Per un’estetica dell’attraversamento. Il cinema carrolliano di Terry Gilliam

Abstract

Terry Gilliam’s cinema can be defined as an aesthetic of cross-over, rooted in an osmotic notion of the concept of boundary, meant as an area of communication among different worlds and time frames and, at the same time, a realm in which diverse literary and artistic models merge. The essay first describes this liminal quality of Gilliam’s oeuvre, by outlining the wide range of cultural references lying beneath his aesthetic universe, and then focuses on the prominent role played in it by Alice, the literary icon created by Lewis Carroll, capable of shaping the contents and, more importantly, the very aesthetics of the gilliamesque universe. Indeed, not only is Carroll’s character frequently evoked by the director throughout his films, but the very motifs of constant transformation and refusal of ordinary logic that underpin Alice’s wonderlands seem to function as the structuring essence of the ever-changing worlds devised by Gilliam.