“…like the god or his representation, youths die symbolically and are reborn as adults.”

Michael Wood reviewed the film ‘La Chimera’ for the London Review of Books of 23 May 2024:

“…The man who so eagerly met Arthur at the station is Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato). Arthur is played by Josh O’Connor, Flora by Isabella Rossellini. All these performances, and several others in the film, are remarkable, perfectly tuned to a touch of exaggeration, as befits a chimerical world. In this vein a recurring image that Rohrwacher turns to is that of persons suddenly, and for no apparent reason, filmed upside down. When they fall, they fall up. It’s interesting to learn that Rohrwacher, writer and director of the work, rewrote her script after she had cast the 33-year-old O’Connor. She said she had shifted away from the topic of a person in ‘the sunset of his life’…”

If Professor Wood had seen the film at a Curzon cinema, he might have been presented with a card like the one pictured…

From Shirley Jackson – A Rather Haunted Life (2016), by Ruth Franklin:

“Many of Hangsaman‘s readers, then as now, are bewildered by the ending and its abrupt shift from a mood of danger to one of serenity. But when understood in the myth and ritual context, it becomes clear. Classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, author of Themis (1912), a book of myth and ritual criticism that was one of Hyman’s touchstones, argues that in ancient cultures, the ritual enacting the death and rebirth of a vegetation deity-Frazer’s Hanged God-should be understood also as a ritual of initiation into society: like the god or his representation, youths die symbolically and are reborn as adults.”