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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El último giro de la TV broadcasting en Argentina: la ficción en su devenir
En la primera década del Siglo XXI se despliega el último giro de la ficcionalidad seriada propia del modelo de la TV broadcasting en Argentina. El artículo aborda las particularidades de ese movimiento centrífugo que permitió la expansión de operaciones formales y narrativas con remisiones a modalidades y prácticas de sentido previas, al tiempo que introducían componentes novedosos dentro del sistema de géneros y formatos de la ficción televisual. Las programaciones son interrogadas en tanto dispositivos que hicieron posible instalar un modelo-de-ver y un modelo-de-producir-simbólicamente que ubicó a la ficción seriada desde un protagonismo que no volvería a recuperar.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristina Andrea Siragusa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Esther Hamburger, Cecília Mello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
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
The Story of Turkish Television History from the Early Years to the 2000s
Since the 1950s, television has found its place in modern social life with its cultural, political, social and economic dimensions in every period of Turkish history. In this study, television broadcasting in Turkey, which started in the 1950s, is analyzed in three periods. The period from the early years of Turkish television history until the early 2000s is described in a chronological analysis in relation to economic, political, cultural and social events. It has been determined that television in Turkey is a political tool, a profitable economic commodity, and both a subject and an object of everyday life. Moreover, this paper suggest that television is directly affected by not only national but also international developments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Zeynep Gültekin Akçay https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ebbs and flows of television content: from the TV station to digital platforms SBTonline
The objective of this article is to identify, map and analyze the multiplatformization process of SBT inserted in the context of transformation/transition of television stations to the digital environment, which enables the transmission of information from many to many and breaks the traditional and monolithic structure of possession and direction of information from one to many. Methodologically, the ethnographic description delimited the case study, with participant observation and interviews, at the station and on digital platforms. As a result, the transmedia ecosystem at SBT is established in the controversies between making TV and making internet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Claudia Fernandes Gomes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Musalsalat in transition: between Arab (trans)nationalism and complex storytelling
This paper investigates the evolving landscape of Arab television series (musalsalat), exploring how transnational influences shape contemporary storytelling practices. It examines the transition from traditional Ramadan dramas to shorter, platform-oriented series that embrace complex narrative styles. By analyzing screenplay development processes, the paper highlights the interplay between cultural identity, global trends, and industry dynamics, revealing how pan-Arab dramas contribute to constructing identities within a rapidly globalising media environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fadi George Haddad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
History on the small screen: Mad Men, television and American history
This article analyzes the role the televisual medium plays in Mad Men (2007–2015), its omnipresence inside the home, as part of seasons’ themes, and its role as a mediator between the show’s fictional characters and the very real historical event they watch unfold on television, trying to understand how television’s presence in the show’s diegesis creates a self-referentiality between the past portrayed on the screen and the present of its exhibition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giancarlo Casellato Gozzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Renascer and the empirical account of feuilleton criticism
This paper presents an empirical account of the exercise of daily criticism of the telenovela Renascer (2024). In addition to an analytical retrospective on the complex negotiations involved in this criticism—with readers, authors and with the work itself—, the text proposes the hypothesis of a critical strategy in a format appropriate to this television genre: a feuilleton-like criticism, outlined in the daily (pursuing) of the soap opera's chapters.
Copyright (c) 2025 Álvaro André Zeini Cruz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In times of strong competition, fragmentation and high costs, the audiovisual industry has been investing in re-makes. The same trend is seen in TV Globo’s telenovelas. “Re-make” is a recurrent concept in Communication. However, some of its central aspects remain uncertain. Nevertheless, there is some consensus that the concept considers narrative, rather than visual, relations with the source text. Based on literature review, film analysis and interviews with image profes-sionals working for TV Globo, we question whether the tele-novela Renascer (2024) can also be considered a visual remake. Our results authorize us to answer the question affirmatively, revealing intersections between narrative and cinematography that can be further explored.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco 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.
“Botoxed telenovela”?: foreign streaming services’ delusions in reinventing Brazilian telenovela
The article analyzes the attempts and delusions of grandeur of US streaming services in trying to produce Brazilian telenovelas. The study reveals how these services face significant technical and operational difficulties when trying to replicate the format, due to lack of adequate infrastructure and specific know-how. The setbacks include abandoned projects, drastic reduction in the number of episodes, productions condensed into other formats, compromised budgets, and loss of cultural nuances in internationalization. Each concession weakens the distinctive qualities that define telenovelas as a unique narrative tradition, exposing the power asymmetries in global audiovisual production.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mayka Castellano, Melina Meimaridis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
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
May 1, 1968 in Cuba through Cuban and North American lenses
We analyze different documentary approaches to the celebrations of May 1, 1968, in Cuba, made for cinema and television. We started with images present in an edition of Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, and images from that same event possibly sent by a North American news agency, United Press International (UPI), to the news program O Seu Repórter Esso, broadcast by TV Tupi. The different options visible in the editing of the reports highlight ideological meanings related to the Cold War and allow us to reflect on similarities and distances between the production process and the language resources of newsreels and television news at that time.
Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematógraficos
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariana Martins Villaça 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