Cinema and Painting

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist's creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.

One of the most comprehensive books to focus on the relationship between cinema and the other arts, this volume explores types and stylistic devices of intermediality through a wide range of case studies. It addresses major theoretical issues and highlights the relevance of intermedial relations in film history, mapping the theoretical field by outlining its main concepts and the research avenues pursued in the study of cinematic intermediality, including the most recent approaches and methodologies. It also presents some major templates of intermediality through various examples from world cinema, including closer looks at films by auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Supplemented by three new chapters dealing with phenomena which came into view since its first publication, the revised and enlarged edition of this ground-breaking volume will serve as a useful handbook to clarify key ideas and to offer insightful analyses.

Convertida en una de las fuentes principales con las que dotar de verosimilitud histórica en el ámbito visual, la pintura emerge como punto de partida para recrear ambientaciones del pasado, con especial relevancia en el ámbito de las películas históricas, y es que es indudable que nuestra imagen del pasado está mediatizada por lo pictórico. El recurso al arte contemporáneo a la época a plasmar, reforzando la correspondencia entre momento histórico y manifestaciones plásticas dadas en esa etapa, es un procedimiento de identificación subconsciente y de verosimilitud en términos históricos. En el cine español destaca especialmente la influencia visual de Velázquez en filmes enmarcados en el siglo XVII, durante el reinado de Felipe IV, monarca del que el artista sevillano fue pintor de cámara; entre ellos se estudia su impacto en la concepción visual, puesta en escena, dirección artística y caracterización de personajes en El rey pasmado (Uribe, 1991) y Alatriste (Díaz Yanes, 2006).

Henri-George Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) and Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003) are celebrated experimental documentaries on the creative process in the visual arts and cinema made (or co-made) by renowned narrative film auteurs. Ludic exercises in on-and off-screen cinematic co-creation, together they foreground creativity and its constraints; artistic style and authorship; and filmmaking as simultaneously a means of personal expression and a collaborative enterprise. The main concerns of this article, both films are also marked by an overlapping self-reflexivity, intermediality, and formal hybridity, rooted in their innovative incorporation – or “nesting” – of pre-existing and in-progress art works (films, paintings, drawings). Focused on multiple forms of reflexivity and a distinctly process-based incorporation of works-within-the-work, juxtaposition of the films sheds new light on these dynamics generally, as well as on the styles and careers of Clouzot and Picasso, Leth and von Trier.

Статья посвящена влиянию Эдварда Хоппера на кинематограф и современную фотографию в связи с основными способами воздействия его картин на зрителя. Создание "саспенса" в живописи связано с жанром нуар в кино, а специфические места и герои Хоппера создают у его последователей желание ответить на поставленные им вопросы.

Suspension of disbelief, ideas geometry, and the 1700s as no one has ever seen before: Barry Lyndon is not only one of the summits of New Yorker director’s career, and neither one of the milestones of entire history of cinema. The movie seems rather one of the most important and meaningful works of art of the 20th century, where intersecting medium-late English and European painting of 1700s, British literature of 1800s, experimental photography and cinema. The perseverate obsessively and repeatedly in the construction of backgrounds and situations that the director showing in Barry Lyndon is a process that owes a lot to the Luchino Visconti M.O., both as regards his approach purely philological and his determination to use evocative potential of art not only for figurative purposes. Through the wealth of formal elements and the aesthetic value of pictures, Stanley Kubrick demonstrates that the painting can have the function of «conscientious objector» for the viewer, driving his direction like HAL in 2001: A Space Odissey.

Las correspondencias entre el universo pictórico de Edward Hopper y la narración construida de Alfred Hitchcock en La ventana indiscreta (Rear Window, 1954) superan lo estético y se explican en una clara voluntad de explorar las relaciones entre el arte y el espectador. Este artículo indaga en las ventanas, físicas y simbólicas, como espacios fronterizos pensados para observar desde fuera. Alejados del relato cinematográfico y del marco plástico, todos somos voyeurs obligados a mirar.

