Enxergar o oculto: as coleções invisíveis de Zweig e Attal

Abstract

In this academic work, two works we will approach: the movie A Coleção Invisível (Attal, 2013) and the short novel A Coleção Invisível: um episódio da inflação alemã (Zweig, 2015 [1925]), part of the book Novelas Insólitas. The movie is an adaptation of the short novel. In both narratives, we have a character in search of art pieces, moved by personal interests, in the first case Beto and, in the second, the antique dealer. Later, they find a collector who could provide such pieces, Samir in the film and Herwarth in the novel. However, the encounter culminates in the encounter with the invisible collection, which names the filmic and the literary texts, and also with the blindness of the collectors. The collection is called like this because the “real” set of artworks has been sold, although the collector still believes that it lies before him. Therefore, after a brief presentation of these works, followed by notes about adaptation, we will link the idea of the commodity form and the rationalization of production to understand the process of commodification as an effort to make the evaluation act objective. Phantasmagoria, fetish, aura, narrative and experience crisis, tactile and visual perception will be some of the themes approached to think about the social acceleration process which emerges from modernity and its opposition to the pre-modern time (Benjamin, 1987, 1989, 2009, 2012; Kehl, 2009; Marx, 2011; Stallybrass, 2008). Next, the disorder occasioned by the extinction of spatiotemporal structures, which stabilizes life, will be examined with the acceleration process, intending to diagnose about the factors that contributed to this state of affairs, resultant of the modern progress. At the same time, new restructuring attempts to redeem the lost organization will be analyzed (Gagnebin, 2014; Malraux, 2011; Lipovetsky, Serroy, 2015; Barthes, 1984). Lastly, the collection as a regime which aims to assemble and prevents dispersion, which also intends to order the disorder of the world, will be contrasted with others ordering methods, whereupon the collection shows itself as an form of anarchive, bringing back the repressed from the history through the endeavor of reassemble the past through its fragments, no more based in an archivist monument from before, since it reinforces the teleological and rational vision of the historical course and the claim of objectivity to portrayal things “as they happened”, but as a way of read, articulate the past historically. (Baudrillard, 2004; Maciel, 2009; Derrida, 2001; Resende, 2020; Agamben, 2016; Bosi, 1995; Artières, 1998).