peer review journals by Fátima Chinita
Rhinocervs, 2025
The introductory essay to the special issue of the journal "Rhinocervs-Cinema, Dance, Music, Thea... more The introductory essay to the special issue of the journal "Rhinocervs-Cinema, Dance, Music, Theater" (June 2025), titled "Intermedial Connections: Impurity in the Arts," explains the rationale behind the theme of artistic hybridity from two seemingly opposite perspectives, those of art forms and mediums, that, nevertheless, conflate in the concept and practice of Intermediality.
Ekphrasis - Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2024
Renowned narratologists, especially those focusing on film studies, have little interest in the p... more Renowned narratologists, especially those focusing on film studies, have little interest in the prologue as a narrative device. I argue that this film segment is crucial in postmodern narratives, usually characterized by their nonlinearity. In films that feature it, this introductory scene/sequence is part of the work's complex embroidery and is formally produced in the same style of the overall film, alerting to its tone, nonlinearity, self-reflexive nature, theme, and metanarrative discourse. Like all prologues, it explains part of what is to follow and engages the viewer's curiosity. I call these segments hermeneutic decoders. However, in complex narratives they also deliberately hide the film's full story and/or real meaning in plain sight. They engage the viewer's cognitive abilities but manage to be as enigmatic as the rest of the film (despite containing most of the clues to its understanding). I will provide examples from several established categories of complex films and will deal with a specific case study in more detail: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), which belongs to an undecipherable category of narratives that Kiss and Willemsen call "impossible puzzle films." After a detailed analysis of the hermeneutic decoder, I will explain how it provides all the clues for an account of the film as an allegory of spectatorship from two theoretical standpoints: Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image and Jacques Lacan's notion of the gaze. The aporetical enunciation and the duplicated gaze, in tandem, form the key to the film's narrative enigma, open to an intense hermeneutic activity that is nevertheless, and necessarily, frustrated.
Ekphrasis , 2023
"The Metamorphosis of Birds" (Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020, Portugal) is a hybrid non-fiction film ... more "The Metamorphosis of Birds" (Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020, Portugal) is a hybrid non-fiction film in which the director represents herself and the members of her immediate family, who are an extension of her, in an intermedial and deliberately lyrical fashion. Starting with Bill Nichols's performative modality of documentary, the article will shed light on how the metaphorical network that links mother (roots and growth), father (life and death) and birds (freedom and creativity) in the film is developed in connection to the filmmaker and her existence, in a profoundly personal and intimate manner. This performative autobiographical stance exists midway between the real and the fictional, i.e., in fully autofictional territory. Permeated with autobiographical details but resorting to imagination, the film seems to be a combination of both "biographical" and "specular" autofiction according to Luz Elena Herrera Zamudio (2007), presupposing lyricism, on the one hand, and reversibility between the real and the imaginary, on the other. Mirroring is the core performative act which demonstrates that the creator is an integral part of her work (film as text) and vice versa.
DOC-online, 2023
Resumo: Naquilo que Laura Rascaroli (2009) designa como cinema subjectivo e Alain Bergala (1988),... more Resumo: Naquilo que Laura Rascaroli (2009) designa como cinema subjectivo e Alain Bergala (1988), Jean-Pierre Esquenazi e Alain Gardies (2006) apelidam de cinema do Eu encontramos documentários metacinematográficos, simultaneamente (auto)reflexivos e sobre o cinema em geral. Nesta categoria, o hibridismo formal e de conteúdo faz-se sentir sobretudo no Filme-ensaio e no Auto-retrato que mostram o cineasta como um profissional de cinema em plena actividade. Em ambos os casos existe auto-representação, sendo que o cineasta se interpreta a si mesmo com contornos autobiográficos. Em algumas situações podemos desaguar no Filme de Arte Poética (do latim ars poetica) segundo Yannick Mouren (2009), que manifesta de modo autoconsciente e discursivo a práxis cinematográfica do artista; ou então no Filme Testamento, uma resenha artística do próprio criador em fim de carreira. O modo como estes conceitos e práticas se intersectam de forma cada vez mais híbrida, leva-me a defender o conceito de Cine-Grafias, aplicado a formas cinematográficas de escrita, a um tempo expressivas e voltadas para o Eu do artista. A última longa-metragem de Jean Cocteau, Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi! (1960), será o estudo de caso em apreço, permitindo-me concluir que as cine-grafias são autênticos documentosque atestam de uma existência concreta-não obstante a sua relação com o real ser batente duvidosa-mas que funcionam prioritariamente como textos. Palavras-chave: metacinema, filme-ensaio, auto-retrato, autoficção, filme de arte poética, filme testamento.
