The glimpse of motionless movement: a comparative analysis between cand the poetics of António Reis

Abstract

This essay seeks to analyze, through a comparative approach, the cinema and poetics of António Reis, the Portuguese filmmaker and poet. Although these are two distinct artistic manifestations, it is argued that, within his body of work, they engage in a profound dialogue. To this end, the films Jaime (1974), Trás-os-Montes (1976), and Ana (1984) are examined. Regarding his poetic production, the selected corpus comprises eight poems from the collection Poemas Quotidianos (2017), an anthology that brings together the only one hundred poems published by the author. The discussion is structured primarily around four thematic axes: the relationship between cinema and poetry; immobility; the deconstruction of neorealism; and the invisibility and interiority in the representation of women—considering that both Reis’s cinema and poetry constitute a singular poetics. To explore the interaction between cinema and poetry, the essay draws on the reflections of João Batista de Brito (2006), Italo Calvino (1990), and Godoy Johnson (1982). For the analysis of Reis’s poetics, we convoke Eduardo Prado Coelho’s essay (1967), written as a preface to the first edition of Poemas Quotidianos in 1967, and Fernando J. B. Martinho’s preface (2017) from the edition published by Tinta-da-China fifty years later.