A construção de sentido na informação das histórias em quadrinhos

The construction of meaning in information within comics
por Robson Santos Costa  e  Evelyn Goyannes Dill Orrico

Resumo: Discute a construção de sentido na linguagem das histórias em quadrinhos compreendendo-a como um meio facilitador de transmissão informacional, fazendo um breve relato de como a área da Ciência da Informação trabalha com a informação nas mais diversas formas de linguagem, especialmente as específicas da contemporaneidade. Partindo das concepções de enunciado e gênero secundário contemporâneo, segundo as orientações de Bakhtin para quem os gêneros discursivos são construções sociais, este trabalho examina o conceito de histórias em quadrinhos e as especificidades da sua linguagem com vistas a inseri-las no processo de transmissão de informações. Por fim, analisa o processo de construção de sentido - e da informação - na linguagem e como a informação é ali produzida. A conclusão é de que as histórias em quadrinhos constroem sentido e produzem informação de forma singular, já que fazem uso de linguagens, signos e demais elementos que compõem essa forma de gênero discursivo .

Palavras-chave:  Histórias em quadrinhos; Linguagem; Construção de sentido; Informação; Gêneros discursivos, Memória de gênero.

 

 

Abstract:  This paper discusses the construction of meaning in the language of comics, viewing it as a facilitator for the transmission of information. It also offers a brief account of how the area of Information Science deals with information in the various forms of language, especially those specific to contemporary times. Starting from the conception of utterance and of secondary contemporary genre, and based on Barkhtin's notion that discoursive genres are social constructions, this paper examines the concept of comics and the specificities of their language with a view to fitting them into the process of the transmission of information. It finally analyzes the process of the construction of meaning – and of information – in language, as well as the way information is generated there. Our conclusion is that comics generate meaning and construct information in a unique way, since they use languages, signs and other elements specific to that type of discoursive genre.
Key words: Comics; Language; Construction of meaning; Information; Discoursive genres; Genre memory.

                                                                                       

 

 

 

Introdução
A área de conhecimento científico Ciência da Informação (CI) surgiu em meio ao “boom” informacional ocorrido em finais da Segunda Guerra Mundial, voltada à pesquisa sobre informação nos mais diferentes contextos sociais. O interesse de área destinava-se sobretudo a refletir sobre demandas informacionais no campo da ciência e tecnologia.

O artigo – hoje histórico - do cientista Vannevar Bush publicado em 1945 foi um dos primeiros textos a versar acerca da Ciência da Informação , podendo ser considerado atualmente como um dos textos de origem desse campo de estudo (Saracevic, 1996, p. 42). Nele Bush pretendia tornar mais acessível um acervo crescente de conhecimento identificando o problema da explosão informacional e o papel das tecnologias de informação como um meio de possível solução. Outros trabalhos como o de Wersig & Nevelling de 1975 (apud Saracevic, 1996, p. 43) trataram dos aspectos históricos da Ciência da Informação  enfatizando sua natureza e relevância social na transmissão de conhecimento no mundo contemporâneo.

Saracevic (1995) recorda que “a explosão da informação é um problema social que teve seu início com o desenvolvimento das ciências, e hoje estende-se para todas as atividades humanas”. Desse modo, a Ciência da Informação é vista como um campo de conhecimento interdisciplinar de importância estratégica não somente no âmbito da ciência mas – principalmente nos dias atuais – nas mais diversas esferas que englobam o contexto social contemporâneo.

Um dos pressupostos que norteiam esta análise é o de que a Ciência da Informação , admitindo a interdisciplinaridade da área, e para resolver os diversos problemas que a informação demanda, estabelece diálogo com diversas áreas do conhecimento, como por exemplo a Psicologia Social, a Computação, a Biblioteconomia, e especialmente com os estudos da linguagem.

Outro pressuposto a nortear este artigo é o de que o ser humano se constitui discursivamente e para tal a linguagem é elemento fundamental. É pela linguagem que os grupos humanos constroem os contextos sociais, estabelecendo relações afetivas, comerciais, informacionais. Podemos dizer que independente do contexto social ao qual esteja ligada, todo e qualquer tipo de informação pertence a uma determinada linguagem que pode ser compreendida como o meio pelo qual as culturas humanas constroem narrativas e discursos que orientam suas ações (Ferreira; Orrico, 2002, p. 8).

Além da informação técnico e científica – nos mais variados suportes – o campo de estudo da Ciência da Informação abarca uma gama variada de linguagens que pode ir da fotográfica e cinematográfica até, por exemplo, a quadrinística.

Desse modo, acreditamos ser de grande importância compreender como ocorre o fenômeno informacional em determinadas linguagens e como se dá a criação de sentido em linguagens específicas, uma vez que “a função e a natureza da informação comportam um elemento de sentido, uma produção de significado transmitida por meio de um sistema de signos (a linguagem) a um ser consciente (o indívíduo) por meio de uma inscrição (a mensagem) (Castro, 2005).

Portanto, compreender como ocorre a construção de sentido nas mais variadas linguagens depende de compreender a construção informacional nos mais diferentes suportes e linguagens que compõem nosso cotidiano. Além de compreender esse processo de construção, é preciso bem determinar a categoria de documento e os centros de informação e bibliotecas em que estão inseridos, visando a uma maior eficiência tanto na descrição quanto na recuperação da informação. Assim este artigo volta-se para uma maior compreensão da linguagem das histórias em quadrinhos visando um maior entendimento de como ocorre o processo de construção de sentido nessa linguagem singular tomando-o como um meio facilitador de transmissão informacional.

As histórias em quadrinhos
Uma das manifestações discursivas da cultura contemporânea são as histórias em quadrinhos (HQs). Assim sendo, pretendemos realizar uma breve apresentação da linguagem das histórias em quadrinhos e suas especificidades na construção de sentido e posterior produção informacional.

As histórias em quadrinhos, como linguagem, existem, no entendimento de alguns pesquisadores como Moya (1977), desde as inscrições imagéticas produzidas pelo homem primitivo em paredes de cavernas ancestrais. Vergueiro (1998, p. 24) enfatiza que “é possível falar de vários começos, em vários iniciadores distribuídos em diversas partes do mundo”. É fato, porém, que a linguagem das histórias em quadrinhos se consolidou em todo o mundo como a conhecemos hoje como um produto oriundo da indústria cultural de massa em tendo seu surgimento creditado posteriormente, por convenção, às últimas décadas do século XIX em especial na imprensa norte-americana.

Deixemos de lado a rica história das histórias em quadrinhos, e passemos a discutir como essa linguagem singular produz sentido e informação. Para que tal ocorra, em trabalho anterior (Costa, 2007), compreendemos as histórias em quadrinhos como um gênero discursivo secundário no sentido bakhtiniano. A concepção de gênero discursivo aqui adotada foi apresentada por Bakhtin, pensador russo do inicio do século XX, que atestou que, devido à grande quantidade de discursos produzidos nas mais diversas esferas sociais, existiram umas formas reconhecíveis que permitiriam o estabelecimento da comunicação entre seus membros. Essas formas reconhecíveis constituir-se-iam de formas estabelecidas antes de um determinado evento de comunicação e, por via de conseqüência, estariam presentes nos enunciados futuros.

Primeiramente devemos enfatizar que os gêneros – compostos por enunciados sócio-historicamente situados - devem ser compreendidos como intrinsecamente ligados à atividade humana e as mais diversas situações sociais (Rodrigues, 2005, p. 165). Podem surgir novos gêneros enquanto outros podem “desaparecer” de acordo com as mais diversas complexidades sociais.

Bakhtin, ao descrever os gêneros, dividiu-os em duas categorias distintas: gêneros primários (simples) e gêneros secundários (complexos). Bakhtin (1997) compreendia os gêneros primários como os gêneros simples do discurso, visto que se apresentam em situações de comunicação mais “simples” e diretamente ligadas ao cotidiano social. Seriam as conversas entre sujeitos no dia-a-dia, as cartas, diários, bilhetes, etc. Os gêneros secundários seriam “complexos”, pois “aparecem em circunstâncias de uma comunicação cultural mais complexa e relativamente mais evoluída” (Bakhtin, 1997, P. 281). Nesse contexto pertenceriam os discursos teatrais, literários, científicos, políticos e ideológicos.

Uma das principais características dos gêneros secundários é a agregação de um ou mais gêneros primários em sua produção. A partir de sua incorporação ao gênero secundário, o gênero primário sofre um processo que o modifica fazendo-o perder “sua relação imediata com a realidade existente e com a realidade dos enunciados alheios” (Bakhtin, 1997). Bakhtin cita como exemplo a inclusão de um gênero primário, como o diálogo cotidiano em uma narrativa romanesca e afirma que, a partir dessa inclusão, esse gênero primário passa a fazer parte da realidade do gênero secundário do romance literário.

Compreenderemos as histórias em quadrinhos, HQs neste artigo como um gênero secundário complexo e contemporâneo do discurso visto que são uma manifestação social surgida em condições sociais de produção específicas. A importância de entendermos as histórias em quadrinhos, HQs como um gênero discursivo secundário transcende a ação classificatória; compreendemos que as, histórias em quadrinhos, HQs se constroem em situações de práticas sociais complexas, demandando que os seus leitores possuam certo conhecimento prévio desse gênero para bem conseguir lê-las.

Os gêneros, segundo Bakhtin (1997), constituem-se de enunciados que, a seu turno, surgem de enunciados anteriores e produzidos por falantes imersos em situações sócio-históricas, não sendo, portanto, fruto do que ele denomina de “Adão mítico” , personagem que teria proferido o primeiro enunciado. Todo enunciado – pertencente a um gênero - é único, jamais se repete pois é proferido em condições de interação social específicas. Por outro lado todo enunciado somente é produzido por meio de enunciados anteriores que são retomados a cada nova enunciação. Cada enunciado produzido geraria ainda uma atitude responsiva ativa, ou seja, “enunciados-respostas” que gerarão novos enunciados e assim sucessivamente.

Essa compreensão dos enunciados seria semelhante ao que Orlandi (2005, p. 31) compreende como uma memória discursiva, que seria “o saber que torna possível todo dizer e que retorna sob a forma do pré-construído, o já dito que está na base do dizível, sustentando cada tomada de palavra”.
Desse modo, todo gênero discursivo possuiria uma memória de gênero de que se utiliza como base e que é retomada na produção de seus enunciados. Essa memória de gênero é essencial para produção de enunciados pertencentes a determinado gênero discursivo haja vista que seria impossível a produção de enunciados de “lugar-nenhum” no interior de um contexto social, pois “se os gêneros do discurso não existissem e nós não os dominássemos, se tivéssemos que criá-los pela primeira vez no processo do discurso, de construir livremente e pela primeira vez cada enunciado, a comunicação discursiva seria quase impossível” (Bakhtin apud Clot, p. 224) e, diríamos nós, o processo informacional não se constituiria.

Memória de Gênero e informação
O conceito de informação pode ter diversas definições. Etimologicamente o termo informação é proveniente do verbo latino “informare” que significa colocar em forma, criar, representar ou construir uma idéia ou uma noção de algo podendo ser compreendida como processo de atribuição de sentido (Araújo, 2001, p. 1). Alguns autores como Little John ([197-], p. 152) associam o conceito de informação à idéia de redução de incerteza  ou entropia visto que quanto maior o grau de incerteza maior será o grau de informação. Se não houver incerteza não haverá informação visto que nada de novo será agregado. Barreto (1994, p. 3) qualifica informação “como um instrumento modificador da consciência do homem e de seu grupo”, sendo que, quando assimilada de forma adequada, “produz conhecimento, modifica o estoque mental de informações do indivíduo e traz benefícios ao seu desenvolvimento e ao desenvolvimento da sociedade”.

