Abstract
In Manoel de Oliveira’s film, Francisca (1981), the viewer is confronted with a provocative definition of the soul: “the soul is a vice,” says the protagonist in her melancholic, naïve, reflexive tone. The expression is borrowed from Agustina Bessa Luís’ Fanny Owen (1979), a semi-biographical novel adapted by Oliveira about a love triangle that conjoined the famous novelist Camilo Castelo Branco with his friend Augusto Pinto de Magalhães and the half-British maid Fanny Owen in mid-nineteenth-century Porto. The aim is to tackle the difficult issue of the "‘filming’ of the soul” (the attempt to allow the "‘visibility’ of the invisible” or the “presence of the ineffable” in cinema) by comparing Oliveira’s procedure with Robert Bresson’s method. The main corpus of this analysis is composed of Oliveira’s Francisca and Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) [Diary of a Country Priest], two films that somehow aim at the representation of the “incarnational” presence of the spiritual dimension of life in the visible world.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Exploring film and christianity |
Subtitle of host publication | movement as immobility |
Editors | Rita Benis, Sérgio Dias Branco |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis AS |
Chapter | 5 |
Pages | 69-81 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781040149041 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781032159560 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2024 |