O cinema em transe: a percepção cinematográfica à luz das metáforas do autômato e dos fenômenos da dissociação

Abstract

Various films have staged the hypnotic and sensorial power cinema has, just as several thinkers and film directors have theorized about it in many different ways. Since the very beginning, cinema has been haunted by vampires, ghosts, doppelgangers , sleepwalkers, insane and hallucinated people who turn the audience s experience and its metamorphoses into metaphors. These issues have been taken as the leading theme for this work which will deal with the exploitation of the connection between cinema and perception through the analysis of both the metaphors of the spectator seen as an automaton and of the cinematographic experience seen as a dissociating phenomenon, linked to hypnosis, hallucination and telepathy. The starting point for the exploitation of these connections is the study of the modernizing trend as to perception and performance in the industrial society. In this context the bond between the cinematographic imagination and the optical imaginary activity is an ambiguous one: on one side the bond goes with the automation of perception through reflexive acts spread by spatial-temporal clashes of modernity; on the other side, the bond goes with the emergency of a ghostly culture which led the technical image into a dialogue with psycho-physical debates on dissociation phenomena and with the fantasizing imagination of the second half of the 19th century. In this setting the metaphors of the automaton and of the dissociating phenomena will supply a theoretical device to analyze some films that deal with the transformations of the cinematographic tool under the impact of new technologies, automation processes and perceptive demands.