Picture-Skin, Music-Muscle: The Intersemiotic/ Intermedia Body of Olney São Paulo’s Manhã Cinzenta

Abstract

The film Manhã cinzenta (1969), by Brazilian filmmaker Olney São Paulo, is a fictional documentary in a short film, which works with fictional space scenes and real elements (clipping from newspapers, movie posters, radio news, images from student marches, and police repression). As a political-artistic form of resistance to the 1964 Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, it is a manifest against authoritarian regimes, also referring to the Latin American dictatorships of 1960-1970. Based on the work of Rajewsky and Clüver, we analyzed, from the intermediate texture, the relationship between image and music, respectively, “epidermis and muscle” by Wingstedt, threads of an artistic and political texture as elements of the constitution of a multimedia body: metaphor of resistance. The film can contribute to breaking with the logic of domination - a logic that is structured by the monopoly of discourse about the past, which in current times has been trying to extinguish from history, from memory, the violent event of the Brazilian civil-military coup. For this reason, it is important to study it, due to the importance of this film as one of the most significant films about resisting, having also been a metaphor for the life of the filmmaker himself.