Poder-se-ia aproximar o processo de formação da memória de gênero ao que se passa no processo informacional, na medida em que, se a informação transforma estrutura, segundo Belkin (1990), é preciso, então, considerar que ela interfere sobre um processo basal já apreendido anteriormente.
Essa relação gênero/memória de gênero pode ser compreendida como um elemento facilitador e de grande importância na construção de sentido visto ser este um elemento da própria natureza do fenômeno informacional. O enunciado, ao ser proferido em determinado gênero discursivo, será parte das especificidades que compõem esse gênero e sua base memorialística. Dessa forma, ao ser proferido no interior do gênero ao qual pertence a relação deste com sua memória de gênero será um meio que facilitará a compreensão da informação transmitida pelo sujeito inserido no processo informacional.

Porém, a cada enunciado – ou discurso – podem pertencer as mais variadas linguagens constitutivas dos mais diversos gêneros discursivos e que influem na produção de sentido desse enunciado.

A Linguagem quadrinística
As histórias em quadrinhos como linguagem podem existir de acordo com diferentes pontos de vista desde a antiguidade mas trataremos dela como uma linguagem ligada à contemporaneidade sendo desenvolvida e difundida em todo o mundo em especial a partir do século XX.

A linguagem das histórias em quadrinhos pode se apresentar em variadas formas: das mais simples às mais complexas. Porém, poderíamos dizer que no momento em que um sujeito tem contato com a linguagem dos quadrinhos, seja em uma revista, uma tira de jornal ou qualquer outro meio, é a união de sistemas de linguagem diferentes – cada uma com suas regências específicas – que primeiramente chama sua atenção: a imagética, reunindo as noções de perspectiva, simetria, hachuras, pinceladas, tonalidades, contornos, cores, etc. E a textual, que engloba a gramática, a sintaxe, sistemas morfológicos e outros. Para Eisner (2001, p. 8), a leitura que um indivíduo faz de uma história em quadrinhos “é um ato de percepção estética e de esforço intelectual”.

Nessa união de signos, porém, é provável que o que mais se sobressaia para o sujeito seja a imagem. Inclusive podem existir narrativas quadrinísticas sem texto, apenas imagéticas. Barthes (1990, p. 30) recorda que para um indivíduo “reconhecer” uma imagem é necessário que exista um já dado “saber-cultural” pelo sujeito, uma espécie de memória-imagética embora isso possa ocorrer em níveis de complexidade bastante variados.

No caso das histórias em quadrinhos que reúnem sistemas sígnicos imagéticos e textuais, Barthes (1990, p. 33-34) utiliza um conceito denominado de função de relais em que “a palavra e a imagem têm uma relação de complementaridade; as palavras são, então, fragmento de um sintagma mais geral, assim como as imagens, e a utilidade da mensagem é feita em um nível superior: o da história, o da anedota, o da diegese”.

No interior da narrativa a união desses sistemas sígnicos muitas vezes pode gerar um fator de redundância na relação texto e imagem uma vez que o texto pode descrever exageradamente algo que a imagem já significa. Por outro lado, dependendo do que a narrativa pede, muitas vezes a relação texto e imagem pode – e deve – possuir significados diferenciados. Um exemplo se dá quando o narrador descreve um acontecimento e a imagem nos mostra outro, ou seja, dois acontecimentos construídos concomitantemente por linguagens diferentes, em uma mesma narrativa. O cinema também pode usar esse artifício, já no caso da literatura não seria possível, visto que se utiliza preferencialmente de uma linguagem, a verbal.

No entanto, a linguagem quadrinística não se resume apenas à união desses dois sistemas de signos. Diversos outros elementos podem ser utilizados das mais diversas formas no interior dessa linguagem com a pretensão de auxiliar a narração de fatos e acontecimentos. Talvez um dos mais conhecidos sejam os “balões”, oriundos dos filactérios egípcios e que possuem a função de recipiente que contém em seu interior imagens ou palavras que podem servir como pensamentos ou diálogos de personagens da narrativa.

Para a representação da emissão de sons há a utilização das onomatopéias, também utilizadas na linguagem literária. Em determinadas línguas, as onomatopéias não utilizam termos que se aproximem de sons mas palavras cujo significado pode remeter a determinado som como, por exemplo, a língua inglesa que utiliza termos como crack ou crash com o propósito de representar o som de batidas e, ou colisões.

Além dos balões e das onomatopéias, Eisner (2001) aponta outros elementos de grande importância em uma narrativa :

a) rabinho - que é o indicador que parte do balão para o personagem;
b) o quadrinho e o requadro - são, respectivamente, o quadro que contém uma determinada cena (box frame) e o seu contorno;
c) as calhas - o espaço entre os quadrinhos;
d) as tiras - que são uma fila de quadrinhos (da esquerda para direita) na página.

Cada um desses elementos também possui particularidades próprias que influenciam o sentido de uma narrativa. Como exemplo podemos citar os requadros que, de acordo com o contorno, modificam o sentido da mensagem em relação ao tempo. Um requadro com contorno reto (Ilustração 1) significa que a narrativa ocorre em tempo presente. Já um requadro com contorno ondulado pode significar situações ocorridas em tempo passado ou em sonhos (Ilustração 2). O mesmo ocorre aos balões visto que, dependendo do contorno, as palavras ou imagens em seu interior podem representar diálogos, pensamentos, sonhos, etc.


 Fonte: Eisner (2001, p. 51) Fonte: Eisner (2001, p. 51)

O formato das palavras inserido nos balões também possui suas especificidades. Palavras em negrito ou em tamanho maior que as demais podem representar uma fala mais alta ou um grito (Eisner, 2001, p. 149). Desse modo “as palavras sofreram um tratamento plástico; passaram a ser desenhadas; o tamanho, a cor, a forma, a espessura, etc, tornaram-se elementos importantes para o texto... Dois sentidos diversos são dados pela mesma palavra através de tratamentos formais diferentes” (Klawa; Cohen 1977, p. 112-113). A especificidade principal da linguagem quadrinística não se resume a nenhum dos elementos apresentados até então. A relação texto/imagem não é primordial visto que podem existir histórias em quadrinhos apenas com imagens. Os demais elementos como os balões podem ou não ser utilizadas na narrativa.

Sendo assim, podemos dizer que essencialmente a especificidade da linguagem “reside, antes, no modo narrativo visual capaz de agenciar elipses gráficas e espaciais. O desencadeamento de imagens (“congeladas” no tempo e no espaço) será sempre relacional” (Cirne, 2000, p. 29) a que denominamos corte gráfico. O leitor é quem constrói mentalmente o movimento, o timing da ação, o tempo e o espaço em que a narrativa ocorre. Como relata Cirne (2000, p. 137), “sem cortes, não teríamos quadrinhos, simplesmente”.

Ou seja, a seqüência de imagens criadora de sentido em seu conjunto é que define uma história em quadrinhos como tal, por esse motivo, essa forma narrativa também é conhecida pelo termo de arte seqüencial. A leitura de uma narrativa geralmente ocorre, principalmente no ocidente,  no sentido da esquerda para direita e de cima para baixo dentro do limite espacial de uma página.




   Fonte: Eisner (2001, p.41)

McCloud (2005, p.7-9), acredita que o termo arte seqüencial, embora possa designar as histórias em quadrinhos de um modo genérico, deixaria alguns pontos falhos. A palavra arte seria um critério de valor enquanto que outras formas simbólicas também podem ser seqüenciais, além disso, o termo arte seqüencial nada diz sobre ser algo imagético ou não. E mesmo o termo imagem também não seria muito preciso uma vez que a palavra escrita em um suporte também seria uma imagem seqüencial. E como o espaço é para os quadrinhos o que o tempo é para o cinema, as imagens não ocupariam o mesmo espaço em sua seqüência, mas justapostas. McCloud chega então à conclusão de que a melhor definição possível para designarmos as histórias em quadrinhos seria a de: “imagens pictóricas e outras justapostas em seqüência deliberada destinadas a transmitir informações e/ou a produzir uma resposta no espectador”.

Produção de Sentido
Como vimos, a linguagem quadrinística é única, composta de diversas particularidades e união de diferentes sistemas de signos e demais elementos – com funções e características próprias - que são lidos em conjunto de forma seqüencial. Sendo assim, podemos afirmar que essa linguagem forma “um complexo: um mosaico de códigos que tem como base informações visuais que fundamentam seus signos, mas também são estranhos a este” (Srbek, 2005, p. 31). Entendido desse modo, é possível concluir que o sentido completo de uma narrativa quadrinística somente se produziria na leitura do “todo articulado”. Uma página ou um quadrinho seriam apenas um fragmento desse “todo articulado” , exceto no caso da história possuir início, meio e fim no espaço de apenas uma página, pois, nesse caso, a página não seria um fragmento, mas a história em sua completude.

Tal significação se dará, desse modo, no interior da compreensão do “todo articulado” complexo que é a narrativa das histórias em quadrinhos conjuntamente a um processo de memória, entendido como “uma reconstrução psíquica e intelectual” (Rousso, 2000, P. 94) por parte do indivíduo sempre no interior de um contexto sócio-cultural. Como atesta Geertz (1997, p. 148), uma linguagem não pode ser entendida como “uma lista de variações sintáticas” e, conseqüentemente, qualquer forma artística e estética,  se assim considerarmos as histórias em quadrinhos,  também não pode ser considerada “um mero encadeamento de formas puras”.

Vista a complexidade das histórias em quadrinhos no que tange à sua produção de sentido e compreendendo-as como um produto social da contemporaneidade podemos afirmar que elas são um gênero discursivo secundário que encerra todas as características inerentes a essa categoria de gênero no sentido bakhtiniano.  Ao entendermos a linguagem quadrinística como um gênero secundário do discurso, compreendemos que elas se constroem a partir tanto de uma memória de gênero, que armazena as características que viabilizam a construção de sentidos, quanto de uma memória discursiva, que toma por base o processo de criação de seus enunciados e, ao construí-los, contribuirá para a geração dos enunciados posteriores, bem como de sua construção de sentido.

Desse modo, todo discurso quadrinístico estará sempre intrinsecamente ligado às características que compõem seu gênero e sua memória. Essas características podem, de forma gradativa, sofrer alterações com o passar do tempo, porém sempre dentro de um contexto estritamente social, uma vez que o gênero discursivo é um produto e um produtor do mundo social e suas relações.  Ao assumirmos a linguagem quadrinística como um gênero discursivo secundário compreendemos que a relação gênero/memória de gênero exerce um papel fundamental na produção de sentido e atua como um elemento que facilita a transmissão informacional.

Visto assim, os enunciados que constituem o “todo complexo” de linguagens, signos e demais elementos que caracterizam o gênero quadrinístico demandarão, por parte do sujeito, uma série de informações prévias acerca do gênero discursivo em foco que viabilizarão a construção de sentido e posterior assimilação e produção de informação, sendo um meio passível de produzir conhecimento.

Conclusão
Compreendendo as histórias em quadrinhos como uma manifestação sócio/cultural contemporânea e como o campo de estudo da Ciência da Informação abrange o estudo da questão informacional nas mais variadas linguagens e manifestações humanas, acreditamos que uma maior compreensão da linguagem é de relevância para esse campo de estudo.

Desse modo, trabalharmos com a criação de sentindo na linguagem é trabalhar para termos um maior conhecimento de como funciona uma das linguagens contemporâneas mais utilizadas e difundidas em todo o mundo pelo homem como um meio de manifestar seus pensamentos, suas crenças, sua cultura e seus valores. Visando aos mais diversos propósitos.
 

 

 

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COSTA, Robson Santos. Linguagens contemporâneas: discurso e memória nos quadrinhos de super-heróis. Rio de Janeiro, 2007. 116 f. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em Memória Social, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2007.

EISNER, Will. Quadrinhos e arte seqüencial. 3. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001.

FERREIRA, Lucia M. A; ORRICO, Evelyn G. D. Prefácio. In: FERREIRA, Lucia M. A; ORRICO, Evelyn G. D. (Org.) Linguagem, identidade e memória social: novas fronteiras, novas articulações. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2002.

GEERTZ, Clifford. O saber local. 7. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2004.

