Phantoms, Drifters, and Desiring Saints: Landscapes, Soundscapes, and Becoming-queer in the Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

This chapter focuses on the relation between landscapes, soundscapes and the concept becoming-queer in O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), Odete (Two Drifters (2005), Morrer como um Homem (To Die Like a Man, 2009) and O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). As Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari note in their works, landscape is deeply connected to the certain image of the human. Landscape, then, is a form-of-life. The concept of becoming-queer is used here to point out the ways in which Rodrigues and da Mata go beyond simple representation of gay or transgender identity, and open the bodies of characters to “natural” and “artificial” environments and milieus surpassing the traditional humanist division of human and non-human, natural and cultural, without naturalizing or denaturalizing queer desire but constructing a third “way” beyond linear and non-linear divide. What Rodrigues and da Mata do is a construction of a specific image of becoming-queer. Such an image constructs the nature/culture-body/subject complex with relations that are neither linear nor non-linear, but material in their differentiation which queers any notion of stability. In a word, an image of materiality that is beyond the face-landscape assemblage and its organic, all too human, representation of the world.