1The coproduction modes of two Brazilian films inspired their directors to situate their stories in urban spaces that are in fact assembled cities. Ruy Guerra’s Turbulence, produced in 2000, creates an Ibero-American city filmed in Havana, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. In Blindness, produced in 2008, Fernando Meirelles, on the other hand, edits a global megalopolis, filmed in Toronto, São Paulo, and Montevideo. In both cases the cities are at once unknown and recognizable, national and transnational. What is more, there is a strong relationship between the city spaces and the characters’ emotions and, subsequently, their psychological or physical health. Whereas the protagonist in Ruy Guerra’s film suffers from paranoia and his blurred vision is translated into hazy shots of the spaces he wanders through, in Meirelles’ movie an entire city goes blind when infected by what is called the “white disease”. In both cases seeing disorders stand in for the inability to cope with or envision society’s flaws and inhumanity, within a patriarchal oligarchy or liberal capitalism.
- 1 Rancière, Jacques, “Thinking between disciplines? An aesthetics of knowledge”, Parrhesia, vol. 1-1, (...)
- 2 Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture and Film, New York, Verso, 2nd edi (...)
- 3 See Ferreira, Carolin, “Em favor do cinema indisciplinar: o caso português” (In favour of indiscipl (...)
2The aim of this article is to compare how both films discuss the problem of vision within the architectural space of the assembled city by using the notions of “indisciplinarity”1 and ‘e-motion’2 as methodological tools. Before analysing them, I will first explain what I mean by indisciplinary film, a new concept based on Jacques Rancière’s neologism that I am trying to introduce as an alternative to the essay film3, as well as resume Giuliana Bruno’s ideas on the relationship between motion and emotion in filmic space.
- 4 Rancière, Jacques, “Thinking between disciplines? An aesthetics of knowledge”, Parrhesia, vol. 1-1, (...)
- 5 Ibid.
- 6 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translation Gabrie (...)
- 7 See Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction, London, Routledge, 1983.
- 8 Rancière, Jacques, “Thinking between disciplines? An aesthetics of knowledge”, Parrhesia, vol. 1-1, (...)
3The French philosopher Jacques Rancière claims that disciplines are not defined a priori by their methods but rather by “constituting an object as an object of thought and as the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge”4. Considering science a “war machine against allodoxy”, he foregrounds the aesthetic dimension involved: “But what is called allodoxy is, in reality, an aesthetic dissent”5. In the wake of post-structuralism, disciplinary boundaries are seen to hide the fact that their methods consist of storytelling. Since politics and aesthetics are inseparable, Rancière actually accuses the disciplines of knowledge of trying to neutralize everything that breaks away from consent and threatens social balance, everything that puts the distribution of social roles and occupations at risk. In short, everything that aims to restructure what he calls the “distribution of the sensible” in his book with the same title6. While Jacques Derrida7 would speak of deconstruction, Rancière uses the term indisciplinarity to disclose methods’ fictionality. Accordingly, any area of knowledge, including the arts, needs to pay attention to the fictions of other disciplines in order to maintain its indisciplinarity8.
- 9 Rancière, Jacques, Film Fables, translation Emiliano Battista, New York, Berg, 2006b.
- 10 See Zarzosa, Agustín, “Layering images, thwarting fables: Deleuze, Rancière and the allegories of c (...)
4Surprisingly, a contradiction can be noted between this attention to the fictionality of human production of knowledge and the author’s writings on film. Since Rancière9 does not effectively challenge the binary opposition established by film studies between fables (dominant narrative film) and “thwarted fables” (modern cinema) even though he accuses Gilles Deleuze of doing so10, it is worthwhile to take his definition of the aesthetic regime in consideration, since it reveals his focus on fictionality and heterogeneity more clearly.
- 11 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translation Gabrie (...)
- 12 Ibid., p. 24.
- 13 Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix, What is Philosophy?, translation Graham Burchell, Hugh Tomlinson, (...)
- 14 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translation Gabrie (...)
5By using Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert to explain and define the regime’s initial moment, the philosopher argues that the book does not bear the traces of its author’s intervention, that is his subjectivity, but, rather, of the indifference and passivity of things without will or significance: “The fictionality specific to the aesthetic age is consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning”11. In other words, the signifier coexists autonomously with the signified and thus enhances the complexity of meaning. The analysis of literary realism as a heterogeneous fiction leads me to suggest that this ‘identity of contraries’12 can equally be considered indisciplinary. In the footsteps of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari13, Rancière is of the opinion that there is no difference between the various disciplines since they only diverge in their fictions/methods: “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done”14.
