Suchergebnisse

This book proposes to replace the general appellation of 'world cinema' with the more substantive concept of 'realist cinema', all the while valorising world cinema as an invaluable reservoir of diversity and inclusion. Arguing that an ethics of the real has bound world films together across history and geography at cinema's most creative peaks, the book veers away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, locating instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: 'non-cinema', or a cinema that questions the film medium, aspiring to be life itself, in constant, and often self-defeating, competition with the medium's inevitable manipulation of world phenomena; 'intermedial passages', or films that incorporate other artworks in progress as a channel to historical and political reality; and 'total cinema', or films relying on long duration and monumental landscapes with a totalising historical and geographical impetus akin to what Bazin had defined as the human desire for 'integral realism'. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, thereby reasserting the point that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.

The relationship between cinema and the real is probably the most central and complex issue in film studies. In this article I shall attempt to address this issue by looking at a selection of films in which intermedial devices, that is, the utilisation within film of artforms such as painting, theatre and music, appear to function as a "passage" to political and social reality. Case studies will be drawn from the São Paulo and Pernambuco scenes, as represented by Beto Brant, Cláudio Assis,Tata Amaral, Paulo Caldas and Marcelo Luna, in order to demonstrate their shared values at a certain historical juncture and interconnectedness across Brazilian geography.

Obra maior, mas pouco estudada, do movimento tropicalista do final dos anos 1960, Como era gostoso o meu francês (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1970-72) recicla os ideais antropofágicos do modernismo brasileiro dos anos 1920, cuja base se encontra na literatura europeia colonial. O enredo aparentemente linear do filme versa sobre um francês devorado por índios tupis no século XVI, ao estilo do relato autobiográfico do aventureiro Hans Staden que teria escapado por pouco de destino semelhante em viagem ao Brasil. Mas a tessitura do filme é na verdade uma colagem de materiais diversos no melhor estilo tropicalista, incluindo não apenas citações do texto de Staden mas também os desenhos que ilustram a edição de 1557 de seu livro, além de referências aos escritos de Jean de Léry, André Thevet, Nicolas de Villegagnon, José de Anchieta, Manoel da Nóbrega, e a poemas e receitas culinárias do século XVI. Neste texto, sugiro que a ausência de hierarquia entre esses materiais, alinhavados por um hibridismo de mídias, línguas e culturas europeias e indígenas, confere ao filme um valor político que transcende o derrotismo reinante na esquerda brasileira naquele momento de auge da ditadura militar. Ao lado de outras obras modernistas associadas ao tropicalismo, Como era gostoso o meu francês reivindica para o cinema e a arte de seu tempo o direito de pertencer a um mundo multicultural para além dos limites da nação brasileira, provisoriamente em poder de mãos erradas.

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an 'uncinematic' element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, 'which constitutes its artistic character'. Similarly, Lyotard defended an 'acinema', which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is 'fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed'. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an 'impure circulation' that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of 'impure cinema', that is, of cinema's interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi's deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).