Significação: Journal of Audiovisual Culture
Significação - Revista de Cultura Audiovisual publishes articles dedicated to the study of audiovisual media and digital systems, considering them in their diversity of practices and ideas that involve specific processes of reflection, creation, production and dissemination.
Universidade de São Paulo. Escola de Comunicações e Artes
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Originally published in the book The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1995), Jameson’s essay analyzes Edward Yang’s film The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi, 1986), considering how the urban experience in postmodernism and Taiwan’s fluid identity impact the narrative of the work. In this interplay, the collapse of the modern notion of the subject is revealed, as well as the crisis in the binary opposition between fiction and reality.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fredric Jameson; Lucas Manuel Mazuquieri Reis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Olga Futemma is a Brazilian filmmaker who worked between the 1970s and 1980s. Considering the consistency of the themes and cinematographic approach of her work, I propose to investigate a set of materials found in the Brazilian Cinematheque, consisting of five screenplays of unrealized films written by Futemma. The aim of the analysis is to understand how this written production dialogues with the rest of her work and how it can be incorporated into the scope of analysis of the director’s filmography.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hanna Esperança https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Swiftie Poète Maudit: Remnants of Modernism in the Production of Pop Meaning
Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department reveals recurring semiotic strategies in pop culture, oscillating between creativity and standardization: a dialectic that, according to Fredric Jameson, defines postmodernity, a cultural framework where remnants of modernism, fostered by capitalist rationalization and its oppositional art, still survive. The pursuit of novelty and a distinctive style attest to this residual survival in a mass culture where Swift recoins the poète maudit: a transgressive, decadent sensibility that, combined with elements of Romanticism and postmodern frenzy, shapes a pop malditism marked by traits of today’s subjectivity.
Walter Benjamin e Dani Karavan: a crossing between history, installation and cinema
This article proposes the enjoyment of the installation Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin (1990-1994), by Dani Karavan, as a cinematic experience. In the field of perception and memory, taking the notions of framing, reality effects, flow-image, montage-effect, and cinema-effect, based on the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Aumont, Eisenstein, Bellour, and Dubois, Passages is analyzed as a vision device capable of providing a cinematic experience, despite the absence of a filmic image. As we walk through the interventions, as we recall visual impression and remember history, we experience an imaginary film — a cinema to awaken.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Angélica Del Nery https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
For a denomination of Queerbaiting: between sapphic receptions, theoretical concepts and media discourses
In serialized narratives, there’s an interpretative hook that draws the attention of queer consumers: queerbaiting, a maneuver that aims to create an expectation of a non-explicit romantic pairing within the work. Based on a theoretical-methodological study involving literature review, participant observation, and semi-structured group interviews, we have the following research problem: is it possible to prove that a production engages/has engaged in queerbaiting? Our goal was to find evidence that this strategy is in place, and we hypothesized that seriality is the cause and fan frustration is a consequence of this phenomenon.
Historiographical anomalies in the surrealism cinema of Buñuel and Dalí in Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or: between aesthetic subversion and political critique
This article analyzes the films Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, challenging David Bordwell’s historiographic categories. Through an interdiscipli-nary approach integrating psychoanalysis, philosophy, and film studies, the article highlights the films’ radical critique of the political, religious, and cultural order of the 1930s. The analysis reveals how Buñuel and Dalí’s cinematic surrealism transcends traditional classifications. It contextualizes their production within the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, as well as their influence on filmmakers such as Lynch, Almodóvar, and von Trier. The conclusion asserts that these works reaffirm cinema as a space of rupture and creative freedom.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcelo Eduardo Ribaric https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Through modes and spaces: on the migratory movements of communication
Roger Odin’s Spaces of Communication uses a meticulous method of analyzing the most varied phenomena of human communication, emphasizing expanded cinema and audiovisual media. Thus, Odin’s book is reminiscent of works such as Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1976) by Charles W. Morris, originally published in 1938. Morris delves into the pragmatic dimension of language and communication in this work. Odin updates the interest in this pragmatic dimension with his semiopragmatics, recombining the tools to analyze communication processes. With rigor and empathy, Odin offers a theoretical model that considers the particularities of communication in his time.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alfredo Suppia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Andréa França, Cristiana Teixeira, Juliana Gutmann, Roberta Veiga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Abstraction, expropriation, anticipation: a genealogical note on the machinic visions of gesture