- 15 Exploring this heterogeneous potential, the works of art of the aesthetic regime differ from those (...)
- 16 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translation Gabrie (...)
6When elaborating on the aesthetic regime, the author specifies a number of characteristics that I have used as key indicators for film’s indisciplinarity, i.e. its capacity to establish aesthetic dissent by way of a heterogeneous worldview. This worldview retracts from the Aristotelian idea of imitation of action, yet not by means of an anti-Aristotelian impetus that challenges identification, but rather due to an interest in the ‘brute’ materiality of the objects that have narrative potential in themselves.15 In order to analyse a film’s indisciplinarity, I have used these characteristics as methodological tools: the co-presence of temporalities; the in-definition of borders between the reason of facts and the reason of fictions; the suspension of the opposition between the activity of thought and the passivity of sensible matter; and, generally, the re-composition of the landscape of the visible as aesthetic dissent.16
- 17 Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture and Film, New York, Verso, 2nd edi (...)
7The study of assembled city spaces and indisciplinarity in Turbulence and Blindness gains depth when taking into consideration Giuliana Bruno’s study of vedutismo17 with which she questions the centrality of the homogenous space of classical unity. By drawing attention to this pre-cinematic way of organizing narrative space in paintings that take architecture as their topic, she argues that the cinematic apparatus does not necessarily present the world as a totalizing spectacle, but is equally interested in heterogeneous spaces comprised of constantly moving centres. In her complex study of the relation between art, architecture and film she points out the strong relation between emotion and space:
“As a view from the body, film is architecturally bound/ sized to the body, experienced from life, architecture is haptically imaged and mobilized. Architecture is neither a static structure nor simply just built. Like all tangible artefacts, it is actually constructed – imaged – as it is manipulated, ‘handled’ by users’ hands. And like a film, architecture is built as it is constantly negotiated by (e)motions, traversed by the histories both of its inhabitants and its transient dwellers. (…) The fiction of a city develops along the spatial trajectory of its image-movement. Film – the moving-image – travels the same path. Interaction is twofold, for film is architectural narration as much as “the image of the city” lives in the celluloid fiction.”18
- 19 Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator, translation Gregory Elliot, London, Verso, 2009.
8Thus, Bruno’s interest in the haptic and the negotiation of e-motion in filmic architectures is in tune with Rancière’s idea of the emancipated spectator19. Distancing himself from Brechtian ideas of intellectual perception, both authors insist that the spectator is always cognitively and sensually involved, be it in architecture and film in the case of Bruno or in Rancière’s aesthetic regime that knows no fixed meaning due to the importance attributed to brute materiality. The author's take on the relation between fictionality, spatial trajectory and the moving-image is useful in an analysis of the two films in question. Let me now look at them and ask to what extent they develop heterogeneous spaces that aim to reconfigure our senses and thus the distribution of the sensible.
- 20 Buarque, Chico, Turbulence – A Novel, New York, Pantheon Books, 1992.
9Ruy Guerra’s Turbulence is an adaptation of Chico Buarque’s homonymous novel.20 It is characterized by creative fidelity in the sense that it translates the perturbation of the book’s protagonist into an ingenious cinematographic approach: 1) by means of the circular narrative of e-motion, 2) the main character’s blurred sight on this meandering flight through familiar places, 3) the first-person voice over narrative spoken by the filmmaker, and 4) by turning the city into a transnational place, on the spatial and on the linguistic level, that could represent any large city in the Ibero-American world.
10The main character, listed as “I” (Jorge Perugorría) in the credits, is a young man who comes from a traditional Brazilian upper-class family. He lives isolated in an apartment, divorced and jobless. This reclusive life-style is interrupted right at the beginning of the film. Following the credits, the screen is black and we hear a doorbell ringing. The first thing we see is an extreme close-up on the protagonist’s eye. The image blurs when he tells us that he is “dazed”, the shot thus serving as much as an expression of his inner state of mind as of the way that this, as we will learn soon, affects his perception of the outside world. In his analysis of the novel, Augusto Massi21 remarks that the protagonist enters a world which is confusing because it is ambivalent with regard to identity and space.
Figure : Photograms of Estorvo (2000) by Ruy Guerra: first shot
- 22 Xavier, Ismail, “O olho mágico, o abrigo e a ameaça: convulsões – Ruy Guerra filma Chico Buarque” ( (...)
- 23 For a discussion of consciousness in modernity and its importance for the development of literary t (...)
