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- Artistic symbiosis: Orson Welles’s Othello (1951) as cinematic operaPublication . Chinita, FátimaEarly film theorist Ricciotto Canudo equated cinema with music because of the Seventh Art’s inherent plasticity; in the 21st century, plasticity extends to the soundtrack. In this article, I explore the fusion of cinema with the musical genre of opera. By considering that film is a performative medium, beyond the actors’ agency, I confirm music’s importance in it as part of the structure and style of opera. Unlike Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Verdi’s opera Otello, Orson Welles’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play conforms to Jacques Aumont’s concept of “operatic film” in that it engenders a coexistence of the verbal and the non-verbal, balancing drama and music with a performative intention. However, this film is so musicalized and operatically rendered, especially through its soundtrack, that it exceeds Aumont’s intention and becomes what I call a “cinematic opera”: a film that is operatic in its artificial and ritualistic nature as well as in its well-woven soundtrack of music, sound effects and voice working together in a common musicalized pattern.
- Fascinating museological audiences, or the cinematic appealPublication . Chinita, FátimaThis review of Elisa Mandelli’s book The Museum as a Cinematic Space: The Display of Moving Images in Exhibitions (2019) explains how, according to the author, several viewing dispositifs, understood as a rather flexible assemblage of elements, are increasingly being used in museums to combine education with entertainment. Thus, museums are becoming “cinematic spaces” with an ideological perspective. Mandelli’s approach to the projection technologies of moving images in museological venues is not only chronological but also phenomenological. A three-way interest is recognizable in the alignment of chapters, encompassing the educational value of the dispositifs, their artistic nature, and the experiential factor. As the book provides an interesting overview of two fields that usually are not taken together and contains an assortment of case studies described in detail, it should make a good addition to the fields of Museum and Film Studies.
- Re-defining poetry through motion: a book reviewPublication . Chinita, FátimaABSTRACT - Book review of Sarah Tremlett's book The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2021).
- A tale of sound and fury signifying everything: Argentine tango dance films as complex self-reflexive creationPublication . Chinita, FátimaABSTRACT - This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song) with the innately hybrid form of film. It compares Argentine tango culture to the height of French cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, arguing that they are both passionate, erotic and nostalgic ways of life. In Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998) and Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), the intertwining of the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking are an audio-visual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Their self-reflexivity promotes excess and the result is a highly expressive and complex form. They evince a cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, typical of a perfect mise en abyme as described by Christian Metz. These films are also art musicals, although they depart from the Hollywood musical conventions. Yet, one cannot speak in their case of intermedia reflexivity, according to Petr Szczepanik’s definition, because both of them retain their qualities in a symbiotic relationship of likeness that highlights their mutual aura.
- An immersive theatrical journey through media and time in Sokurov’s “Russian Ark”Publication . Chinita, FátimaUnlike other films by Alexander Sokurov, "Russian Ark" (2002) is more theatrical than pictorial. I contend the film should be interpreted as a metaphorical representation of an immersive theatrical performance of the space-based variety. The film is structured as a walking journey throughout the parts of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg most connected with imperial Russia and its mythical import. Orchestrated as a grandiose spectacle, the film proposes to immerse the viewers in history and art in a celebrated architectural complex, providing the spectators with the impression of “being there”. This is accomplished through two important narrative devices: the external/internal focalization with an unseen contemporary wandering male, whose voice is that of Sokurov himself, and the deliberate mixture of times. Many characters belonging to several different historical periods – from yesterday’s celebrated monarchs to current real-life people ̶ are linked together in the same space in a Genettian metalepsis, also corresponding to the mingling of times in a museological space and to the efabulatory impetus of all fiction per Jean Bessière. The contact with the historical personages amounts to a brush with theatrical scenes in the form of re-enactments, as is the case in immersive performances. The staging of such encounters obeys the logic of the tableau aesthetic in several of its nuances, to which the absence of archival footage further contributes. In short: "Russian Ark" is a film to be experienced, both at a sensuous level and a cognitive one.
- 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.
- Artistic confluences: from media representation to downright fusionPublication . Chinita, FátimaThe mixing of media and the crossing of media borders have become part of the theoretical discourse on cinema and other art forms, whether one is for or against it. No longer just cinema (or never just cinema), no longer cinema above or with the other art forms, now it has become essentially a matter of cinema in-between the other arts.
- Fostering Intermedial Encounters', a book review of Intermedial Encounters: studies in honour of Ágnes PethőPublication . Chinita, FátimaABSTRACT - Book review of Encounters: Studies in Honour of Ágnes Pethő, edited by "Melinda Blós-Jani, Hajnal Király, Mihály Lakatos, Judit Pieldner and Katalin Sándor (Cluj-Napoca / Kolozsvár, 2022).
- Intermediality: a performative approachPublication . Chinita, FátimaBook review of "Cinematic Intermediality. Theory and Practice", edited by Kim Knowles and Marion Schmid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).