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A intermedialidade como narrativa histórica em Mistérios de Lisboa
Abstract and Figures
Raúl Ruiz’s copious cinematic production has been treated as a single never-ending film due to his notorious disregard for narrative closure. Mysteries of Lisbon is his lengthiest film, consisting of a monumental adaptation (4h26min as a film, 6h as a TV series) of Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous novel in which interconnected narrative strands multiply across generations. However, all of these strands in the TV series, and most of them in the film, come to a logical resolution, indicating that the film’s protracted length derives from the chosen genre, the literary feuilleton combined with the soap opera, rather than being the consequence of an open-ended work. My hypothesis here is that the film’s self-reflexive procedures, questioning the medium and its hierarchic position among other media, bring storytelling close to reality and history-telling by creating holes in the narrative mesh through which the spectator can catch a glimpse of the incompleteness and incoherence of real life. In this context, the film’s constant intermedial morphings become “passages” to the real, through which decorated tiles, toy theatres, drawings and paintings change into live action and vice versa, silently subverting the idea that the story could have one single end, or an end at all.
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This article adds to the critical discourses surrounding Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) and his films of return after exile, or desexilio, by analysing his portion of A TV Dante (1992). In this Ruizian transmedia experimentation of Dante’s Inferno, there is a radical de- and re-territorialisation of the text: on the one hand, from text to film, and, on the other, spatially and temporally by transposing the text onto images of contemporary Chile. This paper reads the film, then, as a Ruizian re-encounter with Chile after exile during the early years of the period transition to democracy and looks to the implications of these disjunctions and displacements – both in the broader thematic vicissitudes and in more specific contradictions between sound and image – when re-worked in terms of spatial (Santiago de Chile) and temporal (post-dictatorship) conditions. In doing so, it turns to the Brazilian concept of anthropophagy as an analytical framework and tool. As such, this paper argues that approaching the film through the lens of anthropophagy not only helps us to read the discursive strategies deployed in the film, but also highlights how cannibalism works as both a formal structuring feature and as part of the film’s content.
The question of realism in the cinema has traditionally hinged on either the indexicality of the photographic image and sound (the approach of Andr Bazin) or generic or classical Hollywood conventions that produce an effect of the ‘real’ (characterizing the apparatus theory and so-called ‘Screen theory’ of the 1970s). However, the issue of cinematic scale and its relation to a sense of either the real or the unreal has remained largely unexamined. This is curious because a significant event in the historical emergence of the cinema was the projection of the image – a projection that allowed a larger sized image as well as a transition from the individual spectator of the kinetoscope or optical toy to the community of spectators labelled an audience. And much of the discourse around issues of scale in the early cinema centred around an anxiety about preserving the ‘life-size’ qualities of projected bodies, as though a defence were necessary against the spectacular possibilities of the gigantic image. With cinema and the accomplished projection of the illusion of movement came an increase in abstraction as well as one of scale. Now untouchable, at a distance, the image had the potential to become gigantic, ‘larger than life’. The viewer, who could dominate, manipulate the optical toy or kinetoscope, controlling the speed and timing of its production of movement, became dominated, overwhelmed and dispossessed in relation to an image that seemed to be liberated from the obligation of dimension.
This article uses the title of the famous book Arabian Nights which in Spanish (Las mil y una noches) has a time connotation, similar to "for ever and a day" in English. In Spanish, "thousand" is a way to mean "infinite"; if you add one to infinite then you have numberless nights. The article departs from a hypothetical question an academic asks him/herself in his way to the educational institution where he-she works: What is my university? What makes me change from enthusiasm to deception, from pain to happiness? The answers give place to a personal dialogue, which brings the awareness that education overflows from the windows and doors of the classroom, to reach those distant places that Juvenal defined as "ultra Auroram et Gangem" (beyond the rising sun and the Ganges), and that Latin Americans could translate to "beyond the Trópico and the Amazonas." In short, to reach the consciousness that our educational work comprehends a larger territory than the one constrained to the limited geography of a site or an institution. In this broad realm, there are diverse attributes we have to create or recreate: hope, opportunity, imagination, and therefore be able to exercise our capacity to relate, to refer, to reflect. In doing so, we organize, devise, transfer, building our narrative, our capability to plot in each journey a new plan. Every plan is a necessary new story, as those of Sherezade, needed to keep acting day by day, using the word as the only thread that gives meaning to our condition as educators, to our academic being.
dqToo unorthodox to be conservative, too systematic to be postmodern, Guerrilla Metaphysics is a unique attempt to describe the carpentry of things. At once systematic and offbeat, technical and poetic, it is a startling new vision of phenomenology's motto: To the things themselves!dq dqInstead of the occasional cause that makes God responsible for all events, Guerrilla Metaphysics seeks the vicarious cause that links human beings, tools, rivers, mountains, plastic, and clowns. Professor Graham Harman argues for a radical shift in the phenomenological attitude to objects, and explains how phenomenology can be reunified with the physical world that it wanted to bracket from view.dq. dqIn Part Two Harman takes a fresh approach to metaphor and comedy, explaining how even physical causation has the structure of allure. In the final Part, he offers a new account of causation, which is shown to be not only vicarious but also asymmetrical and buffered.dq--BOOK JACKET.
In Defence of Mixed Cinema
- André Bazin
Bazin, André. 1967. "In Defence of Mixed Cinema." In What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, 53-
Seduced by Structure Published in the blog Observations on film art
- David Bordwell
Bordwell, David. 2010. " Seduced by Structure. " Published in the blog
Observations on film art, on
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog, last accessed on 1 May
2017.
Interview with Raúl Ruiz
- Michel Ciment
Ciment, Michel. 2011. Interview with Raúl Ruiz. In Pressbook of
Mysteries of Lisbon, available on
http://www.musicboxfilms.com/mysteries-of-lisbon, last accessed on 1 May 2017.
Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon): Story and Structure
- Marshall Deutelbaum
Deutelbaum, Marshall. 2014. " Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of
Lisbon): Story and Structure ". Aniki vol. 1, n.º 2: 241-252.