Friends in Cinema. Filmic Correspondences: From Subjectivity to Intersubjectivity

Abstract

This article analyses the practice of filmic correspondence based on the contemporary concept of intersubjectivity: the space where subjectivities meet and share in order to reach new perspectives and results. The analysis of the most relevant filmic correspondences, generated over more than three decades already – from Video Letter (Tanikawa and Terayama, 1983) to Life May Be (Cousins ​​and Akbari, 2014) –, will allow to determine how this displacement from subjectivity to intersubjectivity happens, through which epistolary constructions, about which filmic practices, spaces and topics, and with which results. The study will conclude then how the epistolary intersubjective attempt materialises in different dynamics: starting point of a shared reflection; result of the epistolary exchange; search for a creative space; dialectics between different film practices; simulacrum that seems an intersubjectivity that it actually avoids; and even its impossibility, when the intersubjective attempt threatens the subjectivities involved.