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Writer's pictureLaurel Creighton

Branca de Neve

Updated: Dec 28, 2022


João César Monteiro's Branca de Neve is a startling recital of Snow White over a black screen punctuated by momentary images and eerie non-diegetic sound composed by opera composer Giovacchini Rossini, of the Barber of Seville fame. The film created a controversial public debate about the limits of creative freedom, funding, and the nature of cinema in Portugal. Therefore, it is essential to understand certain esthetic choices and some history and theory behind them.

Walser's "Schneewittchen" takes place after the "Happily ever after" that ends Disney's Technicolor 1937 masterpiece, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." Bruno Bettleheim – a Freudian thinker and Holocaust survivor – argues that fairy tales permit children to comprehend jealousy toward their parents. That story also helps children realize that adults may have similar feelings. Exploring feelings through the story can help bridge the gap between parent and child by reaffirming that the child is safe and will survive the ordeal. Walser rewrites the story to show the reader, listener, or viewer what might befall the child if the child survives the test but only just.

Walser begins in the wake of Snow White's death. She is brought back to life by the Prince through an alluded kiss. She knows everything that happened to her, such as the Queen's jealousy and desire to murder her through the Huntsman. She becomes aware of her Mother's attempt to dissuade her of this information through a series of tactics such as gaslighting and multiple distractions. She can see that the Mother/Queen's words and actions do not quite align. The Prince, who was once infatuated with Snow White's beauty, betrays her for her Mother/Queen's affections which are rebuked. The Prince admits that he loves both Snow and the Queen. The Queen believes the Prince to be weak and tells him to go away while she leaves with the Huntsman to make love outside. The Prince describes the scene to Snow White, who says, "Woe to me that I must hear." Monteiro and Walser privilege those who can hear over those who can see in this way.

Monteiro is recognized as Portugal's most significant film director alongside Manoel de Oliveira. He is considered in the vein of some of the most vital directors in history, alongside Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and others. Monteiro is a "controlled schizophrenic," often balancing between two worlds as Snow White did in between the "there and here" of the forest where she lived with the dwarves and the castle where she lives with her Mother. But this schizoid personality has created some of his most vital work regarding femininity and masculinity. In his film God's Comedy, Monteiro exemplifies this best by being both predator to 14-year-old Claudia Teixeira and a submissive subject. Monteiro straddled a line of "cinematic deontology." 'Deon' comes from the Greek word for 'duty' and refers to rule-based ethics, predetermined by moral reasoning such as Kantian ethics. Knowing that Monteiro's filmography is self-reflexive, "Monteiro's''''" God's" Portugal's" Queen'sWhite'sQueen'sMother'sQueen'sWhite'sneedn't" Disney's" Walser'sMonteiro'sBazinian" realism this puts Branca de Neve in an exciting position. Extraordinarily female, it refreshes us on the darker side of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the Jungian Electra Complex, where the female must compete with the Mother for social autonomy. From these dark sub-contextual desires spring Monteiro's most brilliant storytelling device used, the black screen.

The genius of Branca de Neve is its use of startling darkness punctuated with brief periods of light and image. The Bible begins with, "the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." For many theorists, darkness is not a color but a condition one was thrust into either by nature or fate, recalling the phrase "Dark Night of the Soul," where one searches without light to find a meaning to the utter blackness that surrounds themselves. But by the late 19th century, blackness became something we could control as an autonomy. "Artificial Darkness" became inextricably linked to the production and reception of images; however, light was linked in the case of theater projections. The theater's darkness was no less critical to the audience's experience than the luminous, moving image projected upon the screen. However, the moment of pure total darkness invites the audience to suspend their ego and launch themselves into the life of the film, which can be called "Wagnerian darkness." An allusion to Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen – the Wagnerian vanishing act that takes place on stage during the Opera.

In the early 1860s, a German physiologist, Adolf Fick, developed a black box so dark that the darkest part of the black paper appeared gray by comparison. Fick discovered "intrinsic light," which the eyes perceive even in complete darkness and is the product of physiological actions. This wasn't" the first experimentation with color; from the early nineteenth centuries, intellectual goliaths such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were making discoveries such as light chaos, light dust, self-light, idiorentinal light, intrinsic brightness or darkness, retinal. Noise, and most famously, Eigenlicht and Eigengrau (inherent light and intrinsic grey). Goethe led a revolution from geometrical optics to physiological optics. He maintained that "black, as the equivalent of darkness, leave the organ in a state of repose; white, as the representative of light, excites i.". These radical nineteenth-century texts, such as the work of Johannes Müller, insisted that "darkness or the color black, is the mere negative result of certain parts of the retina, or its entire surface being in a state of repose or freedom from movement. While this challenged dominant theories, it ultimately preserved the opinion of philosophers such as Aristotle.

While darkness is not a modernist medium, Monteiro has created a work of art anchored in the deep ocean of discourse and praxis, tied to a historically contingent dispositif. The images witnessed in Branca de Neve are as follows: title card deep in sepia tones, the dead man in the Snow, the sky – used in various instances, a panning sweep of a ruined foundation, and Monteiro himself. In his chapter on The Black Screen, Richard Misek reminds us that full-screen blackness has historically been used to separate sequences. They gave the audience a point break to conceptualize the spacing of time and proximity. In Branca de Neve, it is the opposite. Images and non-diegetic instrumentals punctuate the acts of operatic drama. Here Monteiro's marking of mise-en-abyme of the black screen can be determined as both phenomenological and ontological, but what do they mean?

The dead man can be interpreted as Snow White herself as the drama begins at her death, an unseeing state of blankness. Monteiro is precise in deceiving us by showcasing the dead man but showing us that his eyes are open and pointing toward the sky above. Snow White's story begins post-terminus, and Monteiro beckons us into the void. We, as an audience, enter the blackness and are reduced to our audial sense to lead us through the void. Tibetans say that when we die, our last living sense is our hearing – which is why the Book of the Dead is read at the point of terminus, guiding us through that sudden blackness (we) may suddenly find ourselves facing. The sky visuals punctuate the spaces between the darkness and point to the world of the living to which we will leave behind a brilliant reversal of esthetics.

But I believe it goes deeper than this; depending on the character speaking, I think the darkness can be symbolic for each mode of being, and blackness can also be the space inside the womb—a central point of contention for the stepmother in the story. Snow White never occupied that space within the Mother, creating an absence of physicality to connect. The blackness, when viewed through the Huntsman's perspective, can be indicative of the blind eye; he turned towards Snow White, letting her disappear into the dense and darkly lit forest surrounding her, leaving her with perhaps a darker and more nefarious ending. For the Prince, the blackness is his ignorance, his willful negligence of his bride, and his profundity to miss the social context of the world surrounding him. The father, absent throughout most retellings of the fairy tale, represents the absent protector and can stand for the missing presence of divine protection of God.

The ruins displayed towards the end of the film represent the Ivory tower. The foundation of the family is faulty and in disrepair. Even more mysterious is the finale, the appearance of Monteiro as he wordlessly utters something to us in a direct address before exiting the screen. One might make connections, assumptions, and prophetic analogies, but where it might leave us is still one wondering what the call of the void is saying.








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