8 - Space and Memory: The Window as Freeze-frame

Summary

This is freeze-act, as elsewhere one finds the freeze-phrase (the fragment which fixes the writing) or the freeze-frame in cinema, which fixes the entire movement of the city. This immobility is not an inertia, but a paroxysm which boils movement down into its opposite. The same dialectic was already present in Chinese opera or in animal dances—an art of stupor, slowness, bewitchment.

From the beginning of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's collaboration, the city of Lisbon has been at the core of both Portuguese filmmakers’ work, while Macao has also been a focus in some of their more recent projects. Their intriguing characters are lonely city dwellers whose stories are projected onto the urban space, even when they move beyond it. Working within the heritage of a postmodern local community that developed in the aftermath of the Portuguese Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship (1933–74), Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata align their private memories and domestic space with the social and historical urban space. In doing so, they emphasize a connection with the past as a means to evoke previous practices that allow for a better understanding of the present. Taking this into account, this chapter seeks to decipher the domestic and urban territories that exist off-screen in Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata's works and to read the multiple ways in which their experiences relate to encounters or ruptures with the urban space.

The processes of filming, staging, scoring, and editing a film always result in the act of revealing, cutting, organizing, and modeling a space. As such, from its inception as a form of art and mass entertainment, cinema has been a privileged medium through which to problematize the mechanisms of spatial perception and to form new geographies in the interstices of reality and imagination. This is also what Stephen Barber argues when he associates the birth of cinema with the movement of ghostly human bodies in urban space, and the cinematic city with an entanglement of image and language, and of life and death:

Film began with a scattering of gesturing ghosts, of human bodies walking city streets, within the encompassing outlines of bridges, hotels and warehouses, under polluted industrial skies.