11As in the novel, in this very first shot the exterior and interior worlds collapse. While Ismail Xavier22 interprets this as the protagonist’s incapacity to separate his projections and the data he assembles from the outside world, I would like to point out two additional aspects: first, this occurs after he looks directly at something, which is, within the conventions of cinema, actually, us; and, second, that, in the same cinematic logic, it is not only his sight that is blurring but, indeed, also ours. The problem of coherent sight is in fact twofold throughout the film: it affects the protagonist (we see that his eye becomes dazed when his look confronts us) but also affects the spectator, since we are not only faced with subjective shots, but see the world often in the same way that the protagonist perceives his reality. As the first shot so eloquently shows, we are directly confronted with him and his sight and we are therefore touched by his problem, one which has troubled the modern world since Descartes: the danger in the gap between subject and object. After Marx, Nietzsche and Freud we clearly do not find refuge in the idea that we are because we think.23 On the contrary, our scepticism now not only involves ideological beliefs, language and the unconscious, more than anything it implies a questioning of our perception of the world.
12Accordingly, not only the aesthetic representation of sight but also that of space lacks homogeneity from the start: the man who is disturbing the protagonist in his sleep seems to be able to look through the peep-hole from the outside – and we again with him; at least this is suggested by the use of the wide-angle lens with which we see as much the interior as the exterior of the apartment.
Figure : Photograms of Estorvo (2000) by Ruy Guerra: inside and outside
13When the strange man (Xando Graça) outside makes a gesture that the protagonist considers familiar, he flees from his home and embarks on a paranoid perambulation. Looking for shelter from what he considers to be an assault on his life, he moves in and out of a couple of familiar places: his sister's (Bianca Byington) posh house in an exclusive condominium, the workplace and apartment of his ex-wife (Leonor Arocha), the decadent hotel, in what seems to be the city centre, where his best friend used to live, his mother’s elegant and now neglected apartment and the deserted country house of his family, which is falling apart and under the control of drug dealers. To get to these places the protagonist sometimes passes through public areas where subjective shots indicate that he feels observed – for example at the bus station – and opts to take shortcuts through abandoned city areas to avoid the busy streets. His circular movements – he returns several times to his sister’s house, to the shopping centre where his ex-wife works, and is finally forced to return for a third time to his family's property – are a direct result of his anguish and desire to find a place to hide.
- 24 Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture and Film, New York, Verso, 2nd edi (...)
- 25 See Benjamin, Jessica, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference, Ne (...)
14Very much in the sense discussed by Giuliana Bruno’s, motion is e-motion. ‘I’ embarks on a truly psycho-geographic journey which is propelled by his longing to somehow reattach with his family and friends. Visibly, however, the spaces that he feels attached to are emotionally void. Giuliana Bruno24 reminds us that the Latin emovere means “to move” and “out”, and it is striking to note that ‘I’ is moved out and around by a constant lack of reciprocal feelings. Jessica Benjamin would diagnose incapacity of intersubjectivity.25 This incapability characterizes the protagonist as much as the people supposedly dear to him: his sister simply hands him a check; the dealers expel him from the decadent family house; his ex-wife only gives him back a suitcase. This suitcase becomes a burden and an additional cause of paranoia since he can neither leave it at his mother´s house (we do not know if he encounters her dead or asleep – since a flash-forward in which the police find her dead body might as much be a real or a projected fear – or if he ever enters her apartment); and his friend might as well be dead, killed by a young black man who we see being arrested in a media spectacle.
- 26 Ismail Xavier makes a similar point: “Even though unsure in his perceptions, he is astute in his re (...)
15The shattered family relations that keep triggering off his meanderings result from a society where alternatives are wanting to the patriarchal order that causes the protagonist’s crisis. Flashbacks indicate that he tried to get away from it and chose not to participate in the working world, that he passed this responsibility on to his wife and then forced her to get rid of his potential offspring by means of an abortion. The main character’s drama derives from rejecting the patriarchal and oligarchic narrative based on reproduction and property26, but also from the fact that he has no supplementary project. But as he is psychologically unstable, emotionally and financially dependent on his family, especially on his sister, he is unsuited for the defiance that he intends to make. He simply becomes a dropout who – once in danger – cannot but return to his upper class roots. His ineffective revolt is, ultimately, restricted to a pact with criminals who live on the family property and to whom he tries to sell jewels stolen from his wealthy sibling during a fancy party.
