IELT

Este trabalho é financiado por Fundos Nacionais através da FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, no âmbito do projecto Pest-OE/HIS/UI0015/2011. Este trabalho é financiado por Fundos Nacionais através da FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, no âmbito do projecto Pest-OE/ELT/UI0657/2011.

RESUMO: Este artigo parte da noção de que La chute de la maison Usher (1928, Jean Epstein) pode ser considerado não só uma adaptação do conto homónimo de Edgar Allan Poe, como fundamentalmente um trabalho sobre diversos motivos narrativos, figurais, teóricos e filosóficos do autor norte-americano. Esta reflexão é guiada pelo argumento geral de que Epstein se serve das indagações ontológicas que Poe levou a cabo a propósito das relações entre a literatura e a realidade para formular a sua própria reflexão sobre as complexas conexões entre o cinema e o real físico. Deste modo, e tomando La chute como um filme de charneira na filmografia do cineasta, que une a sua primeira fase vanguardista com a segunda, composta por filmes mais naturalistas filmados na Bretanha, procura-se averiguar a importância decisiva de Poe para a evolução de Epstein enquanto pensador e enquanto cineasta.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Edgar Allan Poe; Jean Epstein; ontologia; representação.


Life of images: The Fall of the House of Usher, according to Jean Epstein

ABSTRACT: This article is based on the idea that, being more than a regular adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the same title, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher (1928) explores many of Poe’s narrative motives, symbolic figures and theoretical and philosophical ideas. My main argument is that Epstein uses Poe’s literary enquiries on the relations between literature and reality in order to develop his own reflection on the dynamics between film and physical reality. With this in mind, and taking into account La chute’s pivotal place in Epstein’s filmography, as a stepping-stone between his first, more avant garde phase, and his second phase composed of naturalist films shot in Brittany, I aim to recognize the fundamental role Poe had in the evolution of Epstein as a theorist and as a film director.

KEYWORDS: Edgar Allan Poe; Jean Epstein; ontology; representation.

Resumo: Depois de realizar, entre 1922 e 1928, uma série de filmes enquadrados no universo estilístico da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa, Jean Epstein deixou Paris para se instalar em Finistère, na Bretanha, onde realizaria, entre Finis Terrae (1929) e Les Feux de la Mer (1948), um conjunto de filmes que comporiam um " ciclo bretão ". Estes filmes contrapuseram ao artifício e à estetização da primeira fase uma nova estética marcada pelo abandono dos estúdios e pela utilização de actores não profissionais. O elemento mais importante destes filmes, no entanto, talvez seja o mar enquanto figura paradigmática do cinema. Nas notas que compõem este ensaio, considero algumas implicações teóricas e filosóficas desta viagem de Epstein, de Paris ao fim do mundo.

Abstract: Having directed a group of films between 1922 and 1928 in the style of the First French Wave, Jean Epstein left Paris for Finistère, in Brittany, where he would shoot, between Finis Terrae (1929) and Les Feux de la Mer (1948), a set of films known as his " Breton cycle ". These films were distant from the artifice and stylization that characterized the early stages of Epstein's filmography, as the director adopted a new aesthetics in which the use of real locations and non-professional actors played a fundamental role. However, the sea seems to be the most important element in these films, where it stands out as a symbolic figure of cinema. In the following notes I analyze a few of the theoretical and philosophical implications of Epstein's voyage from Paris to the end of the world.

Resumo: Este artigo propõe uma leitura de A Double Life (1947), de George Cukor, que consiste na análise detalhada dos seus primeiros nove minutos. Inspirada na tradição de explication de texte representada por, entre outros, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, a hipótese crítica subjacente a este estudo é a de que é possível conhecer os motivos narrativos, figurais e teóricos essenciais do filme em apreço a partir de um olhar atento sobre as suas sequências iniciais, que desvele múltiplos sentidos a partir da identificação e da caracterização de aspectos primordiais relacionados com a figuração, a montagem e a mise en scène.

Palavras-chave: cinema clássico americano; George Cukor; ontologia; realidade; representação.


Abstract: This paper offers a reading of George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947) based on the analysis of the first nine minutes of the film. In line with the tradition of explication de texte represented by, among others, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, I argue that it is possible to pinpoint many narrative, figural and theoretical motives in this film by paying close attention to its introductory sequences, consequently identifying and characterizing different primordial aspects related to questions of figuration, editing and mise en scène.