Edward Hopper —who is known for his
pictorial compositions reminiscent of film
scenes and who inspired many filmmakers—
went to the cinema himself very often. He also
addressed cinema exteriors and interiors as a
topic in some of his works. In the following,
three central works on cinemas by Edward
Hopper —The Sheridan Theatre (1937), The
Circle Theatre (1936), and New York Movie
(1939)— whose historical context has not
yet been examined in detail will be analysed.
With their sophisticated compositions,
they are very illustrative of cinema history
in particular and American history of the
1930s in general. Hopper draws attention
to contemporary urban trouble spots for
unrest enhanced by cheapening strategies
in the film exhibition business. He also deals
with the changed cinema experiences in
the 1930s and deconstructs the glamour
of the job of the usherette and exposes the
alienation of their work.

Parmi les nombreuses boutiques mises en scène par Jacques Demy, la galerie de peinture des Demoiselles de Rochefort est un des rares décors de sa filmographie dédié à la création officielle. L’actualité artistique y est réinventée avec des imitations en référence à Niki de Saint-Phalle, Victor Vasarely ou encore Jean Dewasne. Les œuvres s’intègrent à la fiction provoquant rencontres et désaccords entre les personnages. Ce texte vise à comprendre comment Jacques Demy met en fiction son regard sur la peinture contemporaine par l’entremise d’une galerie d’art, qui est avant tout un décor de cinéma.

The article presents how the significance of the paintings in Hitchcock’s films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of mystery or mysterious identity, but also consists in raising questions about the interpretation of images in general. In contrast with a classic dramaturgy that neatly solves all the puzzles, the Hitchcockian painting, or painterly image emerges as the medium of the unknown threatening to throw the mind of the character (and implicitly of the viewer) into the abysmal depths of the uncanny and the unidentifiable. (One of the most eloquent examples of this is the startling image of the squirt of blood “painted” over the black and white images and “thrown” towards the off-screen space, implicitly “at the spectator” at the end of Spellbound.) It seems that for Hitchcock painting acts like an “intermedial demon of the cinematic image,” a medial doppelgänger that is ready at any time to take charge, threatening to disrupt the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world.

Tableaux vivants, which invade contemporary art and cinema, as well as music videos, series, advertisements and social network posts in the 2000s-2010s, are to be considered beyond simple postmodernity. While they do not abandon subversion, these artworks reenactments reveal a desire for artistic “reenchantment” cultivating a fascination for the original images, the techn(olog)ical challenge of their reproduction, and the socio-cultural impact of their updating.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch, is one of the most enigmatic paintings of all time. Its profusion of weird transgressions and intertwinings between the inanimate world and living creatures can be seen as an unparalleled allegory of ‘in-betwenness’. Researching the cinematic history of the painting has revealed three outstanding cinematic ‘adaptations’ ‒ Silvano Agosti’s Il giardino delle delizie (1967), Stan Brakhage’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), and Lech Majewski’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004) ‒ that not only quote the painting but also exploit the media-reflexive potential of the Bosch triptych providing specific insights into cinema’s own transgressive qualities: on ways in which a sensation of intermediality emerges within the cinematic experience. Accordingly, each of these films can be seen as constituting a different model for ‘in-betweenness’ in the cinema, typical, in turn, for modernist cinema’s revitalization of the concept of photogénie, for avant-garde experimentalism in search for a kind of ‘transsubstantiation’, and for the decomposition of cinema in the so called post-media age. The essay proposes a ‘triptych’ of film analyses in which three modes of ‘becoming’ intermedial are examined, while the notion of intermediality itself is re-examined as something more closely linked to ‘perception’ and ‘sensation’ and building on the possible interactions with the camera as a machine.

Introduction and detailed list (about 40 films) of the retrospective that Valentine Robert curated at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2017. The programme was shaped by the direct comparison, on the screen, between (most of the time forgotten) paintings and early films suddenly disclosed as their living reenactments.
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Introduzione ed elenco dettagliato (circa 40 filmati) della rettrospettiva curata da Valentine Robert alle Giornate del cinema muto 2017. Questo programma basato sul confronto diretto, sullo schermo, tra pitture (il più delle volte dimenticate) e filmati delle origini, di colpo divulgati come loro viventi rievocazioni.

