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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Joao Pedro Rodrigues and Joao Rui Guerra da Mata

Edited by José Duarte and Filipa Rosário

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£100.00

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About this book

An exploration of the films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
  • Engages with current discourses around World Cinema, Art Cinema and Queer Studies
  • Offers scholarly approaches from different perspectives and fields: from close readings to Cinema Studies, gender and identity studies, transnational approaches
  • Includes both textual and contextual analysis of the directors’ works

João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata are one of the most cosmopolitan duos in contemporary world cinema. Their films tell us stories of love and human desire, receiving a highly favourable reception among critics and at international festivals. Despite their high profile, Rodrigues and da Mata’s work remains relatively understudied.

ReFocus: The Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, paves the way for the study of the directors’ work, critically analysing the various cinematic perspectives of their short and full-length feature films. In the first collection solely dedicated to their work, this book addresses the historical, political, stylistic, industry, and cultural dimensions of Rodrigues and da Mata’s films, providing critical recognition for their contribution to world cinema.

Reviews

[T]his volume boosts the international status and visibility of smaller players, allows for a larger audience to have access to the work of these two artists while, simultaneously, justifying the international acclaim they have already earned. While the specificities of working and living in a particular small nation are made apparent throughout the essay selection, so is the transnationality of the stories told. Overall, the volume highlights the transformative input of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata in the Portuguese cinematic landscape.

[T]his volume boosts the international status and visibility of smaller players, allows for a larger audience to have access to the work of these two artists while, simultaneously, justifying the international acclaim they have already earned. While the specificities of working and living in a particular small nation are made apparent throughout the essay selection, so is the transnationality of the stories told. Overall, the volume highlights the transformative input of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata in the Portuguese cinematic landscape.

This indispensable collection offers an extraordinarily rich set of perspectives on one of Portugal’s most innovative and important filmmaking partnerships. The result does justice not only to Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s well-known work on queerness but also to their unique and complex engagement with spatial thought, cinephilia and corporeality.

Duarte and Rosário conduct a complex and complete analysis of the work of these two pioneers of Portuguese Queer Cinema; an insightful, multi-layered book that delves into the meaning of Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s images of queer subjects and their endless transformations.

Without ever assuming itself as a manifesto against the auteur theory (which, since the 1950s, has absorbed the entire discourse of cinephilia and film theory), ReFocus: The Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata is an example that the academy begins to expand its scope beyond the figure of the director. [...] In the absence of more extensive studies on the various creative voices that are sheltered in "allegedly" technical positions, comes a book that, in gathering a set of distinct perspectives on the filmography of João Pedro Rodrigues, also presents a panoramic view of one of the most reflexive art directors of Portuguese cinema, João Rui Guerra da Mata.

Table of contents

List of FiguresList of ContributorsAcknowledgements

Introduction. Nonconformities and Unconventional, Unreal Liberties: The Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata - José Duarte and Filipa Rosário

Section 1. Queer (Dis)Placements, Exquisite Bodies

1: Sculpting the Body, Sculpting History - Glòria Salvadó-Corretger and Fran Benavente

2: The Injury: On Pathosformel in João Pedro Rodrigues’s Work - Olivier Cheval

3: Love is Stronger than Death: João Pedro Rodrigues’s Two Drifters and the Ghost(s) of Manoel de Oliveira - José Bértolo

Section 2. Cinematic Landscapes and Territories

4: Phantoms, Drifters, and Desiring Saints: Landscapes and Soundscapes of Becoming-Queer in the Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata - Andrija Filipović

5: Queer Metamorphoses and Displacements in the Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata - António Fernando Cascais

6: Neo-Baroque Landscape: João Pedro Rodrigues’s Docu-Fiction and Ecosophical Kinships in The Ornithologist - Hyemin Kim

7: Failure, Erasure, and Oblivion in João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s Asian Trilogy: Red Dawn, The Last Time I Saw Macao, and Iec Long - Juan Antonio Suárez

8: Space and Memory: The Window as Freeze-Frame - Carlos Alberto Carrilho and Rita Ferrão

Section 3. Artistic Practices

9: New Frontiers in Art Direction: João Guerra da Mata’s Contribution to Portuguese Cinema as a Case Study - Caterina Cucinotta

10: Other Landscapes: On the Expanded Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata - Filipa Rosário

Section 4

. Interview with João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

11: Interview with João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata Julián Daniel Gutiérrez Albilla

About the contributors

José Duarte

Dr José Duarte teaches cinema at the School of Arts and Humanities at the Universidade de Lisboa, and is a researcher at ULICES (University Lisbon Centre for English Studies).

Filipa Rosário

Filipa Rosário is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon (CEC-UL). She co-edited the book New Approaches to Cinematic Space (2019), and is the author of O Trabalho do Actor no Cinema de John Cassavetes (2017).

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