16Since his revolt is not articulated consciously or ideologically, he – and the spectator with him – sees everything in a bizarre fashion. The streets are populated with freaks, and the upper class, which upholds the patriarchal society, is equally populated of neurotic and perverted aberrations. The social elite leads a ghettoized lifestyle to protect themselves from the results of the social injustice they nourish – and that we glimpse in public places and by means of strange criminals – and react brutally to assaults on their property. Symptomatically, the protagonist’s brother-in-law denounces not the protagonist but the criminals when he burgles their home. The character that triggers off the protagonist’s roaming turns out to be a policeman who ends the elite’s problem of theft and occupation by means of a massacre. Not wanting to participate in the oligarchic social structure means, symbolically, being followed by the agents of its perpetrators.
17Whereas the protagonist moves in loops, once the strange character from the beginning returns, it becomes clear that part from all his motion, he makes no real progress. The character is doomed to be enclosed within the vicious circle of his society and the emotional dependence it still generates. However, this outcome has again a double meaning: while the cyclic structure stresses that the young man’s revolt leads ironically to the reestablishment of the social order since he constructs no alternative narrative, his circular motion reveals the very fiction he cannot escape. As we become aware that everything is in a daze and that the protagonist gets nowhere, we come to ask why this is the case. When we start to patch the clues together, the emotional void within the patriarchal structure becomes apparent. Due to the film’s aesthetics none of this is straightforward. We literally have to grope our way through the film. In addition, the outcome is open-ended: it is uncertain if the main character will die when he flees from the scene of the execution to a bus stop and runs into the knife of a startled traveller, or whether this happened before he was disturbed at home, or if it was all only some sort of nightmare.
18After engaging mainly with the film’s subtle foregrounding of oligarchy’s fiction, let me comment a little more on the aesthetic aspects concerning the question of sight and perception, voice narration and the transnational city space. I briefly mentioned the construction of heterogeneous perception and space based on a fluctuation between inside and outside, the unstable spectatorial position and the character’s point of view in the first sequence. The use of unfocused or angular lenses, fast camera movements, extreme low or high angles, a vast amount of close-up or extreme close-up shots and fast paced editing participate constantly in sustaining this lack of stability, which is associated with the protagonist’s psychological state. While the initial sequence most strongly invests in showing that he and the spectator have a similar view of the world, in the following sequences we continue to be immersed in his state of mind by means of our visual and haptic experience.
Figure : Photograms of Estorvo (2000) by Ruy Guerra: blurred sight
19As mentioned above, this not only augments the involvement of the spectator, but raises questions as to its meaning. The audience thus gets the chance to get ahead of the protagonist who does not gain any insight into his situation. During his last monologue on the bus, which he takes just after having been stabbed, the voice over tells us that he will try to return to the places that have proved unreceptive: he will try to call his mother when he gets to the bus station, or go to his sister’s when she returns, or to his best friend, or even to his ex-wife who will take pity on him since he is bleeding. His e-motion will only end if he dies, a possible outcome suggested by the last inter-title: “or I died”.
20The vicious circle produced by the oligarchic society in which the dissident descendant of the elite finds himself and that is palpable through the film’s aesthetics, is, decisively, not only a national issue. With regard to the original novel, some alterations have been made that expand the main character’s crisis giving his problem a wider cultural range than that of its Brazilian author. As mentioned earlier, Turbulence was filmed in three different cities: Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. These cities are actually not easily recognizable. This is due to the abundance of medium and close up shots that suppress the background, allied to a general denial of geographical coordinates commonly offered in establishing shots. The architectonic or spatial elements that could help us situate the story consist mostly of facades of buildings, abandoned areas, or short glimpses of a bus station, the interior of a shopping centre (that could be anywhere in the world) and busy streets.
Figure : Photograms of Estorvo (2000) by Ruy Guerra: transnational assembled city
21Due to the architectonical style of the buildings, which are sometimes in shabby conditions, and some visible tropical vegetation, one can deduce that the film is set in a Southern or hot and humid climate. While it depends on our knowledge of the cities in question, if we can identify the provenance of some of these shots, there is no intention to construct a homogenous and much less a recognizable space.
- 27 The subtitles clearly do not carry this dimension.
- 28 This shared cultural and linguistic heritage, namely, the oligarchic structure of society, but also (...)
