VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética on March 2008. Three hours of life Watching Fengming is an unrepeatable experience – and this has little to do with how hard it can be to find the film. It is unrepeatable because of its monumentality. First of all, the film is monumental for a structural […]
Articles in English
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2OO3), Wang Bing
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in May 2008. |Time traveler| Shenyang is being dismantled. Once an industrial center which produced armaments for the Japanese army, the city was repurposed around a steel industry with the Cultural Revolution. Home to more than 2 million Chinese, Shenyang is observed by Wang Bing between […]
The Two Irenes (As Duas Irenes, 2017), Fabio Meira
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Tonight there will be a screening of the excellent The Two Irenes, by Fabio Meira, at the Anthology Film Archives. The film screens at 7:15pm, as part of a series put together by Cinema Tropical, titled If You Can Screen it There: Premiering Contemporary Latin American Cinema. After the screening, I will be taking with director […]
Last Conversations (Últimas Conversas, 2015), Eduardo Coutinho
* Originally published at Cinética in August 2015. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Fade out A simple yet quietly revealing statement serves as the film’s introduction: Last Conversations is the title Eduardo Coutinho could not have chosen for this film, for it only makes sense after his passing. It is also a title that’s faithful to his descriptive […]
Moscow (Moscou, 2009), Eduardo Coutinho
* Originally published at Cinética in April 2009. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS | In the dark | In the opening shot of Moscow (Moscou, 2009), an actor wearing a t-shirt of the theater group Galpão holds a photograph of a park and tells the camera about the first time he spent his vacation in Moscow. His most […]
Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage, 2014), Jean-Luc Godard
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Article originally published in Eugênio Puppo & Mateus Araújo (ed.) Godard Inteiro ou o Mundo em Pedaços (São Paulo: Heco Produções, 2015), 280. Translation from Portuguese by Fábio Andrade. One of the few artistic strategies that have survived the many distinct phases of Jean Luc-Godard’s work is the pun. Often associated with comedy, for Godard the […]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman
* Originally published at Cinética, December 14th, 2017. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Everything happens The book by the Brazilian researcher and scholar Ivone Margulies on the work of Chantal Akerman holds in its title a synthesis of what’s required of the spectator by a film such as Jeanne Dielman: nothing happens. The title is a witty […]
The Process of Truth
* Originally published at Cinética in August 2011, and first translated into English in March 2013. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS In What is the Contemporary?, Giorgio Agamben points out the discrepancy to one’s historical moment as an essential feature of the truly contemporary person. “But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are […]
Moonlight (2016), Barry Jenkins; The Human Surge (El Auge del Humano, 2016), Eduardo Williams
* Originally published in April 2017 at Cinética. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The specific is dead; long live the specific 1. Moonlight is a tripartite story about the life of Chiron, a boy growing up to be a man in a tough neighborhood in sunny Miami. The film is based on an unproduced play beautifully titled […]
A Tale of Love (1995), Trinh T. Minh-ha & Jean-Paul Bourdier
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese in Carla Maia and Luís Felipe Flores (ed.) O Cinema de Trinh T. Minh-ha (2015) Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Cultural. 87-91. A room of one’s own A Tale of Love begins with a wide shot of a mountain under blue sky, covered by dry weed that sways in the […]