THEATER, CINEMA AND EXPRESSIONISTIC INFLUENCE IN <i>LIMITE</i> AND <i>VESTIDO DE NOIVA</i>

Abstract

: The arts of dramaturgy and cinema, as apparently similar artistic media, have found in expressionistic aesthetics (in through the XXth century) very efficient ways of potentializing their own manners of communicating. Thus, the dramaturgic, literary and cinematographic Brazilian arts have also found ways of connecting their identities to the sharpening potential of expressionism. Starting from the occupation of theatrical language with the utilization of a movie camera, the famous playwright Antunes Filho explores the formal and thematic ambiguities of the Nelson Rodrigues’ play Vestido de Noiva. In the film-play, the characteristic ambiguity of Rodriguean texts expands itself to a specific kind of metalanguage that, at the same time, puts cinema and theater closer and farther. In the same way, Mario Peixotos’s film Limite uses the cinematic device to simultaneously re-ordinate and sublimate the expressionistic contents from which it derivates, making these works of Brazilian art examples of how the relation between the aesthetics influences and a constant effort to overcome them are in the core of dualities that involve cinema and theater, art and life, past and present.