KLAWA, Laonte; COHEN, Haron. Os quadrinhos e a comunicação de massa. In: MOYA, Álvaro de. Shazam. 3. ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1977. (Comunicação, 46). p. 103-113.

LITTLE JOHN, Stephen W. Teoria da informação. In: ______. Fundamentos teóricos da comunicação humana. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara, [197-]. p. 152-161.

McCLOUD, Scott. Desvendando os quadrinhos. São Paulo: M. Books, 2005.

MOYA, Álvaro de. Shazam. 3. ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1977. (Comunicação, 46)

ORLANDI, Eni Puccinelli. Análise de discurso: princípios e procedimentos. 6. ed. Campinas, SP: Pontes, 2005.

RODRIGUES, Rosângela Hammes. Os gêneros do discurso na perspectiva dialógica da linguagem: a abordagem de Bakhtin. In: MEURER, José Luiz;

 

BONINI, Adair; MOTTA-ROTH, Désirée (org.). Gêneros: teorias, métodos, debates. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial, 2005. p. 152-183.

ROUSSO, Henry. A memória não é mais o que era. In: Usos e abusos da história oral. Rio de. Janeiro: FGV, 2000. p. 93-101.

SARACEVIC, Tefko. Ciência da Informação: origem, evolução e relações. Perspectivas em Ciência da Informação, Belo Horizonte, v. 1, n. 1, p. 41-62, jan./jun. 1996.

______. Interdisciplinarity nature of Information Science. Ciência da Informação, Brasília, v. 24, n. 1, p. 36-41, 1995. Disponível em: < http://www.uff.br/ppgci/editais/saracevicnatureza.pdf>. Acesso em: n. 2008.


SRBEK, Wellington. Um mundo em quadrinhos. João Pessoa: Marca da Fantasia, 2005.

VERGUEIRO, Waldomiro. História em quadrinhos. In: CAMPELLO, Bernadete Santos; CALDEIRA, Paulo da Terra; MACEDO, Vera Amália Amarante (Org.). Formas e expressões do conhecimento: introdução às fontes de informação. Belo Horizonte: Escola de Biblioteconomia da UFMG, 1998. p. 115-149.

Sobre os autores / About the Authors:

Robson Santos Costa
robson.sc2001@gmail.com

Mestre em Memória Social (PPGMS / UNIRIO.

 

Evelyn Goyannes Dill Orrico
evelynorrico@unirio.br

Doutora em Ciência da informação (IBICT / UFRJ); Pesquisadora do CNPq; Professora Adjunta IV (PPGMS / UNIRIO).

Simple elixir called a 'miracle liquid' - Los Angeles Times

        Electrolyzed water cleans, degreases -- and treats athlete's
        foot. The solution is replacing toxic chemicals.

By Marla Dickerson
February 23, 2009

It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it.

Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid.

That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

Used as a sanitizer for decades in Russia and Japan, it's slowly winning acceptance in the United States. A New York poultry processor uses it to kill salmonella on chicken carcasses. Minnesota grocery clerks spray sticky conveyors in the checkout lanes. Michigan jailers mop with electrolyzed water to keep potentially lethal cleaners out of the hands of inmates.

In Santa Monica, the once-skeptical Sheraton housekeeping staff has ditched skin-chapping bleach and pungent ammonia for spray bottles filled with electrolyzed water to clean toilets and sinks.

"I didn't believe in it at first because it didn't have foam or any scent," said housekeeper Flor Corona. "But I can tell you it works. My rooms are clean."

Management likes it too. The mixture costs less than a penny a gallon. It cuts down on employee injuries from chemicals. It reduces shipping costs and waste because hotel staffers prepare the elixir on site. And it's helping the Sheraton Delfina tout its environmental credentials to guests.

The hotel's kitchen staff recently began disinfecting produce with electrolyzed water. They say the lettuce lasts longer. They're hoping to replace detergent in the dishwasher. Management figures the payback time for the $10,000 electrolysis machine will be less than a year.

"It's green. It saves money. And it's the right thing to do," said Glenn Epstein, executive assistant at the Sheraton Delfina. "It's almost like fantasy."

Actually, it's chemistry. For more than two centuries, scientists have tinkered with electrolysis, the use of an electric current to bring about a chemical reaction (not the hair-removal technique of the same name that's popular in Beverly Hills). That's how we got metal electroplating and large-scale production of chlorine, used to bleach and sanitize.

It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.

"It's 10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria," said Yen-Con Hung, a professor of food science at the University of Georgia-Griffin, who has been researching electrolyzed water for more than a decade. "And it's safe."

There are drawbacks.

Electrolyzed water loses its potency fairly quickly, so it can't be stored long. Machines are pricey and geared mainly for industrial use. The process also needs to be monitored frequently for the right strength.

Then there's the "magic water" hype that has accompanied electrolyzed drinking water. A number of companies sell so-called ionizers for home use that can range from about $600 to more than $3,000. The alkaline water, proponents say, provides health benefits.

But Richard Wullaert, a Santa Barbara consultant, said consumers should be careful.

"Some of these people are making claims that will get everybody in trouble," said Wullaert, whose nonprofit Functional Water Society is spreading the word about electrolyzed water. "It's time for some serious conferences with serious scientists to give this credibility."

Most of the growth has happened outside the United States.

Russians are putting electrolyzed water down oil wells to kill pesky microbes. Europeans use it to treat burn victims. Electrolyzing equipment is helping to sanitize drinking water in parts of Latin American and Africa.

It's big in Japan. People there spray it on sushi to kill bacteria and fill their swimming pools with it, eliminating the need for harsh chlorine. Doctors use it to sterilize equipment and treat foot fungus and bedsores. It's the secret weapon in Sanyo Electric Corp.'s "soap-less" washing machine.

Now Sanyo is bent on cleaning up Japan's taxis with a tiny air purifier that fits into a car's cup holder. The device uses electrolyzed water to shield passengers from an unwelcome byproduct of Japan's binge-drinking business culture: vomit.

"There was some concern about the spreading of viruses and bacteria via the taxi, not to mention the . . . stinky smells," Sanyo spokesman Aaron Fowles said.

Sanyo's taxi air washer isn't yet available in the U.S.; commuters will have to hold their noses for now. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have approved electrolyzed water for a variety of uses.

PuriCore of Malvern, Pa., and Oculus Innovative Sciences of Petaluma, Calif., have developed treatments for chronic wounds. Albuquerque, N.M.-based MIOX Corp. sells municipal water-purifying systems. EAU Technologies Inc. of Kennesaw, Ga., caters to both ends of a dairy cow, with alkaline water to aid the animal's digestion and acid water to clean up its manure.

Integrated Environmental Technologies Inc. of Little River, S.C., is working with oil companies to keep wells free of bacteria and with high schools to sanitize sweaty wrestling mats and grungy football equipment that spread skin infections.

Electrolyzer Corp. of Woburn, Mass., is going after the hospitality market. The Sheraton Delfina purchased one of its machines. So has the Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Trump International Beach Resort near Miami.

Patrick Lucci, Electrolyzer's vice president of marketing, likes to bombard prospects with scientific studies, then give 'em the old razzle-dazzle. He'll swig the processed salt water before he mops the floor with it.

"Try that with bleach," he said.

The unit in Santa Monica looks a little like an oversized water heater, with two tanks side by side -- one for making the hypochlorous acid sanitizer, the other for the sodium hydroxide cleanser.

Rebecca Jimenez, director of housekeeping, heard grumbling from the cleaning staff when the hotel brought the machine in last fall. Housekeepers doubted that the flat, virtually odorless liquids were really doing the job. Some poured the guest shampoos into their bottles to work up a lather.

"If it doesn't suds up, it doesn't work," Jimenez said. "That's the mentality."

Still, she said, most have come around and are enjoying working without fumes and peeling skin.

Minnesota food scientist Joellen Feirtag said she was similarly skeptical. So she installed an electrolysis unit in her laboratory and began researching the technology. She found that the acid water killed E. coli, salmonella, listeria and other nasty pathogens. Yet it was gentle enough to soothe her children's sunburns and acne.

She's now encouraging food processors to take a look at electrolyzed water to help combat the disease outbreaks that have roiled the industry. Most are dubious.

"This sounds too good to be true, which is really the biggest problem," said Feirtag, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. "But it's only a matter of time before this becomes mainstream."

marla.dickerson@latimes.com

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

        By PATRICIA COHEN
        Published: February 24, 2009

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.

This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being.”

The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”

Mr. Freeland is part of what he calls a revolutionary movement to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.

Next month Mr. Freeland and the association are hosting a conference precisely on this subject at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. There is a lot of interest on the national leadership level in higher education, Mr. Freeland said, but the idea has not caught on among professors and department heads.

Baldly marketing the humanities makes some in the field uneasy.

Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard and the author of several books on higher education, argues, “The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.” He said he was referring not only to writing and analytical skills but also to the type of ethical issues raised by new technology like stem-cell research. But he added: “There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy. I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make — not being able to see beyond that.”

Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said.

But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

To Mr. Delbanco of Columbia, the person who has done the best job of articulating the benefits is President Obama. “He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

During the second half of the 20th century, as more and more Americans went on to college, a smaller and smaller percentage of those students devoted themselves to the humanities. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the heyday in the mid- to late ’60s, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by a consortium headed by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Currently they account for about 8 percent (about 110,000 students), a figure that has remained pretty stable for more than a decade. The low point for humanities degrees occurred during the bitter recession of the early 1980s.

The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Teletransport Quântico

:: Agência FAPESP :: Divulgação Científica - Teletransporte quântico

Divulgação Científica
Teletransporte quântico

23/1/2009

Agência FAPESP – Pela primeira vez, cientistas conseguiram teletransportar informação entre dois átomos isolados em compartimentos e distantes 1 metro um do outro. Trata-se de uma conquista importante na busca por um computador quântico.

O teletransporte de informação não deve ser confundido com o de pessoas, visto em filmes de ficção como a série Jornada nas Estrelas. Mas nem por isso deixa de ser algo inusitado, talvez a mais misteriosa forma de transporte possível na natureza.

No teletransporte quântico, a informação (como o spin de uma partícula ou a polarização de um fóton) é transferida de um local a outro sem que ocorra o deslocamento por um meio físico. Não há transferência de energia nem de matéria.

Estudos anteriores conseguiram realizar o teletransporte entre fótons por longas distâncias, entre fótons e grupos de átomos e entre dois átomos próximos por meio da ação de um intermediário. Mas nenhum desses casos ofereceu uma maneira viável de manter e controlar a informação quântica por longas distâncias.

Agora, o grupo do Joint Quantum Institute, das universidades de Maryland e Michigan, nos Estados Unidos, obteve sucesso no teletransporte de um estado quântico diretamente de um átomo para outro por uma distância expressiva para esse tipo de estudo.

Na edição desta sexta-feira (23/1) da revista Science, os pesquisadores descrevem um teletransporte com 90% de eficiência na recuperação da informação original.

“O sistema tem o potencial para formar a base de um ‘repetidor quântico’ em grande escala capaz de funcionar como uma rede para memórias quânticas em grandes distâncias. Os métodos que desenvolvemos poderão ser usados conjuntamente com operações de bit quânticos para criar um componente central necessário para a computação quântica”, afirmou Christopher Monroe, um dos autores do estudo.

Os cientistas estimam que o computador quântico será capaz de realizar tarefas complexas como cálculos relacionados a criptografia ou buscas em gigantescas bases de dados muito mais rapidamente do que as máquinas atuais.

A base de funcionamento do teletransporte quântico é um fenômeno conhecido como emaranhamento, que ocorre somente em escala atômica ou subatômica. Quando dois objetos são colocados em um estado emaranhado, suas propriedades se tormam inextricavelmente ligadas.

Embora essas propriedades sejam desconhecidas até que possam ser avaliadas, o simples ato de medir qualquer um dos objetos determina instantaneamente as características do outro, não importando a distância em que estejam separados.

