A CINEMA OF IDEAS. PHOTOGRAPHY AND AFFECT IN 'HISTÓRIAS QUE SÓ EXISTEM QUANDO LEMBRADAS' (JULIA MURAT, 2010) AND 'VIAJE SENTIMENTAL' (VERÓNICA CHEN, 2010)

Abstract

In this article I seek to interrogate the audiovisual construction of affective atmospheres through an analysis of Julia Murat’s Histórias que só existem quando lembradas (2011) and Verónica Chen’s Viaje sentimental (2010). Through a system of hierarchization of the photograph and the fixed shot as aesthetic and narrative procedures, the audiovisual poetics of Murat’s and Chen’s work gives new meaning to the familiar, introducing the disruption of ordinary reality and participating in the “extasis” of time, in the “return to death” that is linked with the figure of “Spectrum” (Barthes, 2006). The photographs imply an experience of travel and spatial transitions that are extensive in terms of the body and the gaze, both at the physical and the phantasmagoric levels, and also affective, sharp, and daring (strongly linked to the dimension of Barthes’ punctum). This is an approach to cinema that seeks to practice with photographs a series of ideas (memory, the archive of Time, Photography itself) in which affective atmospheres are inscribed.