The Labyrinth and the Mirror: The Cinema of João César Monteiro
The analysis of João César Monteiro’s work, as a plural textual unit, implies a research work based on the loci simile’s demand: dialogical segments in which it is possible to hear the echo of other textual clusters. Transtextual and interdiscursive relations, often founded on the collision of antithetical elements, generate a complex semantic and iconic universe whose strength comes from the continuous game of similarities and contrasts which in turn arise inside: dialogic network in which the constant semiotic operations give rise to the perfect circle of the back-and-forth, the eternal return of quotations, homages and parodies, whose purpose is to subvert all conventional logical nexus, principles and norms of the dominant culture that our society accepts, on their rigorous univocality. The combination of apparently incompatible elements, such as sacred and profane, popular and erudite, sublime and trivial, all re-proposed or amended by complex dialogical practices, leads images, sounds and phenomena to the destruction of the established hierarchy of values, through the establishment of new relations between words. The subversive monteirian act consists, therefore, in separating what is traditionally united and to bring closer what is usually distant in order to break into the restrictions of the cultural monolingualism to open itself to polysemy.