Interfaces - Image Texte Language, 2022
The mixing of media and the crossing of media borders have become part of the theoretical discour... more The mixing of media and the crossing of media borders have become part of the theoretical discourse on cinema and other art forms, whether one is for or against it. No longer just cinema (or never just cinema), no longer cinema above or with the other art forms, now it has become essentially a matter of cinema in-between the other arts.
Interfaces Image Texte Language, 2022
Early film theorist Ricciotto Canudo equated cinema with music because of the Seventh Art’s inher... more Early film theorist Ricciotto Canudo equated cinema with music because of the Seventh Art’s inherent plasticity; in the 21st century, plasticity extends to the soundtrack. In this article, I explore the fusion of cinema with the musical genre of opera. By considering that film is a performative medium, beyond the actors’ agency, I confirm music’s importance in it as part of the structure and style of opera. Unlike Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Verdi’s opera Otello, Orson Welles’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play conforms to Jacques Aumont’s concept of “operatic film” in that it engenders a coexistence of the verbal and the non-verbal, balancing drama and music with a performative intention. However, this film is so musicalized and operatically rendered, especially through its soundtrack, that it exceeds Aumont’s intention and becomes what I call a “cinematic opera”: a film that is operatic in its artificial and ritualistic nature as well as in its well-woven soundtrack of music, sound effects and voice working together in a common musicalized pattern.
Rhinocerus, 2022
The myth of the Androgyne is appropriated in John Cameron Mitchell's movie adaptation of his epon... more The myth of the Androgyne is appropriated in John Cameron Mitchell's movie adaptation of his eponymous off-Broadway musical play titled Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This is a cinematic feat as the filmmaker foregrounds the main topic in the theme itself in a lowbrow approach clashing with its two main canonical sources: the Christian myth of Biblical creation and Plato's mythological account in The Symposium. The transgender protagonist, Hedwig, is a human divide looking to be symbolically made whole, which she eventually manages to do through her art as rock musician. Thus, Plato's myth of creation finds its natural artistic correlate in glam rock. Musical art is here equated with creation, and the androgynous artist Hedwig, endowed with both female and male psychic principles represents the core of the artistic duality. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is not only an opus about creation in general, but a movie about the myth of the author and his/her intrinsic nature. Keywords: Androgyne-Creation myths-Plato's Symposium-Rock music-Glam rock-Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Ekphrasis - Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2021
Introduction to Ekphrasis - Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, vol. 26, no. 2 (2021). Issue "The Essa... more Introduction to Ekphrasis - Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, vol. 26, no. 2 (2021). Issue "The Essay Film as Self-Representational Mode".
Ekphrasis - Images, Cinema, Theory, Media , 2021
Book review of Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality
and Technology, edited by Julia V... more Book review of Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality
and Technology, edited by Julia Vassilieva and
Deane Williams. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020,
245 pages. ISBN: 978-94-6372-870-6 (hardback)
December , 2021
This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song... more This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song) with the innately hybrid form of film. It compares Argentine tango culture to the height of French cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, arguing that they are both passionate, erotic and nostalgic ways of life. In Carlos Saura's Tango (1998) and Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson (1997), the intertwining of the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking are an audiovisual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Their self-reflexivity promotes excess and the result is a highly expressive and complex form. They evince a cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, typical of a perfect mise en abyme as described by Christian Metz. These films are also art musicals, although they depart from the Hollywood musical conventions. Yet, one cannot speak in their case of intermedia reflexivity, according to Petr Szczepanik's definition, because both of them retain their qualities in a symbiotic relationship of likeness that highlights their mutual aura.
