O clássico e o moderno

Eisenstein e Orson Welles na pena de Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes

Abstract

It is about analyzing two essays produced by the critic and historian Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes about the filmmakers Serguei Eisenstein and Orson Welles. Published in the second half of 1950 in the O Estado de S. Paulo Literary Supplement, the essays analyze aspects of the language, style and social expression of Eisenstein and Welles films from a historical-biographical cut out from of the historical studies developed by the filmmaker during his stay in Paris and the research on the French filmmaker Jean Vigo. We'll see how revisiting Eisenstein's artistic fortune will be instrumental in understanding aspects of classic film language, based significantly on parallel editing and close-up. In Welles's case, the focus rests on discoveries of depth of field and sequential plane as characteristic narrative features of modern cinema. Taken together, the commentary on the works of Eisenstein and Welles opens the way for very refined historical-biographical reflections, which still today can inspire those who have cinema as the theme of their historical research, based on a methodology capable of guiding questions of language, style. and social expression that flow from the cinematographic phenomenon.