(New Directions in Latino American Cultures) Jens Andermann, Álvaro Fernández Bravo (Eds.) - New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema - Reality Effects-Palgrave Macmillan US (2013)

New Directions in Latino A merican Cultures
A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & Jos Quiroga
New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zonee

by Raquel Z. Rivera
The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901
edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michele Roco Nasser
Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities
edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with a foreword by Toms Ybarra Frausto
Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature
by Gustavo Perez-Firmat
Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations
edited by Doris Sommer
Jose Martt: An Introduction
by Oscar Montero
New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s
by Rubn Gallo
The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries
edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics
by Idelber Avelar
An Intellectual History of the Caribbean
by Silvio Torres-Saillant
None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era
edited by Frances Negrn-Muntaner
Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails
by Arnaldo Cruz-Malav
The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World
edited by Ruth Behar and Luca M. Su rez
Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South
by Hermann Herlinghaus
Redrawing the Nation: National Identity in Latin/o American Comics
by Hctor Fernndez LHoeste and Juan Poblete
Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement
edited by Vanessa Prez Rosario
Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience
edited by Jacqueline Loss and Jos Manuel Prieto
Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience
by Christabelle Peters
Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulationss
by Bruce Dean Willis
New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Reality Effects
edited by Jens Andermann and lvaro Fern ndez Bravo
New Concepts in Latino American Cultures
A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & Jos Quiroga
Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age

by Enrico Mario Sant
Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place
by Jacqueline Loss
Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American
Womens Writing
by Benigno Trigo
The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise
edited by Erin Graff Zivin
Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity: From
Sensuality to Bloodshed
by Hctor Dom nguez-Ruvalcaba
White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity
by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
Essays in Cuban Intellectual History
by Rafael Rojas
Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing
by Dami n Baca
Confronting History and Modernity in Mexican Narrative
by Elisabeth Guerrero
Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria
by Madeline Cmara Betancourt
Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s
edited by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and
Disability
by Susan Antebi
Telling Ruins in Latin America
edited by Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh
New Argentine Film: Other Worldss (updated paperback edition of Other Worldss)
by Gonzalo Aguilar
New Argentine and
Brazilian Cinema
Reality Effects
Edited by
Jens Andermann and lvaro Fernndez Bravo

NEW ARGENTINE AND BRAZILIAN CINEMA
Copyright Jens Andermann and lvaro Fernndez Bravo, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-30482-7
All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
in the United States a division of St. Martins Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN 978-1-349-45461-7 ISBN 978-1-137-30483-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137304834
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First edition: March 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C on ten ts
List of Illustrationss vii
Introduction 1
1 Camera lucida 11
Joss Carlos Avellar
2 Footprints: Risks and Challenges of Contemporary
Argentine Cinema 31
David Oubia
3 Documentary Cinema and the Return of What Was 43
Andra Frana
a
4 The Return of the Natural: Landscape, Nature and
the Place of Fiction 59
Edgardo Dieleke
5 Beyond Reflexivity: Acting and Experience in
Contemporary Argentine and Brazilian Cinema 73
Joanna Page
6 The Scene and the Inscription of the Real 87
Csar Guimares
7 Global Periphery: Aesthetic and Cultural Margins in
Brazilian Audiovisual Forms 103
Ivana Bentes
8 Exploding Buses: Jos Padilha and the Hijacking
of Media 119
Tom Cohen
9 The Carandiru Massacre: Across the Mediatic Spectrum 139
Robert Stam
vi CONTENTS
10 Decembers Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and

the Politics of 2001 157
Jens Andermann
11 In Praise of Difficulty: Notes on Realism and
Narration in Contemporary Argentine Cinema 173
Domin Choi
12 The Self as Other: Reality, Archive, and the
Witness in Three Contemporary Latin American Films 185
lvaro Fern
nndez Bravo
13 The Documentary: Between Reality and Fiction, between
First and Third Person 203
Gonzalo Aguilarr
Notes on Contributorss 217

Indexx 221
Il lustr at ions
1.1 Juzoo [Behavee] (Brazil, 2007), directed by Maria

Augusta Ramos, 2008 12
3.1 Serras da Desordem m [The Hills of Disorder]r (Brazil, 2004),
directed by Andrea Tonacci 54
5.1 Estrellass [Stars] (Argentina, 2007), directed by Federico
Len and Marcos Martnez 75
6.1 Moscouu [Moscow] (Brazil, 2009), directed by
Eduardo Coutino 99
8.1 nibuss 174 [Bus 174 4] (Brazil, 2002), directed by
Jos Padilha 123
9.1 Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferroo [Prisoner of the Iron
Bars] (Brazil, 2004), directed by Paulo Sacramento 149
10.1 Habitacin disponiblee [Room for Rent] (Argentina,
2004), directed by Eva Poncet, Marcelo Burd and
Diego Gachassin 167
11.1 El secreto de sus ojoss [The Secret in Their Eyes]
(Argentina, 2009), directed by Juan Jos Campanella 175
12.1 La televisin y yoo [TV and Me] (Argentina, 2001),
directed by Andrs di Tella 197
13.1 M (Argentina, 2007), directed by Nicols Prividera 209
Introduction
In what ways can the resurgence of national cinemas in Latin America,

from the mid-1990s onward, be related to the returns of the real,
which, all over the world, have been among the most interesting
effects of the digitalization of the filmic image that overshadowed the
centenary of cinema? Along with Mexico, Brazil and Argentina have
been at the forefront of a Latin American film revival that has since
spread to formerly minor national cinemas such as Chile, Peru,
Colombia, and even Uruguay and Paraguay. As Lcia Nagib points
out, a common denominator of many of these revivals or retoma-
dass (literally, beginnings-anew)as the most recent wave of national
productions has become known in Brazilhas been the reintroduc-
tion of federal subsidies by democratic governments following the
end of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and the ensuing,
continent-wide austerity policies applied under the framework of the
so-called Washington Consensus. In Brazil, the Rouanet Law of 1991
and the Audiovisual Law of 1993 gradually reestablished a national
funding framework after the State production company Embrafilme,
in charge of administering public subsidies for film production since
1969, had been closed down under President Collor in 1990. In
Argentina, the Film Law of 1994, which, for the first time, estab-
lished a comprehensive fee scheme for film and TV screenings as well
as video rentals, revenue of which was channeled back into production
subsidies, had a similar impact of reviving a national production that
had reached a historic low point in numbers of annual feature releases
(Aguilar, 2006: 195206; Andermann, 2011: 110). But apart from
a more favorable context of production at home, Nagib argues, the
Latin American revivals of the 1990s also resulted from a global
situation which welcomed multicultural expressions, especially when
they combined auteurist impulses with local color and certain doses
2 JENS ANDERMANN AND LVARO FERNNDEZ BRAVO
of conventional genres (Nagib, 2007: xviiixix), effectively provid-

ing global audiences with auto-ethnographic insights into the way
globalization impacts on, and is resisted from, distant locations.
Yet, while they thrive on a globaland vernaculardemand for
local difference made accessible through the filmic image, thus
also turning the latter into a tool ideally suited to the construction
of social knowledge, film scholar Joanna Page has argued that the
films of the Latin American new wave also make a habit of frus-
tratingg the epistophilic desires usually associated with documentary
spectatorship (Page, 2009: 36). Rather than simply transform the
screen into a transparent window through which to access the raw-
ness of things in the street (Oubia, 2000: 34), as many critics
initially welcomed the films made by young directors in the mid
and late nineties, Page suggests that the real achievement of New
Argentine (and, one might add, Brazilian) cinema lay in question-
ing cinemas capacity for delivering such social diagnostics, at least
in the totalizing sense in which the modern Latin American cinema
of the sixties, with directors such as Glauber Rocha or Fernando
Solanas, had sought to portray the social and political plight of the
nation. Instead, by self-reflexively drawing attention to the appar-
ently transparent modes of representation, Page concludes, con-
temporary films from Latin America often sugges[t] that the real
subject of these films is not society so much as the gaze itself (Page,
2009: 36).
It is not hard to recognize, in this dispute between critics who
place emphasis on the social experience that is registered, in its very
materiality, by the filmic image, and those who focus more on the
means by which such representations are obtained, a tension running
through the theory of film in general and that of cinematic realism
in particular. Fredric Jameson, in a seminal essay, points to the con-
tradictory claims that cinematic realism invariably comes up against:
on the one hand, being entrusted with the representation of truth,
it must keep the interference of the apparatus to a minimum, so as to
downplayor even downright concealthe mediated and manufac-
tured nature of the image; on the other hand, as a critique of illu-
sion, it is supposed to unmask and break down the false, or staged,
images of the real by turning attention to the very devices (techni-
cal and rhetorical) of its fabrication. For Jameson, consequently,
no viable conception of realism is possible unless both demands
or claims are honored simultaneously, prolonging and preserving
rather than resolvingthis constitutive tension and incommensu-
rability (Jameson, 1992: 158). Unlike its historical predecessor and
INTRODUCTION 3
successorthe modernist avant-garde and postmodernismrealism

in film cannot escape this tension because it cannot let go of the
possibility of knowledge, the potential for accessing historical expe-
rience by means of the image, which modernism had subordinated to
the autonomy of the artwork and postmodernism gives up in favor of
the narcissism of citation and pastiche.
Remarkably, the two examples Jameson refers to in his essay
originally published in 1992 to signal a possible overcoming of
postmodernism by what he calls a neo-documentary turn, come
from a Latin American context. One is testimonial literature (in
particular, the accounts of Central American revolutionary strug-
gle, which, during the same period, were the subject of polemic
in the North American academy); the other, Brazilian director
Eduardo Coutinhos film Cabra Marcado Para Morrerr (Twenty
Years Later,r 1984), in which Coutinho revisits the locations and
surviving collaborators of an earlier documentary project on peas-
ant resistance aborted by the military coup of 1964. In Coutinhos
film, Jameson sees the emergence of a new concept of the real as
both encountered and produced by the film which registers it,
anticipating the documentarys subjective or performative turn
(Bruzzi, 2006 [2000]; Renov, 2004). Yet, the real thus also figures
as the traumatic remainder of events which cannot be accounted
for except by restaging, and forcing out, their traces and effects. In
neo-documentary as opposed to classical-realist films, Jameson
argues, Materialismor the material signifieris . . . not a func-
tion of some historical truth, which might be set in opposition to
the fictive; nor even an event whose representation we passively con-
template; but lies rather in the way in which the production process
becomes an event in its own right and comes to include our own
reception of it (Jameson, 1992: 190).
Jamesons discussion of Coutinho is important here because it
prefigures several of this books main concernsjust as the film it
analyzes anticipates many of the issues and tendencies coming to
fruition in Brazilian and Argentine cinema some 20 years onward.
In both of these, a trend that can be observed in cinemas world-
widein the work of, say, filmmakers such as Jia Zhang-Ke, Pedro
Costa, Abbas Kiarostami, or Avi Mograbiof blurring the bound-
ary between fiction and documentary, between the real and the
staged, experience and performance, has been taken up in ways that
are at once conversant with this global trend and radically singular
and contingent on the characters and situations triggering each indi-
vidual work. The films of, among others, Lisandro Alonso, Andrs
Di Tella, Joo Moreira Salles, Andrea Tonacci, as well as the most

recent films by Coutinho himself, in their reflexive engagement
with theater and actorship, are thus of central importance to the
contributors of this book not so much for the way in which they are
representative of the current state of Brazilian or Argentine film,
but rather for the way in which they allow us to formulate certain
theoretical inquiries about cinema itself at the advent of the digital
image, which, while not exclusive to the Latin American context,
nevertheless attain a peculiarity proper to these peripheral cin-
ematographies, which it is worth exploring in its own right. How,
for instance, can we rethink the concept of the index that, from
Kracauer and Bazin onward, has been of such cardinal importance
for theories of cinematic realism grounded in the materiality of
the photographic tracenot least, of course, for Latin American
cinematic modernity in the sixties and seventies, with its deliber-
ate attempts to turn the scarcity of means and technical resources
into a programmatic option for direct witnessing of, and joining
in, the struggle of the poor? Films such as Alonsos La libertad
(Freedom, 2001), where the lumberjack Misael Saavedra plays
a character called Misael Saavedra who works as a lumberjack, or
Andrea Tonaccis Serras da Desordem m (The Hills of Disorder,r 2004),
where the Indian Carapiru is alternately the interviewee of a docu-
mentary inquest into his life (invariably frustrated by Carapirus
lack of knowledge of Portuguese) and the character of a restaged,
narrative performance of his own past, both revisit this previous
moment of Argentine and Brazilian cinematic modernity and d point
to the radical ambiguity of a real constantly lingering on the
verge of experience and performance, materiality and mise-en-scne. e
At the same time, as Domin Choi, Ivana Bentes, and Tom Cohen
argue in their contributions to this book with respect to the block-
buster movies of Juan Jos Campanella, Fernando Meirelles, and
Jos Padilha, categories and aesthetic protocols once associated
with filmic realism (such as depth-of-field, internal montage, the
use of nonprofessional actors, and so forth) no longer automatically
guarantee access to an unstaged real or testify to filmmakers
adherence to an anti-industrial and independent ethos.
But, this book argues, the question about the reality effects in
contemporary cinema needs to be asked not just in abstract terms but
by relating the aesthetic solutions (and challenges) encountered in
individual films and auteurs back to the wider context of film produc-
tion and circulation from which they have emerged. One of the aims
of the following chapters, then, is to challenge simplistic notions of
INTRODUCTION 5
a unified new Latin American cinema and instead call attention to

the different conditions of enunciation, which complicate (and pro-
ductively so) the notion of world cinema. The challenge here refers
to the need to read formal and thematic similarities between recent
films from Argentina and Brazil against the horizon of vastly dis-
similar conditions of production and distribution, and thus to place
them in dialogue with, on the one hand, the global concerns of con-
temporary film culture and critique with which they engage and, on
the other, to write them back into genealogies and constellations that
are specific to Argentina and Brazil. The comparison between these
two cinematographies is auspicious precisely in view of their different
inscriptions in global and national markets, which circumscribe their
conditions of enunciation. In Brazil, we witness the recovery of an
internal market since the mid-nineties, dominated to a large extent
by audiovisual conglomerates such as TV Globo, capable of fund-
ing productions with relatively large budgets and aimed at global as
well as vernacular marketsincluding, among others, Walter Salless
Central do Brasill (Central Station, 1998), Meirelless Cidade de Deus
(City of God, 2002), and Padilhas Tropa de Elite I and III (Elite Squad,
d
2007 and 2010)as well as more medium-sized genre features aimed
primarily at the national box office.1 In Argentina, meanwhile, the
collapse in the late nineties of an economic model based on pegging
the national currency to the US dollar imposedwith few exceptions
such as Campanellas El hijo de la novia a (Son of the Bride, 2001) or
Fabin Bielinskys Nueve Reinass (Nine Queens, 2000)the need to
privilege an arthouse cinema, with a view to recover its more mod-
est budgets through festival and niche audiences both at home and
abroad.2 While the impact of these wider economic contexts on the
formal aesthetics of individual films should not be overstated, they
nevertheless also overshadow critical debates in both countries. Only
the capacity of Meirelless and Padilhas films for interpellating large
audiences, for example, accounts for the heated public debates in
Brazil on these films alleged stereotyping of poverty and violence,
and on the ethics and politics of audiovisual representation more
generally, which has largely been absent from the Argentine context.
Here, on the contrary, discussions have increasingly focused on the
presumed incapacity of New Argentine Cinema of surmounting its
own structural limitations and reaching out to audiences beyond the
international festival circuit.
The essays collected here aim to give English-speaking read-
ers a comparative overview of these critical debates, at the same
time as they attempt to delink the evaluation of particular films
and auteurs from the immediate context of their vernacular recep-

tion and instead map them into wider debates on the cinematic real
around the turn of the millennium. In the opening chapter, Jos
Carlos Avellar discusses a range of recent Brazilian filmsboth
fictions and documentariesin order to problematize the rela-
tion between the cameras gaze and the actor/subject it beholds, a
relation in which he traces a mode of cinematic reflection on (and
critique of) the ways in which subjectivity and citizenship are con-
stituted or withdrawn in a deeply rifted society. David Oubi a, in
the following balance of New Argentine Cinema, highlights the
risks involved in the latters neo-realist protocols, with their
potential to relapse into romanticized or exoticist token representa-
tions of otherness that end up reifying, rather than critiquing, social
inequalities. The following essays tackle questions of archival foot-
age and restaging in contemporary documentary practice. Andra
Franas chapter compares Joo Baptista de Andrades 1978 docu-
mentary on a rural bandit killed by the police, Wilsinho Galilia a,
which was censored by the dictatorship, with Tonaccis Serras da
Desordem, in order to compare how both films reconstruct an image
of violence that is missing from the audiovisual archive. Referring to
Georges Didi-Hubermans reflections on the visual memory of the
Holocaust, Frana argues that the restaged footage in both films,
rather than reoccupying this void with a fully achieved scenic pres-
ence, points to its very impossibility and thus urges us to reflect
on the way the archive itself reproduces violence through its acts
of exclusion. Edgardo Dieleke, in comparing Tonaccis film with
Lisandro Alonsos La libertad d (Freedom, 2001) and Los muertoss (The
Dead, 2004), focuses our attention on the circumscribed natural
habitats of their protagonists. These environments, Dieleke argues,
have already become stagelike even beforee the camera encounters
them, because their demarcation on behalf of an advancing civili-
zation puts them under appeal as mere anachronisms, as remnants
or curiosities. Yet Alonsos and Tonaccis films, Dieleke suggests,
also counteract civilizations capture of otherness by emphasizing
theatricality as a site of ambiguity and opacity that forecloses rather
than reveals the secret of the other. A different kind of interplay
between film and theatre is the subject of Joanna Pages chapter,
which analyzes recent work by Federico Len, Mart n Rejtman,
and Eduardo Coutinho. These, instead of performatizing the
documentary make performance itself the subject of documentary.
Page shows how Coutinhos and Len/Rejtmans films, rather
than relapsing into a postmodern fascination with simulation and
INTRODUCTION 7
self-referentiality, reflect on the radical wager an actors perfor-

mance places on real-life experience.
Csar Guimares, in the following chapter, argues for the need
to reconceptualize the distinction between documentary and fiction.
Comparing Orlando Senas and Jorge Bodanzkys classic Iracema,
uma transa amaznica a (Iracema, 1976) with Coutinhos recent films,
he suggests that verisimilitude, as a regime of truth once reserved
to fiction, has today occupied the place the documentary had tradi-
tionally allocated to evidence. Ivana Bentes, meanwhile, contrasts
the theatrical and carnivalizing strategies of shantytown dwellers
self-representations in Brazilian rap videos and street theatre with
affect and action-centered blockbusters such as Meirelless City of
God d and Padilhas Elite Squadd dyptich. The way in which these films
exploit social discourses of fear and release their affective baggage
into the pleasurable discharges of violent action cinema, she argues,
is symptomatic of the way late capitalist society specularizesthat
is, exacerbates and fetishizesthe violence it sets in motion through
social exclusion. A different argument is formulated by Tom Cohen
in his analysis of Padilhas previous film, the documentary nibus
1744 (Bus 174, 2002). Drawing on Hitchcocks reflections on cin-
ematic realism, Cohen reads the viewing cabin of the title-giving
bus involved in a bloody hostage drama, transmitted in real time on
national TV, as a figuration of the postcinematic experience itself. He
asks what cinemaand documentary in particularcan do when it
encounters an other that has already been cinematized, to the
point of turning invisible through its very excess of visibility. Jens
Andermanns and Robert Stams contributions also interrogate the
specificity of cinema vis--vis other audiovisual media in staging and
exposing the political and social present. Working around key events in
recent Argentine and Brazilian history such as the popular uprising of
December 2001at the height of Argentinas financial defaultand
the police massacre at So Paulos high-security prison of Carandir
in 1992, both chapters attempt to determine the particularities of the
filmic image in comparison with not just TV news footage but also
with new counter-informational forms such as music videos, activist
and amateur footage live-streamed through the internet.
Domin Choi also compares low-budget arthouse films such as
Alonsos Liverpooll (2008) or Juan Villegas / Alejandro Lingentis
Ocioo (Leisure, 2010) and blockbusters such as Juan Jos Campanellas
Oscar-winning El secreto de sus ojoss (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2010),
but only in order to suggest a recent change in the very notion of
cinematic realism. Rather than to continue associating the real with
duration and deep focus, he suggests, the advent of digital technol-

ogy demands a reappraisal of the workk of cinema in constructingg the
transparency of perception that allows for reality effects to emerge.
The final chapters by lvaro Fernndez Bravo and Gonzalo Aguilar
engage with questions of biography, subjectivity, and personhood.
Fernndez Bravo compares Joo Moreira Salless Santiagoo (2007) with
Andrs Di Tellas La televisin y yoo (TV and Me, 2002) and Sandra
Koguts Um Passaporte H Hngaroo (A Hungarian Passport, t 2002).
Fernndez Bravo reads these cinematic auto-fictions as a crossroad
between the mediality and archives of modernity (cinema, photogra-
phy, video), reenactment as a form of reclaiming the past as heritage,
and the self-inscriptions of the documentarist as an embattled and
fragile, indeed a vicarious subject. In the films of Alonso and Moreira
Salles, Aguilar also traces a new relation between documentary sto-
rytelling and its remainders, which constantly interrupt the narrative
flow of the filmic text. The most pressing question both in Alonsos
fictional and in Salless documentary cinema, Aguilar suggests,
is therefore the one of personhood itselfnot the first, second, or
third person in particular but the very inscription of the living into
forms of address and representation capable of reaching out to the
spectator.
Notes
1. See, for an overview of feature releases and their production models,
Oricchio, 2003; Frana, 2005.
2. See, on the development of production models in Argentine cinema
before and after the economic default of 2001, Aprea 2008: 1325;
Page, 2009: 917.
Bibliography
Aguilar, Gonzalo. Otros mundos. Ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino.
Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2006. [English edition: Other Worlds. New
Argentine Film. New York: Palgrave, 2008.]
Andermann, Jens. New Argentine Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.
Aprea, Gustavo. Cine y pollticas en Argentina. Continuidades y discontinui-
dades en 25 aos de democracia. Buenos Aires / Los Polvorines: Biblioteca
Nacional / Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento, 2008.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. New York: Routledge, 2006 [orig.
2000].
Frana, Jussara. Precisamos ter um cinema nacional? A retomada do cinema
brasileiro. So Paulo: PUC-SP, 2005.
INTRODUCTION 9
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992.

Nagib, Lcia. Brazil on Screen. Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London:
I. B. Tauris, 2007
7.
Oricchio, Luiz Zanin. Cinema de Novo: um balan rtico da retomada. So
no cr
Paulo: Estao Liberdade, 2003.
Oubia, David. Argentinas Gritty Resurgence. UNESCO Courierr 53, no.
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Page, Joanna. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. a
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004.
CH A P T ER 1
C amera l ucida
Jos Carlos Avellar*

r
1
Every inch, she is the stern mother who rebukes her son for misbe-
having (They call you to go stealing and you just go?) instead of
dedicating himself to his work (You could be washing cars or selling
sweets on the train). She tells her daughters off (You are too young
to be a mother. But you just have kids anyway! Well, take care of
them, then!) and does not accept the argument that they robbed out
of necessity (There is no excuse. You dont have a job? Get one!).
She gets angry because she is afraid of losing her son (Do you want
them to kill you? When the shooting starts, youre the one wholl
get the bullet). She reminds her son of the sacrifices that have been
made for him (Your father had a hard time bringing you up and not
for you to be a thief). She loses her patience with the son who com-
mitted a stupidity (A guy you dont even know comes up to you and
asks you to get hold of a gun and you do?).
The son lowers his head (Yes, mother). The daughter lowers her
voice (We only snatched it and ran away). The sons and daughters
talk with choked voices, suspension dots and lots of silences; their
sentences start and falter (Anyway . . . I bumped into him at that
place. . . . So he called me over to do this thing. . . . So I was like. . . . But
then hee said: Beat it . . . so, I left).
Juzo [Behave] (Maria Augusta Ramos, 2008): in the court room
of Rio de Janeiros Second Juvenile Court, called upon to deliver
justice in a context where the parents have not been granted the
least chance to educate their children, a female judge appears like
12 JOS CARLOS AVELLAR
the composite image of the various mothers who accompany their

offspring at these trials. Part of her is the mother who weeps because
her daughter does not want to come home (so many things depend
on me alone; I have to be mother as well as father, offer love and
affection as well as correct them). Another part, the mother who
explains with her head slightly inclined that she is unable to leave
the favela where she lives and so take her son away from bad influ-
ences. Another part, the mother who defends the extreme act of her
son who killed his father with a knife (He hit him with his belt
every day. He managed to break the clasp. My son even fainted.
Twice he fainted). And another part, one of those mothers who
come to the Pedro Severino Institute for juvenile delinquents to
embrace their sons in a sad silence that is barely interrupted by the
muffled sound of the hall where the families are reunited on visit-
ing days. The female judge is in part all of this, but at the same time
she is much more than this: she is a desperate attempt to maintain
a minimum of lucidity.
Beyond the not-all-too-distant image of the juvenile delinquents
mothers, the juza that is to say, the real judge but also, above all,
the judge as a character in the filmis herself not unlike a camera.
In those scenes where the sons have no future whatsoever, in those
situations where the mother does not have the means to avoid her son
being victimized by the violence and chaos around him, she assumes
a role between that of a mother and a step-mother: she is the voice
Figure 1.1 Juzo [Behave] (Brazil, 2007), directed by Maria Augusta

Ramos, 2008.
CAMERA LUCIDA 13
of authority that sternly rebukes the girl who became a mother while
still being a girl herself and she is the voice of authority that almost
falls silent when faced with the minor who killed his father with a
knife, thus turning into an aggressor as well as a victim. Being cam-
era, lens, and zoom, the judge tries to stay focused, get the light
right, and pays attention to how the scene is framed.
The image has two cameras, one appearing on stage in the figure
of the judge and one filming the scene; both teach us to listen to
what is being said in the court room and also to what is nott being
said. They teach us how to see society as an entity composed of
parts that do not speak to one another. The court room produces a
temporary fusion: in fact, the judge and the young offender, both
of whom appear in the same frame, inhabit different spaces. One
image appears within the other. One image is captured by the other.
As if the two were one. But in reality they belong to universes as
distant from each other as the favela a is removed from the city: a
world away yet fused; the favela a is inside the city at the same time
as it is outside the city. What we are confronted with is the fact that
the favelass of the city speak one language and the city of favelas
quite another.
The judge asks the young offender if it was worth abandoning
school and family: Was it worth going to prison? He does not
understand the question. He would like to say No, but, feeling
pressured (I got nervous) since the judge talks a lot and very fast, he
no longer knows what he ought to say and instead of No he answers
Yes; he says what he did not want to say, namely that it was worth
going to prison.
With the images of the cells at the Padre Severino Institute, of the
streets and houses of the favelaa and, especially, of the court rooms of
the Juvenile Court, Ju o shows a composite image of an entire social
uzo
mechanism that produces the young offender. During the hearings,
more than just the actual hearing is shown. The judicial process also
reveals (by making us see what itt sees) the social inequality that leads
to stealing or selling drugs in order to buy a pair of trainers that cost
more than the minimum wage. Silent and attentive, from behind the
accused, facing the judge and the public prosecutor and next to the
defense lawyer the camera does not lose sight of that which becomes
apparent during the hearing: the impossibility of dialogue. The lan-
guage appears to be the same, but the words refer to different realities
and experiences.
The public prosecutor, the defendant, the defense lawyer, the
judge, the examining magistrate, the relatives of the accused: no one
is sure if they heard what they have just heard. What to do? What
action should be taken? What to do with the delinquent who escaped
from a juvenile detention centre after his freedom had been declared?
What to do with the girl-mother who stole a camera from a tourist
in Leblon in order to feed her daughter? What to do with the girl
who prefers going to jail to returning home? What to do? Look them
straight in the eye is what the film suggests. Start with seeing eye to
eye; face the question.
As it enters the court room, cinema teaches us to listen to what is
said between the lines and to see this slice of documented reality as a
real scene and, at the same time, as a film scene. As a scene that uses
what is present to refer to what is absent. As a scene that is aware that
in film every shot implies a reverse shot, that every frame also talks
about what is outside of the frame. The act of filming in the court
room tells usas film usually does, perhaps even more sothat it is
important to see things in motion.
All of a sudden, the camera takes the viewpoint of the judge and
the viewer is directly confronted with the young offender who is being
interrogatedthe one who stole a bicycle, the one who snatched a
camera from a tourist, the one who took part in an armed robbery,
the one who refuses to return home, the one who climbed a wall to
go to school, the one who killed his father because he hit him and his
mother. They all talk straight to the camera.
The face of the young offender who answers the judges questions
is, so to speak, only half of the image that is presented to the viewer.
To see the face of the young offender who is being interrogated is to
see, at the same time, the face of the judge, at that moment off cam-
era. In seeing this image, or any cinematographic image for that mat-
ter, the viewer is simultaneously aware of what is on screen and of the
point of view from which the shot is taken. It is as if the half-a-person
that is the viewer in the course of the film jumps out of him or herself
in order to look back at the scene from another point of view. In the
cinema, while the film lasts and just as in a dream, we are an amalga-
mation: half of us watches the scene from a little distance, while the
other half adopts the screen characters the point of view.
Since the identification of young offenders is against the law, Juzo
offers an image that is the result of a procedure that appears to be
straightforward: the offenders are replaced by young nonoffenders
who repeat in front of the camera what the defendants said during
interrogation by the judge. What seems straightforward is, in fact,
anything but straightforward, since the aim here is not to show the
court the way it is shown in most fictional films, with a gaze that
CAMERA LUCIDA 15
moves from shot to reverse shot and back to the shot. Before the
camera, the youngsters are interpretersbut not quite actors. They
live in conditions very similar to those of the real offenders who are
filmed with their backs to the camera. They recite texts and recre-
ate the interrogation, not because they have been trained to do so,
nor because they have a natural ability for acting, but because they
have direct life experience. This is worth reiterating: the acting is not
the result of a method, of a convincing effort by the actor. To pre-
pare themselves, these youngsters watched footage from the hearings.
They memorized the words they had to say in the dock of the accused;
they repeated the responses for the camera filming the scene from the
judges seat. The camera, at that moment perhaps more intensely than
at any other moment, records. It does not record the interpretation,
but the person who interprets. It records the interpreter. Juzoo does
not actually show the character played by the nonoffending youth,
but the youth who plays himself. These quasi actors are not part of
the scene; they are part of another scene that is superimposed on
the one in which they play; they play the persons they really are. e
Although they are visible and on camera, it is as if they were off cam-
era, as if they were merely a shadow of what is highlighted by the
dramatic point of view. Without losing sight of the light, however, we
perceive the shadow. That which in fiction would be the mise-en-scne
collapsethat the actor for one reason or another is more apparent
than the character he is supposed to playhere, by contrast, makes
the scene more expressive.
The viewer is invited to establish another relation with the image:
the judges, public prosecutors, defense lawyers, examining magis-
trates, relatives, and personnel of the Second Juvenile Court and the
Pedro Severino Institute are perceived as elements taken from reality
and used, so to speak, to stage a quasi-fictitious scene. As is usual in
film, the meaning of the image exceeds the mere recognition of its
formal constituents. The footage, the part of the actual scene that
was shot, is the raw material for the construction of a representation,
a cinematographic composition. Reality turned into image becomes
fiction; and vice versa, fiction becomes reality. The youngsters who
repeat the responses the defendants give during the actual trial are
elements of fiction deployed in order to go beyond the representation
so as to return to the reality that lies at the root of the scene. This
fiction, without ceasing to be what it really isa staged sceneis
more than just that: it mutates into a live recording; it documents
the reality of the quasi actors who are called upon to reconstruct an
experience that took place in reality and that, directly or indirectly,
was also experienced by them. The young offenders, the ones who
actually stood in the defendants dock, are their alter egos. In playing
the other, the young nonactors play themselves. The physical resem-
blance between the boys and girls whose backs we see in the court
room and the boys and girls who turn to face the camera is not due
to some cinematographic special effect. They have the same repressed
gestures, the same timid voices: they are, to all intents and purposes,
the same persons. s
The simultaneous presence of the two Is can perhaps be bet-
ter understood if we establish a parallel between Juzoo and Jogo de
cenaa [Playing]
g (Eduardo Coutinho, 2008). Both films were shot and
released at about the same time, and both use similar procedures:
the montage of fictional scenes (perhaps it would be better to say
staged scenes) together with real scenes (perhaps it would be better
to say nonstaged scenes). We usually distinguish between real and
fictitious scenes, but it is doubtful whether we can speak of fiction or,
indeed, of reality in relation to Maria Augusta Ramoss and Eduardo
Coutinhos films. In their works, fiction is not content with being the
freely imagined scene that it actually is, nor is the real scene content to
be the direct reflection of reality that it actually is. What we have in
both films is a reconstruction, a reflection that inserts into the image
a fragment of reality and its alter ego, or, if we prefer, a fragment of
fiction and itss alter ego. This is a radicalization of behavior that is the
essence of cinematography.
2
Let us imagine reconstruction not as a way of reflecting an event that
actually took place, but as a way of reflecting onn the event and thus of
representing reflection, taking the word as an element in a represen-
tational gameplaying at playingbut also referring to the double
meaning of the word reflection.
The simultaneous presence in the image of a real person and his or
her other self results from a desire not to be limited to recording the
visible world by means of the cinematic apparatusnot to re-present
or present anew, but to representt reality. To make the unseen visible. To
project onto the screen a cinematic image and its alter ego, reality.1
Maybe one could say that consciously or unconsciously, the docu-
mentarist discusses a part of him or herself in the image of the other.
He or she produces a kind of self-portrait through what is being
filmed (as Eduardo Coutinho observes: I only film the other in
order to resolve some unhappiness within myself).
CAMERA LUCIDA 17
To a greater or lesser extent, while they are filming, documenta-

rists are not themselves any longer. They film as if they were another
person. In the words of Co Guimares:
If my topic is reality, I cannot free myself from it, nor can it free itself
from me. In the exercise of reciprocitythat generous form of surren-
dervarious gradations of subjectivity are interacting. The question
is not that of objectifying my own gaze turned towards reality, but to
mingle my subjectivity with the subjectivity of the other. Sometimes
emptying oneself, in the Zen Buddhist sense of the word, and some-
times augmenting ones self until it overflows . . . while I am filming
I am a different person, I am a cavalo de santoo or saints horse as
they say in Candombl about those who embody spirits: I give form to
something that is beyond my comprehension. (Guimares, 2006: 126)
To make a documentary, agrees Geraldo Sarno, is to empty yourself

out in order to film better: A documentary is a poetic creation that
documents a relation: I do not know anything about myself; I do
not know anything about the other. The documentary happens when
something in my relation to the other is illuminated and, to some
extent, the other invades me (Sarno, 2001: 36). The medium of film
offers the film director, at the very moment he or she is filming, the
same experience that is offered to the viewer who sees the entire film
on screen: just as in the cinema where the I of the viewer merges with
the I of the character on the screen, a documentary makes possible
the absolute fusion between the self who is filming and the person
who is being filmed. As Joo Moreira Salles observes: The direc-
tor surrenders part of his or her artistic control to reality; the films
potential impact is handed over to people over whom he or she has no
control (Moreira Salles, 2000: 29).
To be more precise, perhaps it is impossible to say that the docu-
mentary happens when the one who films aligns him or herself with
the one who is being filmed and, by anticipation, with the person
who will see the film. In a documentary, the documentary maker
occupies either his or her own place, or the place of the intervie-
wee, or that of the viewer; the viewer, in turn, takes the place of the
interviewee, or of the documentary maker, in the same way that the
intervieweemore exactly, the person who is being filmed or, in a
wider sense, the scene that is being filmedtrades places with the
documentary maker or with the viewer. They all change positions at
every instant. This is one of the questions addressed in Jogo de cena
[Playing],
g a documentary that is entirely filmed in a space invented to
make fiction come alive: a theatrical stage where we see Coutinho as
himself, but also and simultaneously in the daughters who talk about
their fathers, the mothers who talk about their sons and the fathers
who are absent from all of their lives.
The camera turns toward the empty auditorium. The members of
the audience are all on stage. They are watching the film as if they
have the best possible seats: they are watching it through the lens
of a camera. They are also watching the film at the exact moment
it is being made, sitting behind the viewfinder or next to it (in this
documentary, more than in any other, the cameraman and the film
director are all but reduced to spectators of the actual scene they are
filming). On stage, the women who are being interviewed and who
have their backs turned toward the auditorium are facing the cam-
era and the film crew. In Jogo de cena a not only are the members of
the audience treated as spectators, they are spectators because they
watch the projection of the film. But the director, the cameraman,
the sound technician and even those who speak to the camera also
behave, in a way, like spectators, because the interviewerthe docu-
mentary makerplays a role; that is to say, he acts.
The camera on stage, turned toward an empty auditorium, is
waiting for the people who will be interviewed. In the seats of the
interviewees, there are only women. Nearly all of them have come in
response to an advertisement published in a newspaper and shown
in the opening shot of the film: Call for participants. If you are a
woman over 18, live in Rio de Janeiro, have a story to tell and want to
take part in an audition for a documentary, contact us.
In addition to the women who came forward in response to the
advertisement, there are actresses who were invited by the director
to occupy the same seat in order to repeat the stories from the inter-
views. They have been invited to transform the stories narrated by
real people into fiction and some of these actresses are interviewed in
turn as well, either to comment on the experience of creating a scene
inspired by a real person who only moments before occupied the same
position, or to tell a personal story to the camera.
The film, therefore, plays with real and fictional characters.
Sometimes, one of the real characters steps out of herself (consciously
or unconsciously) and invents a fiction to explain herselfto herself
or to the others. Sometimes, a fictional character steps out of herself
in order to (shall we put it like this?) better represent the real charac-
ter she embodies: the actress talks about her acting method or about
a historical figure that bears no direct relation to the character she
plays or reconstructs. Reconstruction is perhaps the word that most
closely approaches what the actresses do when they repeat the text
CAMERA LUCIDA 19
from the interviews. It is also what comes closest to what the women
who are being interviewed do when they tell their stories to the cam-
era. There are, no doubt, different levels of reconstruction, different
methods, varying from the intuitive to the methodical. But it is there
that the actresses and the nonactresses meet, at a point on stage where
representation consists of reconstructing a person or an event. Both
actresses and nonactresses reconstruct a real story in which it is dif-
ficult, almost impossible, to identify who is who.
There is perhaps one certainty: in either case we are confronted
with characters, whether created by the interviewed women or by the
actresses invited to repeat the text of the interviews. What we see on
screen, throughout, are characters. The rules of the game demand
that the spectator is unaware whether he or she is watching a real or
a fictional scene, but they also demand that its character of a game
remains clear throughout. This game is announced in the title, in the
opening shot and in the presence of actresses known for their work
in film, theatre, or television, like Andrea Beltro, Fernanda Torres,
and Marlia Pera.
Actresses and real people alternate. One of the women starts tell-
ing a story and suddenly another woman starts telling the same story.
Or else, a woman begins telling a story that is continued by a second
woman after which it is taken up by the first woman once more: they
all tell a fragment of what happened. Or, a story, told in its entirety, is
repeated later on by someone else. Everyone representsthe one who
acts out what was told by another character or the one who tells the
tale of something that actually happened to her. Even the documen-
tary maker represents in the sense that when he is with the actresses,
he repeats the questions he asked when he interviewed the real peo-
ple. The fact that the film takes place on the stage of a theatre informs
us that it is not important to establish where we arewhether in a
fictional world or in realitybut rather to recognize one thing in the
other, as in two superimposed dimensions. Even though she is act-
ing, the actress never stops being herself. She undergoes, in her own
body, the process of making a documentary: she empties herself out
to embody her alter ego, the I of the character she plays. And the real
character, while she is being interviewed, transforms herself into a
fictional version of herself in order to narrate with more precision the
story she experienced in reality. She reveals her true self through her
alter ego. And thus, the reality of fiction cannot be dissociated from
the fiction of reality.
The film takes place in a space that can be interpreted both as
fiction with elements of a documentary and as a documentary with
elements of fiction. To put it more precisely, it takes place in a space

where the camera reveals the extent to which a documentary depends
on mise-en-scne, that is to say, on formal construction, and, inversely,
the extent to which fiction depends on documentary qualities, that
is, on a reality that is produced without being staged. It shows that
a documentary is essentially cinematic. It is not an attempt to docu-
ment reality objectively, but rather, the objective of the documenta-
tion is subjective. Thus, by making an actress play a real character,
Jogo de cena a shows how the documentary genre can reflect an actual
event as well as reflect on n it. In reality, the rules of the game can be
expanded so that it will be possible to realize just how much staging is
involved in the authentic expression of every person, so much so that
it can be said that stating the problem iss the solution: to shoot this
staging game is in itself an objective documentation of reality because
it is, essentially, a construct.
3
It is fitting to recall the verbal image coined to refer to the apparatus
invented for recording the appearance of people and things through a
lens: I am talking about the camera obscura; I am also talking about
the camera lucida. The saying goes that we either extinguish our-
selves in order to receive its light or that we project ourselves outward
in a kind of reason awakened by the experience of seeing the world
through the photographic medium. We do not take photographs to
imitate, but to thinkk nature, to create another reality. It is fitting to
recall, too, the contradiction that forms part of the very essence of
film ever since the first public screening, that is to say, the contradic-
tion between Lumires La sortie des usines Lumiress Lyon n (known
in English as Leaving the Factory) and its alter ego Larroseur arross
(The Sprinkler Sprinkled d or The Waterer Watered).
An element of fiction orients the camera when it registers a real
scene: workers leaving a factory. An element of the documentary ori-
ents the fictional scene when it is set up in order to record a staged
reality: the story of the gardener who receives a squirt of water in
his face. With the workers and the gardener of Lumire in mind, we
can perhaps imagine that to some extent we move about in a pho-
tographic process of understanding reality: the director, during the
shoot and looking out onto the scene, transforms him or herself into
a camera lucida; the actor, who is in the scene, transforms him or
herself into a photographic image of the expression that someone
else invented in order to photograph what he or she was thinking or
CAMERA LUCIDA 21
feeling; the viewer, during the screening of the film, is reduced to a

camera obscura a inside of a camera obscura, a radical expression of the
process of photographing photographs.
4
A tragic mother, weeping incessantly: she is thinking of her daughter
who is far away and with whom she fell out; she is thinking of the
animated film Finding Nemoo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich,
USA, 2003).
As in the other narratives of Jogo de cena, the story told by the
real character is retold by the actress Marlia Pera, even though it
seems as if the opposite is happening. Since the montage does not
limit itself to following a mechanical order and freely mixes testimony
and representation, the viewer sees boththe actress acting out the
real character and the real character taking on the role of the actress.
What Coutinho offers, therefore, is a round trip that starts with the
interview in which a woman narrates a part of her life, switches to
the scene where the actress acts out the text of the interview, and
then moves on to another interview, this time with the actress and
conducted after the shoot, about the experience of playing a real char-
acter, and finally it returns to its point of departure.
After the interview with the mother who weeps because she wants
to go to New York to reconcile with her daughter just as Marlin
crossed the seas to reconcile with his son Nemo, we see Coutinhos
interview with Marlia. They agree it was a restrained interpretation,
but at one point the actress choked up (When I talked about her
daughter, the image of my own daughter came to mind). She nearly
cried, but managed to contain her tears (When people cry for real,
they always try to hide it). People, says Marlia, are not like actors
(The actor, in particular todays actor, the film actor, the television
actor, tries to show w his or her tears). She did not cry, but she came
prepared to cry (I thought the following: if Coutinho really, really
wants me to cry . . . ) and she brought menthol crystals in her hand-
bag (you use a little and it makes you cry a lot).
After interpreting her character, the actress Andrea Beltro says
that she did not want to cry (I hadnt prepared crying, I did not want
to cry), but she could not say her lines without shedding tears (I do
not know what I felt; if, as an actress, I had prepared myself to cry, I
would not have felt so uncomfortable).
In the middle of acting out the scene, Fernanda Torres chokes
up. She starts reciting the text (I dont think Im a very assertive
person, Im someone who doesnt know how to stand up for his opin-
ions when confronted with somebody who has very strong ones, you
see?), but then she interrupts herself (and . . . when . . . when I turned
eighteen . . . well, it was . . . ). It is as if the camera provoked the actress
into displaying subassertive behavior, identical to that of her character.
Under her breath, Fernanda comments on the impasse (Its crazy!).
She tries to continue (This is madness, Coutinho). She does not
manage (It is all so crazy! So crazy! Shall we do this again?). She
prepared everything and knows the text off by heart (When I was
in the middle of talking, you were looking at me; it seemed as if I
were lying to you; I dont know, it is something very tricky), but
she does not succeed in saying her lines (Its crazy! What madness!
Im finding it more and more difficult). She turns her eyes to the
floor, lengthens the silence until she bursts into an uneasy laugha
laugh almost identical to the real characters laugh (She has a pecu-
liar habit . . . she will tell a horrible story and then laugh . . . but her
laughter is . . . its her,
r yes, thats it.). In order to represent a fictional
character it is enough to attain a certain degree of realism and that
person assumes an existence, but a real person constantly reminds
you what you should have achieved, and just how far you fell short of
achieving it.
The task turned out to be very difficult, assesses Fernanda Torres.
To explain what happened she recalls the notion of suspension of
disbelief, that defines the state in which the viewer accepts the illu-
sion that is being created for his or her benefit. An actor needs the
audience to buy into the lie, just as a boy needs another boy if he
wants to play cops and robbers. It is a mutual pretence: I pretend I
am not who I am and you pretend to believe me. Perhaps the gaze
of Coutinho during the shoot did not communicate the complicity
required by this pretence (the documentary makers gaze is like one
who looks for reality in its unmediated form and not its representa-
tion). She had been invited to repeat, as an actress, the testimony
that a woman had given some days before to the documentary maker.
Not a fictional character, but a flesh-and-blood woman who told her
story. They sent me the recording of the interview. I had to watch it
and find a way of playing her, repeating what she had said. The day
of the shoot, Fernanda arrived in a nervous state, With that woman
inside of me. I was dying to get rid of her. It was my turn and I found
myself in front of the camera with her character inside of me; the
crew continued to treat me like Nanda Torres and then something in
me short-circuited; my mouth went dry and the woman inside of me
got away, she disappeared. She ends with a quote from the theatre
CAMERA LUCIDA 23
director Amir Haddad: The worst thing that can happen to you is to
embody a spirit while every around you insists in talking to the cavalo
de santo (Torres, 2006).
Perhaps it is possible to say that Eduardo Coutinhos film essen-
tially deals with what Andrea, Marlea, and Fernandathe last most
intenselyexperience in front of the camera. Perhaps it is possible
to say that in Jogo de cena a the real people who are interviewed are
the raw material for the elaboration of that which makes the film so
interesting: the scenes with the actresses. The interviewees are the
scene before the scene actually exists; they are the scene that precedes
the staged version of the actresses. The film is about the actresses.
What the documentary documents is the process of the actor creat-
ing a character. What the documentary documents is the part of the
process that is directly inspired by reality. That is why the interviews
begin with a woman who tells us that she truly discovered herself as a
person when she became an actress.
Perhaps it is also possible to say that the film by Maria Augusta
Ramos essentially documents its actors, without forgetting that the
actors are not actually actors, but youngsters who come from the
same marginal neighborhoods of the city as the real offenders. Juzo
documents the faces we see. It talks about the youngsters who lend
their faces to the underage offenders whose backs we see in the court
room, in the cafeteria or in the visiting room of the Padre Severino
Institute. The young offenders in the court room present images that
are as choked-up and as timid as their texts: with their backs turned
toward us and in the corner of the frame, it is as if the young offend-
ers are in fact off camera. The gaze of this virtually mute silhouette
climbs up to the figure of the female judge who occupies the back-
ground but who is facing the camera and who is well lit and lectur-
ing them. By contrast, the attention of the viewer is not led astray to
other areas of the image when he or she is faced with the nonactor
who repeats the answers given in the court room. On screen we only
see the actors and their presence or what they are telling us with
their presence is, perhaps because we are in a cinema, more intense
than the stories related by the actual offenders. What the film docu-
ments is what the nonactors show of themselves while they recon-
struct what their alter egos experienced in the court rooms. They
reconstruct a part of themselves in front of a discrete but attentive
camera that stares them straight into the eyes. They tell us that they
have been abandoned and left behind in a corner of society where
people live accused by the authorities. They reconstruct what the
boys and girls, who are just like them, feel when they hear the judge
or the jailer translate, summarize, and repeat what the city never lets
off telling them:
Be obedient!
You dont have a job? Go and get one!
Heads down! Everybody! Line up! Heads down.
5
The question emerges unexpectedly in the middle of the interview. It
emerges as if the rules of the game had not been clearly established.
At one moment in Edificio Masterr (Eduardo Coutinho, 2002), the
documentary maker turns to Daniela and asks her something that, at
least in principle, need not be asked, because asking questions is the
very essence of an interview: Can I ask you something?
This question leads to another one: what is it that a documentary
asks of the fragment of reality that is being documented?
A documentary is not necessarily based on interviews, nor does
it use interviews to ask objective questions that expect objective
answers. It suffices to recall a question from Boca de lixo [The scav-
engers]s (Eduardo Coutinho, 1992) when a woman on a garbage
dump in Itaoca is asked: Is the work good here, at the garbage
dump? Evidently, the question is not looking for an answer. The
answer has already been given, through the images that show a
variety of people trawling through the garbage dumped by trucks
in this open-air rubbish tip. In Edificio Master, Coutinho repeats
the same question in other words when he asks Daniela, a young
English teacher in Copacabana: Can I ask you something? And
just like Daniela, the woman who works on the garbage dump in
Itaoca and who until then had her back turned to the camera, turns
her head in a rather irritated fashion to where the absurd question
came from and briefly stares straight into the camera. (Good? No,
its not good. No sir. But, what can we do? But good, it isnt). A
documentary does not necessarily seek answers. It does not neces-
sarily ask any questions to the fragment of reality it confronts. Or
if it does, it does not do so in order to obtain a clarification, an
explanation, a clear answer. It formulates a question to inflame the
actual scene that is produced as its result. The scene takes place
because film (or better, the man with the camera) is embedded in
reality. The scene that has come into existence through the docu-
mentary is in essence a film scene, even if the medium of film does
not determine or control it.
CAMERA LUCIDA 25
Asking a question stimulates an encounter; it can provoke a con-

