The research actions of the three-year period (2023-2026) of the Cátedra Manoel de Oliveira/Unisalento are hereby inaugurated with the project ‘Musical language as an expression of intersubjectivity in Manoel de Oliveira’s films’. Intersubjectivity concerns the manifestations and evaluations (implicit or explicit) of the interlocutors regarding the content enunciated in the enunciative process (Hengeveld; Mackenzie, 2010) and is constructed in a distinctive manner in cinematographic language, which is essentially multimodal.

For Manoel de Oliveira, “music is one of the four columns that support the temple of cinema, together with the image, the word and the sound”. Therefore, we intend to investigate how musical language/discourse collaborate in the representation of (inter)subjectivity in his work, based on the analysis of the discursive strategies used to produce the effects intended by the author.

Manoel de Oliveira activates the viewer’s musical sensitivity to build emotions, emotional vibration and explores different dialogues between music and the narrative, scenic and thematic elements of films. In his poetics, this exploration presents itself in different ways: from the construction of macabre irony in O Passado e o Presente (1971) and the atmospheric contextual links of O Convento (1995) to the intercreative interactions at the service of the specificities of the film production itself, such as that with Maria João Pires in A Divina Comédia (1991), the libretto written by João Paes for Os Canibais (1988), or the use of Pedro Abrunhosa’s persona in La Lettre (1999).

The research is based on the theoretical principles of Classical Functional Linguistics (Dik, 1989; Halliday, 2002; Hengeveld; Mackenzie, 2010; Casseb-Galvão, 2015, 2015a) and Cognitive Linguistics (Silva et al., 2024; Silva 2020, Langacker, 2008, among others).

The conference, which will take place in Auditorium A14 of Colégio Almada Negreiros, is organised by Caravelas – Study Group for the History of Music in Portugal and Brazil / CESEM.