Jocus in fabula o il sacro impertinente nel cinema di Monteiro

In this essay we will present the dimension of play and ritual in João César Monteiro’s cinema and the visual and verbal structures that characterise it. On the one hand, we observe the organisation of a strongly geometrized space in which Monteiro officiates the feminine ceremonies, revealing a precise eidetic figuration. On the other hand, we analize some examples where this balance is disturbed by the formal composition of semantic subversion. This is responsible for the change of the usual distinction between sacred and profane, thus offering different “views on the world” and various “forms of verbal interpretation”. This analysis is far from being exhaust in the study of spatio-temporal dimensions of the hieratic images that Monteiro builds throughout his work. Nevertheless, it tries to question the strategies through which Monteiro violates the sacred. The transgression of this theme gives rise to concepts of jocus and ludus.