O labirinto e o espelho. O cinema de João César Monteiro

The analysis of João César Monteiro's work as a plural textual unit involves research based on the search for loci similes: dialogic segments that echo other textual clusters. The transtextual and interdiscursive relationships, often founded on the collision of antithetical elements, generate a complex semantic and iconic universe. This universe's strength derives from the continuous play of similarities and contrasts within it: a dialogic network where constant semiotic operations create a perfect circle of back-and-forth motion, the eternal return of citations, homages, and parodies, aimed at subverting all conventional logical connections, principles, and norms of the dominant culture accepted by our society in their rigorous univocity. The combination of seemingly incompatible elements, such as the sacred and the profane, popular and scholarly, sublime and trivial, all reposed or altered by complex dialogic practices, leads to the destruction of the established hierarchy of values through the creation of new relationships between words, images, sounds, and phenomena. Therefore, Monteiro's subversive act consists of separating what is traditionally united and bringing closer what is generally distant, thereby breaking the constraints of cultural monolingualism to open up to polysemy.