Fosfeno refers to an anthropological context rooted in mountain communities. It suggests a cultural and symbolic reality of great complexity, shaped by sociological and psychological, natural and cultural factors. This reality integrates both the order of the real and the order of the symbolic, recalling collective customs and habits deeply embedded in ways of life transmitted across generations.
The filmic itinerary unfolds in four movements — prelude, conflict, zenith, and ruin — each marked by the aesthetics of the image, by the existential conditions of humans and animals, and by relations of harmony and opposition among the beings and objects that animate the cinematic action. Its primary focus is the relationship between humans and animals, in particular the wolf and the horse. Through an artistic language of image and sound, the film reveals that this relationship is neither linear nor objective, but laden with difficulties, negotiations, and acts of overcoming. It refers to the creation and taming of garrano horses, to the control of the predatory behavior attributed to the wolf, and to the ways in which mountain communities confront this tension.
Drawing from these contextual aspects, the film structures itself through a logic of action that integrates episodes saturated with situations, beings, and objects of profound symbolic weight: the gestures and gazes of men, the presence of animals — horses and wolves — and natural elements such as mountain, water, fire, light, and darkness.
We are thus presented with a reality that is at once natural and symbolic, revealing the profound and consubstantial relationship between humans and animals, between nature and culture, which extends beyond the immediate limits of its context. Through the interplay of light and shadow, combined with musical language, the film symbolically weaves, in dialectical movement across shifts of perspective and passage of episodes, the relations of nature and culture, humanity and animality, the real and the imaginary, the sensible and the intelligible, instinct and reason. It is constructed through oppositions and relations.
As Lévi-Strauss observes, “language and culture present a similar architecture: both are constructed by means of oppositions and logical relations.”¹ Through art, communication, and expression, Fosfeno takes shape in matter and form, in image, light, and movement, in contrasts and oppositions that suggest forms of expression of the intimate forces guiding human behavior in different cultural practices.
¹ C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 1958, pp. 78–79.
In opposition both phonetically and semantically to articulated language, it communicates in a naturally symbolic way, and what constitutes it — colors, animals, forms, gazes, and actions — appears as signs that invoke other signs, enjoying, in this sense, the same status as language itself. As with the terms of language, the filmic elements “have no intrinsic meaning; their meaning is one of ‘position,’ on the one hand, in relation to history and cultural context, and on the other, to the structure of the system in which they are called to take part.”¹ The system in which they are called to appear is at once cultural and symbolic, characterized by openness and flexibility, where beings and objects are susceptible to countless meanings.
The domain of symbolism is “the non-sensible in all its forms — unconscious, metaphysical, supernatural, and surreal”², and one of the possibilities of the symbol, whatever it may be — horse, wolf, or mountain — is to present itself as “a mode of knowledge never adequate, never objective, since it never attains an object (…) and which bears within itself, in a scandalous way, the immanent message of a transcendence, never explicit, but always ambiguous and generally redundant.”³
Not fixed on a single object, image, or situation, and not presented as a closed narrative with beginning and end, Fosfeno reveals pathways and allows the spectator to traverse, in sensitivity and understanding, the multiple layers of reality — to feel that the relationships established between humans and animals are not always conciliatory, but at times violent and difficult to overcome.
For these reasons, one may say we are before those symbols that Paul Ricoeur would call authentic, that is, simultaneously possessing three dimensions: “cosmic, oneiric, and poetic.”⁴ A cosmic dimension, because the filmmaker gathers his figuration from the world, visible in the plastic representation of nature, of man, of the horse and the wolf; a oneiric dimension, because it recalls to memory the lived experiences of communities in their relation to horses and wolves — for instance, in collective hunts — as well as the dream and desire for liberation of man in relation to the animal, and of the animal in relation to man; and a poetic dimension, because it also appeals to language, which in society communicates the social through its symbolic expression, saying through symbols what cannot otherwise be said.
¹ Idem, p. 74.
² Gilbert Durand, A imaginação simbólica, Lisbon: Ed. 70, 1993, p. 11.
