The Aesthetics of ‘Speaking Objects’ in Aniki-Bóbó’s Anthropo-cosmo-morphic Material

The surface of the things which make up the pro-filmic constitutes the shell/ signifier chosen to shape the soul of the filmic world or its anthropo-cosmo-morphic image rendered by the techniques of film language. The result is the creation of a complex and multi-layered “possible world”, consisting of discursive parts that speak through the dramaturgy and aesthetics of the film, a socio-semantics which transfigures the matter of bodies and objects through the mechanisms of filmic re-signification. Amongst these, the intellectual montage as well as all the graphic and audio signs that appear on the scene can be identified. These signs stand out because of their metaphorical-discursive capacity, as will be analysed in the film Aniki-Bóbó (1942) by Manoel de Oliveira: the written words that serve to give voice to inanimate matter (Carlitos’ bag); the modelled forms which reproduce material allegories or doubles of the human body (the doll); the fragile materials that refer to the children’s fragility itself; the steel and iron of mechanised infrastructures showing the modernisation of the country; the classical architecture, the nature of the place and the free, open-air spaces of games, as opposed to closed spaces that recall underdeveloped pedagogical institutions; and among the latter, the liminal place par excellence, symbolised by the ‘Shop of Temptations’. In the filmic whole, bodies, places and objects are thus configured as interconnected parts of a single compact world, in which the cosmos is reflected in the anthropo, and the anthropo in the cosmos, in order to transfigure, in a metaphorical key, the immaterial culture referring to the changes in national identity. This allegorical fable of Portuguese pedagogical culture ultimately proposes the possibility of a social (and political) change, projected into a ‘just’ future without dictatorship (victory of good over evil).