Documentary about Suzanne Lilar, pt. 5

http://www.lamediatheque.be/the/auteurs_belges/auteurs/lilar_suzanne_.html .
This video clip shows a segment of the 1979 documentary film about the Belgian writer Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992) entitled "Suzanne Lilar - Au-delà de l'apparence".

(Sorry for the bad image quality of some passages)

This segment is entitled "L'expérience poétique", cont. or "The poetic experience".

For Parts 4 & 5:

Distracted by her newfound literary success, Lilar drifts somewhat aimlessly for several months before catching hold again of deeper values. She discovers the poetic experience, which she describes in the "Journal de l'analogiste" (1954).

This book, which in the eyes of certain critics is her most important work, is a major enterprise of poetic experimentation. Here Lilar posits how poetry is born in the exemplar, in the singular experience of an object (which she illustrates with a dog that suddenly becomes the archetype for all dogs) and in having that object enter a combination of analogies. Likewise, she finds the poetic experience of analogies in the folds of a dress painted by Grünewald and in those of the shell Cassis tuberosa, and in the hair that looks like a fur and in the fur that resembles hair.

It was a brutal shock: how can one be projected into poetry at the same time by the appearance of the most conventional of things - the dog archetype - and by those things from which they are the farthest removed - the duplicity of the appearances?

She also encounters duplicity in art: a trompe-l'oeil painting makes us sway from true to false all the while that we remain conscious of this manipulation. Lilar proposes a theory of the trompe-l'oeil: the trompe-l'oeil does not deceive anybody - it undeceives. It is only at the moment when its deception is noted that the pleasure from entering the game between reality and illusion kicks in.

Lilar adds that the pleasure of the trompe-l'oeil is not a simple visual pleasure, nor even one of virtuosity; it is a metaphysical pleasure. For Lilar it soon became clear that bringing the objects of our contemplation into a combination of analogies is at the core of the poetic enterprise of life in its entirety, and even of art - when it aims at poetry.

Lilar reads an excerpt of the "Journal de l' analogiste" that illustrates her writings on the 1658 Adrian van der Spelt trompe-l'oeil still-life painting of flowers behind a blue curtain.

The film by Jean-Marie Mersch & Joseph Benedek was produced for the Belgian TV station, R.T.B.F.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Lilar

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• Grünewald
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