versation about a place in the past that sums up the experience of a
person. Edificio Masterr asks if it can ask the question and Enrique
remembers the emotion he felt when he went on stage to sing a verse
from My Wayy next to Frank Sinatrathe lyrics of the song, he says,
sum up the story of his life. Esther recounts her despair at being
attacked in her own home and how much she still suffers from the
memory of the robbers assault. Daniela picks up her poems and paint-
ings in order to explain the difficulty of walking on the narrow pave-
ments of her neighborhood due to the throngs of people. Antonio
Carlos remembers his shyness, his stutter and his poor childhood in
order to explain just how important it was that his boss offered him a
token of appreciation for his merits.
The question of the documentary can inflame the moment in
which the experience that the characters are going to live through
from that moment on is defined, as for instance in the court rooms of
the Second Juvenile Court of Rio de Janeiro filmed by Maria Augusta
in Juzo. That way, the question Coutinho asks Daniela in Edificio
Masterr can perhaps be taken from its precise context in which it was
asked to be considered as a representation of the essential gesture of
any documentary. He wanted to know why she had spoken to him
without looking at him. Can I ask you something? Why dont you
look at me when we are talking? That is the question of every doc-
umentary that strives to construct another reality to represent the
real realityif it makes sense at all to suggest the existence of a real
reality, concrete, palpable, different from some other unreal reality.
Cinema, in a documentary, in fact documents nothing but the will to
ask: Can I ask you something?
6
Two shots appear one after the other in the closing sequence of the
film: the face of a bespectacled boy and a landscape dominated by a
tree.
Part of the scene is what can be seen in the film. Another part is
what is represented by the film. Equally important as perceiving the
two shots for what they signify in the narrative in which they are
included is perceiving them as the image of the structure that orga-
nizes the narrative.
In the scene are the boy and the tree that the viewer sees as if it
were filmed from behind the eyes of Tiago who, thanks to the lenses
of his spectacles, is able to see for the first time the tree he had been
seeing every day. In the emotional memory of the viewer the little
myopic boy has exactly the same experience as each and every one
of us had when we saw the world for the first time through the lens
of a film camera. And so, the viewer sees the joy of the boy with the
spectacles lent to him by casual visitors reflected in n the eyes of the
character (wide open and turned towards the radiance of colors and
the sharp contours of shapes discovered thanks to the lenses) but the
viewer also sees withh the eyes of the boy in a representation of the
discovery of film.
The scene can also be understood as the composite image of the
compositional structure of the film, as a metaphor for the spectacles
that restore Tiagos vision. Almost at the end of the narrative, these
two shots adjust their focus: the images seen in the course of the film,
so well defined on screen, were produced by a myopic narrator.
Mutum m (Sandra Kogut, 2007) is a sum of details observed from
up close and stuck one after the other as if they were loose anno-
tations: the strong wind that blows everything over in the garden;
playing with mud after the rain; the field and the task of cutting the
grass with his father; the loud guffawing in the kitchen door, the lost
white cloud in the blue sky, the birds having a shower, the mouth
full of water in order to gently squirt water into the cage, the sad-
ness over the brothers illness. These images are not articulated by a
cause-and-effect relation. What gives unity to these annotations is the
common concern of showing the point of view of a doubly myopic
child: because his eyes do not allow him to see clearly what is far away,
and because the adults do not allow him to see clearly what is going
on up closethe father who fights with his mother behind a closed
door about something that is kept from us; the uncle who gives him
a letter he must deliver in secret and without reading it.
In the shot where Tiago discovers the tree thanks to his specta-
cles, there is no special effect, nothing except a landscape filmed with
the correct lighting and clear contours, nothing except a moment
in which the shot is linked in direct continuity with the previous
shot. The focus that shifts from the foreground to the background of
the frame is enough to make the viewer feel (probably without being
aware of it) that until that moment he or she had been invited to see
the world myopically in order never to lose sight of Tiago, in order
not to take our eyes off the short-sighted boy, in order to continue
seeing him even when he is not on screen.
Before we take our eyes off Tiago, we see the world through
his eyeshis short-sightedness iss the narrative; the story seems to
be made up of chunks of a larger true story. And to see reality in a
CAMERA LUCIDA 27
fragmented way, limited by a form of short-sightedness, contributes

to our understanding that reality presents itself in the same fashion
to Tiago: fragmented.
In Juuzoo and Jogo de cena, we could say that the documentary
adopts fictional procedures. In Mutum, it is the other way round and
fiction adopts the procedures of a documentary. The film is based
on a text by Guimares Rosa. To transform the text into a film took
many trips through the sert too and four or five versions of the script
(cowritten with Ana Luiza Martins Costa). But, strictly speaking, the
film that was shot is not the film that was written. If we exaggerate
a little, we could say that Sandra Kogut wrote the script nott in order
to film it like it was written, but to stimulate in the course of the
shoot the invention of a cinematographic process akin to Guimares
Rosas process of literary creation. An adaptation more faithful to
the authors work and his way of relating to the sert t o and its people
than to the text itself: It is not exactly an adaptation; I believe it is
more a dialogue with the book.2 It is more dialogue than text, which
explains the decision not to show the script to anyone, neither to the
actors nor to the crew: everything was transmitted orally.
The shoot, then, had elements of a documentary. The actors were
nonprofessionals chosen from the people of the regionthe boys
and cowhands had never been to the cinema. Gathered together in
the hacienda where the story takes place, they were invited to play
their roles with their true names instead of those of Guimares Rosas
characters: The work of the actors is constructed from the proximity
between their lives and those of the characters. In improvisations
suggested by the director, the people allowed themselves to be filmed
(almost exactly) as they are. Here, fiction, in order to manifest itself as
fiction and not pretending to be anything else, stimulated the more
or less free invention of situations not controlled by the camera. In a
way, the fiction of Mutum m documents the routine of a hacienda that
never stopped functioning during the shoot, They looked after the
animals, cut the grass, worked, wore their own clothes, and played
with their own toys.
The Tiago of the film, for instance, is in part the protagonist of
Guimares Rosas story, in part himselfTiago da Silva Mariz, a
ten-year-old boy who did not know what film was and who had never
heard of Guimares Rosaand in part the Tiago he plays in the film.
This, let us call it, documentaryy preoccupation is not born from eth-
nographical considerations, but from a process of getting to know the
characters inspired by the authors text, explains the director. In his
books, Guimares Rosa documents many details from nature, from
the life of the sert

t o in the form of fiction: The text is not descrip-
tive, everything in it refers to the interior world of the characters, and
for me, the landscapes of the book are interior landscapes.3
A frame from Mutum, seen in isolation, looks like a frame from a
documentary, a scene that incorporates the spontaneous expressions
of the people. But this cruder and simpler image in fact serves the
purpose of fiction; it is a spontaneity carefully constructed off camera
in order to keep the relations between the characters in the fore-
ground: the mother would comfort Tiago if anyone told him off, even
if I had not been filming it. This is a spontaneity achieved outside
of the frame so that the actors do not feel overwhelmed by the cin-
ematic apparatus.
Let us imagine that Mutum m pretends to be a documentary, just as
uzoo and Jogo de cena
Ju a approach fiction. Let us imagine that fiction
seeks its alter ego, the documentary, in order to forget the cinematic
apparatus without ever forgetting, however, that we are in the pro-
cess of making a movie and thus we reinvent the apparatus, reinvent
the scene, which is, after all, what matters. Film making, says Sandra,
whether documentary or fiction, is always a question of staging. The
only reality that exists in a film is the internal reality of the film.
7
Perhaps at some stage in its history, in order to respond to pressures of
the dominant model of production and distribution of films, cinema-
tography has underestimated the importance of the creative conflict
between the camera and the scene in front of it that takes place at
the moment of the shootor more exactly, the conflict with the raw
material that the camera transforms into a film scene.
This conflict, fundamental in the cinematographic process in the
period between the invention by the Lumire brothers and the first
films with large explanatory intertitles in between the images was
eventually reduced to a mechanical procedure to give form to films
as they were conceived and imagined before the shoot. The confron-
tation with the live fragment in front of the camera was relegated to
the background ever since the film script became to be considered
not a stimulus for shooting and editing the film, but a comprehensive
schedule, as if at that first moment of the process the film was already
practically finished and all that needed to be done after that was to
follow to the letter what had been planned beforehand.
Perhaps to continue to express itself as an original form, film mak-
ing has, of late, taken back and radicalized the conflict between the
CAMERA LUCIDA 29
camera and the scene in front of it. Gone are the days in which a film
was conceived in its entirety before the shoot. Instead, a film is con-
ceived of in detail and written up as if it already existed, but nott to
reproduce it wholesale as cinematic images. The film before the film
proper stimulates the coming-into-being of another film, or, at the
very least, the production of a film not necessarily identical to the one
that was conceived and given form in words.
What appears to be more of a delirium than an actual possibility,
namely to write one film in order to produce another, is in fact a real
and concrete process. This process is present in films that do not take
the script as their starting point, or at least not a script formally orga-
nized as text (Juzoo and Jogo de cena
a for exampleare they films with-
out a previously written script?). This process is also present in films
that, in order to invent a cinematographic form, do not depart from a
text so that it can be turned into a film, but take as their origin a pure
text, a prime example of literary expression (Mutum, for instancea
film not conforming to the script written by Guimares Rosa?).
In the creative process of film making, the word in the script has
something of the image, just as the image on screen has something
of the word. That way, film is not merely descriptive, but it is also
scripted (Pasolinis theorem: is to be a film director to be a writer at
the same time?). So that film does not limit itself to documenting
what it encounters in front of the camera, but also, by contrast, that
the film confronted with reality acts like a camera lucida. a
*Translated by Sander Bergg
Notes
1. Reality: the word here needs to be read like an image, an open expres-
sion, by its very nature ambiguous like all images. Reality as defined
by Pier Paolo Pasolini not long after shooting Teorema a (1968): In
reality, my only idol is reality. If I have decided to become a film
director as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing real-
ity with symbols, that is to say with words, I have preferred film as a
means of expression, to express reality by means of reality.
2. The quotes from Sandra Kogut are taken from a discussion the author
of this text had with her.
3. It is interesting to recall what Walter Salles once said: If there is a
master who can inspire me to make a documentary, he is not to be
found in film, but in literature: Guimares Rosa. He gave shape to
the listener, incorporated the un-said into Brazilian reality. His work
was not guided by a desire to proselytize. He listened and shared
what he heard with others (Walter Salles, 2002).
Bibliography
Guimares, Co. A solido, o cavalo e o lago. In O qu u o cinema v,
o quu vemos no cinema. Edio do 35 Festival de Cinema de Gramado,
Gramado, 2006.
Moreira Salles, Joo. Como planejar voltar para casa com o filme que voc
no planejou. In Cinemais, no. 25, Rio de Janeiro, September/October
2000.
Salles, Walter. Entrevista de Carlos Heli de Almeida. Cat
t logo do Festival de
Cinema Luso Brasileiro de Santa Maria da Feira. Portugal, April 2002.
Sarno, Geraldo. Libertar-se da cmera numa forma vazia. In Cinemais, no.
28, Rio de Janeiro, March/April 2001.
Torres, Fernanda. No dorso instvel de um tigre. In Piau, no. 3, So
Paulo, December 2006.
C H A P T ER 2
Footprints: Risks and

Challenges of Contemporary
Argentine Cinema
David Oubia*
In the nineties, a new type of cinema emerged in Argentina, made

up of independent, fresh, original, provocative films. Compared to
the solemn and artificial recipes of the old cinema, one of the great
merits of this rejuvenation was the frontal gaze with which it encoun-
tered the real, without any preconceived notion as to what it would
find there. Low production costs and the proliferation of nonprofes-
sional crews as well as small-scale and discontinuous shootings favored
the rebirth of the documentary genre, which has always been more
capable in adapting itself to the unforeseen than the large, plot-based
productions.
Nevertheless, in the last few years some of the initial discoveries
have crystallized into lazy and empty formulas. The new cinema
has been unable to avoid generating its own common places: to
confide in the supposed advantages and straightforwardness of the
documentary mode is one of them. To a large extent, this is the
result of a confusion between reality and documentation, between
observation and the absence of staging, between the representa-
tion of a surface and a lack of density. Taking as a starting point
various recent films, I am interested in reflecting on the risks and
challenges of a cinema that, not long ago, was hailed as an alterna-
tive model.
32 DAVID OUBIA
The New A rgentine C inema : Reality and

Representation
Like photography, film has always used rays of light emitted or
reflected by objects in order to record them onto a sensitive surface.
Lev Manovich says that film is an indexical medium, an attempt at
making art from imprints left by a foot (quoted in Mulvey, 2006: 20).
It is a beautiful phrase that describes the difficulties for a film to estab-
lish itself as a medium for aesthetic representation, but it also opens
up a world of very specific possibilities.
The fact is that what Barthes calls the reality effectt seems an almost
natural consequence of the cinematic apparatus: if the contrived use-
less detail offers support for realist literature precisely because the
real is incommensurable with writing, the problem with film is the
opposite, since the same detail is at risk of being insignificant. What
is certain is that reality continuously resists representation. At the
same time, the world invades the camera as soon as it is inadvertently
switched on. Being by nature what the aesthetic arts endeavoured to
be, says Jacques Rancire, cinema goes in the opposite direction.
With Flaubert, the labour involved in writing contradicted, through
the dreamy immobility of the frame, its narrative hopes and verisi-
militudes. The painter or the novelist constructed the instruments of
his passive-becoming. The mechanical apparatus [of film], however,
eliminates the effort involved in this passive-becoming. The cam-
era cannot becomee passive since it already iss passive (Rancire, 2005:
1819). The cameras passivity permits it to reproduce in great detail
and with great fidelity whatever it is pointed at, but this is equally an
obstacle to representation.
The answers offered by film-makers have developed in two oppo-
site directions: according to the definition of Bazin, it would be
possible to speak of film-makers who believe in the image versus
film-makers who believe in reality. The first of these confide in
everything that can add to the representation n of whatever is being
represented on screen whereas for the second the image does not
count in principle for what it adds to reality, but for what it reveals
about it (Bazin, 1990: 82 and 86). Bazins definitions and labels are
in fact problematic, but what interests me here is the functionality of
their classification: it would be possible to write a history of cinema
according to the choices every film director makes and that determine
on which side of the dividing line he or she ends up. It is undeniable
that with neorealism the real city burst onto the scene, but the prob-
lem we face is how to construct a fictional universe starting from such
CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE CINEMA 33
concrete points of reference, how to unrealize the real city, how to

establish the required distance that is the foundation of aesthetics.
In Argentina, the films of the nineties had the merit of rediscover-
ing the real city; they are street films. The way in which they observe
the world recovers the candor, the authenticity, the lack of solem-
nity that was introduced by modern cinema, but forgotten by the
contrived cinema of the 1980s, which was modeled on the aesthetics
of advertising and of television. The definitions neo-neorealism or
new neorealism that have been used to explain the phenomenon
that emerged in the nineties are without a doubt reductionist, super-
ficial and inexact, but at least they testify to the difficulty of charac-
terizing innovations whose reference points ought to be looked for,
in a rather diffuse way, in the foundations of modern cinema. What
could be called the official line of this new cinema, which is intimately
associated with the films of young film directors, constructs its real-
ism on the undecidable crossroads between fiction and documentary.
It is usually a form of observational cinema that takes as its point of
departure whatever it encounters and whatever confronts it. In this
way, even when they are fictional, these films tend to be documen-
tarian (because they work from documentary material) or docu-
mentarized (because they adopt an aesthetics that belongs to the
documentary proper).1
This inflection was a discovery of the first films of the nineties, and
it soon became a distinctive trademark. But once established, the new
cinema had to take care of its own protocols: the challenge that it
had to face subsequently, if it wanted to be included in the tradition
of critical realism, was to avoid the trap of superficial reflection and
platitudes.
Exotism and S pectacle

Talking about his film 10 on Ten n (2004), Abbas Kiarostami suggests
that what interested him in that project was that he was required to
act as if he were a technical football coach: If anyone were to ask me
what I did as a film director, I would say: nothing; and yet, had I not
existed, this film would not have been made (quoted in Saed-Vafa
and Rosenbaum, 2003: 12425). This, I believe, is a neat way of
defining the complex dialectics that articulate the relation between
documentation and invention, including (or above all) when we are
dealing with a filmmaker who is less and less inclined to intervene in
the material. The camera forms part of a state of affairs that would not
exist withoutt it even though the state of affairs does not exist forr it.
34 DAVID OUBIA
The camera interferes with the scene and allows us to see something
that otherwise would have gone unnoticed or would not even have
taken place; it is becausee something has been filmed that we know it
was there in the first place.
In this sense, the documentary register has been both a blessing
and a curse for film. It gave it its specificity, but it has often obliged
it to pay the price of illegitimacy. The idea of an independent cin-
ema in the sense of craftsmanship (as opposed to being free from
the impositions of the industry) marked the first films of the new
Argentine cinema. Digital cameras and smaller technical crews made
it possible to have more flexible shoots in which experimentation, the
unforeseen, or chance could become a productive element of the film
without the director losing aesthetic control over his or her material.
However, the new cinema is not exempt from generating its own cli-
chs. In factas happens invariablyonce a new approach has been
incorporated and has become the norm, it will stagnate if it is not
propelled in new directions.
Whether through studio sets or real locations, the challenge of film
is always to invent a world. And this world is the product of a painstak-
ing construction where documentation is a necessary point of depar-
ture, but from which distance must inevitably be taken. This distance
is the fold that makes representation possible and permits the conver-
sion of documented material into components of a narrative. In the
documentary Oscarr (2003), Sergio Morkin follows the artist Oscar
Brahim who works as a taxi driverwhile he drives around the streets
of the city during the week, transporting passengers from one side of
town to the other, Brahim imagines his own devastating interventions
of advertisement billboards. Like advertising, the work of Brahim is
ephemeralhis rewritings and collages are soon covered by new bill-
boards, but the guerrilla artistconstantly persecuted by the police
and by inspectors of advertising agenciespersists in his crusade to
reappropriate the public space that has been invaded by marketing.
Perhaps Oscarr is not an exceptional film, but it manages to stage
a gaze. Or to put it in other words, it shows that a documentary is
always an encounter between an event and a gaze. When he started
following the protagonist, during the election campaign of 1999,
Morkin could not have known that two years later a political cri-
sis would hit the country ending up in the resignation of President
Fernando de la Ra, but at some point he realized that the artisttaxi
driver could act as a prism through which a complex social reality
could be refracted. Because what Brahim objects to in advertising
is the way in which it imposes itself, its authoritarian and ultimately

fascist character. Indeed, the marketing logic does not merely stage a
blueprint for consumption but also an entire social system of domina-
tion based on the compartmentalization of consumers desires, impos-
ing models whose false necessity appears indisputable. As Adorno
and Horkheimer affirm, the starlet is meant to symbolize the typ-
ist in such a way that the splendid evening dress seems meant for
the actress as distinct from the real girl. (Adorno and Horkheimer,
1979: 121) Morkin shows the way in which such strategies of inclu-
sion are necessarily counterbalanced by a method of exclusion: Oscar,
like many others, has ended up on the outside. The film shows the
impoverishment of his living conditions as a way of understanding
the social deterioration of the country. The film skids towards the
anticipated endBrahim ends up being evicted and the film finishes
with the explosion of the popular uprisings in December 2011.
The film never loses sight of its protagonist, never stops telling
his story, but gradually his storyy metamorphosizes into history. As
if, thanks to the gaze of the documentary, the individual tale had
acquired another dimension. Because what is certain is that Morkin
never uses his material in an uncritical way: whereas the diatribe of the
protagonist is hardly original and often comes across as schematic, in
the filmmakers creation he becomes part of a much subtler discur-
sive system, much denser and more convincing. The contrary occurs
with other documentaries, such as Bonanza a (Ulises Rosell, 2001)
or Estrellass (Federico Len and Marcos Martnez, 2007), where the
fascination exerted by their exotic characters does not leave much
room for a reflexive gaze. Bonanza Muchinscithe protagonist of
Rosells filmis immensetall, big-bellied, long-haired and sport-
ing a white beard. Judging from the way he looks he could be a lucha
libree wrestler or a strange mix between Karl Marx and Orson Welles.
But no. In reality he is a car mechanic and scrap merchant. One day
he took part in an attack on an armored vehicle and now he liter-
ally lives from hunting and fishing on the roadside along the Buenos
AiresLa Plata motorway. You could say that he is a man who lives in
close contact with nature if it were not for the fact that the fields that
surround him belong to an industrial wasteland. That is where we
see him, together with his two sons, surrounded by rusty bodyworks
of cars, mattresses, corrugated iron sheets and all sorts of animals,
from birds and little mojarrita a fishes to opossums and snakes. The
physical aspect of Julio Arrietathe centre of attention in Len and
Martnezs filmis slightly less spectacular that of Bonanza, but he
36 DAVID OUBIA
too makes a rather unconventional livelihood: being a slum dweller,

he had the idea of setting up a casting agency to recruit people from
amongst his neighbors who want to succeed in film and on tele-
vision. Arrieta says: We want to be cast as poor people, because
that is what we know best . . . We have always been poor and so we
know how to play that role . . . We can play thieves, drug addicts and
hoodlums. Both films are so bewitched by their charismatic pro-
tagonists that they never dare to question them on anything other
than superficialities.
Like tourists in a faraway country, the gaze of the directors never
transcends exotism. They ignore the precarious living conditions, the
perverse net of social stagnation and the cruel systems of exclusion;
they only see Romantic heroes or exemplary characters, confusing
their tactics of survival with a deliberate lifestyle. The protagonists
are no longer perceived as victims. The documentary functions as a
vacuum chamber that isolates the individuals from their context and
represents them in an ideal state of purity. But if the protagonists had
no choice but to suffer from certain social mandates, the filmmakers,
by contrast, should not stand back and refuse to take part. Quoting
Anatole France, Walter Benjamin writes: The majestic equality of
the Law prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping under
bridges. The problem, says Benjamin, is that the Law maintains this
equality in a diabolically ambiguous way. Indeed, the rules may be
uniform, but they are hardly fair, because not everyone is in a posi-
tion to comply. Objectivity is not the same as neutrality and it is evi-
dent that to assume an impartial attitude in certain matters is a way of
validating the status quo. The manner in which Len and Martnez
show poor people only serves to accentuate our preconceived notions
of the slums; and the way in which Bonanza is presented, living like
a primitive man though only a few kilometers from the capital city,
makes it difficult to escape from the image of the noble savage.
And so the filmmakers reproduce in formal terms the social condi-
tions of exploitation, because they limit themselves to pointing their
camera and wait for the characters to do all the work while they reap
the benefits. The interest that the bizarre entrepreneurship of Arrieta
and the day-to-day adventures of Muchinsci spark is external to the
film, whose only merit stems from the directors shrewdness in spot-
ting a topic that would be attractive to the public. The camera never
asks itself how
w to show something, but only privileges in a superficial
manner what it deems to be exotic or grotesque. Even though he lives
a precarious life at the margins of society surrounded by garbage and
waste, Bonanza appears like a legendary figure; Rosells documentary
celebrates this state of affairs and neutralizes any possibility for change.
Arrieta maintains that he and his actors are qualified to play the part
of poor people, but this statement turns into a life sentence when the
filmmaker takes him at his word and looks down his nose at him, views
him in a way that is condescending, patronizing, and even contemptu-
ous. Judging from the way the film shows the slum dwellers, it would
seem they have little desire to escape povertyat the end of the day,
if they are no longer what they are, they will cease to be in demand by
casting directors.
Mikhail Bakhtin and Mary Russo have analyzed the productive
implications of the grotesque when it becomes evident, at the moment
it reveals its disturbing familiarity, that what had posed as absolute
alterity (as pure exteriority) is in fact nothing but the obverse of same-
ness.2 But in Bonanza a or Estrellas,s the characters are not rescued by
their familiarity; instead, their nearness (the Villa 31 shantytown, the
La Plata motorway) paradoxically accentuates the strangeness they
provoke in the viewer. They interest us because of their peculiarity,
because they are freaks, because something that could have been rec-
ognizable has been established as something outlandish and astonish-
ing. In the words of Susan Stewart: While the grotesque body of
carnival engages in this structure of democratic reciprocity, the spec-
tacle of the grotesque involves a distancing of the object and a corre-
sponding aestheticization of it . . . The participant in carnival is swept
up in the events carnival presents and he or she can thereby experience
the possibility of misrule and can thereby envision it as a new order. In
contrast, the viewer of the spectacle is absolutely aware of the distance
between self and spectacle (Stewart, 1993: 1078). The characters
bodies are devoid of movement and they are arrested by a gaze that
domesticates and colonizes them. The distance imposed by the spec-
tacle shields the spectator who belongs to the reassuring sphere of
normality compared to which the freak is perceived as an aberration.
Toward a D ocumentary without O bject

The question, it would seem to me, does not lie in the surprise the
topic of the film may generate, but in the curiosity with which the cam-
era observes. Chantal Akerman said about her film Hotel Monterrey: y
When you look at a picture, if you look just one second you get the
information, thats a corridor. But after a while you forget its a cor-
ridor, you just see that its yellow, red, lines: and then it comes back
as a corridor (quoted in Margulies, 1996: 43). This is the dilemma
between the referentiall and the texturall value of the image. If its
38 DAVID OUBIA
expressive function is prioritized, then other meanings come to the

fore that exceed the mere recognition of the corridor as corridor and
these meanings depend on the way in which we are shown the object.
That is why, when the corridor comes back as corridor, this is, in
reality, not a return to the original image, but rather a new version of
the corridor, expanded by all the meanings the gaze has added to it
while it forgot it was a corridor. It is now a rectified corridor, trans-
formed and operated upon. Flexed and inflected.
An image can be said to have succeeded if objects are merely rec-
ognized, or it can go further and make them legible. To observe is
(ought to be) to assign meaning. In Profit Motive and the Whispering
Wind d (2007), John Gianvito gives an account of the political and
social struggle of the last four centuries in the United States, but
he does this with nothing more than an impressive accumulation
of tomb stones and commemorative plaques. There are no people,
no interviews; there is no action, no speech. Just the enumeration
of sepulchral monuments. Gianvitos documentary is no doubt the
most resoundingly political American film of recent years, because
through simple observation, he manages to extract from the images
their profoundly questioning dimension. In Casting a Glance
(2007), James Benning films Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty, one
of the fundamental works of land art. The work by Smithson is a
spiral-shaped jetty of basalt rocks extending 450 meters into the
Great Salt Lake in Utah. In the course of three years, the filmmaker
periodically recorded, in eighty one-minute shots, the changes that
were wrought on the object by the environment. For Benning,
everything consists of knowing how to look and listen. That is all
his film does. But it does so methodically. As with every stylistic
criterion, this presupposes a restriction: there are some things that
the film will not allow itself to do and other things that it imposes
on itself. It could be said that Benning has done nothing except
documenting a landscape, but what is certain is that in addition to
doing precisely that, he does much more than thathe gives the
landscape meaning by virtue of having observed it. Both Benning
and Gianvito construct a narrative. Of course, they do not do so in a
conventional way, but they permanently push us to track the changes
wrought by time and organized by our gaze. It is not only a matter
of documenting how the world is recorded onto film, but also, and
above all, of succeeding in making the film overflow onto the world.
That way it helps us to see the world better, not because things have
become clearer, but rather because the film has restored the inherent
strangeness of things.
Benning and Akermans influences are clearly present in Copacabana

(Martn Rejtman, 2007), a documentary about the festival of the
Virgin of Copacabana, celebrated by the Bolivian community in
Buenos Aires. The Bolivians are badly treated immigrants who work
in precarious conditions and live in extremely poor neighborhoods.
Given the thematic universe of the film and even the kind of relation-
ship the filmmaker might have established with its subject, we could
be forgiven for drawing a parallel with Bonanza a or Estrellas. However,
whereas Rosell or Len and Martnez are completely hypnotized by
the extravagance of their protagonists, Rejtman is not out to docu-
ment anything flamboyant or extraordinary. His film tries to maintain
the correct distance to observe all the habits and routines of a commu-
nity, be it in the static shots of rehearsals for festival dances (that evoke
the gaze of James Benning) or in lateral tracking shots through the
street markets (reminiscent of Chantal Akermans DEst, t 1993). This
is a risky wager and, for that reason, provocative: it does not depend
on a weird situation or character, but it manages to see things under a
different light that emerges from its perspective and its framing.
Copacabana a is an anemic film, removed from the voracity so fre-
quent in documentaries that are out to show it all. Obviously, its
deceptive character does not suppose a lack of interest; it is rather a
quality and a meritRejtmans gaze is always obsessive, meticulous,
punctilious. But instead of his relentless siege resulting in ever more
precise themes, the film blurs them and makes them more abstract. The
narrative is a journey of slimming down. As if Rejtman had decided
that in order to see more it is necessary to record less. Or as if he had
understood that filming is an ascetic process. He does not pressur-
ize objects into giving up the secrets they may hold, but lets events
run their course and allows his camera to observe. He trusts in what
may emerge from this timid, unobtrusive, and withdrawn encounter.
The shots are balanced, symmetrically composed. There is a tendency
towards geometry in order to channel material that permanently tends
to overflowthe eye of the filmmaker imposes a certain order on a
scene that is by definition amorphous, erratic, and unstable. The film
takes its form precisely from the tension between the nature of the
object and the way in which it is framed.
It would be inexact to state that the filmmaker liberates or dis-
tances himself from his topic, but neither does he entirely submit to
it with docility. The festival of the Virgin of Copacabana is literally
a point of departurea place from which the film inevitably moves
away. In following that path, Rejtman moves in the direction of a
paradoxical formulathat of a documentary without an object, a
40 DAVID OUBIA
film that, instead of agreeing to give a meek testimony, blurs what it

is in the process of portraying and ends up expressing this in the hol-
lowness of its shots, as if they were negative copies of the image. The
filmmaker does not pretend to illustrate a state of affairs or make it
transparent, but instead he approaches it via detours. Where Bonanza
and Estrellass cannot get away from their main characters, Rejtman,
like Morkin, removes himself. The result is a gaze that reveals a dif-
ferent space and allows us to see the object under a new transforma-
tive light.
Politics of the N ew Cinema

In Argentine cinema of the last years there are various examples of
films that try to go against the grain of the possibilities offered by doc-
umentation: Historias extraordinariass (Extraordinary Stories, s Mariano
Llins, 2008), La mujer sin cabeza a (The Headless Woman, Lucrecia
Martel, 2007), Liverpooll (Lisandro Alonso, 2008), Castroo (Alejo
Moguillansky, 2009), Todos mienten n (They All Lie, Matas Pieiro,
2009). Beyond the expected democratization of the medium, beyond
the possibilities offered by digital technology, for these filmmakers the
problem remains how to make critical use of the medium, how to use
the camera to restore ambiguity to what is being filmed. Or to take up
Manovichs image once more: how can we make art from footprints?
If some recent films manage to construct a political dimension, it is
not because they uphold a particular ideology, but because they estab-
lish a new critical relation between the image and reality.
When we remember the legend (because it certainly is a legend) of
the first spectators who, during a screening by the Lumire brothers,
fled in terror before a train that came toward them from the screen,
we usually forgetbecause we have internalized ita worrying detail
that is the basis of the cinematic experience: films bring the outside
world to the cinema. It is more than just a train coming toward us; it
is a disturbing form of mise-en-abmethe
e world contains a cinema
that, in turn, contains the world. In the auditorium of a cinema, what
is real becomes the fiction of a fiction. And this is the distinctive trait
of great films, whether they be plot-based or documentaries, whether
they rely on documentation or on invention. We recognize such films
instantly because the intensity of what they suggest is such that, when
we leave the cinema, the real world has become a drab and lackluster
reflection of what we have just seen on the screen.
*Translated by Sander Berg
Notes
1. On the new ways in which the documentary appears in film, see
Beceyro et al., 2005.
2. On the grotesque, see Bakhtin, 1984 and Russo, 1995.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Enlightenment as Mass
Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, t 120167. London: Verso,
1979. Available online in www.soundscapes.info, January 2000.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hlne Iswolsky.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Bazin, Andr. La evolucin del lenguaje cinematogrfico. In Qu es el
cine?, 81100. Madrid: Rialp, 1990. [English edition: What Is Cinema?
Edited and translated by Hugh Gray, 2 vols. Berkeley, LA: University of
California Press, 1967]
Beceyro, Ral, Rafael Filipelli, Hernn Hevia, Martn Kohan, Jorge Myers,
David Oubia, Santiago Palavecino, Beatriz Sarlo, Slvia Schwarzbck,
Silvia and Graciela Silvestri. Cine documental: la objetividad en cuestin.
Punto de vistaa 81 (2005): 1426.
Filipelli, Rafael y Oubia, David. Los pobres. Maneras de ejercer un oficio
(Sobre Copacabana, de Martn Rejtman, y Estrellas, s de Federico Len y
Marcos Martnez).Punto de vista a 88 (2007): 3236.
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens. Chantal Akermans Hyperrealist
Everyday.y Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Mulveyy, Laura. Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image. London:
Reaktion Books, 2006.
Rancire, Jacques. La ffbula cinematogrrfica. Reflexiones sobre la ficciin en el
cine. Barcelona: Paids, 2005. [English edition: Film Fables. Translated by
Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg, 2006.]
Russo, Maryy. The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Saeed-Vafa, Mernaz y Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Abbas Kiarostami. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
n. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Souvenir, the Collection
CH A P T ER 3
Documentary Cinema and the

Return of What Was
Andra Frana*
During my visit to Phnom Penh and the Cambodian interior for

Libration, I could catch a glimpse what genocide looks like, even
self-genocide, which leaves no image and is almost without a trace.
The proof that film is no longer intimately tied to the history of
man, not even its inhuman side: in an ironic contrast to the Nazi
torturers who filmed their victims, the Khmer Rouge had only left
their photographs and the common graves.
Serge Daney
I ntroduction
In the long tradition of documentary cinema, it can be stated that
the resources available to documentarians of historical memory are
archival images, interviews with witnesses, and reenactments. A com-
plex, contradictory, deceptive field: to explore memory in cinema is
to come in constant contact with dangers that include the tempta-
tion to try to resee the past just as it was, the risk of considering the
archive to be exhaustive evidence of the past, or the tendency to con-
fuse memory with recollection (Niney, 2002: 250). In this article, I
propose to discuss the process of reenactment in documentary films
as a practice, and as a way to bring tension to the present and his-
torical images. A method that, in film, brings a sense of engagement
and immersion that documents, history books, and images alone do
not permit. The repetition of situations, gestures, places, and bodies
44 ANDRA FRANA
appears as a procedure capable of demonstrating the idea that the

sense given to an event does not simply depend on recognizing the
event, but also on strategies of representation or the way in which
these strategies are directed at the viewer; that is, the way in which
the subject is approached by the film.
The aim of this essay is to analyze the method of reenactment
in its relation with the image, history, and the memory of those
who are implicated in the process of producing the film. To this
end, I make use of two Brazilian films whose reenactments unfold
in sites where crimes were committed, in scenes that revisit violent
and enduring moments of past events, and the relationship that is
established between images of the past and present. Wilsinho Galilia
(Joo Batista de Andrade, 1978)made for television but prohibited
by federal censorship and never shown on Brazilian screensrelates
and remakes the life of the bandit Wilsinho, who was killed by police
when he was an old man, and who was famous in the seventies for
his crimes, history of arrests, his assaults, and killings. I also consider
Serras da Desordem m (The Hills of Disorder, r Andrea Tonacci, 2004),
which reenacts the wandering trajectory of a native man of guajj
ethnicity, named Carapiru, who survived a massacre that wiped out
his entire village in 1978 in the interior of the state of Maranho.
The first film is interesting above all in terms of its reenactment of
the crime, an event that disrupts the habitual order of those who
are close to the event (the historical element); in the second, Tonacci
alternates between the reenactment of ordinary actions, the everyday
gestures of the village (the anthropological element), and the scene of
the crime, the massacre, as an event that was traumatic and extraor-
dinary in its historical dimension. As opposed to Wilsinho Galilia, in
Serras da Desordem m the character is alive and is an actor in the telling
of his own story. In both cases, the figure of the victim reemerges
principally through the presence of death in the film, of the crime
as an event that traumatizes and fascinates, transforming the order
of things and brutally disturbing the existence of those who are con-
nected to it.
I mage-Reconstitution
Reenactment as cinematic gesture is not a new methodology; on the
contrary, it dates back to at least the second decade of the past cen-
tury. In Robert Flaherty filming Nanook, for example, what we see is
the repetition of a knowing-living and a knowing-doing, an anthro-
pological gesture that reenacts the order in the ordinary, the everyday
DOCUMENTARY CINEMA 45
life of an Eskimo family in their struggle for survival. But there is also
the judicial reenactment of The Assassination of the Duke de Guise, an
art film from second decade of the twentieth century, where what is
in play is the historical gesture of reenacting an extraordinary occur-
rence, which breaks in and disrupts the continuity of chronological
time. If it is true that both proposals/intents were already confirming
in the past century that the relationship between history, reenact-
ment, and cinema can take quite divergent paths, they share the need
to repeat historical events as a way of reconstructing moments from
the past, attacking the chain of events and its significant conceptual
articulations, beginning with memory itselfthat of the archives, of
testimonials, of recollection.
In the first years after the war, Italian neorealism would come to
explore the rhetoric of example in order to promote an awakening
of consciousness in the actor and in all who were involved in the
film, since reenactment here has a corrective effect, that of a moral
lesson, which is only possible with the projection of the anonymous
subjects lives onto the screen (Margulies, 2002). If neorealist cinema
sought to achieve realism and to serve as an example in the actions
and gestures newly placed onscreen, the films of Jean Rouch would
make reenactment itself a field to be investigated and problematized
along with character and viewer. In Rouchs work, the gesture of
repetition as film script ( Jaguarr, for example), would critically resize
the object of the images referentiality, so that reenactment is asor
moremultifaceted and complex in its meaning than the event that
originated it. In the seventies, the Brazilian documentarian Eduardo
Coutinho was forced to interrupt filming of Cabra marcado para
morrerr (released as Twenty Years Later, r in the United States) because
of the military coup. That interrupted film was a reenactment based
on actual events of the murder of a peasant leader, using a crew of
peasant actors who were familiar with the crime. Taken up again and
completed years later, the second Cabra marcadoo . . . was another film,
different from the original idea.1
Reenactment in contemporary documentary has also taken differ-
ent tacks: on one hand, there are filmmakers who explore, by means
of repetition, the incongruity between what is said and what is seen,
between spoken words and gestures, problematizing the borders
between history, memory, and cinema, or even between the past and
images of the past. On the other hand, there are those who make
repetition into a project where history is represented as illustration of
past reality, similar to an action movie (adventure and/or suspense),
where the contradictions and complexities of the past are attenuated
46 ANDRA FRANA
in favor of naturalized images of that past (this is when documentary

approaches fiction based on true events, or historical fiction).
Close-upp (1990), by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, demon-
strates that, by means of the process of reenactment, many other
meanings are activated, since we are not dealing with a mere reenact-
ment of what happened (asking Sbzian to reenact his deceit before
the family who believed in him), but rather the activation and addi-
tion of meanings that were not attributed to the events (Frana and
Lissovsky, 1999). Along those same lines, the documentary The
Third Memoryy (2000), by Pierre Huyghe, reconstructs the episodes
of the film Dog Day Afternoon, by Sydney Lumet, with the collabora-
tion of the actual bank robber who, after getting out of prison many
years later, was unsatisfied with Lumets reconstruction, and who
reenacts, remembers, and analyzesin the same place where Lumet
filmedevents of the famous bank heist in Brooklyn, New York, in
1972. Filmmakers such as Richard Dindo (Swiss) and the Rithy Panh
(Cambodian) also start with the proposition that an incongruity
exists between memory and history; both distance themselves from
a project of repetition as was, from the model of true to life, in
order to, in Dindos case, film the places where significant events took
place, evoked by subjects who were there then, and are there again to
relate what they saw; or, in the case of Panh, to film the very protago-
nists of the remembered events.
In the field of contemporary art, the gesture of repetition
received a large exhibition, History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies
of Re-enactment, in Berlin in 2007/2008, with artists of different
nationalities exploring the field of history as a space of disputed media
meanings. In the Exhibition catalogue, one of the essays emphasized
the epistemological value of reenactment, affirming that as a gesture
it maintains a relationship with knowledge while creating a kind of
palimpsest that accumulates all the meanings created to that point,
including the very idea of copying. It is an artistic and intellectual
explication in favor of reenactment to the extent in which repeating
history would be to exalt the possibility of looking at it more than
once, to bring the most varied positions and consider their effects.
In contemporary art, reenactment, at least ideally, implies the viewers
mobility, a multiplicity of screens, the possibility of telling a story or
not, and interactive interfacesthat is, images that dissolve in con-
ceptual and environmental articulations. In the field of documentary
film, by contrast, at least in its hegemonic, representative narrative
form, reenactment is still tied to the idea of telling a story (or stories),
displayed on a single canvas, for a viewer who is relatively immobile.
However, in contemporary art as well as in documentary film, this

process of repetition can function as a critical strategy for reinter-
preting history, if we consider that the characters in a documentary
or the participants in an event are there as the carriers of a memory,
whether it be of the bodythe one that lived through mourning and
pain, and that repeats it for the camera(s)or the one forged in the
discourse of the media and of history, an imaginary memory.
Rewritings of History
In his book Images in Spite of All, Georges Didi-Huberman problem-
atizes the place of images of the past, specifically the archive, a global-
ized economy and culture that places the management of information
and knowledge in the apex of contemporary life. The first part of the
book had been previously published in 2001, in the catalog of the
exhibition Memory of the Camps: Photographs of Nazi Concentration
and Extermination Camps. This text analyzed four photos taken
secretly by one of the members of the Sonderkommando units dur-
ing one of his jobs in the Auschwitz death camp. The second part
of the book is a kind of response to the countless attacks that he
endured as a result of the text presented in the exhibition catalog,
an answer that he imparted in countless lectures over the course of
2003 to respond to the criticism. In this text, he prolonged and deep-
ened the argument of the first part, as the text resulted in a great
controversy, mainly in France. What, then, might be the theme of
Didi-Hubermans book (one of the themes, at least)?
We need to imagine something that belongs to the order of the
unrepresentable, that is, to imagine what the Nazi death camps were,
based on four photographs that remain irreducible before the person
looking at them. Neither knowledge (as the historians believe), nor a
concept (as the philosophers believe), nor the images in movement (as
the filmmakers believe) can entirely capture what it meant to experi-
ence the Shoah. Even so and in spite of everything, Didi-Huberman
reiterates, it is necessary to contemplate those images and to take on
the risk of our own inability to imagine what History was, given that
those four photographs carry with them the trace of urgency and
fear, translated into their crooked framing, their blurriness, the time
seized to take the photographs without anyone seeing the camera, in
the darkness of the figures, in sum, in its gaps.
Didi-Huberman proposes, as a method of knowing how to see
images of the past, the editing process, the process of deconstruc-
tion, in each gesture that implies new associations, compositions, and
48 ANDRA FRANA
assemblies of different artistic and temporal fields, such that a mem-

ory is produced that can also be woven out of silences, inaccuracies,
and forgetting as meaningful forces. A simple image: inadequate but
necessary, imprecise but truthful. . . . I would say that the image here
is the eye of historyy because of its tenacious vocation to make itself
visible. But also that it is in the eye of history: in a very local area,
in a moment of visual suspense, as is said of the eye of a tornado.
(Didi-Huberman, 2004: 67). Doubtless the author is referring here
to the images of the archive in terms of their element of unpredict-
ability (that which an investigative project does not consider) and of
unease (that which cannot be reduced to knowledge or system), since
to be in the eye of historyy is not only to produce knowledge about the
past, it is also to promote an experience that problematizes the pres-
ent and its future: it is to do battle with the residue that marks those
images, and not to attenuate it. Residue of risk, of danger, of urgency,
as a vestige that points toward the very complexity of the image.
In this discussion I am interested in the way in which history is
brought onstage, as a field in which not only is the future incomplete,
but also the past and the present. The reference to Walter Benjamin
is fundamental since, for the German thinker, the span of history is
infinite and incomplete in every direction, and it is the historians job
as well as the job of every human action to give them an end, to con-
fer a face on the events of the past, since to allow the new to penetrate
into the present is to dedicate oneself to an activity very much like
excavation: it is to position oneself as an archeologist, pointing out
the pasts call to the future. For both thinkers, history is conceived
as a time of rupture where the relationshipp is more important than
isolated periods, since each instant brings with it the emergence of
something new, and it is always a present that recovers something
of the past and thus transforms itself and, at the same time, also the
future.
In Images in Spite of Everythingg as well as in Loeil de lhistoire:
Quand les images prennent position n (When Images Take Position,
untranslated), Didi-Hubermans interlocutors are Walter Benjamin,
Bertolt Brecht, Aby Warburg, and Michel de Certeau, among others.
These thinkers share a conception of history as a time of ruptures,
intensities, and deviations; they share recognition of the emergence
of the historical event as necessary for the distinction of the min-
ute deviations that occur in power relationships in history; there is
a rejection of the understanding of time and history as an artificial
continuum. For de Certeau (1993), the historians activity is, in prac-
tical terms, the manipulation of vestiges while obeying certain rules.
He remembers that the gesture of the historian is to provoke incon-

gruities, to take materials from earlier series and to align them in a
new and singular way, placing them in another location, altering and
assembling their relationships in terms of similarity and contiguity;
ultimately repositioning and rearticulating shards of the world. The
writing of history, de Certeau insists, by bringing back the dead and
introducing them into a narrative and into life, in a certain way repo-
sitions the living and the dead, creating new relationships.
Without a doubt, the job of the documentarian is somewhat dif-
ferent from that of the historian, given that he or she operates using
different materials and processes. Leaving aside the educational films
of iconography I have mentioned, documentary film finds itself lim-
ited by living historical sources; that is, its material is surviving wit-
nesses and archival images. Nonetheless it is interesting, in allowing
access to the theatrical dimension of the historical process (Annette
Wieviorka, cited in. Didi-Huberman, 2004: 134), the moving images
do not limit themselves to remembering, but rather they show certain
aspects of a time (archives, vestiges, gestures): they make us directly
hear and see testimonies and memories, operating on the incongruity
between what is said and what is seen, between what a witness says
and how he or she says it or, even, contradicts it. It is in this sense that
Franois Niney wonders how cinema can turn toward memory, so that
the history represented is not a mere database, a dead memory, but is
instead a reflection on the past and present, a tension between these
periods, an interrogation from one to the other (Niney, 2002: 250).
This question remits to the theme of the Holocaust, the event that
has inspired many films, from the United States TV series Holocaust
(1978), to Life is Beautifull (Roberto Benigni, 1997), Schindlers List
(Steven Spielberg, 1993), Train of Lifee (Radu Mihaileanu, 1998), and
The Trucee (Francesco Rosi, 1997, an adaptation of Primo Levis book
of the same name), in a variety of reconstructions and formal pro-
posals, which endlessly reconfigure their primary cinematographic
referencesthe documentaries Night and Fogg (Alain Resnais, 1955)
and Shoahh (Claude Lanzmann, 1985). The latter two revolve around
the logic of destruction in order to consider not only the slaughter
of Jews in Europe by the Nazis, but also of the idea of a crime that
reaches to mans very humanity, a crime that establishes the impos-
sibility of any historical reconstruction because, ultimately, there is
no cause or justification for the suffering of the other. Both Resnaiss
and Lanzmanns films (and, in the field of fiction, Mihaileanus),
reconstruct the horrifying idea of suffering devoid of usefulness or
sense, all for nothing (Lvinas, 2006: 83).
50 ANDRA FRANA
History is repeated in these films not on the scene of the histori-

cal actionsudden, painful, and senselessbut on a different stage
where events are reversible and mediated, where the living speak as
survivors and, paradoxically, testify in place of the dead. If a film is
often able to make the dead speak, as de Certeau would have it, these
films about the Holocaust show in their limitations that those who
were saved cannot recall the crucial thing: they cannot bear witness
to the camps, in that they were not total victims (Agamben, 1998).
The intensity of the lived experience is also that which the testimony
is nott capable of representing, and it is precisely that impossibility that
he needs to reject.
Reenactment in Documentary Television:

Between the Ephemeral and
the Critical Image
In the field of Brazilian documentary, the gesture of reenacting an
extraordinary and traumatic event, showing its internal tensions,
appears in the audiovisual pieces made and shown on the television
program Globo Reporterr in the seventies. As films that reconstitute
historical episodes, these documentaries mixed a variety of shoot-
ing styles, benefiting from direct sound technology. Procedures
such as interviews with witnesses and survivors, official and private
archival footage, narrative voiceover and reenactment, call for a judg-
ment that is at once ethicalregarding the correction of historical
interpretationand aestheticabout the pertinence of the formal
proposal; they ask for an a posteriorii judgment of a past that is evapo-
rating and that must be picked up again, remembered again, thought
again. Above all because, quite often, films such as Caso Nortee (Joo
Batista de Andrade, 1977), O ltimo dia de Lampiio [Lampios Last
Day] (Maurice Capovilla, 1973), A mulher no Cangaoo [The Woman
among Bandits] (Hermano Penna, 1976), or Wilsinho Galilia, inter-
rogate the system of images in history, starting from their own strate-
gies of representation.2
Such films of reconstruction only become possible in their ability
to occupy a difficult position between reflexivity and a certain posi-
tivism, because, boycotted by internal censorship (of the TV station)
and external (of the military dictatorship), they forced the filmmakers
to experiment with new language processes to make the image say
what could not be said. If the almost always obligatory offscreen com-
mentary, which was done by the TV station and tended to reduce the
complexity of the image, is the repetition of places, gestures, bodies,

and speech, upon exploring the incongruity between memory and
history it can return investigative control to the past. In the decade of
the seventies, we saw an expressive generation of Brazilian filmmakers
who migrated to the television, producing and showing documenta-
ries on the Rede Globo program, as part of a policythe military
governments as well as the channelsthat set as its goal to increase
the quality of television programming and to prize access to informa-
tion about the country. Ultimately, it was all a political and media
agenda to demonstrate that there was public peace, and that Brazil
was future-oriented. It was these new television professionals, natives
of cinema and theater, who increased not just the formal references
in the films made for Globo Reporter, r but also the teledramaturgy,
modifying its conventions and enriching its aesthetic possibilities.
With their film projects frustrated and interrupted by the regimes
censorship, these leftist filmmakers would attempt to realize their
projects of political intervention for the television, creating programs
that would transmit a critical vision of the national reality.3
Among Globo Reporters films that would explore the reenact-
ment of an extraordinary event, Wilsinho Galilia a is a documentary
whose methodology is to take history as a problem, while at the same
time wondering how to relate to it. Joo Batista de Andrade mixes
reconstructions using actors with the testimony of police inspectors,
members of Wilsinhos family, and his colleagues. The sensational-
ist legends promulgated in the press of the day also appear, as well
as information taken from the police files that, associated through
editing, allow the viewer to glimpse a complexity in the portrait of
the criminal that was unthinkable at the time the crimes were com-
mitted. It is as though the documentary were reiterating through
montage and repetition that the images alone say nothing, that they
lie and remain obscure as long as one does not take the trouble
to read them, that is to say, analyze them, deconstruct them, put
them back together, interpret them, distance them from the linguis-
tic clichs that arise along with the visual clichs (Didi-Huberman,
2008: 44). From the clichs of Wilsinhos marginality and coldness
that are forged by the police reports and the press, we move toward
other dimensions of the criminal that are less reductionist, and that
are only possible as a result of the fragmented reenactmentsof the
assaults and murders, the rides in stolen cars, of the police ambush
to kill him.
Batista uses the reports, the files, the criminal records kept by
the police, as well as the photographs of the bandit published in the
52 ANDRA FRANA
newspapers, to gradually show the discontinuities between those

institutional documents. It is as if amid those archives there were
holes and gaps that needed to be reenacted and completed with other
stories, other temporalities and sympathies. The field of memory
photographs, testimony of family members and colleagues, police
records, and press clippingsis the foundation from which the film
brings images into exchange and confrontation, reenacting in actor
Paulo Weudes, who plays Wilsinho, the countless flaws in the hege-
monic discourse that made the criminal into a symbol of violence and
cruelty. The reenactments with the actor in bars, streets, and places
the criminal frequented before he was killedWeudes walks through
the miserable neighborhoods of So Joo Clmaco and So Caetano,
in the suburbs of So Pauloproduce, at the same time, an approxi-
mation of historyfor they are the places where Wilsinho grew up,
lived, had friends and family, the places the actor looks atand an
irreducible distancethe actor is very different from the bandit we
have seen in the photographs, not only in age but also in appearance.
It is as if the actor were inviting the viewer to look along with him
at those places so deprived of everything, as if he were inviting the
viewer to stand before those images, to register the unbearable, in
order to interrupt his sensory-motor reactions.
To explore the incongruity in the reenactment between the actor
Paulo Weudes, with his ironic smile, and Wilsinho, is to introduce a
flaw in the internal time of the police files and the media; it is to rein-
ject its original power back into the field of memory, promoting a kind
of dialogue between the gesture of repetition proposed by the director
and the traces of information left over time, exploring the chasm that
lies between signs and their objects. Here the reconstruction points
to the power of the abyss between the theater of memory and the
Brazilian police/prisoner apparatus, legitimized by their scientific
knowledge, because what the film displays is the chasm between the
image produced by the criminal filespreeminent in framing and dis-
ciplining anything that could cloud the island of peace and tranquil-
ity named Brazil, as president Mdici called itand the brutality of a
repressive regime that kidnapped and killed without hesitation.
In mixing processes of fiction with those of documentary, jour-
nalism, and performance in order to reenact history, these docu-
mentaries are already pointing to the idea that an image consists
of regimes of differing visibility, multiple and shared practices that
can and should be resized. This period of Globo Reporterr opened up
the possibility for innovation, and even continuity, to a project of
aesthetic experimentation that the military government aborted dur-

ing a period of intense censorship of artistic expression, a period of
the States supremacy in the production, financing, and distribution
of films.
Reenacting the Solitary Body of

the Survivor: Times Within Times
To discuss the process of reenactment today, as a practice and a means
of negotiating with history within documentary cinema, helps us to
think about questions such as: How can we instill difference amid
the homogeneity of images? How can we invent new ways of looking?
How can we position ourselves critically in the audiovisual flow? All
of which leads to a situation that emerged during the 1980s and was
identified by film criticsparticularly Serge Daney, and later, Gilles
Deleuzewhich pointed to the necessity for the artist to become a
skilled artisan and manipulator of various toolsin short, a special-
ist. There is no doubt that today, the logic of reenactment in film
can still attempt to represent the historical event in its continuity and
sameness; or rather, conversely, it can attempt to restore the events
autonomy and persistence over time.
In Serras da Desorden n (2004), Andrea Tonacci reenacts the wan-
dering trajectory of a native man of guajj ethnicity, the survivor of
a massacre that wiped out his entire village in 1978, in the interior
of Maranho. The native escapes and begins to walk through the
Brazilian interior, until he is taken in, ten years later, by a peasant fam-
ily in Baha, more than two thousand miles from his burned village.
Some time later, a researcher of the sert t o finds out about the situa-
tion and makes the first attempt to approach the native. Eventually
brought to Brasilia, he is identified as a surviving member of the
Guaj tribe, which was confirmed by a young native interpreter of the
same ethnicity who had also been rescued over ten years earlier by
the FUNAI (National Indian Foundation). In their encounter, a sur-
prise: they recognize each other as the father and soneach thought
the other had been murdered in the village massacre.
What matters to the film, however, is what occurred far from the
television cameras, in silence, before and after the meeting between
father and son. It is as if Tonacci were seeking, in contrast to the great
syntheses of unpublished cases, the singularities and the experience
of this ordinary man who, in this case, is indigenous, and as such,
54 ANDRA FRANA
must reenact his story with his own body. As a result, Carapiru must
become involved again with his body (baring it for the second time)
and his story, since these are the origins of his suffering and pain.
Tonacci turns the time of researching and shooting into an ally.
Serras da Desordem m is based on an investigation beginning in 1993
as the result of a conversation with anthropologist Sidney Possuelo,
which continued up to the first shooting sessions in 2000. To recon-
struct the natives wanderings across the Brazilian interior is, then,
to work over a long period of time, the time necessary to let the
others body impact on ones own and for this body to allow the
camera to approach it. In this way the film reenacts situations, repeats
old encounters, and theatricalizes pain and incomprehension in the
body of the Indian himself. Tonacci makes Carapirus body into an
ambiguous space, a place from which history is written and that also,
at the same time, recreates it, in the extent to which these encoun-
ters are, this second time, happy, celebrated, and cathartic. The mas-
sacre in the village is repeated, the natives flight, his long wandering,
the encounters with the white people who take him in, family meals
around the table, exchanges of smiles around the fire, a television
program watched together, the solitude of the survivor. Singularity
and repetition, truth and lie, the face and the mask, all are reconciled
by the strength of the film that makes this confusion between stage
and game its ethical and aesthetic principal.
To place reenactment at the heart of ones methodology is to make
what the film shows possible once again. It restores the shadowed
m [The Hills of Disorder]

Figure 3.1 Serras da Desordem r (Brazil, 2004),
directed by Andrea Tonacci.
zone of death, understood as the suppression of othernessthe

others understood as the insane, criminals, foreigners, the poor,
the indigenousand as the difference that exists in time itself, its
passage as a flow of constant ruptures. Finally, while the crime is
a thing of the past, so that all can come together to make the film
and remember, rehabilitating the living and the dead as Michel de
Certeau would have it, the crime is also that which stands as the
dark side of mans humanity, the thing that complicates Tonaccis
reenactment and that makes the violence committed (in the past and
the present) diffuse.
In the movement to reenact the rituals of civilization that the
indigenous man goes through, the sense of unease is reinstated, even
amid much sympathy and complicity between the native and the
white man. There is an uncomfortable duality in the film, which is
illustrated very well by the scene in which a hair band passes from
the natives head to the little girls. The hair band, a feminine adorn-
ment used to hold back hair, is the element that calls up an ambigu-
ous space of the past in the present; it is the thing that reiterates the
natives body as one outside the law of men. In the kitchen, around
the fire, the native and the family that took him in for the first time
play with the hair band, and it is that unforeseen element, fruit of
the reenactment itself, which is placed on Carapirus head. Everyone
laughsand everything is dislocated, in the reencounter as well as
in the viewer, touched by the freeness of the scene, by an inno-
cence that is subjected for the second time for the crime of being
different.
There are, as such, two contradictory dimensions surrounding the
image of Serras da Desorden n and that constitute a place of hesita-
tion, since the indigenous mans body bears witness to a paradoxical
experience: the exclusion of his being and itsuncomfortableso-
cial reinsertion, because it occurs through a smiling, sensible, cordial
presence, but in a speechless, dark body that puts up no resistance.
The gesture of repetition that is demanded from the native ironically
exposes the crime of this representation, exposes it for the second
time, for it is present in the unavoidable lacuna that inhabits these
images. To reproduce history is to substitute a possible for a real that
is repeated. Ultimately, it is having been born Indianyesterday,
today, tomorrowthat makes it possible for a life to be killed, dis-
regarded, considered worthless. To repeat history, thus, is to make
the mise-en-scnee out of the victims body, it is to bring suffering to
the gaze of he who does not suffer, it is to fulfill the role of historical
justice and of historical document.
56 ANDRA FRANA
C onclusion
Cinematographic reenactment given by the indicative presence of
places (social or historical), of bodies, of gestures and voices, captured
in the same moment in which the relationship between documentar-
ian and character is established, is what allows a return to the exact
point in history when it bifurcated and took the wrong path. It is
what allows one to pick up the course of history and put it on track,
breaking the strict chronology of events, reconstructing the chronicle
of time (of the institutions of power/knowledge) to work with his-
tory as if in a kind of workshop where distant and uneven elements
are joined.
While the primordia of cinema itself, the documentary register, and
reenactment all coexist in very different ways, certain contemporary
films (Serras da desorden, but also Jogo de cena a [Playing] by Eduardo
Coutinho, 2007, or Juzoo mayor exige do menorr [Justice], by Maria
Augusta Ramos, 2007) excel at a new inflection in the combination
between presence and artifice, the spontaneous and the constructed.
How do we situate ourselves before the indistinctness between what
belongs to singularity and what belongs to repetition? From there
arises a series of issues that interest us to the extent in which reenact-
ment can open these films to the duration of eventsbe they small
or grandiose, ordinary or extraordinaryexploring the empirical
trace of the world in the image (Xavier, 2004: 75) and dislocating
the place of the viewer who needs to experience the images, not as
illustration of a preexisting reality, but rather as a field to be worked,
to be understood, to be linked to other times, other histories and
other memories.
Thatt criminal, thatt cadaver, thatt gun, thatt native man. What the
reenactment demonstrates is that the exact place of these beings in
the world is not of great importance. What is truly important is their
place in the film, the way in which bodies, sounds, and images act to
fill in gaps in historical memory, without losing sight of the fact that
this act of reconstruction is never an attempt to restore a whole.
Translated by Megan McDowell
Notes
1. The version of Cabra marcado para morrerr that is known today is
the second one, from 1984, which Coutinho returned to again at the
end of the seventies and that used what was left of the 1964 shooting
as its starting point. The process of democratic opening-up allowed
Coutinho to use the negatives of the first filming that were hidden away
for years, in order to rescue not only the story but also the memories of
those implicated, making cinema into a field of formal invention.
2. Outside Brazil, we have what some authors will come to refer to as
reality syndrome on TV: in the United States, television recon-
structed small crimes, while in England in the sixties we had pro-
grams that seeked to reenact political and social investigations. It is
in the decade of the seventies, however, when the strategy of mix-
ing real people with fictional elements was consolidated, given the
large audience for those dramatized documentaries (or docudramas)
that were the continuation, in turn, of experiments by the English
school of documentary of the 1930s and 1940s.
3. It is important to mention that Globo Reporterr is a television program
of documentary origin that is still aired today and that arose during
the most repressive period of the military regime, in the beginning
of the seventies. The program came to occupy the place of Globo Shell
Especial, which already had the goal of continuing after the style of
North American television documentaries, with simple and informa-
tive language and room for experimentation.
B ibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer El poder soberano y la nuda vida. Valencia:
Pre-textos, 1998. (trad. Antonio Gimeno). [English translation: Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lifee (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998].
Bangma, Anke. Experience, Memory and Re-enactment. Berlin: Revolver
Publishing, 2005.
Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Cineastas e imagens do povo. So Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2004.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Voir et pouvoir: cinma, tlvision, fiction, documen-
e Paris: ditions Verdier, 2004.
taire.
Daney, Serge. Persvrance, Pars: POL, 1994. [trad. esp.: Perseverancia.
Reflexiones sobre el cine. Buenos Aires: El amante, 1998.]
De Certeau, Michel. La operacin historiogr fica. In La escrita de la histo-
a (trad. Jorge Lopez Moctezuma). Mxico: Universidad Iberoamericana,
ria
1993. [English translation: The Historiographical Operation. In The
Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley. Columbia University
Press, 1992.]
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Im genes pese a todo. Memoria visual del Holocausto
(trad. Mariana Miracle). Paids: Barcelona, 2004. [English translation:
Images in Spite of Alll (trad. Shane B. Lillis). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012.]
. Cuando las im genes toman posicin (trad. I. Brtolo). Madrid:
Antonio Machado Libros, 2008.
58 ANDRA FRANA
Frana, Andra. O cinema entre a memria e o documental, Revista

InTexto, vol. 2, Publicacin semestral do Programa de Ps-Graduao em
Comunicao e Informao da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do
Sul (UFRGS), 2008.
Frana, Andra and Mauricio Lissovsky. A tirania do mundano, Cinemais:
revista de cinema e outras questes audiovisuaiss 10, no. mar-abr (1999):
121138.
L vinas, Emmanuel. Entre-nous: Thinking of the Other. r London: Continuum,
2006. [trad. esp.: Entre nosotros: ensayos para pensar en otroo (trad. J. L.
Pardo). Valencia: Editorial Pre-Textos, 1993.]
Margulies, Ivone. Rites of Realism. Duke University Press, 2002.
Niney, Franois. Lpreuve du Rell Lcran, Bruxelles: ditions de Boeck
Universit, 2002. [trad. esp.: La prueba de lo real en la pantalla. Ensayo
sobre el principio de realidad documentall (trad. Miguel Bustos Garca).
Mxico: CUEC, UNAM, 2009.]
Xavier, Ismail. Iracema: o cinema-verdade vai ao teatro. Deviress 2, no. 1
(2004): 7185.
CH A P T ER 4
The Return of the Natural:

Landscape, Nature and the
Place of Fiction
Edgardo Dieleke*
e
Contemporary Latin American film, particularly Argentine and

Brazilian cinema from the past 15 years, has been analyzed in terms
of one of its dominant tendencies: an urgency of the real that is,
in some cases, comparable to neorealism.1 In addition, the so-called
New Argentine Cinema was hailed due to its independent mode of
production that made it possible to pursue more risky projects than
in the large productions of the eighties.2 In turn, critics like David
Oubia and Ivana Bentes agreed on the characterization of the New
Argentine Cinema and Brazils Retomada, respectively, as surgical
cinemas, in their demarcation of new areas of the present, while
not intervening in it explicatively or allegorically (Oubia, 2002;
Bentes, 2003).
Italian neorealism has been used as a point of comparison because
of the inclusion of nonprofessional actors, narrative ellipses, settings
in urban locations, and the recurrent construction of narratives or
scenes from the present (Bazin, 1972). This framework especially
includes the films of Adrin Caetano, Pablo Trapero, and Daniel
Burman and, in the case of Brazil, a group of fictional films that cen-
ter on the dismemberment of the big cities, as in the films of Walter
Salles, Jos Padilha, and Fernando Meirelles, among others.
But this turn toward realism can also be considered in relation to
the documentary, precisely because many films flirt with a position
60 EDGARDO DIELEKE
in which the viewer perceives the fiction as real. More than a

swing of the pendulum toward realism, films such as Bolivia a (Adrin
Caetano, 2001), City of God d (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), and, more
radically, the films of Lisandro Alonso (La libertadd [Freedom], 2001;
Los Muertoss [The Dead], 2004), have encountered success at festi-
vals on grounds of their exploration of indexical images of other-
ness, a characteristic intrinsic to the documentary. Moreover, in the
opposite direction, several recent documentaries of a more subjective
tenor have also made use of strategies that belong to fiction, includ-
ing Um Passaporte H Hngaroo (A Hungarian Passport, Sandra Kogut,
2001), the films of Andrs Di Tella, or Albertina Carris Los rubios
(The Blonds, 2003).
Now, in terms of emphasis on recording or documenting, the use
of real settings and the tension with the documentary form, we can
agree with Gonzalo Aguilar that Lisandro Alonso is the filmmaker
who has most deeply exploited this drive to record (Aguilar, 2006:
67).3 What I wish to highlight in this chapter is that in Alonso, this
drive is tied to marginal, distant places, where the characters have a
way of life that brings them closer, as we will see, to subjects of the
documentary genre. For Alonso, that drive to record, to observe,
is outside, at the edges. Particularly in La libertad
d (Freedom, 2001)
but also in Los muertoss (The Dead, 2004), the record is key, and thus
Alonso follows almost every activity in the daily lives of the two
characters: the lumberjack Misael on one hand, and on the other,
Argentino Vargas, a man who is released from prison and returns
to his home in the jungle. But beyond that recording, that observa-
tion, there is a particular way of working with the characters speech,
which seems to me to offer a possible new reading of Alonsos films.
I wish to refer to two statements of his that allow us to envisage
these characters and their ways of life, and thus define the directors
choices:
My films do not arise from the interest provoked in me by some ele-

ment in this or that movie. They arise out of the place where I want
to film. And the kind of lives those places produce. For me, these
places are almost as much the protagonists of my films as the people
(Fontana, 2009).
The people are more elemental, purer, less complicated. They speak
less. I have very little faith in words. I believe humans hide behind
words (Klinger, 2005).
Let me point out a few cues here to understanding what this obses-
sion with recording is about. On one hand, the selection of certain
THE RETURN OF THE NATURAL 61
natural settings, like the brush of the pampas and the jungle, and
no longer the streets or slums of more urban cinema. On the other
hand, a particular gaze on the characters: there is for Alonso a greater
purity in these characters who live on the margin. Gonzalo Aguilar
indicates that there is an asceticism in Alonsos films, a wager on
marginality as a means of escape.4 Nevertheless, this asceticism is not
a clear decision on Misaels part. It is, according to Andermann, a
mode of subsistence, an inclusion by excluding, or, in any case, it is
something that the film does not try to explain.5 Nonetheless, this
choice to recover an alternative way of life, this other relationship
with the environment, or, better yet, in Alonsos own words, this
greater purity that lies behind the characters, is not built only in rela-
tion to the outside or to the margin, but also through the absence of
speech. These characters are more real, Alonso also seems to say,
because they speak less.
In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which this attempt to
record, and also to avoid speech and dialogue, establishes a par-
ticular amalgam of documentary and fiction. Based on that explora-
tion, I will investigate and question the construction of the subject
in Alonsos films, precisely from his provocative statement regarding
speech and words. What are the risks and the gains with respect to
speech, an aspect historically central to the documentary genre, in
films that set such a productive border between fiction and docu-
mentary? How do those borders work? Where do they place the rep-
resented subject, and what kind of relationship to they establish with
the director? To develop these lines of thought I will also analyze a
Brazilian film that springs from an impulse similar to Alonsos.6 It is
a film that seeks out a setting far from contemporary urban realism,
a film that also works with the borders between fiction and the pure
recording of a subjects otherness: here, the native of an Amazonian
tribe. In analyzing some scenes of Serras da Desordem m (The Hills of
r 2004) by Andrea Tonacci, I will examine some readings of
Disorder,
the genre divide with reference to two films that present their char-
acters in a liminal space, literally defined by a border that cuts them
off from any other kind of sociability. I wish to ask, in short, how this
wager on marginality, which can be read as belonging to the docu-
mentary, is also the very thing that allows for the entrance of fiction
in both Alonso and Tonacci.
In one of its possible definitions, a documentary is inscribed as
such based on its claim to realitythat is, on the performative posi-
tion of the viewer, who perceives the represented experiences as real.7
According to Bill Nichols, moreover, the documentary is defined in
62 EDGARDO DIELEKE
its opposition to fiction, where access to knowledge is secondary.

Bernini points out the other definition of documentary that strikes
me as pertinent to mention here. For him, what constitutes documen-
tary is, beyond its treatment, an image of otherness.8 The interest-
ing thing about Alonsos and Tonaccis films, as we can gather from
their statements, is that they call into question the traditional way of
accessing that otherness. But, to repeat once again, that estrangement
comes paradoxically from the images of the other. And, moreover,
from a rereading of the very first documentaries.
One of the historical impulses of documentary film, in the prac-
tice of ethnographic cinema, works not only with the idea of seek-
ing out an image of otherness, but also with the documentarians
very practice of observing alternative ways of life tied to spaces in
which man must survive in a still-natural environment. These strat-
egies are present from the very beginning, in Nanook of the North. h
But here also, the approach to the real has made use of the scen-
ery, of an almost theatrical appearance, necessary to communicate a
type of life different from that of the big cities. At times such as our
current one, when natural settings can no longer maintain the same
statute of purity, Alonsos and Tonaccis practice seems to place
itself as a new twist on this first documentary attempt. They pro-
pose to go out to natural or distant settings and, through their
characters, to introduce an estranged filmic proposition, while at
the same time proposing a reflection on the access to these sub-
jects. I would like to discuss a couple of scenes from La libertad
and from Serras da desordem m that reveal a manipulated staging in
relation to the natural landscape. They are strategies that seem to
work with a delimited natural stage, one that is literally fenced off,
but that is, at the same time, conscious of its borders. A space that
is a theater of operations for the relationships between the outside
and inside of society, and a space of tension between documentary
and fiction.
I would like to begin by delving into some of Lisandro Alonsos
strategies, in particular in La Libertad, and, second, those of Andrea
Tonacci in Serras da Desordem. Although each directors subjects
belong to different categoriesone is a lumberjack, the other a native
of the Awa-guaj tribe in the Amazonboth of them are inaccessible
not only because of the spaces they occupy, but also because of both
directors decision to block the possible access that dialogue could
provide. Still, there is a clear difference: Misael in La libertad
d speaks
Spanish, while Carapir , the protagonist of Serras da Desordem, does
not speak Portuguese. In any case, confined to a seminatural space

whether by choice or notthe instance I would like to go over is
precisely that separate place, literally fenced off, as I mentioned,
liminal, where certain aspects of the politics of the films language
are revealed.
La libertadd opens with a scene that is comparable to the first
scene of Serras da Desordem. In both films, Misael and Carapir
are close to a fire. One is cooking an armadillo that he then eats
facing the camera, and in the other, filmed in black and white but
also with an observational aesthetic, the character, naked, is light-
ing a fire, and then he lies down to sleep. In neither case is it clear
what we are seeing or who the subjects are. It is pure action and
observation, empty of all explication. Nonetheless, La libertadd takes
longer to break that code. The film advances almost to the mid-
point, where it reaches its most estranged moment. And here we
find one of the cues to Alonsos films. In showing Misael taking a
nap, the camera breaks away from his face, and in a kind of aerial
pan, it leaves the character and interrupts the observational record-
ing of his daily life. Conversely, Tonacci breaks earlier from this
mode. As soon as Carapir seems to be asleep, the films language
changes. A sequence begins that is a mixture of dreams, in color,
with images that begin to explain part of the protagonists incred-
ible story. Throughout the film, he will rebuild a possible story, an
attempt to gain access to Carapir s lifesomething that Alonso,
on the other hand, never proposes.
How are the real characters constructed in Alonsos films? A
central aspect of his documentary aesthetic has to do with his use
of nonactors, like the lumberjack Misael, who is observed over the
course of one day. At the same time, as in the case of Argentino
Vargas in Los muertos, Alonsos protagonists move within a known
space, in which, without conflict, with a radicalization of contin-
gency as Bazin understood it, they simply take or do what they need.
And the camera accompanies them, observes them, because part of
what defines them, as the director himself says, are their gestures
and their belonging to places where, according to the director
and I believe there is a certain navet
herespeech is distrusted.
Entering into that exterior space is one of the driving forces of the
film, but at the same time Alonsos contribution is to place a certain
strangeness onto images that could have been filmed by the very first
documentarians. It seems to me that La libertad d can be read along
these lines, as can Los muertos, especially the second half. Not as
64 EDGARDO DIELEKE
marginalized characters who choose to leave the system, but rather

as characters who in their simple way of lifein Alonsos vieware
defined by certain everyday actions, like eating an armadillo, killing
a goat, or picking fruit. And in this sense it strikes me as impor-
tant to highlight something: in Alonso, nature is restricted, literally
fenced off, but it provides his characters with what they need. This
natural wooded space gives Misael what he needs to subsistthe
food he needsand if he requires something else, he simply goes
to the market, abandoning his restricted and safe space. If in other
films nature can show itself as threatening, or loaded with violence,
as in Serras da Desordem, here it offers all that one wants to take
from it. Misael needs no more than this and, in fact, he is not there
because he shuns contact with the world. In several scenes we see
him in conversation with a neighbor who lends him his truck, and
even on the phone with family members. He is simply isolated, but,
as Andermann states, it cannot be said that he is fleeing from the
world of consumption, or even from contact. There literally is no
way of knowing.
Nature provides everything necessary in Los muertos, too: lum-
ber pays well, fish go on biting. That is the only thing Argentino
is interested in finding out in Los muertos, when he returns to the
islands after getting out of prison. And there is a sense of community,
as well, which to me seems to complicate a postpolitical reading: in
Alonsos films the characters mostly travel in borrowed vehicles or get
rides from friends.
Alonso proposes, then, a more spontaneous cinema made of pure
imagein his words, a return to the Lumire brothers images.
There is also the stamp of the documentary. But his relationship
with the characters introduces the disquieting, uncomfortable ele-
ment, which upsets the observational aesthetic. For this, the scene
I mentioned earlier is the key. In it we see only Misaels dream,
but this is also where the fictional appears, the out of place, or the
Alonso effect, as we could call it. It seems to me that more than
in the sequential shots, Alonsos films are staked on the combina-
tion of that disquieting camera, alongside a logic of inaccessibility
given by the constructionor lack thereofof his characters. His
characters are defined by certain actions that exploit contingencies
to their limit, and by a secret, something they hide and will never
reveal to us. If they have knowledge, or a truth that exceeds their
actions, Alonso is not interested in discovering it. But above all,
one can never gain access to it through dialogue. Thus, the inac-
cessibility or secrecy is repeated in all of Alonsos films, not only in
La libertad, which is his most observational work. In all of them,

there are masculine characters who are alone by choice, not because
they have been abandoned by the state, but because of some secret
that, from the start, defines them as they are. Even in Liverpool
(2008), the main character is a laconic man who hides a secret, and
who lives with that internal burden with no desire to communicate
it to others. Faced with the indecisiveness of the meaning of mod-
ern cinema, perhaps Alonso executes a simpler and more effective
practice: inaccessibility or the deferral of dialogue.
However, it is not that Alonsos characters do not talk; the for-
mula perhaps resides in the fact that their speech is inaccessible to the
audience, and, in additionand this is Alonsos romanticismthese
subjects are defined by their actions more than their speech. One
could go further on this point to discuss the role of speech as opposed
to the power of the image. The deferral of dialogue could then be
interpreted as an attempt to fictionalize the characters, to avoid the
explicative, and thus separate these films from the documentary. At
the same time, this politics of character construction could be ana-
lyzed in opposition to the mandate of documentary films that set out
to give voice to the other. In that case, there would be a politics of the
image and of the relation with the subjects of his films, in line with
Comollis suggestion:
I fear, for example, that filmmakers who claim to and who do place
themselves in the position of givingabove all documentarians, it
is true; and especially those who sincerely propose to give words to
those who do not have themdo nothing more than reiterate the
place of the master, the gesture of power. Because it is not about giv-
ing but rather to take and be taken; it is always about violence: not
restituting to some dispossessed person what I possess, saying that he
lacks it, but rather to establish a power relationship with him in which,
surely, I run the risk of ending up equally deprived as he (Comolli,
2002: 55).
Nevertheless, if we return to Alonsos statement quoted above,

what does he want to tell us with his affirmation that these men,
in their actions, in that absence of dialogue, are more pure? Could
there not be in this instance, perhaps, not only a deferral of speech
but also a deferral of problematizing this relationship with the
other?
It strikes me as important to emphasize another of the laws of
the world of Alonsos characters, almost always strictly masculine:
their relationship to women. In almost all of Alonsos films, except
66 EDGARDO DIELEKE
for Fantasma a (Ghost, 2006), his characters come from their natu-
ral world, or from their action space, and they have, or try to have,
relations with prostitutes. The inaccessible world, that secret, unites
Misael, Argentino and the protagonist of Liverpool, and the need to
pay for a woman is part of the storys construction, of the charac-
ters incarnation, without dramatics or conflict, narrated in the same
spontaneous way in which they make use of a honeycomb or a liter
of gas.
Ruled in the extreme by the utilitarian and the contingent, it seems
to me that this is where Alonsos aesthetic imprint is staked. We
could then discuss whether his mark, his effect, could be rethought
from: (1) A forced anachronism, in its turn toward observational
documentary, or even more, to the Lumires: pure movement with-
out dialogue. The result of that anachronism: out of context, and
without the excessive explanations of the documentary, the images
power is reinforced. (2) The radical use of the contingent and the
nondramatic, along the lines of Bazins realism. As Bazin said in
regard to neorealism, if the character had to stop and urinate, he
simply did so. Alonso takes this to the extreme, thus the confusion
with documentary. And also for this reason, in the case of La liber-
tad, the Alonso effect appears when the camera breaks away from the
character to linger on the landscape, bestowing greater secrecy on
his politics of fiction. Finally, we need to highlight something that
distances him from modern cinema, and from neorealism, and which
must be discussed further: how best to read the dialogues, speech
and its absence, in Alonso.
It seems to me that the nature of his characters, the deliberate
inaccessibility and secrecy that defines them, does not allow us to
say they are nomads who shun contact or evidence from outside
their worldsfrom a center that marginalizes thembut rather
that they inhabit a delimited refuge that we are not allowed to
enter. For this, one can return once more to analyze the final
sequence of Los muertos. Argentino and his grandson are inside a
tumbledown hut, and they are listening to some murmurs while
the viewer is left outside, merely attending to the limits of what we
can see or even interpret. And then we are left with the shot of a
doll, a soccer player, and little more. The real action in the delayed
meeting is happening outside the frame, because in Alonsos films,
the characters only say what is necessary, for he is not interested in
having them explain themselves. And here is part of the enigma of
his films as well as one of their limitations. In this difficulty with
the work of dialogue lies the loss or feeling of hollowness of his

later films.
An aesthetic of inaccessibility, then, the interrupted or deferred
dialogue in Alonso, and the addition of a disquieting camera that
brings in a more fictional element as it shows the borders of the
space in which characters like Misael and Argentino operate. But
let us turn now to Serras da Desordem, before returning once more
to Alonso. Serras da Desordem m reconstructs the journey of over
a thousand kilometers that its protagonist, a native man of the
Awa-guaj ethnicity named Carapir , undertook almost 20 years
earlier, f leeing from landowners who had murdered most of his
small clan. With Carapir himself, the film repeats the same jour-
ney, which was previously only partially covered in the press. Thus
he reconstructs the initial scene, and pauses to observe everyday
life in the jungle, where it is not clear, as Ismail Xavier indicates,
whether the film is a documentary, a fictional story, or bothin
any case, an extremely unlikely story. But as the story advances, we
will see that once the character leaves behind that liminal space,
the controlled nature that is his native field of action, the possibil-
ity of accessing this other, different subjectivity dissolves. Thus it
is precisely in the moment when that border, that natural space, is
crossed, when a layer that is more documentary in the traditional
sense intervenes through the inclusion of a number of archival
images, referencing the Brazilian dictatorship and the construc-
tion of the Trans-Amazonian Highway. Interchanging two reg-
isters, from color to black and white, the film returns to the past
and the present, although this does not become entirely clear until
the end.
While in Alonsos films nature provides what is necessary to subsist
without drama, in Serras da desordem m the space of the jungle is, from
the start, a space without interest in terms of exploration, since it has
already been exploited. While in Alonso the characters move about
out of simple necessity, here we have not just the flight of the hunters,
but also the impossibility of finding a calm place to hunt or simply
survive. But the inaccessibility of their characters unites the projects of
both directors. If, as we have discussed, in both Alonso and Tonacci
there are scenes of a certain dream state (for Misael and Argentino,
before they wake up), in Carapirs case the dream allows for a return
to what happened, and a way to begin to tell his story. But once again,
and here lies the pertinence of tying the film to Alonsos work in
spite of their dissimilar languages, it is that disquieting dream that
68 EDGARDO DIELEKE
brings to the fore the difficultyor, better yet, the impossibilityof

clearly accessing the subjectivity of the other. And that inaccessibil-
ity, contrary to the didacticism an ethnographic documentary might
relapse into, inverts, or rather, constantly problematizes the relation-
ship between director and subject.
However, while in the course of Serras da Desordem, because
of its more documentary nature and its use of archival images, it
continues trying to account for certain aspects of that otherness,
one of its strong points, as Ismail Xavier has pointed out, is in the
uncertainty present in the process of the film itself.9 Because if
documentarys mandate has traditionally been to give voice to the
other, as Comolli says, that operation has now become anachro-
nistic in that it ultimately confirms the place of the master. In the
case of Serras da desordem, the inaccessibility, the impossibility of
knowing exactly what Carapir is thinking, even with an inter-
preter present (who does not translate anything for the viewer, as
in the films final scene) is problematized precisely before the cam-
era, when we see Carapirs face explaining something that we will
never understand. Perhaps this is the best way of giving voice, not
translating but also not excluding it, without taking speech from
the other, as at times it seems Alonso does in order to carry out the
indecisiveness in his films.
Beyond all this, Serrass makes us see that there is no comfortable
place for anyone, and in that sense it overcomes, it seems to me, a
certain unease provoked by the directors position in Alonsos case.
A position that I believe is only overcome in certain final scenes
in Fantasma, where the filmmakers place is called into question.
Carapir , at the end of his long journey, is brought back to the res-
ervation by the Bureau for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples,
where he appears fenced-in and extremely sad. Fenced in by the
landowners, fenced in by the States protection, fenced in by the
train tracks surrounding the reservation, in those archival images
the film problematizes historical discourses and images about
nature and the natives, but also, very subtly, the role of film itself.
In reconstructing Carapir s original journey, the film seems to
end up enclosing the protagonist himself, in a process where he
seems tired and fenced in once again. But it is this tension that
reveals, in contrast to the characters in Alonsos films, the conflicts
of a subjectand the capturing of this subject on filmwho seems
unable to move about of his own free will. A character who in the
final shot speaks to us in his language and leaves us, once more,
not knowing what to say. And then the camera points to the sky,
where the real breaks in by means of a strange object, a modern

airplanethe mark of the director.
*Translated by Megan McDowelll
Notes
1. See Ngib (2003; 2007) for a reading of the Retomada, Wolf (2002)
and Aguilar (2006), among others, for the case of the New Argentine
Cinema.
2. See Beceyro, Filipelli, Oubia, and Pauls (2005).
3. Says Aguilar: But there is one film that carries further than any
other this drive to record, to the point where the idea of narration in
a classical sense disappears: I am referring to La Libertad d by Lisandro
Alonso. I dont want to tell a story, says the filmmaker, Im only
interested in observing.
4. I understandor believe I dothe paths Alonso is venturing down:
those of the celebration of asceticism and retreat, of distancing and
renouncement, of individualism and caprice (Aguilar, 2006: 71).
5. As Andermann astutely points out: The film does not suggest at
any moment that this precarious life is the voluntary asceticism of
someone who renounced the cities in exchange for nature and the
treeson the contrary, it shows the precariousness as the state of
pure necessity, where choice is dismissed in favor of functionality.
Neither, it is clear, does it show the lumberjack as one who was driven
out (as were the protagonists of cinema from the Eighties, where the
poor were shown as dispossessed, deprived, that is, of the life they
would have chosen, that of the middle class): to read the film from
the alternative between social criticism and ascetic epic would be to
fall, one way or another, into psychologizing the character; some-
thing that Alonso carefully dodges in his avoidance of close-ups
(Andermann, 2007: 286).
6. As Andrea Tonacci, the director, says in an interview, What brought
me to make the film was the search for knowledge, the desire for a
still-possible humanism, the defense of the free beingany oneof
the natives (Caetano, 2008: 97).
7. Verisimilitude is herefore central for the documentary filmjust as
much and perhaps more than for the fiction film. The world repre-
sented must be believable, it must be like what we expect the world
to be in order for the film to sustain our belief in its claim to reality
(Cowie, 1999: 30).
8. It becomes necessary to also distinguish the documentary from the
short films of the Lumiere brothers because, though some of them
certainly tell a story, they do not have that which would have to be
considered constitutive of the documentary: an image of otherness
(Bernini, 2008: 91).
70 EDGARDO DIELEKE
9. The mixing of styles, the alternating spaces and the absence of

coordinates invite us to a conversation between film and viewer that
challenges and disconcerts, creating that sense of drifting that was
already present in Bang-bangg (1970). In short, what is it about?
(Xavier, 2008: 12).
B ibliography
Aguilar, Gonzalo. Otros mundos. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2006. [Eng.
translation: Other Worlds: New Argentine Film, translated by Sarah Ann
Wells. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.]
Andermann, Jens. La imagen limtrofe. Naturaleza, economa y poltica
en dos filmes de Lisandro Alonso. Estudioss 15, no. 30 (julio-diciembre
2007): 279304.
Bazin, Andr. An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism, in What is Cinema? II. I
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Beceyro, Ral, Rafael Filipelli, David Oubia, and Alan Pauls. Esttica del
cine, nuevos realismos, representacin. Punto de Vista a 82 (agosto de
2005).
Bentes, Ivana. The serto and the favela in contemporary Brazilian film. In
The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lcia Nagib, 121137. London /
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003.
Bernini, Emilio. Tres ideas de lo documental. La mirada sobre el otro.
Killmetro 111, Buenos Aires 7 (marzo 2008): 89107.
Caetano, Daniel. Entrevista com Andrea Tonacci. Caetano (org.):
97138.
Caetano, Daniell (org). Serras da desordem. Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue /
Sapho, 2008.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Cmo sacrselo de encima? Filmar para ver: escritos
ra y crrtica de cine, LA FERLA, Jorge (org.), 4361. Buenos Aires:
de teor
Ediciones Simurg, 2002.
Cowie, Elizabeth, The Spectacle of Actuality. In Collecting visible evi-
dence, edited by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, 1945. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Fontana, Patricio. Lisandro Alonso. La aventura de salir de uno mismo.
Interview with Lisandro Alonso. Revista Otra Partee 19 (summer 2009
2010). Available online att http://www.revistaotraparte.com/n%C2%BA
-19-verano-2009 2010/lisandro-alonso-la-aventura-de-salir-de-
uno-mismo.
Klinger, Gabe. Lisandro Alonso, Mostly in His Own Words. Interview
with Lisandro Alonso. Senses of Cinema a 36 (2005). Available online at
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/36/lisandro_alonso/
Nagib, Lcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London /
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007 7.
(ed.). The New Brazilian Cinema. London / New York: I.B. Tauris,
2003.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2001.
Oubia, David. Un mapa arrasado: Nuevo cine argentino de los 90.
Sociedad (Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales). Buenos Aires:
Manantial, 2002. n. 20: 193200.
Wolff, Sergio. Las estticas del Nuevo cine argentino: el mapa es el territo-
rio. en El nuevo cine argentino Temas, autores y estilos de una renovaci
i n,
Horacio Bernades and Lerer, Diego y Wolf, Sergio, 2942. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Tatanka, Fipresci Argentina, 2002.
Xavier, Ismail. As artimanhas do fogo, para alm do encanto e do mistrio.
Caetano (org.): 1123.
CH A P T ER 5
Beyond Ref lexivity: Acting and

Experience in Contemporary Argentine
and Brazilian Cinema
Joanna Page
Two apparently antithetical tendencies have dominated recent

Argentine and Brazilian cinema. A return, in fiction film, to the use
of natural actors and neorealist, minimalist, or observational filmic
techniques has been accompanied by a marked inclination towards
reflexivity in documentaries, in which layers of self-conscious media-
tion seem to remove us from any notion of realism.1 Both trends
can be understood, however, to enact a similar antitheatrical preju-
dice, stripping bare the artifice and apparatus of representation in
an attempt to reveal a deeper truth. In the case of neorealism, this
becomes a gesture toward greater authenticity in registering social
and economic reality, particularly when nonactors are used to rep-
resent characters of their own class and profession. In reflexive film-
making, the truth uncovered is the artificial and mediated nature
of all representation and performance.
This chapter will focus on four recent documentaries from
Argentina and Brazil that engage critically with one or both of these
dominant trends, in order to construct a very different relationship
between acting, experience, and truth. All four films take theatri-
cal performance as their subject matter. At first sight, they appear
to inscribe themselves within a familiar postmodern aesthetic, artic-
ulating a contemporary fascination with the real and simultane-
ously announcing its disappearance in a proliferation of simulacra,
74 JOANNA PAGE
performances, and mediations. However, as I will show, these films

open up alternative ways of thinking about documentary truth and
performance. Two of them in particular refuse to rehearse a cynical
deconstruction of performativity, but allow us to consider the pos-
sibility, through performance, of a genuine encounter with the other.
They are able to stage this possibility, I will suggest, by locating
reflexivity within their filmic subjects rather than solely or primarily
within the approach of the filmmaker.
Estrellass [Stars] (Federico Len and Marcos Martnez, 2007) is
a playful documentary on the real-life entrepreneur Julio Arrieta,
who sets up a theatre company in Buenos Aires to provide work for
shantytown inhabitants as authentic-looking extras in films about
poverty, corruption, or violence. Entrenamiento elemental para
actoress [Elementary Training for Actors]s (Federico Len and Mart n
Rejtman, 2009), an hour-long feature made for television, focuses
on an acting school for upper-middle-class children in Buenos Aires;
the drama teachers unconventional methods are designed to dem-
onstrate to children and parents the essential continuity between
theatrical performance and the social performance of everyday life.
This continuity, a central theme of both Estrellass and Entrenamientoo,
echoes the insights of Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, Jerome
Bruner, Richard Schechner, and many other sociologists, anthropol-
ogists, psychologists, and theorists of performance in past decades.
Two recent productions directed by Eduardo Coutinho, Jogo de cena
(Playing, 2007) and Moscou u (Moscow, 2009), also undermine distinc-
tions between reality and performance, juxtaposing and overlaying
real and performed memories and experiences in such a way that the
spectator struggles to separate the two. While Estrellass passes caustic
comment on the production of the real in contemporary cinema and
Entrenamientoo cynically observes the extent to which everyday life is
a continual performance, Coutinhos films take a different approach.
Here, performance, with its many duplications and substitutions,
does not falsify what we understand by real life; instead, it gener-
ates new experience and knowledge.
E strellas
In one of the most ludic episodes in Estrellas, Julio relates the story
of his meeting with Alan Parker, the director of Evita a (1996), who
visits the shantytown in search of a suitable location for his period
drama but leaves disappointed, as there are too many television aeri-
als. Julios response is to offer the services of ten villeross who would
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 75
take just an hour to erect 20 typical shantytown dwellings in the

middle of an unused field. As the scene is enacted for the camera,
we witness, in a literal sense, the construction of authenticity.
Always the entrepreneur, Julio knows how to respond to a demand
for authentic experience and nostalgia for local place on the part of
filmmakers from within Argentina as well as abroad. The measure of
success enjoyed by his theatre group is clearly linked in the film to
the fascination of contemporary spectators with the real and our
propensity to look for it in the experience of lower social classes. As a
cinephile says, with no hint of irony, to one of the villeroo actors, est
de moda la marginalidad.
Julios website contains a photographic database of what he calls
portadores de cara, including potbellied men, with or without
teeth, and women whose vital statistics would certainly disqualify
them from any conventional acting career. With the audio accompa-
niment of cumbia villera, 2 we see samples of personajes tpicos (see
fig. 5.1), including thieves, prisoners, bodyguards, and maids, along
with stills of typical villa
a locations such as a callejn para peleas,
casa tipo secuestro, and a casa tipo dealer. Julio offers himself
as the crucial go-between for directors in search of natural actors
from the working classes or gritty villaa locations, mimicking the ele-
vated discourse of the hospitality industry as he earnestly promises to
brindar el confort de todo el grupo de produccin. He hastens to
provide the important reassurance that he will be able to control the
Figure 5.1 Estrellass [Stars] (Argentina, 2007), directed by Federico Len

and Marcos Mart nez.
76 JOANNA PAGE
potentially chaotic and economically unsound intrusion of the villeros

into the high-pressured and professional world of filmmaking: he will
ensure that the actors are quiet when the cameras roll and dont slope
off before the end of the day.
For Julio, this is a straightforward business opportunity. For many
viewers of Estrellass it is also a corrosive indictment of the clich-ridden
television and cinema productions of recent times, which, for all their
focus on marginalized figures, have often reproduced as many social
stereotypes as they have challenged. However, lest we assume that such
stereotypes are always the product of middle-class filmmakers, turning
poverty into a spectacle for our consumption, Estrellass shows us the
shantytown inhabitants own capacity, under the leadership of the irre-
pressible Julio, to engage in precisely this kind of image-manipulation
for their own strategic purposes. Julios principal message to directors
is no contraten a rubios para hacer de negros: there is an authority
that emanates from having lived in the villa a and experienced at first
hand the poverty, crime, violence, and marginalization that constitute
the themes of so many contemporary films. This discourse is rapidly
deconstructed in the film, of course: what we, as spectators, often
revere as the unassailable authenticity of lived experience becomes
questionable as we are confronted with the performancee of authentic-
ity and its exploitation as a marketing opportunity.
What differentiates the practice of a trained actor from that of a
natural actor? This question becomes the focus of a crucial dialogue
staged in Estrellass between Adrin Caetano, the director of several
now-canonical works of New Argentine Cinema, and Jean Pierre
Reguerraz, representing the Asociacin Argentina de Actores, the
professions principal trade union. For Caetano, who makes exten-
sive use of natural actors in his films, acting is what happens en el
momento en que el tipo est frente a la cmara y empieza a trabajar,
esto lo convierte en un actor. The ability to act stems from previous
experience: from the capacity to reproduce with naturalness the kinds
of speech and behavior we associate with the character being acted.
Reguerraz, on the other hand, argues for the importance of a different
kind of experience: the formal training of an actor that prepares him
to take on roles for which he has had noo direct experience. The camera
pans across black-and-white portraits of famous Argentine actors on
the wall of the Asociacin bar; comically accentuating the audacious
intrusion of the nonactor into the world of professional theatre, these
photographs have been interspersed with those of villeross (including
Julio) in highly staged poses, strikingly and incongruously clad in
white tunics and dark velvet capes.
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 77
Do Caetanos subjects act? Do Julios? How are we to evaluate

the role of professional acting in a reality-show culture? Estrellas
does not finally arbitrate between the opposing sides of the dis-
pute, although it certainly highlights how uncritically we approach
experience as a guarantor of truth. It also shows that this debate, of
potential aesthetic, social, and even philosophical import, is really a
screen on both sides for economic interests. Julios triumph consists
of wresting jobs away from the theatre-school-trained middle classes
and giving them to the villeros. The basis of Reguerrazs complaint
is that there arent enough jobs to go around, and that trained actors
are missing out.
Entrenamiento elemental para actores

