Abstract
This essay offers a reading of Pedro Costa’s first feature-length film, O sangue (1989). It explores the representation of different sorts of walls, their semantic inferences and functions, arguing that Costa's "mural imagination" speaks to the limits—or perceived limitlessness—of contemporary filmmaking. I show that in O sangue, walls emerge as tools for defining realism and its relation to cinema. Beyond this, they work as rhetorical strategies to interrogate the threshold between fact and fiction and between socio-political realities and artistic filmmaking. For Costa, walls emphasize the authenticity of fictional worlds and highlight the ways in which audiences relate to the realities and communities represented on screen.
Highlights
This essay offers a reading of Pedro Costa’s first feature-length film, O sangue (1989)
While walls—whether man-made or natural, real or fictional, formal or contextual, psychological or sociological—become more explicit in Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy; they are already central to his first feature-length film, O sangue (1989) and play an important role in his Casa de lava (1994), as well
I argue that this motif only becomes more intense and explicit in the enclosed spaces and settings of Costa’s later Fontainhas trilogy—the work that would receive numerous critical reviews and bring him international praise
Summary
Before turning to my reading of the film, I would like to refer to two different but related concepts. The first is the idea of the “fourth wall,” a term attributed to French Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Diderot builds this conceptual wall to create a stronger connection between what happens on stage and in life As he sees it, if the actors pretend that the audience is not there, they can act naturally. When actors today speak directly to the audience or camera, it is commonly understood that they are “breaking the fourth wall.” In his own account of Diderot’s theory and its impact, Schneider focuses on how a new understanding of theater in the eighteenth century makes possible for the first time the representation of an abstract collective, given that the illusion of reality set on stage is a form of acting out a community, albeit in theoretical. While they seem to exclude and separate, they forge connections and make possible a sense of identification, or lack thereof
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