Leis peculiares

No novo estudo, os pesquisadores emaranharam os estados quânticos de dois íons de itérbio (elemento químico da família dos lantanídeos) de modo que a informação contida na condição de um pudesse ser transferida para o outro.

Cada íon foi isolado em um invólucro no vácuo, suspenso em uma gaiola invisível formada por campos eletromagnéticos e envolta por eletrodos. Os cientistas identificaram dois estados discerníveis, de menor energia, dos íons, que serviriam como valores alternativos de um bit quântico (ou qubit).

Bits (dígitos binários) eletrônicos convencionais, como os de um computador pessoal, estão sempre em um de dois estados: ligado ou desligado, ou 0 ou 1. Os bits quânticos, entretanto, podem estar em alguma combinação (superposição) dos dois estados ao mesmo tempo – como uma moeda que ficasse simultaneamente tanto na cara como na coroa. E é justamente esse fenômeno inusitado que dá à computação quântica seu enorme potencial.

Cada íon foi inicializado em um estado básico. Em seguida, o primeiro (íon A) foi irradiado por uma emissão específica de micro-ondas de um dos eletrodos, ficando em uma superposição de estados, como se escrevesse em sua memória a informação a ser teletransportada.

Imediatamente, os dois íons foram excitados durante um trilionésimo de segundo por um laser. A duração do pulso foi tão pequena que cada íon emitiu apenas um único fóton à medida que recebeu a energia do laser e retornou a um dos estados quânticos iniciais.

Dependendo do estado, cada íon emitiu um fóton cuja cor (azul ou vermelha) estava perfeitamente relacionada com o estado quântico. É justamente esse emaranhamento entre cada bit quântico e seu fóton correspondente que permite que os átomos se entrelacem.

Os fótons emitidos foram capturados por lentes, encaminhados a fibras ópticas separadas e levados para lados opostos de um separador de saída da luz, no qual podiam passar diretamente ou ser refletidos. Nos lados do separador estavam posicionados detectores para registrar a chegada dos fótons.

Antes de alcançar o separador, cada fóton estava em uma superposição de estados. Depois, quatro combinações de cores se tornaram possível: azul-azul, vermelho-vermelho, azul-vermelho ou vermelho-azul. Na maior parte desses estados, cada fóton cancelou o outro de um lado do separador e ambos terminaram no mesmo detector do outro lado.

Mas houve uma combinação na qual os dois detectores registram o fóton exatamente no mesmo instante. Mas é fisicamente impossível determinar qual íon produz cada fóton, ou seja, qual foi a combinação, porque não dá para saber se o fóton que chega ao detector passou pelo separador de luz ou foi refletido por ele.

Graças às leis peculiares da mecânica quântica, essa incerteza inerente projeta os íons em um estado de emaranhamento. Ou seja, cada um deles fica em uma superposição dos dois possíveis estados. Como a detecção simultânea de fótons pelos detectores não ocorre com freqüencia, o estímulo do laser e o processo de emissão do fóton precisam ser repetidos milhares de vezes por segundo. Mas quando um fóton aparece em cada detector, é um sinal inconfundível do emaranhamento entre os íons.

Quando uma condição de emaranhamento foi identificada, os cientistas imediatamente mediram o íon A. O ato de medir fez com que ele saísse da superposição e assumisse uma condição definitiva, isto é, um dos dois estados do bit quântico. Mas como o estado do íon A estava irreversivelmente ligado ao do íon B, a medição do A também fez com que o B assumisse o estado complementar.

Dependendo de qual estado o íon A terminou, os cientistas conseguiram saber precisamente que tipo de pulso de micro-ondas devia ser aplicado ao íon B de modo que ele recuperasse a informação exata que foi armazenada originalmente no primeiro íon. Era o exato teletransporte da informação.

O que distingue esse resultado como teletransporte, e não como outra forma qualquer de comunicação, é que nenhuma informação contida na memória original realmente passou entre os íons. Em vez disso, a informação desapareceu quando o íon A foi medido e reapareceu quando o pulso de micro-ondas foi aplicado no íon B. “Um aspecto particularmente atraente de nosso método é que ele combina as vantagens únicas tanto dos fótons como dos átomos. Fótons são ideais para transferir informação por longas distâncias, enquanto que átomos oferecem um meio vantajoso para a memória quântica de longa duração”, disse Monroe.

“A combinação representa uma arquitetura promissora para um ‘repetidor quântico’ que permitirá com que informação quântica seja transferida em distâncias muito maiores do que seria possível apenas com fótons. Além disso, esse teletransporte de informação poderá constituir a base de uma internet quântica, capaz de superar em muito qualquer outro tipo de rede”, destacou.

O artigo Quantum teleportation between distant matter qubits, de Christopher Monroe e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Science em www.sciencemag.org.

Plumes of methane gas found on Mars - Los Angeles Times

The gas could be coming from rudimentary life-forms -- apparently nothing capable of piloting a spaceship to Earth.

By John Johnson Jr.
January 16, 2009

Scientists have discovered large plumes of methane gas in the Martian atmosphere, a key marker for biological processes on Earth but not convincing proof that rudimentary life-forms exist on Mars.

Scientists led by Michael Mumma of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland first detected the gas in 2003, using infrared spectrometers on three Earth-based telescopes, the team said Thursday. At its peak, the plumes contained about 19,000 metric tons of methane, a large amount comparable to the seep off Coal Oil Point near Santa Barbara.

The source of the methane is still a mystery, the scientists said in a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington. But its existence proves that Mars is not the dead desert planet that many scientists thought it was.

"Mars is active," said Michael Meyer of NASA's Mars program. "Whether it's geology or biology, we don't yet know."

On Earth, the natural gas that heats our homes is mostly methane. About 90% of the methane released into our atmosphere is produced by biological processes, the largest contributors being bacteria in wetlands and the burping of cattle. The methane is released as a waste product by microbes reacting to hydrogen.

But methane is not a surefire indicator of life. Geological processes such as the interaction of water and molten rock in volcanoes can produce methane. On Titan, Saturn's largest moon, liquid methane is so plentiful it flows in rivers. Titan is so cold that it is extremely unlikely that living organisms are producing the methane.

Although they cautioned that more work is needed, the scientists said the absence of other gases that would be expected if volcanic activity was producing the methane is one indicator that organisms could be at work.

"This is exciting to think about in terms of life on Mars," said Lisa Pratt, a geologist at the University of Indiana. "Given the lack of compelling evidence of heating and faulting, it's prudent for us to begin to explore Mars looking for life-forms that are exhaling methane."

Getting to the source may be difficult. Pratt said that if the gas is biologically produced, the source must be underground, perhaps several miles deep, away from surface oxidants that would destroy the methane.

According to Pratt, the Martians that humans have imagined for centuries may wind up being nothing more than a thin film of bacteria clinging to life in some underground caverns where there is just enough heat from the planet's core to melt the surrounding ice.

Along with the ground-based telescopes, Europe's Mars Express spacecraft tracked three methane plumes, beginning in 2003. Over the next few years, Mumma said, they were able to pinpoint several possible emission sources in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Plumes were located near the Martian regions known as Arabia Terra, Nili Fossae and Syrtis Major.

Since the production of methane requires water, scientists said there must be some source in those areas.

Ancient Mars is known to have been a wet place, with rivers and shallow seas. But most scientists believe the surface has been dry and inhospitable to life as we know it for billions of years.

Between 2003 and 2006, the size of the methane plumes decreased, raising the possibility that the release in 2003 was a one-time event that persisted through 2006.

One theory is that a comet deposited the methane when it collided with Mars. That's considered unlikely because the amount of methane measured on Mars would require a comet several miles across, an event that astronomers probably would have noticed.

Similarly, the winds on Mars, which can produce planetwide dust storms, would have dispersed the methane over the entire planet between 2003 and 2006 if the gas release was a single explosive event.

Scientists think the methane could be released on a seasonal basis from certain discrete locations on the planet, presumably where cracks in the surface allow venting from the planet's interior.

If the source of the methane is biological, it might be analogous to permafrost on Earth, the scientists say. Each summer microorganisms frozen in the arctic tundra thaw just enough to release significant amounts of methane.

The same process could be responsible for methane releases on Mars. But the amount released would be a thousand times less than the quantity released on Earth each summer, the scientists said.

If the methane is being produced by living organisms, there should be evidence of other complex organic molecules in the atmosphere, Pratt said.

Mumma said research was continuing, using the adaptive optics technology at the European Southern Observatory, to get a better fix on Mars' chemistry.

john.johnson@latimes.com

Maremoto de 1908 - Pellaro - Reggio di Calabria

Op-Ed Contributor - A Deadly Wave, a Lucky Star - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor
A Deadly Wave, a Lucky Star

By JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO
Published: December 27, 2008

ONE hundred years ago this morning, the life of my grandfather Lorenzo took a tragic and extraordinary turn.

Dec. 28 marks the Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents on the Catholic calendar. Once the final day of the Christmas season, it instead signaled, by 1908, a return to normal life, as children were headed back to school and parents to work for the first time in weeks.

Alarm clocks were set the night before, at the end of a Sunday that had been uncommonly cold and gloomy across southern Italy, so much so that people forsook the traditional visits to friends and family and stayed home.

My grandfather’s family would not have ventured out in any event, because that night they welcomed a new addition, another sister for 10-year-old Lorenzo — his sixth — to go along with his little brother, Giuseppe.

My grandfather lived in Pellaro, a small town just south of Reggio di Calabria on the Strait of Messina. His family lived alongside that of his uncle, aunt and five cousins in the Via Madonella, a road that dead-ended into a sandy beach. His childhood was idyllic: the sea right outside his door to play in, Mount Etna rising fantastically across the blue-black waters.

That late-December morning, Pellaro smelled strongly of perfume; it was harvest time for the bergamot, the small citrus fruit that is the principal ingredient in all manner of cologne and grown only on this narrow strip of the Calabrian coast.

Lorenzo was awakened shortly before the dawn, not by his alarm but by the loud low rumble of the earth and the awful crashing that followed. Living in an area recently wracked by earthquakes, most people immediately knew what was happening. During seismic events the majority of deaths are caused by people’s homes collapsing in on them — a fate suffered by few in Pellaro, which was a sparsely built farming community.

People gathered near the water, thinking it the safest place to be, but 10 minutes after the main shock the sea began to recede from shore. Boats at anchor tottered and hit bottom. There were two words in Italian to describe what was happening, one native (maremoto) the other borrowed from Japanese (tsunami).

There was no time to outrun the water, but someone pushed my grandfather up into an olive tree along with his little brother, whom Lorenzo held onto with all his strength. The roar of the sea was deafening — the tidal wave crested at more than 40 feet — and fight though Lorenzo did, the impact broke his clutch on Giuseppe.

No one will ever know how long my grandfather wandered the ruined coast, calling out the names of his brother, of his family. Everything Lorenzo had ever known was destroyed. The land beneath his neighborhood collapsed and fell, Atlantis-like, into the sea. The Church of the Madonella was open to the sky, a boat docked in its altar. Farther up the beach, a crack in the earth revealed ancient Greco-Roman tombs, still intact.

Across the straits, Messina — one of the most ancient cities in Europe — had been annihilated. More than 50,000 were dead. It took only a few hours for civilization to break down among the survivors. Looting ran rampant; thieves cut fingers from the dead rather than waste time prying their rings off. Marconi’s new radio transmitter at the mouth of the strait had gone silent, and many believed themselves to be the only people left alive, anywhere.

The 1908 earthquake stands as the most lethal natural disaster in recorded European history. (And only the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 has dwarfed it recently.) Nearly 100,000 people perished, including all 16 of my grandfather’s relatives in Via Madonella.

The response of the royal Italian government makes FEMA’s effort in New Orleans look like a model of efficiency. Most disgracefully, the shacks built as temporary shelter for the homeless would remain occupied for 30 years while the reconstruction dragged on. My grandfather himself was shuffled among relatives in Calabria before boarding the steamer Europa in 1921 to seek a better life in America.