22Another strategy to enhance the story’s geographical ambivalence occurs on the linguistic level and consists in the use of an eccentric mixture of Portuguese and Spanish by a couple of characters, particularly by the protagonist, but also by his ex-wife, the caretaker (José A. Rodriguez) of the family property and by several people on the streets. The elite – the protagonist’s sister, his brother-in-law and the best friend of his sister – speak, on the other hand, standard Brazilian Portuguese, thus establishing a class difference and turning the language, also, into one of social belonging. By and large, this linguistic strategy participates in creating the impression that the film takes place in a non-existent and assembled Ibero-American metropolis and its surroundings.27 The conclusion that can be drawn by the spectator is that the story is valid for various countries that share cultural and linguistic straights that go beyond the national boarders of the original literary text.28
23There are two additional cinematographic strategies that participate in the amplification and transnationalization of the protagonist’s conflict. The first consists in the duplication of the character into the performing protagonist and an auto-diegetic narrator. This has again a heterogeneous dimension to it. On the one hand, it serves to express the schizophrenic state of the protagonist. On the other, the use of Ruy Guerra's own voice with his Mozambican accent to articulate the thoughts of the protagonist bears the traces of his transnational belonging, raising, as well, questions of authorship. By involving the filmmaker, the film not only gestures towards the presence of the film’s author as someone who not only comes from a different cultural background but also shapes, from that perspective, the original story. When the author of the film incorporates orally the identity drama proposed by the book’s author, the question of subjectivity is multiplied. In other words, the vision of the filmmaker does not simply aspire to substitute or enhance that of the writer, it adds his own to the original by pointing towards the intrinsic relationship between subject and object, creator and creature. The merging of the two voices, the authorial – the double voice of consciousness – and the protagonist’s, which occurs when the latter is unintentionally stabbed at the end of the film, consequently indicates the end of this separation. It offers a last moment in which the spectator can experience the heterogeneity of authorship, since the death of the character now implies, literally, the death of the author(s).
24In any case, the film is indisciplinary by foregrounding that patriarchy’s fiction is under threat by dissidents like the protagonist, even though he proves ineffective in his anarchic and emotional roaming, which implicates him in a crime and is self-destructive. The impact of the film lies in making us participate in his e-motion. Its aesthetic dissent consists in recomposing our visual landscape, since we not only see the protagonist’s paranoia but share it and can come to understand that the oligarchic fiction creates a vicious circle for the descendants of the elite that do not know how to develop an alternative fiction in the Ibero-American world.
- 29 Saramago, José, Blindness, Fort Washington, A Harvest Book, 2nd edition, 1999.
25Fernando Meirelles’ Blindess is based on José Saramago’s homonymous novel from 199529 that radicalizes the question of losing sight by telling a story about a whole city going blind. While the book is set in an undefined, yet probably Portuguese, city, sometime after 1985 when the first hypermarket was opened in the country, Meirelles’ film sets out to show us a contemporary globalized megalopolis in which people from all over the world are primarily pursuing a materially rewarding life: a Japanese businessman (Yûsuke Iseya) and his yuppie wife (Yoshino Kimura), a local car thief (Don McKellar), a Brazilian call-girl (Alice Braga), a Latino barman (Gael Garcia-Bernal), a wealthy local ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), etc.
- 30 Heinrich, Klaus, Arbeiten mit Ödipus. Dahlemer Vorlesungen 3, Berlin, Roter Stern, 1993, p. 41.
- 31 Miller, Andrew, “Zero Visibility”, The New York Times on the Web, 4 October 1998, accessed 12 July (...)
26Saramago’s novel returns to a literary trope which has been employed as an allegory of the limits of human knowledge ever since Sophocles used the myth of Oedipus. Interestingly, however, Oedipus’ blindness has also been associated with the return of the repressed feminine30 and it is not surprising that the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize would choose a woman – the ophthalmologist’s wife – to have the only pair of eyes that remain with sight and who watches humanity’s descent into mayhem. She is central to the dense and polyphonic prose with “its flickering of tense and subject so that we glide between first and third person, between stream of consciousness and wry objectivity”31. Although it closely follows the fable of the book, the film does not actually accomplish Saramago’s aesthetic originality and resulting dissent.
27In tune with the original text, the film starts at the very moment when the flow of urban life is suddenly interrupted. The local man without recognizable profession in the novel has, as a result of the film's coproduction with Japan, turned into a businessman from the Eastern Asian nation who is suddenly unable to drive his car. He is plunged into what is later called the “white evil”, a disease that immerses the affected into a brilliant, impenetrable white world without recognizable shapes. What seems to be a Good Samaritan accompanies him home but ends up stealing his car. While the thief first suggests to the upset foreigner that his disease is surely psychosomatic, he quickly develops the same symptoms. The idea is thus introduced that it might somehow be a punishment for immoral deeds, or at least of selfish and self-centred people. While the novel – which in Portuguese is called “Essay on Blindness” – not only reflects on people’s actions, it also has a more heterogeneous outlook on the paradoxes of the human soul. The film, on the other hand, offers a much more moral approach and clearly separates people into essentially good or bad. In both book and film, an expanding circle of victims starts to radiate from the first case by means of the visit to an ophthalmologist. In fact, the patients who are in the doctor’s waiting room will become the doctor’s surrogate family that holds together until the very end.
