Edgar Pêra’s new toy or the restlessness of the cinema of ideas

Abstract

In this interview, I propose a journey through words that, by being spoken, construct meanings and through images that fabricate utopias. The premise is the new film by Edgar Pêra, called Telepathic Letters. In this path, I don’t place myself in the shoes of a critic who judges a product or exclusively in the position of an academic who makes theoretical considerations about an object, based on a priori-analysis models. Rather, I situate myself as a researcher who opens to the investigation with a detached commitment. Immersing myself in the dialogic weaving of art, literature and philosophy, I discuss processes of adaptation for cinema, the role of Artificial Intelligence in creation, what it is like to be a cosmic spectator, like Fernando Pessoa and H. P. Lovecraft, whom Pêra (the telepathic channel) communicates with in this film. In these attempts, I present the productive methods of an artist, whose discourse is formulated in unrepeatable moments of interviews, with specific conditions of existence. Therefore, this communicative process in the form of conversations takes on an autoethnographic character (Ellis & Bochner, 2006).