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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2024
FLESH AND MONUMENT
The body is one of the key motifs in the work of João Pedro Rodrigues. The director problematizes the body by considering its meaning in liminal terms and in relation to the need to mold it. Furthermore, the body in Rodrigues's films is a complex issue: it may be disguised, combined, transformed, or sculpturally chiseled. It is a plural, hybrid, multiple, or split body; a chiasmus. It is a body that is present or absent, visible or invisible, inhabited by the ghost of history. It is an animal body and a spiritual body.
Moreover, in Rodrigues's work, the body is an open, bordering entity. It is a space for negotiation and change that draws out the idea of identity. Yet this identity, trapped in a dialectic between permanence and variation, is not only an individual character's identity, or a gender identity, because the body also operates as a place for questioning a collective identity. As such, national identity is examined through a history that evokes notions of colonialism and modernity (in a country that is heavily defined by the Catholic tradition). Finally, the body in Rodrigues's films is also the body of cinema and of cinematic history.
One of our principal aims in this chapter is to make sense of João Pedro Rodrigues's work through an investigation of his side projects: his short or medium-length films, his collaborations with João Rui Guerra da Mata, and his audiovisual installations. A good starting point in this sense is O Corpo de Afonso (The King's Body, 2012), or, more specifically, the reading of this film that was offered by the filmmakers themselves at the installation Identidade Nacional (Príncipe Real) [National Identity (Príncipe Real)]. The installation was exhibited in 2019 at the Reservatório da Patriarcal (an exhibition space located under the Príncipe Real gardens in Lisbon) on the occasion of the Biennial of Contemporary Arts (BoCA). It is not unusual for Rodrigues to adapt his work to an exhibition format. In a way, this device of migration requires the delivery of not only a new presentation of the images, but also a reinterpretation of those images as they are placed in contact with other materials.
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