Musical visions, cinematographic listenings

Nomadic agencies for a decolonial cine-music

Abstract

The present work seeks to draw parallels between cinema and music, from a border and decolonial perspective. For this, some films were chosen and analyzed, with their soundtracks, as well as songs that resonate with the topics addressed. Constructing a transversal view of cinema through music, we sought to question or dismantle crucial categories for Western-centered cinema, which still reflect a colonial nostalgia and persist in ideological divisions, such as between “art-cinema” or “modern-cinema” and the “rest”. Thus, the text is divided into three central sections and two concluding ones: Cinema seen through music: verticalisms and horizontalisms in transversals epistemologically inserts the theme, rhizomatically analyzing the horizontal and vertical forces of cinema and music; Modal cine-music addresses some films/musics from a transcultural perspective of modal music, focusing on its cycles of repetition, transformation, as well as symbolic death and rebirth cycles; Modal, Tonal, Atonal: cinematographic resonances addresses the changes that music and film have faced and spawned, from the transformations of modal music into tonal and “atonal”; Small coda briefly summarizes the path traced throughout the work and Da capo al fine: for a frontier decolonial thought concludes it. It is hoped that the article, essayistic in nature, can contribute to enrich reflections on cinematography and other arts, especially since it starts from a non-specialized look-listening, built from a different art, music, which I consider a powerful and fruitful form of encounter, precisely because it allows transcultural and rhizomatic transit between different arts and knowledges.