Widerscreen, 2021
David Lynch’s cinematic work has always been intermedial, engaging other art forms. In this artic... more David Lynch’s cinematic work has always been intermedial, engaging other art forms. In this article I focus on a variety of performatic intermediality, which I deem responsible for Lynch’s atmospheres and his motto of entering into another world. I posit that Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted is the key to Lynch’s artistic hybridity as well as the core of the immersiveness his films impart to the viewers. However, this is done differently in the eponymous stage performance (1989) and the deriving television film (directed and edited by Lynch himself, broadcasted in 1990). The theatrical performance is one big, long mood, as Lynch observed, whereas the film version expands upon the immersive experience of the stage and creates a novel approach to audiovisual works in the line of Gene Youngblood’s concept of expanded cinema, and more specifically the “synaesthetic mode”, highly dependent on a stylization achieved in the post-production stage. This spectatorial experience stimulates the sensorium in an almost erotic manner, as Laura U. Marks contends of “haptic eroticism”, and spreads the self-reflexive properties of the film to the entire cinematic medium, as Gilles Deleuze claims of his “crystal-image”. Thus, the more the film commingles (self-)reflexivity and sensoriality, the more it reinforces the viewers’ immersiveness and allows them to enter into another world.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0004, 2018
The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, "Songs from the Second Floor" (Sånger från and... more The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, "Songs from the Second Floor" (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), "You, the Living" (Du levande, 2007), and "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls " the complex image, " a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this " complexity " poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a " hyperreality; " (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-contained and entirely open, highlighting a tension between volume and surface; (3) the opposition between stasis and movement, conveying a meaningful social contrast and the characters' angst; (4) the pictoriality of the image. 1
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication , 2017
In The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy – Part 1 – "The Moab Story" (2003); Part 2 – "From Vaux to t... more In The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy – Part 1 – "The Moab Story" (2003); Part 2 – "From Vaux to the Se" (2004); Part 3 – "From Sark to Finish" (2004) – Peter Greenaway plays with the tension between three-and two-dimensionality. His digital cinema, which superimposes several layers of images and sounds, uses the frame as both instrument and theme of a meta-cinematic discourse on media and the way they interrelate. Drawing especially from painting and theatre, Greenaway rejects the Renaissance monocular perspective in favour of a haptic visuality that alternates between depth and flatness, between single-framed tableaux and multi-framed composite images. The result is a hybrid, a sort of " imploded " narrative, as disruptive as it is engaging. Although dismissing the traditional Western visual paradigm in general and the classical analytical montage in particular, Greenaway nevertheless bases his practice on some of the most renowned aspects of the continuity editing style, if only to undermine them. This critically revamped editing is aesthetically and cognitively seductive, acting upon the viewers' fetishistic attraction for the medium as well as their affects and senses.
International Journal of Cinema, Jul 2016
Considering the film "Eraserhead" (David Lynch, 1977) an ode to the body in both its outward and ... more Considering the film "Eraserhead" (David Lynch, 1977) an ode to the body in both its outward and inward manifestations, this article compares the body as it is represented in the film, through the physical and psychical depiction of characters, with the cinematic medium and its conventions. The article presents Eraserhead as having three levels of meaning, all of them connected to the corporeal: one literal and two figurative. These latter two are clearly allegorical and, ultimately, one of them is literal and the other two are figural. In the most complex of them all, which presents the film in general as an artistic body, "Eraserhead" can be understood as an allegory of spectatorship.
Acta Universitatis Sapientia, Film and Media Studies, 2015
Derek Jarman was a multifaceted artist whose intermedial versatility reinforces a strong authoria... more Derek Jarman was a multifaceted artist whose intermedial versatility reinforces a strong authorial discourse. He constructs an immersive allegorical world of hybrid art where different layers of cinematic, theatrical and painterly materials come together to convey a lyrical form and express a powerful ideological message. In Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991), concomitant perspectives. In Caravaggio, through the use of tableaux of abstract meaning and by focusing on the detailing of the models' poses, Jarman re-enacts the allegorical spirit of Caravaggio's paintings through entirely cinematic resources. Edward II was a king, and as a statesman he the theatrical basis of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play bringing it up to date in a successfully abstract approach to the musical stage. In this of existential phenomenology as advocated by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, in order to address the relationship between the corporeality of a means to convey intradiegetically the sense-ability at play in the cinematic touching the spectator in a supplementary fashion. The two corporealities favour an inter-artistic immersion achieved through coenaesthesia.
Aniki - Revista Portuguesa de Imagem em Movimento, vo. 1, nº 2 (2014)
Partindo da explicação daquilo que neste ensaio se entende por “metacinema” e a sua relevância co... more Partindo da explicação daquilo que neste ensaio se entende por “metacinema” e a sua relevância como discurso autoral sobre a sétima arte, aborda-se o fenómeno do visionamento múltiplo de uma mesma obra (aspeto conhecido em inglês como “repeat viewing”). Este fenómeno permite um contato privilegiado entre o meta espetador, propenso a aderir em maior grau aos metafilmes, e o meta realizador, inclinado a construir uma carreira em torno da execução dos mesmos. Em causa está o visionamento e o fabrico de obras, direta ou indiretamente, especializadas no universo cinematográfico.
