The word impossible to rest: Pasolini and Murilo Mendes’ camera-eye

Abstract

More than a theory of language, the filmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini gave us a theory of the language and its relation to the reality. The cinema appears as a trigger of a philosophical investigation of the possibilities of verbal language in the crossroads between his historicity and the poetical desire to reveal new meaning, or more than that, the struggle with the nonexistence of meaning. Establishing ties between Pasolini’s theory of cinema and the poetics of Murilo Mendes we seek to think about the poetic of dispossession of meaning through the work of cutting and subtraction concepts direct at the word. Pasolini’s proposals theorizes about the cinema, but it´s above all a theory of language, a comparison between the possibilities of th verbal and the visual. This theory helps gain a different perspective of Murilo Mendes poetic work, interested in the poetry that is activated through the eye of a camera, an eye capable of uncovering the essentials of the word in a process of subtraction that seeks the permanent displacement of the meaning, the word impossible to rest.