If Estrellass gives voice to the idea that acting is synonymous with
the simple placing of everyday reality within a framejust turning
on the camerathis frame is removed entirely in Entrenamiento
elemental para actores, which presents us with an everyday real-
ity that is always already constituted through performance. In this
sense the film reverses the premise of Estrellas, although both
films announce the inseparability of theatrical acting from the per-
formance of everyday life. It is this continuity that structures the
philosophy held by Entrenamientos idiosyncratic drama teacher.
His pupils perform a miscellany of visualization techniques, physi-
cal interactions, improvisation exercises, and group therapies, but
everything is done behind closed doors and he refuses to put on
end-of-year shows. When this makes him unpopular with the par-
ents, he shows them a home video of a toddler, who even before he
can speak, has learned how to perform for his parents. To encour-
aging cries of lindo and muy bien from behind the video
camera, the beaming child tries out a few unsteady moves to the
background music, basking in his mothers pleasure. As the drama
teacher observes: El chico ya est haciendo su performance para
un pblico reducido.
The children in the drama class are taught to despise overacting
and exaggeration and to aim for naturalness in everything they do,
while being conscious of their performance, both on and off stage.
According to their teacher, Los chicos solo pueden actuar de chicos.
Un chico no puede hacer de polica, de viejo, de prostituta, por ejem-
plo. La gran ventaja de un nio es que es el nico que puede hacer de
nio con naturalidad. This appeal to experience and natural acting
seems to echo Julios claims in Estrellas, but the ultimate aim here
78 JOANNA PAGE
is different: not so much to introduce authenticity into acting, as to

introduce it into real life, training children to be conscious of their
own everyday actions as performances and to have the confidence not
to attract attention to themselves at every moment and play for the big-
gest laughs. Soff a, a new member of the class with a particularly pushy
middle-class mother, is roundly chastised for her histrionic perfor-
mances. The teacher takes a firm line with Soff as mother: unlike in
gymnastics or dance, in acting No hay nada peor que la bsqueda de
virtuosismo; it may ruin not only an actor but also a life.
Ya estamos actuando, profesor, en todo lo que hacemos? Mati,
who poses this question in one of the drama workshops, has grasped
perhaps the most important concept his teacher has been attempting
to help the children understand. The teacher does not need to show
his pupils how to act, he explains, because they already know how
to. What he can teach them is a consciousness of the choices they
have in performance, as he does when he exhorts them to reject the
first idea they have because it will always be a un clich, un lugar
com n. The naturalness of acting in Entrenamientoo has, in the
end, little in common with that of Estrellas. In Estrellas, acting
oneself results in the production of clichs that are disingenuously
presented as authentic. It is possible to act yourself and still be inau-
thentic. In Entrenamiento, acting oneself naturally is much harder
to do and involves stripping away the narcissistic, attention-seeking,
overacting that Western culture encourages from a very early age.
Unlike in Estrellas, acting oneself and becoming conscious of ones
performance is associated, not with a farcical pretence at authentic-
ity, but with a real act of personal integrity.
The subjects of both Estrellass and Entrenamientoo are performers
who gain (or already have) the ability to reflect on the complex construc-
tions and reconstructions that govern the relationship between acting
and everyday reality. This allows the directors to position reflexivity as a
universal practice rather than reserving it for themselves. Before explor-
ing the consequences of this approach, I wish to examine its adoption,
to more radical ends, in two recent productions by Coutinho. In these
films, the question is not whether previous experience qualifies or does
not qualify a person to act himself or another; instead, an emphasis is
placed on ways in which acting producess a form of experience.
Jogo de cena
a is a highly innovative meditation on the relationship
Jogo de cena
between acting and experience, and between fiction and reality. The
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 79
director, Coutinho, placed an advert in a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro,

calling women to come forward to tell their life stories in front of a
camera. In the film we see, selected sequences of these real wom-
ens stories are intercalated with those of actresses who have been
asked to relate the same stories as if they were their own. The stories
are sometimes distressingas the women describe unplanned preg-
nancies, marriage break ups and the death of a childand sometimes
uplifting, as they tell of a spiritual encounter that brought freedom
and resilience, or of the healing power of time. At several points, the
real womens stories overlap with those presented by the actresses,
producing duplications. In many cases it is difficult for the spectator
to establish which is the real woman and which the actress, unless
he or she recognizes the face of one of the more well-known actresses.
Sometimes the real story precedes the performed one, but at other
points it is the other way around; sometimes the real woman dis-
plays more emotion, sometimes the actress.
Two kinds of performance encounter each other in Coutinhos
film. The actress studies recordings of a real person in order to prepare
her role for a filming session; she is not performing a real life, how-
ever, but another performance. Occasionally the actresses come out
of character to discuss aspects of their performance with the director.
But the real women also reflect on their performances in a similar
way, demonstrating the fact that they are not simply telling their life
stories but also simultaneously interpreting them and judging their
own performance of them. Aleta, for example, is concerned that her
story might not be coherent enough and Sarita asks to come back at
the end and sing a song, as she thought she had come across as too
heavy. Jerome Bruner refers to human reflexivity as precisely this
capacity to turn around on the past and alter the present in its light,
or to alter the past in the light of the present (1990: 10910).
Most disturbing for the spectator are the tears shed by both sets of
women. We are moved by Andrea Beltros tears as she relates the story
of her son who died only days after birth, and we only later come to
realize that she is acting someone elses story, as she tells Coutinho
that she hadnt intended to cry, but she couldnt say the lines with
the serenity with which the real mother had delivered them. We
understand that we cannot use the presence of tears to decide which
are real emotions and which are feigned; indeed, another actress gets
out her bottle of glycerin to show the director that shed come pre-
pared if she needed to cry. And yet Coutinhos design is not to set
real emotion against faked, but to show the process of acting as the
sharing of experience. The actress telling Aletas story explains that
80 JOANNA PAGE
she felt during rehearsal that Aletas memories had become her own.
She struggles in her performance, often visibly moved. Marlia Pra,
the actress who has brought the glycerin, begins to cry without any
need for using it as she relates Saritas story, telling Coutinho after-
wards that it made her think of her own daughter.
Susan Bennett reminds us of the persuasive power of the autobio-
graphical in documentaries, such that
audiences for documentaries are compelled by the Barthesian that-

has-been of filmic bodies, by the certain, evidence-based knowledge
that the bodies rendered on screen are those of the people to whom
these things happened, for whom these represented events were lived
experience. For this reason, the autobiographic documentary is power-
fully persuasive in that, even if the material has been shaped, selected,
adapted, and edited, what we seethe bodies on the screenaffords
us some special insight into the history under review. (2006: 34)
By the end of Jogo de cena, however, it becomes irrelevant for the

spectator which women are telling true stories and which are act-
ing them. We know that we too, like the actresses, have encountered
a form of truth that does not reside, or uniquely reside, in the embod-
ied experience of certain individuals. As Andreea Iulia Sprinceana
observes, Al final de la pelcula quedamos con la sensacin de haber
visto a muchas mujeres y a una sola (2009). There is a commonal-
ity of experience that seems to transcend the individual and take us
into a realm of intersubjectivity, of pure affect. Watching Jogo de cena
encourages us to question the extent to which bodily presence and
autobiography offer a privileged purchase on the real.
Moscou
Performing the other, then, is an exercise in empathy that generates
new knowledge and experience. Empathy, as Paul Ricoeur notes, is
the transference of ourselves into anothers psychic life and also
the principle common to every kind of understanding (1976: 73).
A similar dynamic is at work in Moscou, which radicalizes the prem-
ises of Jogo de cena. Coutinho gathers together a group of actors who
will rehearse Chekhovs The Three Sisterss for three weeks, but on the
understanding that there will be no actual performance of the play.
Instead, the rehearsals provide a space for experimentation with the
notion of acting as shared experience. Ideas, emotions, and lines from
Chekhovs play become intertwined with the actors own experiences.
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 81
When they depart from the script it is sometimes difficult to decide

whether this represents a form of improvisation in order to explore
the character or the incursion of the casts own experiences into the
play. There is no clear distinction between rehearsal, performance,
and real life.
At one point early in the film, the theatrical director appointed
by Coutinho asks each group member to share an image from the
past, one from the future, and to recount something they are dealing
with in the present. Later, he proposes to the group that they pres-
ent each others memories as if they were their own. The effect is to
produce a dissolution of autobiography in which what happens to
one, happens to all: a kind of Borgesian universal history in which
selfhood is suspended. Similar techniques are used in rehearsing The
Three Sisters. In one scene, two actors play Andrey simultaneously,
alternating lines, echoing each other or speaking fragments together
in one voice. In another scene, a crowd of male actors wear T-shirts
with Verchinin chalked crudely across their chests, and they share
out the characters lines between them. Rather than focusing in a
more typical postmodern fashion on the multiple identities and per-
formances of the individual that undermine a coherent notion of the
self, Coutinho focuses on processes of intersubjectivity that under-
mine the notion of experience as singular and the preserve of the
individual.
Acting becomes a means of sharing experience and constructing
relationships with the other. The actors talk around the script, use
the play in different ways as a vehicle for their own memories and
hopes, but also learn through the experience of rehearsing it and col-
lectively immersing themselves in the experiences of others. Were
going to construct, not just deconstruct, states Coutinhos theatri-
cal director, and this is what his films are engaged in, not primarily
focusing on the limitations of our knowledge, but making a genuine
attempt to engage with the other. As the director explains, the idea
behind these rehearsals is to forge links, to find what is human in
the play and share it. We see this in action in a monologue given by
an actor whose wife we know is about to give birth. In the char-
acter of Andrey but with lines of his own choosing, he has a drink
with the portrait of his old colonel father and announces the news
of a grandson. Hes just like you, he says, tucking a photo of the
ultrasound scan of his own unborn baby into a corner of the picture
frame, before returning to Chekhovs script. Past, present, fiction,
realityall are superimposed, like the old and new photographs
used as props by the actors, and especially when they are worn by
82 JOANNA PAGE
them (see fig. 6.1). Such devices do not merely announce the blurred
nature of the boundaries between these categories but also highlight
the work of the imagination and embodied performance in creating
experiential links between them. They provide a visual analogy of
Goffmans argument that the self and the body merely provide the
peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung
for a time (1959: 245).
Reflexivity, P erformance and an Encounter

with the O ther
In Estrellass and the two Coutinho films, experience is not pre-
sented as any kind of guarantee of eyewitness truth or authenticity,
nor as a solid certainty or authority in contrast to forms of abstract
theorizing. If Estrellass places under erasure the unassailable author-
ity of lived experience, which might qualify the actor to act himself,
Coutinhos films explore an important form of experience that comes
from performing the other. This corresponds to the kind of experi-
ence defined by Gadamer, for whom experience in the genuine
sense is always negative. It does not conform to our expectations but
is dialectical, because it challenges our previous notions of something
and enlarges our view; It is not that we see through a deception and
hence make a correction, but we acquire a comprehensive knowledge
(Gadamer 1989: 353). Coutinhos films, in which acting results in
precisely this kind of dialectical experience, align themselves much
more clearly with Gadamers depiction of experience as productive of
knowledge and meaning than with the deconstructive dismantling
of meaning as a series of deceptions and illusions that is central to
postmodernist approaches.
Elin Diamond attests to the power of performance to produce new
experiences in this dialectical manner:
while a performance embeds traces of other performances, it also pro-

duces experiences whose interpretation only partially depends on pre-
vious experience. This creates the terminology of re in discussions
of performance, as in reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify.
Re acknowledges the pre-existing discursive field, the repetition
and the desire to repeatwithin the performative present, while
embody, configure, inscribe, signify, assert the possibility of
materializing something that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the
shape of sites and imagines other as yet unsuspected modes of being.
(1996: 12)
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 83
By contrast, for nonactorsas in Estrellass and in so many contem-

porary Argentine filmsthe ability to act is predicated on previous
experience and existing knowledge. As Joan Scott suspects, the evi-
dence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphor of visibil-
ity or in any other way that takes meaning as transparent, reproduces
rather than contests given ideological systems (1992: 25). The use of
nonactors in contemporary film and television will tend to reinforce
the spectators stereotypes; on occasions where they are challenged,
genuine experience is available only to the spectator and not to the
actor, who is only required to act himself. In a sense, then, Estrellas
points to a missed
d encounter with the other that results from our fas-
cination for the real. By exalting what we take to be pure and authen-
tic and trying to fix it on screen, by effectively naturalizing categories
of otherness and misunderstanding the discursive and performative
nature of experience, we miss the opportunity for an encounter with
the other.
As Bruno Latour and others have observed, reflexivity often claims
a special form of insight for itselfin deconstructing the very pro-
cess of representation, it manages to establish its own mode as more
truthful. The filmmaker therefore takes up a privileged position in
relation to the material under investigation (Lynch, 2000; Webster
2008). Performative documentaries, as Stella Bruzzi claims, present a
kind of honesty as they do not seek to mask their inherent insta-
bility but rather to acknowledge that performancethe enactment
of the documentary specifically for the cameraswill always be the
heart of the non-fiction film (2000: 155). This claim to truth diverts
our attention toward the filmmaker and the filmic techniques used,
and fosters a cynical attitude toward the representation of the other,
which becomes merely an exercise in self-projection. Latour also
observes that reflexivists spend an enormous amount of energy on
the side of the knowing, and almost none on the side of the known.
They think that any attempt to get at the things themselves is proof
of naive empiricism (1988: 173).
The emphasis in the films discussed here, however, is not placed
on laying bare the illusionist devices of cinema. Although their focus
on issues of performance, acting, and filmmaking might tempt us
to regard them as reflexive, in neither Estrellass nor Entrenamiento
are the workings of Len and Rejtmans films uncovered, nor is
their relationship with their actors or nonactors placed on screen. In
Coutinhos films, we are aware of the interaction between director
and actors, and occasionally of the apparatus of filmmaking, but the
84 JOANNA PAGE
presence of these on the screen does not undermine the truth-value of

what is being shown or divert our attention to the fictionalizing oper-
ations of the filmic text. Reflexivity is not reserved for the filmmaker
in such a way that he is accorded a privileged position in relation to
the material he is investigating. Instead, reflexivity and performativ-
ity are universalized, not simply the result of the process of filmic
representation.
Estrellas, Jogo de cena, and Moscouu deconstruct a range of represen-
tational modes that have responded to a contemporary demand for the
real, autobiographical testimony and the public confession of private
lives in the case of Coutinhos films, and the use of nonactors and
the production of local place and authenticity in Estrellas. But if they
find something disingenuous, compromised, or simply tired about the
contemporary reverence for the real in cinema and television, these
films do not find an answer by retreating into self-reference. Their
aesthetic corresponds to what Latour calls infra-reflexivity rather
than meta-reflexivity, a direction which allows us to maintain the
necessary reflexivity without whirling helplessly in our efforts to outdo
and outwit each other in proving that the other is a nave believer
(1988: 170). In the place of self-reference, infra-reflexivity chooses
self-exemplifying principles of analysis. Making films about perfor-
mance means that the directors can avoid both the trap of referential-
ism and the impasse of reflexivity, as the necessary self-consciousness is
embodied in the subject of the film rather than in its methodology.
A focus on performance and acting undermines fixed notions of
reality and authenticity and helps us to understand the concept of
experience as an effect of our engagement with certain practices
and discourses rather than something produced by ideas or material
conditions that are external to us. This leads, as Teresa de Lauretis
argues, to an understanding that subjectivity is an ongoing con-
struction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one
then interacts with the world (1984: 159). Viewing experience and
subjectivity in this manner not only gives the lie to our frenzied
search for authenticity in the form of autobiography or testimony
and the use of nonactors. By making performance the subject of
their documentaries, Rejtman, Len, and Coutinho also manage in
some ways to bypass the solipsism of reflexivity, to refocus attention
on the reflexive activities and the self-constructions of the other as
much as the self. It also enables them to consider acting, neither as
an expression of authenticity nor as an exercise in artifice, but as an
encounter with forms of truth and experience that generates new
knowledge.
BEYOND REFLEXIVITY
Y 85
Notes
1. Examples abound: the first tendency would include Mundo gra
(Trapero, 1999), Los muertoss (Alonso, 2004), Cidade de Deus
(Meirelles, 2002), Linha de Passee (Salles and Thomas, 2008); the
second, Edif
fcio Masterr (Coutinho, 2002), Um passaporte hngaro
(Kogut, 2001), Yo no s qu u me han hecho tus ojoss (Wolf and Mu oz,
2002) and Los rubioss (Carri, 2003).
2. A shantytown strain of a music genre originally from the Caribbean
that became very popular in Argentina in the 1990s.
Bibliography
Bennett, Susan. 3-D A/B. In Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and
Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, edited by Sherrill Grace and
Jerry Wasserman, 3348. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2006.
Bruner, Jerome S. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London; New
York: Routledge, 2000.
Diamond, Elin. Introduction. In Performance and Cultural Politics. s
London; New York: Routledge, 1996: 113.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin,
1959.
Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative. In Knowledge
and Reflexivityy : New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by
Steve Woolgar, 155176. London: Sage, 1988.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London;
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984.
Lynch, Michael. Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of
Privileged Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Societyy 17, no. 3 (2000): 2654.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. g
Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
Scott, Joan Wallach. Experience. In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited
by Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, 2240. New York: Routledge,
1992.
Sprinceana, Andreea Iulia. Jogo de cena de Eduardo Coutinho: La verdad
entre realidad y representacin. LLJournall 4, no. 2 (2009). http://ojs
.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/lljournal/article/view/528
Webster, Joseph. Establishing the Truth of the Matter: Confessional
Reflexivity as Introspection and Avowal. Psychology & Societyy 1, no. 2
(2008): 6576.
C H A P T ER 6
The Scene and the Inscription

of the Real
Csar Guimares*
A ffinities between Documentary

and F iction
In various contemporary contexts, from Latin America to Asiaas
demonstrated by films such as Jogo de cena a (Playing, 2007) or Moscou
(Moscow, 2009), both by Eduardo Coutinho, and Er shi si cheng ji
(24 City, 2008) by Jia Zhang-kethe relations between documen-
tary and fiction have taken on a configuration in which several things
stand out: the use of theatrical proceedings in the composition of
the filmed scene; the staging of lived events and experiences (under-
taken by those who lived through them or by actors taking up their
stories); the inclusion of fictional stories placed between real situa-
tions (converting these into new and impure testimonial devices);
and the association of fictional stories to documentary images. While
there are many examples of these elements, the critical categories
activated to account for them quite often find themselves up against
a looming conceptual timidity. Recognizing the insufficiency of the
metaphor of the borderr (besieged by the impetus of identifying the
lines of separation between territories) but likewise abstaining from
a purified terminology, I would like to approach the current con-
figuration of the relationship between fictional processes and the
documentary mise-en-scnee from the angle under which the prob-
lem originally emerged in the context of a research project entitled
Figures of Experience in Contemporary Documentary.1
88 CSAR GUIMARES
Certainly, attempts to find a categorical, ontological distinction

between fiction and documentary (like those inspired by analytic phi-
losophy, for example) are welcome, but these seem to me insufficient
to account for the phenomenon I wish to look at.2 Even though I
agree with the need to identify structural divisions between docu-
mentary and fiction, I disagree with such approaches on three counts.
First, the conventional notions that prevail in the cognitive-analytic
point of view (such as presumptive insertion or social indexation)
are insufficient for an understanding of the different ways in which
the real affects a films form. Second, the notion of the real will be
used here according to its Lacanian usage (which saves us the logical
discomfort of its slippery correlations with concepts of the true and
the objective. Third and finally, although I do not believe in the
radical impossibility of establishing ontological differences between
documentary and fiction, I agree that the countless interrelations
between one and the other (throughout film history and especially
today) produce effects of meaning that exceed the horizon of taxon-
omy, particularly as they attain the domain of the audience. That said,
I wish to indicate the meaning of the term fiction in this chapter,
which follows Jean-Marie Schaeffers suggestion. In a broad sense, I
would define fiction as a shared ludic pretense (conditioned and
governed by an intersubjective agreement), different from lies or
error and beyond the opposition between true and false, which uses
mimetic acts (producers of different degrees of resemblance) to sum-
mon the receiver to a mimetic immersion. In specific terms, this
is manifested in different fictional devices (literary, theatrical, picto-
graphic, photographic, cinematographic) that use particular vectors
and postures of immersion in the created fictional universe. In the case
of film (both documentary and fiction) the impression of reality,
with its strong sense of analogy, fulfils, right from the start, a decisive
role in the production of receptive immersion.
To accept the difficulty of identifying formal differences between
documentary and fiction (both intrinsic and immanent), then, does
not necessarily imply that they cannot be distinguished from one
another. With a bit of insight, one can discern the structural lines that
documentary and fiction films share, without entailing the dissolution
of the difference between them. At the same time, it is not necessary
to postulate that those distinctive lines can only be defined in extrinsic
and relational terms (as Carroll would have it, for example), privileg-
ing a pragmatic approach. It seems possible to adopt a perspective that
combines the semiotic dimension with the pragmatic one, a perspec-
tive that establishes the distinction between documentary and fiction,
THE SCENE AND THE INSCRIPTION OF THE REAL 89
but nonetheless does not exclude the multiple modalities of interrela-

tion between them. Let us see how we can do just that.
According to Roger Odins semiotic-pragmatic approach, docu-
mentary films can share with fictional ones certain operations that
belong to the fictionalizing mode: the construction of a diegetic world
(making use above all of the impression of reality that is typical of
film), the web of conceptual actions (following Ricoeurs concept)
that supports the narrative, the use of narration and the figure of the
narrator, the organization of the film as a discourse, and the adop-
tion of an expository structure. Odin notes, however, that the distinc-
tion between documentarizing and fictionalizing modes should
be sought in the particular expository structure of each film. He rec-
ognizes that documentary has a complex and fortuitous structure
and recommends that each film be studied case by case. Additionally,
despite his claim that the documentarizing mode is a conglomera-
tion of processes surrounding one obligatory process: the construction
of a speaker who can be interrogated in terms of truth, the film can
either tell the truth or not, voluntarily or not (Odin, 2000: 135). That
is, the documentarizing mode can escape from the obligation of the
real speaker, and take on a fictional one. It seems to me, therefore, that
we should not abate the difference between documentary and fiction
by means of the overvaluing or exacerbation of these general lines that
documentary film shares with fiction.
Today we are witnessing an intensificationon the part of docu-
mentariesof those fictional properties, manipulated in a way that
they cite operations of contrast, of parallelism, of hybridism or fusion
between the two modes, documentarizing and fictionalizing.
The difference between them does not abate, but rather dislocates
and gains complexity and ambiguity precisely to the extent in which
one mode comes to call up the other. In this sense, the so-called moc-
kumentary, or fake documentary, has little to offer toward the renewal
of the relationship between the two modes: a fiction masquerading as
documentary is still fiction, and its effect only arises when that reve-
lationsooner or lateremerges. Now, the documentary cannot try
to pass itself off as fiction and still go on being a documentary: what
methods could it have to convince the viewer that everything she had
taken as fiction belongs, in reality, to another domain, this side of the
fictionalizing mode? Both fiction and documentary feed off a move-
ment of negation that brings us to oscillatefreelybetween doubt
and belief (without needing to abandon one in favor of the other),
but this is far from being an intentional and controlled achievement
imposed on the viewer, and is only revealed at the end of the film.3
90 CSAR GUIMARES
The Stage and True Inscription

Films such as Eduardo Coutinhos Jogo de cena a and Moscouu lead us to
assume that the impact of the fictional on the inscription of the real
could be taken as a new modality of the documentary-fiction divide.
This new modality arises amid the challenges that film-writing faces
confronting the experience of the filmed subject in an era strongly
marked by the detemporalization of social space, according to
Zygmunt Baumans expression (1997: 110). In effect, the distinc-
tion between documentary and fiction has been historically and epis-
temologically variable, subject to the particular interrelations between
the two registers, and supported in various ways throughout film his-
tory by particular theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives. It
is possible that such distinction can only be understood according to
the specificity of the theoretical and critical inflexions that both reset
and dislocate, and to varying degrees, the differences and approxima-
tions between the two domains, in the manner of cartographers who
disagree regarding the demarcation of territories. (I fall back on this
metaphor faced with the recurrent use of the expression dissolving of
the borders between documentary and fiction, which is at the point
of becoming a theoretical refrain)
Let us assume that the transformations achieved by the structure
of experiencefreed of its ballast in space and time, making it liquid
and fleetingas well as the difficulties indicated by the reduction of
the interview to a mere machine for collecting testimony, led some
producers to invent other writing devices for film (documentary or
fiction). Given the fact that experience, which is disperse and frag-
mented, is difficult to apprehend even for the very subject who lives
it, a simple story, reduced to a set of statements set forth by an I
who is the only source in the discussion, can apprehend little of what
is truly in play. In the case of documentary film, the goal is not just to
produce or capture the experience of the filmed subject, but also to
protect it, a complicated task that resists any kind of calculation, but
one that is also smoother and more subtle because its very nature is to
escape from the representation that approaches it. The use of fictional
expedients can be thought of as a means of achieving unprecedented
dimensions that are more complex than the experience of the filmed
subjects, coming to reorganize the relationship between film-writing
and the real that constitutes it, ultimately perforating it.
What happens, then, when certain strategies of fiction come to
animate the documentary mise-en-scne, or evenmore radically
when the documentary stage passes wholly to the theatrical stage?
Or, conversely, what happens when certain fictions incorporate docu-

mentary elements? We could think that if the documentary seeks out
fiction, it is to apprehend with greater subtlety and accuracy the expe-
rience of the filmed subject. On the other hand, if fiction seeks out the
documentary, it could be out of a resistance to the multiplication of
strategies of spectacle and virtualizationin film and on television
that make the filmed world more and more unreal. Faced with this,
fiction has no recourse other than to respond by offering something
more than real and recuperating, in another key, other examples from
the past: say, the hooking of a tuna fish in Rosselinis Stromboli, which
would correspond today to the earthquake sequence in Life, and
Nothing Moree (Zendegi va digar hich, 1992) by Kiarostami (Comolli,
2009: 113).
The principle that guides the documentary aestheticthe force of
the real that runs throughout and configures the films form in a man-
ner different from fictiongains, in many recent works, a renewed
modulation. In consequence, the material connection between image,
sound, and represented object takes on unexpected relationships with
the regime of verisimilitude that belongs to fiction. From there arises
an amalgam of the elements of the inscription of the reall and the call
to verisimilitude. The inscription of the real, according to Jean-Louis
Comollis formulation, has four components: the camera (which
ensures the recording), the presence of the actors body, the place
of the actors body in the scene, and timethat which passes as the
recording is madeshared by the person filming and the one being
filmed. Verisimilitude we understand as the set of procedures (inside
the fiction) that ensure its similarity to the world being represented.
(It refers, as such, to an internal coherence of the work, and not to
a resemblance that should be sought in its relation to an external
referent).
Without forgetting how the affinity between fiction and documen-
tarymaking use of Godards old formulahas taken shape through-
out film history, we can nevertheless accept a provisory difference
between these two regimes in terms of their respective strengths of
representation, while assuming the need to perfect it in the course of
our argument.4 Fictional film has a sovereignty to create and order
the signs that sustain the world being represented (in the manner of
a double), although the imagination creating the world brings with
it, in its very interaction with expressive forms, limitations that are
historically and socially defined. The documentary has only partial
autonomy in the use of its narrative and plastic procedures, perme-
ated as it is by situations, events, and conditions that inscribe in it
92 CSAR GUIMARES
the vestiges of a social and historical world (conceived as a bundle of

intersubjectively constructed relationships, and not simply as a state of
things that is completed and devoid of future).
As such, fiction and documentary struggle (and suffer) in different
ways with that topological impossibility of taking on the multidimen-
sionality of the real in one-dimensional webs of language (whether
verbal or imagistic) (Barthes, 1980: 22). The risks are not the same
for one as for the other, even as the base material for both is the docu-
mentary dimension of every shot and every scene. As Comolli writes:
Both zero-degree and primal scene, the filmed encounter between body
and machine was filmed and will be mechanically reproduced with the
goal of being seen at a distance in space and time, at least by a viewer.
That reproducibility guarantees its reality. The recording is its tireless
testimony: proof that does not wear out, at the same time assuring and
reassuring the reality of that encounter, it bears witnesses to it, it con-
fers on it the dimension of a real that is indivisible, unchangeable, that
cannot be disguised (Comolli, 2008: 144).
While, as Ismail Xavier notes, the strength of film comes from what
it invents from the indexical hypothesis and its problems, mainly by
bringing the process of image production to the surface (Xavier,
2003: 75), we find ourselves today faced with new methods of
exchange between documentary and fiction, as several contemporary
films demonstrate. This situation complicates the theoretical handling
of that indexical starting pointthe material connection between
signs and the objects they representcommonly adopted to define
the ontology of the photographic and cinematographic image (from
the well-known Bazinian formulation). This will entail implications
both for the definition of the distinctive realism of documentary film,
as well as for what is commonly understood as the defining character-
istic of fiction. In this regard, let us remember in passing how much
Pedro Costa, for example, insists in opposing the meticulous con-
struction of his characters dialogue (repeated over and over) to the
documentary dimension superficially attributed to his films. (In our
view, however, the Portuguese director considerably reduces the vari-
ety of stylistic resources available to documentary).
To do justice to the purpose of this chapter, which defends the unsta-
ble nature of the distinction between documentary and fictiontaken
as a historical and epistemological constructionI seek a comparison
between two moments in Brazilian cinema: one, when direct cinema
appeared in theaters for the first time, as happened with Iracema, uma
transa amaznica a (Iracema, 1976) by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando

Senna; and another, 40 years later, when the theatrical stage came to
govern the truth effects in film, as in Eduardo Coutinhos two last
films: Jogo de cena
a and Moscou. The route between these two extremes,
however, is not oriented by any telos: I do not claim any necessary
evolution that would impede the current coexistence of a variety of
documentary works (including those that do not dialogue closely with
fiction).
Iracemaa adopts a provocative model to stage characters who,
belonging to the real world, are attractednot without crueltyinto
fictional representation, and who show, self-reflexively, the power
games that emerge from the interaction between the professional
actors (Paulo Cesar Perio and a group of artists in Belm) and the
inhabitants of the place, starting with Edna de Cssia, cast as the pro-
tagonist. She herself is only partially aware of the plot that simulta-
neously needs her (calling on her for an actresss performance) and
expels her by displaying what exceeds this performance: the residue in
the gestures, in her bodys presence, her speech, her way of looking,
a remnant of something that does not bow to the scene as it is writ-
ten. I shall take as my example a scene guided by Perios improvisa-
tion, in the role of the truck driver Tio Brasil Grande, defender of
the model of development and exploitation imposed by the military
dictatorship.
In this scene, Tio Brasil Grande and Iracema stop at a roadside
bar composed merely of an improvised counter and a pool table,
around which a group of rural workers gather. As the protago-
nists enter the scene from the leftTio in front and Iracema just
behindthe anonymous faces of some children briefly fill the screen:
silent and with watchful eyes, especially one little girl who, unlike
the others who turn their eyes toward the recent arrivals, faces the
camera a bit longer, as if she had gotten carried away by her appear-
ance time, insisting on remaining a little longer in the image, before
Perio begins his provocative interaction with the nonactors who do
not know he is acting. The camera finds the proprietor, who talks
about deforestation and the possibility that he will have to move his
business elsewhere. After the drink and a few games of pool, two
men stand out among the group that was featured initially, and they
denounce the sharks who, with the help of the INCRA (National
Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform) and the police, seize
the workers land. In this way, fiction summons the real to appear.
Beyond the topicality of that denouncement, what I would like
to draw attention to in this sequence is the brief appearance of the
94 CSAR GUIMARES
nonprofessional actors: the couple who turn around watch the

protagonists when they depart; the young people around the pool
table; the man who passes with a suitcase and a chicken in his hand;
the man with two children on horseback, followed by a couple also
on horseback. More than the fact that they do not talk, the impor-
tant thing is that they are on the cusp of coming into the scene, as
if a very fine border separated them from interacting with Perio
and Iracema. Note the edge that these characters occupy, situated
within the image, but decentered; they are called to occupy it, but
only in its periphery, as if the singularity of their lives could only
appear if the real hurled itself into the trap prepared by the fiction.
In this sequence, the figure of Iracema mixes with the extras from
reality; she comes to be situated as one observer more in the scene
when Tio reaffirms his faith in the future. She withdraws from her
own performance, attracted to the realm of those closest to it. Still
in the scene, she escapes momentarily from the figure reserved for
her, while the other characters remain at the edge of an apparition
in which their lives could gain, for a bit, a little more visibility.
In contrast to the ingenious mise-en-scnee of Iracema, the provoca-
tion in some contemporary films is that we often no longer see the
border where the real and the fictional interact, teasing and attracting
each other. Perhaps there is a shift underway and, in order to under-
stand it better, it would be useful to counterpose it to other examples
in film history. Comolli observed that, if neorealism and the French
New Wave renewed fiction by using documentary forms, what is in
question in many contemporary films is not merely the production of
new ways of inscribing the real, l but rather, above all, new methods to
certify the reality of the inscription:
n
The documentary part of a film implies that the recording of a gesture,

a word, or a look, necessarily refers back to the reality of its manifesta-
tion, be it provoked by the film or not, even when the film is a filter that
changes the shape of things. Their form, certainly, but not their reality.
Referential reality that documentary film places before everything else,
and that it imposes as its law. Fiction can divert from its referents, can
shroud them. But there is no science fiction documentary (Comolli,
2008: 170).
On the contemporary stage, a new topology seems to be drawn before

our eyes of the relationship between fiction and documentary. At first
glance, it seems that the indexical dimension of the image disappeared
and made way for the sovereignty of discourse and narrative processes:
omnivorous, the fictional stage swallowed up the real one (which
disappeared into it without a trace), and once and for all declared
the persistent argument between fiction and documentary (permeated
with so many missteps) as byzantine. In the opposite direction from
the spirit of this new age, I would like to explore another explica-
tive model for the recent relationships between the fictional and the
indexical, making use of the confluence of two vectors: one that runs
from the sign to the referent, and another that runs from the sign to
the spectator-subject (to return to some terms from semiotics, used
freely).
The Vestige and Verisimilitude

The logical problem of reference and meaning (which Comolli trans-
lates cinematographically as the inscription of the real) cannot be
dissociated from the wager of the imagination that the viewer dis-
patches over the scene projected in the dark theater, guided by the
logic of negation. Here, we need to mention an important distinc-
tion: the material presence of some kind of vestige of the referent,
temporally inscribed as a duration, onto the image and in the sounds
(thanks to the devices automatic recording), does not guarantee that
the viewer will reencounter the inscription of the real, free from all
doubtthat is, the fullness of the reality in the truth of the inscrip-
tion. The viewer of a documentaryof any documentary, everis
situated amid ambivalence, Comolli emphasizes:
I want to be both in the film and not, I want to believe in the scene
(or to doubt it), but I also want to believe in the real referent of the
scene (or to doubt it). I want to simultaneously believe and doubt the
represented reality, as well as the reality of the representation (Comolli,
2008: 17071).
Thus, the truth of the inscription is not the same thing as the inscrip-
tion of the whole truth. Taken as much by doubt as by certainty,
the viewer occupies an uncertain, mobile, critical place (Comolli,
2008: 171). More than eliminating the problem of reference and com-
fortably installing the viewer within the lack of distinction between
the genres of documentary and fiction, it seems to us that certain
films revitalize the oscillation between doubt and belief that induces
any viewer to project themselves onto the filmed scene. To those who
lament or celebrate an attempted closing of the curtaineverything
is theater, fiction, staging (premeditated or not); there is no more real,
and what is left is the achievement onto which we happenedcertain
96 CSAR GUIMARES
films respond with a disorienting series of mises-en-abymee and oblique

passageways between the regimes of fiction and documentary.
In Jogo de cena, whatever comes from the real can only mani-
fest itself on the theatrical stage. And while that process is initially
subjected to the documentary aesthetic, as the womens stories are
recorded onstage (emptied of spectators) where the device is set up,
an inversion immediately occurs. The prepared staging reaches into
the womens story using three principal methods, two of them openly
self-reflexive. The first arises when the actresses, known to a broad
audience, present the difficulties of reenacting the story of the other
women (anonymous nonactors). Here, two dimensions coexist: one,
of a meta-linguistic kind (staging taken as object), and the other,
indexical. The second brings the actresss testimony into relation with
the production of their performance, even showing, in a sense, ele-
ments of their own experiencebefore or beyond the text they are
interpretingwhich also places them, partially and obliquely, in the
same condition as the women from whom they borrowed the original
story.
The second type of reflexive process appears when the film
allows us to confront the performances of other actresses, unknown
or amateur, also interpreting real characters who have given us
their stories. As opposed to the first two, these stories in themselves
have nothing self-reflexive about them (which does not mean that
they are purely spontaneous and free of any staging, or that they
are more true). This division has little analytical value, because
from the point of view of the aesthetic experience that the film as
a whole provides, such layers or strata of meaning arise as interpo-
lated, associated, or embedded within one another. In any case, what
colors the entire film is a conjugation of the truth effects by means
of the articulation between similarity, indexical nature, and dramatic
composition.
If at first we cannot distinguish the narratives of real characters
from the performances of the unknown or amateur actresses, it is due
to the intervention of both an iconic resemblance, more evident and
convincing (the acting methods and attire are similar to the con-
ventions that govern social recognition of the characters), as well as
another, more powerful resemblance, native to the internal form of
the story as it is staged. There is something that develops over time, a
narrative organization that ties together the implication of the narra-
tors (real or interpreted) subjectivity, so that she acts as the interpreter
of her experience, scanned with comic or dramatic power. Ultimately,
it is the power of fiction to create verisimilitude.
In order for that performance to be able to convince the viewer

and make him or her believe in it, it must exhibit the presence of the
body as indexer of its truth effect, manifested in gestures, intonations,
speech rhythms, voice modulations, in the intensities and speeds with
which they travel over the face of the person narrating. It is not merely
the truth of what is represented or the content of a representation that
is in play, but also the truth of its inscription in the performance of
those who are relating their experiences. The viewer is taken by the
eventual dimension with which a subjectivity is produced in the course
of each story (in its internal economy), whether in a prepared staging
(second degree, if we can call it such), or taken from outside. In some
way, something of what is lived, converted into narrative material and
thus transfigured, pierces like a splinter into the duplicated scene.
It is this intricate articulation that makes Jogo de cena a far exceed
a reflexive device, content with revealing its achievement of a viewer
who could be convinced to accept a sham, something entirely artifi-
cial, as something true. On the contrary, the film reinforces even more
the dialectic between belief and doubt that sustains the viewersany
viewersdesire. How can we not know that such a reflexive film is
equally sustained by the pathos of loss and separation, by suffering
and the rebuilding of life, subjected to different provocations, just as
the different narrated stories show us?
Although Coutinhos procedures are radicalized in this film, in
adopting the scenic space and the rhetorical strategies of performance
as the main supports for developing the documentary mise-en-scne,
there is in Jogo de cena a a thicker, more resistant material that does not
allow us to say, univocally and exclusively, that the world is guaranteed
only and completely by the film. To echo Comollis words, there is
still something of the world in Jogo de cena a that guarantees the film.
We could call this the experience of the filmed subject, taken now
for a sophisticated incorporation of subjectivity in the shape of the dis-
course, something that film learned along with theater at the moment
when the interview-device, exhausted through its appropriation by
television, contributed more and more to the destruction of speech
and the defection of the subject. Coutinhos next film would take an
even more decisive step forward.
Meaningfully, Moscou u begins with the fictional story of a cine-
mas destruction, an event the narrator feels more acutely than the
demolition of his own house. Film without a place, without a dark
theater, forged entirely on the stage of a theater, now without lived
experience (supposedly), and whose stories come from a theatri-
cal script (Chekhovs Three Sisters), subjected to deconstruction and
98 CSAR GUIMARES
reconstruction (in the mold of postdramatic theater) carried out by

Enrique Diaz. The filmic writing of Moscou, however, is not content
to merely observe the actors work; it also distributes those bodies
in space, it chooses what it hears and captures, it searches in zones
of shadow or light, it alternates rhythms and distances. We are both
inside and outside the staging: in that moment, film and theater are
no longer separated by a border, but rather are intertwined in an enig-
matic topology, made of almost imperceptible passages between the
regimes of documentary and fiction. Paradoxically, what does not go
onstage (in Chekhovs text) is what will be filmed and projected. Film,
even at home, is still able to project.
Film projects the actors work: the filmed work and the filming of
the work emerge as dialectically conjoined. But there is something
more, as in so many of Coutinhos films: the pathos of ordinary life,
taken from the play, is inscribed in the group of actors, who distance
themselves from all mimetic appearance and come to be the support
for an experimentation that makes use, initially, of the effects tied to
memory (no matter if invented, recreated, fabricated, borrowed, sto-
len from others, or appropriated, as recommended in Enrique Diazs
proposed exercise). It is what happens, for example, when the actor
who plays Andrei (though at that moment we do not know what his
role will be) displays a photograph of three children and alludes to an
image of childhood.
In this short sequence, the hiatus between reference and meaning
is intensified by the strength of the narratives verisimilitude, which
leads us in some way to believe that there is a subjective implication in
the experience that becomes narrative material. We know that every-
thing is theater, but even so, because of the strength of the story and
of the acting, and although the scene is repeated and shown as an
artifact in the next shot, we cannot dispel once and for all the question
that perhaps something of what was said belongs to the experience
of the one who said it. We do not know which are the characters
concerns and which are the actors. If this is so, is it not because the
referent moved to the interior of the scene, taking up residence now
in the actors body, and what we witness is precisely the recording of
that passage?
In Moscou, the figure of the director and interviewer moved away
and mixed ambiguously with a camera that has abandoned the stage
as a device (as it was in Jogo de cena) in order to get inside, as intruder
and accomplice, a space that no longer entails the division between
stage and wings, true and false, what belongs to a person or is invented
(the narrated experiences, the memories, the texts that come from the
u [Moscow] (Brazil, 2009), directed by Eduardo Coutino.

Figure 6.1 Moscou
actors or from Chekhovs characters). In terms of what is represented,

there can remain no doubt: we are squarely in the realm of fiction;
there is no real or referent outside theatrical discourse; and nonethe-
less, the films work, its operation of recording (in time and in space)
the bodys attitudes, does not stop and is not erased.
In Les enfants jouentt la Russiee (1993), a documentary that also
makes use of Chekhovs text, Jean-Luc Godard states that the origin
of hope and utopia coincides with the invention of the optic phenom-
enon of projection, when Victor Poncelet, an official in Napoleons
army, projected figures onto the rectangular wall of a prison in
Moscow. In Godards film, with its strong Benjaminian accent, the
invention of utopia arises as the projection of another world in the
middle of the world we live in. Meanwhile, in contrast to Godard,
in Coutinho that utopian gesture, exiled from the great narratives of
political emancipation, seeks protection in the pathos of everyday life,
in its small hopes, as we hear in the directors words in the films final
scene. The spatial situation recalls a bit the end of Jogo de cena: except
that the stage with its two empty chairs gives way to the presence of
Irina, Olga, and Macha, in the middle of a square. Facing them and
with their backs to the viewer around a worktable, some actors from
the piece are gathered. When Irina turns to Olga and asks her to travel
to Moscow, it is Coutinho who answers, now from outside the field of
Moscou, with the lights slowly going down and the growing murmur
of the actors voices: Time will pass and we will leave for good. They
100 CSAR GUIMARES
will forget our faces, our voices; they will forget that there were three
of us. But our suffering will change into happiness for those who
come after.
If the scene is centripetal (though it allows for small jaunts inside), if
the borders exclude neighbors (what is contiguous to the geometrical
enclosure of the square), then it will be necessary to invent an absolute
out-of-field: Moscow, what is left of utopia, the memory of its frac-
tures, the reparation of the destroyed lives, what comes after the end
of suffering, the jubilation promised by love, the warmth of redemp-
tion in the microcosm of the miniscule life. Perhaps we are not so far
from the narratives of Jogo de cena, and many other wordsuttered by
so many others whose faces still remain in view in Coutinhos previous
filmsperhaps they are also present here, projected in our memory.
If so, a more radical out-of-field remains beyond the borders of the
square that demarcates the theatrical performance.
*Translated by Megan McDowell
Notes
1. Funded by CNPq (National Council of Scientific Study)
2. I am thinking primarily of Noel Carrolls formulation (1997) regard-
ing the film of presumptive assertion.
3. Regarding the function of negation in the viewers experience, both in
documentary films and fictional ones, see Comolli, 2008 and 2009.
4. I have already signaled the strategic necessity of realizing that differ-
entiationprovisory and open, free of any dogmatismin the preface
I wrote for the Brazilian edition of Jean-Louis Comollis book. See
Guimares and Caixeta, 2008: 3249.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Aula a. So Paulo: Cultrix, 1980.
Bauman, Zigmunt. O mal-estar da ps-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar,
1997. [originally English: Postmodernity and its Discontents. New York:
Polity Press, 1997.]
Carroll, Noel. Fiction, non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion:
A Conceptual Analysis. In Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard
Allen and Murray Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Ver e poder: A inocncia perdida: cinema, televis
s o, fic
c o,
documentt rioo. Belo Horizonte: Ed. da UFMG, 2008.
. Cin nma contre spectacle. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2009.
Guimares, Csar and Ruben Caixeta. Pela distino entre fico e docu-
mentrio, provisoriamente. In Ver e poder: a inocncia perdida. Cinema,
televis
s o, fic
c o, document t rio, Jean-Louis Comolli. Belo Horizonte:
Editora da UFMG, 2008.
Nineyy, Franois. Le documentaire et ses faux-semblants. Paris: Klincksieck,
2009.
Odin, Roger. De la fiction.
n Bruxelles: De Boeck Universit, 2000.
Ramos, Ferno. Mas afinal . . . o quee mesmo documenttrio?? So Paulo:
SENAC, 2008.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Pourquoi la fiction?? Paris: Seuil, 1999. [English
edition: Why Fiction?? (trans. Dorrit Cohn) Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010.]
Xavier, Ismail. Iracema: o cinema direto vai ao teatro. Devires: Cinema e
Humanidadess 2, no.1 (2004).
C H A P T ER 7
Global Periphery: Aesthetic and

Cultural Margins in Brazilian
Audiovisual Forms
Ivana Bentes*
The closer we survey the contemporary scene, the more difficult it

becomes to analyze questions related to violence, audiovisual lan-
guages, and social thought. How should we interpret images of vio-
lence today? Images of poverty and violence have never circulated
more vastly, including those of the excluded, of deviant or
abhorrent behavior. To decry violence and crimes has turned into
yet another journalistic genrewhich might be interesting if those
images werent frequently decontextualized or pressed into the ser-
vice of discourses of control and repression. Violence thus appears as
spontaneous and unrelated to the economy or to social injustice,
and treated in a spectacular fashion, as sensational event, TV soap, or
reality show, which can be consumed with extreme delight.
The most visible consequences of this discourse of fear are:
greater indifference toward the origins of poverty and toward struc-
tural injustice, more private security, more repression and demand for
the containment of slum populations so they cannot leave their ghet-
tos without being observed, more CCTV surveillance in defense of
private property. The descriptive discourses about poverty (on TV
and in the newspapers) tend to function as a mere backup of these
stereotypes, in which the poor are portrayed as carriers of risk and
social menace.
In this context, Brazilian music and film put forward different
notions, less marked by the idea of poverty as risk and thus allowing
104 IVANA BENTES
for ambiguity. Beyond the Brazilian context, or before closing in on

it, however, we could also take a historical view in order to map out
some aspects of the relation between images and violence. We need to
underscore that ethical and aesthetic questions involving experiences
of violence in art, film, television, or videogames have been asked for
a long time. However, it is only now that these experiences seem to
have reached an epidemic level, or better, a global and constant per-
ception of insecurity, which the contemporary context turns both
more visible and explicit.
Contemporary Brazilian audiovisual culture also mobilizes, in some
of its expressions, this naturalized, random violence, as a world of
impulses where judgment is suspended. This suspension is symptom-
atic of a cultural crisis, a crisis of values, where cinema ceases to take
the risk of interpreting and contents itself with taking note of a certain
state of things, with an attitude of impotence and perplexity that only
in certain cases opens up toward the contingent.
We could link the incorporation of local topics (the sert t o, the
s poverty, the drug traffic) with a transnational aesthetic, a
favelas,
post-MTV neorealism based on massive discharges of adrenaline,
shock reactions by the second created through montage, and total
immersion in the image. That is to say, the very foundations of the
Hollywood-style action films efficiency and capacity to please are
of an almost hallucinatory order, an imperative and sovereign plea-
sure to see, inflict, and suffer violence, real or symbolic, that is being
naturalized. The same sensorium has also been worked through,
although in a different key, by contemporary art (notably where it
crosses the path of documentary film), an aspect we shall not have
time to develop here.
I mages of Poverty and S tate of Exception

Before analyzing some significant Brazilian films from the nineties,
in which questions of violence and power surge in a new context, it
makes sense to detain ourselves on the proposition formulated by the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben with respect to the state of
exception as a paradigm of government and thus a point of departure
for us to think about images of poverty as images of exception. For
Agamben, violence is no longer what sustains power, rather it is power
itself which permits the use of violence.
The sovereign exception entails, according to him, that the contin-
uous suspension of rights allows for a violence not regulated by laws,
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 105
for which the state of exception becomes the legitimate, naturalized

juridico-political structure: the suspension of juridical order becomes
the rule, and thus natural. The law and the normality of the excep-
tion become the anchorage of governmentality.
Throughout our research on the images of poverty and violence in
a global context, we have seen again and again how images of favelas
and peripheries take on the legal form of that which cannot have a
legal form and thus engage the State in paradoxes and impasses. We
could say, with Agamben, that the questions referring to the construc-
tion and circulation of images of favelass, peripheries, ghettos, confla-
grations exceed the field of aesthetics and audiovisual media and need
to be conceived as an essentially political, or better, biopolitical phe-
nomenon, as images/lives. For, the state of exception and the images
of exception are first and foremost an area of absolute indetermina-
tion between anomie and law, in which the sphere of creation and the
juridical order slide into one and the same catastrophe (Agamben,
2002: 89).
Violence and the images of exception are not a means to attain
particular ends, rather they are the ends, and thus become image-
events, pure exceptions, manifestations. In the moment images begin
to coincide entirely with life, they may either potentiate it or become
the arbiters of life.
F AVELAS and P eripheries: U rban Folklore and

Random I mages of Violence
In Brazil, we are experiencing a moment of fascinated obsession with
the social other, with discourses from the periphery beginning to con-
quer a place on the market and in public policies: in literature (with
writers such as Paulo Lins and Ferrez, among many others), in music
(with funk and hip hop), on TV (with series such as A Turma do
Guetoo on the Record channel, Cidade dos Homenss on Globo, Central
de Periferiaa and Esquenta, another two Globo franchises featur-
ing Regina Cas), and also in politics (with government programs
developed during the first and second Lula administration, includ-
ing flagship ones such as Fome Zeroo [Zero Hunger], Bolsa Fam mlia

[Family Grant], and PAC / Programa de Acelera o do Crescimento
[Accelerated Growth Scheme]).
Discourses that reflect, respond to, dialogue with shantytown dwell-
ers everyday experience and discursive production, as well as those of
the sub- or unemployed, the incarcerated, the drug usersa diffuse
106 IVANA BENTES
marginality that has taken shape in the media, where it appears in

ambiguous and often amorphous forms. Peripheral aesthetics and dis-
cursive violence conquer a place on the market as samples of an urgent
present, yet also as product (editorial, journalistic, cinematographic),
as part of the new forms of social and cultural marketing, of styles and
fashions.
Beyond the media discourse of amorphous fear and demand for
repression, we come across a variety of forms of consuming poverty,
linked into the circuit of tourism and cultural exchanges. The least
perverse and most traditional among those makes us think about
poverty and misery as a kind of museum of humanity, in which
the chartered favelass (a tendency of inclusive urbanism, which has
largely replaced the removal paradigm) are tourist spots offering the
primitive and exotic, multicultural, and a glance at ways of life in the
process of extinction.
The scene is a frequent one at Copacabana. An enormous olive-green
jeep, bursting with tourists dressed as if they were going on an African
safari, crosses Avenida Atlntida departing from Copacabana Palace
Hotel.1 The Jeep Tourr takes people from all nations to see from close
range or rather from atop the jeep this natural habitat of a mis-
ery ironically incorporated into the folklorized tourist postcard of Rio
de Janeiro. Another provider, Favela Tour, covers the same itinerary,
mostly centered on Rocinha, but also explains that the favelass have
their own history and memory, which is being retold with rigorous
attention to detail during the visits, thus reinserting the favelass into
the history of the city from which they cannot be separated.
The word favela itself is being generalized to signify national and
international peripheries. If the term favela still causes considerable
controversy among residents who often prefer to speak of a com-
munity, the favela as myth, enshrined and frozen, opens up toward
a dynamic of glocalglobal and localperipheries under transforma-
tion. What interests us here is the generic favela, the mutant favela a,
the global favela, overdetermined by contradictory discourses that
compete with one another.
Favela Chic is the name of a fashionable Brazilian bar in Paris,
conjuring the paradoxical image of a multicultural and peripheral soci-
ety in which poverty and social conflict, in and outside the audiovisual
media, can be envisaged, at one and the same time, as intolerable and
as charming or cool, in a cultural dynamic of multiple meanings
that hardly ever coincide.
The modern favela a differs from the global favela a in that it is
still the postcard in reverse, a kind of museum of misery referring to
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 107
an era of capitalism and the poor that, despite all the production of
wealth in the world, refuses to become extinct and rather continues to
form part of that strange reservation which, at any given moment,
can escape the States control and explode into a threat against the
entire city. By contrast, we shall conceive the global favelaa as flow and
exchange, where asymmetries and hierarchies do not disappear as if by
magic but rather enter into collision with other signs and meanings,
in which the favela a is fundamentally constructed as integrated and
productive territory.
It is in this context of a culture capable of maintaining, at one and
the same time, relations of fascination and terror with the favelas, s of
perceiving its archaism but also its productivity and potential, that
we can analyze contemporary Brazilian films on the topic. These never
propose to explain any context or take the risk of making a judg-
ment; rather, they are perplexed narratives that offer themselves up as
symptoms more than as diagnoses of a state of things, and only very
recently have dared to make some kind of political statement.
The inefficiency of modernitys totalizing political discourse, the
emergence of fragmented meanings and of a micropolitics, the stage
entrance, post-MTV and video clips, of brutal audiovisual narratives,
the surge of a new, Latin American neorealism that would include
films such as Amores Perross (Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, 2000) and
O Invasorr (The TrespasserBeto
r Brant, 2002), interest us here in what
could be considered their affirmative, positive aspects. Our analysis
reads the new brutality as a line of dialogue with the aesthetics of
hunger and violence inherited from the sixties, as we have argued
elsewhere (Bentes, 2003). Not merely as continuity, impossible in
the face of a new historical context, but rather as an extemporaneous
dialogue: as a Latin American contribution to the construction of a
vital and affirmative form of thinking about poverty, an aesthetics of
confrontation and violence, which displaces or relativizes the myths of
cordiality in the name of a new kind of virulence.
The irony and black humor of some of these contemporary nar-
ratives (Amores Perross, O Invasor) in the face of the ruin but also the
vitality of the peripheral metropole produces extraordinary films, an
acid cinema that departs from mere specularization and enjoyment
of violence. This is also what we shall problematize in our analysis
of Cidade de Deuss (City of GodFernando
d Meirelles / Katia Lund,
2002), a kind of cinematic synthesis of many of these questions,
which also looks toward new impasses and possibilities. In truth, we
find ourselves before very different proposals and narratives, which
must be analyzed in their singularity: Murilo Salless Como nascem
108 IVANA BENTES
os Anjoss (How Angels Are Born, 1997), Beto Brants O Invasorr and
Os Matadoress (Belly Up, 1997), Tata Amarals Um Cu de Estrelass (A
Starry Sky, 1996), to name but a few films produced in the nineties,
describe an imploded social context, where violence is frequently asso-
ciated with specific social groups: the poor, the lower-middle class, the
youths, all of which are taken as carriers of paradoxical and resignified
discourses.
G lobal FAVELA
A
Within the configuration of this new urban imaginary, of which the

favelaa is a constitutive part, as a site of contrast but also of hybrid-
ity, invention and production, we can distinguish two important
extra-cinematic moments, which organize this new imaginary and its
ambiguities. The first is Michael Jacksons visit to Brazil to shoot a
video clip at the Santa Marta favela a in Rio and, together with the
Bloco Olodum, at Bahia; the second is the interview the drug lord
Marcinho VP gave the Jornal do Brasill during the same period.
Michael Jacksons visit in February 1996, in order to shoot the
video for They Dont Care About Us in a Rio de Janeiro shanty-
town and in downtown Bahia, joined by the group Olodum, raised
prolonged and polemic public debates about the image of Rio and
of Brazil abroad, triggered by the use of faveladoss as extras in a visual
superspectacle. The visits of global celebritiesfrom Charles Darwin
to Madonnato Brazilian favelass deserve to be studied in their
own right, and I will not dwell on this aspect here. Yet, the fact that
an international pop star uses shantytown images as added value to
his own image takes us beyond the fascination with the primitive
and into the realm of emergence of a planetary urban folklore full of
complexity and ambiguities. In the title of the song and clipThey
Dont Care About UsJackson frames this passage in vaguely politi-
cal terms.
There is something extremely ambiguous about this discourse,
which points us toward new instances of cultural and political media-
tion in the scenarios of global povertyalso the topic of numerous
films. What is noteworthy about Michael Jacksons strategy is the
efficiency with which it makes visible poverty and social problems in
countries like Brazil while eschewing a traditional political discourse.
What is problematic, however, is that this mediatic visibility doesnt
imply any real intervention into the conditions of poverty, which
instead become the focal point of a mediatized humanism that trans-
forms the denunciation into banality, faits diverss, diversion.
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 109
Another crucial, extra-cinematic moment occurred when, during