[bilingual | bilingue]

The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may connect this feature of these tableaux vivants, therefore, to what Lyotard termed as the “figure of return,” and to the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.

La produzione cinematografica di Agnès Varda è notoriamente ricca di riferimenti alla pittura. Le citazioni appaiono, nei suoi film, in modalità diverse: citazioni “in cornice”, tableaux vivants, inquadrature rifatte “à la manière de” un determinato artista. Il saggio si sofferma su alcune citazioni particolarmente significative, che non si limitano a istituire legami con temi, significati o atmosfere del film, ma forniscono chiavi interpretative essenziali per l’intera composizione filmica. Tra i film analizzati: Le Bonheur (1964), Lions Love (1969), Jane B. par Agnès V. (1987).

Selon Ray Harryhausen, maître des effets spéciaux cinématographiques, « Gustave Doré aurait été un grand chef opérateur […] il regardait les choses avec le point de vue de la caméra ». L’œuvre de Doré a marqué de manière indélébile l’imaginaire filmique depuis ses origines. Peu de films sur la Bible, depuis la Vie et Passion de Jésus Christ produit par Pathé en 1902, qui ne se réfèrent à ses illustrations, ni d’adaptation cinématographique de Dante ou encore de Don Quichotte qui ne l’aient pris comme modèle, de Georg Wilhelm Pabst et Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam. Il n’est pas de films sur la vie londonienne et victorienne qui n’empruntent leurs décors aux visions de Londres, un pèlerinage, qu’il s’agisse de David Lean, de Roman Polanski ou de Tim Burton. Nombre de scènes oniriques, fantastiques, fantasmagoriques ont puisé dans l’œuvre graphique de Doré, depuis le Voyage dans la lune de Georges Méliès en 1902. Si dans le domaine du dessin animé ou de l’animation, la dette de Walt Disney envers Doré est immense, ses forêts « primitives », notamment celles d’Atala, ont aussi servi aux différentes versions de King Kong, de l’original de 1933 au film de 2005 de Peter Jackson qui s’était déjà appuyé sur l’œuvre de Doré dans Le Seigneur des anneaux. Ce chapitre du catalogue de l’exposition "Gustave Doré : l’imaginaire au pouvoir" présentée au Musée d’Orsay à Paris et au Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada à Ottawa, qui prend corps dans un choix d'extraits de films "accrochés" à côté des gravures, montre comment, depuis la dette explicite de Jean Cocteau dans La Belle et la bête (1945) jusqu'aux réminiscences doréennes du personnage de Chewbacca dans la Guerre des Etoiles, le cinéma a « gravé » Doré dans l’imaginaire du XXe siècle.

Jelen tanulmány Pablo Picasso Las Meninas címen ismert festménysorozatának (Museo Picasso Barcelona) elemzése kinematográfiai kontextusban.  Az életmű kései periódusában, 1957 augusztusától decemberéig készült képek (58 db) meglátásom szerint Picasso filmes munkái közé illeszkednek, nem csak keletkezésük ideje, hanem a kinematográfiai képalkotás „technológiája” felől nézve is.

In recent art cinema there are several experiments that conceive entire movies based on the aesthetic of the tableau. Such films blur the boundaries between cinema and installation art consisting of a loosely connected string of tableaux which can be no longer interpreted in the context of a cinematic narration and dramaturgy as they gain a degree of autonomy. Although these films are usually categorized as slow movies and their durational aspect has inspired most of their analyses in film theory I suggest that we focus on the similarities between the tableau sequences of slow movies and the installations of moving image tableaux in order to highlight the way in which they revitalise the traditional, intermedial figure of the tableau vivant in art, and foreground the single, photographic frame within moving images. Based on the recent reinterpretations of the notion of the transmedial dispositif, on the revisions of the tableau mode in art (and following the ideas of Jean-François Chevrier) I propose to contest Raymond Bellour’s idea on the ‘battle of the dispositifs’ and concentrate on aspects of the complex convergences between traditional visual arts and the new media of moving pictures underlying the tableau aesthetic in post-cinema. Taking into account the implosion of the tableau vivant into a more generic tableau style, I examine (using examples from the films of James Benning, Lav Diaz, Gustav Deutsch, Raúl Perrone, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang) a set of gestures and actions of folding together photography, painting and cinema that the may define the post-cinematic ‘mise en tableau’.

