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Igor Livramento

Cinema Today: a Disappearing Art

September 1, 2025

Art, Criticism, Experiencing

art, capitalism, experiencing, Igor Livramento, social masses

This post has all the ingredients of an old man tilting at windmills or rosy retrospection and all that, but at least I have backups! That is to say, I’m not alone in lamenting the state of cinema today and dreaming of other cinematic realities.

This post is based on an ongoing discussion I’m having with my good friend Igor da Silva Livramento, fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

Both Igor and I agree that cinema today – especially mainstream, mass-produced US-made films – rarely has anything of value to demonstrate. It’s once again, a living example of what happens when art is industrialized.

Cinema today. Painting of sunset by Chris Angelis
In a discussion about cinema today – more generally: art – and the effects of mass production, I felt it appropriate to use my own paintings as accompanying images. My technique is rudimentary and one can freely criticize my artistic ideas but guess what: At least I have artistic ideas.
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About a Paragraph Found in Madame Bovary

November 20, 2023

Criticism

criticism, guest post, Igor Livramento, literature

Today’s post – “About a Paragraph Found in Madame Bovary” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn and here is his own blog.

As per the translation for Penguin (2011, Vintage series):

Emma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for the passion of romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery. As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her own ruin and despair. Exquisite, moving, at times ferociously satirical and always psychologically acute, Madame Bovary remains one of the greatest, most beguiling novels ever written.

Knowing this novel that has made history (given its many film adaptations), I will analyze a paragraph to demonstrate that its superficial simplicity and perfect grammar conceal a creative and magnificent use of language in its powers of characterization, description, abstraction, concreteness and perspective.

We will find a representation of the dissolution of subjectivity through the accumulation of restless anguish, paired with existential reflection in the small actions of everyday life. This will demonstrate the technical mastery with which Flaubert wrote and from which we can learn to produce literature of high emotional impact, even when the scene we describe to the reader seems as static as a Renaissance painting.

Madame Bovary, painting made with Bing Image Creator
This is only an image made with Bing Image Creator, but it’s a serendipitous “choice” to place the character in front of the open window, the room behind her
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The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature

October 16, 2023

Experiencing, Literature

creativity, guest post, Igor Livramento, literature, writing

Today’s post – “The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn and here is his own blog.

Art is contact with the inhuman that dwells in all of us: be it the animalistic and abject subhuman – as in Lautréamont, Clive Barker, Artaud, Pierre Guyotat – or the angelic and sanctified superhuman – as in the biblical psalmist, Rōdhakī, Hāfez or Petrarch. Style, therefore, is not a form of individual expression, externalization of the soul, exposition of a supposed interior, but the making up of a just form (fair, as in Law, fit, as in Fashion). This form is just because it is homologous to the world, it follows the same logic as the world (homo-logos): as obscure, dense and impenetrable as the matter of the day.

Style, therefore, is the way to make things – ideas, beings, moments – last in time, which means that language also lasts to allow this lasting. It thus opens up the chance for a reader to place their own time transversely in the timed chronometer of work and routine.

style and thinking about literature
Style, thinking, literature. Art. Language.
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