James Ivory's legacy in diversifying visual culture in the 1980s

• Autor(a) principal: Lemos de Souza, José Ailson
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34640/universidademadeira2021souza
• topic: cinema; cultura visual; gênero; James Ivory; sexualidade; cinema; visual culture; gender; James Ivory; sexuality; cinéma; culture visuelle; genre; James Ivory; sexualité; cine; cultura visual; género; James Ivory; sexualidad

This article aims at presenting a brief discussion on two films directed by James Ivory, Uma Janela para o Amor (1985) and Maurice (1987), both of which are adaptations from the novels of the same name by E. M. Forster. The focus of the analysis is the gender critique and the troubles concerning sexuality in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such themes are adapted and contextualized in spaces that are associated to heritage films, a critical term that emerged in British academic context and that refer to period films, which depict British past and its literature. Before the films’ analysis, wediscuss some of the feminist criticism that consider the questions explored in the film narratives, mainly in the texts by Mulvey (1983), Cook (1996), Pidduck (1997), and Monk (2011), among others. Ivory’s films select and develop scenes of subversion that criticize power relations of gender and sexuality and, as a result, diversify contemporary visual culture by means of a more democratic distribution of discourses and representations of human experience.