03  Spring 2026

We could paraphrase Tag Gallagher speaking of the duo in Two Rode Together and say that Larry Cohen and Rita Azevedo Gomes have something of an intimate nonrelation. A generation and a continent apart, the American director had an eventful career as a television writer before transitioning to making his own genre films during the height of the war in Vietnam, while the Portuguese filmmaker quit art school roughly around that time — it was the Carnation Revolution — and worked various roles until she could direct her first film in the late eighties. It is quite certain they do not influence each other, nor claim any shared influences.

An attempt to juxtapose their fields of activity must therefore have a decentralized rationale. We bring them together for this issue because we think both make films worthy of interest. At a time when the possibility of watching almost any pair of films back to back is integral to cinephilia and criticism, this basis of selection holds even more intrigue. We find ourselves in a situation not unlike that of the stranger visiting Socrates’s grounds to raise the task of distinction-making: if the whole of cinema is present to our consciousness — a lot of it, at any rate — and if, according to the tradition extending from Parmenides to Jacques Rivette, that which is on the screen irreducibly is, how can we articulate sameness and difference in this being that is simultaneously one and multiple, brimming with particulars? What makes Cohen’s and Azevedo Gomes’s films poles between which we can observe the equality of very different forms of expression?

Today, in evaluating their films, even side by side, it makes less and less sense to cling to reductive notions of verisimilitude (e.g. by accusing a film made under Reagan about a mythical creature nesting in the spire of the Chrysler Building of not being expensive enough to be ‘believable’) ^[1] or accessibility (when it was rather the profitability of prestige that undermined the chances of O Som da Terra a Tremer reaching its audience). ^[2] Neither the sort of lazy invective that reacts to a work of deliberate style and conceptual ambition in terms deriving less from grounded judgment than from contempt for its ‘exploitation’ status (‘lurid’, ‘assaulting’, ‘[he] thinks he’s saying something important’, ‘shrill’) ^[3] nor the sectorization of the ‘art-house’ that feeds on bad-faith assumptions about the market can account for directors who seem aware that every film has its own appeal and its own commercial viability, that venturing into the esoteric is not an aesthetic aberration, ^[4] that participants in the art-house circuit may well turn out to be the most oblivious to the riches of cinema as a material art and, as such, the least suited to receive what gets shown there. ^[5] Needless to say, these truths have long been known to practitioners of other, more valuable modes of engagement with our pair. ^[6]

Regardless of the mechanisms and mentalities you must deal with (including your own), what is at stake here is the independence of filming what you want, however you must, whenever you can. Only then can your adjustment to conventions and restrictions — resourcefulness in the face of rejection, neglect, or illness — oscillate between free renunciation and free acceptance, a balance only you can strike for yourself, one film after another. Thus, beyond differences in attitude towards budgeting and promotion (Cohen is often proactive in anticipating how much his film will cost or whether the campaign for it will attract people, while Azevedo Gomes admits to knowing nothing about pricing and trailers), in the manner of embracing immediacy and latency (he is often more than ready to pitch projects to interested parties or move on from those no longer in his hands, while she tends to keep close to heart an idea that may take years to mature into the circumstances and camaraderie proper to it), and in the attachment to supervision (he ensures direct control at every stage, whereas she has at times been forced to cede power to authoritarian producers), we nonetheless observe in both a drive to be true to their idiosyncrasies. Seeing a film by either, we get the impression of an author attempting to maximize their capacity to take responsibility for what they show as well as what they cannot show.

It remains to suggest how images and sounds by these filmmakers convey this sense of responsibility in matters of representation. One — and perhaps the only — common denominator is an eye for cutting and framing that is more or less resistant to codification (or ‘dispositivism’ as Luc Moullet puts it), since both directors are hypersensitive to the implications of composition on the generation of narrative sense, often deviating from a classical approach to causality. How what remains offscreen in each frame links up to what can be heard and seen onscreen; how the shot length and other properties of it mediate visibility and the lack thereof; how the actual location becomes denoted and connoted across a finite number of angles; how the actor’s presence can be rhetorized in accordance with the dramatic and semantic register intended for the action: these appear to be questions with which Cohen and Azevedo Gomes never stop preoccupying themselves. The myriad divergences in their specific formal inclinations, then, would have to do with what it means for each to give their script its due realization — in his case, stories with high-concept premises and marked correlates in social and political actuality; in hers, a host of literary materials whose procedures mobilize cinematic solutions that a more banal poetics of adaptation would have failed to discover.

The texts to follow take up the above-mentioned currents and more. Their angles are — like those of our filmmakers — neither pre-determined nor exhaustive. They are disjoint or overlapping. There are more eyes than films, after all.