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Films

Venus

Colin Brookes sees perspectives representational and moral in Hanif Kureishi’s oblique study of love.

Much attention has been paid to making the appropriate distinctions between realities and representations (legitimate or otherwise), and to what constitutes either. Examples include Plato’s interest in clarifying relations between mere worldly imitations and their corresponding actualities in transcendent forms. Via Aristotle, this distinction continued in various ways to influence artistic practice and aesthetic theory for millennia. This film plays with the difference.

In contrast, there are strands of Islamic teaching that forbid representation altogether.

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