Estética da maldade no cinema: “iteramalgimpsesto” como conceito heurístico de análise fílmica

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how the films Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) and The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) reinscribe evil through the materialities of image and sound, understanding it not as a moral essence but as a historical, aesthetic, and political process. Drawing on established traditions of film analysis (Jacques Aumont; Thompson Bordwell e Ismail Xavier) and on ethical and philosophical approaches (Hannah Arendt; Zygmunt Bauman; Friedrich Nietzsche e Jaquest Rancière), the study proposes the neologism iteramalgimpsesto, coined in this thesis, as a heuristic concept for the sensory analysis of evil in contemporary cinema. The term articulates three complementary operations—iteration, amalgam, and palimpsest—and conceives the film as a re-inscribed surface in which images, sounds, and affects return in transformed form, preserving traces of previous inscriptions.The methodology is based on qualitative film analysis, structured through an interpretive chromatic heuristic composed of three axes: red (visual materialities), blue (sonic materialities), and violet (perceptual syntheses between image and sound). The corpus was selected for the formal density with which the films articulate, respectively, political evil and social evil. In Joker, evil emerges from institutional collapse and the aestheticization of abandonment, manifesting in the relationship between the marginalized body, urban space, and spectacle. In The Substance, evil takes the form of biopolitical violence, visible in duplication, abjection, and the deterioration of the female body under normative regimes of visibility and performance. The results indicate that evil is fabricated within the film form itself: in color as a tensioning of moral interpretation, in sound as a reorganization of affective perception, in editing that oscillates between hesitation and affirmation, and in mise-en-scène that redistributes regimes of visibility. The concept of iteramalgimpsesto demonstrates that the films in the corpus operate through an aesthetics of erasure, in which sensory layers are scraped, accumulated, and transformed, producing evil as a sensory experience prior to moral enunciation. This thesis contributes to the field of film studies by systematizing this concept as a critical tool for understanding how contemporary industrial cinema thinks and produces evil through the sensible.