THE IMPRESSIONIST NARRATIVE OF THE WRITER MACHADO DE ASSIS AND THE EXPRESSIONIST ATTITUDE OF THE FILM DIRECTOR LUIZ FERNANDO CARVALHO

Abstract

As a reader of the impressionist narrative of the author Machado de Assis, the director Luiz Fernando Carvalho, when adapting the novel Dom Casmurro (1899) to the television mini-series Capitu (2008), sought to keep the imprecision in the narration, and the synesthetic and suggestive exploration in the telling. But, when working on the aesthetic process of his adaptation, he decided to deeply explore the feature of the characters in a deforming, stylized, grotesque and caricatured way, that was much closer to an attitude considered expressionist than impressionist. Thus, as the aim of this paper is to demonstrate the option made by the director towards an expressionist attitude in the characterization of a syncretic narrator, as an example, we infer that there is the destruction of the conventional reality of the means he used and the creation of a certain effect of strangeness produced by the almost insane lucubrations of the narrator. He almost glues himself to the camera, interacts with the scene that happened in a distant past. Progressively, the narrator speaks in every corner, inside a dark space, permeated by shadows, creating, in this way, the phantasmagoria of a tormented inner self. Thus, the exaggeration of the human condition is emphasized by the expressionist point of view, engendering a transfiguring potential of thinking, acting and being in the world. Therefore, it seems that the grotesque, used as a formal solution to hyperbolize such expressionist attitude, is present from the make-up to the positioning in the scene, allowing us to amplify and engender other possibilities for reading this already much studied literary work, but that is constantly revisited because of its polysemy and contemporariness.