Le reflet et le double face au miroir de l’autotextualité cinématographique dans l’œuvre de João César Monteiro

In the field of cinema, the metaphor of the mirror finds in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty one of the most valuable hermeneutic supports, particularly regarding the elucidation of the "chiasmatic" relationship of individuals with themselves and the world around them. The cinematic image allows us to decode and extract, as if facing a mirror, individuals and their modes of action. However, cinema is not merely a space for duplication through which the viewer becomes aware of their own subjectivity and body as an object; the specular metaphor also highlights certain features of transtextual exchange and the underlying mechanisms, while projecting its dioptric capabilities onto a dialogic plane in a complex play of autotextual references and reflections. Here, I will analyze the phenomenon of cinematic self-citation drawing on the main chapters of João César Monteiro's filmography (1939-2003), whose work is marked by the systematic practice of various strategies related to self-reflexivity. Regarding the study of self-referential occurrences, I will identify several intertextual sub-articulations, emphasizing the mise en abyme and its specific reflexive modalities. Indeed, the purpose of this article is to conduct a semiotic analysis of the different strategies through which self-reflexivity manifests, aiming to outline a preliminary casuistry of its filmic manifestations, attempting to unveil the duplicity, semantic stratifications, and specular reversibility of the self-referential image that sees itself while seeing something else.