“Yet the death of this friend inexplicably relieves something, like the threat of his death.”—Jean Louis Schefer, in his eulogy for Roland Barthes1For Jean Louis Schefer, the distinctive writer and nonpareil theorist of art who died in early June of this year, the interaction between oneself and the image is a fraught site of self-definition. Perhaps no other thinker was as dedicated to exploring the interlocking of interior self-consciousness and external perception that the experience of images provides. It is an event that occurs across cultures, across eras.The singularity of his thought stems in part from the uncommonness of his childhood. He was born in 1938 into an aristocratic and well-connected family. And like something out of Proust, his childhood was filled with the household visits of famous artists and writers. The most memorable for Schefer, and the person who would exhibit great influence on his thinking, was...
- 7/11/2022
- MUBI
Mubi's retrospective Out of this World: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is showing July – September, 2020.Above: The Portuguese WomanIt's staggering how complete the cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is already in her first film, a feature no less: O Som da Terra a Tremer (1990) is an explosion of feeling and thought and invention carried by the profoundest of knowledge about cinema and the arts. Thus, it is most lamentable that it took another two decades plus for her to be recognized by international film culture at its most general level, with A Woman’s Revenge (2012), a work refined and lean, almost minimalist, très Portuguese à la Oliveira, thus similar to other films, other auteurs from Europe's western-most nation—and therefore welcome with open arms at all the places usually deemed right.While one can easily say that in the end it all worked out, one has to immediately...
- 8/3/2020
- MUBI
A Portuguese Woman“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite. Her 2016 poetic...
- 8/1/2019
- MUBI
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