³ Idem, p. 16.
⁴ P. Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations – Essais d’herméneutique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, n.d., p. 18.
² Gilbert Durand, A imaginação simbólica, Lisbon: Ed. 70, 1993, p. 11.
³ Idem, p. 16.
⁴ P. Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations – Essais d’herméneutique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, n.d., p. 18.
The material the film offers us does not end with custom, nor with the concrete and lived relationship between man and animal: the shifts of perspective, the luminous stains, the distorted images, the contrasts of light and shadow, silence and noise, the voices of men and of animals, together with the sound effects, operate at the level of the senses and of thought, making possible the creation of perceptible illusions and the induction of feelings and ideas. Under the effect of the language of cinematic art, and by evoking behaviors and situations, by polarizing images and emotions, Fosfeno generates a meaning open to interpretation, leaving the audience with the possibility of thinking, feeling, organizing, and uniting what apparently seems separate.
From this hermeneutic possibility, the work recalls the Greek tragedy, characterized by the Dionysian and the Apollonian spirits. The first refers, in 5th-century Athens, to Dionysus, a figure who “in the Greek pantheon (…) occupies an ambiguous position (…) more demi-god than god, embodying the figure of the Other, eliminating the boundaries between the divine and the human, the human and the bestial”¹; he symbolizes chaos and the life that emanates from instinct and will. J.-P. Vernant observes that “the epiphany of Dionysus is that of a being who, even in his proximity, in his intimate contact with us, remains inaccessible and ubiquitous, never where he is (…)”². In this sense, one may establish analogies with the vitality of the animal and the wild instinct expressed through the behavior of the horse — “a being endowed with clairvoyance (…) known for the quality of its instinct (…) and (…) considered within Dionysian practices.”³
The second refers to Apollo, god of beauty, harmony, and reason, “symbol of victory over violence, of self-mastery”⁴, who, in Greek tragedy, stands in opposition to the Dionysian spirit, representing order and rationality. Though opposed, these two spirits unite to give birth to tragedy and to represent life in its fullness — in what it holds of beauty and ugliness, of good and evil, of instinct and reason.
¹ J.-P. Vernant, Figuras, Ídolos, Máscaras, Lisbon: Editorial Teorema, 1991, p. 175.
² Idem, p. 180.
³ Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, Dicionário dos Símbolos, Internet Archive, 16th Edition, 2001, p. 126.
⁴ Idem, p. 56.
² Idem, p. 180.
³ Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, Dicionário dos Símbolos, Internet Archive, 16th Edition, 2001, p. 126.
⁴ Idem, p. 56.
Thus, in musical language and aesthetic image, the conditions of the communities — of men and of animals — who live in close proximity to nature and are essentially dependent upon it, at least on the symbolic level, are brought together. By integrating individuals, objects, and situations into its cinematic representations — even when dealing with the unrepresentable — the film brings into focus aspects of human and animal life: harmony and beauty, the terrible and the violent. Whatever the modalities of image chosen, the figures systematically rely on interferences between the human and the animal, between nature and culture. We are, in fact, confronted with a cinematographic reality which, analyzed from within — from man to animal and from animal to man — highlights the relations established over generations between humanity and animality: physical, psychic, and sociological relations that manifest themselves through a reciprocal appropriation of man and animal. As Marcel Mauss reminds us regarding symbolic exchange, “everything happens as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual substance comprising things and men, between groups and individuals.”¹
The evidence of the relation between animality and humanity becomes the object of questioning and reflection on what is meant to be established: themes and messages pass subtly through a poetic and sublime dialogue with nature, men, and animals, while reality — in image and symbol — refers us back to the way man relates to himself, to things, to symbols, to animals. Within this dialogue, bonds of reciprocity between man and animal are unleashed, bonds that may reach the point of identifying two different beings in the same, and of recognizing the other in its alterity, as truly an other: leaving behind rationality, of being either man or animal, their roles, their social and natural functions, man and animal affirm themselves through one another in what they both share — the condition of existence.
¹ Idem, p. 69.
