The cinematic image can be a driving force for transformation. Some films do more than tell stories — they summon rituals. Internal rituals created by the characters — gestures, repetitions, passages — which become motors of their progression and catalysts of their inner conflicts. And there is also the spectator’s ritual: the one we repeat with each screening — entering the darkened room, ceremonially, silently listening to a narrative, diving inward. The spectator absorbs the agency of the first ritual and amplifies it through the second. The Rituals of Cinema is a cycle that arises from this double ritual dimension — diegetic and experiential — to offer encounters with films that carry, both in form and content, forces of transition, suspension, and transformation. Cinema, then, can be more than entertainment or contemplation: it can be a way of accessing the invisible.

We begin with Nostalghia (1983), by Andrei Tarkovsky — a film constructed as an inner journey. A Russian poet wanders through Italian landscapes, but it is within himself that the true movement occurs: the path of exile shaped by memories, visions, symbols, and silences. Tarkovsky’s mise-en-scène operates as a ritual in itself — composed of repetitions, long takes, and gestures charged with meaning. In each scene, time spirals, and the image invites meditation.

The following day, Rumble Fish (1983), by Francis Ford Coppola, invokes another kind of ritual: one of youth in crisis, identity in formation, and inherited legacies under threat. In this film, extreme stylization — from expressionist black and white to Stewart Copeland’s obsessive soundtrack — transforms a simple narrative into a rite, a modern myth. The main character, Rusty James, seeks to free himself from an absent, mythical figure: his older brother. But the real confrontation lies within.

Both films depict characters in suspension — between worlds, between versions of themselves — and it is precisely this state of passage that connects them to the realm of ritual. These are not depictions of religious or codified ceremonies, but rather the cinematic emergence of the symbolic tension that underlies every process of transformation.

The Rituals of Cinema proposes that these processes are not limited to the narrative. The way a film is built — the time it demands, the sound it imposes, the rhythms it sets — produces an experience that moves through the spectator. When we enter the sensitive logic of the image, we too are affected, confronted, displaced.

This cycle does not seek answers or closed interpretations. It seeks gestures. And in each film, the ritual gesture is what shapes the passage — a crossing of the visible, one that may touch the unspeakable. The character creates a ritual to face their conflict — and the spectator, in silence, follows that transformative act while undergoing one of their own.

(Curatorship of Alexandre Braga)