A mediação do dispositivo cinematográfico na projeção em sala ou a apropriação de novas e cada vez mais versáteis tecnologias de captação e reprodução audiovisual permite transformar o vidente cinéfilo num utilizador compulsivo, conferindo ao cinema atualmente uma dimensão háptica que ele não detinha da mesma forma anteriormente. O espetador apropria-se de obras criadas por outrem, atribuindo-lhes uma nova forma e um novo sentido, mas dentro de um contexto cinéfilo. Inversamente, o criador é voluntariamente apropriado pela indústria, permitindo o consumo de si mesmo nas edições em videograma e trabalhando internamente as obras e os seus mecanismos formais e narrativos para geraram maior e mais multiplicadas formas de consumo junto dos espetadores. Assim se fomenta uma jornada que não é do herói, mas sim do vidente.
Para concluir, defende-se que a maior acessibilidade fílmica permitida pela disseminação de novas janelas de consumo cinematográfico incrementa o "repeat viewing" e uma apropriação cada vez maior das obras, mas em contrapartida, pode desencadear a nulidade do discurso metacinematográfico e o esboroar do metacinema como tal.
Networking Knowledge, Vol. 7, nº 4 (2014)
One of the filmic trends which has been neglected by the Academy Awards is the metacinema, which ... more One of the filmic trends which has been neglected by the Academy Awards is the metacinema, which for practical purposes I will consider to be a cross between the complexities of the self-reflexive cinema (highly connoted with modernism) and the Hollywood Film (the classical films about the urge to ‘make it’ in Hollywood). Indeed, these films have always existed and some, as "Sunset Boulevard" (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA) and "Mulholland Dr." (David Lynch, 2001, FRA/USA), have even made it to the ceremony, but were, predictably, defeated in the main categories, by other more ‘serious’ or less self-reflexive products. The United States has always insisted on not revealing the tricks of the trade while, ironically, generating films that deal with this theme, in order to cater to the curiosity of the metacinema-inclined spectator. For this reason such films are usually about the universe of cinema but not its medium, at least not in a way that discloses the operations of the technical apparatus.
Why are these films not viewed as serious enough and artistic enough to be awarded Oscars by the Academy in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography? Are they being discarded for the same reasons that comedy and musicals usually are? Or are they being punished for being too unveiling? Or is the industry going for commercial products that can easily be pushed on a global scale and make a profit?
Book chapters by Fátima Chinita
Intermedial Encounters: Studies in Honor of Ágnes Petho, 2022
Theoretical account of the convergence between cinematic self-reflexivity and intermediality.
UBI Cinema: 2007-2017, 2017
Análise do filme "Lemúria", projecto de Mestrado de José Ratinho (2009), Universidade da Beira In... more Análise do filme "Lemúria", projecto de Mestrado de José Ratinho (2009), Universidade da Beira Interior.
Uploads
peer review journals by Fátima Chinita
and Technology, edited by Julia Vassilieva and
Deane Williams. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020,
245 pages. ISBN: 978-94-6372-870-6 (hardback)
A mediação do dispositivo cinematográfico na projeção em sala ou a apropriação de novas e cada vez mais versáteis tecnologias de captação e reprodução audiovisual permite transformar o vidente cinéfilo num utilizador compulsivo, conferindo ao cinema atualmente uma dimensão háptica que ele não detinha da mesma forma anteriormente. O espetador apropria-se de obras criadas por outrem, atribuindo-lhes uma nova forma e um novo sentido, mas dentro de um contexto cinéfilo. Inversamente, o criador é voluntariamente apropriado pela indústria, permitindo o consumo de si mesmo nas edições em videograma e trabalhando internamente as obras e os seus mecanismos formais e narrativos para geraram maior e mais multiplicadas formas de consumo junto dos espetadores. Assim se fomenta uma jornada que não é do herói, mas sim do vidente.
Para concluir, defende-se que a maior acessibilidade fílmica permitida pela disseminação de novas janelas de consumo cinematográfico incrementa o "repeat viewing" e uma apropriação cada vez maior das obras, mas em contrapartida, pode desencadear a nulidade do discurso metacinematográfico e o esboroar do metacinema como tal.
Why are these films not viewed as serious enough and artistic enough to be awarded Oscars by the Academy in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography? Are they being discarded for the same reasons that comedy and musicals usually are? Or are they being punished for being too unveiling? Or is the industry going for commercial products that can easily be pushed on a global scale and make a profit?
Book chapters by Fátima Chinita