Altar (Gomes, 2003): ICA Cinema, 6pm
For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature, theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity. This screening is part of the ICA season devoted to the filmmaker. You can find the full details here.
ICA introduction to tonight's screening:
Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting
between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as
fragments of a distant past resurface. The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Benjamin Crais, a scholar, critic, and film programmer. He is on the editorial board of the film magazine Narrow Margin, a quarterly magazine of film criticism.
Critic Adrian Martin has written about Gomes' cinema (full article via this link) and here is an extract from his writing about her on the film screening this evening:
Altar (2003) is Rita Azevedo Gomes' most radical and inventive exploration
of this layered approach. At its core stands the small, physical gesture of a
woman, Madeleine (Patrícia Saramago), a gesture that obsesses a widower
playwright (René Gouzene) living on an island. The entire film is constructed
as a slow-paced unfolding of the events and implications surrounding this single
gesture. The oral retelling of memories, filled with rich literary description,
is both accompanied and counterpointed by a careful soundtrack mixing natural sounds,
various musical pieces, and passages of poetry by E.E. Cummings and Sophia de
Mello (read by the director herself). The image-track mixes domestic scenes
where the protagonist tells the story to a young visitor, with a selection of
details from paintings. Altar is a stunningly beautiful piece, very much in line
with an idea that Oliveira and Bénard da Costa discuss in The Fifteenth Stone: that the power of an image comes not from what
it shows but what it signifies, a meaning which is not strictly visible, and
can be found only by going right “inside” the work. Altar also plays with two tropes beloved of Azevedo Gomes:
the paradoxical parallelisms between sensory or aesthetic experiences (“images
so silent that, when seeing them, it seems like I’ve closed my eyes”, as one of
de Mello’s poems says); and the intermingling of spatio-temporal dimensions.
These tropes were already evident in Azevedo Gomes’ stunning debut, The Sound of the Trembling Earth (1990),
where Alberto (José Mário Branco) quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying:
“Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting”. A powerful device in
this film is the hallucinatory collapse of movements occurring simultaneously in
different directions – a little like the famous “zolly” shots (zooming in and
tracking out) made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Here (and above) is an extract.
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