The cinema as a place to search for knowledge, driven by astonishment, and a place of sudden awareness, collective ecstasy and the joys of solitude. A place like a playground, an Agora and a church (where they also celebrate black masses). This is what Edgar Pêra’s The Amazed Spectator is all about. It is the result of a multiannual interest in 3D cinema with all its technical and cinephilosophical dimensions – the topic of a Bildrausch seminar two years ago.
Pêra, the eccentric of contemporary Portuguese cinema (for example O Barão, 2011), has found a creative form unique in film history to express this. It is an essay film that resembles a cheerfully camp vampire movie, with protagonists including leading figures in film theory such as Laura Mulvey, madmen of cinema such as director F. J. Ossang, and cinephiles such as Augusto Seabra. Everyone fascinated by 3D films should prepare to see an unprecedented use of this technique, which until now was used almost exclusively for narrative feature films. In this film, thinking becomes a spectacle of creativity.
