Banca de DEFESA: ADRIANO SIQUEIRA RAMALHO PORTELA

SANTA jOANA CAROLINA: An altarpiece of literary and cinematographic interfaces in Osman Lins

Osman Lins; Creative Writing; Retábulo de Santa Joana Carolina; Literature; Movie theater; Nouvelle Vague; Jean-Luc Godard.

Writer. Playwright. Critical. Teacher. Osman Lins has always been a committed intellectual and an enthusiastic lover of literature. In the collection of articles published in the press and gathered in the book Do ideal e da Glória: problema inculturais Brasileiros, he frankly addresses aspects of cultural life at the time (1965-1976), which, after almost sixty years, still resurface with force, attesting to the relevance of many of his concerns. Some of these articles, therefore, contain the germs of the proposition of a literary research very close to that which today populate university courses focused on Creative Writing. As a writer, teacher, playwright and filmmaker, I have always been interested in Osmanian work; which I use as inspiration for my own productions, from academic to artistic ones. Thus, involved in an ambitious film adaptation project of the narrative “Retábulo de Santa Joana Carolina”, from the book Nove, Novena (1966), by the writer from Pernambuco, while at the same time that I was poring over the process of writing a doctoral thesis on this author, I saw the two activities inevitably intertwine, resulting in this hybrid work that I present to the Graduate Program in Letters at UFPE. The text initially deals with the very particular experimental way of conceiving the fictional narrative of the Retábulo, revealing how much Osman Lins stood up to orthodoxy also in the field of creation. Hence his interest in radical experiences carried out by the French, such as the Nouveau Roman in literature and the Nouvelle Vague in cinema, with which he established close contact during a scholarship that took him to Europe in the 1960s. The study of this parallel between literature and modern cinema also guided me in my own process of adapting the work in question, which resulted in the writing of a film script. It was possible, in this joint process of mine, to reach an intimacy with many aspects of literary creation that simple theorization would not allow. Quoting Osman Lins: “We also obtained something that the teacher and the student rarely know in the classroom: the joy of doing.” (1977, p. 78).