The dead ends of photogénie. From cinephilia to cinephobia and back: Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV and Roi Soleil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis XIV through a film, a performance and a video installation, in order to examine the role of negativity and deferral in his relationship to cinema as a medium. By analyzing Serra’s classical understanding of photogénie as an expression of destructive plasticity, I delve into the structural cinephobia that undergirds his films. I suggest that the mystery at the core of La mort de Louis XIV is not death but the cinematic image itself, not the body as matter but rather the body as a virtual image capable of traversing and surviving different temporal organizations. Through this reading, Serra’s cinema emerges as a false promise to see through and beyond the two-dimensional image that transforms desire into an optical illusion.