Grampa, who died in 1990, always said he had been born under a lucky star. I assumed this belief was the sign of an earlier, more stoic generation. In fact, it was not. People went insane with grief over the events of Dec. 28, 1908. But a few survivors came away from the experience with the knowledge that they had stared apocalypse in the face and found the strength to come through it. And, having done so, they could endure anything — including arriving in America with little money and even less English, and raising eight children through a Depression and a war against their home country.

Grampa’s lucky star was in fact mine, and my brothers’, and all our cousins’.

John Bemelmans Marciano is the author and illustrator of “Madeline and the Cats of Rome.”

Will Elder | b 1921

Will Elder - b. 1921 - His Mad World - The Lives They Lived - Obituaries - NYTimes.com

Will Elder | b. 1921
His Mad World

By DAVID HAJDU
Published: December 24, 2008

’Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s treasured piece of holiday piffle, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The outlawed comic, titled Panic, was a spinoff of Mad, the wild and wildly successful year-old magazine for 14-year-old minds. Panic’s crime was having published Moore’s much-reprinted public-domain text, verbatim, to the accompaniment of outrageous, incongruous, stream-of-consciousness illustrations by Elder. None of the four-legged creatures that Elder drew in the opening panels were stirring, because all of them were dead — half-butchered carcasses of hogs, a goat, a baby elephant, a lion and the requisite mouse, all dangling from meat hooks, gushing blood. One of the animals, a small lamb, was still alive but stewed — that is, drunk from guzzling moonshine out of a jug nestled between its hooves. The sugarplums dancing in the children’s heads were Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and when the narrator of the tale settled down for his nap, he did so with a tall iced nightcap and six bottles of hooch scattered around his bed, alongside a sexy mama kerchiefed like a belly dancer.

“I had a good time thinking of every kind of wild way to interpret all the words of the poem,” Elder recalled a few years before he died. “I thought it was funny, but it happened that some other people didn’t agree. There were people out there who really didn’t like the idea that we were doing something for kids . . . [that] made fun of things that were supposed to be sacred, like Santa Claus.” The people who disagreed with Elder included not only Massachusetts state officials but also members of the New York City Police Department. A few days after that Christmas, cops entered the offices of Panic’s publisher, EC Comics, asked to buy a copy of Panic and arrested the receptionist for being willing to sell them one. The charges were unclear and dubious, but the transgression indisputable: the aesthetic lawlessness of Will Elder’s cartooning.

Elder was a master of an art beloved by kids and despised by their parents for its almost-criminal juvenility. Along with his childhood lunchroom buddy Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, Elder was a primary creator of the gleefully rude, perennially adolescent, unaffected smart-aleck humor that would forever be thought of as the sensibility of American youth. With his art for Mad, for Panic, for lesser-known humor magazines like Trump and Help! and, finally, for Playboy, Elder found a window to the junior-high-school soul and chucked rocks through it, exposing that teen spirit in all its confused, hyperactive, self-absorbed glory and scariness. Earlier comic-book artists like Joe Shuster and Bob Kane may have invented the superhero, but Will Elder made possible “Superbad.”

“Will was the one who gave Mad magazine its look and style, which were different from any comic book that had been created before,” Kurtzman wrote in his memoir, “My Life as a Cartoonist.” “He was the one who started filling the margins of every page with hundreds of tiny cartoons. They had nothing to do with the story on the page.”

Connoisseurs of Elder’s style call it “chicken fat,” so named by its inventor for “the part of the soup that is bad for you yet gives the soup its delicious flavor.” Elder’s art was one of perilous excess. Elder was the funny pages’ answer to Charlie Parker and Allen Ginsberg and Lord Buckley, and he served as inspiration not only to the comix artists of the underground movement, like Robert Crumb, but also to rock musicians in their aesthetic neighborhood, like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Garcia, who idolized Elder, once sought him out and invited him to a concert (at which Elder wore earplugs) and commissioned his idol to paint his portrait in oils. “I always liked that thing of overdoing it,” Garcia explained in an interview about Elder, “and here’s a guy who really understands what overdoing it is all about.”

The sleek, hyperrealistic portrait Elder did of Garcia, along with further evidence of his range and prolificacy in and out of comics, appears in the first of two books of Elder’s art: “The Mad Playboy of Art” and “Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles.” Both books reveal a craftsman of stunning ability, which Elder applied with cheerful randomness. He had the skill to render anything he saw so realistically that he left one early portfolio painting (a portrait of the old character actor John Carradine) unfinished, so it would not be mistaken for a photograph. Raised in poverty in the Bronx during the Depression, Elder had as much pride in his professionalism as he had in his artistry, and he always took the work he got, providing unfailingly meticulous and unexpectedly funny illustrations for slick magazines like Pageant.

“I had a family to feed,” he explained not long before he died. “But I always wanted to try to do a good job, and I always took the job seriously, and it was very important to me to be as silly as I possibly could be. I was very serious about that.”

As he grew older, his cartoons never lost their breathtaking immaturity. Indeed, the same impulses to excess and abandon that made his early comics feel like dizzying playground fun made much of his later work seem miraculously, sometimes maddeningly, infantile.

Elder spent the last decades of his professional life applying his extraordinary technical facility, his appetite for juvenility and his indiscrimination to the service of Playboy magazine. He wasted a quarter of a century collaborating with Kurtzman to produce the Little Annie Fanny comic strip, which has earned a place in pop-culture history as the most painstakingly executed piece of garbage ever to disgrace the names of comics and sex. Creatively, Will Elder died, at midlife, from too much chicken fat. n

Prosecco - Vinho Borbulhante

Italian Makers of Prosecco Seek Recognition - NYTimes.com

By AMY CORTESE
Published: December 26, 2008

IN 1984, Fabio Zardetto, chief winemaker at his family-run vineyard in northern Italy, leapt at the chance to become one of the first bottlers to export prosecco, the sparkling wine, to the United States

At first, his efforts on behalf of his bubbly fizzled. “I had to push people to taste the prosecco,” recalled Mr. Zardetto, now 50. “I would run behind them with a glass saying, ‘Please, taste this.’ ”

When they did try it, he said, they were pleasantly surprised. Sales of Zardetto prosecco grew to 100,000 cases in the United States in 2007, from 50 cases in 1984.

With its fresh flavor, pleasing bubbles and gentle price tag — it typically sells for $10 to $20 a bottle — prosecco has gained many fans worldwide. Global sales have been growing by double-digit percentages for 10 years, to more than 150 million bottles last year. And with consumers in an economizing mood this holiday season, prosecco is an increasingly popular alternative to Champagne, which has been soaring in price.

But prosecco is also encountering some growing pains. From its traditional home in northern Italy, it is now waging a war against outsiders, just as Champagne, its more elite cousin in France, has done for so many years.

A host of producers elsewhere in Italy and as far away as Brazil are trying to cash in on the drink’s newfound popularity. Because prosecco is the name of a grape, like chardonnay or cabernet, anyone can use the name.

Today, about 60 percent of all prosecco — some eight million cases — comes from producers outside the traditional prosecco-growing region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, a cluster of villages about a half-hour’s drive north of Venice. The newcomers are not held to the same strict production standards as the traditional producers, which are tightly governed under Italian wine laws.

One product, Rich Prosecco, is made by an Austrian company whose ads feature Paris Hilton. In some, she is naked and spray-painted gold. What’s worse to some producers, the product is sold in a 6.8-ounce can, in gas stations as well as stores, for around $3.

“It’s absolutely vulgar,” says Vittorio Zoppi, marketing manager for the prosecco consortium.

Claus Jahnke, a sales and marketing executive at Rich, says he is puzzled by the reaction to the product, which uses Italian grapes. “We have invested a lot of money in advertising and P.R. to launch Rich and promote prosecco,” he says. “We gave this famous grape a helping hand in conquering the world.”

The Italian winemakers worry that upstarts will weaken prosecco’s image just as it is taking off.

“If everyone around the world plants prosecco, we will lose the value of the name,” says Ludovico Giustiniani, vice president of a consortium that represents about 150 wineries in the traditional prosecco-producing region.

Over months of discussions, the consortium, along with a broader group of growers and producers, has hammered out a plan that would create an official prosecco production zone tied exclusively to northern Italy. Only wine produced in that region could be labeled as prosecco. If the plan is approved by the Italian government — a decision is expected by early 2009 — prosecco would then be eligible for “protected designation of origin” status under European laws intended to protect regional products from Champagne and port to Serrano ham.

“It will let prosecco be an Italian product — and nothing else,” says Giancarlo Moretti Polegato, the owner of Villa Sandi, one of the area’s prominent wineries.

That is the theory, at least. Protection from the European Union would extend only across its 27 member countries, and, as Champagne producers have discovered, a lot of policing is still required.

The Champagne region of France has been officially designated since 1927 as the authentic home of the wine that bears its name, but its trade organization still spends millions of dollars battling producers of items as varied as sparkling wine, bubble bath and bottled water that also use the word.

“We have to spend a lot of money and energy protecting our product,” says Sam Heitner, director of the Office of Champagne USA, a trade group that represents the interests of Champagne producers.

That spending is on display in Times Square, where a giant screen flashes an ad by Mr. Heitner’s group for holiday revelers. A bottle, labeled “American Champagne,” is covered by a red, Venetian-style carnival mask. It’s part of the group’s “Unmask the truth” campaign, which notes its opposition to the name’s use by United States producers.

Producers of prosecco may also be in for a long fight.

PROSECCO’S success can be seen in the steep-hilled villages surrounding Conegliano and Valdobbiadene.

The area has grown from a sleepy agricultural area to one of Italy’s wealthiest enclaves, dotted with shiny new wineries and farmhouses that have been transformed into rustic inns to support a growing wine tourism trade.

Prosecco sales from this area alone were 370 million euros last year. And a hectare (2.47 acres) of vineyard in the most coveted spots, like Cartizze, sells for more than $1 million. Prosecco from Cartizze, a panettone-shaped hill in Valdobbiadene where 140 growers farm about 250 acres, fetches about $40 a bottle.

The vines are tended and harvested by hand. Machines cannot navigate the vertical angles, although helicopters are occasionally used when a vineyard needs to be sprayed. The soil and the mix of warm days and cool nights make for an especially flavorful prosecco — an affinity given official weight in 1969, when the region was awarded the status of denominazione di origine controllata, or D.O.C., Italy’s version of a wine appellation.

The region’s turn of fortunes, though, is relatively recent. Although prosecco grapes have been cultivated here for three centuries, in the early days they were made mostly into still wine for local consumption. The vines shared the steep hillsides with more valuable cows and sheep.

It was only after a new method for producing sparkling wine became widespread in the mid-1900s that things began to change.

Champagne and other sparkling wines typically get their bubbles when they are fermented a second time, with added sugar and yeast. The yeast feeds on the sugar and converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When the bottle is opened, the escaping gas gives the wine its bubbles and characteristic “pop.”

Champagne re-ferments in bottles, an expensive and labor-intensive process. But the new production methods allowed prosecco makers to re-ferment their wine in large tanks, a process that kept prices down. That, and prosecco’s light, delicate flavor and low alcohol content, made it an especially versatile wine.

IN Italy, prosecco is enjoyed year-round — and practically around the clock. “The only moment we don’t drink it is for breakfast,” Mr. Giustiniani says.

That approachability has helped propel the popularity of prosecco — in the 1960s throughout Italy, in the ’80s in Germany and neighboring countries and in the ’90s in the United States, which today is prosecco’s No. 1 market outside of Italy.

Perhaps no one pushed harder to establish prosecco in the United States than Mionetto, a winery founded in Valdobbiadene in 1886 and now one of the area’s largest, with sales of 40 million euros a year.

Seeing the tremendous growth potential in the 1990s, this winery began expanding aggressively. It established Mionetto USA to control distribution in North America and has spent millions of dollars promoting prosecco and the Mionetto brand. Today, the company has the leading market share, roughly 33 percent, in the United States, with 168,000 cases a year of its D.O.C. and non-D.O.C. prosecco.

