Description
[original title in Portuguese]«Garlands, drums, music of love!»: the nationalist aesthetic in the audio-visual work of Heróis do Mar (1981-1989)
This communication presented an expositive exercise on the audio-visual work of the Portuguese band «Heróis do Mar», that allowed to reflect on the moving image as an artistic object – beyond the medium – and its historical, cultural and visual legacy, all the while, conveying a dialogue between the survival of a nation's identity (markedly based on an idealised visual construct) and how it has been appropriated and reinterpreted.
Heróis do Mar were considered due to the patriotic flair and nationalist aesthetics (which pertain to the historical glories of The Fifth Empire), intricately woven into their image (from the album artworks to their videography), and how it can be perceived as an act of criticism and subversion.
In this sense, and aside from the visual elements, we understood that the inspiration in the «brave and immortal nation» (as retrieved from the national hymn A Portuguesa (Mendonça & Keil, 1890)), offered as well an exercise on intermediality: on the one hand, there is an intention to establish a sonic leitmotif through the percussions that evoke militaristic rhythms; on the other hand, an oral discourse is produced around concepts of accentuated 'portugality' – such as the «saudade» [‘longing’, ‘presence of the absence’] present in a «chest, torn by love», that echoes as «the drum rolls» (Magalhães, 1981).
| Period | 12 Nov 2020 |
|---|---|
| Event title | XIV Jornadas Cinema em Português |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 15 |
| Location | Lisboa, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |
Keywords
- Moving Image
- Visual Culture
- Aesthetics
- Music
- Visual Literacy