Michael Jacksons visit to Brazil, the drug trafficker Marcinho VP gave
an interview to the Jornal do Brazill, in which he offered a sociological
explanation for why I deal with drugs. Both, Michael Jackson and
Marcinho VP, the pop idol (with his Brazilian counterparts in funk
and hip hop) but also the drug-dealing intellectual are new sub-
jects of discourse, new mediators of shantytown culture, which also
begin to appear in some contemporary Brazilian films and video clips:
Orfeu, O Rap do Pequeno Prrncipe Contra as Almas Sebosas, Noticias
de Uma Guerra Particular, Soldado do Morro, Cidade de Deus, Dirio
de Um Detento, Fala Tu, Favela Rising. g
The E lites on View

Let us imagine a Brazilian cinema that turned its lens not just on the
people, the favela, the poor, but also on the elites who would pre-
fer not to be mentioned, not to be on view, and whose drama is
somehow the reverse of povertys invisibilitya fear of inappropri-
ate exposure. The question was already raised in the seventies by Jean-
Claude Bernadet in his book Cineastas e Imagens do Povoo [Filmmakers
and Images of the People] and we might revisit it today for the pur-
pose of analyzing contemporary productions:
Why only make films about social outcasts, about faveladoss, about land-
less peasants? Why are elites and power not topics of documentary?
Why not make a film about the Unibanco or Ita banks? I believe that
in this near-exclusivity of a focus on the excluded, there is a tacit agree-
ment of not criticizing power, of not opposing it. For social, philosoph-
ical or religious reasons, people feel pity for the poor but this doesnt
touch the social structure. Theres a kind of omnipresent and generous
Catholicism in the documentarists attitude towards the excluded. The
very Joo Moreira Salleswho is a Catholicraises this question: why
not make films about the upper-middle class? (Bernadet, 2003)
With few exceptions (O Invasor, Os Matadores), the great majority of

films never relates violence or poverty with the elites, with the culture
of enterprise, banks, commerce, with the middle class, and instead
focuses insistently on a recurrent theme: the spectacle of the exter-
mination of the poor killing one another. This violence surges as the
new urban folklore, a history of crimes, massacres, horrors. In this
new brutalism, which can be presented with negative or positive attri-
butes, we should note that the great majority of films also, fortunately,
does not incur into either complicity or pity. Rather, these are films
110 IVANA BENTES
of confrontation. Random violence, hollowed out of meaning, which

may lead to pure spectacle or to an ethics of shock, marks Brazils
contemporary audiovisual production.
C ITY OF
F G OD : N eonaturalism and C elebratory
Self -Destruction
Cidade de Deuss (City of God) by Fernando Meirelles, released in 2002
and adapted from Paulo Linss novel, is the film that sums up a kind
of brutalism that is very different from films such as Beto Brants O
Invasor. It also employs to very different ends the video-clip aesthet-
ics and genre cinema which, just as in Beto Brants films, it takes as
its modelshere, above all, the gangster movie, the mafia saga, the
epic. Here, these characteristics will have not just aesthetic but ethical
implications as well. Undoubtedly, we are before a landmark, a genu-
inely important film, for the way in which it narrates the history of
drug traffic in Brazil from a singular audiovisual stance.
The scenes of violence are spectacular and thrilling, with a large
number of assassinations and acts of physical violence. Personal ven-
geances, strategic massacres of one gang by another, gratuitous vio-
lence, institutional violence, all are encouraged to retro-aliment each
other in this vicious circle.
The favela a is shown in total isolation from the surrounding city,
as an autonomous territory. At no point are we given any reason to
believe that the drug trafficincluding the circulation of weapons,
money, police protectionis being developed and sustained because
it has a base outside the favela. This outside does not exist in the
film. The question here is not about demanding from the film a socio-
logical treatise on the origins and global dynamics of drug trafficking.
Nor about including dramatic action that would explain violence
and deviant behavior.
The favela a of the annihilation of rights is the very state of excep-
tion, and Cidade de Deuss expresses this in exemplary ways: this is the
baseline of its pedagogy of cruelty. In the film, however, this anni-
hilating drive seems to grow out of the earth itself, from the favela
and its characters, as it had once done from naturalist writer Alusio
Azevedos tenements, where impulses and ignominies had been but
the correlate of poverty. The favela, as its forerunner the tenement,
appears as a closed world of ungovernable impulses.
As it isolates, frames, and crystallizes the favela
a as a kind of urban
concentration camp, where impulses and desires explode into the
open deprived of any legal or normative containment except for
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 111
the whim of the local despots and their codes of conductlaws of

need and desirethe film acquires a hallucinatory character. Cidade
de Deuss links the most auto-destructive impulses to easily accessi-
ble action-movie codes, in an efficient combination of realism and
naturalism. In this way, the film holds the viewers hostage to its
narrative and solicits their complicity with its universe, whose vital
energy and youthful virility come together in a kind of celebratory
self-destruction.
Deleuze saw in naturalism an intensification of realism, a particu-
lar surrealism he related in cinema to the impulse-image. Referring
to its literary forerunner, Deleuze says that naturalism in literature is
essentially Zola: he had the idea of making real milieux run in paral-
lel with originary worlds. In each of his books, he describes a precise
milieu, but he also exhaustss it, and restores it to the originary world; it
is from this higher source that the force of realist description derives
(Deleuze, 1986: 128).
In Cidade de Deus, s the favela a is turned into such an originary
world of impulses, measured in a time of entropy or eternal returns:
in both cases, what is at stake is an encapsulated time, which governs
destiny and from which there can be no escape. The favela a is the
beginning and the end of time, the monstrous milieu in which all are
gobbled up, governed by, and prisoners of, sheer impulses. The films
neonaturalism can only capture the negative effects of time: degra-
dations, mutilations, usury, squalor, annihilation, as well as fleeting
moments of hallucinatory delight in the exercise of killing.
Obviously, descriptive discourses about poverty (in film, televi-
sion, video) can work both as reinforcements of stereotypes and as
openings toward more wide-ranging and complex debates, in which
poverty is not just seen inherently as a risk or a threat to society.
This, perhaps, is the films political slant, the extra-cinematic effect it
might be capable of provoking. In itself, the narrative frequently draws
us toward a sensation Hollywood action cinema has already made us
familiar with, an infernal tourism in which the favelass appear not as
museums of misery but, rather, as the new concentration camps, as
hellish, self-enclosed worlds condemned to suffocating any form of
life that might emerge there.
Cidade de Deuss provoked a very rich debate in Brazil,2 thanks to
the dissonant voices of intellectuals, film critics, activists from social
movements, and common inhabitants of the Cidade de Deus shan-
tytown as well as other favelas. For the first time in their lives, these
inhabitants would come out and speak publicly of their discomfort
with the image film and other media were fashioning of them, to be
112 IVANA BENTES
exhibited here and also to be exported abroad as a portrait of Brazilian

violence and of life in the favelass.
Who, after all, holds the copyright for images of poverty and mis-
ery? Another extra-cinematic event calls for our attention: a Cidade
de Deuss inhabitant, Ailton Batata, aged 47, made declarations to the
newspapers announcing that he would take legal action against the
movie and the novel Cidade de Deus. Calling himself the sole survivor
of the gang war which had ravaged the favela a in the 1970s and 1980s
and identifying himself as the films Sandro CenouraLil Zs rival
in the fight for the favelas drug outletshe was said to be defending
his authorship rights:
In the words of his lawyer, he [Batata] is just coming out of prison and
should have the right to have his past forgotten so as to reinsert himself
into society. But he will come out of there condemned once more by a
film, which exposes his past, without him having given any kind of per-
mission . . . Both the film and the book are marketing a biography they
had no authorization to divulgate and make commercial gains with.
The theft of the image would also be the topic of Evaldo

Mocarzels documentary A Margem da Imagem m (2003), in which
we see a growing awareness of the problematic exploitationin
every sense of the wordof images and characters extracted from
territories of poverty, favelas, and peripheries. But here we are still
in the realm of representations produced and operated by others
(ourselves). The ultimate fold takes us a step further: the favelaa as
a production instance of languages and lifestyles, to which we will
turn in our conclusion.
Regressive Discourses: Jos Padilhas

TROPA DE E LITE
E
Another film worth looking at more closely is Jos Padilhas Tropa de

Elitee (Elite Squad, 2007), by the same director as the documentary
nibus 174 4 (Bus 174, 2002). In Tropa de Elite, Padilha deploys a clas-
sic action narrativewith a handheld camera simulating the urgency
and subjective point of view of documentaryin order to encour-
age viewers to identify with the character of a BOPE officer, part of
the extremely violent Brazilian elite police squad. BOPE stands for
Batalho de Operaes Policiais Especiais (Batallion for Special Police
Operations) and is a task force that forms part of the Rio de Janeiro
state military police. The film is narrated from the latters point of
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 113
view, a police-officers vision of the world that is legimitated through

cinematographic means.
Neither the narrative nor the character allow any space for ques-
tioning. The action presses viewers into complicity with a regressive
and vengeful discourse that enjoys great popularity in Brazil, combin-
ing the blaming of others (drug dealers and users), a traditional mor-
alism (a prohibitionist stance toward drugs, which refuses to discuss
their legalization or regulation), and a discourse of fear, to justify its
support for the death penalty for drug dealers and the criminalisation
of users. The only good bandit is a dead bandit; and those who use
drugs are funding violence and the killing of innocents.
This kind of strategy can be summed up through the different
scenes where drug users are criminalized and the moral discourse
that, throughout the film, points a finger at the liberal middle class
and especially at academics, as in a scene that pokes fun at a univer-
sity professors Foucaultian jargon. Another scene subjects to ridicule
the non-governmental organizations working in the favela, with their
demands of drug legalization and of police respect for the rights of
citizens. The most exemplary scene of this discourse of culpability is
the moment in which Captain Nascimento clasps the bloodied face
of a dead drug user, shouting You pot-smoking fag, its you thats
funding all this shit!
The pleasure, the regressive delight of the character in a state of
excitement readily produces commotion among the audience in the
face of the formers sacred rage and indignation, its urgency marked
by the nervous camera simulating a real-time narrative, similar to TV
news or a videogame. Essentially, it is the same kind of denunciatory
indignation that the media never tire of repeating and incentivating.
Told in the first person, the film aims for an immediate identifica-
tion between spectator and character-narrator, which is triggered by
elements of catharsis. The Captain Nascimento appeals to our own
becoming-fascist, with his expertise, his commonplace verdicts, his
black shirt and apologies of torture and extermination, and his cel-
ebration of death, in a frenetic and urgent narrative that captivates the
audience. State terror, in other words, is being legitimized cinemato-
graphically and socially. We could say that the first victim of Tropa
de Elites narrative is the viewer herself, taken hostage by the logic
of Captain Nascimento and of Matas, the captains apprentice, who
can only evolve into a single direction: that of becoming assassins in
uniform, dragging the audience along with them in their regressive
pleasure of repression, torture, and infantilization, with the BOPE
acting as the skull-on-black-cled avenger hero whom the children of
114 IVANA BENTES
Rio de Janeiro have since turned into a carnival costume, and who
is coming out to get you (as the funk soundtrack at the start of the
film has it).
The film sticks to this discourse in such a way that it is impossible
not to desire what the narrative itself desires, and not to justify the
characters actions. The spectator is taken hostage. The impulse of
death and adrenaline, the imperative and sovereign pleasure of seeing,
inflicting, and being exposed to violence is present in much of con-
temporary action cinema, in a planetary regression that reaffirms the
absolute authority, the power that will normalize chaos and contain
casastrophe, even if to do so it has to resort to maximum violence and
arbitrariness.
The dualism and the pragmatism of the Captain Nascimento char-
acter reaffirm themselves in certain cathartic scences, as when an ado-
lescent dealer is beaten up and suffocated with a blood-soaked plastic
bag, kicked, punched, and tortured, in order to extract more informa-
tion from him. The film justifies this torture on the part of the good
cops as part of their expertise and efficiency. Torture is just another of
their technologies, and thus plainly justified, morally and cinemati-
cally, as police procedure.
Tropa de Elitee was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film
Festival of 2008, having been taken by the jury to be a film denounc-
ing police violence in Brazil, a reading it is difficult to agree with
from a cinematographic point of view. From the perspective of audio-
visual analysis, the framing of shots, the narrative point of view, the
effects of identification with the policeman-hero, and the enjoyment
of the killings, confirm and coincide with a dualistic worldview bereft
of lines of flight, in which the spectator remains caught up.
Music, Politics, and Peripheral Cultures

Films such as Tropa de Elitee express all the ingredients of an extremely
conservative mindset that is wide-spread in Brazil, and shared not just
among elite sectors but among many shantytown dwellers as well.
Nevertheless, it is a mindset under challenge. As an example, and tak-
ing our analysis into a different direction, we might look at the ways
in which poverty and the margins produce aesthetics and styles, how
they create worlds that can be enhanced or appropriated in a positive
fashion by the media and the market.
The entrance of MTV in Brazilian urban youth culture is directly
related with the international rise of a lifestyle and of forms of
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 115
self-fashioning, in which ones marks of distinction, attitude, behav-

ior, and style are being produced through the consumption of
images, clothes, musical forms, brand names, and other signsa
differential consumption of culture that crystallizes through MTV
international. Instead of an elaborate rhetoric, traditional discourse
is substituted here by the exteriorization of visual, gestural, and cor-
poral signs. It is symptomatic, then, that innovations in the repre-
sentation of poverty in Brazil should have emerged in the fields of
music and video, which have shown greater agility in reading this
new urban and global context than cinema or traditional journalistic
discourses.
The rap and hip hop sceneboth in Brazil and in the world at
largeare key references in this respect. MTV Brazil gave visibility
to these new subjects of discourse: rappers, skaters, graffiti artists,
MCs, and militants of Brazilian hip hop, are now token characters
on all kinds of TV shows. The decisive aspect here is that MTV
Brazil and the video-clip are capable of repositioning within the
media and thus of repoliticizing the everyday life of young peo-
ple who have received their cultural formation not just through
television but also through new media including the internet and
videogames.
The decisive change is the political dimension of these urban cul-
tural expressions and lifestyles forged in contexts of poverty and vio-
lence but also in the passage from a lettered to an audiovisual and
mediatic culture. These peripheral cultures put themselves at a
distance from merely assistentialist impulses and affirm the political
and aesthetic quality of their marginal location. These new subjects
of discoursemusicians, writers, and other kinds of intellectuals and
artists from the periphery who have come to replace the traditional
spokespersons of culturego on from being objects to becom-
ing subjects of discourse, in another novelty that eliminates the last
remainders of paternalism.
The periphery fights for visibility; hence Open TV and MTV
Brazil are important sites of this symbolic conquest, this struggle
to obtain copyright over ones own condition and image, in an
original attempt at politicizing the culture of entertainment and at
struggling for the conditions of material production of ones own
existence. However, if TV and film give visibility, their limitations also
become manifest. It is not enough to be simply visually included
but rather, it is necessary to break down the boundaries of the medi-
atic or artistic ghetto in order for the politics and the culture of the
116 IVANA BENTES
favelass to become the objects of an expanded, general reflection and

experimentation.
Counter-discourse: The New Precariate

and the Semiotic Guerrilla
The poor today are not the poor in the classical sense, because they
are inserted into consumer society, not excluded from it. On the
contrary, they are at the basis of what makes capitalism and urban
services work: favelass and peripheries are highly productive locations,
and the city is not divided. It makes no sense to speak of marginal-
ity in respect of an active population, with an enormous turnover of
formal and informal economic activity, and where only a tiny, minori-
tarian fraction lives off the drug traffic.
The vacuum of the state was not just occupied by the drug
traffic but also by projects of social and cultural organization,
of material production of alternatives to state policies and those
of organized crime, and last not least by new urbanistic projects
such as Favela-Bairro (Favela-Neighborhood). These, as well as
the recent policies of pacification through UPPs (Unidades de
Polica Pacificadora, or Police Peace-Keeping Units, who remain
in particular favelass for an indeterminate amount of time), have
understood that it is necessary to extend the city to the favelass,
to urbanize them without destroying their communitarian ethos,
pointing toward a wholly new and singular possibility of a non-
bourgeois and nonhomogeneous city. They are like the stem cells
of cities of cooperation.
In this new avatar, the favelass have to be inserted into the analysis
of an immaterial capitalism dedicated to the production of symbolic
goods, and of the constitution of a new precariatethe pre-cogs,
or cognitivist precariate; both of which condition the immaterial and
symbolic production of a capitalism of knowledge. The favelass are
not homogeneous but neither are they a singularity within capitalism.
Rather, they need to be analyzed comparatively alongside ghettos,
peripheries, and other local and global communities. The favelass have
to be conceptualized not in their exceptionality but in their universal-
ity, their generality: as global favela
a.
Here we reencounter a renovated discourse not just aboutt but also
stemming from m the favelas. This is the final, and decisive, link we need
to establish for researching the global periphery, putting in relation the
shifts in discourses and images about the favelass in film and audivisual
forms, on the one hand, and the emergence of cultural movements
GLOBAL PERIPHERY
Y 117
m the favelass, on the other. These transform the media framework

from
as such, integrating themselves into and rivalling the production on
the favela, in a dispute of imaginaries and through a politics of the
symbolic.
*Translated by Jens Andermann
n
Notes
1. A description of the experience of favela tourism on a jeep tour was
the topic of one of the first pieces I wrote on favela culture, pub-
lished in the Jornal do Brasil. See Bentes, 2001.
2. Part of this debate in Brazil turned on the notion of cosmetics of
hunger I put forth in an early article published in the Jornal do Brasil
on July 8, 2001, attempting to make visible the transformations and
reiterations which occurred in discourses on the territories of poverty
in contemporary Brazilian cinema. In a second stage, this ethical, aes-
thetic and political question took on more generalized proportions
coinciding with the launch of Cidade de Deus, s when, in the newspaper
Estado de So Pauloo of August 31, 2002, I published an essay Cidade
de Deuss promove turismo no inferno (City of God d promotes Tourism
in Hell). An exchange of different positions in this debate, very much
still marked by the recent launch of Cidade de Deus, s took place at
the 3-day symposium Da Esttica Cosmtica da Fome (From the
Aesthetics to the Cosmetics of Fear), held at Espao Unibanco de
Cinema, So Paulo, on September 1618, 2002.
Bibliography
Agamben. Giorgio. Estado de Exceo. So Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2002.
Bentes, Ivana. Da Lepra da Esttica da Fome Favela Pop, Chic ou Area,
l Caderno B, 11/02/2001: 45.
Jornal do Brasil,
. The Serttoo and the Favela
a in Contemporary Brazilian Film. In
The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lcia Nagib. London: I.B. Tauris,
2003.
Bernadet, Jean-Claude. Cineastas e Imagens do Povo. Sao Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
CH A P T ER 8
Exploding Buses: Jos Padilha and

the Hijacking of Media
Tom Cohen
After the Candelaria massacre, do Nascimento used to sleep

underneath a bridge near where he hijacked the bus. Its right next
to the Globo TV office.
Jose Padilha1
We were putting on an act. It was an act.

a, Bus 174
Janaina
The era of hyperindustrial modernity can be called a cinematic era,

even as it careens into a dawning era of climate change: resource
depletion, extinction events, food riots, and so on.2 The latter (cli-
mate change) can serve as one name for material processes that lie
outside of the formers window of reference. And if one wanted a
single metaphor for this anthropic bubble, you might think of us as
all on a busits
s windows are like screens that look out, in safety, or
can be seen into, its transport appears stationary, and its wheels imply
a circular back loop that puts time itself in question.
Here, I will reflect on this bus by relating Jorge Padilhas nibus
1744 (Bus 174, 2002) to a very distant and unlikely parallel, Hitchcock.
What links these is the use of a bus as a figure of cinematic experience
itself. Bus 174, of course, presents itself as a faux documentary deploy-
ing archival footage of a real eventthe famous hijacking of the Rio
120 TOM COHEN
public bus by a street kid, Sandro Nascimiento, which brought

Brazilian media to a standstill. As such, it is as far as possible, we
might suppose, from high modernist allegory of the sort Hitchcock
practiced, wherein the enigma of cinematic processes are ceaselessly
foregrounded, marked, put in question. One can fail to notice that
the film is traversed by figures of media. In Padilhas Rio, the real
has been already cinematized, the product of the encompassing Globo
network of Brazil, of telemarketing, and telenovelas, of video-screens
that penetrate into the favelas. This association of the street kid
Sandro with media (as in the interview cited above) is emphasized of
course in the film: Sandro contrasts his act with that of action mov-
ies and is quoted by his adoptive mother as performing the hijacking
to become a screen star, of sorts, even if he would not be there to then
watch the screen with her. This screen, like the bus, will itself encom-
pass that which is literally before the viewers of Bus 174.
4
For Hitchcock a buss is recurrently used as a figure of cinematic
experience (as is, more frequently, a train). In Hitchcocks early film
Sabotage, this takes the form of bombing such a bus itself. A boy
unwittingly carries a time bomb onto a bus, together with film canis-
ters. This temporal bomb blows both him and the bus up on the way
to Piccadilly Circus (called the center of the world). What Hitchcock
implies is a technical arrest of time turned against those who imag-
ine themselves transported by this agency, communally protected
rather the way Hollywood, at the time, would be. In Padilha, the
bus is different. The bus, which is also the screen, takes into itself the
community or telepoliss (Rio). This entire circuitry will be hijacked,
turned on, put at risk, or held in hiatus.3 What occurs when cinema
turns against a real it has produced too successfully, to the point of
producing a suicidal double of itself?
The subject of Bus 174 4 is media itself, which Sandro is associated
with and takes over in the hijacking. The omnibus of the title first
appears on the screenafter an extended aerial panorama descends
into the cityas a clip of public footage from a recorded traffic
cam. It is thus at once the reall bus (footage) and cites the automated
surveillance cam. Various forms of media and its devices are inces-
santly cited in the various frames and sequences: handsets, walkie-
talkies, televisions, towers, writing on windows, video-game screens,
Sandros references to movies hes seen, and so on. If the point of
the film were restorative, to return to us the personhood or identity
of the street kid Sandro, that would mean wee have absorbed him
into the visibility side, that of the humans and the community. In
a perverse way this may turn out to be so when the film gives the
EXPLODING BUSES 121
real Sandro fame and then generates another film in which a real
actor is playing and interpreting him (Ultima Parada 174)that is,
when the cultural machine reduces him to a psychology, arching his
disruption. To restore Sandro to one of us would be to restore
the control over visibility that was interrupted, shattered, hijacked,
upended by this takeover of media. Instead Bus 174 4 attempts, like
Sandro, an intervention in the whole at the sacrifice of itself as a
movie.
Visibility and the Telepolis

What does cinema a do when it encounters a real that has already
become cinematized d in advance? This is particularly so, if it encounters
in that world itself what has come to be thought of as a biopolitical
closure.4 A bus, after all, is an enclosure, and it has an outside. What
would cinema do if it had to turn against itself, against this bus, to
break the spell of that real, which the film calls by default the vis-
ible as such. Would cinema be acting all but suicidally? If such were
the case, if the real already were produced by media circuits, and
if this in its way generated and defined the visible, then the visible
would be blindand cinema would have to reorient itself. In Bus 174 4,
the street kids are repeatedly identified by the enlightened sociolo-
gist (Luis Eduardo) as invisible, as bound by invisibility, and the
screen literalizes this by blocking out faces, covering with scarves, and
so on. Sandro does so repeatedly: putting his face before the camera,
addressing Brazil, asking to be filmed, then wrapping his face again
and again. A persistent defacementt suffuses the films seeming parade
of speaking faces.
The street kids are repeatedly called nonvisible and nonbeings,
garbage, bare life in Agambens much-used sense. In human
form, they are excluded from human recognitiona ban that con-
stitutes the orders of the human or visible in turn. It is a global
situation, today, corresponding not to a class split but a species split.
The street kid is not a lower class but an out-of-life (as
( bios).s Zizek
represents this view when developing Agambens example of the
slum dwellers and favelas to the camps: the slum-dweller is a
homo sacer,r the systemically generated living dead; or animal of
global capitalism . . . pushed into the space of the out-of-control.
(Zizek 2008: 42) Yet, this biopolitical analysis may be precisely
what is undone by Bus 174, because it maintains a nostalgia for the
bios, the idea of a poliss even without polity that requires a binary of
the excluded and the invisible to fuel itself. Sandro, the totally
122 TOM COHEN
excluded, the category of bare existence (zoe) in media revolt,

appears all too included even at the margins within the circuitry of
the telepolis. In question here is: what occurs when the invisible
erupts to take over the screen of the visible, hold it hostage in real
time (35 million TV viewers, hundreds of eyes), or when the homo
sacerr is in media revolt? Similarly, what occurs when media is itself
held hostage, as if itself arrested? Padilha replicates Sandros violent
takeover, and does so by an attack not on the inhumanity of the
citizens (the sociologists moralism), but on a real that has already
been cinematically programmed to include, over and again, the frag-
ile hypothesis of the excluded.
On the one hand, everything in this film is edited footage of the
real, real TV footage of the event, real witnesses, real place-shotsno
authorial intervention at all. On the other hand, everything arrives as
a citation, from the cuts of footage of the event to the gallery of talk-
ing heads and voice-overs.5
If, then, Bus 174 4 brings things to a halt, holds media hostage like
Sandro, it is in part because it refuses to be a movie. It does not aim
to disclose some unseen truth as would what Padilha dismisses as
observational documentary. Everyone knows the street kids are
the unliving, the undead, the invisible, they are openly visible at
the same time, and so on. And it does not aim to recover the human
subjectivity of Sandro for us to understand him. Sandro will wait for
ltima Parada 174 4 (2008) for that to be tried, for an interpretive
narrative to psychologize him or make him like us, and to end up in
Wikipedia.6 Both would be symptoms of relapse. This is made clear
by the second tracking shot of the mountains where we find them
crowned with giant media towersoverseeing
s Rio, feeding screens
and circuits.
Mere documentary is to Padilha as historicism might be to
Benjamin, a deceived index for producing the real (or visible), at odds
with the citational hiatus of the image, the enemy (as Benjamin
says).7 What occurs in the theoretical documentary, though, is that
rather than recover or mourn a reall Sandro, the latter is produced
increasingly as a counter-logic and figural agency. For the sociolo-
gist who romanticizes this, Sandro becomes the one who sacrifices
himself to enter the orders of the visible and burn out in fiery
glorya vaguely Christian mytheme: The boy exchanges his future,
his life, his soul, for an ephemeral and fiery moment of glory . . . a cru-
cial moment. A turning point. One might ask, instead, at what point
does he appear as a certain master-of-media and a saboteur of the
cinematic real?
EXPLODING BUSES 123
A Th eoretical Documentary?
Padilha cites a clipping from the film itself in the commentary he
addends to the DVD for the English audience. He suggests that the
film is not a documentary but something that he calls a theoreti-
call documentary. The word theoretical is cryptic and points to
what could be called the allegorical zone of which the clip is exam-
ple. It is opposed to what is called the observational documentary,
which investigates a contemporary event. By contrast, the former
takes up a past event (in this case, what is also already a media
t one which leaves traces in the archive as what he calls the
event,
most filmed hijacking ever). The theoretical documentary then
destroys the representational premise of documentary. The phrase is
less a self-cancelling oxymoron than a nonexistent or nameless genre,
of which it is the sole example.
Padilhas commentary is interwoven with clips of Sandro provok-
ing the police from a bus window. It captures Padilha giving his
account of what he is doing while having Sandro direct and speak for
him. Other things are marked in this performative explanation of the
nonexistent theoretical documentaryfor instance, the identifica-
tion of the bus with cinema itself, with its succession of screen-like
windows and the writing on the window glass. Padilha marks his own
identification with Sandro: he, the director, will in fact take direc-
tions from Sandro about when to get on and off the bus when
Figure 8.1 nibuss 174 [Bus 174] (Brazil, 2002), directed by Jos Padilha.
124 TOM COHEN
editingthat is, when to go from the event footage to various places

and interviews explaining the episodes of Sandros existence. Sandro
will in fact actt precisely as the director of a film he is improvising for
real inside and outside the bus itself. He tells his various hostages how
to actt for the camera, in effect creating two different discourses (in
the bus, and outside, for the police and, beyond them, the cameras).
The hostages, moreover, will be told to actt as what they nonetheless
are, that is, to act terrorized, while Sandro assures them they will not
be shotstaging such an imaginary shooting for the police. Padilha
will in turn note that the directors most difficult task is to take the
right shot,
t which turns out again to be a problem for Sandro, and
also for the hapless cop, Marcelo. It is the last who rushes Sandro
when the latter finally leaves the bus on a seeming whim, drawing the
drama to an arbitrary close. Yet, from a foot away, Marcelo none-
theless misses Sandro but manages to shoot the hostage in the face
(triggering Sandros shot as they go down). Padilha identifies with
Sandros takeover of the cinematic bus, the visible, as the film m itself
takes over the name of the event itself (Bus 174).
This reflexivity gets worse once one begins to read it. When
Sandro tells the cops again and again that this, whatever is taking
place, is no fucking movie, it occurs in what Padilha nonetheless
calls one of Sandros speeches. At the time of saying this, real
time, Sandro is already performing as if in some film (he has models
in his head, like the airplane movie he refers to having watched the
night before). And of course he told his adoptive mother Dona Elza
that she would see him become world famous on the screen, even if
he would not be there to watch it himself. And Sandro speaks, here,
in a movie of sorts in which his name is listed among the players.8
Nonetheless, to say this is not a fucking movie speaks, for Padilha,
of his Bus 174 4 itself. To say that a theoretical documentary is not
a fucking movie is to claim it cannot be digested as a film is, gives
up the ostensible fictions of cinema, and can only be regardedlike
Sandros suicidal trajectoryas tearing a whole in the confabulation
of the real in the media circuitry that is called Brazil (and, again,
indexed to Globoo itself).
When we see Sandro talking to the camera and the cops, we think
we know what it means. Sandro acts for and is protected by the cam-
eras. The Governor intervenes to assure that he will not be shot by
a sniper, since brains splattered before the kids watching the TV at
home would be bad for reelection. By saying that this is not a fuck-
ing movie Sandro is telling the cops that he really, really, will use his
gun and massacre people on the bus. He is giving the cops a way to
EXPLODING BUSES 125
envision the disaster to come (blood everywhere) and insisting they

take him seriously. This is serious shit. Yet, it produces the opposite
effect, since just as his threats are an act, as if in a movie (he does
not intend d to kill as he says), so the cops act even more as if they are
watching one.
What is meant, however, when the screen itself speaks through
Sandro, as Padilha does? What does it mean when Bus 174 4 says, to us,
this is not a fucking movie? That it is not a documentary, not a narra-
tive film? Then what is it? To say this is not a fucking movie is to ask
where the performance is an intervention in the real reall (real shit)
not that it represents for us a real problem (the life of the street kids)
but that it intervene at the archival site from which visibility and the
real are as if produced. For Bus 174 4 to say this of itself, that it is not a
fucking movie, would be like cinema suiciding itself in order to break
its own spell. And one can see why, since the film appears as if it were
a composite of archival footage and sheer reportage. There is no narra-
tive imposed, no fictions, no Padilha as interviewer; it is all reportage,
monologues of witnesses. That is, it seems to insist on the unadulter-
ated reall of all of its edited clips. Nothing seems added (except for the
imposing score). Yet, everything acts as a citation rather than a report.
When Sandro tells the cops that this is not an action movie, he
implies two things: he actss like the villain of the action movie, in which
the police must be phony heroes; yet he also implies that he is the
hero inversely, rebelling against a totalized system that deprives him
of life and exterminates his kind (his little friends at Candelaria).
Turning the tables, Sandro criminalizess the entire order of the vis-
ible which the police enforce and the cameras represent.
That is why the clip is chosen for Padilhas commentary. If docu-
mentary is allied to the indexing of a real or praxis (the supposed other
of theory), then what is called theoreticall documentary turns on
a past event and alters the events condition of emergence. That is,
it is an act that alters both the past and, prospectively, the future
past. It does this not by restoring a lost identity or narrative (Sandro
as person) but by allowing what is called Sandro to take over the
bus, violate the orders of the visible, criminalize and expose those
orders. When the invisible takes over the cinematic bus, Sandro
in effect opens an irresolvable rift within the visiblee that cannot be dis-
solved, reversed, or explained in the latters terms. He wants to enter
it, become a media star momentarily, become visible or recognized at
the cost of life, but also deface it. In this instance, it is the theoretical
dimension that makes some sort of irreversible or sabotaging action
possibleas other, say, than a mere replay of facts.
126 TOM COHEN
The term theoretical adheres to the Greek theoreinechoing

seeingg and theatrical spectation. When we think of this term as con-
nected to abstract thoughtas when theoryy is opposed to praxiss we
ignore that it has to do with the eyee or where the latter is bound
to memory and media. It returns us to media, or in terms of the
film the telepoliss itself, what is here called Rio. But there is more.
Theory implies here what Benjamin might term allegory, an act,
the active intervention into the archival site from which the real
itself is generated.
If Bus 174 4 were about recovering Sandros otherness and human-
nesss for ourselves, the living, that would be reassuring and an end
of mourning. But Bus 174 4 instead creates of Sandro a monstrous
rift between the visible and the invisible. He becomes an ante-figure
that resists readability absolutely. Instead of being returned to us, to a
psychological or moral story, he drags the order of the visiblewhich
is also the screeninto this rift, or across to its other side. The latter
occurs when the screen goes negative, exchanging black for white, on
the third d prison visit. Starting off as the criminal, the bad guy of the
show, Sandro criminalizes the visible as such (which includes the
viewers). This frees what we call Sandro from any final resting point
or grave (no one attends the funeral) and makes him most real, so to
speak, when he has no place. The theoretical documentary is not
a fucking movie. It produces something monstrous, is something
monstrous, a hybrid twenty-first century nongenre of which it is the
only example, a post biopoliticall cinema. This is why Bus 174 4 seems in
endless mourning from the beginning aerial shot and at the same time
beyond mourning. But the object of mourning is not Sandro but Rio,
which is to say the bus, which is also to say the mediatric polis.
E xploding Buses
The buss as a figure of cinema is a not-unfamiliar modernist trope
and runs, like that of the train itself, through Hitchcock. Again, the
series of windows like screens, the faux transparency of the glass,
the stationary transportt promised to the one seated, the wheels that
elicit a back looping logic of time and artificial memory circuits yet
also provides a material base. In the opening of The Man Who Knew
Too Muchh this occurs as James Stewart and Doris Day banter about
the desert world outside the windowseverything is first made
familiar, compared to what is known (America), looking through
windows of utter alienness. The windows as screens place the tour-
ist viewer in this position, but the America referred back to as
EXPLODING BUSES 127
familiar never quite existed as such. As the little boy Hank says
who hangs between every question and says I dont know a lot
what they call the dark continent is twice as bright as their home
city, Indianapolis
a , Indiana. Indianapolis is the name of a phantom
mediapolis of sorts, called home. This cinematic bus at once too dark
and too brightt reminds the viewer that there is no America, which
was originary to the Indians. As Hitchcock remarked: there are no
Americans, since they are all foreigners. But this cinematic logic is
casual compared to that in Sabotage, where the saboteurwho runs
a movie houseplaces a time bombb on a bus that is blown up. The
bomb of time is placed next to movie reels, hence cinematic, and
under a birdcage in which it is timed to go off when the birds sing.
The saboteur is linked to Hitchcock and the cinematic bomb, which
irrevocably disperses archival time. It would be intended as if to get
at some real, to actt upon and alter irrevocably the very center of the
world (as is said), the sites or non-sites of memory inscriptions from
which world springss (or screens projected upon). Cinematic process
as time-bomb explodes the bus of media itselfa suicidal gesture,
which cinema can afford, since it persists as an (im)permanent after-
life. There is something of this gesture at work inversely as Sandro
perpetually counts down to a putative or proleptic six oclock that
will, as needed, appear plastic or put off or given up.9
If the figure of the bus is in this sense viral, determining its own
point of disappearance, it is because, in a sense, it is a figure for what
can have no proper figure, just a stand in, since it is encompassing.
Hitchcock would explode the bus of cinema by its own means, while
for Padilha, the invisible hijacks the bus and the visible itself.
They converge about attacks on the construction of the visible.
Padilha turns against movies in so far as they motor and perpetu-
ate the state of the real, the telepolis. If Hitchcocks figure in the
1930s anticipates the tele-empire which Hollywood will be indis-
sociable from the spread of, Padilha arrives at the world as that has
taken place. It is a world that cannot be held in place by the biopoliti-
cal model that, like the sociologist, can only map the cruel manage-
ment of the invisible. What one witnesses in Sandros uprising and
takeover is not the revenge of the homo saceras both Agamben and
Zizek cite the favela to supposedly demonstrate. Rather, what is called
Sandro represents an uncloseable rift in the orders of the visible,
into which gap the entire bus is drawn and arrested by. It wont close,
because the very tissue of the visible/invisible distinction is breached
and Sandro as the name for a performative within the film can-
not be mourned (no one but Dona Elza attends the funeral), despite
128 TOM COHEN
the ritual of recovery the film actss as if it is performing. Instead,

something else occurs, since in standing outside the bus, which now
includes Brazil, the camera attaches itself to something outside the
biopolitical map. It is not so much a zoopolitical cinemathat is,
shifting to the side of the nonhuman (Sandro as street kid), or the
thing, or animalas one that is postbinarized altogether. The telepo-
liss is overseen by the media towers and its public space is not the street
but the screen itself or the stream of Globoo data.
A n I nterrupted R obbery
It is the second appearance of the mountains above Rio that displays
the strange media towers, at once assertively dominant and fragile in
the lush peaks. The row of towers appears as a blind d panopticon struck
into the earth and ranging over the poliss belowmanaging media cir-
cuits, feeding TV screens, relaying memory streams. It is blind not
because it emits rather than sees, creating the real that pacifies so
surveillance is irrelevant: it is blind since, rather than maintaining the
human polis, the entirety drifts, suicidally, toward twenty-first cen-
tury mutations that put its survival in question. When, throughout the
film, different facess turn up masked or blurred, it is also before this
tower in a way.10 Sandro will both thrust his facee out of the window
and wrap it, giving and taking away face. In the biopolitical accord that
is put on display, the visiblee itself is invisibly broadcast, and generated.
Let me follow this thread. The circuits of media that traverse Bus
1744 are established from the firstwith the cameras aerial panorama.
It is free of gravity and independent of the footage it will soon cite,
including each talking head it visits. The arrival of footage appears in
identifying the busa traffic cam m shot in the street. It is a robotic
camera, a surveillance wired to no one. It links a new public space to
the camera stream that has no locus and whose secret is, in part, the
death or arrest of politics as we imagine itthe ghosting of the polis.
The polis, or Rio, has become a transindividual memory circuit.
This is apparent in the screens parade of talking heads which serially
supplant one another and yet, collectively, traverse Brazilian types
and roles (students, police, social workers, intellectuals, street kids).
So many faces, highly individual, and yet always battling against a
stripping of face itselfthe blurred or covered faces of interviewed
gangsters, street kids, police.
Sandro arrives with films in his head, raising and lowering his face
scarf in ways that make no sense. He is in the remote tradition of a
Quixote or Bovary in that regardtransposing a pop media template
EXPLODING BUSES 129
into life, into action, and because it is cinematic it is condensed to an

instantaneous occasion. He refers to the airplane movie he saw the
night before as what he would not do (he could not toss a hostage
from the window of a bus) and had prophesied to Dona Elza she
would see him on the screen even if he may not be able to. Sandro is
protected as long as he holds the cameras hostage, becomes hostage
to them in turn. He leaves the bus suddenly, surprising everyone, as if
he tired suddenly of the eternal recurrence he finds himself in.
But while the film poses as a faux documentary, the foreground-
ing of media had marked d itself from the start: cell phones go off,
cameras snap. Rather than strip cinema of anything but sheer report-
age and archival footage, Bus 174 4 discretely runs through a series of
mock televisual or cinematic genres. Padilha cinematically signals and
disowns these genres in turn: there is the action film, the CSI-likeI
TV police show (jazzy cuts and musical score), the horror movie,
the docudrama, the black comedy, the favela thriller. When the cop
thinks Sandro was shot and is shocked to find him reanimated, the
unkillable monster movie flares up. And it finally displays the real
real of a snuff film in which Sandro stars. When he is asphyxiated
in the back of the police van the cameras, which revoke protection
once he leaves the bus suddenly, turn on him and go into a feeding
frenzy. They prevent themselves from seeing through the windows by
their own reflected lights on the glass. This runs through the com-
mentators too: the therapist references American films, Sandros
performance is called a show (seen at home on TV) and Sandros
erasure in the van is said by a reflective cop to fulfill the demands of
the script, since in any show the bad guy must die. Yet as with the
writing that takes place on the bus window to communicate, draw-
ing attention to the glass (or medium) itself, the film ratchets up the
stakes. The transparency of the glass becomes opaque and replaced
by script, the media now become a mute barrier. This appearance of
giant reverse letters suggests a rebus. It draws us into a mutee archive,
a meltdown through technologies of script preceding speech or talk-
ing heads.11 This trajectory once again ups the ante for the violation
of visibility Sandro performs. It again redefines the reference of the
bus, and draws us to the underworld of inscriptions.
Such a focus on what we are calling here archivess had all along
been at workfootage, testimonials, public records, places visited by
Sandro revisited, scoured for traces. Bus 174 4 is all about archives
and its proper title, Omnibus 174, marks this confluence of the bus
with a totality that is poised by the omni. Thus a certain muteness
and muting opens beneath the many voice-overs and monologues.
130 TOM COHEN
Cops dont have walkie-talkies and make hand signals like mimes;
Damianas stroke makes her mute, so her daughter has to read her
diary for her. We pass through a series of public archives, typed jail
reports on Sandro, court sentences consigning his place in time for
the record. And this drifts toward what is called the Vault, the
dead inner sanctum of Sandros prison cell, without sunlight and now
windowless. The Vault provokes horror in the prisoners, who panic
once they hear that they are assigned there. Yet the total enclosure of
the cell is like a bus without windows but instead with walls covered
now with unreadable graffiti. The Vault inverts the open sky of the
panoramic earth outside Rio, and precedes visibility. What goes on in
this underworld, this darkroom?
Unlike the third jail visit, this one is emptied when visited. The
warden stutters, saying it is not a jail, unable to give any name to
the placeless place. Here the unliving banished from the bioss are
stored outside of time and life, warehoused. In turning to the cell
wall, again, the camera finds the parallel to Janainas writing on the
window in the very minimal inscriptionss on the wallgraffiti from
unknown authors, unreadable name-words: Grota . . . C.V . . . Deus . . .
Orpheu u (lower right). The walll has effectively sealed over the window
on which letters had appeared that could be read still. It becomes
the extreme reduction of the bus regarded now as enclosure even
as it turns to mere inscriptions. The name Orpheu appearswhat
does it mean? Is Sandro a different black Orpheuss in Brazilian cinema?
Does Padilha mark the camera itself as Orpheus-like since, in turning
back (the theoretical documentary), it must annihilate and lose the
beloved again, leave the mourned Sandro to the underworld? Does
one find, at this omphalous of magical inscriptions, an abandonment
of mourningfrom an increasingly nonanthropicc position?
But the camera does not stop there. Rather, it asserts and shows
itselff at times, like Sandro covering and uncovering his face. Thus
when the aerial panorama that takes us over the mountains identifies
with a terrestrial surface, bare life of sorts without face (which is to
also say personification), the camera eschews any anthropic position.
The camera enters from outside. It departs, moreover, from the watery
surface of the sea outside Rio, not just the encircling element out of
which life fashions itself but also the specular surface out of which
reflective visibility and the eye is as if created by a techno-genesis of
light outside any human cognitive design. The descent from above
might appear discretely angelic at first as it discloses the favelas creep-
ing up the cliffside. But it is suspended between heaven and earth,
bird-like. It citationally invokes less a Christian or angelic visitation
EXPLODING BUSES 131
to the unjust world of men than the repetitions and decays of cinema-
tized history and empire: the descent into Rome and the Coliseum
in Gladiatorr or that of the Triumph of the Will, with attendant reso-
nances. At the point at which the hapless cop Marcelo rushes Sandro
to earn his promotion and, as an expression of Brazils inability to sort
out any perspective or target, shoots the female hostage Geisa in the
face instead, which we all want to understand, the screen goes into
slow motion, frame by frame, invoking its technological powers to
taunt the eye with what it cannot, even then, see.
The window is, itself, a heroo here: framing, admitting visibility,
capturing, reflecting itself as if invisible and yet a barrier. A screen
that reflects another scene, it can draw attention to itself materially,
become a text. A shift occursstill linked to the media towerwhen
Janaina must write script in giant letters backwards on the glass. This
writing is done with lipstick, eroticized, and shifts attention to what
lies in between, medial, the glass. This appearance of giant reverse
letters suggests a rebus. It draws us into a mutee archive, a meltdown
through technologies of script preceding speech orr talking heads. It
reorients the film, again redefines the reference of the bus, and draws
us to the underworld of inscriptions.
D isrupting the A rchive of the Visible

