Materiality and Desire of Fiction: The song in four “musical moments” of Miguel Gomes’ cinema

Abstract

Popular song is an ambivalent object, linked to musical immateriality and yet with many connexions to sound materiality. The song is an ephemeral form that, due to its short duration, does not last but wishes to be prolonged, namely, through repetition (rhymes and refrain helping memorization) and via the means of the “technological reproducibility”. This paper focuses on Miguel Gomes’ contemporary cinema, considered as part of musical movies history, often seen as entertainment or ideological alienation. It aims to shed light on the way this cinema explores, through a very rich and original treatment of song’s materiality, the time paradox of song. I argue that the song allows the Portuguese director to produce a lasting change in the relationship with the spectator, to which it “passes the baton” of fiction. Through four examples, I will analyse how Gomes’ cinema conceives “musical moments”, as theorized by Amy Herzog. Beyond their “representational meanings” (primarily lyrics and the song’s relationship with the screen play), these sequences create “suspended presents” which crystalize the intrinsic value of the human “desire of fiction”. The latter becomes the condition for making cinema possible, subverting the monopoly of the artistic intention and allowing for the reconfiguration of the “distribution of the sensible”, as theorized by Jacques Rancière.