In 1927, Reinaldo Ferreira, a well-known journalist and writer who published under the pen name ‘Repórter X’, founded the cinema production company Repórter X Film, through which he directed four films that same year. Among them we find “O Táxi no. 9297” and “Rita ou Rito?…”, where homosexuality, transvestism and drug use feature explicitly in Portuguese cinema for the first time. “Reinaldo’s Motifs” is an audiovisual essay that focuses on a series of recurrent motifs in Reinaldo Ferreira’s cinematic work. A commissioned work by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, in which I tried to play around with these recurrences, in a manner that is playful but also unreverential. This approach emerges from the conviction that an essay is an exercise where the breakdown of other people’s work is closely tied to the idea of child’s play. And it should also serve as an invitation for the spectator to play along. As a prompt, I leave you with the puzzling question: “Do you believe in the voice of objects?”