This study traces a genealogy of automatic vision of gestuality. Its text is organized into three parts. Its first part describes how the technical reproducibility of images came to be used to replicate gestures, to abstract them, and to expropriate them in several fields. Its second part shows that the matrix of the contemporary technical model, aimed at predicting behaviour, is already partially defined by cybernetics. Finally, the last part analyses computer-assisted vision devices using the automated detection of gestures and movements to predict and control driving. This genealogical outline highlights two vectors of transformation: a gradual abstraction and expropriation of gestures by technical imaging and a relative erasure of identity and subjectivity when the predictive bias of technical imaging is reinforced.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mauricio Lissovsky, Fernanda Bruno, Icaro Ferraz Vidal Junior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Urban physionomy: the city of Belém (PA) as a metropolis in the short film Belém 350 Anos
This article aims to analyze the short film Belém 350 anos (1966) by filmmaker Líbero Luxardo, investigating the modernization narratives about the city of Belém (PA) present in it. To this end, we carried out an analysis of the histori-cal and urban context of the city, Luxardo’s career, and his relationship with local authorities, highlighting his role in the production of propaganda films for the government, as well as a film analysis of the movie in question. We conclude that Lux-ardo’s cinema reveals both his intentions and the film’s subtext, which reflects the narratives in dispute at the time and the so-cial, economic, cultural, and political situation of that period.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ival de Andrade Picanço Neto, Dóris Karoline Rocha da Costa, Francisco Pereira Smith Junior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Eros: from the spectacle to the eroticism that still awaits a spectator
This study analyzes Rachel Daysi’s film Eros (2024). It is made by a montage of images captured using a device: the director asked people to film their “intimacies” in motels. It aimed to show how the film evinces contemporary mutations in the notion of intimidation and the limits between the images of amateurs in private life and the spectacle. Furthermore, it stresses how, in Eros, the feminine gender functions as an element that destabilizes a certain hierarchy of gaze distribution.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Bogado, Artur Seidel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between environmentalism and social documentary film: Alejandro Fernández Mouján’s view on Chaco
This study focuses on the first documentary films by Argentine director Alejandro Fernández Mouján, which address the problems in the Chaco region in Argentina due to neoliberal advance. Its analysis stresses the dialogues these films establish with each other based on the recurrence of certain audiovisual motifs and the use of the archival apparatus. Considering the director’s career, this study also addresses the way in which the narrative search in these films navigates the themes and aesthetics of environmental cinema without losing its interest in the Argentine and Latin American social documentary tradition.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paola Margulis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Lissovsky’s photographs: what will they do while we are not looking at them?
Originally written as a tribute to Mauricio Lissovsky, this study dedicates itself to two intricate themes. First, it addresses the author’s latest book, A fotografia e seus duplos. Then, this study discusses how the ontogenesis the author proposed constitutes a historical study of photographic forms from the perspective of their future. This homage to the author highlights his relevance as an original thinker, the work of whom is fundamental in studies on photography in Brazil and around the world.
Copyright (c) 2024 Claudia Linhares Sanz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Images of mothers: a take on the Lissovkian waiting machine by female photographers
By observing images by Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin, we revisit Mauricio Lissovsky’s (2008) notion of waiting machine, thinking relationships between the waiting of photographers and the portrayed mothers. This study aims to address, by the works New Mother (1994) and From here to motherhood (1986-2000), the way in which the photographers, in portraying the maternal experience, imbue the image with its quality and re-establish the power of indeterminacy of the Lyssovskian machine in the face of an anti-machine of female expectation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Roberta Veiga, Juliana Salles de Siqueira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The fictional course of the pencil in El lápiz del carpintero: history, war, ideology
The book El lápiz del carpintero, by Manuel Rivas published in 1998, is set in Galicia during the Spanish civil war. There is, however, a connection with the present led by the object/character of the title. It is through this common thread, too, that the narrative unites real history and fiction. From the analysis of the book, this piece of work aims at investigating how this narrative feature is intersemiotically translated in the homonymous film of the director Antón Reixa, from 2003, as well as the perception of how in these two media the experiences referring to memory and identity come together.
