Bostofrio: a recusa fotográfica como evocação

Abstract

In 2018, the film Bostofrio, Paulo Carneiro’s first feature film, premiered. This documentary, about a director in search of the memory of his grandfather, in the eponynous village in which he lived, is part of a line of “rural-fantasistic” films about the landscape and the experiences of Trás-os-Montes. In it, the photographic dimension emerges from a narrative necessity but also
from a formal point of view, emphasizing its importance by the absence of a key image: the portrait of the “incognito grandfather”. In this essay I try to explain how this absence, together with a series of “primitive” filmic strategies with a strong Gothic correlation, convert the absent figure into a spectral presence.