ISBN: 978-65-86495-06-5
Título | Nostalgia e subdesenvolvimento: documentário e o imaginário brasileiro |
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Autor | Vitor Vilaverde Dias |
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Resumo Expandido | Departing from two understandings: one that documentary films may produce cultural communities and educate plural imaginaries - a movement that could generate social change within a project of education to “not only read and write words but to learn to read and write reality” (Paulo Freire, 1979). The second is that analyzing the visual archive of a certain mode of documentary film is “a multi-leveled process” (Xavier, 1982) that includes literary criticism, formal aspects from classical and modern cinema, and broader comprehension of the whole cinema apparatus. This perspective also allows an analysis that looks at films in a historical context in terms of their models of production, their relationship with film history, and the sociocultural particularities of the region (Podalsky, 2011). In hands with such methodology, I analyze the documentaries “Banana is My Business” (1995), “Cinema Novo” (2016), “Humberto Mauro” (2020), “Orí” (1989), “Pan Cinema Permanente” (2008), “Hunting Season” (1988), “Seams” (1993), “Bixa Travesty” (2019), “Elena” (2012), “The Edge of Democracy” (2019), “Ex-Shaman” (2018), “The Last Forest” (2021), “Kbela” (2015) and “Fartura” (2019), understanding them as cultural objects, I rely on authors that recognize the social diversity and on scholars that have been helping to remap the geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo, 2003), by addressing the systematic issues derived from the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). I extract from the group of documentaries resources to think and theorize about our contemporary society, but also, recognize how they could create a movement of resistance to an unbridled notion of progress, helping to build a proposition of new and plural modes of living and organizing society. Once these films are considered a socially engaged mode of filmmaking, they could lead us to the affirmation of local communities and respect for different cultures. By constructing a framework timeline from 1936, with the foundation of INCE – the National Institute of Educational Cinema created with the belief that “cinema should be employed to glorify Brazilian culture and history” (Pereira, 2021) and its paradoxical resistance to an “anti-photogenic progress” (Humberto Mauro, 2020) to then go searching for an imagined future in which Brazilian imagined territory could benefit from a set of possibilities for alternative economical sustainability, and the people could have access to wealth in abundance. After Brazilian cinema has become one of the most influential aesthetics from the Global South at the end of the 1990s, nostalgia became one of the symbolic modes of expression in accordance with a larger trend identified by Fredric Jameson and commented on by Lucia Nagib. Facing these symptoms of late capitalism, potentialized by Covid-19, the multiple possibilities brought by plural subjectivities challenged any project of national imaginary (Signorelli Heise, 2012). After presenting an experience in which the actual and the virtual merge on screen – what we can see in the frame of the film, and the expression of the self. The use of personal archives and experiences to understand the borders between collective and individual, private, and public brought the demand for a fairer division of the imagined territory. But, to build any type of place with wealth and nature, preserve or represent any story of our collective memory there is the need for “epistemic decolonization as a crucial domain of struggle towards transmodernity or alternatives to modernity” (Escobar, 2015). In the nostalgic scenario in which we encountered ourselves after the pandemic, haunted by hours of leveraged content-generating memories stored in archives of footage from cinema, television, home video, smartphone, and the Internet; what other affect could reveal to us what really means a state of a good social life than nostalgia? |
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Bibliografia | Anderson, B. Comunidades imaginadas: Reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo. 1983 |