Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969), by João César Monteiro: The (Im)Possible Cinematographic Quest for Poetry

Abstract

This article approaches João César Monteiro’s short film, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969), as a cinematographic essay about the essence of poetry and cinema, taking as its subject matter the writing of the poet that provides the film its title. In spite of the film’s efforts to capture the person of Sophia through the deconstruction of the persona built by her literary creation, I propose an analytical journey through the structure and the imagetic content of the film so as to reveal its impossibility to eschew the strength of the written word and the thematic, intertextual and formal obsessions that distinguish the literary universe the poet had erected by the late 60s. Through the identification, in the film, of a structural arrangement which proves to be essentially literary, this article considers its object as an instrument for the filmic apprehension of poetry – a claim the director explicitly refused. The article explores, in short, the resources – which are also mostly literary in nature – that turn this film into a cinematographic mechanism that addresses the poetic miracle the public and the critics have for decades recognized in Sophia’s writing.