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.

Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema argues that art cinema, unlike classical film, draws attention to its disjointed, multi-parted form, but that criticism has too frequently sought to explain this complexity away by stitching the parts together in totalizing readings. This stitching together has often relied on the assumption that complicated character explains articulated form and that the solution to art cinema’s puzzles lies in interpreting each film as the expression of a focalizing character’s internal disturbance. This book challenges this assumption. It argues that the attempt to explain formal complexity through this character-centric approach reduces formal achievements and enigmatic characters to inadequate approximations of one another. Reference to character cannot fully tame unschematic and unpredictable combinations of—and collisions between—contradictory levels of narration, clashing styles, discontinuously edited shots, jarring allusions, dislocated genre signifiers, and intermedial elements. Through close analyses of films by Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, and Kelly Reichardt, Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema offers an ethics of criticism that suggests that the politics of art cinema’s eccentric form are limited by character-centred readings. Each of the featured films presents inarticulate or muted characters, whose emotional and intellectual lives are unknowable, further complicating the relationship between character and form. This book argues that, by acknowledging this resistance to interpretation, critics can think in new ways about art cinema’s interrogation of the possibilities of knowledge.

Del rigor en el relato. A propósito de Invasión (Hugo Santiago, 1969)

El presente artículo analiza un filme que traspone una parte sustancial del universo de Jorge Luis Borges mientras vierte nuevas miradas sobre nociones tales como «cine político», «épica» y «fantastique». Un universo literario se encuentra con una visión depurada del arte del cinematógrafo proveniente en línea directa de las enseñanzas de Robert Bresson para proponer un encuentro improbable entre la ascesis más depurada y el cultismo más estricto. Invasión demanda un espectador que no le haga ascos a entender que lo más clásico es lo más moderno o que los trasvases entre el universo literario y el cinematográfico solo son posibles si antes se ha comprendido lo que ambos mundos comparten. Invasión, un clásico moderno, es un filme tan europeo como latinoamericano, tan porteño como universal.

Música preexistente, leitmotivs e retornos no cinema de Jacques Demy dos anos 1950 e 1960 // Preexisting music, leitmotifs and recurrences in the cinema of Jacques Demy in the 1950s and 1960s

Analisamos o uso de música preexistente do repertório clássico em três filmes de Jacques Demy do final dos anos 1950 ao final dos anos 1960 – A mãe e a criança (1959), Lola, a flor proibida (1961) e O segredo íntimo de Lola (1969) –, tendo como base a característica da repetição, presente tanto no procedimento musical do leitmotiv como em diversos retornos que ocorrem entre vários filmes do diretor, assim como em suas associações intertextuais, especialmente com As damas do Bois de Boulogne (1945), de Robert Bresson.

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms: Love and Silence in First Reformed

This chapter reads First Reformed as an embodiment and fulfillment of Paul Schrader’s career, a capstone that serves as a meditation on our responsibilities toward each other, our earth, and god. The transcendental style, the quest for redemption, a sense of restraint punctuated by violent action--these qualities have dominated Schrader’s career since the publication of Transcendental Style in Film until 2017, when he updated that text while writing and directing a film about a struggling pastor in a small church in upstate New York. First Reformed also contains nods to his filmic influences, including Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and his own work on Taxi Driver. This chapter surveys these many influences and self-references to read Schrader’s most recent film as a culmination of his life in film.

Schrader’s Women: Cat People and Patty Hearst

Paul Schrader’s connection with director Robert Bresson is often explored through his male characters, the ‘man in his room’ of Light Sleeper and American Gigolo, but Taxi Driver before them and First Reformed most recently. However, Schrader’s two primary experiments with female characters, Cat People (1982) and Patty Hearst (1988), also follow a similar Bressonian trajectory and end with each female character incarcerated, yet finding a kind of spiritual freedom that helps them realize their identities. This chapter explores Schrader’s women primarily through close examination of Cat People’s Irina (Nastassja Kinski) and Natasha Richardson’s eponymous heroine in Patty Hearst, but use his representation of women in the male-driven films for points of comparison and contrast. In addition, this chapter approaches Schrader’s women as reflections of his male characters, many of whom are driven by existential anxiety that motivates them to seek self-actualization in redemptive violence.