Copyright (c) 2024 María del Mar Paramos Cebey, Soraya Ferreira Alves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The video, the NGOs in Rio de Janeiro and solidarity as a principle - interview made with Mauricio Lissovsky
An interview made with Mauricio Lissovsky about his trajectory, still in his youth, in the cinephile movement in the 1970s; he speaks on the practice and production of video supported by the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s; he analyses the political role of video and NGOs alongside popular and social movements in the context of the end of the Brazilian dictatorship and eventually he considers the strategic position of video in political action for the media dispute.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andréa França https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Geographic imaginations and figurative decentralization in the landscapes of contemporary cinema
This study seeks to acknowledge the forms of destabilization of the geographic space and the decentralization of the human figure in the landscapes of contemporary cinema. This study focuses on the films Meek’s cutoff (2010) by Kelly Reichardt, Jauja (2014) by Lisandro Alonso, and Il buco (2021) by Michelangelo Frammartino, representatives of a spatial reiteration that crosses contemporary cinema. First, we focus on the concept of “geographical imaginations” by Ângela Prysthon. Then, we address the concept of the figure by the theory of image and with how some ways to address this figuration can lead to a decentralization of the human in relation to space.
Copyright (c) 2024 Bruno Mesquita Malta de Alencar, Cesar de Siqueira Castanha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between self-portrait and selfie: a study of performance in photographs of oneself
This study analyses self-portraits and selfies to understand the space-time issues in Mauricio Lissovsky’s thought, which involve constructing self-images. By the lens of performance, it seeks to comprehend the historicity of self-portraits up to the phenomenon of selfies and to point out several ways in which bodies compose accounts of oneself, with their own intentions and meanings that shapin various modes of perceiving space and time in photographic experiences. Despite showing the matrices of the genre, selfies bring specificities in their performance: gestures as establishing the photographic space-time.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ravena Sena Maia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This study analyzes the processes of setting discourse with generative artificial intelligence technologies on the Dall-e 2 website by a semiotic proposition about discursive interactions. The projection in the enunciation of a human and a machine actors produces effects of meaning of reflexive and unidirectional bilateral interactions between these actors that require new competences from the recipient to interpret. This emphasizes the need for the enunciator to identify these discursive marks toward establishing communication contracts.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ana Silvia Lopes Davi Médola, Henrique da Silva Pereira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Republic of Assassins: memory in a Brazil of “Men of Steel”
This study sociologically analyzes the film Republic of Assassins (1979) by Miguel Faria Júnior based on the concepts of witness, trauma, and victim from Cynthia Sarti and Myriam Jimeno. Dissecting the characters of crossdresser Eloína and actress Marlene shows how both fit into the three indicated concepts due to their respective interactions with Mateus Romeiro, a member of the “Men of Steel.” Thus, this film contributes to establishing a memory that provides a place for the pain of the victims of the Brazilian Death Squad and for denouncing the atrocities of paramilitary groups that prevail to this day.
Copyright (c) 2024 Leonardo Corrêa Figueira, Marcos Alexandre dos Santos Albuquerque https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Watching at home: the presence of audiovisual technologies and consumption in domestic environments
The presence of audiovisual artifacts in domestic environment creates different living habits. This study reflects on domestic audiovisual consumption relations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This period made the private environment more relevant and changed habits. This research explains this processes by ethnographies of reception and cultural studies theories. Information was collected by a questionnaire and interviews with residents of Curitiba, Brazil, about their television and streaming consumption habits. The pandemic changed family and spatial arrangements in the collected sample but some habits related to earlier uses remained throughout that process.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carlos Alberto Debiasi, Luciana Martha Silveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Live from cyberspace: or, I was sitting at my computer this guy appeared he thought I was a bot
The popularization of the english word live recently to symbolize the production of real time audiovisual content for the internet has in this article a presentation of its historical trajectory, from the advent of this word published in an English dictionary for the first time in 1934, to the current contextualization of implications of live in the most recent manifestations of a particular digital technology: conversational softwares, known as chatbots. For this reason, we present this translation into portuguese of the essay “Live from cyberspace”, by Philip Auslander, which addresses the implications of these uses for understanding live performance and the crisis surrounding the liveness in relation to digital technologies as an ontological discussion about who performs it.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jair Molina Jr. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The names of Júlio Bressane: a play of senses in cinematic conversations
The article analyzes the ways in which the naming of characters shapes the cinematic conversations of Júlio Bressane’s films as speech acts whose sense leads to the proliferation of becoming and the production of undecidability. Based on the research of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we unfold the status of speech act of conversation in cinema, highlighting the eventimental character of the sense of conversation when it is crossed by the naming act. The study of names in Bressanean cinema is based on the analysis of blocks extracted from the films Brás Cubas (1985) and O mandarim (1995), in which the sense of nominations expresses a conversation that values tension between the already lived and the yet to come.
