“GATTACA” 1997 | M/14 | 1h46’ [US] | MICHAEL NYMAN: Pulse + Trance Screenings

#### Conversas com Cinema© PROSA

## MICHAEL NYMAN: PULSO E TRANSE

[MICHAEL NYMAN: PULSE AND TRANCE Cinema Screenings]

“GATTACA” 1997 | M/14 | 1h46’ [US]
De Andrew Niccol
Sábado Dia 10/01 às 19h30 [Saturday 01/10 at 7:30pm]

Numa futura sociedade distópica, onde a posição social é determinada pelas características genéticas, um homem geneticamente inferior assume a identidade de outro, com o objetivo de realizar seu sonho de se tornar astronauta.
In a future dystopian society where social status is determined by genetic traits, a genetically inferior man assumes someone else’s identity in order to fulfil his dream of becoming an astronaut.

Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese

Mais info:
More info:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/michaelnyman

MICHAEL NYMAN: Pulse and Trance proposes a cinematic mode of listening: approaching cinema through a composer. In line with other paths already explored — the recent Peter Gabriel cycle, as well as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Philip Glass — music here does not illustrate; it structures time, establishes a state, and creates a breathing rhythm between image and spectator. In Nyman, pulse is not mere rhythm: it is insistence and return, the sound of the body itself — cyclical, minimally varied, leading toward trance.

Before becoming an indispensable name in cinema, Michael Nyman built a singular career as a composer, musicologist, and thinker of minimalist music. His collaboration with Peter Greenaway decisively shaped this trajectory: films such as The Draughtsman’s Contract and Prospero’s Books assert a geometric, repetitive, almost architectural music — a music that thinks, measures, and comments on the image, in constant tension with it.

With The Piano (1993), something shifts and expands. Nyman’s score becomes simultaneously emotional atmosphere and diegetic element: the piano does not accompany the character — it is her voice. The music emerges from the body, from gesture, from the very matter of the film, traversing silence, desire, and repression. Few film scores in the history of cinema have achieved such an organic fusion of narrative, character, and listening; here, music does not underscore the drama — it is and amplifies the drama.

In Gattaca (1997), Nyman treats the future as an inner destiny. In a world governed by genetic codes and statistical prediction, his music introduces a poetic fissure: a pulse that resists, a melancholy that persists against the logic of perfection. The repetitive, anachronistic, ascending strings transform the human gesture — running, dreaming, surpassing limits — into an almost ritual act. In Gattaca, trance is not escape: it is perseverance.

Taken together, this cycle reveals Michael Nyman as a composer of the threshold: between calculation and emotion, repetition and revelation. In The Piano, music embodies the unsayable; in Gattaca, it sustains the impossible. Two works, two worlds, one essential gesture — using pulse as a form of resistance to silence, determinism, and the anaesthesia of the sensible. To listen to Nyman is to accept that cinema is also thought through the body, in the hypnotic interval between time passing and time insisting on eternalising the moment.

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

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!

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