Sinais do amanhã : imaginação e ética em ficções audiovisuais sobre o futuro

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the constitution of the imagination about the future in contemporary times and understand its different ethical implications from a look at futuristic audiovisual fiction. For this, we take the future as historical time and cultural experience, highlighting it as a fundamental part of a political dispute. The future can be experienced in the most diverse ways — such as, for example, through contact with fictional narratives. Therefore, we propose a study centered on a network of texts whose nodal point is the film Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019). From the reflection on the Brazilian feature film, we highlight three major themes — utopia/dystopia, neoliberal competitiveness and the ends of the world —, which are unfolded in analyzes that transit between texts and contexts and culminate in the reflection on three more audiovisual productions — the films Divine love (Gabriel Mascaro, 2019) and Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019) and the television series Westworld (HBO, 2016-present). At work, we debate diagnoses about the future verified throughout history, trying to locate different experiences, problematize certain established discourses and assess to what extent the current future is, in fact, designed as decadent and gloomy. The aesthetic experience with symbolic media forms arouses a repositioning of the subject in the world and, in the specific case of futuristic fiction, contributes to fostering imaginative variations on the time that “is not yet”. Therefore, we present an investigation that highlights the cultural experience with audiovisual texts in order to observe the ethical dimension linked to the future — in a tension between “living together” and “enmity” — and to understand which futures are being produced today.