Keywords: classical American film; George Cukor; ontology; reality; representation.

(folhear um excerto aqui: https://issuu.com/sistemasolar/docs/jose_bertolo_imagens_em_fuga_issuu )

Explorando dinâmicas complexas entre corpo e imagem, realidade e sonho, matéria e fantasma, as personagens de François Truffaut reflectem a instabi-lidade ontológica própria do cinema, que, como identificou Derrida, se concretiza na aparição e na desaparição de imagens fixas. Persiste a imagem em fuga no ecrã, a que os filmes em estudo neste livro parecem reportar-se por meio da ficção.

Este ensaio consiste na análise de quatro filmes realizados por João Pedro Rodrigues e João Rui Guerra da Mata que, no seu conjunto, compõem aquilo que se designou como "ciclo asiático": China China (2007), Alvorada Vermelha (2011), A Última Vez que Vi Macau (2012) e Mahjong (2013). A influência oriental, tornada explícita nos títulos, é o elemento que mais evidentemente aproxima estes filmes; porém, essa influência manifesta-se de maneiras distintas em cada um deles: em China China, seguimos o último dia de vida de uma mulher chinesa que vive e trabalha em Lisboa; em Alvorada Vermelha, acompanhamos um dia de actividade do Mercado Vermelho de Macau, desde a abertura até ao fecho; A Última Vez que Vi Macau desenrola-se nas labirínticas ruas macaenses, onde um protagonista sem rosto procura a amiga desaparecida, enredando-se numa trama que traz à memória o film noir; por fim, em Mahjong, a acção decorre em Varziela, Vila do Conde, apresentada como a maior chinatown de Portugal, onde uma vez mais o desaparecimento de uma mulher é alvo de investigação. Tendo em consideração a influência de China e Macau como um factor transversal aos quatro filmes, defendo que estes representam, na verdade, o culminar de uma tendência que Mário Jorge Torres identificou num filme anterior de Rodrigues, ao classificá-lo de "pura matéria fílmica". Servindo-me da ideia de que estes filmes compõem efectivamente um 'ciclo', e que, portanto, funcionam tanto autonomamente quanto apreendidos em conjunto, examino de que forma cada um deles desenvolve linhas teóricas específicas que, na relação com aquelas exploradas nos restantes filmes, concretizam um projecto de cariz teórico assente num pensamento sobre o cinema enquanto arte fundada na confluência entre realidade e imaginário.



Palavras-chave: cinema português; ficção; imaginário; João Rui Guerra da Mata e João Pedro Rodrigues; Oriente; realidade.

Resumo: Em “Tentative d’évasion”, um poema incluído em Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919), Jean Cocteau reserva alguns versos à expedição liderada por Robert Falcon Scott à Antártida (1910-13), durante a qual o explorador inglês pereceu sem cumprir o objectivo de se tornar o primeiro homem a pisar o Pólo Sul. A expedição, registada pelo fotógrafo Herbert Ponting, foi transposta para filme, e é sobre este que Cocteau escreve. No poema, Cocteau transfigura a natureza documental das imagens de Ponting, convertendo-as num “film surnaturel” no qual “Scott et ses amis / retournent mourir / jadis / chaque soir”. Aspectos importantes da sua teoria de cinema estão já aqui esboçados, mais de dez anos antes da realização de Le sang d’un poète (1932), nomeadamente: a arte de ‘irrealizar’ o real, o cinema enquanto forma de dar a ver o invisível, o trabalho da morte sobre os corpos e na arte.

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Abstract: In “Tentative d’évasion”, a poem from Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919), Jean Cocteau dedicates a few verses to the Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic (1910-1913), in which the British explorer died without being able to become, as he intended, the first man to set foot on the South Pole. The expedition was accompanied by photographer Herbert Ponting, who was responsible for the pictures that inspired the poet to write these verses. In his poem, Cocteau transforms the documental nature of Ponting’s images, turning them into a “film surnaturel” in which “Scott et ses amis / retournent mourir / jadis / chaque soir”. Some important traits of Cocteau’s film theory are outlined in these verses, which were written more than ten years before Le sang d’un poète (1932), namely: the dynamics between reality and unreality, cinema as a medium able to render the invisible visible, the workings of death over bodies and in art.

