Corpo Crítico invites Descompasso Magazine
PRESENTATION
The workshop Traces of the Imponderable: Modes of Seeing, Listening, and Creating Tension, held by Revista Descompasso, invited by the Corpo Crítico section of FestCurtasBH’s current edition, proposes a plunge into zones of openness and fissure. Guided by authors like Jean-Claude Bernardet, Rogério Sganzerla, Roland Barthes, Edwin Frank, Nicole Brenez, and others, the workshop invents writing exercises as practices of deviation: ways to disrupt the automatic gesture of criticism, to refuse immediate evidence, and to pursue traces, noises, and margins. The focus is less on interpreting the work in its entirety and more on what spills from it — fragments hinted at as enigmas, folds that disturb the order, signs that vibrate towards other places.
The notion of criticism presented in the workshop asserts itself as relentless inquiry. This space — a laboratory of invention, situated between description and thought, listening and gesture — aims to explore a form of writing that rejects imposed methods and embraces tensions to be rehearsed: modes of looking and listening that create cracks, enabling other forms of relationship with images, sounds, and words. The place of the question as the first possible critical exercise, and strangeness as its vital nourishment.
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
FIRST MEETING – Criticism? To put something into crisis (04/11)
We understand that inquiry lies at the very source of the critical gesture. To question, first and foremost, is what drives our thinking. We seek to provoke questions even before presenting possible answers. Our first session, after all, begins with one: “Criticism?” sparked by the text Por uma crítica ficcional (Towards a Fictional Criticism), written by Jean-Claude Bernardet. In his essay, the author proposes the idea that the primary function of criticism is to put the film/object into a state of crisis. But how to accomplish that? And what questions should we ask of the objects, from which points of view? We propose, then, that after a collective reading of the first text, we visit another piece of writing by Rogério Sganzerla, published in 1970 in the Jornal do Brasil. This is a short and seminal text written in response to the release of his feature film A mulher de todos (The Woman of Everyone, 1969). Certain assumptions about Brazilian cinema, along with a very insightful perspective on how to interrogate a film or what to expect from an artistic object, will guide this first day of the workshop.
Required readings:
BERNARDET, Jean-Claude. Por uma crítica ficcional. In: Fórum Doc BH. 7º Festival do filme documentário e etnográfico – fórum de antropologia, cinema e vídeo. Belo Horizonte: Filmes de Quintal, 2003. p. 66-70. Forumdoc.bh
SGANZERLA, Rogério. A Mulher de Todos. Jornal do Brasil, 20 fev. 1970. Seção “O filme em questão”
Supplementary readings:
CÂNDIDO, Antonio. Overture. In: CÂNDIDO, Antonio. Notas de crítica literária. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2021. p. 168-172.
BRENEZ, Nicole. O papel da crítica: rememoração histórica e exigências contemporâneas. In: CESAR, A., MARQUES, A. R., PIMENTA, F., COSTA, L., eds. Desaguar em cinema: documentário, memória e ação com o CachoeiraDoc [online]. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2020, pp. 203-220. ISBN: 978-65-5630-192-1. https://doi.org/10.7476/9786556301921.0013.
SECOND MEETING – Studying gestures and sensations (05/11)
Is it possible to reduce a film until it becomes just a gesture or a sensation? How does one look at this gesture, and what does one do when faced with it? In this session, we propose looking at films through their minor elements, paying attention to their minute gestures and the sensations that might go unnoticed, as a counterpoint to a perspective that seeks their totality. Unlike a critical approach that aims to fully “account for the work” or explain a large amount of filmic material in a single text, we propose a session that will seek filmic meaning in the details and investigate how something small can illuminate other elements of the work or unfold into other aspects. We therefore propose a collective reading of two texts, written by Luiz Carlos Oliveira Junior and Lorenna Rocha about Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007) and A Gente Acaba Aqui (Everlane Moraes, 2021), respectively. The aim is analyzing the writing method and discussing the gestures chosen by the authors.
Required readings:
OLIVEIRA JUNIOR, Luiz Carlos. Paranoid Park. Contracampo: Revista de cinema, 2007. Disponível em: http://www.contracampo.com.br/89/festparanoidpark.htm.
ROCHA, Lorenna. A Gente Acaba Aqui. Cinética, 2021. Disponível em: https://revistacinetica.com.br/nova/a-gente-acaba-aqui/.
Supplementary readings and listenings:
SONTAG, Susan. Contra a interpretação. In: SONTAG, Susan. Contra a interpretação e outros ensaios. Tradução de Denise Bottman. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020.
BORDWELL, David. A aparência dos filmes: a importância da história estilística. In: BORDWELL, David. Sobre a história do estilo cinematográfico. Tradução de Luís Carlos Borges. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2023. p. 13-28.
THIRD MEETING – Choosing what does not choose me (06/11)
Criticism, as understood here, is not anchored in judgment or immediate interpretation, but in description as a practice of listening. To describe is not simply to enumerate or reproduce what is before us: it is to invent a language capable of welcoming what reveals itself obliquely, laterally, unexpectedly. Attention turns to the residual detail, to the excess and noise that resist framing. This form of critical writing does not seek to resolve the work into a single meaning, but to intensify its presence. To describe, in this context, is also to refuse the automatism of criticism as celebration or condemnation, taking on the subtler task of making that which does not settle into centers of evidence vibrate.
To put this descriptive gesture under tension, we propose a collective reading of excerpts from Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel and Roland Barthes’ The Obvious and the Obtuse: Critical Essays III. One or two paragraphs from each text will serve as triggers for a conversation around the question: how to write not to resolve one film, but to sustain its singularity?
Required readings:
FRANK, Edwin. Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
BARTHES, Roland. O óbvio e o obtuso: ensaios críticos III. Tradução de Lea Novaes. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2004.
African-American Sound Recordings – Several Stories to Dissect, 2021.
Supplementary readings and listenings:
CAMPT, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2017.
Jota Mombaça – ‘Can you sound like two thousand?’ | Serpentine x Boiler Room: Park Nights, 2021.
FOURTH MEETING – Editorial Meeting (07/11)
This editorial meeting aims to open a collaborative space for reading and discussing the texts from the second assignment, fostering an environment of mutual learning where the students themselves take on the role of commentators. The proposal is for the texts to circulate among all participants — not just the instructors — allowing us, through critical readings and the exchange of perspectives, to identify adjustments and collectively contribute to the refinement of the group’s writing.
Collective reading of the texts produced in the Corpo Crítico program of the 27th FestCurtasBH.
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ABOUT DESCOMPASSO
Founded in August 2023, Descompasso Magazine is an independent publication dedicated to the practice and expression of critical writing on cinema and its multiple artistic connections. Inspired by the notion of descompasso (defined by the Priberam dictionary as a lack of measure, irregularity, and disorder), the magazine proposes a constant, intermittent movement in search of new dimensions and perspectives for film reading.