Copyright (c) 2023 Lennon Macedo, Bruno Leites https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Image/Time: for a Lissovskyan method of photography research
What do images do, want, or dream about? Challenging questions as, rather than facing a closed field of knowledge, we address an open-air, centrifugal, and dizzying arena. Reading its history and its vertigo, of what was, what could have been, and what will still be reveals photography itself. In his research, Mauricio Lissovsky combines two methodologies, a biographical and an iconological one . However, it seems that a Lissovskyan method of analyzing photographic images emerges by joining these parts. The theoretical basis in his extensive academic production proposes improving this methodological thinking about how to understand images and how to understand ourselves with images.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marcela Chaves do Valle https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Time and gaze in Cláudia Andujar’s photography
This study begins from a question that arose in debates at the Intercom Photography GP in 2021 about the time taken to observe a photograph. Thus, we seek to reflect on the time spent looking at images and what it can communicate based on the subject who observes and relates to the photo. We used authors such as Maurício Lissovsky, Boris Kossoy, and Roland Barthes and carried out a floating reading of the series É o trem do diabo by Cláudia Andujar. Finally, we understand that contemplative time is fundamental for the affectivity that draws the gaze, communicating aspects presents in observers’ subjectivity, making it impossible to grasp the Other in their entirety.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rayane Lacerda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Remote audiovisual editing: innovative, inclusive and multiuser technology
This article presents a project for implementing the Remote Edit Bay (IER)—a multiuser server that aims to provide access to remote editing and audiovisual post- production software—, being developed at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). As a state-of-the-art project focusing on social needs, the IER will be made available free of charge for teachers and students from public educational institutions, contributing to digital inclusion, digital citizenship and the right to information, knowledge and communication.
Copyright (c) 2023 Elianne Ivo Barroso, Márcia Bessa, Maria Gabriela Capper, Carolina Rodrigues, Ivan Athanazio, Théo Brígida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Mythical realism in the western: Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
In this article, we coin the concept of “mythical realism” to examine Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven (1992) and we make a comparison between Homer’s Odyssey and the western. Supported by studies on mythology, we present the characteristics of mythic realism and analyze the reasons of the trip, the name and the revenge. We consider that the concept of “mythical realism” may raise new questions about the relationship between realism, myth, literature and the western.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mauro BAPTISTA, Guillermo Giucci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Em antecipação à sua visita a São Paulo em dezembro de 2023, a Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual realizou uma entrevista online de duas horas com Giuliana Bruno, com foco em Atmospheres of Projection e em suas outras contribuições inovadoras. Bruno é palestrante convidada do workshop interdisciplinar organizado pela Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp) em dezembro de 2023. Antes disso, ministrará uma Masterclass na Universidade de São Paulo (USP), evento promovido pelo Laboratório de Investigação e Crítica Audiovisual (Laica) e pela Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual, com o apoio da Fapesp, do Instituto de Estudos Avançados (IEA-USP), do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Meios e Processos Audiovisuais da Escola de Comunicações e Artes (PPGMPA-ECA) e do Programa de Pós-Graduação e m Multimeios da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (PPGM-Unicamp).
Copyright (c) 2023 Luiza Wollinger Delfino; Esther Império Hamburger, Cecilia Mello, Giuliana Bruno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, situated in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. For over three decades, her critical thinking has been characterized by sophistication, rigor and originality, placing her among the leading world academics exploring intersections between visual arts, art history, architecture, film, and visual culture studies. Bruno's interdisciplinary approach has fostered connections between these fields, enriching our understanding of visual culture. Her work anticipated the field of ‘media archaeology’, uncovering and analyzing historical layers and traces embedded in visual artifacts for deeper contextual insights. She has also contributed significantly to spatial theory, particularly in relation to the intersection of architecture, art, and film, exploring how spaces and places shape our experiences and perceptions. In anticipation of her visit to São Paulo in December 2023, Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual conducted a two-hour online interview with Bruno, focusing on Atmospheres of Projection and her other groundbreaking contributions.
Copyright (c) 2023 Luiza Wollinger Delfino; Ester Império Hamburger, Cecília Mello, Giuliana Bruno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Images and counterimagens: disputes around the meaning of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985)
What associations can we establish between an image of a military parade in 1971, one a photojournalist keeps stored for a decade before publishing it, an Air Force photograph of political prisoners exchanged for an ambassador, the use of that image in a documentary, a television advertisement that says it survived torture, and the live and color broadcast of the 1970 World Cup? This study gathers and analyzes several ways in which images operate narrative disputes surrounding the meaning of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) and, based on the juxtaposition of images, discusses the terms of disputes that put our past and our future at stake.
Copyright (c) 2024 Luís Henrique Leal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0