LAVOURA ARCAICA: A CINEMATIC REINVENTION IN MOTION

Abstract

This paper explores the cinematic adaptation of Lavoura Arcaica as a creative endeavor that breaks away from the conventional paradigm of strict textual fidelity. Rather than offering a literal reproduction of Raduan Nassar’s novel, Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s film occupies an interstitial space between artistic languages, where verbal expression is reimagined through images, soundscapes, and embodied performance. The analysis highlights the intermedial dynamics and aesthetic frictions that emerge from this transposition, revealing how cinema becomes a medium for the sensory and symbolic reconfiguration of literature. Grounded in theoretical frameworks on adaptation, performativity, and intermediality (including Hutcheon, Stam, Rajewsky, and Fischer-Lichte), the study argues that cinematic adaptation is not a simple act of translation but a poetic reinvention. Elements such as rhythm, silence, and texture play a vital role in shaping new layers of meaning. By transferring verbal language into a field of affect and sensation, the film transforms reading into a visceral experience, expanding the boundaries of the literary through the grammar of the moving image.