“BARTON FINK” 1991 | M/12 | 1h56’ [US] | I THINK, I WRITE Cinema Screenings II

PROSA Conversas com Cinema©

## Ciclo de Cinema PENSO LOGO ESCREVO II

["I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE I" Cinema Screenings II]
(Curadoria de Alexandre Braga)

“BARTON FINK”
1991 | M/12 | 1h56’ [US]

De/By Joel & Ethan Coen

Sábado Dia 29/06 às 19h30
Saturday 06/29 at 7:30pm

Um dramaturgo de Nova Iorque de renome é atraído para a Califórnia para escrever para o cinema e descobre a verdade infernal de Hollywood.

A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.

https://prosacultural.org/cinema/pensologoescrevoii

PENSO LOGO ESCREVO is the name of the Creative Writing Workshop proposed by PROSA as a space for inner listening and the creation of fiction, starting from a focus on narratology and the representation of reality. It is an invitation to practice a form of writing that puts us in touch with the ‘self’ — that being who sometimes reveals itself within us, sometimes in the other — building language as one would build a place. Writing is a gesture of search, a quest for being. A liberated act that, beyond enhancing communication skills, stands as a tool for care, resistance, and self-reinvention. In a world increasingly demanding of creativity, writing also becomes a means of survival — emotional, symbolic, and at times, physical.

In this context, writing comes closer to the body and to time as sensitive matter. It is a muscular exercise, made of flow, hesitation, and impulse. To write is to enter a rhythm, a stroke, a pulse that inscribes us into the world with identity, with poetry, with memory. And each person will find their own way: through an intimate journal, an elaborate fiction, an unsent letter, an abrupt poem, or an idea in the making. The workshop invites this inaugural and liberating gesture: to begin. To rewrite oneself.

There is an ongoing dialogue between writing and cinema — sometimes silent, sometimes explosive. Both languages operate as assemblages of reality, creating meanings and fabulations. Both work with narrative structures, images, and characters. Cinema can be seen as a visual extension of writing — or writing as its primordial sketch. When a film approaches writing not only as content, but also as form, something fascinating happens: language becomes visible, the text gains a body, and the body becomes text.

I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE II Cinema Screenings now turns to the labyrinthine universe of the creator’s mind in crisis, with Barton Fink (1991), by the Coen brothers. In this grotesque and hypnotic portrait of a writer caught between literary idealism and the ruthless machinery of Hollywood, we follow the slow unraveling of Barton — a New York playwright unable to write a single line in a hotel room that feels more like a purgatory of the mind. Writer’s block becomes a metaphor for a deeper struggle: the tension between the desire to represent “the common man” and the inability to truly listen to the real world that beats, screams, and bleeds right next door.
The film doesn’t offer advice to writers — it offers a distorted mirror. It invites us to examine our mechanisms of escape, the abysses of the ego, and the risk of getting lost in “style” rather than finding the truth of the gesture. As an exercise, we propose writing that begins from discomfort, from silence or pressure. Writing while the room is on fire. Writing even without knowing why. After all, the question that hovers over Barton — “What goes on in a writer’s head when he can’t write?” — is also an invitation to reflect on writing as more than a technique: a confrontation with the unspeakable.

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Som original em Inglês | Legendas em PT
Original sound in English | Portuguese subtitles

IMDB
Trailer