Screen

The screen is the central element of the scenic device, which regulates both the material order (the distribution of characters in space) and the symbolic play (the prohibition that the scene transgresses, the subversion it operates, the scandal it produces)

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Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ

The compartmental arrangement characteristic of Gothic narrative devices is still visible here. But the space is becoming more unified: we're moving towards a system separating the spectators on one side from the actors on the other, in what is becoming a stage. The former compartment (columns, white line on the floor) then becomes a screen delimiting the performance itself.

Historically, the screen has changed in nature: it doesn't appear until the Renaissance, as it's linked to the invention of linear perspective. Indeed, the Chevalier de Jaucourt begins the article PERSPECTIVE in the Encyclopédie thus: "it is the art of representing on a plane surface visible objects as they appear at a given distance or height through a transparent plane, placed perpendicular to the horison between the eye & the object." In its strictest definition, the screen is this transparent plane. But we note that this construction is itself put in abyme and thematized in painting: the screen then becomes what stands between the vague space and the restricted space of the scene.

From the second half of the eighteenth century, this screen-cut is gradually replaced by a sensitive screen that no longer delimits a restricted space but envelops the character or characters on stage: the curtain theme is succeeded by that of the veil.

In the nineteenth century, the screen gradually established itself as a projection surface. It itself constitutes a front stage (or scene-screen) where clues to what's going on behind (or has gone on before), in the other scene that remains unrepresentable, are shown.

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of the screen as a projection surface.

In the second half of the twentieth century, television introduced yet another new model of screen. The screen becomes an object, a screen-image around which we can turn.

Whatever its nature, the screen nevertheless performs the same function: it implements, in the scene, a doubling, both spatial and symbolic.