The screen n itself can also mutate in this general dismemberment. The
tear in the system that Sandro holds open circulates virally. Upon
the entry to Nova Holanda a slum where Sandro spent time, the entire
screen is taken over by a videogame in which cartoon creatures blast
away with superguns. It is placed on the way into the favelaadja-
cent to the STOP TIME motel signto mark that this circuitry
of media in fact precedes, and informs, the favela, that videogame
shoot-outs become the template of gang gunplay (a cinematized
life). The videogame is the brute interactive programming of cin-
animation shaping the definition of life and the order of favela vio-
lencemachine gun posses performing videogame battles. It again
undermines the bio-political map, since those radically excluded d from
human status are shown here to be not strictly excluded at all but
are clearly within the mutating circuitry. One is now within a suicidal
biopolitical accord d running on inertia, in which living film loop the
visible is entirely aware of the invisible, sees it before it daily, and
actss as if it were not thereaccelerating itself. This model of tele-
political circuitry coincides with a suicidal acceleration, which cor-
responds to its virtual blindness to what is outside the bus. And the
132 TOM COHEN
sociologist suggests that there is no way outt of this, no amelioration or

political change since the system pursues an efficiency (biopower)
that does not exist. This is why to speak of a postbiopoliticall cinema
is redundant as a formula. And it is why one is not tempted to speak
of Sandro as Agambens homo sacerr in revolt, or of this even as a
zoopolitical cinema, since this would keep the trace of its binary in
place. Here the definition of the excluded would have to be revised,
since nothing lies outside this circuit in fact: Sandro can end up
in Wikipedia a and have a film made after him, and the favelass have
become a film-making colony of sorts.
Sandro strides the bus, waiving a gun, exploding from invisibil-
ity, giving speeches, a Hamlet of the favelas and of the screen. He
hijacks the bus on the absurd pretext of robbing students, becomes
Sergio, puts the bus in hiatus, expends himself as a caesura. He has
an accord with the directors cut. Since what is implied by visibility
includes how the human n community blindly establishes its proper
identity, there is in fact no human n defined as such in agreement with
this normativenot the street kid banned from human life, but also
not the social order that persists as if it had a biopolitical contract.
I suggested that the opening aerial panorama bonds the camera
with the nonanthropicthe reflective sea surface it emerges over and
rushes across, the mountain cliffs that rear about Rio, then the media
towers. The first gives rise to the visible and to specular life, the
second gives place to the polis, and the towers sustain and traverse
perception and memory. This makes a certain Sandro also a ghost
of the future, of the human or poliss itself trapped in a suicidal posture
with reference to what is outside the busthes twenty-first century
horizons mentioned above (biodiversity collapse, resource depletion,
extinctions). If hyperindustrial modernity had been the era of cinema
in all of its extensions, the Buss could denote the anthropocene era,
Rio the postglobal telenecropoliss from the cameras perspective.
This bus is interrogated and turned against by the camera, which has
the power to redefine the screen n in the third prison visit. There, the
negatived d order of the visible appears to pass to its inverse side in its
entirety (as if white for black, black for white).
The drugs that Sandro is hopped up with (cocaine is mentioned)
are not cause for his dismissal as a figure of justice. Drugs course
through and militarize the favelas, are tied to their sovereignty
within the mediapolis. And they mime the anestheticization or drug
of the visible, of media circuits (Globo), of telenovela realities. The
reason that this cinema is postbiopoliticall is because life as an
effect arrives in advance as cinanimation. When the film m descends
EXPLODING BUSES 133
for its third visit to its underworld, to the now anonymous site called
anyy jail in Rio, we seee what this movement to the other side of the
screen of the visible entails, which is still the screen. Nothing is
excluded from this circuitry, no outside, since it itself has become
pure exteriority.
In short, cinema a as the viral busbrought to a halt, arrested, held
hostagedestroys the biopolitical binary that is a residue of twen-
tieth century humanism in hedged inverse form: it does not view,
record, trace, burn through, deface, from any point of identification
with a nostalgic external premise (zoe) from which the telepolis is
segregable. This Padilha more or less tells us by identifying Foucault
as the intellectual guiding the middle-class social worker students,
tourists in the favela, who the director delights in burning, shooting,
and humiliating in Tropa de Elite. As Justin Read describes, this new
megalopolis is one of circuitry, a unicity that mimes the screen as
a self-deconstructing site of a viral public memory (and mourning):
The Unicity would be a break with both biopolitics and abstract
space in certain respects. In the space of the Unicity both the nat-
ural and the symbolic (spiritual) have been liquidated by the sheer
physicality of networks. . . . There are real modes of disaffection, dis-
empowerment, and exploitation in the Unicity, but none of these has
anything to do with binary relations of inclusion/exclusion. (Read,
2011) In Bus 174, the cinematic trace identifies with the broadcast
towers and auto-cams, the seeming meltdown through media forms,
and the sea surface and primal mountains cradling the hero of the
film, Rio.
C inemacide
Having entered the film in the open air, in the reflective sun on the
watery surface or atop giant terrestrial folds, we are taken for the third
time underground and in a sunless enclosure. The scene is more than a
living tomb of warehoused human lives placed outside of timeheld,
like and unlike those in the bus, in a nonplace. Thus, upon entering
this one scene the screen itselff appears in shock, flipping the interface
of the visible outright. It retreats into the form of the filmic negative,
white exchanged for black, entering the unearthly Hades of Zizeks
living dead, the storage space of bare life. Unearthlyy faces and
bars. Nonhuman forms swarm, rush up monstrously behind irrevoca-
ble bars. The bars seem to graphically form their own serial interrup-
tion. If the human constructed itself by banishing from the visible
its waste as bare life (to pursue this formula), then the former are here
134 TOM COHEN
shown to be inhuman all along. The previous empty jail celll called the
Vault which Sandro had spent time in by contrast mimed, in its rect-
angular walls scribbled over, the old trope for the isolating frame of
the celluloid band. In this case, the negatived d visit to the sunless crypt
also mirrors and inscribes the screens citizen viewer.
Though stationary, arrested, the hijacked buss of media goes hyper,
has a citational meltdown that leads to the third prison. It is, or goes,
outt of its mind (as is said of Sandro at the end). Erupting into visibil-
ity, speaking from different windows on the bus, Sandro is protected
by the cameras. He is not a killer, we are told by the therapist and Dona
Elza. Padilha calls his behavior poignant, his harangues speeches.
He fakes a killing by shooting the floor (off camera) and tells the hos-
tages how to act terrorized before the camerahow to act ass what
they are so that he does not have to actually act. Everything takes
place in hiatus, in putting the moment off, in counting down to six
oclock, then extending the countdownthe STOP TIME motel
sign. Sandro proceeds by directing his not-a-movie to approach seri-
ous shit, the virtual collapse of the visible regime. This involves
different discourses for those inside and those without, who can see
only threats, savage terror, gunshots. Janaina accounts: Parallel con-
versations were going on. One for the cameras and public and another
for the hostages inside. She and others talk of the confusion, when
the lines of play acting and lethal act crisscross or convergewith even
Sandro not knowing which is which: Then he looked at me and he
seemed to realize that there was something ambiguous in what he was
doing. Either he wanted us to put on an act or he really wanted to kill
us. Sandro occupies the position of a permanent parabasiss or disjunc-
ture that cannot be closed but takes into its black hole everything in
contact with itor the bus. Stalking the bus windows like a rampart,
his do not forget is the Candelaria massacre that he witnessed, in
which the police murdered his little friends, and his mothers virtual
beheading by robbers in front of him as a child. These two ground
zeroess of catastrophic memory, before which all else is erased yet which
are not locatable in time, makes of the films Sandro a zero figure, in
the inverse sense to a man to come.
This doubling of actingg and the actt returns us to the act that the
theoreticall documentary implies, of altering the effaced or ante-
rior event to shatter or transform a captured presentwhat remains
if one is not a fucking movie. Sandro imitates himself, becom-
ing his dark double, the name that the police give to him and which
he accepts to play, Sergio. There is a perpetual rift here, in the
EXPLODING BUSES 135
always-missed performance of a self in auto-citation. The film does

not, in this sense, do what Padilha says or the documentary as social
criticism pretends. It does not only retrace for us the lesson of how
torture is institutionalized in the state, as Padilha encapsulates in his
commentary. That is local, and everyone in Brazil seems aware of it.
The zombies of the third prison, negatived, are both the strangest
beings of the screen and, discretely, form a specular relation to the
viewer, the citizen, as the blind prisoners of visibility.
Thus what the screen calls Brazil is in fact a place in which
nothing signifies itself, nothing equals itself. The cops are not cops,
cannot shoot, and drop stones on the heads of sleeping street
kids (of which the population approves); the hijacker cannot
hijack, has no clear aim or exit; the prisons are not prisonss (as the
warden says, unable to give it a name). And documentaries are not
documentaries. This is what a caged prisoner, appearing negatived
on the screen, left to rot long after his time is up, implies in saying:
Nothing in Brazil works.
Thus the actt is what the theoretical documentary itself poses
and makes interminableas it steps beyond movies. It destroys
documentary by turning its citations into an active archivea circuit
of which a certain Sandro emerges as the anarchic center to which all
is related, or referenced. Such a work would precede where that real
is itself generated, artificed. The biopolitical contract is thus tracked
to its technogenesiss where the human anesthetizes itself in telecra-
cies and blinds. This being finds itself enclosed or en-celled d by the
media-shell that surrounds it, beamed from the towers, as it drifts
toward catastrophic twenty-first century confrontations with what
lies outside the bus.
This is the import of the cameras identification with the waters
reflective surfaces and the mountains, with the physics of light and
the nonhuman, whatever is outside the cinematized spell of the
polisor
s bus. The theoretical documentary aims to precede the
condition of emergence of the event it would account for, and this
by an act it can never coincide with. Where the order of the real is
produced by mediacratic circuits in advance, cinema, like the hopped
up Sandro, goes hyper, empties itself of itself, saturates itself with
its doubles. It becomes monstrous and gives itself a counter task: to
interruptt that, to take over the bus (or itself), hold itself hostage. And
in doing so it turns itself, suicides itself, in order to sabotage a bad
cinematic real. It acts out cinemacide. Or, in Hitchcocks terminol-
ogy, it would explode the bus itself.
136 TOM COHEN
Notes
1. Campion 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3615945
/Turning-real-terror-into-gripping-cinema.html.
2. Cinema has, for a while, been thought in relation to the advance
of twentieth century tele-technologies, including war tech-
nologies, atomic fusion, state propaganda, artificial memory,
and techno-genocide (Kittler, Virilio, Derrida, Stiegler, among
others).
3. What emerges is a film that does not coincide with the sociologists
commentary on ethical impasses. These, in the end, even he (Luis
Eduardo) views as without hope since todays system is altogether
premised on efficiency. That is, one is within a self-interpreting
system like the revolving jails, a film loop. Thus, one cannot call
the work biopolitical in the restrained senses of the term today.
It is, after all, just such biopolitical theses that are given to the
socially conscious and liberal students in Padilhas next film, a fea-
ture film the opposite of Bus 174. In Tropa de Elitee (2008) we
are even given the biopolitical model in association with the
name Foucault. And the director seems to delight in having the
favela ganglord humiliate them, shoot them, and light them on
fire. (Indeed, in that film Sandros last name Nasciemento is given,
discretely, to the other sidethe BOPE commander who is at once
ruthless and fascistic, hyped on drugs (like Sandro), and the nihil-
istic anchor of the sickness.) Padilha revoltsas does Sandroby
taking cinema hostage, putting it in hiatus, and identifying with
what is nonetheless outside of the bus. It is this entire system,
as it is called, that appears in the third avatar, Padilhas Tropa de
Elite 2 (2010) as the entire political mafia of the state, the laww itself
captured.
4. The term biopolitics is commonly derived from Giorgio Agambens
appropriation of the term from Foucault, is that the modern man-
agement of lifee entails dividing the term into two zoneshuman
life or that of the polis (bios)
s and mere life (zoe). The latter zone
includes animals, things, organic process, and disposable humans
banned from the status of the living (like the street kids in Bus 174).
Both Agamben and Zizek evoke the slums or favelas as an example
of this bare life that is nonetheless taken into the polis. Padilha
rewrites this divide, at first, as having to do with the visible and the
invisible. I will suggest that Padilhas Bus 174
4 exceeds this first map
altogether in confronting the global telepolis.s
5. These witnesses, speakers, cops, and acquaintances arrive on screen
as individuals yet assemble almost as TV types: the selfish aunt, the
liberal sociologist, the bureaucratic SWAT leader, the masked gang-
ster. The numerous speaking faces (some blurred or covered) form a
sort of circuitry or transindividual display of what is called Brazil.
EXPLODING BUSES 137
6. By all measures Sandro has become a sort of star. He has his own
wiki page and the film mentioned, Ultima Paraida 174 4 (2008), is a
feature film directed by Bruno Barreto in which signal features of
Sandros story are reshaped and dramatized. A morality tale, this full
narrativization of Sandro can be seen as the opposite, rather than an
extension of, what Padilha unleashes as his Sandro.
7. The interrupted robbery (a robbery that, after all, is itself a pre-
text) is another covert name for cinema itselfand returns us to
Benjamins caesura, the cinematic cut, and so on. It also implies
the manner in which the image involves both the robbery effected
by representation and the attempt to interrupt that itself, as a mne-
mo-politics. In this hiatus, Sandro ceaselessly measures, defers, and
references time or the instant of killing (a mythic 6 p.m.).
8. As noted, Padilhas Tropa de Elitee drew controversy for what seemed like
its identification with the brutal (fascist) tactics of the BOPE. Yet, in
giving his BOPE chief the name Nascimento, the same as Sandro, he
indicates the symmetricall inversion of rhetorical positions concealed in
the feature film narrative. With the sequel, Tropa de Elite 2, Padilha
completes the viral injected into his cinema with Sandro emerging at
the political heart of an inverted, yet totalized and captured, system.
9. Sabotagee is cited interestingly in Tarantinos recent Inglourious Basterds
(2009) with this same image in mindthat of the (cinematic) bus
being exploded with a bomb associated with the film itself. Tarantino
appropriates the trope of a movie house as the spy front for blowing
up itself with its audience. He applies this, wincingly, to World War
II as what might be termed a cinematic war. Sabotagee however con-
tinues to insinuate cinematics not only to history but also to life and
human form. It visits zoos, references animals for eating, and asso-
ciates with bombs (birds), passing to animationa Disney cartoon of
a half-human half-birdin the film house. It opens a logic of cinani-
mation that exceeds Scotland Yards policing of representation.
10. A recurrent taking away of facee passes virally through different social
types and figurespolicemen, street kids, Sandro (and Padilha, who
appears nowhere on the screen or in the presentation). This is not
only a figure of invisible surveillance that incriminates the viewer
but also threads the numerous talking heads and the omni of the
titlethe Brazil of the screen. Such defacement moves toward a
preindividuated locus attached early on to the mountains, the water
surface, and reappears at the end of Tropa Elitee (2007) where the
final wasting of the drug lord occurs by blowing away his facee (which
he alone asks not to be done), with a shot into the camera and a whi-
teout. Defacementt is one of Padilhas elite tropes. The further twist
in this infrapolicial viral arrives in Tropa Elitee 2 (2010), where the
working out of sociopolitical purging is as if performedthe final
work or migration of what could be called the Sandro-virus taken
into Padilhas calculus and algorithms.
138 TOM COHEN
11. I use the term archive in the general sense, today, of the mobile
orders of memory traces (texts of all sorts and histories) out of which
perception and world is generated, interpreted, altered.
B ibliography
Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer. r Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Campion, Chris. Turning real terror into gripping cinema. The Telegraph, h
April 26 (2004). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3615945
/Turning-real-terror-into-gripping-cinema.html
Read, Justin. 2011. Unicity. In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate
Change V. 1, edited by Tom Cohen. Open Humanities Press, 2012. Online
edition: http://openhumanitiespress.org/telemorphosis.html
Zizek, Slavoj. Nature and its Discontents. SubStancee #117, 37, no. 2
(2008): 3772.
CH A P T ER 9
The Carandiru Massacre: Across the

Mediatic Spectrum
Robert Stam
In this chapter, I hope to demonstrate a critical, theoretical, and ped-

agogical method for analyzing a series of representations of the same
event as mediated across a broad mediatic-artistic spectrum. How
is the same event represented, or better refracted, through diverse
media, formats, and genres? What is the political valence in each case?
What medium specificities and intersections come into play? Which
voices and discourses predominate?
The event in question is the massacre in Carandiru prison in So
Paulo on October 2, 1992, when 325 Brazilian military police, firing
515 shots, slaughtered at least 111 inmates (needless to say, such situa-
tions are hardly unique to Brazil. A similar massacre also took place in
the United States, in Attica prison, in 1971). Although the Brazilian
police made the standard claim of a cross fire between inmates and
police, no police were killed or even seriously wounded. Most prison-
ers, meanwhile, were killed in their own cells, with many shot in the
back. Frightened at the prospect of contracting AIDS from the blood
of their victims, the police forced the surviving inmates to clean up
the blood caused by their own bloodbath.
Prisons everywhere are sites where the state meets the citizen in a
very direct and brutal way. A manifest instance of Webers concept of
the states monopoly on violence, a prison is also the place where
Althussers idea of interpellation becomes terribly literal. No longer
the abstract hailing of a widely disseminated ideology, it now takes
the very concrete form of a voice heard from the intercom ordering
140 ROBERT STAM
prisoner number 347 to strip naked and come to the yard! While
one can ignore discursive interpellation without any immediate conse-
quence, ignoring the hailing of the carceral state can easily become
dangerous to ones health.
A prison can be metaphorized in manifold waysas the dark side
of a presumably enlightened society, or as a social microcosm reflec-
tive of the contradictions of that society, or as a dumping ground for
the marginalized of that society. In the case of Carandiru, the prison
warehoused a veritable army of the marginalized masses of Brazil:
the racially marginalized (blacks and mestizos), the sexually margin-
alized (prostitutes, transvestites, transsexuals), the regionally mar-
ginalized (migrants from the northeast), and even the religiously
marginalized (the practitioners of Afro-diasporic religions). But, of
course, prisoners are not merely marginalized victims; they are for the
most part also criminals, adding still another layer of complexity to
the issue of ethical responsibilities of media making. How does one
avoid both the demonization and the angelization of prisoners while
also probing the system-institutional dimension of the problem?
The Carandiru massacre generated written, performative and
audiovisual texts of all kinds. This discursive afterlife includes offi-
cial reports concerning the massacre, firsthand testimonies by sur-
vivors, memoirs from the participants, novels, poems, and films, as
well as diverse accounts in the print, the electronic, and cybernetic
media. Here, we will look at three representations of the prison and
the event, representing different points along the discursive, medi-
atic, and artistic continuum: first, a feature fiction film (Carandiruu,
2002); second, a feature documentary (Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferroo,
2003); and lastly, a concert film (Caetano Velosos Haiti from the
CD Noites do Norte). I wish to emphasize a number of interlocking
issues: (1) the commonalities across the spectrum; (2) the convergen-
ces and interplays acrosss media and genres; (3) the diverse modalities
of representing the real, not in terms of accurate versus inaccurate
representation, but rather in those of the inescapable processes of
mediation. How does each text recover cinemas capacity to observe
or stage the observation of real worlds? What is the role of perfor-
mance and theatricality? In each case I will link the segment in ques-
tion to larger methodological or theoretical issues: the fiction feature
and point of view; documentary and the politics of authorship; music
and national allegory.
Although I will not be able to analyze it in detail here, it is worth
mentioning briefly how the event was portrayed in the national news
THE CARANDIRU MASSACRE 141
show Jornal Nacional, as a way of contextualizing the screen image of

the prison incident. This highly evocative rubric (roughly National
Daily) embeds in its very name the mediatic-intertextual memory
of the inheritance of print media (journal or newspaper) and its
national role in generating the shared sense of the lived simultaneity
of a community. For Benedict Anderson (1983), collective national
consciousness was made possible by a common language as purveyed
by print capitalism, which generated the horizontal camaraderie of
imagined national communities. In the wake of the newspaper and
the novel, the cinema became the teller of the national tale, mobi-
lizing desire in ways responsive to nationalized (and imperialized)
notions of time, plot, and history. The cinemas institutional ritual
of gathering a community of spectators homologized, in a sense, the
horizontal comradeship of nationhood.
TV news inherits these various modelsthe fictional procedures
of the novel, the informational function of the newspaper, and the
audiovisual capacities of the cinema. Jornal Nacionall offers a daily
newspaper equipped with the medium-specific attribute of televi-
sionits capacity for direct transmission (it was only with the inven-
tion of tape-recording in 1957 that television ceased to be exclusively
direct). Although much of the news is not longer directly transmit-
ted, TVs contagious sense of liveness surrounds all of television
with an aura of vivacity and experiential simultaneity. It thus shapes
mass emotion and opinion on a moment-to-moment breaking
news basis.
The specific segment commented here is the Globo Reporterr sum-
mary of the Carandiru massacre, which replays materials from the
Jornal Nacionall but is now newly synthesized with commentary by
the Anchor and the various correspondents. The segment displays the
national vocation of TV news as a channel for national emotion, in
this case the grief and shock provoked by the massacre. TV becomes
not only the conduit but also the conductor, as it were, for a broadly
shared revulsion that would hardly have existed in the same way had
the event nott been portrayed on TV.1 Given Globos unsavory repu-
tation on the left due to its historical collaboration with the dicta-
torship, one might have expected Globoo to be inclined to whitewash
the role of the military police. Althusserian theory would have led
us to expect Globoo to play its obedient role as an ideological state
apparatus. Yet the actual report, for whatever reasonperhaps a
need to placate an angry public or perhaps to garner high ratingsis
largely sympathetic to the prisoners. Although we hear a few official
142 ROBERT STAM
voices, these are outnumbered and, more important, discredited by

the unofficial voices. A police representatives claim that the situa-
tion was out of control is rebutted by the inmates themselves: They
fired on us for no reason. The inmate voices, furthermore, are more
graphic and persuasive, marked by the urgency of the eyewitness
account: They beat us while we were naked, with hands above our
heads. One inmate speaks of summary executions, while another
calls the massacre a holocaust. Instead of the usual ping-pong of
liberal and conservative voices, with the Anchor as referee, here the
anchor and reporters basically agree with the inmates. Nor do the
anchors and reporters use official euphemisms like police action or
restoring order; rather, they speak of a massacre and a slaugh-
ter that provoked indignation around the world.
The F eature F iction Film

We can now proceed to another medium and genre treating
Carandiruthe feature film Carandiru u (2003) by Hector Babenco.
A reenactment of the lives of the inmates and of the massacre, the
film was by Brazilian standards a big-budget superproduction by the
consecrated auteur-director of Pixotee and Kiss of the Spider Woman.n
Babenco auditioned 2700 actors, and used the actual prison as well
as rented studio sets from the famous Vera Cruz studios, the 1950s
attempt to create a kind of MGM on the Tiet, a Hollywood-style
film production studio in So Paulo.
The film adapted a memoir by Drauzio Varela entitled Carandiru
Station. Varela had worked at Carandiru for 14 years as a doctor com-
bating the AIDS epidemic. The film follows the structure of the book,
which is based on the stories of individual prisoners. The structural
challenge was that the massacre forms the climax of the film, yet the
stories of the prisoners bear no intrinsic connection to the massacre,
except in the sense that we get to know the complex individuals who
are ultimately killed en masse. Perhaps the major achievement of the
film, partially made possible by the large budget, was its reconstruc-
tion of precisely that which was not intended to be representedthe
massacre itselfan absence due to the fact that the military police
went to great pains to make sure that there would be no visual or
audible trace of the massacre. Babenco thus performed a public ser-
vice by reconstructing the sounds and images of the slaughter that
took place within the prison walls. Babenco thus makes visible what
was meant to be obscene, offstage and offscreen. The massacre, in this
sense, forms a paradoxical variation on the Foucauldian theme of the
disciplinary spectacle. While a public hanging of the kind Foucault

describes in Discipline and Punishh (1995 [1975]) was staged in order
to be seen by the spectators, here many of the spectators of the event
were physically annihilated, while the events were not filmed. Yet,
the police did have a disciplinary goalto show who was the wielder
of the state monopoly on violence. The paradox was that the police
wanted to teach a lesson to the inmates, but did not want to be seen
actually administering that lesson.
It is productive, in my view, to analyze virtually all films, whether
fictional or nonfictional, not in terms of single genres but rather in
terms of a broader transtextuality which embeds the traces of mul-
tiple genres which are layered and counterpointed together. Genre
in this sense is not an essence inhering in the texts themselves, but
rather a cognitive instrument that allows us to analyze texts in their
palimpsestic complexity. Each generic category provides an analytical
prism, which sheds a special light on the text. Babencos feature, in
this sense, can be seen through the light of many genres and inter-
texts. On the most obvious level, Carandiru u is a prison film, but that
is only its topic; and the topic of prison can be treated by an infinity of
genres (comedy, satire, melodrama, etc). More precisely, it is an adap-
tationn of a book, and as an adaptation, it inherits the various genres
embedded in a book that is simultaneously a personal memoirr and a
set of medical case studies. The stories of the prisoners (those included
in the film), meanwhile, are multigeneric and classifiable as domestic
melodrama, erotic comedy, gangster caper film, and so forth.
At the same time, Babencos Carandiru u is a historical film. Unlike
TV News, which offers a hasty first draft of history under the pres-
sures of inexorable deadlines, before opinion has gelled into com-
mon sense or into a noisy debate about contradictory versions, the
Babenco film offers a more considered and researched second draft
of history. Made a decade after the key event, it benefits from new
sources of information, including that encased in the Varela source
text. Babenco then visualizes and dramatizes this knowledge, giv-
ing it flesh and bones. The film also includes materials drawn from
TV reportage. In this sense, it illustrates Gaudreaults (2011) con-
cept of intermediality, and, in embryonic predigital form, Jenkins
convergence culture as exemplified in a certain hybridization of
media and formats (Jenkins, 2006). This hybridization also but-
tresses the reality effect of the film. The onscreen neighboring of TV
footage, recognized as authentic by the spectator, alongside staged
scenes, implies that the two forms of representation exist as part of a
continuum, each with its quantum of veracity. The inclusion of TV
144 ROBERT STAM
reportage means that the film can also be seen as a documentary,

not only in that it is based on documents but also in that it deploys
documentary-like techniquesdirect-to-camera interviews, purpose-
fully inadequate footage as guarantor of authenticityeven n in the
staged sequences. Finally, in terms of macro-generic or transgeneric
categories, the overall structure of the film is that of a tragedy. Like
an Elizabethan tragedy, the film leads inexorably toward death, leav-
ing the filmic stage littered with corpses. Like the audience at an
ancient Greek tragedy, that knew full well that Oedipus Rexx was not
likely to end happily. Brazilian telespectators were aware of the violent
outcome thanks to saturation media coverage, a fact that, for them,
imbued the film with an air of ineluctable fatality.
The segment I wish to analyze shows Varela leaving his prison
office to check on the prisoners. Its interest lies in its approach to
point of view. Film theory and analysis asks a number of questions
about point of view, basically: who tells? (Narration); who sees? (Point
of view or ocularization); who hears? (Chions point of hearing);
who knows? (Focalization); who judges? (In the sense of carrying
what Boris Uspensky calls the norms of the text,) and finally who
solicits our moral affiliation (Alignment la Murray Smith). As a sur-
rogate both for the director and the spectator, the Varela character
gathers diverse powersof seeing, hearing, and knowingand occa-
sionally of narrating via voice-over.
It is noteworthy that the film is not terribly interested in Varela
as a character. He is less a character than a function. In the book he
changes over time, more like a character, slowly shedding his preju-
dices about the prisoners. In our sequence, Varela leaves his office
and wanders through the prison corridors, stopping to peep in on
the prisoners. In one cell, he spies on numerous inmates watching
four TV monitors amidst an ambient cacophony. In another cell,
he watches a single inmate consuming his meal. In this sequence,
Varela becomes an eye, privileged in outsized close-ups reminiscent of
the opening shots of Hitchcocks Vertigo. With the inmate-patients,
meanwhile, Varela functions as a giant earhe is the listener; the
inmates confess to him as if he were a secular priest/analyst who lis-
tens but who remains nonjudgmental. (We recall that Foucault links
the two figures in The History of Sexuality,y 1990 [1976]).
Carandiru u provides an interesting variation on the panoptical
situation described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In the
Benthamite system, the inmates are hypervisible from the central
viewing point of the tower; the gaze is nonreciprocal. Completely
exposed to the wardens relentless and unforgiving gaze, the
prisoners themselves see very little. In Carandiru, in contrast, the

visual field is not organized around the centralized gaze of author-
ity, but rather around the mobilized gaze of the middle-class flan-
eur, even if only within the walls of the prison, and the sympathetic
observer/listener. Like the warden, he has privileged access to the
prison, but he exercises his panoptical power in order to help (and
in fact Varela did d indeed win the trust of the prisoners). Varela in
this sense has a very special statusneither prisoner nor a repre-
sentative of the state, he is a doctor, an intermediary, an insider/
outsider, familiar with the prison and liked by the prisoners, yet
ultimately invited by the authorities. The result is a kind of oxymo-
ron: a humanized and humanist panoptical observer. Instead of a
panopticona simpaticon! n
The sequence also brings up the question of authorship and inter-
textuality and the relation between the two. A self-described cineph-
ile, Babenco was a fan of the New Wave who, as an adolescent, literally
carried Truffauts bags during Argentinian film festivals. Babenco
crowds the film with cinematic clins doeil, many of them having to
do with Hitchcock and with seeing. Varelas look through the peep-
hole of the first cell is framed and lit exactly like the spotlighted look
of Norman Bates as he peeks in at Marion Crane in Psycho. When
Varela watches the inmates watching television, the array of monitors
recalls the array of windowsreminiscent of a series of YV moni-
torsacross from Jeffriess apartment in Rear Window. In a 1980s
essay on the Hitchcock film, I suggested that Foucaults account of
the panopticon also offered an apt description of Jeffriess view of
the neighbors in Rear Window w as captive shadows in the cells of the
periphery . . . like so many cages, like so many small theatres, in which
each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.
Like Jeffries, Varela gazes into the private lives of his neighbors; he
observes from a protected vantage point, the voyeuristic position par
excellence. A final allusion to Rear Window w in the sequence takes the
form of a 360 panoramic shot around the courtyard of the prison,
reminiscent of the recurrent 360 pans around the courtyard in Rear
Window. Indeed, the architectural structure of buildings around an
inner courtyard, filmed with the same panoramic camera movement,
recalls the arrangement of the Greenwich Village apartment complex
in the Hitchcock film.
Another voyeuristic element in Carandiru u lies in its rather obses-
sive concern with nonheteronormative sexuality, especially involv-
ing gays, transvestites, and so forth. Of course, this emphasis could
logically be explained by Varelas position as a doctor dealing with
146 ROBERT STAM
sexually transmitted diseases, but it is noteworthy that such figures

also proliferate in other Babenco prison films, notably in Pixotee and
in Kiss of the Spider Woman. In Carandiru, we also find a kind of
Flaubertian-Pasolinian free indirect discourse in the sense that gay
and transvestite characters become an alibi for stylistic virtuosity, in
a contagion between character and style, in the manner of Pasolinis
Cinema of Poetry. At the same time, the prisonnot normally the
site of the free expression of intimate emotionbecomes the scene of
constant dramatic confessions, especially by the more flamboyantly
gay characters, shaping a privileged space of tender vulnerability and
of heightened personal expression, a veritable utopia of communicative
transparency. There, characters reveal their inner truth, a trait more
characteristic of melodrama and the womens pictures (pejoratively
labeled weepies) than the kind of social realism usually associated
with prison pictures. Through an intermedial contamination of genres,
we also recognize the traces of lachrymose Globoo telenovelas.
Recalling the melo in melodrama, and the primordial role of
music in melodramas as well as in Carandiru, it is important to reflect
on what the music tells us about the relation between the director,
the narrating character, and the prisoners. The music is nondiegetic,
commentative, atmospheric. In stylistic terms, it is modernist and dis-
sonant and reflects not only the socially normative ethos but also the
social distance between the filmmakers and the prisoners. Music in
film also conveys a perspective. In the case of Carandiru u it reflects
the social vantage point from which the prisoners are being pitied but
also judged from a kind of ethically panoptical position. In short, it
reflects the cultural norms of both author and auteur, the middle-class
director and the middle-class doctor. At the same time, in generic
terms, the music is of a kind typically associated with horror-based art
films. By engendering a vague disquiet and malaise, the music creates
a certain political ambiguity: does the ominous music suggest that
the prisoners themselves are horrifying, which would suggest a right
wing law-and-order discourse, or does it imply that the prison experi-
ence, and the imminent massacre, are the source of the horror, which
would imply a more leftist critique of the prison system?
The F eature D ocumentary

Let me move on to a new genrethe feature documentaryand a
new set of theoretical-methodological issues revolving around author-
ship and representation. The connotations of representation are at
once religious, aesthetic, political, and semiotic. On a religious level,
the Judeo-Islamic censure of graven images and the preference for

abstract nonrepresentational forms such as the arabesque cast theo-
logical suspicion on directly figurative representation and thus on the
very ontology of the mimetic arts.
Representation also has an aesthetic dimension, in that art too is a
form of representation, in Platonic or Aristotelian terms, a mimesis.
Representation is theatrical too, and in many languages to repre-
sent means to enact or play a role. But on another level, repre-
sentation is also political, in that political rule is not usually direct
but representative. Marx, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, said of the
peasantry that they do not represent themselves; they must be rep-
resented. The contemporary definition of democracy rests on the
notion of representative government. Many of the debates around
class, race, and gender, meanwhile, have revolved around the ques-
tion of self-representation, seen in the pressure for more minority
representation in political and academic institutions. What all these
instances share is the semiotic principle that something is standing
for something else, or that some person or group is speaking on
behalf of some other persons or groups.
A full understanding of media representation therefore requires a
comprehensive analysis of the institutions that generate and distribute
audiovisual texts as well as of the audience that receives them. Whose
stories are being told? By whom? How are the stories manufactured,
disseminated, received? Who controls the image? Who is represent-
ing whom and within what power arrangements? Indeed, questions of
address are as crucial as questions of representation. Who is speaking
through a film? Who is imagined as listening? Who is actually listening?
Who is looking? And what social desires and discourses are mobilized
by a film or video or TV program? While in a novel it is clear who is con-
trolling the representation, in film, as a collaborative art, and especially
in documentary film, which usually involves a dialogue between the
filmmakers and the human subjects of the film, it is much less clear.
Attempts to democratize filmic authorship go back to the many left-
ist collectives of the late 1960s, whether Cine-Liberacin in Argentina
or Third World Newsreel in the United States. In France, the debate
about putting cameras in the hands of the workers goes at least as
far back as Chris Markers 1970s efforts with SLON (Society for the
Creation of New Works) in collaboration with French factory work-
ers. Whereas filmmaking historically has usually been in the hands
of middle-class directors equipped with cultural capital (Bourdieu)
and with connections to funding sources, there have also been many
countervailing attempts to democratize filmmaking by putting the
148 ROBERT STAM
camera in the hands of the disempowered. Although this usually very

partial transfer of power was extremely difficult when filmmaking
equipment was cumbersome and expensive, it has become much eas-
ier with the various technological changesfrom lightweight cam-
eras and sound recording equipment in the 1960s to later video and
then digital revolutions in the presentthat have rendered cameras
and recording equipment lighter, cheaper, and more user-friendly.
When we shift attention from texts to their authorship and pro-
duction, the question of the mimetic real gets displaced onto a differ-
ent register, touching on the issue of who is empowered to represent
the real. Rather than being an issue of a realist style or of realistic
representation, the issue becomeswho is producing the film and
actually holding the camera. At the same time, the question of giv-
ing voice to the other is very complicated: it is not simply a question
of handing over the camera to representatives of the disempowered
group. In the 1970s, different directors took different positions. For
Chris Marker, putting cameras in the hands of workers would lead to
a more accurate representation that would reveal a kind of truth, if
only the provisional truth as seen by the workers themselves. Jean-Luc
Godard was more skeptical; for him putting cameras in the hands of
workers would mean that workers, in a circular process, would simply
imitate those actors, such as Jean Gabin, who had incarnated them in
the cinema, and thus produce only imitation of an imitation.
In Brazil, we note the shift from representation to self-representation
in the transition from the Cinema Novo of the 1960s to more
recent films. While the Cinema Novo directors were almost invari-
ably white, middle-class, male, urban intellectualsthere were no
womenspeaking for the mestizo peasants of Vidas Secass and the
black favelados of Rio, the new directors are of more diverse origins.
We see evidence of this paradigm shift not only in the trajectories of
individual directors such as Eduardo Coutinho, but also when we
compare two versions of the same film project, one from 1962 and
the other from 2010. The project in question is the 1962 film Five
Times Favela a a five-episode film about the Rio favelas directed by
five middle class Cinema Novo directors like Leon Hirszman and
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The 2010 remake of the film was orga-
nized by Carlos Diegues (director of one of the original episodes)
filmed by people from the favelas themselves. The revelatory new title
points to the shift toward self-representation: Five Times Favela: This
Time by Ourselves.
The discussion echoes Foucaults comments, in the context of pris-
ons, about the indignity of speaking for others and what Gayatri
Spivak (1988), riffing on Foucault, called subaltern speech. One

product of this democratizing tendency is what one might call hybrid
authorship or in Foucauldian terms speaking together instead of
speaking for. A signal example of this democratizing tendency is
Paulo Sacramentos documentary about Carandiru, Prisoner of the
Iron Barss (2003). Sacramento initially planned to make a conventional
documentary about the prison, but, during his first visits, crystallized
an awareness that his relatively pampered middle-class background
had not prepared him to make such a film. He therefore decided to
offer training in filmmaking to the guards and to the prisoners as a
way of really getting to know the prison. In the end, the guards were
not interested but the prisoners were, so it was they who ended up
being the codirectors of the film.
The question for Sacramento then became: How does one speak
with the prisoners, or at least enable their own speech? The film thus
foregrounds the issue of the power relations between director and
subject, a relation that is necessarily asymmetrical but which becomes
overwhelmingly so in the case of those who have suffered the social
death of incarceration, those who normally lack all social power to
shape their own representation. Hybrid authorship becomes a par-
tial solution, then, to the problem of subaltern speech. In this experi-
ment in coauthorship, the subtitle reveals the films intention: rather
than portraitss of the prisoners, we have self-portraits. Instead of char-
acters in search of an auteur, we have prisoner-characters as coauthors
of their own portrait.
Figure 9.1 Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferroo [Prisoner of the Iron Bars] (Brazil,
2003), directed by Paulo Sacramento.
150 ROBERT STAM
Prisoner of the Iron Barss is premised on a kind of contract

between the director and the prisoners, whereby the filmmaker ini-
tiates the prisoners into the world of filmmaking and the prison-
ers initiate the filmmakers into the world of the prison. Breaking
with the tradition of the sociological documentary of the 1960s
where experts spoke in voice-of-God offscreen narration about
the socially excluded while subtly reaffirming their own power
and authority. Prisoner of the Iron Barss subverts the directors own
authority. It does so through a number of mechanisms: first, pre-
senting the prisoners themselves as the real experts on the prison,
as those who know its secret codes, power arrangements and politi-
cal economy, and who are therefore the best equipped to analyze
the prison world for the director and the spectator; second, by
showing scenes that the director could not possibly have filmed, for
example scenes from inside the cells at night. (While Sacramento
had assumed the prisoners would film the insidee of their cells, the
prisoners, quite logically, were much more interested in what they
could see outside). We look with the prisoners who are holding
the camera, and we watch the prisoners looking, but the prisoners
look takes us back outside again to the world that we the specta-
tors inhabit and that prisoners hope to inhabit once again. Third,
through an inversion of the panoptical voyeurism of the prison film
genre, we do not look at the prisoners through the peephole like
the guards (or like Varela in the Babenco film); rather we look with
the prisoners att the guards as they look through the peephole.
Finally, the film domesticates the prisoners because we see them
in the cells that they have remade into a simulacrum of home with
their photos and artifacts. Thus, the film shows, and the prisoners
themselves demonstrate, that they are part of the larger middle-class
world. They exist on a continuum with the larger society; they come
from that society and will return to it. The effect is one of humaniza-
tion and normalization of the excluded. In the end, film also creates a
kind of self-subjectification. The prisoners become the phenomenolo-
gists of their own lives, practitioners of consciousness consciousing.
As they share their reflections on the most banal quotidian events
(falling asleep, preparing coffee) the spectator comes to inhabit their
subjectivity while the prisoners guide the spectators gaze and atten-
tion. The film thus condenses and fuses two roles usually separated:
the subjects/objects of the film, those who supposedly experience
without reflection, and the directors, those who are supposed to
know and positioned to reflect with intelligence and distance.
Prisonerr foregrounds the agencyintellectual, practical, musi-

cal, cinematicof the prisoners by showing (1) the filmmakers in
the act of filming, often in pairs, in a mise-en-abymee of collective
authorship; (2) their capacity to make art; (3) their creative way of
communicating with women neighbors through an invented sign
language; (4) their capacity to narrate their own lives; and (5) their
capacity to shoot film. The prisoners are so much at ease with the
director, so convinced that he is not an agent of the state, that
they proudly display their illegal activities, such as making rum,
planting marijuana, and fabricating weapons. (If the perspective of
the Babenco film is voyeuristic, that of Prisonerss is exhibitionistic).
At the same time, the film makes us aware of the limits of giv-
ing voice, since at any given moment we are not completely sure
who filmed what we are seeing. So Sacramento gives the camera to
the other, but also reveals the limits of this gesture. The control
remains, in the end, in the hands of the director and the editor. At
the same time, the film shows prisoners who not only want to be
visible but who also want their point of view registered and under-
stood. In a case of what Jean-Louis Comolli (2004) calls auto-
mise-en-scene, their desire shapes the mise-en-scene. Yet they do not
angelize themselves; they know they have committed crimes. But
what matters to Sacramento is not that they be heroes but that they
be complex, fully human subjects.
The Concert F ilm

The final genre example to treat Carandiru, and more broadly to
treat state and police violence, is the concert film or filmed musi-
cal performance, in this case by Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso
and his song Haiti. The CD of which Haiti forms part exem-
plifies a striking feature of Brazilian popular musicits political
and intellectual ambition. As engaged intellectuals who also inspire
large dancing crowds, artists like Caetano and Gilberto Gil form
the contemporary equivalent of Gramscis organic intellectuals,
or, melding Gramsci with the figure of Orpheus, orphoganic
intellectuals. The Caetano CD, called Nights of the North,
is a kind of historicized commentary on slavery and its sequels
in Brazil. As a polyphonic orchestration of voices addressing the
Middle Passage, slavery, and discrimination, the CD constitutes
an essay on the history of the Black Atlantic, with references to
Nigeria (two naira fifty kobo); Angola (congo benguela manjolo
152 ROBERT STAM
cabinda mina); to the sugar plantations and to the black leaders of

rebellions against them, to the abolitionism of Joaquim Nabuco,
and to May 13, the day of the official celebration of the abolition
of slavery. With each song, the chosen musical genre itself makes a
comment. Nabucos text, for example, a white mans melancholic
ref lections on the legacy of slavery, is linked to the romantic style
of the German lied, while the celebration of abolition takes the
form of a festive samba de roda. In the end, the CD stages the
history of the African diaspora in musical form, and the DVD, in
audiovisual form.
Within this broader frame, the song Haiti, addresses the trou-
bling social issue of police brutality. Here, Caetano places the story of
Carandiru within the frame of the variant modalities of oppression in
Brazil and in the Americas. As an analysis of the intersectionalities of
race and class in white-dominant societies, the song is more enlight-
ening than many academic dissertations in that it conveys a sense of
how race, to cite Stuart Hall, becomes the modality through which
class is lived. The lyrics describe a scene in which Caetano himself
played a role. Just as he was being given a citizenship award on
a stage overlooking Salvadors historic Pelourinho square, Caetano
saw mostly black police beating up mostly black, or mestizo, or poor
white people.
When you are invited to go up to the top

Of the Jorge Amado Foundation
To see from above the line of soldiers, almost all of them black
Hitting on the nape of the neck
Black hustlers, mulatto thieves, and others almost white
But treated like blacks
Only in order to show to the others almost black
(and they are almost all black)
And to the almost white poor as blacks
How it is that blacks, poor people and mulattos are treated.
The first point to make here is that Caetano recognizes his own
social advantage and privileged voyeuristic position. Hee is not the
victim of the violence; he is the observer. Moreover, he stages a racist
voice which is not his own personal voice but rather a harsh expres-
sion of what might be called the racist common sense, the world
of the doxa, of everyone knows. In a case of what Bakhtin calls
double voiced discourse, he articulates the discourse but frames it
in a critical a way.
Interestingly, Caetanos poem also practices intermediality, with

two references to television, to the TV News and to the Globoo net-
work program Fantastic Lens.
And that is where Carandiru comes in.

And if, when you go through the red light, the old, usual red light
And you notice a man pissing on the street corner onto a shining
garbage bag
In Leblon / And when you hear the smiling silence of So Paulo
During the Massacre . . .
111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black
Or almost black, or almost white almost black because so poor
And poor people are like rotten people and everyone knows how
blacks are treated
And when you take a trip around the Caribbean
And when you fuck without a condom
And offer your intelligent contribution to the embargo of Cuba
Think about Haiti, Pray for Haiti / Haiti is here / Haiti is not here.
A pause in the music allows for a dramatic announcement of the

massacre. In a minimalist presentation, the events are evoked in
words alone, without any audiovisual support beyond the perfor-
mance itself. Caetano evokes the real through spoken words in their
referential dimension. At the same time, there is a kind of reen-
actment, in that Caetano performs the shock felt the first time he
heard the news, even if he is singing the song many years later. In
Haiti, the words take on more force precisely because the song is
interrupted, as if for a dramatic announcement of a tragic event. The
effect is of an eruption of the real into a musical entertainment: We
interrupt this performance to announce a catastrophe. The show
must nott go on.
We return to an apparently precinematic formmere words relat-
ing an immense reality, like Shakespeares bare stage representing the
battles of Agincourtyet everything is changed by the fact that the
words are filmed. We are not just hearing the words or reading them
but also seeing the music performed. We see who is playing which
instruments, we observe the performance style and body language
of the musicians. In an acousmatic effect whereby we hear speech or
music without seeing its source, we hear the audience singing along
with the refrain without seeing them. The audience too serves as our
surrogate; it reverberates to the music as we do. (The song would
not have had the same impact if we had heard it on the radio for
154 ROBERT STAM
example, and if we did not hear the audience singing along). The
music of Haiti also sends a message through its harsh dissonance,
with its own modernist or postmodernist beauty. The song offers a
tense aesthetic, not Freyres homeostatic description of Brazil as an
equilibrium of antagonisms; it offers, rather, a disequilibrium m of
antagonisms. It offers, in the end, the politicization of avant-gardist
dissonance.
C onclusion
So what have we learned from our journey across the mediatic spec-
trum? Overall, we have seen a trend toward intermedial hybrid-
ization. First, all the segments mingle documentary and fiction
(even the Caetano song includes documentary-style verbal reports on
the police beatings that he personally witnesses in Salvador, and on
the prisoner massacre that he learns about on the news). Secondly,
given the subject of the massacre, all of the texts touch on the subject
of death, even though they approach it differently, whether through
words (Caetano) or literal restaging (Babenco). Death, in this sense,
still forms a kind of gold standard of the real even in a simulacral
mass-mediated age. Third, all five segments, including the news and
documentary, involve acting or performance of some kind. Caetano
is a musical performer, an actor-singer, so the issue of performance is
obvious, but he is also performing even when he reports on the mas-
sacre, enacting his outrage at the news. Globo Reporter, r meanwhile,
features the acting typical of TV anchors, a mixture of Stanislavsky
and Brecht, combining a pose of cool objectivity with facial expres-
sions that evoke feelings of empathy or offense. The Babenco film,
for its part, features only actors, some well-known and others rela-
tively unknown. Yet even the extras are playing roles, since Babenco
refused, for ethical reasons, to use actual inmates from the prison.
With Babenco, the acting is virtuoso, sententious, grandiloquent,
even bombastic, in line with the melodramatic approach he has cho-
sen. The documentary Prisoner of the Iron Barss is the most minimalist
in terms of performance and acting. The performance is limited to
what Ismail Xavier calls the process of theatricalization generated
by the camera-effect and the real instigated by the experience of the
filming itself with its consequences for all those involved.
Each text refracts and mediates the real in distinct ways depending
on the medium, the genre, and the artists. Each offers its own coef-
ficient of realism, stylization, reenactment, performance. Television
news offers immediacy, direct transmission, a polyphony of voices, and
the horizontal camaraderie of a shared experience, including direct

eyewitness accounts in the heat of the moment. Babencos Carandiru,
meanwhile, reconstructs the taboo image of the massacre itself, but he
does so in the style of the art film, where the hyperdensity of artfulness
seems to cry out This is great art! In a paroxysm of artistic excess,
the film combines melodramatic sentimentality with the most brutal
naturalism, wrapped within a tragedy that culminates in a cathartic
purgation of the pathos generated by the mythos. At the same time,
the style recalls the confessional dramas of the telenovelas.
Prisoner of the Iron Bars, meanwhile, reduces the gap in a different
way, through shared authorship. The Caetano song Haiti finally
uses words, music, and performance, without any attempt to represent
the events in audiovisual form. Yet, the song is powerfully effective in
its own way. Ironically, it is precisely the moment when the artist does
nott use music or lyrics but only words that has the most impactthe
announcement of the massacre. Yet, everything in the concert film
the music, the mise-en-scene, the performancehas been a necessary
prelude that makes possible the efficacy of that moment.
We have analyzed five mediated versions of the same actual event,
refracted through different media, formats, genres, and ideologies.
For Bakhtin, human consciousness and artistic practice do not come
into contact with the real directly but rather through the medium
of the surrounding ideological world. Audiovisual media, in this
sense, not only register the sounds and images of world; they also
represent the languages and discourses, which refract and interpret
the world. Rather than directly reflect the real, or even refract the
real, audiovisual media refract a refraction, in a mediated version of
an already textualized, discursivized, and ideologized socioideologi-
cal sphere. In this sense, each text conveys different ways of reflect-
ing and refracting the real through art and ideology: the common
sense humanism of Globo Reporter, r the bien-pensantt melodramatic
humanism of the Babenco film, the bottom-up social anger of the
rap video, the dialogically hybrid authorship of Prisoners of the Iron
Bars, and the double-voiced critique of the Caetano song, as a sterling
example of what Caetano calls, speaking of Brazilian music generally,
the sweetest protest music in the world. Art is incontrovertibly
social, not so much because it represents the real but rather because
it constitutes a historically situated utterancea complex of utter-
ances addressed by one socially constituted subject or subjectsa
TV network, a filmmaker and his collaborators, a documentarist and
his inmate subjects, a singer-composer and his audienceall deeply
immersed in historical circumstance and social contingency.
156 ROBERT STAM
Note
1. Globo was seen at the time as the personal fiefdom of conserva-
tive media magnate Roberto Marinho, the same figure who was
denounced in a British documentary by Simon Hartog as enjoying a
power that went BEYOND Citizen Kane.
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Commolli, Jean-Louis. Voir et pouvoir. Linnocence perdue: cinema, tlvision,
fiction, documentaire. Paris: Verdier, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1995 [1975].
. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley.
London: Penguin, 1990 [1976].
Gaudreault, Andr. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema
[Cinma et attraction: pour une nouvelle histoire du cinmatographe].
Translated by Timothy Barnard. Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2011.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Spivak, Gayatri. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
CH A P T ER 10
Decembers Other Scene:

