Physical Realism and the Sublime: Nature and Striving in Cinema

• Grant number: 23/16359-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2024
• End date: May 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Leandro Rocha Saraiva
• Grantee: Samuel Malaquias Carvalho
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims to investigate the relationships between Physical Realism and Sublime, in a set of films that plastically dramatize the tension between characters and natural environments. How, in the films in question, the ways of preparing the cinematographic staging (the pro-filmic), of situations of physical confrontation with the environment, together with the filming decisions that make up the mise-en-scène, construct different forms of Sublime? The main works to be analyzed are The Letter That Was Not Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960) and Stalker (Andrei Tarkovski, 1979). In short, in Kalatozov's film the sublime occurs based on the immediately physical presence of the brutal grandeur of the Siberian landscape, while in Tarkovsky's film, there is a sublime of the unknowable, spatially materialized in the mysterious environment of the Zone. Completing the picture, two films by Werner Herzog, Aguirre - The Wrath of the Gods (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). In the two Amazonian colonial sagas, the physical clash with the environment is confused with the characters' existential abysses.