Prisma: When the point of view is the main character

Prisma is an RTP Lab production, released on November 28, 2024. The TV series has five episodes, each lasting around 20 minutes, and is available (in Portuguese) on the RTP Play app. Maria de Sá and Rita Revez wrote the script and Sónia Balacó and Zé Bernardino are responsible for directing, whilst being part of the acting team, alongside Pedro Hossi.

 

The narrative is set in contemporary Lisbon and takes place over a single day, through the eyes of the five main characters, to whom each episode is dedicated. The episodes are named by the colors Pink, Red, Green, Yellow and Blue, which contrasts with the fact that the entire production is presented in a monochromatic format, taking our attention away from the artifice of image composition to focus on each character’s point of view.

 

In cinema, the term “point of view” can refer to the character’s conceptual perspective and the way in which knowledge is distributed through the narration by the characters, or it can also refer to the way in which characters comment on or relate to diegetic events. Additionally, it can also designate the implicit position of the narrator, or author, in relation to the fictional events taking place, and can be used as a reference to the personal points of view from the director (Persson, 2003, p. 46).

 

In Prisma, the use of point-of-view is taken to the extreme to stitch together these five narratives, all about the same day, but always presented through the eyes of different characters, a fact that was probably the motto for the production’s name [Prism]. Different shots, angles and camera movements are used, as well as different shot/reverse shot combinations depending on the view of the character being shown. The dialogues change depending on the focus of each character, focusing on what is relevant to each protagonist and showing the world as each of them sees it, emphasizing their different concerns, as if we were inside their heads.

 

Narrating the individual and private problems of each character and their interactions in public spaces, the use of the monochrome format also seems to refer to the absence of “color” in each person’s life. It’s an aesthetic choice that also constantly contrasts with the reference to colors that are never seen, only enunciated, in a city that is increasingly impersonal, populated by short-stay foreigners, more precariousness, and fewer and fewer locals, due to the high price of housing. It’s a way of referring to the directors’ personal points of view on the current state of the city and its mediatization.

 

The first episode portrays the day of the artist Vera Mendes, whose popularity on social media is on the rise. It’s the day of the opening of her exhibition at one of Lisbon’s most prestigious galleries, the Ana Rebelo gallery. She is anxious about the possible results. Vera’s art is conceptual, created with oil and text, with words that evoke concepts such as “Pink”, “Glasses” and “Panic”. While visiting the gallery to advertise her event through Tiktok, she ruins the exhibition’s statement piece, which reads “This is a sign” and embarks on a mission to recover the damaged frame in time for the opening. During her day, she meets Ana Rebelo, the critic of her exhibition, Rui Alves, and Clara, the young artist who works in the frame store, all of whom are the main characters in the following episodes.

 

The actions of all the protagonists are divided between private and public spaces, public spaces in which they cross paths and which constitute “a practical intersubjectivity, of reciprocal recognition as subjects, of the connections between people and the chaining of their actions in social cooperation” (Martins, 2005, p. 157). In these moments, we can observe how their internal dilemmas conditions their interactions. For example, Vera Mendes’ stage name is Veramente [as in Vera-Lies], a pseudonym that refers to the impostor syndrome that the character feels. Ana Rebelo even refers to her as an “instagramer” and not an “artist”, referring to the increasingly important role of social media in popularizing art and its consequences. According to Fuchs, despite the apparent democratization of social media, where everyone can easily produce and publish content, there are asymmetries in visibility and attention, with entertainment dominating instead of education and politics (Fuchs, 2022, p. 63).

 

The uncertainties that Vera feels about her creations are revealed both by the speech of Rui, the critic, and by the existential crisis that plagues her at the end of the episode, in which her frustrations are revealed in an abortion clinic. There, in a delirium, she talks to a poster of a baby, who criticizes her for her superficial art and encourages her to cancel her exhibition, which leads to a statement from Vera, to herself, that “nobody cares about your real art”, making her question whether she should have the baby that she’s decided to abort. There is a parallel between art and life that shows how Vera is aware of the lack of depth and intention in her art pieces. So, Vera decides to have the abortion and goes to the opening of her exhibition, where she destroys all the paintings she can, also aborting her artistic project, which ends up being a spontaneous performance that the public quickly begins to broadcast online.

 

Following this episode, we move on to an episode dedicated to Ana Rebelo, who, despite her successful image, is on the verge of bankruptcy, another to João Maria, a successful businessman whose mother is ill and is therefore looking for a new genuine connection, another to Clara, a young artist in a precarious situation with no opportunities in sight and, finally, an episode dedicated to Rui, the art critic who is faced with the dilemma of writing an article he doesn’t believe in so he can keep his job, or giving an honest review of Vera’s exhibition, which didn’t impress him. If we assume that the digital public sphere takes the form of a colonized public sphere, dominated by commercial culture (Fuchs, 2022, p. 65), João Maria, the successful entrepreneur who represents the capital needed to continue artistic production, symbolizes at the same time the difficulty of creating a single genuine connection in this type of culture. He tries unsuccessfully to do so with Ana Rebelo, who desperately needs his funding through purchases of Vera’s art pieces.

 

Clara’s story clashes directly with Vera’s, as she is a young artist who tries to deliver her portfolio door-to-door to Lisbon’s galleries. However, her anonymity is not viewed favorably by the rest of the intellectual elite of Lisbon’s elitist circle, which can be seen as contradicting the “essential vision” that has so far distinguished cultural criticism, which attributes “fundamental value to the particular and trusts in the privileged nature of human consciousness and the human being in the world as the true source of meaning in experience” (Cruz, 2019, p. 185). Unsuccessfully, since no one is willing to see her work in physical format, she ends up going to the newspaper where Rui works to apply for the position of cartoonist, ready to give up her artistic career.

 

In the final episode, Rui Alves says that “in art, as in life, what defines our experience is where we choose to place our attention”, ending with a shot of the character in an offscreen space where we hear a road accident, seeing just the leaves he was carrying flying through the air onscreen.

 

Text: Catarina Bessa Rodrigues (CECS/University of Minho)

Images: RTP Divulgação (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0)

February of 2025

 

 

References

Cruz, M. (2019). Art curation and critique in the age of digital humanities. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 15 (2), 183-196. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2019.1638647

 

Fuchs (2022). Social Media, alienation and the public sphere. In Ronsen, D. (Ed.) The Social Media Debate: Unpacking the social, psychological, and cultural effects of social media.  (1^st ed., pp. 53-76). Routledge.

 

Martins, M. (2005). Espaço Público e Vida Privada. Revista Filosófica de Coimbra, 27,157-172.

 

Persson, P. (2003). Understanding cinema: a psychological theory of moving imagery. Cambridge University Press.