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- Tapping into the senses: corporeality and immanence in “The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes” (Quay Brothers, 2005)Publication . Chinita, FátimaIn "The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes" (2006), the Quay Brothers' second feature, the sensual form and the meta-artistic content are truly interweaved, and the siblings' staple animated materials become part of the theme itself. Using Michel Serres's argument in "Les cinq sens" (2014), I address the relationship between the Quays intermedial animation and the way the art forms of music, painting, theatre and sculpture are used to captivate the film viewer's sensorium in the same way that some of the characters are fascinated by the evil Droz, a scientist and failed composer who manipulates machines and people alike, among them Felisberto, a meek piano tuner with the ability to stir the natural elements. I posit that the entire film is an allegory of animation. The Quay’s haptic construction of a three-dimensional world which they control artistically is replicated in the film in Droz's and Felisberto's activities vis-à-vis Malvina van Stille, an abducted opera diva who is kept in a suspended animation state (just like a marionette) and several hydraulic automata, some of them made up of an uncanny assortment of body parts. The artificial life of these creatures is contrasted with their physical reality as beings that exist in the world. Firstly, via Serres's sensorial strategy to transform a body into a conscious entity (i.e., endowed with a soul), an embodiment I call 'Corpo-Reality'. Secondly, by resorting to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the body without organs (BwO) in its advocacy of 'hard' nature and the rejection of a rigid assortment of body parts (either biological or social). However, just as in the story things are not what they seem, so the film itself can be a 'crystal-image' (per Gilles Deleuze), offering itself to the senses of the spectator.
- Derek Jarman’s allegories of spectacle: inter-artistic embodimentPublication . Chinita, FátimaABSTRACT - Derek Jarman was a multifaceted artist whose intermedial versatility reinforces a strong authorial discourse. He constructs an immersive allegorical world of hybrid art where different layers of cinematic, theatrical and painterly materials come together to convey a lyrical form and express a powerful ideological message. In Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991), Jarman approaches two european historical figures from two different but concomitant perspectives. In Caravaggio, through the use of tableaux of abstract meaning and by focusing on the detailing of the models’ poses, Jarman re-enacts the allegorical spirit of Caravaggio’s paintings through entirely cinematic resources. Edward II was a king, and as a statesman he possessed a certain dose of showmanship. In this film Jarman reconstructs the theatrical basis of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan play bringing it up to date in a successfully abstract approach to the musical stage. In this article, I intend to conjoin the practice of allegory in film with certain notions of existential phenomenology as advocated by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, in order to address the relationship between the corporeality of the film and the lived bodies of the spectators. In this context, the allegory is a means to convey intradiegetically the sense-ability at play in the cinematic experience, reinforcing the textural and sensual nature of both film and viewer, which, in turn, is also materially enhanced in the film proper, touching the spectator in a supplementary fashion. The two corporealities favour an inter-artistic immersion achieved through coenaesthesia.
- The cinematic quest for the sculpturalPublication . Chinita, FátimaAbstract - Book review of "Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens, Lisa Colpaert,e dited by Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
- The moving form of film: conference overview on IntermIdia II (6−8 November 2017)Publication . Chinita, FátimaAbstract - This is an overview of the conference "The Moving Form of Film: Exploring Intermediality as a Historiographic Method", centering on the the invited keynote speeches and general activities.