La mano del diavolo e il cuore di Pascal

This paper aims to analyze the concept of fear in La main du diable, a movie of Maurice Tourneur. The film shows the Faustian pact between a bad artist and the devil. The pact concerns a wretched hand, and the obsession that will lead the protagonist to free it. The director has been able to show two kinds of fear, which, taken in isolation, seem to be a chiasm: the fear of death, which is afraid of a condition of life that leads to death (misery, failure, lack of love), and the fear of life, which is afraid of eternity, of an eternal suffering, of a life that does not remedy the loss of one's being. And these fears are afraid of the image and fear of the lack of image. The heart's reasons arise with overwhelming from the interweaving of these two fears. They subsume unto themselves the intellect because it supplins, comforts and obeys passionate motives. The study of the morphology of the various movie's fears uses the terminology of Blaise Pascal, which is the hermeneutical instrument of the analysis.