The Privileged Gaze of the “Filter Character” Between Contemplation and Prohibition, in the Movie “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”

In our paper we would like to discuss several aspects related to the “priviledged gaze” of the central character in the movie The Nutcracker and The Four Realms, released in 2018. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s source text, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, published in 1816, has been continuously adapted according to the type and development of society, and now finds variants in literature, ballet, music, theater, cartoons, film, etc. Focusing on the film directed by Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnson, a sequel to Hoffmann’s story, we would like to discuss how time is perceived in the two worlds, real and fantasy, but starting from the image and what the main character Clara, who has become a “filter-character” involved in the realization of this aspect, captures in her eyes. The director of the movie accepts the idea of a parallel world, and chooses as the link between the two worlds the very clock from which Clara has the opportunity to observe the mechanism of the passage of time, but also to capture the emotional states of her family members. For this approach, we have taken the theoretical and practical reference points provided by Victor Ieronim Stoichiță in The View. As in painting, the different frames of the images in the film, “frozen”, fixed, can provide a narrative, an interesting story.