New Argentine Cinema and the
Politics of 2001
Jens Andermann
Emerging on the international festival circuit around the same time

when the political and social crisis in the country was reaching its
peak, New Argentine Cinema was heralded by critics at home and
abroad as the genuine, raw expression of its own moment: a cin-
ema that, because of the way it experienced crisis as a daily reality
of production, became a document and a mode of critique of the
present not just through the objects of narrative but also embod-
ied in the very form of cinematographic expression. Filmmaking,
writer and critic Alan Pauls suggested, as a technological-financial
venture was immediately exposed to the volatilities of the market,
with the effect that, in new Argentine cinema, to think about form
is to think about production (Beceyro et al., 2000: 1). This con-
temporariness on the level of film form and even of the vital experi-
ence of filmmaking, moreover, was widely thought to have endowed
Argentine cinema with a uniquely prescient, anticipatory grasp of
social developments, forecasting the crisis of the nation in images
thatas the ragged mobs of suburban poor raiding a supermarket
in Jorge Gaggeros Ojos de fuegoo (Fiery Eyes, 1995) or the incensed
bank customers seeing their deposits evaporate before their eyes in
Fabi n Bielinskys Nueve reinass (Nine Queens, 2000)had yet to
reach the TV screens. Two assumptionsone aesthetic, the other
politicalsustain this reading of recent film production as being
(once again) in sync with its social context, and both of them are
158 JENS ANDERMANN
primed on the idea of a return of the real. In fact, it is this shared

notion of a reemergent real that provides the very basis of articula-
tion between politics and aesthetics; between the history made in
the streets and the streets that move onto the screen, to quote
Siegfried Kracauers classic dictum about the cross-fertilization
between revolutionary action and cinematic modernism (1960: 98).
On the one hand, the Argentine monetary crisis of 2001 leading,
first, to the confiscation of bank deposits in a last-ditch attempt to
defend parity between the national currency and the US dollar, and
subsequently to the downfall of the Alianza a government, devalua-
tion of the Peso and a temporary default on foreign debt repayments,
was widely likened to a bursting of the speculative bubble, which
exposed the fantasy character of neoliberal economics and its claims to
have elevated Argentina into the First Worldinstead bringing to
the fore the true realities of exclusion, poverty, and hunger; the open
secret of neoliberal globalization. This return of the real, shatter-
ing the specularization of society imposed by finance capitalism, took
place in the form of an event that virtually refounded politics in its
radical reclaiming of collective, popular agency, at least for some time
also opening up the prospect of different, radically horizontal, auton-
omous, and nonrepresentative forms of societal self-organization.
When, on December 19, 2001, President Fernando de la R a, in
response to food riots in the poverty belt of Greater Buenos Aires
earlier the same day, declared a nationwide state of siege, he was being
defied by (mostly urban middle-class) protesters gathering spontane-
ously on the streets and banging on pots and pansa way of symbol-
izing and simultaneously infracting the prohibition the government
had sought to impose on political expression. A day later, following
intense street fighting and police repression that left 33 people dead
across the country, the crowd that had gathered on Plaza de Mayo in
Buenos Aires saw De la R a flee the government palace by helicopter,
giving rise to a string of emergency governments that ended only
with the election of Nstor Kirchner in 2003.1
As Sebastin Carassai (2007: 4562) has suggested, from the view-
point of social and political theory the 2001 events were variously
understood as the moment when the fantasy work of global-capitalist
symbolization became unable to contain the forces of the real, to
the surge of which it had incessantly contributed, undermining its
own roots (iek, 2000: 322), by concentrating wealth in fewer and
fewer hands and restricting access to communications and consump-
tion, thus increasing the numbers of the excluded. Yet, the 2001 crisis
was also seen as the time when the shared experiences of loss and
DECEMBERS OTHER SCENE 159
injustice made from different class and subject-positions reconstituted

the fragmented, atomized subjectivities of speculary, postadjustment
society into a new network of solidarities sparked by, and in turn con-
tributing to, the new global cycle of struggles [that] organizes and
mobilizes the multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2004: 217).
It is, then, in this puncturing of neoliberal economics based on
the fiction of credit and on the commodification of social exchange
in the form of the spectacle (as manifest, for example, in the spread
of private television and celebrity culture) that social mobilization
and cinema in Argentina around the millennium have been found to
share common ground. For Tamara Falicov (2007: 119), the wave of
quirky, youth-oriented films made since the mid-nineties exhibited
a realism that exposed a side of Argentina that most medium-budget,
middle-class dramas had not. Cinemas low-budget, improvisational,
and auteuriall mode of production, a direct consequence of its mar-
ginalization from the (now televisual) mainstream of the audiovisual
market following the demise of the last remainders of a national stu-
dio system (Amado, 2003), imbued the filmic image with a doubly
indexical character, according to Gonzalo Aguilar, which allowed
for the construction of a testimonial space (2006: 176). In embrac-
ing the precariousness of means as a deliberate formal choice (includ-
ing the preference for light video equipment, on-location shooting,
direct sound, vocational actors, and so forth), cinema was able to
develop, by contrast with other contemporary arts, and even with
literature, such a strong obsession with the flow of the present that a
cultural critic could make an inventory of social transformations dur-
ing the decade of the Nineties just by watching its films (Aguilar,
2006: 73).
On these pages, I shall try to qualify these readings by suggesting
that the relation between new Argentine cinema and the politics of
2001 was never one of simple contemporariness and mutual recog-
nition. Or rather, if there are films that (just as the aforementioned
Bielinsky blockbuster) have made the present of the nation recog-
nizable, for instance by inscribing it into the narrative formulae of
classic film genres, these have actually not been those associated with
the more experimental, improvisational, and low-budget edge of con-
temporary filmmaking. If it makes sense nonetheless to think of this
more leftfield, auteuriall cinema as political and as being somehow
of the same time as the social mobilizations of 2001, its chronotopy
(its movement in space and time) should probably be understood not
so much as parallel but rather as obverse to that of social action. There
is, I shall argue, in new Argentine cinema a politics of the image that
160 JENS ANDERMANN
advances not toward commonality but toward singularity; not toward

the transparency of collective political will but toward the opacity and
contradictoriness of local and originary worlds (Deleuze, 1983:
173). Critics such as Horacio Gonzlez (2003) and David Oubia
(2003) have already pointed to this nonconvergence between cine-
matic neorealismas the rediscovery and observation of the singu-
lar and contingentand the return of the real in Argentine society
more generallyas the reencounter of disconnected experiences of
exclusion in the horizontal articulations of the multitude. But for
them, cinema, therefore, fell short of politicsor, as James Scorer
(2010: 151) sums up the charges, the focus on the individual and
the small group in recent Argentine films amounts to a conscious
rejection of wider urban possibility and an affront to the possibili-
ties of commonality as advanced by social mobilization, thus in fact
aligning cinema with a cynical take on social processes that has more
in common with the object of its narrative (neoliberalism) than it
chooses to reveal.
My point here will instead be that, as new audiovisual media such
as digital video and the internet have taken on the counter hege-
monic functions once attributed to militant filmmaking, cinema
becomes a site not so much of social chronicle and testimony as of a
reflexiveness of the image, in the space between televisual spectacle and
video-activist counterinformation. In this new constellation, I argue,
the filmic image provides the space for an archival self-consciousness,
in which the immediacy of the televisual or counterinformational
real-time image is turned over to different forms and modes of reflex-
ivity (both of a Bazinianobservational or naturalistand of a
Brechtianrefractory or criticalkind). This reflexivity, which
is the effect of an untimeliness, a delay between film and other forms
of audiovisual imagery, generating an archival anxiety, the disjunc-
tiveness of a presence relived, of a presence haunted by historicity
(Doane, 2002: 23), can turn into a genuine politics where it is actively
marked and incorporated as a guiding principle of composition.
To support my case, I will compare very different filmic (in this
case, documentary) responses to the 2001 crisis: on the one hand,
Fernando E. Solanass Memoria del saqueoo (released in English as Social
Genocide, 2003) and on the other, two documentaries by Alejandro
Fernndez Moujn (who worked as cinematographer in Memoria a)
and by Eva Poncet, Marcelo Burd, and Diego Gachassin respectively,
Espejo para cuando me pruebe el smokingg (A Mirror for When I Try on
the Dinner Jacket, 2005) and Habitacin disponiblee (Room for Rent,
2004). Whereas, in Memoria, the December uprising is explained and
justified, in a pedagogical discourse from above, as the effect and

expression of social injustice it seeks to overturn, both Espejoo and
Habitacin take a more lateral approach, literally leaving the square
where the crowd has gathered (and where Solanas begins and ends
his narrative). This lateral turn, in which one scene of politics (the
Plaza de Mayo with its symbolic charge as the site of government and
of popular direct action) is exchanged for another (the streets and
neighborhoods of Buenos Aires) also inscribes the difference between
the temporalitiess of politics and of cinema as a distancing in space. In
this movement, I argue, what is forced out is what we could call with
tienne Balibar (2002: 2; 3435) the other scene of politicsthat
is, the both imaginary and reflexive site where the relations between
the autonomy and the heteronomy of politics (between the struggle
for emancipation n and the transformation n of the conditions bearing
on its very possibility) are being negotiated.
S hooting the R evolt: R ecognition and

Defamiliarization
Whereas Moujns and Poncet/Burd/Gachassins films address
their very different subjectsthe radical sculptor Ricardo Longhini
in Espejo; the plight of three immigrants in the crisis-stricken city
of Buenos Aires in Habitacinin ways that also reflect (on) cin-
emas own exteriority toward, and curiosity for, the present of city
and nation, Solanass Memoria a encounters in the politics of 2001,
a retrospective vindication of his and Octavio Getinos seminal
film-pamphlet La Hora de los Hornoss (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968).
A quarter-century later, Memoria a and its more recent sequels (La
dignidad de los nadiess [The Dignity of the Nobodies, 2005], Argentina
latentee [Latent Argentina, 2006] and La prxima estacin [Next Stop,
2008]) seem to suggest, the docu-activist program of La Hora de
los Hornosnot
s just to document the realities of colonial and impe-
rialist oppression but also to transform them by propelling viewers
into revolutionary action (Bernini, 2004: 160)has lost none of its
validity. Arguably, however, in Memoria a the changes imposed on the
models of the seventies by both Solanass own auteuriall sensibility
and by the new audiovisual technologies (video and digital handycam
instead of 16 and 35mm film cameras) and the ways in which these
are edited against the televisual archives of the present (newsflashes,
talk and reality shows) in fact induce major aesthetic and political
readjustments, which are actively disavowed in favor of a suggested
epic continuity between the battles of past and present.
162 JENS ANDERMANN
Suffice to compare the opening moments of Memoria a with the

famous first sequence of La hora de los hornos: in the 1968 film, an
increasingly frantic percussion solo on the soundtrack accompanied
short, discontinuous flashes of political strugglea torch, a march,
someone throwing a molotov cocktailand of brutal repression,
alternating with black-on-white intertitles quoting, among others,
Fidel Castro, Juan Domingo Pern, and Frantz Fanon. As the drum-
ming and singing reaches its peak, Solanass voice-over assumes the
reigns of the narrative: Latin America is a continent at war. For the
dominant classes, war of oppression. For the oppressed people, war
of liberation Next, an intertitle announces the beginning of the first
chapter, La HistoriaHistory. Memoria del saqueoo starts with a
similar prologue, this time set to an elegiac string score by Gerardo
Gandini: a slow, circular pan around the high-rises of downtown
Buenos Aires shot from below, followed by a match cut to a dirty,
rag-clothed child shot in close-up from above, introducing an alter-
nation between similar pans around palatial buildings and close-ups
of urban poor. Eventually, this alternating rhythm is interrupted by a
panoramic long shot of the city from atop an office tower, storm clouds
gathering on the horizon, superimposed to which an intertitle appears
locating us in time and space: Argentina, 2001. A series of white-on-
black intertitles now appear spliced between TV footage of Presidents
Menem and De la Ra and treasury secretary Cavallo: Millions of
poor and unemployed, Massive capital flight, December 19th,
before Solanas cuts to footage of the marches toward Plaza de Mayo,
finally singling out, among the multitude, a man carrying his small
son, shouting Argentina, Argentina! It is at this epic climax, just
as in La hora, that Solanass own voice takes over, speaking on behalf
of the disinheritedonly this time with a notably more personal,
affective tone. After many years, he begins in an avuncular, story-
tellers voice, thus relating not just this uprising of the nobodys but
also his own activist filmmaking back to their 1960s predecessors, to
eventually pose the question his film sets out to answer: What had
happened in Argentina? Once again, he answers with a history les-
son, announced by the following intertitle: Chapter 1: The Eternal
Debt.
But if, then, the formal similarities are many and deliberate, the
differences are no less pronounced. Whereas in La hora de los hornoss,
the staccato-paced montage of attractions and use of found footage
and quotations sought to destroy and replacee the auteuriall subject
of second cinema by a collective, revolutionary visioncountering
bourgeois cinemas techniques of identification and affect through
a radical fragmentation of the scenein Memoria a both author and

scene are reinstated through the redemptive figure of Solanas him-
self. As well as being the implicit confidantee of anguished protesters
telling their stories to camera, the filmmaker also appears in archi-
val TV footage, giving an interview after suffering an armed assault
for denouncing state corruption under President Menem. As Emilio
Bernini (2004b: 44) puts it, in Memoria del saqueo, it is the author
who forges all the images, and the single or ultimate source of mean-
ing, even that of the speeches made by others, despite the films sug-
gestion . . . that it continues that earlier, clandestine film, which had
based its truth precisely on the negation of the author.
Hence, too, the short, slogan-like images of misery and oppression,
which in La hora a had been part of an attempt to change the docu-
mentary itself from an instrument of representation into one of trans-
formation of society, in Memoria del saqueoo threaten to relapse into
well-meaning clichs. Reducing the worlds of poverty and opulence on
screen to mere evidence of the truth-claims asserted in the voice-over,
without exploring them in their singularity or even so much as nam-
ing his interlocutors (only Pino himself is sometimes addressed by
name) Solanass film threatens to become a mere mirror-image of
the shallow and superficial news coverage he denounces. Of course,
Solanasnot unlike Michael Moore against criticisms of his similarly
self-centered Fahrenheit 9/11 (USA, 2004)would claim to be fight-
ing the enemy with their own weapons. But by editing its images
of hardship and of social mobilization into mere audiovisual back-
ground for Solanass own truth-speaking voicein a discourse that
is less that of the Griersonian social scientist, contributing facts and
background information, and more of the political orator, heaping
up slogans and allegorical condensationsMemoria a becomes a kind
of extended election spot for the political party Solanas now leads
(called Proyecto Sur, r after a previous Solanas movie). Tellingly, his
film ends with a long panning shot from Solanass subjective cam-
era entering the presidential palace, to the cheers of a triumphant
crowd on the soundtrack chanting El pueblo no se va (The people
wont go away)at least not, the sequence seems to imply, until the
interlocutory structure of Memorias, of multiple voices converging in
theliterallyvoice-over of the Great Poet and Translator (the cin-
ematographic auteurr thus turning into a model of political interpella-
tion and leadership) has become that of the nation itself.2
It is interesting to compare the closing sequence from Memoria a with
the opening of Burd, Poncet, and Gachassins Habitacin disponible, e
which performs the exact obverse movement. The narrative build-up
164 JENS ANDERMANN
here is at first strikingly similar to Solanass, the camera panning

along pot-banging protesters gathered on the nightly Plaza de Mayo,
some of them waving the national flag. As in Memoria, the cam-
era then finds an individual subjecta young woman with her son
perhaps just over ten years oldand starts panning around them as
they cross the square, looking at the other marchers with a somewhat
curious, bemused expression. But, contrary to Solanass film, we soon
realize that the movement of these two and of the camera following
them is not toward d the square and onward into the presidential palace
at its head but in the opposite direction, away from m the square and
against the centripetal movement of the crowds. The woman and the
boy start walking up Avenida de Mayo, then turn sideways toward the
southern (poorer) neighborhoods of Montserrat and San Telmo, pass-
ing protesters and a platoon of riot police about to enter into action,
until they are alone by themselves. It is here, too, after they have left
the square and after they have exchanged a few words, that we first
realize they are foreigners: the words are without subtitles, thus we
cannot understand the couples reaction to the events just witnessed
(moments later, a caption informs us that Natasha and her son are
Ucranian and have been in the country only since March 2001).
Where Memoria del saqueo, then, took the scene of nation and
family (the father and son on Plaza de Mayo, shouting Argentina,
Argentina) as an emblem of popular resistance, inviting
Solanas-the-auteurr to expound on its meaning as well as underwrit-
ing the truthfulness of his discourse, Habitacin disponiblee compli-
cates the transparency of such a delegation of voice and agency by
introducing a detached, external point of view. Natashas and her
sons presence makes the familiar scene strange (familiar in the two
senses of the term: we immediately know we are looking at the cacero-
lazoss of December 2001, which are represented here as a reencounter
of the nation-family). By contrast, the beginning of Habitacin is
nothing but an exercise in defamiliarization, where that which, at
first glance, does not seem to require further explanation suddenly
becomes enigmatic as this first glance is being attributed to the
viewpoint of an outsidersomeone who, by her legal and linguistic
condition as migrant, is not completely of the place she nonethe-
less finds herself in. Thus, the moment of recognition is cut short,
interrupted by the opacity introduced by the migrant gaze and voice:
they (migrants) cannot understand our (Argentine) self-evidence
manifested in chanting the name of the nation, or rather, we cannot
know whether or not they have understood and adhered to the
popular cause.
What interests me in this counterposition of two sequences from the

politics of 2001, both shot at the plaza of December 19 and 20,
2001, but framing and editing the event in radically different ways, is
to distinguish between two attitudes in contemporary Argentine cin-
ema toward the political and social present. We could tentatively call
the first of these (exemplified in Solanass film) a politics of familiarity
and the second a politics of defamiliarization, which also opens up an
avenue of reflexive critique of the former. The politics of familiarity as
exemplified in Memoria a is based on a (recurrent and self-perpetuating)
moment of recognition, alternating images of hardship and opulence,
which are rendered emblematic by the auteurial voice-over, actively
soliciting affective adherence to the plight of the disenfranchised.
Thus, both the visual and the linguistic images cannot be anything
but commonplace, since their primary function is to be recogniz-
able in order to facilitate (as in electoral politics) the adherence of the
greatest possible number of spectators. Meanwhile, defamiliarization
requires, first and foremost, the inscription of a critical interruption
(a deferrall and a displacement) t of the affect flows mobilized by the
politics of familiarity, so as to draw out the singularity of the onscreen
situation, which is actively marked in the composition of the image.
If, then, both films originate in the politics of 2001, their readings
of it could not be more different: a unification and simplification of
meanings, in the case of Memoria, which forges a common place
from square and screen; an unraveling of singularities, in the case of
Habitacin, which deliberately chooses the vantage point of the inas-
similable, the foreign body of the immigrant, in order to question the
possibility of a common cause.
The migrant experience, in Poncet, Burd, and Gachassins docu-
mentary offers a displaced vantage point on a city and country in crisis,
literally putting these into perspective as the film inserts them into
alternative trajectories and temporalities. As a documentary, Habitacin
disponiblee falls squarely into what Bill Nichols (1991: 3275) calls the
observational mode, in which the production of insight is delegated
exclusively to the camera rather than to an omniscient narrators
voice-over, yet also without any reference to the cameras presence in,
and impact on, the world into which it ventures, as in the interactive
and reflexive modes of documentary filmmaking. Yet, this absence of
any explicit thematizing of the film crews interference is itself turned
into a powerful trope of reflecting on the radical disjuncture between
the migrants urban experience and the city of the locals. Observation
serves as a self-conscious way of incorporating into the documentary
form itself the distance between, on the one hand, the city inhabited
166 JENS ANDERMANN
by filmmakers and audience and, on the other, that of the subjects of

the narrative: parallel worlds, literally, which, despite sharing the same
streets, shops, and apartment blocks, nevertheless occur in different
space-times. An emblematic location of this other, migrant chrono-
topy is the locutorio, or telephone centre, from where the immigrants
make contact with their loved ones at home. Their solitude and isola-
tion is doubly marked in these emotionally charged sequences, the
camera almost always remaining on the other side of the telephone
cabins glass panels, while on the soundtrack we witness one half of
a conversation, the speakers often frantically trying to sound upbeat
and reassuring, attempting to unmake in the course of a few minutes
the distance and absence that is at the same time highlighted through
the very construction of the shot.
In a particularly striking sequence, Natasha and her son are on
the phone to relatives or friends in Ucrania, their in-betweenness
or double separation from Ucranian as well as Argentine space-time
marked by both the glass panel and the used-up telephone cards
displaying a stylized world map, which Natashas son presses against
it. Cut against these shots of mother and son, while the conversa-
tion continues on the soundtrack (incomprehensible to us) are views
from the cabin onto the street outside, deliberately out of focus as if
to underscore our withdrawal from external space and into that of
the intradiegetic bearers of the gaze. These shots, in other words,
draw us into an affective interior whose language we are unable to
understand. Reflected in the glass of the phone cabin is a sentence
in Spanish from a sign outside, perhaps a traffic education poster,
urging the entire family to please use safety belt. In the sequence
of shots, the traffic warning engages (over the voice on the sound-
track speaking a foreign language) in an enigmatic dialogue with the
little world maps Natashas son had pinned against the other side of
the same glass barrier. Together, the two signs stand in as it were
for the subtitles, framing the scene as in a baroque emblem-card, a
sign-language conferring a secret meaning on this incomprehensible
sequence. Or rather, this sign-language translates not so much the
conversation in Ucranian as the conditions of spatiotemporal dis-
juncture under which it takes place, of global traffic networks and
families under threat, thus also conferring a politicall meaning to the
construction of the sequence as a multiple refraction of sound and
image, actively marking the strangeness and exteriority from which
we behold the onscreen action.
The migrant, then, in Habitacin disponiblee is literally an agent of
defamiliarization because, being herself disjointed from the space of
Figure 10.1 Habitacin disponiblee [Room for Rent] (Argentina, 2004),

directed by Eva Poncet, Marcelo Burd and Diego Gachassin.
the family she can only reconstruct prosthetically, in ways thatas

in the locutorioo sequenceend up exacerbating the separation. She
misrecognizes the space of the familiar, but thus at the same time
reinvents and enriches it. Burd, Poncet, and Gachassin wisely refrain
from any obvious intervention in the narrative, letting the migrant
gaze and body do the work of defamiliarization (often to the point
of making us witness long conversations in Ucranian without sub-
titles, thus subtly inverting the roles and drawing the viewers into
the position of the outsider, excluded from communication and com-
munity). The result is an intensely political film, which draws out
the global, macroeconomic dimensions of the Argentine crisis not, as
does Solanas in Memoria del saqueo, by turning the emblematicc value
of particular images into argumentative currency (through a linguis-
tic operation of condensation and abstraction in the voice-over) but
instead by dwelling on the singularity of its subjects, forcing into the
open the concrete, experiential dimension of locality and globality,
as an intersection realized not in capital flows but in real bodies and
their displacement.
A rchaeologies of the Present

A completely different way of defamiliarizing the plaza of
December 2001, but which likewise marks in its own expository
168 JENS ANDERMANN
structure the need to move beyond a poetics of recognition, is the

one chosen by Alejandro Fernndez Moujn in Espejo para cuando
me pruebe el smokingg (A Mirror for when I try on the Dinner Jacket,
2005). Here, the difference toward the familiar images from Plaza
de Mayoshot not, as in Habitacin disponible, during the cacero-
lazo of December 19 but during the clashes with armed riot police
the following day, presumably as part of the footage Fernndez
Moujn was assembling as cinematographer for Memoria del
saqueois inscribed as a separation not in space but in time. Or
rather, the image is replayed in a state of spatiotemporal nonsimul-
taneity, as footage from the street fights is set to a voice-over from
the sculptor Ricardo Longhini. Longhini confesses to having spent
December 20 in a neighborhood bar watching things unfold on
TV, after having fled the Plaza scared and nauseated by the tear
gas, only to return later that evening when De la R a had fled and
the crowds had dispersed, to gather some of the leftovers from the
battle (police bullets, tear-gas grenades, stones and marbles thrown
by protesters) as source material for a piece of commemorative
sculpture. The effect of this counter editing of Moujns own
images, shot in the abrupt, hurried pans and zooms of a camera
fully exposed to the battle raging all around it, and Longhinis
verbal narrative on the soundtrack remembering an event witnessed
mostly from afar and on TV, is a subtle questioning of the testimo-
nial truth supposedly contained on the image track. Like Longhini
in returning to the Plaza, Moujn on revisiting his own images
shot during the street fights finds them in need of further inquiry,
a piece of forensic or archeological evidence akin to the fractured
projectiles Longhini collects from the square, the impact of which
may or may not have been fatal.
Espejoo follows the process of reinscription of these singular pieces
of evidence into a collective body of meaning, chronicling the grad-
ual assembly of Longhinis sculpture Argentinitoss (Little Argentines),
which brings the bullets and shards into an emblematic arrangement
loosely modeled on the Argentine flag, cast in an asphalt panel, each
projectile standing for one of the lives lost during the uprising. There
is, then, a tension running through Longhinis work between the sin-
gularity of his found materials as traces of individual and contingent
events (the subjects and nature of which remain enigmatic) and the
wider, allegorical design and meaning into which they are eventu-
ally brought without losing their singularity. Moujns film closely
and patiently follows each step of Longhinis complex process of
object-making, thus also highlighting the gradual coming-together
of collective meaning out of material singularity and drawing atten-

tion to the sculptors counter archaeological method (which, rather
than strip the site patiently of all posterior aggregates and sedimen-
tations in order to restore it to its original appearance, invents new
constellations from the chance encounter of fragments rescued into
his workshop).
A complex relation of distance and empathy emerges between the
two artists reworking the materials of the immediate past, each in
their own medium and its discontinuous temporality, yet also in con-
frontation with one another. At one point, Longhini compares his
own work with the Dogma groups self-imposed ascetism, explain-
ing that he will never embellish his source material for the purpose
of sculptural effect. Likewise, Moujns film hardly ever strays from
Longhinis workshop, drawing its own narrative of the December
2001 events and their aftermath entirely from this observation of
anotheran othersform of commemoration. The event is remem-
bered, then, through the monument that pays homage to its victims,
and whose assembly processor work of memoryincluding intri-
cate technical decisions about the selection of material supports and
preservatives, Moujns camera duly and patiently registers, allow-
ing Longhinis work to gradually acquire a monumentality that both
indicates and displaces what it alludes to. At the same time, Espejo
reproduces in its own filmic materiality the tensionof fundamental
importance in Longhinis workbetween the absence of the event
in its unfolding and the material presence of its traces: hence, the
simultaneous difference and continuity between the footage shot on
December 20 and its reuse in the film is actively marked through the
separation between sound and image track, but this self-questioning
of the documentaryy nature of the image at the same time allows to
foreground its monumentall quality. Every real-time image is poten-
tially available for either of these two poetics, as we can see from
the use of identical footage from the December 2001 uprising in
Solanass Memoria a and in Moujns Espejo. Yet, whereas the docu-
mentary image takes for granted the possibility of inferring general
meanings from the singular and instantaneous, the monumental
image takes hold of the very space of tension between these two,
and draws attention to the struggle for meaningg that goes with all
processes of remembrance.
In another key sequence of (dis)encounter between the artistic
process and the context of social struggles that it works through and
that, in turn, determines it on the side of its materiality (if not its
formal solutions), Moujn once again uses the disjuncture between
170 JENS ANDERMANN
sound and image as a way of forging a reflexive third space. The

procedure inverts the one previously used for the footage from Plaza
de Mayo: here, instead, a slow pan across the materials in Longhinis
workshopdiscarded, mutilated objects in various states of reassem-
bly and resignificationis set to a voice-over from a radio news-
reader informing about the point-blank killing by police officers of
the piqueteroo (unemployed) activists Kosteki and Santilln in June
2002 during a protest march (immediately afterward, a sequence
of shots shows Longhini at his workshop the next day, browsing
through newspaper coverage including photographs of the shoot-
ings). The radio voice-overan aural presence found on location,
but subsequently used by Moujn as a compositional device of inter-
nal montageinscribes the image with a question about time, con-
temporariness and the political responsibilities of art: not, as in the
previous sequence from Plaza de Mayo, as a critical deconstruction
of the juncture between event, image, and meaning but rather in a
way that supplements the missing pieces from Longhinis objects,
associating their wounds and erasures with the political violence
of the present. Moujns camera observes the coming together of
(political) meaning as the objet trouv is reinserted in and exposed
to the public space and the struggles going on within it, through
the rescuing labor of the artist. Thus, Moujns Espejoo does indeed
find, in Longhinis radical sculptural practice, a critical mirror on
the documentarists own relation with contemporary politics: just
as Longhinis, the filmmakers source materials are of an indexical
naturepointing to singular, ephemeral constellations of moving
bodies in spacebut their meaning is never contained in them and
remains elusive unless one probes and combines them with other,
likewise incomplete fragments: submitting them to a process of edit-
ing that amounts to a kind of imaginative archaeology of the pres-
ent. In this critical mirroring, I would argue, Moujn ultimately
triumphs over Longhini, showing us something elsee cinema is capable
ofnot just because he resituates the monumental temporality of
Longhinis mementoo in the processual, critical time of film but also
by thus reinscribing artistic practice in a historical becoming that the
former can only refer to by way of allegory. Cinema, in the workshop
sequence set to the audio of state-orchestrated murder, iss the media-
tion between politics and its other scene: between the occurrence of
history and the recognizability of its meaning forged in the hetero-
topic other space of art. Cinema can make these hold a mirror to
one another becauseas Moujn realizesit does not fully belong
with either of them.
Notes
1. For a comprehensive account of neoliberal politics in Argentina, see
Svampa, 2005; for a chronicle of the 2001 protests, see Lewkovicz,
2002; Zibechi, 2003.
2. Fragments of Memoria del saqueoo can be found on a YouTube chan-
nel called, with scant subtlety, Pino Presidente. For a more sympa-
thetic reading of Solanass politics and cinematographic output, see
Amado, 2009: 6588; Stites Mor, 2009: 22154.
B ibliography
Amado, Ana. La imagen justa. Cine argentino y poltica (19802007). Buenos
Aires: Colihue, 2009.
. Cine argentino, cuando todo es mrgen. El ojo que piensa
Revista virtual de cine iberoamericanoo 0, agosto de 2003, online pub-
lication. http://elojoquepiensa.udg.mx/espanol/numero00/veryana/06
_cineargentino.html (accessed October 2007).
Aguilar, Gonzalo. Otros mundos. Un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino. o
Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2006.
Balibar, tienne. Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation,
Civility. In Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002.
Beceyro, Ral, Rafael Filipelli, David Oubia, and Alan Pauls. Esttica del
cine, nuevos realismos, representacin. Debate sobre el nuevo cine argen-
tino. Punto de Vista a 67 (2000): 19.
Bernini, Emilio. Politics and the Documentary Film in Argentina During
the 1960s. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studiess 13, no. 2 (2004a):
155170.
. Un estado (contempor neo) del documental. Sobre algunos films
argentinos recientes. Kilmetroo 111, no. 5 (2004b): 4157.
Carassai, Sebastin. The Noisy Majority: An Analysis of the Argentine
Crisis of December 2001 From the Theoretical Approach of Hardt &
Negri, Laclau and Zizek. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies
16, no. 1 (2007): 4562.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinma 1: Limage-mouvement. t Paris: Minuit, 1983.
Doane, Mary Anne. The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002.
Gonz lez, Horacio. Sobre El bonaerensee y el nuevo cine argentino. El Ojo
Mochoo 17 (2003): 156158.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. y
Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude. War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Lehman, Kathryn. La crisis argentina y los medios de comunicacin:
estrategias para hacer del espectador un testigo. In El cine argentino de
172 JENS ANDERMANN
hoy: entre el arte y la polltica, edited by Viviana Rangil, 2340. Buenos

Aires, Biblos, 2007 7.
Lewkowicz, Ignacio. Sucesos argentinos. Cacerolazo y subjetividad posestatal. l
Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2002.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Oubia, David. El espectculo y sus m rgenes. Sobre Adri n Caetano y el
nuevo cine argentine. Punto de Vista a 76 (2003): 2834.
. Between Breakup and Tradition: Recent Argentinean Cinema.
Senses of Cinema a 31 (AprilJune 2004), online publication. http://
archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/contents.html (accessed
December 2010).
Remedi, Claudio. Cine documental y trabajadores: ensayo sobre una
experiencia. DOCA (Documentalistas Argentinos), seccin art culos,
2008: http://www.docacine.com.ar/articulos/remedi03.html (accessed
June 2010).
Scorer, James. Once Upon a Time in Buenos Aires: Vengeance, Community
and the Urban Western. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studiess 19,
2 (2010): 141154.
Stites Mor, Jessica. Imgenes de un sur desplazado: Fernando Solanas y el
imaginario de la transicin. In El pasado que miramos. Memoria e imagen
ante la historia reciente, edited by Claudia Feld and Jessica Stites Mor.
Buenos Aires: Paids, 2009.
Svampa, Maristella. La sociedad excluyente. Argentina bajo el signo del neolib-
eralismo. Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2005.
Zibechi, Ra l. Genealog ga de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movi-
miento. Buenos Aires: Letra Libre, 2003.
iek, Slavoj. Holding the Place. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, t edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, and Slavoj iek. London: Verso, 2000.
CH A P T ER 11
In Praise of Diff iculty: Notes on

Realism and Narration in Contemporary
Argentine Cinema
Domin Choi*
On the following pages, I wish to complicate the question of realism

drawing on some examples from contemporary Argentine cinema. To
that end, I will begin with Andr Bazins theory of cinematic realism,
which is founded on the technical conditions of the apparatus, and
which was of key significance for the emergence of modern cinema.
I will revise Bazins notion by analyzing the ways in which it con-
trasts with the construction principles of both literary and pictorial
realisms. Thus, I will attempt to evaluate the films deemed realist
within the field of contemporary Argentine film.
To begin with, I will comment on two scenes from two recent
Argentine films, which at first sight appear strikingly antithetic. One
of these two films is El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes,
2009), directed by Juan Jos Campanella, which had a powerful
impact on the Argentine audience at the time of the films release.
The other one is Ocioo (Leisure, 2010), directed by Juan Villegas and
Alejandro Lingenti, which was screened at the 2010 edition of the
Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, and premiered
that same year. Both are adaptations of present-day literary works: the
first one of Eduardo Sacheris novel La pregunta de sus ojos, which
became a best seller, and the second one of a nouvellee written by
Fabin Casas.
174 DOMIN CHOI
Although in terms of construction the two films differ drastically,

they share at least one topic: the passion for soccer. In addition, it so
happens that in both films the same soccer stadium appears, namely
the one of the Club Atltico Huracn, situated in Parque Patricios,
a neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In the scene from El secreto de sus
ojos, during a match between the club Racingg (based in Avellaneda)
and Huracn, by means of an aerial tracking shot, the camera places
the spectator in the popular zone of the stadium, where the tickets
are cheaper and where the most fanatic fans can be encountered. The
entire scenewhich represents a key moment of the film, since it is
when the murderer is caughtis filmed in a single sequence shot.
Campanella has declared the following about this shot:
I began with a convention that we all have in our mind of an aerial

shot of a stadium. But we also have the convention of cutting to the
crowd, when a certain point is reached. If you dont cut and continue,
the spectators start to lean back in their seats, and, suddenly, its as
if they were thrown into the bleachers, and they begin to form part
of the persecution. Once there, this scene becomes a persecution on
foot, which we have seen hundreds of times. In Starsky & Hutch, h
every week somebody used to be chased after. But now, it feels per-
sonal to the audience, and this makes it much more exciting than if
there had simply been one man chasing after another. And once you
continue without cutting, the point of view can no longer be altered.
(Campanella 2010)
However, the point here is not just about giving continuity to the
scene so as not to disrupt the spectators point of view and his pos-
sibility to identify with the scene (in addition, the exact opposite
could happen to a film enthusiast), nor is it solely about present-
ing a persecution following the paradigm of North American series.
Instead, it is about showing the performative power of cinema (and,
in this case, of Argentine cinema, which has always suffered from
a shortage of technical devices to shoot the unfolding of an action
in a solidly constructed plot). Therefore, in terms of diegesis, there
is search, persecution, and capture, and with regard to the specta-
tor, there is identification with the continuous point of view, and a
technique that absorbs the viewers and makes them inhabit the
image.
From a Bazinian point of view, it would be difficult to consider this
scene as realist, because in it continuity is achieved through a filmic
trick effect. Campanellas sequence shot is not a result of continuous
recording, but of digital technology that combines an inhuman point
REALISM AND NARRATION IN ARGENTINE CINEMA 175
Figure 11.1 El secreto de sus ojoss [The Secret in Their Eyes]

s (Argentina,
2009), directed by Juan Jos Campanella.
of view (the birds eye view) with a humanized perspective (the lat-
ter is achieved through the subjectification of the camera during the
persecution).
In Ocio, too, the stadium of the Huraccnn club is filmed, but this
time the camera, which accompanies the protagonist, is unable to
access the match: The character in the film forgot to bring along
the money to pay for the ticket; thus, the camera politely remains
with him outside the stadium. Here, there is no longer access to the
crowd, to the match, and to the popular celebration. However, simply
to say that something is missingg would not be truthful, for, indeed,
Ocioo signals the fact that an image and an unfolding of the plot are
missing. In other words, this lack reveals a cinematic choice. Thus,
if in the first example there is a plot, action, performative power,
and spectators identifying with the characters in the filmin short,
richness in diegetic and technical elementsin the scene of Ocio, in
addition to the denouement of the plot, temps morts, the characters
self-absorption and inability to perform (a performance in which the
spectator is not included), we have the signaling of a lack.
Of course, these are two forms of perceiving cinema: On the one
hand, genre cinema as narrative, entertainment, and having the power
of reconstruction (mise-en-scne), and, on the other hand, the record-
ing of insignificant events. In one case, what is at stake is a histori-
cal reconstruction (Argentina in the seventies). In the other case, as
Alejandro Lingenti has explicitly stated, there is a temporal overlap:
elements from different periods in history coexist within the same
world. In addition, Ocioo captures Buenos Aires in a state of ruinas a
devastated city corroded by timeand recreates an atmosphere of rar-
efaction, at the same time that it shows the inequality of a modernity
176 DOMIN CHOI
that is stagnating in many zones, which has characterized Argentina

for the last 50 years. However, strangely enough, currently narrative
cinema (as is the case of El secreto de sus ojos)
s is usually not identified
with realism. And although Ocioo possesses some elements that would
supposedly separate it from realism (inability to perform that signi-
fies a lack, postapocalyptic landscape, temporal and spatial overlap,
cinephile quotations in the soundtrack, and characters that hark back
to films like Rumble Fishh and The Warriors), s the Rossellinian way
in which it presents things and situations brings it closer to certain
features of the cinematic realism of today. But how can this identifica-
tion with cinematic realism be explained? As I argue below, it is much
more complicated to characterize or classify a film as realist than its
formal and technical differences might make us think at first.
The A mbiguity of R ealism in F ilm

Lets do a bit of theoretical genealogy. Realism, refers to widely
differing operations and aspects in painting, literature, and cinema.
What, for instance, might Courbet, Balzac, and Rossellini possibly
have in common?
Whereas Ian Watt (1982) traces the terms origin to 1835, when a
critic confronted Rembrandts human truth with the poetic ideals
of neoclassical painting, Duranty used the term realism in 1856 to
refer to literature. When Linda Nochlin defines realism in paint-
ing, she describes it as offering a truthful, objective, and impar-
tial representation of the real world, based on careful observation
(2004: 11). In Europe, this tendency was historically corroborated in
painting from 1840 to 1870/80. But if we go back to Plato and the
scholastics, we see that the true reality can be found beyond the
sensible, thus identifying realism with universals. In contrast, mod-
ern realism is affirmed by a rejection of universals, because in this
period, the philosophical assertion that truth can be discovered by
the individual through the senses (Watt, 1982: 20) was of funda-
mental importance. In this way, the realism of the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century was consolidated under the influence of empiri-
cism and positivism, combining individual experience and innovation
for literary representation.
The most important revelations in this brief historical outline are
the epistemological aspects of realist representation in painting and
literature. In the latter, a major challenge of realism consists in how to
translate into words the individuals experience of the world. Painting,
on the other hand, struggles with how to reflect, in an image, the
careful observation of reality. In fact, it is in these epistemological

problems where the difficultyy of both literary and pictorial realism
resides (a central issue to which I shall return in greater detail later).
In cinema, the question of realism followed a different course.
While cinema of the action-imagee and that of the time-imagee have
been linked to specific historical moments, opening the possibility of
a periodization of cinema, today the two forms seem to coexist, claim-
ing back their respective genealogies and traditions. Historically, in
Western cinema, the notion of the time-imagee emerged with Italian
neorealism. The need for duration, in order to present real situations
and things without fragmenting them, has tended to identify the cin-
ema of the time-imagee with realism. That way, for example, Andr
Bazin (1966) considered a baroque filmmaker like Orson Welles
as realist because of his use of deep focus and sequence shottwo
instruments that allowed him to avoid the use of montage. There
is no doubt that for a critic as accurate as Bazin, this paradox about
Welles is the result of his ontology of cinema.
Cinematic realism has sustained itself against a certain idea of
mise-en-sccne, and has endorsed documentary recording. When Andr
Bazin developed his ontology of cinema, he referred to the psycholog-
ical need for images and to the technical innovations in photography,
which are at the origin of cinema. The psychological need to simulate
the real results from the question of how can life (and therefore liv-
ing beings) be preserved through appearances? Since death is but the
victory of time, and since images defy death, the primary function
of images is to preserve (Bazin used the expressions embalming
and mummy complex to refer to this function of preserving life).
However, the novelty of the photographic imagewhen compared to
more traditional images (paintings)is that it is an imprint and an
asymptote of reality. The innovation of both photography and film
resides in its power to reveal the reall without using any artifices (for
this reason, in Bazinian theory, linear perspective in painting is con-
sidered as the original sinn of the West). The approval and primacy of
this technical innovation led Bazin to privilege sequence shot and
deep focus over sovereign montage. What has to be added to this
well-known recap of film theory is that Bazins affirmation of ontog-
enyy (which relies on the emergence of technical conditions) contrasts
with his phylogenyy (development of film language). Precisely this con-
trast has led Bazin to defend a certain concept of realism, namely to
allow reality to be what it is in all its ambiguities, and not to construct
a subjective meaning of the real through montage. Hence, the novelty
of neorealism resides in a new notion of reality: it points toward an
178 DOMIN CHOI
impersonal real yet to be deciphered, and not towards a reality that has
already been deciphered (Deleuze). In Bazins theory, when speaking
about cinematic realism, what is at stake is a perceptual realism, m not a
narrative realism, as has historically been the case with literature.
Different to painting and realist literature, the obligation and deontic
of film is to reveal the essential ambiguity of reality by avoiding the
use of a subjectivee point of view. Thus, although Bazin spoke of Orson
Welles and Rossellini as exemplary filmmakers of realist cinema, both
what cinema oughtt to be and what it istwo s parallel constructions,
which have mutual implicationsare to him independent of any par-
ticular poet or authors vision. Here, it becomes apparent that the
idea of cinematic realism depends on its technical conditions1.
Thus, if literary realism tries to translate and reconstruct, in words,
an experience, and if painting attempts to capture the attentive obser-
vation of reality on a surface by reconfiguring the conditions of
perception (and herein lie all the difficulties),
s cinematic realism is fun-
damentally shaped by the concept of recording, which is determined
a priorii by the characteristics of its apparatus. Hence, two different
processes are at stake. Whereas in film the real arises from a mechani-
cal automatism, in painting and literature reality is being constructed.
Therefore, although in painting, literature, and film the same may be
understood under the term the real, the way they articulate real-
ity is completely different in each of the three fields. This difference
between the reality that literature or painting construct, and the real
inscribed in the cinematic image is not only theoretical, but also tech-
nical. My intention is not to say that film lacks reality construction,
and that literature and painting lack its inscription. Rather, given
the characteristics of their apparatuses, I try to provide a minimal
description of the starting and ending points of each of these three
types of art.2
But let us return to the question of difficulty, which has been
adumbrated above with respect to literature (how to put into words
the individual experience of the outer world) and painting (how
to reflect in an image the careful observation of reality). As is well
known, in avant-garde and postavant-garde art, difficultyy has not
received a good press. Today, the assessment of an artistic work rarely
takes it into consideration, and, thus, art is somehow moving away
from its original meaning of techn.
We can however find a thought-provoking praise of difficultyy in
a late text from Claude L vi-Strauss, in which he attempts to estab-
lish a personal history of art. There, L vi-Strauss asks himself: what
gives trompe-loeill its power of enchantment? And he answers that it
results from the seemingly miraculous coalescence of the indefin-

able and fleeting aspects of the sensible world, as obtained by techni-
cal procedures that, after considerable intellectual labor and a slowly
acquired mastery, allow these aspects to be re-constructed and per-
manently fixed (1998: 25). Since the period of La pens se sauvagee,
for L vi-Strauss, aesthetic emotion is created in painting through
the synthesis of the sensible and the intelligible. Thus, the difference
between the trompe-loeill and photography is found in this process of
synthesis, for photographic realism does not distinguish accidents
from the nature of things, but places them both on the same level.
There is certainly a process of reproduction, but the part played by
the intellect is minimal. Though the masters of the genre may have
perfected their technique, the latter remains servile to a thought-
less vision of the world (1998: 25). The trompe-loeill is so valuable
because of its process of synthesis: it reduces the three-dimensional
space to a two-dimensional space and reconstitutes it on another
level. This effort, this difficultyy that is skillfully overcome is miss-
ing in film, because, as Jacques Rancire declares, the intelligence
of the film projector resolves the question of mimesis at the root:
the Platonic denunciation of the images, the opposition between the
sensible copy and the intelligible model (2005: 11). Therefore, if in
literary modernismfrom Flaubert to the Nouveau romanreach-
ing the splendor of the insignificant things necessarily implied a
tough conquest, in film this splendor is the starting point and can
already be found in the first shots filmed by the Lumire brothers.
Hence, in order for cinema to become established as art, it had to
conquer for itself the fable, the narration, so as to eventually succeed
the nineteenth-century novel in the twentieth century. This was the
primary difficultyy that cinema had to confront.
How, then, to evaluate modern cinemathe aesthetic regime
that established the time-image, and that (often stubbornly) still per-
sists today? Would it necessarily represent a regression? According to
Rancire, modern cinema, which challenges the narrative regime,
implies a disfigurementt of classic cinema. In other words, the greatest
modern writers made two types of sacrifices in their films: a mate-
riall and a logologicall (mise-en-scne) one. In this way, Deleuze (1984)
distinguishes between two types of out-of-field (hors-champ): One is
homogeneous (Renoir) and the other is heterogeneous (Hitchcock)
with respect to the content that is presented. This gravitational
out-of-field of the cinematic imagedefined by Bazin as cachein
turn bifurcates. On the one hand are the filmmakers who refer to the
out-of-field as the wholee as relation. This is the case of Hitchcock,
180 DOMIN CHOI
who connects the blind field with a web of relations, sacrificing the
materiality of space. In this way, the thinking that passes through
montage would be commensurate with an intelligencee that refers
to the invisible and to the open. On the other hand, in Rossellinis
workmore clearly than in Renoirsinstead of channeling the
whole of the image through montage, and the out-of-field through
its relations with the image, the logological part tends to be sacri-
ficed for the benefit of recording and for the belief in reality. The
time-imagee that arises with neorealism is, I think, strictly related to
this logological sacrifice. Thus, the cinema of time-imagee is not a
mere phenomenon of belief like religion, but a knowledge of cinema
sacrificed and subordinated to the belief in the world.
In this way, the subtractive methodd only makes sense in this sacrifi-
ciall context or in the disfigurementt of the narrative regime of classic
cinema. In other words, if the realist cinema of today did not imply
a dialogue with the history of cinema, it could be considered a mere
regression or only a starting point. Moreover, if the risk of the narra-
tive regime is that it might fall into the clich of the genres, then the
peril of present-day realism is that it might confuse technical condi-
tions of film with the operations of art. At least in cinema, from the
realism that the technology of recording allows, the aim should be
to overcome a difficulty, and not to settle with the mere use of what
is already there.
A Case of R ealism in the N ew

A rgentine C inema
In conclusion, I would like to mention a typical example of percep-
tual realism. Although Lisandro Alonsos films have played to very
limited audiences in Argentina, his films have nonetheless attracted
a great deal of attention among both national and international crit-
ics. Alonsos films can be characterized as minimalist. His characters,
in their moderate mobility, move within remote spaces more or less
remote from human civilization.
On the other hand, in the context of the new Argentine cinema, a
Lucrecia Martel focuses on filming the corrosion of the middle class
of Salta (The Swamp, The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman), Pablo
Trapero on the working world and the functioning of the police force
(Crane World, El Bonaerense, and, more recently, Lions Den n and The
Vulture), and Martn Rejtman on urban comedies in which hein
the style of Robert Bressoncreates worlds that are akin and close
to one another (Silvia Prieto, The Magic Glovess), Lisandro Alonso
pursues that difficult encounter with the unknown other. r In this way,
topics of hiss generation or of his social class do not seem to awaken
his interest. On the other hand, although the topics of errantry and
relocation recur frequently in the independent Argentine cinema
(Swimming Alone, The Aura, A Stray Girlfriend d ), in Alonsos La lib-
ertad (Freedom, 2001), Los muertos (The Dead, 2004), and, to a lesser
extent, in Liverpool (2008), the search for the hidden otherr intensifies
and seems to reach its geographical and civilizatory limits.
This extremism also depends on the systematic exhaustion of cin-
ematic methods. In this way, subtraction n seems to be the essence of
Alonsos cinematic methods: absence of psychology, absence of narra-
tive motives, absence of fabulation, and absence of a narrative voice.
In relation to the Argentine cinema of the eighties, an explicit cinema
that is tautological and slowly spoken, this relentless method of sub-
traction can be regarded as a radical rupture.
Now, what do these films show? What do we see in this blend of
fiction and documentary? A woodcutters working day, an ex-convicts
journey to his daughters home, a laborers return from an industrial
transport vessel to his hometown. Hannah Arendts tripartite divi-
sion between the human activities of labor, work, and action (the vita
activa, 1993) can be applied to the activities shown in Alonsos films:
r the activity that corresponds to the biological processes and
labor,
necessities of human existence (feeding, reproduction, defecation);
work, the activity that corresponds to the unnaturalness of human
existence, and to the fabrication of an artificial world of things; actionn,
political life and history, the primordial characteristic of which resides
in being a plural activity, the collective human condition. Now, if this
tripartite division is considered in relation to La libertad, Los muer-
tos, and Liverpool, the human activities that prevail are the solitude
of labor and the dedication to workaction and collective life being
subtracted to a large extent. This is also a form of absence of poli-
tics, which a great number of authors have pointed out with respect
to fiction cinema in Argentina of the nineties.
This method of subtraction n and the tendency to show minimal
events characterizes not only Alonsos films, but also Ocio, as well as
an important zone of the independent Argentine cinema that attempts
to establish a continuity with cinematic modernity. As Alonso himself
declared, his job is not to narrate, but to observe. This observation,
however, is very particular, for it is achieved through the recreation of
artificiall conditions (Misael Saavedra is actually a salaried employee;
Argentino Vargas did not really kill his brothers; Farrel, in reality,
does not work on a ship). While the observation itself tends toward
182 DOMIN CHOI
the documentary form, these conditions function as a fictional frame.

