O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital: Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema

This thesis explores the understanding of rhythm in scientific, philosophical and
artistic discourses as from the end of the 19th century, as well as the place of rhythm and its studies in understanding art and social organization. Having assumed the status of a general interpreter of modernity, the notion of rhythm emerged as a productive term in various disciplines, including cinema, enabling to understand the ongoing transformations and, simultaneously, to model behaviours and to implement new everyday choreographies. Amongst the constellation of studies on rhythm developed at the core of the criticism of modern society, this thesis privileges rhythmanalysis, a critical and experimental methodology for analysing rhythm and its disruptions. Drawing upon critical theories of the Eurocentric conception of modernity, as well as upon rhythmanalysis exercises that I carried out in Buenos Aires, I seek to advance contributions to a complexification of rhythmanalysis, subsumed under the designation of rhuthmanalysis.
I hereby adopt a conception of rhythm as a form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, i.e., as a flow in constant circulation that momentarily crystallizes. In the same sense, this thesis develops the idea of a vital rhythm that is provisionally configured in artistic forms. This flow, which is timeless and has no determined space, survives in historical forms, always in different ways and crossing times. This conception is heir to the notion of survival (nachleben), according to which some pathos formulas (pathosformeln) are repeated over time. Starting from the analysis of a corpus constituted mainly of films by Chantal Akerman and Raymonde Carasco, this thesis argues that the ekstasis - the state of being displaced - that comes from the ritual traversing of worlds and from the contact with the vital rhythm is the pathos that images bear and transport through the fundamental gesture of crossing - travessia. This, in turn, is composed by a montage of other gestures: the gesture of breathing and the gesture of commoving.