Resumen de Canções na Serra: algumas notas sobre o som e o significado narrativo fílmico
Monte Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop (1971), Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha (1999) and Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month ofAugust (2008) present complex theoretical articulations between sound and image in cinema. Two-lane Blacktop isa road movie that ends with the sound fading out a few moments before the film starts to melt in the screen; Juha isa contemporary silent movie where its characters tend to communicate through gesture, and Our Beloved Month ofAugust’s plot, as a mélange of documentary and fiction, is at turns inspired and dictated by the Portuguese Augustfiestas popular soundtrack.Taking into account Michel Chion’s distinction between visualized and acousmatic sound, as well as the conceptsof diegetic and non-diegetic sound (1994), the ways through which these films create narrative and self-reflexivemeaning differ to a great extent. However, their shared and depurated experimentalism reveals innovating charactertrajectory possibilities, and these seem to defy the classic narrative structure from which each one of these movies,in different degrees, is built upon.Given that sound plays a key role in this dynamics, this paper will analyze the visualized and acousmatic soundfrontiers’ behavior together with the main characters’ motivation and trajectory in Hellman’s, Kaurismäki’s andGomes’ films.
