Crises do homem sério: narrativa fantástica e a mise en scène discordante do saber moderno

Abstract

This study has an overall aim to understand the fantastic - particularly the one invented by the cinematographic mise en scène - as an enlightener category over conflict relations between subjects and a modern knowledge regime, knowledge that is based on practical rationality, on order and on seriousness. Initially, we promote a review of studies on the fantastic in literature from the nineteenth century (in the work of authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe) and from the twentieth century (as in Franz Kafka and Julio Cortázar) in perspective with sociological and philosophical issues related to the knowledge and to the normativity gestated by modern thought and in relation with a complex contemporary normative framework. From an understanding of the fantastic as a narrative construct, we point out to its particular form of emplotment and to the experience of crises of the normality founded on the disagreement. Then, we launch ourselves to the perception of cinema as a privileged device for the creation of fantastic narratives, present in works of filmmakers such as Tod Browning, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel and George Romero, leading to a diversity of expressions and significant dimensions. Finally, we find in the film A Serious Man (2009), of Joel and Ethan Coen, an opportunity for reflection, making use of thefantastic as the operator concept, in view of a tensioner feature that its narrative can bring to the discussion and to the understanding of knowledge relations and normativity in contemporary societies.