The Sun in Cinematic Imagery, by Yves Steichen

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Since the earliest days of cinema, the sun has occupied a central place as both a visual and narrative tool. As a primordial source of light, it structures cinematic time, shapes the rhythm of sto­ry­telling, and carries multiple symbolic meanings; sunrise evoking hope and renewal, sunset signaling melancholy or the end of an era.

This lecture will explore how filmmakers transform the sun into a complex cinematic language. From the tran­scen­dent golden hour of Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven (1978) to the cosmic eye witnessing creation in The Tree of Life (2011), and the dying star of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), the sun becomes alternately a source of spiritual illu­mi­na­tion or an existential threat.

In David Lean’s work (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962), the desert sun becomes a dramatic actor, its blinding heat a physical and psy­cho­log­i­cal ordeal, while George Miller turns it into a hostile force in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). A metaphor for power in Apocalypse Now (1979), where Coppola fuses the rising sun with napalm fire into an iconography of madness, it becomes in Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) a filtered light symbolizing fragmented truth.

Its absence defines film noir, while modern dystopias such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017) veil the sun behind the smog of a dying world. From Bergman’s pale Nordic sun (The Seventh Seal, 1957) to the artificial star looming over the ocean of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), this lecture will reveal how the sun — between romantic glo­ri­fi­ca­tion and apocalyptic vision — remains one of the most versatile motifs in the history of cinema.

Speaker: Yves Steichen
In French
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Yves Steichen (born 1983) studied history in Luxembourg and Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) before spe­cial­iz­ing in film and cinema history. His final thesis focuses on the recent history of cinema in Luxembourg and traces the development from the Ciné-Club 80 to the Utopia SA multiplex chain. Since 2023, he has headed the film department at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA). He regularly gives talks on cinema and its history, and writes film reviews.

Organised by Cercle Cité in col­lab­o­ra­ton with CNA — Centre nationale de l’audiovisuelle