28According to its moralist take, the film's opening sequences focus on the cold and distanced behaviour between the people who populate the contemporary city. When the businessman cannot drive, people get impatient and honk their horns. Not surprisingly, he does not trust the man who brings him home and urges him to leave his apartment. In contrast to the novel, the wife of the car thief refuses to help him. The young prostitute is abandoned in both media by her client in the hotel room when she suddenly goes blind and is then escorted naked from the hotel. Among these rather selfish and unfriendly characters, the wife of the ophthalmologist (Julianne Moore) is from the start of a caring nature and her conviction that she will not get infected seems to be related to her kind behaviour. The book is much more speculative about her difference, while the film leaves no doubt about her outstanding humanity. Among the people who will become close to her – the Japanese couple and the prostitute – there is also a little boy and an elderly man (Danny Glover) with a cataract. The latter enunciates in voice-over the details of the pandemic dimension of the disease and the scientists’ and politicians’ helplessness.
29The construction of our perception by means of voice-over narration, camera point of view and spatial relations is quite different when compared to Turbulence where we are from the start in a world where inside and outside have collapsed, offering us as such the possibility to be in the position of the film’s hero. Blindness always tells the story from the outside and plays only eventually with what it might be like to be infected by the milky white blindness. By means of overexposure and loss of focus the spectator is briefly immersed in the sensation of loss of vision. This occurs for the first time when the Japanese businessman leaves his car for his apartment and starts stumbling around. The camera takes its distance and the images become blurred, as if we were experiencing the same visual loss and sense of direction as the character. However, due to the distance of the camera, we actually remain remote from his experience and also far from identifying with him.
Figure : Photograms of Blindness (2008): blurred vision
30While the novel constantly offers insights into the stream of consciousness of the different characters and thus constructs a polyphony of voices that destabilize a homogeneous perspective on the situation, the film does not propose equivalent audio-visual means through which to express the deconstruction of a single story. The moments when we approach the loss of sight are too short to be disturbing and the camera quickly recovers its focus so that we can follow the evolution of the plot.
31It shows us how an alarmed and Orwellian government quickly takes precautions to stop the epidemic and transfers the blind to a defunct mental asylum. Since social status is of little interest, the ophthalmologist is the first to be hurried into an ambulance in order to be taken into quarantine. When other characters arrive, they have been stripped bare of their individuality and present themselves as numbers. The only character that is again singled out is the doctor’s wife. She did not want to be left behind and lied that she just lost her sight. Even though a key figure in the struggle for survival that will take place in the asylum, she too will be faced with one of the foremost preoccupations of Saramago’s novel: how quickly the façade of civilization crumbles. In fact, she will see her husband be unfaithful with the young prostitute and become herself victim of a collective rape.
32In the film these are mainly plot points that do not transpose the book’s explorations of the thoughts and feelings that accompany this drift towards catastrophe. The different wards of the institution rapidly engage in an uneven battle, which the film reduces to a conflict between worse and better people. One ward is led by the bartender who – an addition in the film – was the former pimp of the young call-girl and is now determined to impose his will and take advantage of the others. He installs his authoritarian reign by means of a revolver and the schooled perception of a blind man (Maury Chaykin). Whereas the group around the doctor and his wife still tries to maintain civility and establish some sort of routine and order, the second group reveals the brute side of human nature and a Darwinian approach towards coping with the scarce resources, refusal of medical help that costs a life, deteriorating hygiene and emotional conflicts.
- 32 Scott, A. O., “Characters Who Learn to See by Falling Into a World Without Sight”, The New York Tim (...)
