Filming the soul? from Robert Bresson to Manoel de Oliveira

Maria do Rosário Lupi Bello*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExploring film and christianity
Subtitle of host publicationmovement as immobility
EditorsRita Benis, Sérgio Dias Branco
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherTaylor and Francis AS
Chapter5
Pages69-81
Number of pages13
Edition1
ISBN (Electronic)9781040149041
ISBN (Print)9781032159560
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2024

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Filming the soul? from Robert Bresson to Manoel de Oliveira'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this