Resumo:
Neste ensaio, atenta-se no modo como, em La Glace à trois faces (1927), Jean Epstein se apropria da complexa estrutura do conto homónimo de Paul Morand para desenvolver uma investigação sobre algumas questões relacionadas com o cinema, em particular com a narrativa cinematográfica. Convocando dois ensaios da autoria do cineasta, cuja publicação acompanhou a estreia do filme, e analisando algumas das sequências cruciais deste, argumenta-se que Epstein trabalha o motivo do acidente (no caso, um acidente de automóvel) de forma a propor uma ideia de cinema enquanto "arte do evento".
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Abstract:
In this essay, I consider the ways in which, in La Glace à trois faces (1927), Jean Epstein puts to work the complex structure of Paul Morand's homonymous short story in order to investigate on some questions related to cinema as medium, and particularly on cinematographic narrative. Discussing two essays by the filmmaker which were published in the same year La Glace à trois faces was first screened, and analyzing crucial sequences of the film, I will then argue that Epstein uses the motif of the accident (in this case, an automobile accident) in a way that enables him to meditate on cinema as an "art of the event".

Morte e Espectralidade nas Artes e na Literatura reúne um conjunto de ensaios nos quais se reflecte sobre as problemáticas da espectralidade e da morte nos campos da produção e da teorização das artes. Na primeira parte, procede-se à questionação e à análise de algumas configurações que o tópico da morte conheceu na literatura, na fotografia, no cinema, na literatura e nas artes de palco no decorrer dos últimos dois séculos. Num segundo momento, trata-se a espectralidade enquanto problema inerente à fotografia e ao pensamento crítico em torno desta arte, interrogando diversos pressupostos da representação realista que lhe são comummente associados.
Este volume tem origem em dois encontros organizados no âmbito do projecto “RIAL – Realidade e Imaginação nas Artes e na Literatura”, sedeado no Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, designadamente a Jornada “Máscaras de Cera: O Espectáculo da Morte na Literatura e nas Artes dos Séculos XIX e XX” (2017, em colaboração com a linha de investigação “Teatro e Imagem” do Centro de Estudos de Teatro da FLUL) e o Seminário “O Realismo Espectral da Imagem Fotográfica” (2018).
Os ensaios reunidos são da autoria de Amândio Reis, Ana Campos, Fernando Guerreiro, Filipe Figueiredo, Golgona Anghel, José Bértolo, José Duarte, Kelly Basílio, Luís Mendonça, Margarida Medeiros, Patrícia Soares Martins e Susana Lourenço Marques.

NEW DEADLINE - 31st MAY 2020

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RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages

CALL FOR PAPERS
Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly – RCL n. 53 (Autumn/Winter)

Editors:
José Bértolo (CEC, U. Lisbon)
Margarida Medeiros (ICNOVA — NOVA U. Lisbon)

