Abstract

The master's thesis interprets the delicate passage that links reality and fiction in Pierre Perrault's film The Shimmering Beast . Literary and philosophical modes of investigation are used to decode the principal traps of this "reality" hunting, interlaced with words and images. What exists beyond the horizon, beyond the threshold that sends us adrift towards the imaginary? Imagination fills the void in the wait, and becomes more difficult to understand than the beast itself. In the act of waiting that transpires in the scene where the novice hunters of the Shimmering Beast attempt to lure the animal towards them, reality transforms itself, and becomes charged with nervousness and apprehension. The edge of the woods, a natural frontier, becomes through analogy, the screen that separates man from animal, fiction from life. Fantasized by man, the coveted animal metamorphoses into an "image of possibility" into a seemingly divine apparition, yet remains invisible to the eye. Lying low in a cramped space, kneeling in the wet grasses in the heart of the forest, silence reigns; the hunter waits. In this space of waiting, the manifolds of silence are proportionally in correlation with the fear and the desire sensed by the hunters. The layout of these scenes resonates with the fictitious constructs of film, which projects its most enticing lures.