Visual pleasures: body meaning in hardcore erotic movies

• Grant number: 11/52105-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: June 01, 2012
• End date: May 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Vicente Seraphim Pietroforte
• Grantee: Odair José Moreira da Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

There are three fundamental goals targeted by this research. The first would be a deepening current semiotics studies that put the body in evidence, and to show how the body means and establishes meaning through its presence in film narratives. The second put the cinema in highlighted by the bias of French semiotics, assuming that the visual semiotics, still tied to studies of still images, has devoted little space to explore the moving image, such as the cinema. The third will involve a genre of film producer of controversy, which tends to provide important discoveries in the grounds of sense, as a discourse: the hard-core erotic cinema (and video), the object of the studies of this research. Be convenient to note that our vision of erotic cinema, as a genre, is determined through a rupture that creates two subgenres from this matrix the soft-core erotic cinema (motivated by the erotic suggestion), which represents implied sexual acts, visually simulated but not detailed -establishing as an erotic cinema of the lack -; and hard-core erotic cinema (crystallized by the advent of pornography), in which sexual acts, as opposed to soft-core, are explicit, detailed and focused - instituting as a cinema erotic of the excess. Therefore, the body, while instituting effects of the sense in the hard-core films, will be observed through the embodiment in four dimensions that constitute the semiotics process of signification: the narrative, the passional, the figurative and the enunciative. Thus, what is proposed here is to lay the foundation for a semiotics of sexuality and sexual representation in film erotic of the excess, the famous porn movies. (AU)