RESUMEN Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar las estrategias narrativas de las cabeceras fílmicas exentas de las películas sobre artistas; concretamente aquellas que se agrupan dentro del género biopic. A través del estudio comparativo de películas como Moulin Rouge (Vincent Minelli, 1953), Lust for life (El loco del pelo rojo, 1955) de John Huston o la más moderna Lautrec (1997) de Roger Planchon, se deducen las tácticas de presentación/disuasión em-pleadas por sus cabeceras, así como su imbricación en la narración fílmica. A través de los recursos gramaticales analizados (imagen, texto y música) se examina también su vertiente semántica, es decir, su capacidad para producir significados dentro de una estrategia per-suasiva. Significados que nos introducirán directamente en el universo de la película. ABSTRACT This work has as objective to analyze narrative strategies of film titles for films about artists; particularly those of the biographical gener. Through a comparative study of films like Moulin Rouge (Vincent Minelli, 1953), Lust for life (John Huston, 1955), or the modern version of Lautrec (1997) by Roger Planchon, the aim is to deduce the tactics of presenta-tion/deterrence used in the films narrative. Using analytical gramatical means (image, text, music) their semantic side is also examined, this is to say, their capacity to produce meanings within a persuasive strategy. Meanings which introduce us directly into the univers of the film.

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist’s creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.

The paper proposes to focus on the multiple affordances and intermedial aesthetic of the cinematic tableau seen as a performative space resulting in the impression of watching a painting, a theatre stage, a shop window, a diorama, or a photo-filmic installation in which the play between stillness and motion is accompanied by a reflexive emphasis on media and the senses. Such images, described extensively by David Bordwell in his writings on the evolution of film style, are being re-evaluated through debates on the “tableau form,” “absorption and theatricality” in modern art and photography (e.g. Jean-François Chevrier, Michael Fried). In particular, the aim of this paper is to examine inflections of the cinematic tableau in the films of three contemporary European authors, Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania), Roy Andersson (Sweden) and Joanna Hogg (UK), and relate them to the paradigm of the Dutch interior established in seventeenth-century painting.
Keywords: intermedial aesthetic of the tableau shot, Dutch interior in cinema, Corneliu Porumboiu, Roy Andersson, Joanna Hogg.

The article deals with issues that rise from confronting Honoré de Balzac's famous short story "The Unknown Masterpiece" [1831] and the movie "La Belle Noiseuse", from Jacques Rivette [1991], being the latter a loose cinematographic adaptation of the literature piece. It is our intention here to underline issues around the creative process, as the obsession in the search for a masterpiece, having the idea of failure as a guideline, a decisive factor in art making. Both works addresses strong and relevant questions, such as “What can be considered a masterpiece?”, “How can we measure the significance of failure in the artistic process?”.

Adapté de Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir (1945), “testament littéraire” du romancier et scénariste Pierre Bost, Un dimanche à la campagne occupe une position paradoxale dans la filmographie de Bertrand Tavernier. Reçu de façon globalement très positive à sa sortie en 1984, malgré quelques voix discordantes, le film a paradoxalement souvent été décrit comme un simple exercice de style, un “Tavernier en mode mineur” dénué de l’originalité et de l’ambition de Que la fête commence (1975) ou de Coup de torchon (1981).

Visant à dépasser cette vision réductrice, cet ouvrage s’efforce de restituer les complexités toujours actuelles d’une œuvre sans équivalent dans le paysage cinématographique des années 1980, en la replaçant dans son contexte d’émergence. Il se fonde sur l’étude des archives scénaristiques de Tavernier et adopte une approche pluridisciplinaire associant l’histoire du cinéma, l’histoire de l’art et l’historiographie de la France moderne de 1830 à nos jours. Articulant l’analyse filmique et la contextualisation socio-historique, il propose l’hypothèse qu’Un dimanche se présente à la fois comme un allégorique de la création artistique, comme une expérimentation concrète des puissances du cinéma, et comme une réflexion étendue sur le nouveau régime d’historicité issu des mutations du XIXe (dans une acception large du terme : jusqu’en 1914).

