A cidade emaranhada: imagens ressonantes no cinema cearense contemporâneo

Abstract

This research investigates how contemporary cinema from Ceará, produced in Fortaleza, operates temporal and spatial displacements that challenge colonial-capitalist chronopolitics and reorganize the conditions of existence in the city. The film corpus comprises Tremor Iê (2019), Boca de Loba (2018), Cartuchos de Super Nintendo em Anéis de Saturno (2018), and Vando Vulgo Vedita (2017), works produced between 2015 and 2019 that inventively explore the relationships between body, city, time, and resistance. It is argued that these films intervene in the city by producing displacements in hegemonic ways of organizing time, memory, and the presence of bodies in urban space. To engage with these operations, the thesis is structured around three interdependent movements: Layers of the Map, which dismantles dominant temporal regimes and positions the films as chronopolitical agents; Resonant Images, which traces recurring figures—night, monument, fugitivity, and the collective (bando)—as fields of meaning that tension the materiality of the city; and Notebooks of Conversation, which gathers dialogues with filmmakers, expanding the space of resonance and unfolding from creative processes. The writing embraces discontinuity, fragmentation, and leaps between planes, composing a partial and situated map of resonant images inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory.” In dialogue with authors such as Rasheedah Phillips, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Donna Haraway, the study proposes a speculative approach to thinking about the city of Fortaleza, its tensions, contradictions, and modes of invention.