Banca de DEFESA: TATIANA DINIZ DE SOUZA

WHEN LIFE LOSES COLOR: the communication of mourning in A Espuma dos Dias, by Michel Gondry.

cinema, production of meaning, grief, colors, media studies.

Cinema portrays a diversity of feelings in its narratives and loss is one of them. The objective of this research is to analyze the Michel Gondry film Mood Indigo (L'Écume des Jours,2013), an adaptation from the homonymous novel written by Boris Vian, published in 1947. The purpose of this text is to question whether the colors chosen by the director, present in the film scenic elements, are related to the grieving process experienced by the main character, Colin. The narrative, which has aspects of surrealism, tells a love story between Colin and Chloe, who after their marriage discover a water lily growing in their lungs. Plants are used in an attempt to cure the illness but without success. With no resources, Colin search for a way to have money to pay for the treatment, but soon Chloe will be dead. The hypothesis of this study is that the change in the color palette is related to the grief experienced by the main character, in addition to being a chronological marker in the narrative. The film presents significant changes regarding the colors, as when discovering the terminal illness of Chloé, the world of Colin is transformed, the sets becomes increasingly dark, losing all their color, ending the narrative with the film photographycompletely in black and white. The French director Michel Gondry, in his playful universe, worked on deep aspects of human nature, seeking in his memories and experiences the necessary poetics to transform pain into art. To understand their mise-en-scène, we will use Bordwell (2008), Oliveira Jr. (2013), Elsaesser (2018) and Rancière (2005). To understand the grief process and identify it in the film, we will use the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1996) concept of the fivephases of grief, which are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The grieving process is not only related to the death itself, but to all the feelings present in a process of loss (in case of terminal illnesses, end of a relationship, and death, for example) but it can occur as well from the discovery of the illness, as in thecase of anticipatory grief, a concept proposed by Kovács (1992). The qualitative methodology used is the Vanoye and Goliot-Lété (2012) film analysis. To select the material we will use the decoupage technique (DELEUZE, 1983). Thus, the color palette of each image was produced using Adobe Color. The chromatic analysis was based on Farina (2000), Guimarães (2001), Heller(2013) and Silveira (2015).