Peregrinação

From the matrix source to Botelho’s film

Résumé

The figure of Fernão Mendes Pinto and / or his work, Peregrinação, inspired creatives from different artistic areas: from painting to sculpture or tile making and from different graphic and illustrative arts to comics, from theatre to music and cinema. For the purpose of this text, and after a brief presentation of both the twenty-one years adventurous experience of this Portuguese traveller from the Discoveries era and the success and nature of the book of this 16th-century author, we chose the 2017 film adaptation-recreation by João Botelho, a place for questioning History based on the filmmaker’s present (and ours) and for experimenting with different ways of telling/filming a story (his own and that of others) and a meeting place for different arts, namely literature, photography/painting, theatre, and certainly music as an essential compositional and stylistic ingredient in which telling becomes singing. Two choirs of seven members each (singers/actors) reinterpret seven songs from the vinyl record album Por Este Rio Acima (1982) by singer/composer Fausto, an unavoidable name in contemporary Portuguese music and, simultaneously, another sui generis interpretative work around the book of the 16th century author. This expedient of the choirs (in an operatic way) stands out among the filmmaker’s various creative freedoms that contribute to the idea of cinema as construction and experimentation.