Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Oh! Fantasma

A very intriguing film, this O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000), where a trash worker deeply attuned to his senses and his libido develops into ever more "deviant" behavior. This worker, Sergio, is kept at bay from much of any psychologizing or pathos, and at the same time we're presented his actions with the utmost intimacy, and so we come to live with a figure who's not quite a character, not quite an icon, but more than a cipher. To me he's much like Misael in Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad or Vargas in Los Muertos. Have we the proliferation, in one stratum of cinema, of the 'three-dimensional' cipher ... whose significance is also, or ultimately, symbolic? If we take these massive generalizations with all the grains of salt they deserve, might we wonder if (building off of Deleuze) it's not so much a question of the pre-WWII figure who acts and the post-WWII figure who also sees, but now a figure who does or is something else, or something more (and I can't yet pinpoint what that is)?

I have a few ideas about all this, but they're too poorly formed even for this blog's off-the-cuff standards. But more thought will go into the question soon. In the meantime, I await Odete (Rodrigues' new one) with interest.

3 comments:

Winstrol said...

Do you watch all these films in original language?

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I love to watch stories about ghosts in my opinion those are so exciting and you can feel the emotion through them in special this film Fantasma is great.

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