Still, says Sergio Mionetto, who took over as chief winemaker from his grandfather in 1956, “we believe we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”

At the bustling Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, where the house prosecco is Mr. Mionetto’s top-of-the-line Sergio (named after himself), prosecco by the glass outsells Champagne two to one, says Stephen Paul Mancini, director of wine and spirits at the restaurant. “Prosecco is an extremely popular product for us,” he adds. And some retailers report that prosecco is flying off shelves this holiday season.

Prosecco is also catching on in new markets, like China, India and Vietnam, causing producers to think even bigger.

“Prosecco can be the best-selling sparkling wine of the world,” says Gianluca Bisol, a 21st-generation winemaker and general manager of the Bisol winery, in Valdobbiadene. He figures that prosecco can overtake Champagne in sales volume in the next 25 years or so.

The problem is that others saw the potential, too. It started with the relative newcomers in the plains of northern Italy. Growers there are less regulated than their D.O.C. kin; they were granted the Italian wine system’s least-stringent designation, known as I.G.T., in 1995. They can produce almost double the volume of wine per hectare, and quality can vary.

In the flatlands, winemakers can use machines to harvest and tend to their vines, at about a tenth of the cost, Mr. Bisol and others say. “For these reasons,” Mr. Bisol says, “this area that didn’t exist 25 years ago now accounts for 60 percent of prosecco production.”

A more recent worry for the consortium and newer growers is that countries like Brazil, Romania, Argentina and Australia have begun to plant prosecco. Brazil, in particular, has embraced the grape, perhaps not surprisingly, given that its main wine region is populated by northern Italian immigrants.

Close to 2,000 acres of prosecco are planted in Brazil, Mr. Bisol says.

“The Brazilians like parties,” Mr. Bisol says. “They drink a lot of prosecco.” The homegrown prosecco could cut into Italian sales there: Brazil is already the fifth-largest export market for Italian prosecco.

Closer to home, German and Austrian producers have taken to buying tanks of Italian prosecco produced in the plains and shipping it to their countries to be bottled. Or canned, in the case of Rich Prosecco.

When Ms. Hilton traveled to northern Italy to promote Rich Prosecco two years ago, “it was a big scandal for the area,” Mr. Bisol says. “The winegrowers were very angry.” She has not returned, he says.

Günther Aloys, a hotelier and entrepreneur in the Austrian resort town of Ischgl who introduced Rich Prosecco in 2006, plans to take it to the United States next year. And Mr. Jahnke, the sales and marketing executive at Rich, said the company was following the developments with the Italian producers’ proposal to the Italian government.

THE threat of foreign-brand prosecco has prompted northern Italian producers, of both D.O.C. and I.G.T. prosecco, to work together to protect their turf. They say they believe that their proposal will raise quality and prevent others from calling their products prosecco.

The plan would create a broad new D.O.C. designation to govern the hundreds of I.G.T. prosecco producers that have sprung up across eight northern Italian provinces in the plains from Treviso to Trieste. The producers would have to comply with strict quality controls, including lower yields per hectare and stronger oversight.

The region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, meanwhile, would be elevated to Italy’s highest designation for wine regions, known as D.O.C.G.

The key is to link prosecco to its traditional home.

“We don’t want to end up with something like pinot grigio,” says Primo Franco, owner of the Nino Franco winery in Valdobbiadene, referring to another white wine grape from the Veneto region that today is grown around the world.

Because prosecco is also the name of a northern Italian village where the grape is believed to have originated, the consortium can make an argument, too, that prosecco is a place name that can be protected just like Chianti, Champagne and others.

By bringing all of northern Italy’s prosecco makers into the fold, the winemakers hope to do more than give prosecco a territorial identity. They also want the muscle power to meet growing demand and achieve their goal of matching or even besting Champagne, which today produces some 300 million bottles a year. About 150 million bottles of Italian prosecco are produced a year.

Prosecco producers say they believe that with the new plan, they can double their output to 300 million or even 400 million bottles a year, while providing consumers with a guarantee of quality.

“Champagne is the king of the bubble,” Mr. Bisol says. “But prosecco maybe can be considered the small prince.”

In recent weeks, the winemakers have been scrambling to nail down a final proposal to the Italian government before a year-end deadline. The producers hope to be eligible for a streamlined European Union system that goes into effect in August. If all goes well, the new prosecco protections will be in place for the 2009 harvest.

But that is just a start. European Union regulations are valid only for members, and deals have to be struck with countries outside of the union, like the United States or Brazil, on an, ahem, case-by-case basis. For now, says Mr. Moretti Polegato of Villa Sandi, “everybody involved in prosecco production is happy.”

You can almost hear the corks popping.


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Philip Seymour Hoffman

A Higher Calling - NYTimes.com

By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Published: December 19, 2008

WHEN HE WAS 12 YEARS OLD, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN saw a local production of “All My Sons” near his home in Rochester, and it was, for him, one of those rare, life-altering events where, at an impressionable age, you catch a glimpse of another reality, a world that you never imagined possible.

“I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman told me on a gray day in London early in the fall. He was sitting in the fifth row of the audience at Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where he was directing “Riflemind” (a play about an ’80s rock band that may or may not reunite after 20 years), dressed in long brown cargo shorts, a stretched-out polo shirt and Converse sneakers without socks. His blond hair, still damp from showering, was standing in soft peaks on his head, which gave him the look of a very intense, newly hatched chick. At times, especially when he is in or around or anywhere near a theater, Hoffman, who is 41, can seem like an eager college student — bounding from seat to stage to give direction, writing feverishly in a notebook about a feeling he wants an actor to convey, laughing at an in-joke regarding a prop that keeps disappearing — but when the conversation shifts to a discussion of his acting in movies like “Capote,” for which he deservedly won every award that’s been invented, or “Doubt,” out this month, he seems to turn inward and ages markedly. “The drama nerd comes out in me when I’m in a theater,” he explained now, as the actors rehearsed. “When I saw ‘All My Sons,’ I was changed — permanently changed — by that experience. It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

Hoffman took a gulp of coffee from a large cup that he was holding in a brown paper bag. He turned his attention to the stage, where two actors were rehearsing a sex scene. “Riflemind,” which unfolds over a weekend, is a self-conscious study in wounds: long-simmering battles are reignited and secrets are revealed. The play has a predictable middle-aged-angst narrative that is somewhat glamorized by its rock-star milieu: the drugs may be stronger, but the emotions are oddly detached. Hoffman’s fascination with “Riflemind” — he directed it in Sydney, Australia, last year and, when we met, had been in London for several weeks preparing this production — can be explained by both his commitment to theater and by the fact that the play is written by Andrew Upton, the husband of Cate Blanchett. Hoffman met Upton and Blanchett when he appeared with her in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” “On that movie, we shot only one or two days a week,” Hoffman recalled. “Much of the time, I was in Rome with Cate and Andrew. I have a hard time having fun, but that was heaven. And I must really like Andrew — my girlfriend, who is in New York, is about to have our third child, and I am here.” Hoffman paused. “I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play. It’s not like acting. If this fails, I wouldn’t be as upset by it.”

Hoffman jumped out of his seat and ran to the stage. He proceeded to correct the sex scene. He bent the actress back over a couch and metamorphosed into a desperate character, the former manager of the band, driven by the hope of sudden riches and his lust for the guitar player’s wife. He played just enough of the scene and, then, he switched back to being Phil, the regular guy in the baggy shorts. It was stunning. “I don’t know how he does it,” Mike Nichols, who has directed Hoffman on the stage (“The Seagull”) and in movies (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), told me later. “Again and again, he can truly become someone I’ve not seen before but can still instantly recognize. Sometimes Phil loses some weight, and he may dye his hair but, really, it’s just the same Phil, and yet, he’s never the same person from part to part. Last year, he did three films — ‘The Savages,’ ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ and ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ — and in each one he was a distinct and entirely different human. It’s that humanity that is so striking — when you watch Phil work, his entire constitution seems to change. He may look like Phil, but there’s something different in his eyes. And that means he’s reconstituted himself from within, willfully rearranging his molecules to become another human being.”

FROM HIS FIRST ROLES in movies like “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a villainous prep-school student, to the lovesick Scotty J. in “Boogie Nights,” to the passionate and ornery rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous,” Hoffman has imbued all his characters with a combination of the familiar and the unique. It’s not easy; it’s the sort of acting that requires enormous range, as well as a kind of stubborn determination and a profound lack of vanity. In the theater, Hoffman finds refuge in being part of a community. Theater presents considerable difficulties — Hoffman said his most challenging role for the stage was as Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway (“That nearly killed me”). But when he speaks about his work in films, Hoffman’s struggles sound lonelier: his childhood dream was to be on the stage, and the fulfillment of that fantasy seems to mitigate some of the strain Hoffman experiences when he is acting.

“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

For all of his struggles, Hoffman works a lot — he’s a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting. “I’ve seen him tear tickets and seat people at LAB productions,” said John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of “Doubt” and himself a LAB company member. In his 17-year-long career, Hoffman has also made more than 40 films, including “Doubt,” for which he has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor, and “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also released this year. “Synecdoche,” which was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is a hugely ambitious film that deals with death and art and how they come to inform one another. Hoffman plays a theater director, Caden Cotard, who wins a MacArthur and uses the prize money to begin an autobiographical play so enormous that it swallows his actual life. The movie is, as Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review in The Times, “about . . . the search for an authentic self in an unauthentic world.” The plot may get murky and the worlds within worlds (within worlds) are often confusing, but the film lingers in your memory, largely because of Hoffman’s performance. As he grows old, disintegrates, misses romantic connections and suffers loss after loss in pursuit of his artistic vision, Hoffman remains the emotional center of the film.

“There were days when I was three different ages,” Hoffman said while the cast of “Riflemind” took a break between the first act and the second. “I’d be married, and then two hours later my family would be dead. Charlie seemed to be interested in the idea of life moving faster as you age. And the fear of missed opportunities. In life, do you ever really know if you’re missing an opportunity? No, you really don’t. And you’re never really finished either, unless the finish is dying, and you don’t really want to think about that too much.” Hoffman paused. “Synecdoche” clearly had resonance for him. Hoffman is not a carefree person; he resolutely refuses to live lightly. “Phil is hard to know,” John Patrick Shanley said. “Phil and his longtime girlfriend, Mimi [O’Donnell], came to a party at my house, and he had on three coats and a hat. I said, ‘Take off one of your coats; it’s hot in here.’ His girlfriend said, ‘He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.’ It’s such an obvious metaphor, but Phil has a protective cocoon that he sheds very slowly. It takes him a while to make friends with his environment. And yet you know the men he plays the minute you meet them.”

Caden Cotard seems to echo many of Hoffman’s own internal debates and anxieties. “I took ‘Synecdoche’ on because I was turning 40, and I had two kids, and I was thinking about this stuff — death and loss — all the time,” Hoffman continued. “The workload was hard, but what made it really difficult was playing a character who is trying to incorporate the inevitable pull of death into his art. Somewhere, Philip Roth writes: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’ And Charlie, like Roth, is quite aware of the fact that we’re all going to die.” Hoffman looked around the theater. The stage manager was arranging furniture; the actors were lolling on a sofa; Andrew Upton was chatting with an assistant. “In 80 years,” Hoffman went on, “no one I’m seeing now will be alive. Hopefully, the art will remain.”

