4 - Phantoms, Drifters, and Desiring Saints: Landscapes, Soundscapes, and Becoming-queer in the Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), Odete (Two Drifters, 2005), Morrer Como um Homem (To Die Like a Man, 2009) and O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016), João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata create specific relations between landscapes, soundscapes, and what I call becoming-queer. I am using the concept of becoming-queer to describe the ways in which these directors go beyond simple representation of gay or transgender identities to construct milieus that surpass the traditional humanist divisions of human and nonhuman, or natural and cultural, without naturalizing or denaturalizing queer desire, but constructing a “third way” that goes beyond the linear/non-linear and material/non-material divide. I will argue that Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata create a specific film/world image of becoming-queer. Becoming-queer in this sense is a much broader concept, which surpasses purely LGBTQ+ identity concerns and is much closer to Rachel ten Haaf 's concept of “neither,” as developed in her discussion of A Última Vez Que Vi Macau (The Last Time I Saw Macao, 2012). Moreover, becoming-queer includes the “neitherness” of gender, film style, and locality in these films, while actively creating an ontological openness toward another (filmic) image of the world, which questions any kind of stable boundary.

In the essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger writes that “metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed.” Such metaphysical ground is what Heidegger calls the “world picture.” The modern world picture “does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture,” which means that it is, first and foremost, “representing man.” To represent means “to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself.” For the world to become picture (or image, in the context in which I am using the term) is “one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subjectum in the midst of that which is.” The modern image of the world, therefore, is essentially the relation between subject and object, where the primary element is man as subject. The becoming-queer of the image (of the film/world), meanwhile, constructs complex milieus with relations that are pluritemporal in their multimaterial differentiation, and that queer any notion of stability.