The cinemas deterritorializing potential and its philosophical contagion

• Autor(a) principal: Garces Velasco, Ricardo
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/77689
• topic: Cinema; Desterritorialização; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Artes

Guillermo del Toro’s most recent film The Shape of Water (2017) ends with a sequence presenting the leading role’s peculiar transformation that not only saves her life but allows her to breathe underneath the water and to be with the amphibious manlike creature she loves. By showing the exact instant where the character’s ancient neck scars open into gills with a thought-provoking low angle medium close-up in a floating environment, the film denotes a resonance between physical metamorphosis and a change of perspective. In addition, the sequence’s final scene is an extreme long shot of the story’s two main characters merged in a hug and surrounded by an aquatic empty landscape. Thus suggesting that the shift process’s culmination is not merely a matter of altered body parts but also of changing contexts, environments and ways to be, perceive and understand reality. However, this example is not the only one of how motion pictures have been approaching and displaying different transformation processes and their multiple implications. Almost a decade before The Shape of Water, the anime feature films Studio Ghibli released Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008). The story of a red goldfish princess who wishes to become a human after knowing a five-year-old boy. The film focuses on Ponyo’s becoming-human journey, showing how it develops alongside with her motivations and the ramifications of such a desire. The moment where Ponyo’s will of change provides her with legs and hands, disrupting her restraining water-bubble borders and altering nature’s balance, establishes a key progression to analyze and experience the complex shifting relationship between a subject and its milieu.