Name: RADAEL REZENDE RODRIGUES JUNIOR
Publication date: 19/04/2016
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANGELA MARIA GRANDO BEZERRA | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: The cinema has often had a strong connection with the narrative, connecting its essence to telling a story through the overlapping of plans and the scene
concatenation. However, from the year 2000 onward, motion pictures have been produced WHERE the narrative is by far the scope of its productions: the post-continuity cinema. Directors such as Michael Bay, Tony Scott and Paul Greengrass are particularly concerned in sensorially affecting its audience rather than narrating a complex story or developing deep characters. It is worth highlighting that such essentially affective and non-narrative wise thinking is not new neither exclusive to the post-continuity cinema. In fact, despite its dominant narrative nature, the cinema was born non-narrative. It emerged as one of the several essentially visual spectacles on the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The so-called Cinema of Attractions has produced the first cinematographic motion pictures of history, these being based on the ability of provoking the audience through intense sensorial shows. Thus, on an
analysis of the Transformers trilogy (BAY, 2007, 2009 and 2011), it is here proposed a new approach to the contemporary cinema of spectacle, whose movies are to be seen as sensorial performances, largely based on the ability of intensely affecting its audience rather than creating well-structured narratives. Therefore, the cinema of spectacle would be some sort of a contemporary Cinema of Attractions, being more closely related to the logic of the spectacle and lack of narrative as found in a circus, for instance, than to the structure of Literature. On the other hand, in the same way as its counterpart of the late 19th and early 20th century, the post-continuity cinema
would be a reflex, and simultaneously, an essential component of the contemporary scene, in which it has emerged and evolved. This scene, in turn, would be characterized by a typical neobaroque mindset, which allows a continued shift of rescuing the baroque mindset, between late 16th century and early 18th century. It is then through typical elements of the neobaroque, such as exaggeration, tendency to the limits, and constant instability that the post-continuity cinema is able to introduce itself as a new type of Cinema of Attractions..
Keywords: Cinema of Attractions; post-continuity; entertainment; spectacle;
neobaroque; non-narrative cinema.
