Elizabeth Taylor

Summary

Dominique Pagani refers to Elizabeth Taylor almost always in connection with a single film, Suddenly, Last Summer, which he cites from 2017 to 2024. He notes that she plays the heroine's role "marvellously"1. What he retains from the film is the situation of the confined, institutionalised young woman who cannot manage to remember2. She tries to recover the memory of a murder and breaks into a sweat as she struggles to recall the initial shock3. He draws on this scene in the 2020 sessions devoted to the "benefits and harms of amnesia". He then returns to it in a session on Götterdämmerung, which deals with the passage "from repetition to liberation"4. The film comes up again more briefly in sessions on art, on Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and on secularism. Only once, in a session devoted to Marcel Griaule, does he mention another role: the one she plays in the film adaptation of Ivanhoe.

1. 1#2.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017 · 20:41
2. 2#2 Benefits and harms of amnesia…23 Oct 2020 · 55:11
3. 3#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia…13 Nov 2020 · 49:30
4. 4#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation3 Apr 2021 · 41:08

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.