Arquitetura na construção de narrativas: uma investigação espacial por meio de análises do filme Ainda estou aqui

Abstract

This work investigates the relationship between architecture and cinema through the understanding of space as a symbolic, cultural, and subjective phenomenon. It departs from the premise that cultural values and affective dimensions are constitutive structures of spaces and spatial relations, both in architecture and in cinematographic representation. The study examines how the construction of filmic spaces operates as a narrative agent within a cinematic work, investigating the ways in which architecture actively participates in a film's plot — conveying information about characters, historical context, and emotional states. The objective is to analyze how the structuring of sensory elements is employed to spatialize messages and activate memories and affects in the viewer. To this end, the Brazilian film I'm Still Here (2024), directed by Walter Salles, is used as a case study, with a focus on the Paiva Residence, the central space of the narrative. The analysis investigates how the house acquires the character of a protagonist, actively participating in the progressive complications that unfold throughout the plot. By highlighting architecture as a mediator of experiences between body, memory, and image, the work seeks to demonstrate that lived space is, also, a form of language. The analysis demonstrates that the Paiva Residence operates as a surface of narrative inscription: it absorbs and spatializes the irreversible shift in values brought about by the abduction of Rubens Paiva, translating into scenic terms the passage from presence to absence, from openness to confinement, and subsequently from the inhabited home to the emptiness that consummates mourning, as the family departs the house and the city. The house thus becomes the landmark that delimits the three acts of the narrative as an active agent of the plot.