Which is, of course, the perfect reason to make great movies. A single performance on stage is ephemeral, but films can still be watched 80 years after they are created. Hoffman would never say that out loud — it would sound too grand, too self-important, too movie-starish. Still, he knows he will not be remembered for his real-life persona but rather for the characters he has chosen to embody. In “Doubt,” for instance, which was originally a play, he is a Catholic priest who may or may not have been inappropriate with a young male student. He is suspected and accused by the principal of the parish school, a nun named Sister Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep. “If I asked 10 people on the subway who I should cast for the older nun, they’d all say Meryl,” Shanley told me. “But I didn’t know what Phil would do with the part of Father Flynn, and that intrigued me. I did know that he would make Meryl sweat, that she would be up against someone of equal intelligence. Meryl is a street fighter, and she schemes as an actress — she wants to win the scene. Phil won’t play that way. He won’t engage. Before their big confrontation scene, Meryl would be muttering ‘I’m going to kick his butt’ for the entire crew to hear. She’d look at him and say, ‘I know you did it.’ And Phil would just laugh and say, ‘Meryl’s always trying to get in my head.’ ”

As usual Hoffman struggled with the character. “On every film, you’ll have nights where you wake up at 2 in the morning and think, I’m awful in this,” he recalled. “You see how delicate it is — a little movement to the right or the left, and you’re hopelessly hokey.” The film revolves around the question of the priest’s culpability, but that is not what mattered to Hoffman. Hoffman plays the priest as a reformer, a man interested in a more philosophical and tolerant approach to religion. Shanley had given Hoffman a “back story” on Father Flynn, who is based, in part, on a teacher who had a profound impact on Shanley as a boy, but Hoffman added his own interpretation. “I did research by, among other things, going to church. As a kid, I was confirmed and I went to church, but I was bored. Now, I feel the opposite: A good sermon is just like theater. It combines the political scene and the Scriptures, and I thought, Hey, I could do it like that. It’s like a teacher getting up and saying, This is the school I come from.”

Since playing the role, Hoffman has been asked repeatedly if Flynn “did it.” He won’t answer. “I wouldn’t ever say whether the priest is innocent or guilty because I saw ‘Doubt’ as being about something larger,” Hoffman said. “What’s so essential about this movie is our desire to be certain about something and say, This is what I believe is right, wrong, black, white. That’s it. To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what’s really true, which is the whole mess that the world is. The world is hard, and John is saying that being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.” Hoffman paused again. “And I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity. I find the need to play a part like Father Flynn inescapable, and I only want to do things I’m that passionate about. I know there are actors out there that present themselves as cool cats, but you better take your cool-cat suit off if you want to act. You can’t otherwise.”

As he said this, Hoffman sounded more melancholy than strident. He looked up at the stage where the actors were reassembling, about to run through the entire first act. “We’re hitting the moments too much,” Hoffman said to no one in particular. What he seemed to mean is that the characterizations had little individuality, that the actors were spending too much time polishing the shiny surface of the play instead of exploring its nuances. “They have to get back to the simple act of doing something,” Hoffman said patiently. “With any character, you have to bring it back to the normal.”

But, as the director, Hoffman could only inspire them — he couldn’t jump onstage and play all the parts himself. Which may have been a relief. “During ‘Doubt,’ Phil seemed to be in a lot of pain,” Shanley remembered. “He’d smoke cigarette after cigarette and stare out the window. I was afraid to say anything to him. And now when we talk about the movie, he says how much fun he had. I’d say, ‘You looked like you were in hell.’ Phil just shrugs and sort of jokes: ‘Hell? That’s where I live.’ ”

“IT WAS PRETTY GOOD LAST NIGHT,” Hoffman said over lunch the next day at a hotel called One Aldwych, which was near the theater. “We were there until 11:30. I had to show tough support to the cast. I can’t do it for them, but I know how it goes: you open the play, and you’ll have a week that’s weird. And then you have a performance that’s really strong, and you’ll try to find that performance again, as if you’ve never done it before. Finally, you find it again, and you’re on and off for a little while, and then you reach a stretch for a couple of weeks where — wow! — you know how to do the play! And then you become stiff again. And so on. But I can’t tell them all that. They have to figure that out on their own. If I’m on them all the time, it’s never going to be theirs.”

Hoffman paused and studied the menu. He was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and he was carrying a worn paperback copy of “Othello.” He will portray Iago in a new production of the play next year, directed by the avant-garde theater and opera director Peter Sellars. Othello will be played by John Ortiz, Hoffman’s friend and a founding member of LAB, which will be affiliated with the production. Often, when you connect the dots with Hoffman, you wind up at LAB.

“I’ve never been all that interested in playing Hamlet,” he said, after ordering corned beef hash and eggs. “Hamlet is a role most actors are supposed to want to play, which is probably why it’s never intrigued me that much. But Iago — I guess his demons interest me more. Iago is a military guy, and I like the idea of him being a general like Wesley Clark, who has accomplished so much in an arena where there’s death and, suddenly, he walks into a nonmilitary world, and he’s no longer the guy he thinks he deserves to be. To my mind, Iago actually loves Othello. And it’s hard not to think of Obama when you read ‘Othello’ now.” Hoffman took a sip of coffee. “It’s fun to think about the possibilities, but as always, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It seems impossible to me.”

When you sit across from him, it is difficult to imagine Hoffman playing anyone as angry and diabolical as Iago. With his pale, lightly freckled skin, blue eyes and solid build, he looks more like an avuncular scholar than a military man (or a priest or . . .). His demeanor and appearance are so fundamentally regular that it seems impossible that he has played such a vast array of anything-but-regular characters. “His physical form actually works to his advantage,” Meryl Streep told me. “Philip is not particularly any one way, which means he can be anybody at all. One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy, and I think Philip is the same. What that means is you want to devour lives. You’re eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.”

Hoffman’s approach may be less vampiric than Streep’s, but he is no less adept at getting beyond the merely physical embodiment of a role. He may put on his character’s shoes, but he also takes them off: in his work, Hoffman is willing to be ugly, pimpled, sexually scarred, miserably unhappy, fleshy and naked. He is never hesitant to reveal the soft underbelly — the insecurities, the (perhaps humiliating) desires, the longing. “I’m much more vain in my life than I am when I’m working,” he said as the food arrived. “I wish I looked different as Phil walking around or Phil waking up. I’m going to be 41, and I’ll go to the bathroom and get a good glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I’m like, What happened? All youth has left me for good. That fear that makes people crazy will strike me at those moments. But when I’m working, I’m grateful for the way I look. I’m grateful for the fact that I have a body with which I can do what I need to do and I can come off as . . . anybody.”

He started out as an athlete. The son of a Xerox employee (“My father did something a little spooky with computers all over the country”) and a lawyer (“My mother is crazy about my career — she goes to the festivals and comes to the play readings”), Hoffman was the second youngest of four kids. He was raised Catholic and played three sports until a neck injury during wrestling practice forced him, under doctor’s orders, to quit contact sports. “I thought, O.K., I’ll play baseball,” Hoffman said. “But I’m 14 with a neck brace. I’d see some girl from 10 blocks away, and I’d take it off until she passed me. I was this freckle-faced kid, and I perceived myself as not attractive. When the doctor asked me if I still had pain, I lied. My pact with God was that I would no longer play sports. So instead of trying out for baseball, I auditioned for a play.” Hoffman smiled. “And also there was this beautiful girl. I had a huge crush on her, and she acted. It seemed like something worth giving up baseball for.”

In 1984, when he was nearly 17, Hoffman auditioned and was chosen to attend the New York State Summer School of the Arts, a highly selective program in Saratoga Springs. “Phil stood out,” recalled Bennett Miller, who directed Hoffman in “Capote.” “We met then, along with Dan Futterman, who wrote ‘Capote.’ At the time, Phil was very popular: he won everybody over. It wasn’t really because he was a social animal. We were attracted to the fact that he was genuinely serious about what he was doing. Even then, he was passionate. Phil drank a lot of beer, and he could tell a story and light up a room. You wanted to be around him — he was like Truman Capote in that you wanted to sit at his table.”

Miller and Hoffman became great friends. When the summer ended, Hoffman stayed in touch, even flying from Rochester twice to visit Miller at his home in Westchester County. “Phil always had an exceptional interest in the outside world,” Miller said. “He wanted to go to Manhattan, to the Blue Note, to hang out in Times Square. In his high school, at 17, Phil was cast as Willie Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman.’ After the performance, he called me and said, ‘I got a standing ovation.’ One of the biggest regrets I have in life is I didn’t see Phil as Willie Loman.”

Hoffman auditioned to study theater at Syracuse University, Carnegie Mellon and N.Y.U., where Miller was also applying. They both got into N.Y.U. “Once we made a pact with another friend that if any of us ever won an Academy Award, the first person had to bark their acceptance speech like a dog,” Miller told me. “The deal was that until the producer fades you out, you have to bark instead of speaking. When Phil won for ‘Capote,’ we were hoping for at least one bark but, sadly, no.”

In 1991, when Hoffman was 24, he auditioned five times and was cast in the Al Pacino film “Scent of a Woman” as the prep-school student who betrays his classmate, the lead character. “That’s when I first noticed Phil,” Nichols said. “He summed up all the ways those boarding-school bullies were scary. There is something deeply ethical about Phil as an actor that was apparent even then — he has the integrity and commitment to represent his characters without any judgment.” At the time, Hoffman was living in Brooklyn (“with just a futon”) and working at a deli. “When I catch ‘Scent of a Woman’ on television now,” Hoffman said, “I’ll watch it, and I say, ‘Do less, Phil, less, less!’ Now, I’m a little mortified by parts of my performance. But back then, it was huge! It was pure joy to get to do the work. The director, Marty Brest, told me to never call acting a ‘job.’ Even now, I’ll catch myself calling it a job, and I get angry at myself.”

Paul Thomas Anderson also admired Hoffman’s performance in “Scent of a Woman.” “It was one of those ridiculous moments where you call someone and say, ‘You’re my favorite actor,’ ” Anderson told me recently. Anderson then wrote a part for Hoffman in “Boogie Nights” and, later, in “Magnolia” and cast him in “Punch-Drunk Love.” Those supporting roles — a repressed film-crew member in love with a porn star, a saintly hospice nurse, a menacing proprietor of a phone-sex operation — became part of Hoffman’s collection of precisely drawn, scene-stealing characters. “I remember seeing Philip in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ ” Streep told me. “He played a rich, spoiled snob, and I sat up straight in my seat and said, ‘Who is that?’ I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless. He’s done what we all strive for — he’s given this awful character the respect he deserves, and he’s made him fascinating.”

Hoffman’s role in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was Freddie Miles, a close friend of the golden-boy protagonist, whom Hoffman played as a somewhat boorish, future captain of industry living in a constant state of plush pleasure. “He’s existing in a ‘just about to take the beautiful woman’s clothes off’ world,” Hoffman told me. “And he doesn’t like anything interfering with that mood.” Unlike Freddie, however, most of Hoffman’s characters have been profoundly vulnerable, often disenfranchised misfits. In Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” he played Allen, an insecure man who masturbates while making obscene phone calls. “That wasn’t easy,” Hoffman said now. “It’s hard to sit in your boxers and jerk off in front of people for three hours. I was pretty heavy, and I was afraid that people would laugh at me. Todd said they might laugh, but they won’t laugh at you. He saw what we were working for, which was the pathos of the moment.” Hoffman paused. “Sometimes, acting is a really private thing that you do for the world.”

“AROUND 2004,” BENNETT MILLER SAID, “Phil was where Truman Capote was in his life before he wrote ‘In Cold Blood.’ He was respected by everyone, but he hadn’t fulfilled his true potential on film. And yet Phil regarded playing Capote with absolute dread. Phil told me, I’m too big and physically too different. I said: ‘That’s not what this movie is about. Who cares if Capote was short and you’re not — that’s not the point.’ I knew that Phil, like Capote, had the charm, the ambition and the talent to both be great and self-destructive. I told Phil to lose weight and the rest would be my problem. And then he showed up, and I thought: What did I promise? He’s 5-foot-10 and 230 pounds? What have I done?”

Capote was a dramatic departure for Hoffman. Not only is he in nearly every frame of the movie, but the man was entirely contradictory — he was charismatic but an outsider; always watchful but loved a party; inordinately talented but competitive to a fault. Capote was seductive, manipulative, insecure, dishonest and ruthless. It intrigued Hoffman that Capote was very successful but a bit lost and, like him, wasn’t sure which path to take. Strangely, “Capote” was Hoffman’s “In Cold Blood,” the project that changed everything.

