Três leitores de Dostoiévski: Kulidjánov, Bresson e Scorsese

Este ensaio apresenta uma leitura de três obras cinematográficas que, de diferentes formas, levaram às telas a ficção de Fiódor Dostoiévski. Os filmes Crime e castigo (1971), de Liev Kulidjánov, O batedor de carteiras (1959), de Robert Bresson, e Taxi Driver (1976), de Martin Scorsese, são analisados e relacionados às narrativas de Crime e castigo e Memórias do subsolo. Dessa maneira, o texto objetiva explicitar a estreita relação que a sétima arte manteve/mantém com a literatura de Dostoiévski.

art of director, screenwriter, and actor Martin Scorsese as an author's cinematography model

Martin Scorsese is an outstanding contemporary director, who strongly influenced the artistic and aesthetic foundations of American (authors’ in particular) cinematography of the 19th–20th centuries He was and remains one of the outstanding creators who shaped the aesthetics of the “New Hollywood” cinematography. In the period from 1917 to the early 1960s, there was a paradigm of “classic Hollywood”, in which films were produced according to the dominant aesthetic, genre and narrative formulas, the characters represented themselves as specific typical images with understandable motivations for the general public. Martin Scorsese is a representative of cinematography, who changed classical views of film art. That is why the study of Martin Scorsese's work remains relevant for researchers in the field of cinematography and culture to the present day. The purpose of this work is to study the creativity of director, screenwriter and actor Martin Scorsese, as well as to identify the author's style in the artist's work, determine his author's handwriting and manner. The methodology of this research is based on theoretical methods of scientific knowledge, in particular, the method of information analysis and synthesis, the cultural method, as well as historical and comparative methods were used.

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese

This chapter analyzes how Hugo (2011, dir. Martin Scorsese) metacinematically approximates what French film theorist Alexandre Astruc called the caméra-stylo, or camera pen, through which cinema communicates as written language. In “writing” a film history around and through Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), Hugo’s metacinematic caméra-stylo strictly adheres to classical auteur theory ideas about personal, authorial enunciation. However, Scorsese writes a metacinematic film history that periodically disavows personal enunciation to claim film-historical truth, fact, and canon—a white, male, paternalistic canon that teaches Hugo’s young audience a warped film history. Hugo’s metacinematic, historiographic writing invokes contemporary debates about videographic criticism, the essayistic mode, and film historiography conveyed on film.

The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema

This article is concerned with the intersection of digitally augmented performance and nostalgia in contemporary Hollywood franchise cinema. The practice of ‘de-ageing’ or even resurrecting actors following their real-life deaths in films like Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010), Terminator Genysis (Alan Taylor, 2015), Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016), Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019), and a large number of Marvel Cinematic Universe films, is now commonplace. Though such digital faces are primarily still found in franchise cinema, some exceptions ( The Irishman, Martin Scorsese, 2019; Gemini Man, Ang Lee, 2019) are telling in their franchise-like appeals to cinematic nostalgia. In particular, the digital face is most commonly aligned with the ‘legacy film’ (Golding, 2019), resurrected franchises interested in transferring franchise protagonists, themes and fandom across generations. The digital face therefore is an expression of the convergence of the digital with film, with the franchise, with the past and with memory. For these films, memory and nostalgia are meticulous exercises involving thousands of work hours of highly skilled CGI workers and cutting-edge technology. These highly technical, virtuosic digital faces are quite literally the face of this kind of nostalgia, and as Ndalianis observes, position the face ‘as façade that opens up a time-travel passageway between past and present’, inviting a seam-spotting game between audience and filmmaker (2014). Even if the digital face is perfect in its recreation, the audience’s knowledge of the impossibility of the performance leaves a trace of artistry. Accordingly, digital faces are creative, technical and financial decisions above all. This article outlines the uses of the digital face for memory, nostalgia and seriality in contemporary Hollywood franchise cinema, with a focus on representation and death.

Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann (b. 1911–d. 1975) was a prolific American composer and conductor, known primarily for his work in film. He was also active, however, as a composer for radio and television, had written music for the concert and operatic stage, and had a prodigious conducting career later in his life. The majority of the current research on his oeuvre focuses on his film scoring and his collaborations with film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma. He started producing scores for films in 1941, with Welles for the film Citizen Kane, and died just after completing his work for Taxi Driver (dir. Scorsese, 1976). Prior to his experience in cinema, Herrmann wrote music for hundreds of radio dramas starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1950s, which he credited for his ability to compose so readily for cinema. Herrmann’s most famous collaboration was with Hitchcock, which began with the film The Trouble with Harry (1955) and ended with Marnie (1964). The director-composer duo had a falling out in 1966 over Herrmann’s score to Torn Curtain, which Hitchcock refused to use; the director instead hired John Addison to replace Herrmann. Herrmann went on to compose scores for films by Truffaut, Scorsese, and De Palma in the 1960s and 1970s. While composing for cinema, Herrmann also wrote stock music for television, mainly for CBS, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Herrmann also conducted concert and film music on several recordings released from 1966 through 1976, including some of his own concert works. In addition to an extraordinary output for film, radio, television, and recording, Herrmann also wrote concert music, some of which he considered most dear. He composed orchestral, ballet, and vocal music throughout his life, starting in his teens and until his death. His opera Wuthering Heights (1951) was especially important to him. In interviews, especially later in life, Herrmann emphasized that he was a composer of music—not one restricted to only film music—and even then, he regarded film music to be equal to that for the concert stage.

Lectura crítica del relato audiovisual como fuente de información en el filme Taxi Driver

La presente investigación aborda, desde la metodología de la lectura crítica, el filme de ficción como documento audiovisual. Parte de la hipótesis de cómo el relato audiovisual es capaz de representar, mediante su lectura reflexiva, el espíritu de una época. Ciertos fenómenos sociales, como la soledad, pueden entenderse de un modo más profundo a partir de la mirada subjetiva de un autor y su obra ficticia. Desde décadas recientes, vivir solo ha dejado de ser algo estadísticamente marginal o socialmente extraño. Por una parte, se ha convertido en una oportunidad vital para alcanzar objetivos personales; por la otra, en un problema social que implica a un número cada vez mayor de individuos. A través de un ensayo de lectura del relato audiovisual, este artículo examina cómo se hace sensible al espectador la soledad a través del caso de estudio del filme Taxi Driver, con guion de Paul Schrader y dirección de Martin Scorsese. Se examina el modo en que se encarna esa soledad a través de la puesta en escena de un guion en el que la escritura de un diario personal es clave para racionalizar las imágenes documentales de una época.