Throughout the nineteenth century, the camera was believed to be a diabolical machine that could steal human souls. In one of the most notorious texts included in When I Was a Photographer (1899), Félix Nadar famously described how Honoré de Balzac thought that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters”, and that each “Daguerreian operation” would retain one of these spectral layers until the human body of the photographed person amounted to nothing.
If on the one hand there was this general idea that photography was a “killing instrument”, on the other hand it was clear from the beginning that photographs also granted new lives to human beings, animals, objects, etc. Being the “perfect” double of what was once seen in the visible world, the photograph becomes the space where that which is no longer alive can continue to exist. With this in mind, Roland Barthes wrote on his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) that this relatively new and mostly mechanical art form is responsible for the “return of the Dead”. Likewise, Susan Sontag (1977) also posited that “all photographs are memento mori”.
The correlation between photography and death is particularly striking in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of spirit photography. Through the extensive use of double exposures, William Mumler, William Hope, and others, demonstrated that photography not only dealt with physical reality, but could also place itself within the realms of imagination, magic and illusion.
Like photography, cinema has since its beginnings been associated with spectrality. As early as 1896, Georges Méliès was already directing films such as Le manoir du diable, where editing tricks were used in order to create a supernatural world inhabited by fantastic creatures. At the same time, the supposedly realistic films of brothers Lumière were also being perceived by some spectators as much more than direct and lifelike representations of the world. After watching a Lumière program in 1896, Maxim Gorky famously wrote: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows […] It is not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre”.
In the following decades, film critics, film theorists and philosophers as different as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-Louis Leutrat explored ghostly metaphors in their inquiries on the nature of film. The prime example of this critical tendency occurs in an interview published in the Cahiers du Cinéma (2001), in which Jacques Derrida, almost a decade past the publication of Specters of Marx, characterized cinema as a “spectral technique of apparitions”.
In addition, scriptwriters and directors pertaining to different historical and cultural contexts are evidently interested in stories in which the ghostly, the oneiric and the immaterial play a special part. The exploration of such elements is not limited to German Expressionism, the American Gothic (Film) tradition of the 1940s, or the Italian Giallo, also playing an important role in the works of filmmakers as distinct and unique as Yevgeni Bauer, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tourneur, Kaneto Shindo, Alain Resnais, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Pedro Costa.
Borrowing from several important studies on the ghostly published in the wake of the “spectral turn” popularized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Spectral America (2004), this thematic issue aims to depart from and contribute to an ongoing debate which shows that many areas of spectrality in art are yet to explore. This special issue aims to reconsider the close link between photography, cinema and the ghostly, bringing together traditional and new historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches.

Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• The nineteenth century, the emergence of new media, and the ghostly imagination
• Photography, memory, and death
• Spirit photography
• The ghostly in modern and contemporary photography
• Key issues related to the ontology of the photographic image: (un)reality, (im)materiality, (in)visibilitiy and the (un)seen
• Ghostly metaphors in film writing (criticism, theory, philosophy)
• The spectres of digital media and/or film (in photography and/or cinema)
• Experience, perception, subjective images and imagination
• The representation of dreams and hallucinations
• Special effects aiming to enhance the spectral dimension of photography and/or film (e.g. double exposure, superimposition, stop trick, rear projection, acousmatic sound)
• Ghostly or haunted media in fiction film (photography, radio, the Internet)
• Ghosts across different genres (e.g., horror, melodrama, comedy, war film)
• Critical and contemporary approaches to the concept of spectrality

The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and be sent through the OJS platform until May 10th, 2020.

For queries, contact the editors José Bértolo ([email protected]) and/or Margarida Medeiros ([email protected]).

Guidelines for submission and Instructions for authors:
http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

Website: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/announcement/view/15

Considering a broad critical and theoretical tradition that reflects on cinema as a medium associated with the concept of spectrality, this thesis offers an analysis of films directed by two Portuguese filmmakers, Manoel de Oliveira and João Pedro Rodrigues, in which different configurations of spectrality are explored, both in their narratives and in their visual dimension. The corpus includes O Passado e o Presente (Past and Present, 1972), Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (Benilde or the Virgin Mother, 1975), Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (Memories and Confessions, 1993) and O Estranho Caso de Angélica (The Strange Case of Angelica, 2010), by Manoel de Oliveira, and O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), Odete (Two Drifters, 2005) and Morrer como um Homem (To Die Like a Man, 2009), by João Pedro Rodrigues.


Film Analysis — Ghost — João Pedro Rodrigues — Manoel de Oliveira — Ontology — Portuguese Cinema — Spectrality

This article analyzes several aesthetic, narrative and theoretical topics firstly developed by Alfred Hitchcock in Rebecca (1940) and recently explored and reinvented by Ricardo Vieira Lisboa in his audiovisual essay some visual thoughts about perception in Rebecca (2020). Other specific works and references also come into play, such as the (original and derivative) novels of Daphne du Maurier and Ana Teresa Pereira, other films by Hitchcock, and Stanley Cavell’s conceptualization of the “unknown woman” in classical melodrama. In Hitchcock’s film, the topics under analysis here are narratively acted out in the characters of Rebecca and the unnamed protagonist played by actress Joan Fontaine. However, they also materialize theoretical aspects of the spectral ontology of cinema: i.e. the dynamics between absence and presence, invisibility and visibility, past and present, the dead and the living, perception and point of view, the indexicality and materiality of moving images.

Keywords: Absence; Audiovisual essay; Alfred Hitchcock; Invisibility; Ricardo Vieira Lisboa; Spectrality