Dans cette perspective, il déploie un parcours analytique en trois temps. “De l’écrit à l’écran : la fabrique de l’adaptation”, la première partie met en rapport l’œuvre source et l’œuvre seconde, afin d’identifier de quelles façons celle-ci a réélaboré l’esprit, la visée et la portée du roman de Bost, entre restructuration du sens et amplification de l’émotion. Portant sur “L’art et la manière : la petite musique de Tavernier”, la seconde partie remet en cause l’idée que le film serait dénué d’enjeux narratifs et offrirait un “pastiche impressionniste”, en s’intéressant à sa narration lyrique et à son style à contre-courant. Intitulée “D’une fin de siècle à une autre : explorer la discordance des temps”, la dernière partie se risque à analyser la double ambition historiographique de l’œuvre : filmer le passé en tant que présent, penser le présent au miroir du passé. La conclusion interrogera la façon dont Un dimanche mêle l’art, le cinéma et l’Histoire pour ouvrir de larges fenêtres sur la “Terre Promise” de l’imaginaire.

Resumo Nesta comunicação abordamos dois aspectos em que a influência da Pintura, com séculos de existência, mais se fez sentir no Cinema: as formas de utilizar a cor e a luz (muitas vezes relacionadas), nas quais têm um papel decisivo os directores de fotografias, em articulação com os realizadores e departamentos artísticos. No entanto, o cinema teve ao seu dispor, desde o início, técnicas da cor que lhe eram específicas, que foram em seguida abandonadas. Abstract In this article we discuss two aspects on which Painting’s influence, centuries-old, more was felt in movies: ways of using color and light (in many cases related), in wich cinematographers play a decisive role, in close articulation with directors and art departments. However, from the beginning, cinema has had at his disposal specific color techniques, that subsequently have been abandoned.