“I knew that it would be great, but I still took the role kicking and screaming,” Hoffman said now, as he ordered sticky pudding for desert. “Playing Capote took a lot of concentration. I prepared for four and a half months. I read and listened to his voice and watched videos of him on TV. Sometimes being an actor is like being some kind of detective where you’re on the search for a secret that will unlock the character. With Capote, the part required me to be a little unbalanced, and that wasn’t really good for my mental health. It was also a technically difficult part. Because I was holding my body in a way it doesn’t want to be held and because I was speaking in a voice that my vocal cords did not want to do, I had to stay in character all day. Otherwise, I would give my body the chance to bail on me.”

There was nothing easy about the shoot. Winnipeg, Canada, doubled for Kansas, and it was freezing; money was short and Hoffman’s company, Cooperstown, was a producer of the movie. “That may have been crazy to take on,” Hoffman said, “but as much as I hated spending Sundays — which was my day off — attending production meetings, it took me away from the obsession of acting the part. Putting that obsession somewhere else is rejuvenating.”

By the end, all the relationships were strained. “It was a very happy thing to have something that you suffered over be embraced,” Miller said. “A few weeks before the Oscars, we were at the Berlin film festival, and we were completely fatigued and longing for the finish line. Phil said, ‘I’m going to go in the theater and watch the end of the movie.’ He came out afterward, and his face was wet with tears. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. Phil, at that moment, was just an audience member. He wasn’t Capote anymore.”

THREE MONTHS AFTER HOFFMAN returned from London, on a freezing Friday night in early December, he was standing in front of the Public Theater in the East Village of Manhattan smoking a cigarette. He was there to see an early staging — “it’s only the third time all these words have been said in a row,” Hoffman told me — of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” a new play by David Bar Katz that LAByrinth is producing. LAB has a long-standing relationship with the Public Theater, which often makes its auditoriums available to the company. Hoffman, wearing a baseball hat and bundled in a heavy twill jacket that looked as if it was designed with farming in mind, cradled a pair of large headphones around his neck. “I’m playing a character who always listens to headphones,” Hoffman explained. “So tonight I thought, I’ll use them — I’ll be that guy who always has headphones on. And I put on the Cat Stevens song, ‘Trouble.’ You know, ‘Trouble set me free.’ What a great song! I had forgotten. A lot of times, a song will let you down halfway through, but that song is great to the very end.”

The part Hoffman was rehearsing on his way to meet me was a part he hoped never to play: one of the lead roles in a screen adaptation of “Jack Goes Boating,” a play about four pot-smoking friends and their quest for love, which was first staged at LAB in 2007 and which he plans to direct as a film next year. In London, he had been adamant about not wanting to direct himself. But none of the actors he hoped to cast were available, and the shoot had already been scheduled for February.

“I’m in denial about this,” Hoffman said as he finished his cigarette. “Complete denial. I have no idea about what I’m doing. I was in the play, but I don’t remember what I did. That was a year and a half ago, and even then, I was kind of unsure about the character. But if I don’t direct the movie now, I’m not going to do it, and it’s an extension of the theater company. And that’s why I got into this whole acting thing to begin with — to be part of a theater company, to do new plays. Making this movie is about being loyal to that somehow.”

Hoffman’s loyalty to work keeps him very busy: in September, “Riflemind” opened in London to stinging reviews (The Independent called it “mortifyingly bad”; The Sunday Times chided, “nearly three grueling hours of stifling your yawns”), even if Hoffman’s direction was noted with less vitriol. He then returned to New York, where he lives downtown with Mimi O’Donnell and their son, Cooper, and daughter, Tallulah, in time for the birth of their third child — a girl named Willa — in late October. “It’s three kids now and I’m very tired,” Hoffman said. “I’m a little lost in my brain.” He has a movie coming out next spring, “The Boat That Rocked,” in which he plays a D.J., and he lent his voice to “Mary and Max,” which has just been chosen to open the Sundance Film Festival. In November, Hoffman found two weeks to do a workshop of “Othello” with Sellars, before it is performed in Vienna and perhaps New York next fall. He made a trip to Austin, Tex., in search of funds for LAB, and he flew to Los Angeles to promote “Doubt” for a few days. In the last week, after screenings of the film for Academy Award voters, he had three question-and-answer sessions with the cast and director of “Doubt”; he attended the Gotham Independent Film Awards, which were held at Cipriani on Wall Street, where “Synecdoche, New York” shared the prize for “Best Ensemble” with “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”; and he looked at photographs of pools for scenes in his new film, talked to cinematographers and imagined the movie he would soon direct. “It’s a lot,” Hoffman said, as David Bar Katz, the author of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” bounded over to greet him.

Hoffman has always been attracted to the idea of an artistic community, particularly in the theater, which is part of why he is so attached to LAB. He met Mimi, a costume designer who has recently begun directing, at LAB (“I hired her,” Hoffman joked), and the company members are some of his closest friends. When he began his film career, he worked in a similar way, joining what you might call the Paul Thomas Anderson repertory company, which included John C. Reilly and Julianne Moore, among others. Hoffman appeared in all of Anderson’s movies until last year’s “There Will Be Blood.” The members of that group have gone on to have big careers independently, and the work they do is no longer as collective. “We had a ball then,” he said in London. “It was everyone at the right time. It was very strange not to be in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ Paul kept asking me to come to Texas where they were filming and hang out. I said I’d come, but I wanted to dress in period costume and throw stones at the oil well. I wanted the audience to say, ‘Who’s that guy chucking stones at the well?’ ”

While movies typically require an elaborate and expensive mechanism, plays can be relatively simple to produce. Every year, LAB has a two-week “summer intensive” workshop during which 35 to 40 plays are rehearsed and read. Company members — there are about 100 — offer their critiques and the artistic directors then select the 10 or 15 plays they would like to see go to the next step. “Most of us liked ‘Philip Roth in Khartoum,’ ” Hoffman said. “Some of the women had problems with it, but I asked my mother to come to a reading, and she thought the female characters rang true.” Hoffman lit another cigarette. “People only want to invest in a play that they think will do well. They are not interested in risky theater. But even more traditional theater is pure risk, which is what I love about it. You roll the dice for the thrill of rolling the dice.”

As we spoke outside the Public, Katz, clearly excited and nervous about that night’s performance, leaped into view again. Hoffman stamped out his cigarette and gave him a bear hug. Katz, who was wearing a complicated gray overcoat that looked a little more Hollywood screenwriter than downtown playwright, has worked extensively with John Leguizamo and has some of his frenetic energy. He clearly saw this production as a big opportunity; Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” directed by Hoffman in 2000, cemented LAB’s reputation as a theater company committed to significant new voices. “I used to think I was Catholic until I met Stephen,” Hoffman joked. “But I am not Catholic the way he is. He is tortured and haunted by that religion, and you see it in his work.”

We headed inside, veering left toward a room that had been outfitted with a hundred seats on four-tier bleachers. The stage was not raised, and there wasn’t much of a set — just some nondescript tables, stools and couches. The room was very wide, and it was hard to tell where the set stopped — often the characters appeared to be offstage when they weren’t: it was meant to evoke a TriBeCa loft that never ends.

“Philip Roth in Khartoum,” like most LAB plays, is designed to be something of a commentary on our times. “It’s about a dinner party that goes bad,” Hoffman said quietly as we took our seats in the top row. The play began with four men discussing their wives’ lack of carnal interest in them. The dialogue was funny and a little sad, but the characters were indistinct — somewhat stereotypical aging yuppies who longed for the days of easy sex. When the action moved to their spouses, the play became more engaging. But as the conflicts emerged — a severely autistic child, a wife with a more successful career than her husband’s, an interracial marriage — the play, which was two and a half hours long, began to verge on soap opera.

Hoffman seemed to love it. His attention was entirely focused, a perfect audience of one. At moments like this, it is easy to forget that Hoffman is a major movie star with an Oscar on his mantel. He appears not to have a trace of ego. “That’s why I wrote the character of the saintly nurse Phil Parma in ‘Magnolia’ for Phil,” said Paul Thomas Anderson. “Phil is that good — he’s committed to art and not in a phony, grandstanding way. He really wants to live a life in the arts that means something.” There are few other Academy Award-winning actors who have devoted themselves to the full-time running of a theater company. “It sounds noble, but it’s really not,” Hoffman said. “I do this because it gives me a home, a place where I can come and work. The movies are great, but they require a different kind of concentration, and then they’re over. Theater was my first love, and it’s been the biggest influence on my life. The theater is why I got into acting and why I’m still in acting.”

When the audience cleared out, Hoffman went backstage to talk to the actors about the performance. It felt strangely like a moment from a simpler time and place: Hoffman and his buddies putting on a show. Later that night, Hoffman would walk home in the cold listening to “Trouble” over and over on his headphones, imagining his soon-to-be-played character projected onto the big screen, but right now he was like an enthralled kid. “I’m happy here,” he said, sounding surprised at his glee. “You never forget your first love.”

“SOMETIMES WHEN I SEE a great movie or a great play I think, Being human means you’re really alone,” Hoffman told me on another cold winter night. We had just seen “Gran Torino,” the new Clint Eastwood film in which he directs himself. Eastwood plays a racist, cantankerous curmudgeon named Walt Kowalski who befriends the Hmong boy who lives next door. Kowalski is a symbol of a dying America — blue collar, militaristic, practical, afraid, proud. There’s a stylistic link between “Doubt” and “Gran Torino” — both films are rich in character and take place in a time of change. “Doubt” is set in 1964, before the upheaval of the late ’60s, and there is only one black student at the parish school in the Bronx. Similarly, “Gran Torino” depicts the last breaths of a certain kind of man: Kowalski is a former autoworker who lives his life according to strict beliefs and rules. Both films begin and end in the Catholic Church; both suggest an uncertain future. “And they are both filled with regret,” Hoffman said. We were having some pasta at an Italian restaurant near the movie theater where we had seen “Gran Torino.” “So many things I’m interested in come down to the subject of regret,” he continued as he ate his spaghetti. “That’s Capote alone on the plane at the end of ‘Capote,’ the priest and the nun in “Doubt” who make judgments they may wish they hadn’t and Clint Eastwood tonight. I try to live my life in such a way that I don’t have profound regrets. That’s probably why I work so much. I don’t want to feel I missed something important.”

Hoffman fell silent. “Gran Torino” is emotional, and he was clearly affected by the film. “I still get wide-eyed,” he said. “It’s true that I’ve made a lot of movies, and I know there’s a microphone over there and a camera back there, but when you see something great, you lose all that. I’m sitting forward, and I’m being moved, and I have no idea how he did it. I don’t know Clint Eastwood, but what’s amazing is that you have the sense that he’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing. He’s so committed. In this film, he keeps the action going, and the people don’t ever behave against their true nature. That’s what I look for in my work: when a writer can deftly describe the human experience in a way that you didn’t think could even be put into words. That doesn’t happen often, but it gives me something to play inside. Too much of the time our culture fears subtlety. They really want to make sure you get it. And when subtlety is lost, I get upset.”

When Hoffman talks about his need for emotional nuance, it’s easy to understand why he gravitates to the theater, where the great roles combine magnificent writing with intense feeling. “I’m sure Phil will do the great plays of O’Neill and Miller,” Nichols told me, “because he’s like a lion — he needs meat to feed on. And, God willing, he’ll do great movies. But those parts are harder to find in film. Movies, for me, need to be reborn. They can’t rely on the classics the way theater can.”

Hopefully, Hoffman will not give up his film career. “I heard that Eastwood is saying that this will be his last film as an actor,” Hoffman said. “There’s part of me that feels that way during almost every movie. On ‘Synecdoche,’ I paid a price. I went to the office and punched my card in, and I thought about a lot of things, and some of them involved losing myself. You try to be artful for the film, but it’s hard. I’d finish a scene, walk right off the set, go in the bathroom, close the door and just take some breaths to regain my composure. In the end, I’m grateful to feel something so deeply, and I’m also grateful that it’s over.” He smiled. “And that’s my life.”

Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.