Scenes of Capture in the City

This chapter discusses documentary approaches to subjects living in conditions of extreme marginalization. Though these subjects arguably suffer from social invisibility, becoming visible more often than not entails their capture in codes that lay beyond their control—such as the sensationalist narratives and stereotypes of the media or the incriminating gaze of institutions and representatives of the law. What are the possibilities and risks for documentary practices that, while aware of the dangers of the visible, insist on visualizing marginalized subjects? Focusing on Padilha’s Ônibus 174 (2002), Maria Augusta Ramos’ Justice (2004) and Behave! (2007), and Paulo Sacramento’s The Prisoner of the Iron Bars, Self-Portraits (2004), this chapter examines the strategies of films that locate their practice at sites where invisible subjects enter the purview of dominant society and reflect on cinema’s own forms of capture as well as on its possibilities for seeing otherwise.

Introduction

The introduction offers an overview of the documentary in contemporary Brazil and discusses the significance of archive concepts for the documentary in general and for Brazilian documentaries in particular. The archive has been undervalued as a heuristic concept in documentary film studies, which have tended to discuss it only in the literal sense of film archives and to speak of repurposed footage. The documentary, however, has an inherent affinity with the concept of the archive that becomes crucial in the work of many filmmakers. Taking Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked For Death/Twenty Years Later, 1964–1985) as a point of departure, the introduction argues that the documentary has a Janus-faced relationship with the archive, at once producing lasting records for the future and de-archiving materials from the past, returning what was hidden and stored away to the present.

Tactics of the Invisible, Shadow Archives

This chapter shifts the reflections on marginalization and visibility discussed in chapter 3 to Brasilia, the modernist capital that was built from scratch in forty-one months and completed in 1960. Embodying a strategic visuality intent on ordering urban space, Brasilia also produced massive forms of invisibility, as illustrated by the forced relocation of workers to peripheral satellite cities and by the repression of marginal histories—histories that are buried beneath the city’s surface like the bodies of workers who died during its construction. Paying special attention to Vladimir Carvalho and Adirley Queirós, this chapter examines a counter-visual cinema that is dedicated to what is invisible and even non-visual—such as the sounds of the periphery and the voices of workers whose memories contradict the official record.

Reparative Mediations

Just as the exploration of geographic areas such as the Amazon is economically extractive, an extractive logic has informed ethnographic image production from its inception. Travelers collect valuable records to fulfill the interests and needs of metropolitan publics, as well as to furnish their museums, libraries, and archives—often leaving indigenous subjects diminished by the experience of contact. The cooperative Video in the Villages (VNA) attempts to invert this extractive pattern through the repatriation of archival images to indigenous communities and the introduction of video technology for indigenous use. Focusing on the group’s inaugural video and several recent works made in collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers, this chapter traces the group’s attempt to rework the contact imaginary and re-orient the ethnographic archive to serve indigenous needs.

Epilogue

This epilogue briefly discusses the interconnections between the three parts of the book and considers additional examples of recent films that deal with contemporary issues of social justice and post-dictatorship memory while maintaining an engagement with questions of the archive. As this book has explored in several contexts, Brazilian documentaries engage critically with archives while performing archival functions of their own—producing records of what would otherwise be lost and incorporating fragments of the present and the past that are preserved for the future. At the same time, films can be the vehicle for the de-archivization of documents and materials that are unearthed from unseen records and placed into public circulation as well as given new futures through their filmic inclusion. Functioning in liminal and transitional terrains, the documentary’s interaction with concepts of the archive and archival materials allows it to reflect on and intervene in the distribution of visibilities and invisibilities, centers and margins, silences and speech, forms of authority and forms of resistance, living memory and its preservation in fixed forms.

The Melancholy Subject of History

The memory of political militancy and of the dictatorship (1964–1985) is a frequent topic in recent Brazilian films. This chapter maps out the historical context for these films and offers ways to understand the significance of these works, which deal with the transfer from communicative and embodied forms of remembering to durable memory formats, as well as with the transfer of memory from one generation to another. The chapter discusses films by former political militants, such as João Batista de Andrade, Silvio Da-Rin, and Lúcia Murat, but focuses especially on outstanding new works by the daughters of political militants, such as Petra Costa, Flávia Castro, and Maria Clara Escobar. While the work of former militants emphasizes testimonial memory and indexical records, second-generation works emphasize the fragmentary inheritance of memory and deploy an abundance of familial tropes and forms of filiation and affiliation to negotiate their subject positions vis-à-vis private and public pasts.

Homes, Archives, and Archons

The turn toward intimate terrains and private life is a major trend in contemporary documentary. Materials, styles, and themes germane to the photo album and the home movie increasingly migrate to the documentary screen and into the public sphere. As this chapter discusses, this move does not represent a retreat from the social and the historical in favor of atomistic or narcissistic self-involvement but rather a changing approach to the sociohistoric, which is rendered through the self-conscious and refracting lens of personal experience and located in the microcosm of interpersonal relationships. Engaging with the history and theory of familial image-making, this chapter explores the reworking of the home mode in Consuelo Lins’s Babás (2010), Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica (2012), and João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007)—three films that deal with relationships of power, labor, and servitude in private life and the home.

Feverish Archives, Feverish Films

Focusing on contemporary documentaries that deal with isolated indigenous groups in the Amazon, this chapter discusses a contact imaginary that was inaugurated by Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter of “discovery” to the Portuguese king in the year 1500 and re-elaborated ad nauseam in a vast corpus of films documenting encounters with indigenous people. The “contact film” constitutes an archive of predictable and endlessly repeated original contacts and “first” encounters. During the course of the twentieth century, however, this documentary subgenre becomes increasingly troubled by its own history and the destructive consequences of contact. Inheriting a burdensome legacy, contemporary films approach the remaining borders of contact with isolated indigenous groups while evincing the crisis of this imaginary and its archives—as illustrated in works by Werner Herzog, Silvio Da-Rin, Vincent Carelli, and especially by the feverish, formal experimentations of Andrea Tonacci.