My contact with the Brazilian generation who have been releasing their first feature films during the course of the twenty‐first century proved decisive for me during the Tiradentes Exhibition, which is one of Brazil's most important film festivals, which I first attended in 2009. I chose to go along above all in order to attend the pre‐screenings of A Fuga da Mulher Gorila/The Escape of the Female Gorilla (2009), directed by Felipe Bragança and Marina Meliande, and No Meu Lugar/In my Place (2009), directed by Eduardo Valente. I'd already heard about the changes that had taken place at the Tiradentes Exhibition as a result of Cléber Eduardo's curatorship. During the week I spent at Tiradentes I was absorbed by the debates which transcended the customary rather monotonous discussions about the creative process and the bitter experience of production which in the past had driven me away from this type of event at exhibitions and festivals. More than the discussions in themselves or any film in particular, though, what aroused my curiosity was the atmosphere at the exhibition – the desire to make a new type of cinema. No, it was no longer simply the gesture of self‐affirmation to do something after the cultural dismantlement brought about by President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1990–1992 which brought the Brazilian film industry to its knees such that it hardly produced any more full‐length feature films.  And it wasn't anything like the film-makers of the cinema da retomada (a new type of national cinema), such as Carla Camurati, Walter Salles, and Fernando Meirelles, who came on the scene at the end of the 1990s. No, this was a brand new Brazilian cinema – garage cinema – and it expressed a completely different space.  that it hardly produced any more full‐length feature films.2 And it wasn’t anything like the film- makers of the cinema da retomada (a new type of national cinema), such as Carla Camurati, Walter Salles, and Fernando Meirelles, who came on the scene at the end of the 1990s.3 No, this was a brand new Brazilian cinema – garage cinema – and it expressed a completely different space. Indeed, garage cinema has allowed me to reconnect with Brazilian cinema in a way that had only happenedfor me once before with the postmodern or neon‐realist cinema of the 1980s.4 At that time the dictatorship was coming to an end. Indeed, when I went to university in 1984, I came across those urban films that were not intimidated by genre cinema and had come a long way since cinema novo,5 and they made me feel like I belonged existentially to the films being made in Brazil at that time. This was not because of any reverence I might have had for the films themselves or because of their historical significance – in relation to the past – but because I felt they just were the sort of films I would have made if I had been a filmmaker.
I returned to the Tiradentes Exhibition in 2010 when I was invited to take part as a jury member. The prize for Best Film was awarded to Estrada para Ythaca/Road to Ythaca (2010), directed by Luiz Pretti, Ricardo Pretti, Pedro Diógenes, and Guto Parente, and the fascination returned – but now there was a whole new set of questions. Yes, it was a lot easier now than in the past to make films with a group of friends, even without raising financing for production and post‐production. Alongside the prize for Best Film I should also mention the significance of the prize awarded to O Céu sobre os Ombros/The Sky Above (2010) directed by Sérgio Borges, at the Brasilia Festival, also in 2010, along with the national as well as international splash caused by O Som ao Redor/Neighbouring Sounds (2012), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. But what were the aims of these films? What I saw spoke of an impasse which simply became more and more pronounced.
Fast‐forward a few years and those rookie filmmakers were no longer the newcomers. And what do you do when you are no longer a promising young filmmaker? The critic and writer Silviano Santiago once told me in a conversation that the contemporary Brazilian artist has to choose between failure, success, or the fringe.6 If I remember correctly, in Santiago’s opinion, failure meant being an independent artist, success meant working in the media, above all in TV, and the fringe meant a university job. Of course none of those choices came, or indeed come, with ready‐made values; they simply express the ethical dilemmas that each artist has to face up to even if it is a case of deciding in the darkness of his room whether he will keep plugging away at it or throw in the towel. Perhaps these dilemmas should be understood not as permanent choices or what each artist might judge as success or failure but rather as the way in which society constructs the artist and positions him within that society. That is, it is more a question of how the artist is perceived by Brazilian society nowadays. Brazilian society is, after all, distinguished by a cult of celebrity, a concentration of large entertain- ment conglomerates as well as a proliferation of alternative production and distribution outlets.
Failure as an ethical and aesthetic attitude could be seen as a key to unlock the meaning of not only Estrada para Ythaca but a number of Brazil’s first‐feature films made in the years since 2010, which have been grouped together under the rubric of garage cinema (Ikeda and Lima 2011, 2012) or post‐industrial cinema (Migliorin 2011) – to this day the secondary literature on this film movement is still sparse, consisting of a sprinkling of short newspaper reviews and a few Master’s dissertations. Radically different from the cinema da retomada of the second half of the 1990s, which sought to reach a large audience by achieving a pragmatic balance between genre‐based cinema and high‐quality production values,7 garage cinema seeks to create an alternative dramaturgy and staging based on reduced production costs by using digital supports and by relying on alternative distribution outlets – based on an increased use of festivals, exhibitions, and cineclubs – rather than the large distribution networks which have a reduced number of film releases and are dominated by North American blockbusters or Brazilian comedies. It is more than simply a change in production methods or a change in the make‐up of the teams – professionals are now chosen from various regions in Brazil. Garage cinema seeks to recuperate the collective as a way of life which needs to be better understood within the film world (Migliorin 2012). Offering a counterpoint to programmes which are focused on individual auteurs,8 the search for collective experiences on the modern stage is as old as the avant‐garde (see Bishop 2012), which itself sought to integrate participative, collaborative, and relational proposals into its art forms (Bourriaud 2002). It is a programme which is present, indeed, in Brazil’s diverse languages, and it has been explored in greater depth in the fields of the visual arts, thea- tre, and performance rather than in film. Despite the experience of many filmmakers who have collaborated on each other’s film projects – and this has been common in Brazil since at least the days of cinema novo – it is true to say that when Estrada para Ythaca was released what caught everyone’s attention was the breaking down of hierarchies and the fact that the four directors were present during the filming and making of the film, and even played their part as actors and performers in the film.