That obscure object of literary quotation: For a phenomenology of intertextuality In João César Monteiro’s work

Abstract

Although poetry, or rather, literature tout court, is omnipresent in João César Monteiro’s work, his cinematographic praxis reveals how unlikely it is to film it. The refusal to illustrate literary texts and the perception that there is no possible correspondence between word and image is simply the demonstration of the cinema’s inability to film poetry and the uselessness of attempting it, since “what can be filmed is always something else, that may have or not a poetic quality” (Monteiro, 1974, p. 115). We can see this from Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969) to the adaptation of Robert Walser’s Snow White (2000), the latter embodying the monteirian prophecy according to which the “cinema is the Word [...] and the Word turned into movie will ultimately testify, on the dark surface of the screen, the death of the cinema and its rebirth” (Monteiro, 1969, in Nicolau (org.), 2005, p. 105). Monteiro’s work represents one of the most acute explorations in the “re-writing” of literary texts through images and words. In fact, this essay aims at performing a semiotic analysis of some of the main strategies through which literature is manifested in Monteiro’s filmography, enabling us to outline a brief phenomenology of the intertextual relations between literary words and cinematic images. Specifically, we intend to stress the “anti-illusionist” relations created by the progressive divergence between the soundtrack and the visual one, examining from the interruptions caused by unusual and unexpected images, through which the transparency of sound opposes the opacity of images, to the blindness of the black screen.