A engrenagem da laranja: a configuração do personagem Alex no filme Laranja Mecânica, de Stanley Kubrick

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the configuration of the character Alex in the film A Clockwork Orange (1971), produced and directed by North American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick based on the adaptation of the literary work of the same name by British writer Anthony Burgess. The intention of this dissertation is to analyze the central character and thus promote an understanding of the filmmaker’s work, screenwriter of his own films, most of which are adapted from literary works. Given the scope of the researched object, theoretical sources from different fields were used, in addition to drama theory and studies on fictional characters. Cinema theorists, biographical sources about the director, and authors from the fields of Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy and History were also used. The purpose was to enrich the work in order to do justice to Kubrick's sophisticated and complex work, and provide an enriching look beyond the cut made. The authors used to approach the character are: Anatol Rosenfeld, Antônio Cândido, Beth Brait, Eric Bentley, Jean-Pierre Ryngaert, Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, Renata Pallottini, and others. As a source of information about the life and work of the filmmaker in question, the work of Michel Ciment was essentially used. He’s a French journalist and author of several books written based on interviews given by Kubrick. Specific cinema authors are David Bordwell, Doc Comparato, Syd Field, among others. And, in a complementary way, this analysis was historically and socially contextualized with the theoretical support of Bertrand Russel, Eric Hobsbawm, Guy Debord, Margot Berthold, Michel Foucault, Sérgio Paulo Rouanet, among others. Some academic works on the film were also consulted, in order to survey the state of the art and bring the research up to date. Throughout the three chapters that make up this work, was tried to reveal this filmmaker's work in its conceptual aspects (always supported by its historical-social contexts) and also in its plastic and formal aspects, these resulting from the processing of those, because in cinema, form and content are inseparably intertwined. It’s important to make sure that the focal point of this study is the character Alex, possibly the most iconic among the director's films. It was believed that scrutinizing the character's journey and his movement in the film's plot would shed light on his environment, the Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic and fascinating artistic language.