The Name of the Rose · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Annaud's adaptation of Eco's semiotic thriller is, at its cinematic core, a sustained argument about what the camera can and cannot reveal — and Tonino Delli Colli's mise-en-scène makes that argument visceral. Taking its cue from Barry Lyndon, which first demonstrated that interiors could be shot by motivated candlelight alone, Delli Colli lights the abbey's scriptorium and night corridors as if the tapers on the monks' desks were the only source: amber pools dissolve into near-monochrome stone and shadow, a visual grammar in which knowledge and darkness are literally coextensive. The film's second great instrument is the affection-image: casting the monks in the tradition Delli Colli had established on The Decameron, Annaud fills his frame with grotesque, weathered faces whose blank stares and clenched features register ideology before argument, terror before theology — feeling as doctrine's face in close-up. But it is the relation-image that governs the film's architecture: William of Baskerville is explicitly a reader of signs, and his deductive chain — from material evidence to institutional conspiracy to the forbidden book on Aristotle's comedy — folds the viewer into the same interpretive web, making the film's epistemological stakes a participatory puzzle rather than a lecture. The library's final conflagration, where centuries of knowledge burn because one zealot feared that laughter would dissolve the fear of God, resolves the relation-image catastrophically: all connections severed at once by fire.