The lecture will focus on three significant contemporary films, distinct in form and style, yet approached through the same tripartite analytical framework proposed by Paul Ricoeur in his seminal work Time and Narrative, itself informed by Aristotle’s concept of mimesis. In Ricoeur’s reading, this model unfolds in three stages: prefiguration consists in the articulation of an event, a narrative, or a fact through historical, mythical, and philosophical resonances; configuration concerns structure and aesthetic parameters (shots, editing, spatio-temporality, etc.); and refiguration designates the interpretive process through which the viewer reconstructs and interprets the narrative presented.

Dominique Nasta is Full Professor of Film Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a Member of the Belgian Royal Academy. She has been chairing the Film Studies Department for more than 30 years and was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Montréal (2013), Strasbourg (2015) and Buenos Aires (2019). She is the author of Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (2013) and Meaning in Film: Relevant Structures in Soundtrack and Narrative (1992), and the co-editor of New Perspectives in Sound Studies (2004), Revisiting Film Melodrama (2014), and La chanson dans les cinémas d’Europe et d’Amérique Latine 1960-2010 (2019). She has published widely on the aesthetics of emotions and music in films, East-European cinemas, early film melodrama, and the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. She has been series editor for “Rethinking Cinema” at P.I.E. Peter Lang since 2002.

Lecture coordinated by Scientific Researcher Ioana Raluca Zaharia.