33It is a rather predictable binary opposition of human conduct in crises that leaves no room for the much more complex battle described in the novel. Neither vision nor principles can prevent nine women from the doctor’s ward being raped in exchange for food once everybody is starving. When one of them gets killed, the doctor’s wife gives up on her caring and motherly nature and murders the gang’s leader with a scissor. In the book her decision is conscious. She does not act out of selfishness or cruelty, but with the purpose to change the rules. She even threatens to kill one of the men from the ward each night, if they do not give out food. In the film, we see a stunning psychological interpretation by Julianne Moore who despairs and feels guilty. Nevertheless, this approach alters completely the idea of the book where the doctor’s wife is an allegory of human conduct – in a positive reinterpretation of Oedipus she is the compassionate one who feels and therefore sees – and not a person horrified by her act. The murder is not a moral question but a reality that cannot be avoided under the circumstances. What is more, the Breugelian and almost surrealist crusade between the two wards in the novel, turns into a Hollywood showdown in the film. I agree with A.O. Scott32 that Meirelles takes advantage of the horror, instead of engaging the spectator with the gloomy despair of the blind: “And he is not above exploiting both the comical and the horrific aspects of their condition, punctuating scenes of cruelty and dread with moments of grimly funny slapstick.”
34Just before a war breaks out in the film another woman takes action and sets the rapists’ ward on fire. Fleeing to the yard, they discover that the soldiers have already left and that the city has become an abandoned place of looting. The director now intercuts scenes filmed in São Paulo and in Toronto for the following sequence, which shows how the small group around the doctor’s wife reach the city centre and look for food. When they leave the asylum, they walk over a bridge, which was at the time under construction in Brazil’s biggest city. The skyline behind it looks from a distance similar to any globalized metropolis since it depicts the new financial district around Avenida Faria Lima. But once they reach the city centre we see images taken in Toronto, recognizable in terms of architecture but even more so because cables are still above ground in most parts of São Paulo. Even though several areas and buildings in São Paulo’s central districts have been object of reconstruction and improvements, areas around the “School Yard” (Pátio do Colégio), where the city was founded, turn at night into an open-air asylum for the homeless. It is rather ironic that the film would shoot the scenes of people squatting in the centre of the wealthier Canada.
Figure : Photograms of Blindness (2008): blurred vision
35When compared to Ruy Guerra’s collage of city space, one realises that Fernando Meirelles works in fact in the opposite direction: he constructs his assembled city not by adding disparate images together but by merging distinct socio-economic spaces into one. The film actually hides the existing urban differences between São Paulo, Toronto or Montevideo. The divers cities are fitted together into one high-tech town since the director mainly shot what is now common to all major cities around the globe: heavy traffic, five star hotels, top of the line clinics, apartments filled with the latest designer furniture, and so on.
Figure : Photograms of Blindness (2008): high-tech globalized city
36As a result the film with American movie stars not only links the epidemic to our globalized and post-industrial world with its consumer culture and lack of values, but makes the homogenously constructed city accessible to the first world film it is marketed to, without taking into consideration the abysmal dissimilarities that still exist between the Brazilian, Canadian and Uruguayan urban landscapes. The uncountable scars in the Brazilian megalopolis – a result of real estate speculation and social injustice – are of no interest to the film. It is too concerned in developing a biased perspective of humanity – there are those who will always be blind and others that will learn and be able to catch sight of human nature’s limitations –, than to take social differences into consideration.
- 33 In contrast to my opinion, A.O. Scott believes that the film is based on a “lofty, ideologically de (...)
- 34 Undoubtedly, the separation into first, second and third world has become obsolete. Still, it would (...)
37I do not think that Saramago’s original text is to blame.33 His allegory gives hints why the fiction of a progressive modern society suddenly enters into turmoil, and he does so through a polyphony of perspectives, thoughts and images that take their cue from Western civilizations’ tales and imaginary, such as the already mentioned Pieter Breughel, Surrealism, but also the Old Testament, the Odyssey and so forth. The film tells the book’s story but by translating it into conventional realism. As a matter of fact, while Meirelles sets out to show us the crumbling façade of civilization from Saramago’s novel, he ends up constructing two other fictional frontages; first, by using the ophthalmologist and his wife as moral heroes of a predictable plot, and, second, by suggesting that Brazil’s financial capital faces the same civilizational dilemmas as other first world nations.34
38The film’s disclosure proves both points. The doctor’s wife leads them to their comfortable modernist house (the doctor in the novel lives in a simple apartment block). Returned to this civilized surrounding with a modern kitchen and extensive bookshelves, there is a promise that their experiencing and subsequent comprehension of human nature’s most brutal behaviour will make them see again. After the women showered in the rain, got a night of rest and are settling in for breakfast, the Japanese businessman regains his sight. When this happens, the camera fully assumes his point of view – he looks at the coffee being poured into his white milk, looks at the doctor’s wife, encounters his wife – and we are invited to identify with his joy and share his excitement almost physically by moving around with him through the apartment.
