Coringa esteve aqui! Poéticas da desfiguração no cinema e arte contemporânea

Abstract

The article is based on the analysis of a scene from Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman. The aim is to define a possible dimension of the image in the twentieth century, pregnant in both the cinema and the arts from the 1960s onwards. The phenomenon concerns a figural power, an excess of plastic energy that pushes the image to disfigurement, understood here not only in its negative sense, of destructive violence, but above all, in a sense of a positive creative force that destabilizes conventional figuration norms to release meanings, effects and powers of plasticity repressed in the image, and only visible through operations of deformation and fraying of the figure.