Recife cinemática: as paisagens fílmicas em Amarelo Manga e Febre de Rato

Abstract

The urban landscape is constituted by multiple layers of meaning. Considering it as a text, allows us to access the symbolic content through which the dominant or alternative cultures reproduce their norms, values and worldviews. In this methodological approach the material landscape itself, in all its forms of expression, appears as a text that must be read and interpreted at length. Evidences of the meaning of landscapes are also found within cultural and aesthetic products in the society: in paintings, in literature, in music and in films. The latter play an important role in the structuring of contemporary geographies. Cities, in those cases, do not serve only as mere background, they have become cinematic cities as they gave meaning to cityscapes. Within this context, this study presents a discourse analysis, and an interpretative approach, of the cinematic Recife presented in the films Amarelo Manga (2003) and Febre do Rato (2012), both directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Claudio Assis. This work’s intention is, thus, to reveal the image of Recife through the understanding of its filmic landscapes. It was found that Amarelo Manga and Febre do Rato build a deleted and/or alternative Recife landscape and replicate a contestatory discourse about the city from different formats: on the one hand violence or shocking images that show the landscape degradation from social and historical potions of Recife and its peripheries in Amarelo Manga; and the other, a utopian discourse, allowing for another way to see and experience the city, and the black-and-white photograph that adds a poetic meaning to these same landscapes