Losing sight in the globalized city: Estorvo/Turbulence (2000) by Ruy Guerra and Ensaio sobre a Cegueira/Blindness (2008) by Fernando Meirelles

Abstract

Two Brazilian co-productions, Turbulence (2000) and Blindness (2008), have used their modes of production as a motive to situate their stories in urban spaces that are in fact assembled cities. Turbulence creates a location by drawing on footage filmed in Havana, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. Filming for Blindness took place in Toronto, São Paulo, Osasco and Montevideo. In both cases the cities are at once unnamed and recognizable, transnational and familiar. What is more, they have a deep impact on their characters’ emotions within these spaces. In both cases losing (clear) sight is a metaphor for the inability of coping with society’s inhumanity. The aim of this article is to compare the two films, discuss their adaptation from renowned novels and reveal their differences: while Turbulence is an indisciplinary take on a young man’s vision obfuscated by the repressive paternalistic order he lives in, Blindness is a disciplinary approach towards the loss of sight of an entire civilization. While the first film develops an allegorical and heterogeneous city space that aims to make us perceive a repressive (emotional) cultural landscape associated with the Ibero-American world, the second is rather an altered but conventional take on the ancient myth of Oedipus that does not offer new insights by means of the homogenous portrayal of a globalized Western megalopolis.