Figure : Photograms of Blindness (2008): regaining sight
39The last sequence at the ophthalmologist’s home reveals how strongly the film remains close not only to a dominant narrative structure but also to the aesthetics related to it. Saramago is much less affirmative. What is troubling at the end of the book is exactly how society will restructure itself after everybody in the apartment but also around them – they hear cries of joy from the apartment below and in the streets – regains their vision. Human consciousness is much more troubled and cannot free itself that easily from all that it has lived through and participated in: treason, murder, theft, battles over food, etc. In contrast to the film, the novel offers no comfort at the end, as the film does. It requests us to speculate constantly on the reason why the doctor’s wife retains her sight, but also – more generally – on human behaviour in society, as Andrew Miller notes:
- 35 Miller, Andrew, “Zero Visibility”, The New York Times on the Web, 4 October 1998, accessed 12 July (...)
“Clearly it is useful for Saramago to have at least one pair of eyes still seeing, but as both readers and characters begin to suspect that the blindness has as much to do with a pathology of consciousness as with any failure of retina or lens, we are invited to speculate on her exclusion, as indeed we are invited, sometimes teasingly, to speculate on every aspect of this fascinating novel.”35
40This finds no audio-visual equivalent in Meirelles’ film. When compared to the cyclic and fragmented narrative of Turbulence, the heterogeneity of perspectives is not perceivable as it is in Guerra’s film where the constant instability of point of view and spatial relations involves the spectator in the paranoid mind of the protagonist and his distorted perception. In Blindness we see barbaric behaviour, which is shocking, but it does not make us see anything in a different way. There is no aesthetic of dissent and, consequently, no intent to redistribute the sensible. Focused on its plot, the film thus keeps the blindness metaphor simple. Instead of making the audience experience feelings of discomfort and doubt, it plays with our sight and with different genre conventions to keep us at a not too painful distance. Fernando Meirelles quickly relieves us from the pathology of consciousness that does not disappear with the closure of Ruy Guerra’s film.
41The problems of sight vary noticeably in the two source texts. The filmmakers’ aesthetic approaches towards the loss of sight are even more diverse since they develop different perspectives on how to engage their spectators into civilizational neurosis. Ruy Guerra wants his audience to experience the paranoid state of his protagonist but also make him gain a deeper understanding of the vicious circle of the social order of patriarchal oligarchy. The link between motion and emotion is therefore foregrounded. What is more, Ruy Guerra uses the collage of details or scenes shot in different Ibero-American metropolises to make the point that the main character’s dilemma goes beyond Brazil’s boarders. He extends Chico Buarque’s diagnoses to a broader cultural context, raising additional questions on authorship. Keeping in mind the social contrasts between the condominium world of the upper class and the abandoned city centre, the impossible dissent of a member of the elite can be read as a transnational phenomenon at the world’s semi-periphery.
42Fernando Meirelles takes a different route: he turns the allegory of humankind’s limited insight into a coproduction with international film stars that follows the rules of dominant narrative cinema. There are, as mentioned, shots that show the blurring sight of the characters but they are not of a metaphorical nature. They simply pass the sensation of lack of vision and getting blind through loss of focus and overexposure, but recover their focus in order to keep on telling a homogenous fiction. As spectators we do not experience anything we have not seen or felt before. Accordingly, apart from staging what would happen in a worst-case scenario of a pandemic of “white evil”, the film does not explore the limits of human reasoning that the original novel proposes as a mind-game of imagination.
43With regard to city space, Blindness equally remains within the frontiers of a homogeneous worldview by levelling the socio-economic differences of the coproducing countries and film sets. While the globalized audience the film is marketed for is told a story about blindness and the possibility of recovering vision after a moment of crisis, Turbulence offers an experience that aims to change our perception of the world. In the latter film, the loss of sight is the result of social blindness by means of a tour de force for the spectator, as well as a reminder of oppressive mechanisms in the Iberian world and beyond; whereas the first film mimics blindness and shows that humans are all barbaric – but to varying degrees – in a way that we have already seen too often in films and other media. In conclusion, Ruy Guerra’s film offers an indisciplinary take on the fiction of patriarchal oligarchy that has a lasting effect on how we envisage the emotional state of all those who go in circles to escape from it. Fernando Meirelles, on the other hand, remains within a disciplinary take on the post-industrial nations without translating Saramago’s allegory on the limits of individualistic fiction.