Queer Metamorphoses and Displacements in the Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

The trope of metamorphosis, already all-pervasive in O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), is easily detectable throughout the cinematography of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, being recurrently retrieved by the filmmakers in different cultural versions, along different approaches and in different settings. These transformations develop across space, allowing us to suggest that one very salient and meaningful trait in Rodrigues’ and da Mata’s cinema is the spatialization of (re)subjectifying processes. In fact, such transformations in the individual subjectivities span over eventful spaces, i. e.: spaces that are not inert background scenarios, but are fully intervening in the action, as agents of processes of devenir-autre (becoming-other), shape-shifting and metamorphic identitary transformations. From this standpoint, Rodrigues’ and da Mata’s films can be reasonably ranked among the fictions of terminal identity and of hybrid entities dealing with the end of the metaphysical, substantial, unitary, essentialized subject so akin to queer critical theory, and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. In this sense, Rodrigues and da Mata’s cinema conveys a kind of “erotitude” that erases the difference between what they do with their bodies and how they use their spatial environment, which is the focus of this chapter.