In other words, in La libertad, in Los muertos, and in Liverpool, what
takes place is an erasure of the conditions of observation, which the
film itself creates. One might say that this observation shows a world
with an imaginaryy line drawn between nature and culture. Its most
accomplished image might be the final shot of Los muertos: a small
toy that, as if it were a vestige of civilization, got lost in this untamed,
wild land. That way, the characters move along and within this imag-
inary boundary, and they themselves become bordering characters
that merge with nature. And precisely this demarcation becomes
clearly visible, because these images are presented to spectators who
find themselves unfailingly immersed in a cultural dimension that is
the movie theater.3
Regarding the question of the otherr in film history, perhaps
Jean Rouch is the filmmaker who has provided the most con-
vincing and just answers. In his film Moi, un noirr (1958), the
documentary basis makes possible a poetics of the encounter
with the nonwestern other, and the result is a fabulation in which
a real enunciative democracy is being established. This egalitar-
ian passion converts the otherr into the familiar without losing its
irreducibility. If in the encounter with the other, Rouch passes
from the documentary to the fabulation that becomes familiar,
Alonso seems to choose the opposite path: his fictional frame
leads to a documental and remote observation of the other. Now,
as Flaubert expresses, if something is looked at long enough, its
strangeness appears; thus, it is not unusual that Alonsos films
produce estrangement. How can we understand this effect? Both
Los muertoss and Liverpooll end by displaying a commodity (a toy
and a key ring), and money is omnipresent in the exchanges in
all of Alonsos films. Hence, the two principal forms of fetishism
are present here. And between nature and the fetishistic illusion,
the characters appear absorbed in thought like unapproachable
others, who cannot say anything of their situation, of their real-
ity. Thus, this lack of understanding, this estrangement seems
to acknowledge a secret defeat of cinematic realism against the
contemporary globalized worldthe operation of which we no
longer understand.
But what is cinematic knowledge about the world? What does it
mean, for example, to cinematically know a soccer stadium (so as to
take up again the two films previously mentioned)? In order to shed
light upon an aspect of this cinematic knowledge, cinema itself has
to be examined. But there is no doubt that between converting the
sports stadium into a place of persecution, as is the case in El secreto

de sus ojoss (a conversion that is made possible through digital tech-
nology, which functions like an eye-capturing device), and between
transforming the soccer stadium into an inaccessible and unknowable
place, as is the case in Ocio, cinema still canor should attempt to
come up with other, less methodic options. In other words, between
a difficulty that is overcome by modern technology (El secreto de sus
s and the inability of the plot to unfold itself (Ocio), cinema should
ojos)
try to propose less systematic alternatives.
Presenting alienated subjects in a world that they cannot under-
stand, and in which they cannot act either, can only be a starting
point for cinema today. A cognitive mappingg of the world, as Fredric
Jameson (1995) proposes, cannot consist only of the estranged
perception of things and situations, but must also include a con-
structivism that hypothesizes about the functioning of the real. In
this respect, given the present circumstances, contemporary cinema
should reconsider to what extent it is creative to continue adher-
ing to an aesthetics of the time-image, the possible banalization of
which Deleuze himself has warned against. The creativity of cinema
can no longer rely on the potentials of recording, in the words of
L vi-Strauss, on a thoughtless vision of the world that does not
imply a synthesis between the sensible and the intelligible. Instead,
it must draw on fabulation, on constructionput differently, on
cinematic operations that introduce a number of difficulties to be
overcome.
*Translated by Manuela Gloor
Notes
1. Today, after the development of various versions of the time-image
and of digital technology, it would be difficult to define the con-
ditions of cinematic realism by means of the duration of shots and
through the technical conditions of cinema. It would be problematic
to think about Tarkovski, Antonioni, or Cassavetes as realists but, at
the same time, it would also not be correct to consider the continu-
ity and the coexistence of heterogeneous elements in a single shot in
films like Jurassic Parkk or The Matrixx as characteristics of realism. I
discuss these issues further in Transiciones del cinee (2009).
2. In addressing the new Argentine cinema, Gonzalo Aguilar coined
the elegant term the aleatory real. On the basis of these thoughts,
it helps to situate Aguilars term between the concepts of inscription
and construction (2006).
184 DOMIN CHOI
3. The irony of all this seems to reside in Fantasma, Alonsos third

feature film, in which Misael and Argentino go to a movie theater
(more precisely to the auditorium Leopoldo Lugones, in the Teatro
General San Mart tn, one of the more cultural places of Buenos
Aires) to watch their own adventures in this imaginary line.
B ibliography
Aguilar, Gonzalo. Otros mundos. Un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino. o
Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. La condicin humana. Barcelona: Paids, 1993.
Bazin, Andr. Qu es el cine?? Madrid: Rialp, 1966.
Campanella, Juan Jos. Juan Jos Campanella: The AMG Interview (2010).
http://blog. allmovie.com/2010/04/18/juan-jose-campanella-the-amg
-interview/
Choi, Domin. Transiciones del cine, de lo moderno a lo contemporrneo. Buenos
Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2009.
Deleuze, Gilles. La imagen-movimiento. Barcelona: Paids, 1984.
. La imagen-tiempo. Barcelona: Paids, 1987 7.
Jameson, Fredric. La est ttica geopolltica: Cine y espacio en el sistema mundiall.
Barcelona: Paids, 1995.
L vi-Strauss, Claude. Mirando a Poussin. In Mirar, Escuchar, Leer. r
Madrid: Siruela, 1998.
Nochlin, Linda. El realismo. Madrid: Alianza, 2004.
Rancire, Jacques. La f f bula cinematogr rfica. Barcelona: Paids, 2005.
Watt, Ian. R R alisme et forme romanesque. In AA.VV., Litttrature et r ral-
itt. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
CH A P T ER 1 2
The Self as Other: Reality, Archive, and

the Witness in Three Contemporary
Latin American Films
lvaro Fernndez Bravo*

o
This chapter focuses on the strategies used in three contemporary

Latin American documentaries that represent the self and appeal to
the archive in order to produce an image of the subject. The use of
the archive as a source of compensation for a foundational lack places
reality in the center of the scene. Given that the films are, princi-
pally, documentaries, the individuals that speak are real subjects: they
are people and not characters. Nevertheless, documentary has
pushed the boundaries of the genre, problematizing the distinction
between person and character and constituting today one of the most
innovative territories of contemporary film. By transforming ordi-
nary people into characters, the documentary navigates a border zone
between the density of day-to-day life and the fluidity of fiction. As
Jean-Louis Comolli put it it is difficult for the documentary to film
human beings without falling into the temptation of rapidly trans-
forming them into film characters (Comolli, 2007:131). The strate-
gies for the decomposition of the self and the use of both the third
person as well as the archive to present a self-image are the focus of
my work.
Here, I would like to pause for a moment on the relationship
between image, subject, and archive, specifically on how that rela-
tionship appears in the three films to be investigated: La televisin y
yo: notas en una libreta (TV and Me, 2001) by Andrs Di Tella, Um
Passaporte Hngaroo (A Hungarian Passport, 2002) by Sandra Kogut,
186 LVARO FERNNDEZ BRAVO
and Santiago: uma Reflexo sobre o Material Brutoo (Santiago, 2007)

by Joo Moreira Salles. These three films provide an adequate base
upon which to analyze the issue of reality. They launch forth from a
void and an enigma found in the world of daily life, and interrogate
the familial pasts of the directors in order to reconstruct a memory.
Each of the films serves in this way as a means of understanding a
fragment of life that awakens interest and ends up being illuminated
by the cinematic device.
In their willingness to reconstruct a familial story, these films are
interventions in reality given that they propose a vision that at the
same time illuminates aspects of the past and also modifies them.
The archival material used, both found footage and home movies in
La Televisiin y yoo and Santiago, along with the compilation of hetero-
geneous imagesinterviews, visits to both private and state archives,
testimony from witnessesassembled into a sequence of shots, lead
one to think of a new era of the documentary where the first person
is combined with other means of narration typical in the genre: real
characters (with the key presence of elderly witnesses, older individu-
als who speak of the past events under investigation in the films),
urban scenes, domestic spacesfamily homes, apartments, and public
offices. The three films work from an historic context into which they
are spliced and with which they dialogue: the second postwar period
in Latin America, Peronism, Developmentalist Modernization and
its impacts in Brazil and Argentina. In many ways the films review
representations of Latin American modernization and discover dif-
ficult moments in that process, such as the governmental and social
presence of anti-Semitism that calls into question more nave versions
of the story of Latin Americas opening up to refugees in the second
postwar period.
They are document t rios de buscaa (search documentaries),
according to the category coined by Jean-Claude Bernardet (2005),
even though each one employs different strategies to generate a rep-
resentation of the self that ends up duplicated in a vicarious subject.1
Thus, the Santiago character speaks of the Moreira Salles family and
his personal relationship as butler and servant for the Latin American
bourgeoisie (Argentine and Brazilian, in Buenos Aires and Rio de
Janeiro). Santiago fulfills his role as informant and maintains a sub-
ordinate link with the director throughout the filming, obeying the
instructions of the director, his former employer with whom he main-
tains a relationship of both affection and subordination. For their
part, the Yankeleviches work as a Jewish double of the Di Tellas, and
Sebastin, Jaime Yankelevichs grandson interviewed by Andrs Di
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 187
Tella, works as a double for the director. Even if it seems difficult to

sustain a reading of the third person in a filmography so ominously
eclipsed by the first person like Di Tellas is, Sebastins presence
nonetheless allows a displaced approach to the self, which frankly has
an organic dependence on a third to sustain its self-image. In the
case of Um passaporte hngaro, we are in reality dealing with two (or
three) passports that come into play: those held by Sandra Koguts
grandparents, who used them to leave Hungary in 1937, which now
serve as documentary evidence of their origin, and the new passport
that the director obtains to gain European citizenship. Subject and
citizenship, humanity and nationality thus remain associated with
one another, as Hannah Arendt (1951) and Benhabib (2001) noted,
for humans stripped of citizenship (such as the Jews expulsed from
Europe and deprived of legality after having lost their natural citizen-
ship, and consequently having their own human condition put at risk).
So all three films investigate the archive and find images in it where
the self is seen reflected: family, butler, characters without a link to
the subject of enunciation, as is the case of the Yankelevichesthey
work as mirror images of the self.
The self functions in this way, faced with a third person who
serves to define it, without whom it cannot manage to take form
and upon whom it depends to assume an image of subjectivity. This
image, nonetheless, never turns out to be sufficient for uncovering
the enigma that the films seek to discover, the enigma we could
define via the Shakespearean formulation: who am I? The third
person, defined as the nonperson, is the one who remains exiled
from the dialogue between me and you; the third person can
also become the subject of investigation, study, and the reconstruc-
tion of its trajectory through the formation of an archive of data
referring to it (Esposito, 2012). The third person may furthermore
work in the process of self-investigation due to its reified nature,
a subject objectified (like the butler), subject to manipulation and
depersonalization, just as he appears at various points in the Moreira
Salles film.
The figure of the archive appears as a referent in the sense that all
three films cover documentary and film archives, archives of images,
of documents, family archives, and archives of the state in their efforts
to capture an image of the self. The material obtained in the archives
supplies a type of story, a memorya fableabout the self. However,
the archive does not solely operate as a theme but rather as a theo-
retical problem of the mode of representation. Each one of the films
articulates with the material gained from the archivean organized
compilation of images in a story. This compilation organizes a plot

that gives each one of the documentaries its peculiarity. Even though
the problems that the films addressfamilial past, the European
diasporas in Latin America as a result of the world wars, the recovery
of a fragile and evanescent memoryare problems with a real refer-
ent, each one of them can be read as a frustrated attempt in a certain
way to represent the world to which they refer, and fill, with images
that temporal void.
Lets examine this operation in more detail. Um passaporte hn-
garoo reconstructs the process of requesting a passport as experienced
by the director, Sandra Kogut, the granddaughter of European
Jews who immigrated to Brazilher grandfather, Hungarian, her
grandmother, Austrianshortly before the second World War. The
film is organized by following the (empty) blanks in the Hungarian
citizenship request form that Kogut must fill out, obtained in the
Hungarian consulate in Paris (where the director lives at the time
of filming). The chapters of the film respond to each of the bits of
data solicited on the Hungarian form (for example, 3/b./ mellkletek
[relevant documents]). Each of these boxes requires information and
documents recovered in archives in Budapest or Rio de Janeiro. The
film combines interviews with the directors grandmother in Rio
the directors main alter ego who never appears on screenwith visits
to relatives in Budapest, proceedings in the Hungarian consulate in
Paris, and strolls through archives in Rio de Janeiro and Budapest. In
the search for images of her grandmothers life, Koguts film recon-
structs their departure from Hungary before the war, but it does not
appeal to the visual archive as a source. As we will see, the film com-
bines the offscreen voice of the grandmother with a type of image
that intrigues: that of a false documentary that pretends to illus-
trate the wrong momentsthe departure from Budapest and arrival
in Recife. The shots combine the grandmothers words with images
of Budapest, set to the tune of Jewish folk music. Each one of these
images, filmed on Super 8, grainy film, as if imitating unavailable
footage, captures an attempt to represent a reality equipped with a
fortified, historic density.
As Natlia Pinazza notes, the deterritorializing effect of the transi-
tion between identities and national spaces (Brazil, France, Hungary)
and trips between Europe and the Americas both ways (the grand-
mothers and Sandras) are accompanied by a temporal superposition
that evokes the past and inserts it into the present of the interviews
with the grandmother (Pinazza, 2011).
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 189
In this way, Um passaporte hngaroo alternates between interviews

where the grandmother speaks and grainy images that replace the
images from archives. These images of Recife, the Brazilian port
where her grandparents disembarked from the boat after their trip
from Europe, and likewise the images of Budapest, particularly of the
trains, are an important part of the film that allow speculation over
the fictional representation of reality.
The images of trains, which as we know have a long tradition in
modern film, remit to the other trains that carried off human masses
toward the concentration camps or other destinations in the war.2
Its interesting that in this case the first shot of the train has Budapest
as its destination: a train that exists in an inverted relationship to
that which her grandmother took to leave Hungary. Now the grand-
daughter returns to Budapest in search of an Hungarian passport
and interrogates her familial past. I am particularly interested in the
use of images from a false archive, filmed in the present, but alluding
to the past: the trains are modern; Recife is not the same city that
received her grandparents in 1937. Nevertheless the reals evocative
power serves to think about the narrative and the fictional condi-
tion into which the representation of the past gets spliced.
Foram tempos que vocs no podem imaginar . . . voc no pode
imaginar (They were times you just cannot imagine . . . you can-
not imagine) repeats Mathilde, the directors grandmother, when
bringing up her departure from Europe. It is precisely that difficulty
in imagining that opens to the film the opportunity to intervene
and generate reality. The grandmother narrates her departure from
Hungary for Brazil in 1937, when the Nazis threatened to advance
over the entire European continent. She also speaks of her arrival to
a new world and the pain of the loss of her old life. That loss, the
void that emerges from immigration, is the mechanism that feeds the
cinematographic imagination, but it also has its limits: Kogut doesnt
seek out found footage like Di Tella in his investigation of the past.
She simply combines the voice of her grandmother and Jewish music
with images from the false documentary, asking for the spectators
collaboration to imagine that past from contemporary shots of places
lacking local marks: the Port of Recife, the Budapest train station, the
railway tracks. These are all non-places, as Pinazza observes, useful
for shooting the imaginary work that the film demands of its viewer.
The film doesnt attempt to be seen as historical. It presents con-
temporary images that have the ability to evoke the past referred to in
the grandmothers words. The impossibility of imagining signaled by
the grandmother thus has a positive value: it justifies the cinemato-

graphic intervention to replace the unimaginable (the Holocaust).
Jacques Rancire studies the space between screen and spectator
where the real is produced or manages to be recognized as such
(2006: 18183).3
Santiagoo also works with a type of void: the void of the house
where Joo Moreira Salles lived together with Santiago, the fam-
ilys butler, in the G vea neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. The film
speaks of the death of his parents, the end of an era, childhood, but
also of the end of the modernist expansion period throughout the
mid-1960s, when the 1964 coup began to eclipse an era of hap-
piness, cultural productivity, and economic growth. The present is
empty, just like the family home. The family no longer lives there,
and now Santiago alone has stayed behind, living at the time of the
interviews in a small Rio de Janeiro apartment. His presence in these
sequences refers to memory and archive, the same way that his words
are filmed and archived by the camera that uses them as a means of
access to a lost world.
As Comolli points out, the documentary acts as observer and actor
at the same time: the films do not only adapt archives for film and
display their contents, but they also themselves function as means of
recovery, and operate as archives of oral history. The films express
urgent questions about the mode of representation and, in tune with
certain trends in contemporary documentaries, they turn to the first
person, the self, to speak of themselves. Thus, Santiagoo recovers the
daily (real) life of the Moreira Salles family in the glorious moment of
developmentalist modernism, as well as images of the strange archive
accumulated by Santiago over 30 years: his collected notes, cards, and
information about families. Aristocratic characters from around the
world also appear filmed, that is, preserved in the celluloid that func-
tions as a visual and documentary archive.
The butler furthermore possesses a sophisticated symbolic capital
that includes cinematographic, musical, and literary references. Ingmar
Bergman, Beethoven, Fred Astaire, Dante, the Italian Quattrocento,
a well-nourished encyclopedia of European culture that once pro-
vided the Moreira Salles children with an education now recovered in
the film. Santiago as butler also occupies a vicarious pedagogical and
paternal role, like a hired father or mother that gives, among other
types of learning, a cinematographic education with enduring traces
in a family with several film directors. In this way, there are various
archives associated with the butler character.
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 191
An additional detail of the Santiago figure is the voice that speaks

in the film, which is not that of Joo, the director, but rather his older
brother, Fernando. Thus the self ends up doubled in the brother who
enunciates the directors words and constitutes an additional third
party interjected between the events mentioned and the self that
remembers them. Various layers end up superimposed through this
operation: the voice that narrates, which is distinct from that which
remembers, the character who is witness to the events, Santiago, and
the oral archive of an era past. All of these elements insert them-
selves between the self and the world evoked. There is no direct link
between the two, only one that is mediated by various interjected
thirds.
Lastly, La Televisin y yoo turns to the television that the protago-
nist never saw in his childhood for having gone into exile with his
family following the Argentine coup of 1968 and the Night of the
Long Batons, which had expulsed professors from the University of
Buenos Aires, including the directors father, sociologist Torcuato
Di Tella. Television is thought of as a source of a collective memory
from which the director remained excluded. Television, we know, is
the opposite of an archivethe images that it produces do not last,
but are quickly replaced by others; in Argentina, where the archives
are weak or nonexistent, very little from the earliest TV has lasted.
It then also implies an empty archive, even though Di Tella will try
to look for the information that will help him better understand his
family history.4
Reality, as Karl Erik Schollhammer (2005) reminds us, is that
thing impossible to represent, that which resists symbolization5. In
that sense, it is interesting that the three films depart from a void,
from a hole and an enigma before which they intend to be search
tools, even if the result of that search does not manage to fill the void
shown, but simply call into evidence its own hollowness. What is left
between the question and the viewer is an image that condenses the
enigma and displays films intervention against the problem of the
real.
Facing this problem, the films occupy the dual position signaled
by Comolli: they act as both observers and actors. They are instru-
ments that explore and, at the same time, decompose the nature of
the archive. Thus, Santiagoo exhibits an enormous archive of 30,000
pages, built up by the films protagonist over 30 years. It is an aristo-
cratic familial archive that accumulates an enormous wealth of infor-
mation without any use for others. The absurd and arbitrary condition
of the archiveits place as a collection organized around a random

axis, useful only for compiling information but without a purpose or
destinationopens the path to examining the relationship between
reality and fiction, or how to represent the real, in the string of shots
where a fictional plot takes form.
The visual archive encapsulates an appropriate problem in interro-
gating the link between cinematographic language and the representa-
tion of the real. For its historic and documentary condition, archived
images acquired an elevated status frequented in some contemporary
films that increasingly use filmed material to construct a new represen-
tation and call into play their own contingency and opaqueness. Upon
making evident the material of which the film is made and the proce-
dures employed to narrate, they distance themselves from any natu-
ralization of the image. Hence they seek to form a totality of images
that postulate versions of reality that are tentative and temporary,
articulated like a language composed of syntagmata, that is, subject to
being distorted, which is what the films manage to do (especially La
Televisin y yoo and Santiago). Upon exploring the archive and extract-
ing fragments from it to recombine them, they show how fortuitous,
arbitrary, and contingent every syntagmatic combination is.
The memory stored in the archive thus remains revealed not as
an innocuous and immobile deposit, but rather as a compositum m of
fragments that, restructured in a fable, now acquires the form of a fic-
tion. The archive of oral memory constructed in the films turns out
accordingly not recuperated, but created (Rancire, 2006). The real
shows itself as a result of the cinematographic work.
In this sense these three films are, more than mere attempts to
investigate the past to gain awareness of that search, proposals to cre-
ate a visual memory where it did not previously exist. Upon departing
from a void, a loss, and a blank, the three films transform lack into
fuel for cinematographic narration. That hole encourages the search
and the construction of a tale to replace the absence, coming close to
what Comolli has studied as the presence of the image, founded upon
a dialectic between presence and absence where the viewer intervenes,
a phenomenon characteristic of the cinematographic experience.
At the same time, as we know, the documentaries are tributes in the
anti-information tradition, that is, they face off their own and obvi-
ously subjective version of the facts with those consecrated by mass
media (e.g. television). In this way, the genre condemns the alleged
objectivity of the visual code. The interstice where its poetics
become manifest are of an exploratory and experimental nature: the
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 193
documentary thus operates as a laboratory of formulas and a center of

invention as opposed to TV, dominated by repetition and convention-
alism, as Comolli has observed (2008).
Andrs Di Tellas La Televisin y yoo begins with the search for
a lost archive, the television archive of a generation from which
the director was separated due to his familys exile. Abroad from
Argentina, Di Tella could not watch the television of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, and the film attempts to recover that visual mem-
ory. Television, nonetheless, works more like the opposite of an
archive: it is not a means that stores information, but more a vehicle
of loss, destruction, and oblivion. None of what the TV enunci-
ates remains; it evaporates quickly and is swiftly replaced by a new
image. Nevertheless, Di Tellas film defends or exhibits a paradoxi-
cal nostalgia for the TV that the director never saw in its originally
presented format.
In Di Tellas film there persists, in that sense, a confidence in the
archive (and in the informant, an incredibly present figure in all three
films) as possessor of a revelatory knowledge. Yankelevichs enigma
(the peak and decline of his empire and his relationships with politi-
cal power), nonetheless, is not made clear, nor is it possible to under-
stand what happened with Di Tellas own family, the reasons for their
debacle and decline.
The Other Subject

Giorgio Agamben speaks in The Coming Communityy of the substitu-
tion, the vicar, the Other, not as an Other, but rather as an almost
symbiotic reflection of the self, a mirror image, a neighbor, an exem-
plumm (Agamben, 1993: 26). The exemplum, just as the Italian phi-
losopher develops the concept, serves to think about the proliferation
of doppelgngers in these filmsthe Yankelevich family, Santiago,
the grandmother in Um passaporte h ngaro. They are asymmetrical
doubles of the self: they are older, they pertain to a different national-
ity or social class, and they lived through a different historical con-
tingency. In another essay, Special Being, the Italian philosopher
speaks of the image that duplicates and reflects a special being, that is,
the image as pure appearance, mirror, or spectacle (Agamben, 2007).
The image contains within it the function of the double, given that
identity is always affirmed in terms of the other (Agamben, 2007;
Guimares, 2006).
Agamben speaks of the substitution in relation to an Arab medi-

eval religious practice, Badaliya, which means that the self becomes
situated in the place of the other (2007). This practice points towards
an adjacent space that is empty where the self may expatriate, that is,
have a place in that otherness inhabited by the neighbor. It is possible
to employ the figure of the vicar to think about the films analyzed
in this work. At the beginning, Santiagoo shows the brothers bed-
room (it would seem like it would show Santiagos room, but it is the
directors, which hints at this adjacency). It shows the empty bed, the
empty chair, and the covered furniture in the unoccupied rooms of
the family house where the director spent his childhood. What does
this empty and uninhabited house, shown insistently throughout the
film, mean?
The house and Santiago are both doubles or mirrors for the lost
and unrecoverable childhood. They shed light on an image of the self
that thus establishes a relationship of dependence with the Other who
becomes objectified: the double becomes necessary to display and
speak of the self. The self is subjectt to the Other, because it depends
upon its image. The image is always far from the self, it is something
else. The film radicalizes this relationship by resorting to Santiago as
a surface to elaborate the place of the self and by avoiding the first
shots, just as the director states at the end of the film. Inspired by
Ozus filmography, the film constantly keeps Santiago slightly distant
and under control even though it ultimately recognizes its position of
power over the butler who acts as a subordinate or a character subject
to the directors power: Ele nunca deixou de ser o nosso mordomo,
(He never stopped being our butler), the director confesses.
La Televisiin y yoo also plays with the void, as we recently saw: the
Yankeleviches empty apartment that was a TV production office in
years past; the now-empty factory of the Di Tella family, who share
a social status with the Moreira Salles family that they have now
lost. There is a voidthat which cannot be imagined (the real?) that
enables the documentarys work. The most interesting part of the
film is, perhaps, in the Yankeleviches story, although here too the
film believes in the reality that it shows. Unlike the other two, that
almost entirely disregard the historical or referential shots, Di Tellas
film includes images of Peronism and Yankelevich family albums, as
well as testimony from family members interviewed to help uncover
the mystery. This stands in contrast to the house in Gvea (today it
is the Moreira Salles Institution of Rio de Janeiro), which is shown,
empty and somewhat abandoned, with covered furniture, or in
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 195
contrast to the images of the false documentary in Um passaporte

hngaro. The information from the Yankeleviches does not help to
clarify the reasons for the ruin of the family empire, an issue that stays
an enigma.
In the case of Um passaporte, the void could be the citizenship
request form that needs to be filled, completed and around which
the film is organized. From that bureaucratic void of the State (the
place of the stateless and their descendants), the film is displaced and,
in another sense, shows the absence of images of the past: there are no
images (photographs, found footage, remains) of the grandparents
departure from Hungary and arrival in Recife. All that remains are
the passport and the registries in the Archive of Rio de Janeiro that
reveal the restrictions on persons of Jewish origin. The images are
replaced by shots that are contemporary, yet filmed on Super 8 (or
grainy film).
The confrontation with the familial image reveals the magnitude
of the loss: the stateless condition of the Jews expulsed from Europe,
the letter K in the grandfathers passport that alludes to his loss of
citizenship that the granddaughter shall now recover, even though
she fails (Kogut only obtains Hungarian citizenship for one year).
That is, the investigation of the Other through a story illuminates
and alters the nature of the self.
Finally, we must point out that Um passaporte hngaro, besides
its formal strategies, makes one see (it never postulates it, and from
there comes its excellent results) the fictional status of national
identities. Koguts film shows how namesthe surnames contin-
ually changed for political motives, or by the State, due to rac-
ism or the will of the protagonists themselves to hide their Jewish
background in the light of growing anti-Semitism, including in
the country where they seek refugeare as unstable as citizen-
ship, compared to clothes that can be taken off and put on by an
employee at the Rio de Janeiro archive. By recognizing the con-
stant variation in the public aspects of identity, the film reveals the
fictitious but nonetheless necessary condition of name and citizen-
ship. That is, the documentthe passport of a grandparent with
their photo, nationality, and name, constantly manipulated in con-
sulates, ministries, and archivesis a fiction, but an indispensable
one. The contingency of identity is proven at the end of the film,
when Sandra finally gains the citizenship, but only for a one-year
period. In reality, one could even say that the demonym is excessive:
the history of the passport that Sandra gets a hold of can be that
of any European passport obtained by Brazilians, Argentines, or

Americans; the directors residency in France during the filming of
Um passaporte h ngaro may allude to, from her own experience, the
need to recover a European citizenship, a demand many Latin
Americans felt throughout the 1990s (Lins, 2004).
The memories also show that they are capable of being deliber-
ately created: the rough images filmed on Super 8 in Recife, Rio, or
Budapest that the investigation uses as reference material are evidently
not archived images but contemporary shots, which, when contrasted
with the digital shots that have greater transparency, simulate antiq-
uity. The memory does not hold any indelible loyalty to the past; it
is merely a vehicle that the fiction can replace with as much author-
ity as true mental memory, in this case that of the Rio grandmother
interviewed in the film who played protagonist in the escape from
Hungary. As Consuelo Lins says, Sandra Koguts most pressing con-
cern while filming was not over obtaining Hungarian citizenship,
but over losing her Brazilian citizenship as a consequence of her new
nationality (Lins, 2004).
Di Tella points out that when they tell the story of the Yankelevich
empire it reminds him of his own family. The Yankelevich family
works as an exemplum, in the definition of this word according to
Agamben. Hence the proper place of the example is always beside
itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable
life unfolds. This life is purely linguistic life. Only life in the word
is undefinable and unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely linguis-
tic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except
by being-called. Not being-red, but being-called-red; not being-Ja-
kob, but being-called-Jakob defines the example (Agamben, 1993:
10). It becomes interesting to evoke the self through the other, in
this Jewish case, compared to the Italian immigrant through whom
a story of Argentine industrial elites develops. The two empires, the
Di Tella family empire and that of the Yankeleviches, reflect each
other as if in a mirror. One can even think about heavy industry
(fridges, television sets, and cars manufactured by the Di Tellas) and
cultural industry (radio and TV controlled by Yankelevich), in par-
allel and in contrast. Even the television that Di Tella watched was
Siam-Di Tella brand, the source of the family fortune that financed
the forefront taken in the 1960s in the homonymous Institute. Both
industries, heavy and cultural, flourished under Peronism, held up
as an economic-industrial device and a propaganda tool supported
in the flourishing cultural industry (in a clearly Adornian, that
is, negative sense): resources, radio, television, manipulation and
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 197
Figure 12.1 La televisin y yoo [TV and Me] (Argentina, 2001), directed
by Andrs di Tella
control of public opinion to sustain the regime and provide support

to populism.
In the image included above, director Andrs Di Tella goes over
the Yankelevich family archive with Jaime Yankelevichs grandson in
the empty apartment.
R eporting on O nes S elf

I would like to think about how the film Santiagoo presents Santiago
as a butler, despite suggesting it might take another direction upon
affording him speech and filming in his own apartment. Joo Moreira
Salles guides him, submits him to his own needs and recommen-
dations, denies him speech, interrogates him, shows him without
resorting to close-ups, maintaining an ambiguous distance that could
indicate respect but also authority and control. When Santiago wants
to speak of his sexuality, the director denies him the picture and pre-
vents him from doing so. Something remains out of bounds, even
in the final assembly of shots, that very exclusion and negation of
the witness word becomes one of the films most revealing aspects.
It unveils the procedure for the construction of the character and
discovers the nature of a patronizing relationship that, even though
Santiago is retired, persists between the director, who Santiago calls
Joozinho (Portuguese diminutive of Joo), and his former butler.

Simultaneously, Santiago manages to refer to himself as a member of
a damned race and alludes to his homosexuality. In this way, his
speech infiltrates this work to recover itself from that crude mate-
rial for the version that becomes the final cut of the movie.
This is also how it occurs with the Moreira Salles family men-
tioned through Santiagos story that elaborates an image of them
more essential than any other. The association of the house in Gvea
with the Pitti Palace in Florence, the aristocratic visits and the jet set,
the banquets, the dances, the floral arrangements, and the orchestra
indicate a world where the butler played his character. That version
prevails over the (empty) house shown in the film. Thus, Santiagos
narration has appropriated the image and inscribed it in his archive
of aristocratic families. In this sense, the narration ends up occluding
every real referent: Santiagos version predominates including over
the family filming that comprises the black nannies in uniform, wit-
nesses just like Santiago to the richness and social standing of the
Moreira Salles.
The three films resort to the archive of the other in their articu-
lation of an image of the self, and even displace themselves for that
archive of notes and crude material that will be processed in the
cinematographic syntax. The other called upon as witness ends up
taking over the image entirely and taking ownership of it. As Moreira
Salles suggests at the beginning, the film is the rewrite of a truncated,
failed film that was left unfinished. Uma reflexo sobre o material
bruto is the films subtitle, and in the same manner as La televisiin
y yo: notas en una libreta, this film comes close to being a cinemato-
graphic essay due to its ability to incorporate a metareferential reflec-
tion on its production. In this sense, upon reflecting on the film
from a distanced perspective, a theoretical one, the movies also think
about the position of the filmmaker as someone granted authority, a
bourgeois figure supported by economic and social capital, capable
of manipulating his characters and having the means to realize his
project.
If Andrs Di Tella chooses to compare himself with Sebastin,
Jaime Yankelevichs grandson, and recover the story of Jewish immi-
gration to Argentina, that course also chases after understanding the
trajectory of his own family through a third person, which becomes
indispensable for sensing ones own body, and giving it an image
that can only be provided by someone external and mildly distanced
from it (socially or temporally, or in terms of citizenship). Santiago
has Italian-Argentine roots, works for a Brazilian family, is 80 years
THE SELF AS OTHER
R 199
old at the time of shooting, and speaks a hybrid language, portunhol

with an Italian accent; Sandras grandparents were born in Europe
and her grandmother Mathilde speaks of a time impossible to imag-
ine, although from a Brazilian present and also with an accent; the
Yankeleviches, although more parallel, have a distinct affiliation
with the Di Tellas that nevertheless becomes blurred in the younger
generations.
The three films resort to a third in order to project images of the
self, in search of answers that they cannot seem to find submers-
ing themselves in their own pasts, but that they will not manage
to answer, not even through the invitation of a vicarious character
that operates at the same time as a double and a witness of those
lives examined. The third person, for his position that lies beyond
the dialogue between the producer and the viewer (the I and the
you), fulfills a key role as the surface that projects the images capa-
ble of speaking about that I through the other. Those images at
the same time can no longer distinguish themselves from a real-
ity beyond themselves: the distinction between reality and appear-
ance has disappeared (Rancire, 2009). The real is left then as an
elusive and inapprehensible substance, barely the fragile remains of
an unrecoverable talea tale from which there only remain pieces,
disjointed but still subject to being spliced into a narration that dem-
onstrates, even more so, the very precarious, artificial, and as a last
resort, indiscernible nature of real life as the material of a cinemato-
graphic fable.
*Translated by Jacob Steinberg
Notes
1. See also Consuelo Lins 2004.
2. The images of trains in another Brazilian film, Serras da desordem
(Andrea Tonacci, 2006) likewise evoke something uncanny: the
authoritarian modernization undertaken by the military dictatorship
in Brazil and the invasion railway tracks of the indigenous territories
of the Amazons. Cf. Luis Alberto Rocha Melo 2008.
3. On the Holocaust as unimaginable see also the critical posi-
tion held by Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four
Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shan B. Lillis. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
4. Silvia Romano & Gonzalo Aguilar, eds. Qu he hecho yo para mere-
cer esto? Manual de supervivencia del investigador de medios en la
Argentina. Buenos Aires: Asociacin Argentina de Estudios de Cine
y Audiovisual, 2009. This document speaks of the difficulties and

poor quality of visual archives in Argentina.
5. See also Belsey 2005.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993: 26.
. Special Being. In Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York:
Zone Books, 2007 7.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1951.
Benhabib, Seyla. Transformations of Citizenship. Dilemmas of the Nation
State in the Era of Globalization. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Van Gorcum
BV, 2001.
Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Document rios de busca: 33 3 e Passaporte h n-
garo. in O cinema do real, Amir Labaki and Maria Dora Mouro. Sao
Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2005.
Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real. Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
London: Routledge, 2005.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Os homens ordin rios, a fico document ria in O
comum e a experincia da linguagem, edited by Sabrina Sedlmayer et. al.
Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2007 7.
.Ver e poder. A inoccncia perdida: cinema, televis s o, ficco, documen-
t rioo. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2008.
t
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from
Auschwitz. Translated by Shan B. Lillis. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
Esposito, Roberto. Third Person: Politics of life and philosophy of the imper-
sonal. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Guimares, Csar. A singularidade como figura lgica e esttica do docu-
ment rio. Alceuu, 7, no. 13 (2006).
Lins, Consuelo. Passaporte H ngaro: cinema pol tico e intimidade.
In Gal l xia, Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunicao, Semitica e
Cultura, v. 7. Sao Paulo: Programa de Ps-Graduao em Comunicao e
Semitica PUC, 2004.
Pinazza, Nat lia. Transnationality and Transitionality: Sandra Koguts The
Hungarian Passportt (2001). in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen
Media, Issue 1. Available online att http://www.alphavillejournal.com/
Issue%201/ArticlePinazza.html (accessed September 2011)
Rancire, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. Oxford:
Berg, 2006.
. The Emancipated Spectator. r Translated by Gregory Elliott. New
York: Verso, 2009.
Melo, Luis Alberto Rocha. O lugar das imagens. In Serras da desordem m,
edited by Daniel Caetano. Rio de Janeiro: Azouge, 2008.
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Romano, Silvia and Gonzalo Aguilar (eds). Qu he hecho yo para merecer

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a
Buenos Aires: Asociacin Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual,
2009.
Schollhammer, Karl Erik. O espetculo e a demanda do real. In
Comunicao, cultura, consumo. A [des]construo do espet tculo contem-
r neo, edited by Joo Freire Filho and Micael Herschmann. Rio de
por
Janeiro: e-papers, 2005.
CH A P T ER 1 3
The Documentary: Between Reality

and Fiction, between First and
Third Person
Gonzalo Aguilar*
r
Four-Armed M onsters
In the freeze-frame one barely recognizes, inside an apartment
decorated with floral-patterned wallpaper, a body with four arms.
The voice of the producer comments: Aqui eu apareo ao lado de
Santiago. De todo o material uma das duas nicas imagens em
que fui filmado ao lado dele. Foi feita por acaso, (Here I appear
next to Santiago. Of all the material this is one of only two images
where I was filmed next to him. It was taken by chance). The film
in question is Joo Moreira Salless Santiago, and the people in the
shot are the protagonist, the butler of the Moreira Salles house-
hold, and the director who, in a shot taken by chance, completely
eclipses him. An image shot in 1992 returns in 2007 to resolve
the conflicting and traumatic relationship the director had main-
tained toward this material he had abandoned, only to return to
it 15 years later. With this remainder, this shot that, in the 1992
version, would have been an outtake, Moreira Salles discovers that
the film is not only about Santiago but tambbm sobre mim (it
is also about me). Comeava a, asserts the offscreen voice of the
director himself, um novo tipo de relacionamento, (There began
a new type of relationship). In a similar vein, Argentine documen-
tarist Andrs Di Tella, on different occasions when he was screening
204 GONZALO AGUILAR
Montoneros, una historia a (Montoneros, a Story, 1994), paused his

film in the instant where his body, also by chance, eclipses that
of Ana, the protagonist. The shot occupies a completely marginal
place in his documentary because the governing principle is that the
director-interviewer should remain offscreen. Yet, in retrospect, Di
Tella found in this shot a cue for his subsequent work, within the
orbit of what is known as the first-person documentary.
One could argue that both directors tend to consider their own
story and that of their families (Moreira Salles and Di Tella are well
known surnames in their respective countries) as a privileged place
where categories such as the public and the private, the spectacle and
the intimate, the political and the apolitical, the trivial and the mean-
ingful all establish relationships, and that this understanding is what
drives them to inscribe such a powerful first person. What interests
me more, however, is what this encounter (Moreira Salless sobre
mim) points to in a more general sense: what happened between
1992 and 2007 to cause the outtakes return, the return of that
which is left over? For what reason did the first person need to ret-
roactively inscribe himself into the image, and what exactly gives way
to this relationship between person and image? Definitively, what
does this novo tipo de relacionamento, which is not just that of the
director with his character but also that of the gaze with the images,
consist of?
The history of film could be written as a gradual conquest of the
third person or of the nonperson. In its origins, in the constitution of
what Nol Burch called the Institutional Mode of Representation,
the language of film elaborated in the times of Griffith was charac-
terized by the gaze of a spectator separated from his body and trans-
ported inside the visual diegetic spacee (Burch, 1990: 55). Not being
seenneither by the camera nor by the viewerpreserved the auton-
omy of fiction, a rule that still reigns today over a large portion of
cinematographic production. Everything occurs as if the cameras eye
should not anchor itself to any person in particular. In the conven-
tional grammar of cinema, the first person is either an absurdity or is
merely figured through such basic procedures as the subjective point
of view or the offscreen voice that, when added to the appearance of
a first person in the film, ultimately subordinate themselves to a third
person enframing them. We know that any cinematographic experi-
ence, aside from animated cartoons is, in some way or another, tied to
the document. Traditional film grammar excluded from among these
documents the first person not so much as a body (Orson Welles
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 205
and Woody Allen could very well appear in their own films, but on
the condition of taking on the role of a third person), but rather
as the discursive inflexion of someone claiming here I have left my
trace, or, as Salles states, aqui eu apareo. It goes without saying
that a general claim such as the one I am making here immediately
gives rise to numerous exceptions. But these never suffice to quell our
amazement about the way cinema has excluded the first person as a
document.
In recent years, this situation has changed markedly, and a new
type of relationship has emerged, not only with regard to the testi-
monial use of the document, (which, in spite of all possible reserva-
tions, in my view still best defines the documentary) but also with
regard to fictional uses.1 In Nanni Morettis Caro diarioo (Dear Diary,
1993)to give an example of a first-person fictionthe directors
own body becomes the protagonist in the form of an itch, and the
discursive inflexion of the diary genre reinforces the latters presence
through a proper name, which is also that of the director: the only
one among the entire cast or technical crew authorized to inscribe
himself as the first person.
This dislocation of the first person in film is perhaps owed to the
origins of cinema, the development of a visual grammar before the
appearance of a spoken one, and to the fact already signaled by Ludwig
Wittgenstein, that visual space has essentially no owner . . . and con-
tains no suggestion of a subject (Wittgenstein, 1975: 100). If the
history of film is thus basically articulated around the nonperson,
a genealogy could be put together to observe the different modes
through which the first person became inscribed in the image. One
of the privileged modes of that inscription is through the body. If
we return to our example of Santiago, the inscription is produced
there through the two-headed monster, one of whose heads belongs
to the director and the other to the character. The fact that the
inscription is artificial and still incomplete highlights the fact that
the director has his back turned toward us. Without his face, we are
only able to recognize Moreira Salles because he declares: Aqui eu
apareo. Through pronouns, a category that Peirce included among
his indexical signs, a voice doubles the image in the sobre mim. The
personal pronoun I seals the inscription with a testimonial pact,
which does not make all that is being said to be either true or at least
trustworthy (as occurs in Jonathan Caouettes Tarnation) but rather
forces us to read those indices under the force of testimonyin this
case, that of the director who places himself between the spectator
and the object that is being shown.
206 GONZALO AGUILAR
Is this relationship that Salles speaks of, then, the sign of a

more general transformation? Because, without doubt, it is valid for
the documentary and its shiftt toward the first person, the autobio-
graphical, the confessional, the intimate. But can we also claim that
this relationship has an impact on films of fiction? The analysis
of some recent Argentine films inclines us toward an affirmative
answer. A marked trait of the Argentine Nuevo Cine, to provide
just one example, has been to use the actors proper names for the
characters they play. In the names, a self-enclosed fiction is made
unstable and forced to reflect on the materials facilitating its own
production through stories that, unlike the names, are made up.
This use of proper namesamong other devicesmarks a change
in the regime of fiction, which instead of adhering to an autono-
mous or realist aestheticas in nonperson cinemauses fic-
tion more in the sense of a fabulation or in the way that Mallarm
used the term: as a hypothetical construction enmeshed in the web
of social life. But, in general, fiction, writes Jacques Rancire
(2006: 158), is not a pretty story or evil lie, the flipside of reality
that people try to pass off for it. Originally, fingeree doesnt mean
to feign but to forge. Fiction means using the means of art to
construct a system of represented actions, assembled forms, and
internally coherent signs.
El Rulo in Mundo gr a (Crane WorldPablo Trapero, 1999),
Couguet in Caja negra a (Black BoxLuis Ortega, 2002), Gastn
Pauls in S
S bado (SaturdayJuan Villegas, 2001), Freddy in Bolivia
(Adrin Caetano, 2001), Vargas in Los muertoss (The Dead
Lisandro Alonso, 2004) all show that our relationship with fiction
has changed. It is no longer the entrance to an autonomous world,
but rather the search for links with reality, and thus we come to
understand how third-person films have increasingly made use
of the document, the image as a document, in a more intense way.
This can be particularly seen in Lisandro Alonsos films, the point
of departure of which is always the document in an almost ethno-
graphic sense. Alonsos characters take leave from their own lives
to play a role characterized by exchange and dissolution: they are
themselves without ceasing to be others. The greatest virtue of the
filmmaker here consists, precisely, in not inscribing his person on
the screen, in never placing his body between the gaze and the
image. Alonso prefers to excise himself in order to observe and
register the other. The first person is not inscribednot because
he is not present but because difference provides the basic method
of relationship with the other. In contrast with Salless monster
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 207
fusing author and character, Alonso sustains distance as a means of

illuminating a relationship. The director is an outsider and a col-
lector of traces.
Why, then, in such dissimilar films as those mentioned above,
does the inscription of personhood become a shared critical prob-
lem? My hypothesis is that, however different in their approach,
all these films nonetheless work with the same kind of material: at
stake in them is the personthe part of human life that is most
alive, in Mara Zambranos words, the living core capable of pass-
ing through biological death (Quoted in Esposito, 2012: 1). This
relationship also goes back to the origins of film, that strange
art, as Serge Daney writes, which is made with true bodies,
(Daney, 2004: 288). My hypothesis, then, is of both an historical
and a critical order. Historically speaking, I maintain that a change
has taken place in our relationship with the image, in which the
link with the living is produced according to new rules. More than
a link, life is in the background of the image, guiding the modula-
tions of personhood. From the critical point of view, I suggest that
a new conceptual arsenal is needed because such established binary
differences as fiction versus reality, the real and the staged,
or filmmakers who believe in the image and filmmakers who
believe in realityaccording to the Bazinian distinctionare no
longer meaningful. The question is about turning our critical gaze
toward impure, or monstrous, images and about unsettling these
binary distinctions at the point where they fuse, become indiscern-
ible, or dramatic. Images, from this perspective, would not be the
means of arriving at the real, but enigmatic organism[s] which,
far from being the representation or copy of an ontological real-
ity exterior to them, are images among others on one and the same
plane of immanence.2 The image, considered in its impurity, does
not participate in binarisms but rather causes them to collapse.
What I propose, then, is to consider the image from two perspec-
tives: that of the environment in which we live and in which we
must inscribe a person; and that of a means of connecting ourselves
to life through images that challenge the binarism between the real
and the staged.
If the inscription of personhood does not principally relate to the
difference between documentary and fiction, if personhood is not
only a question about inflecting the first person (Moreira Salless it
is also about me) but also appears in third-person films or in those
in which the very category of personal pronouns is called into ques-
tion, if the self is not the origin but a fold and derivative (because there
208 GONZALO AGUILAR
is something in the camera that always resists capture): what is it that

brings us the indexical image? Why is this preeminence of the index,
of the trace, of the punctum, so powerful today? Why has the sheer
force with which it appears before us cut through the binary between
the real and the staged? Today, we can no longer categorize cinematic
signs but must instead let them manifest themselves in every moment
of the film, both from the point of view of its production and of its
reception. This is due, on the one hand, to a crisis of beliefs that strips
the image of any spirituality or transcendence and returns it to the
state of pure material (or better, of impure material). Undoubtedly,
our gaze is encouraged in this way to collect images like one who col-
lects the remains of a shipwreck at the seashore. On the other hand,
the very dispersion and propagation of images destabilizes our idea of
the real and brings us to rely on physical connections, on the living,
on the most minuscule certainties, in order to keep producing reality.
We need, in short, to link the image to the real or to the living, and
this is what I wish to sketch out here.
The Image and the L iving

There is an increasing number of films today that exhibit this link
with the living. Even in mainstream production, we now often see
intertitles informing us that the events narrated in the film occurred
in real life or about the characters destiny beyond the diegesis, as if
the narrative had to warrant its improbabilities through these bio-
graphic hinges. The current proliferation of biopics (Leonardo de
Caprio, we are told, is growing a beard for his next role as Lenin)
responds only in traumatic and deviant ways to this ambivalent desire
for linking the image with the real and the living. Elsewhere, aside
from the increase in biopics, reality shows (where life itself is captured
in order to make the protagonists live in the image), biodramas, the
surge of the documentaries, and the various kinds of home movies
that circulate online, even conviviality with online images anywhere
and anytime, seem to indicate that today the units of a story are no
longer of a fictional order, but vital, be it as a slice of the quotid-
ian or as a biological chain connecting birth and death. From this
point of view, the inscription of the first or the third person in these
crisscrossings is nothing less than the clashings of a group of living
organisms who struggle to leave their footprint. The camera itself
now becomes an organism or a prosthesis because we no longer live
outside of the image.
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 209
Figure 13.1 M (Argentina, 2007), directed by Nicols Prividera.
Let me exemplify and at the same time radicalize this reflection

on the new type of relationship between the image and personhood.
I am referring to the documentaries about desaparecidoss [disap-
peared], or more precisely, produced by the children of desapare-
cidoss like Albertina Carris Los rubioss (The Blonds, 2003), Nicols
Privideras M (2007) or Mara Ins Roqus Pap Ivn (2004). While
vn
images of the directorstheir bodies and their voicesare of fun-
damental importance in these films, the first person is not the point
of departure. More than documentaries in the first person, these
are documentaries about the difficulties of reaching personal enun-
ciation, whether in the first, second, or third person. This becomes
clear, especially, in Los rubios, which rejects conventional documen-
tary procedures that had predominated in the genre until then and
partly continue to do so.
Through personal experience, the directors of these films know
about the difficulties that exist before one is able to say I because,
ever since their childhood, their identity and that of the people sur-
rounding them have been suspended or called into question. In
Albertina Carris Los rubios, the self unfolds and investigates the rela-
tionships between past and fiction. In Pap Ivn, we witness the ago-
nizing struggle between an I that painfully inscribes itself into the
images and a he (the father) who, from the side of death, tries to
unmake any attempt of questioning his lifetime decisions. In M M, the
self ties the social to the personal, the political to the historical, pres-
ence to absence. In sum: the corporalization of these documentaries
generates a vicarious selff in which the possibility of memory and the
political is examined. Prividera laid out this situation starting his film
with no less than a sentence from William Faulkers novel Absalom!
210 GONZALO AGUILAR
Absalom!! The quote says: His childhood was full of [names]; his very
body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he
was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth.
What is called into question is the person himselfthe person in
the image and in the presentand this also applies to Joo Moreira
Salless Santiagoo and Lisandro Alonsos Liverpooll (2008). Santiago
has something of a wax death-mask to it. Andr Bazin, when asked to
provide an example of the indexical image that differentiated cinema
from all other mediums, suggested the holy shroud in which Christs
body had left its imprint (an example which, as is well known, had
major consequences for Bazins poetics). The protagonist in the film
says that, when a neighbor asked him if they were making a movie,
he had answered to her: they are embalming me. In other words,
he knew very well what he was dealing with. For Santiago the butler,
the film is a journey to the world of the dead: Santiago claims that he
speaks with them, that the strokes of the clock give life to his papers
and documents, and that everything has died, but all the time his
intention is to have a joyous burial, referring in some way to the
film itself.
The director accompanies him in this funeral rite, but this proves
to be not so simple. In fact, in the process, Moreira Salles finds him-
self faced with other deceased whom he must embalm, among them
his own father. The butlers death is contiguous to that of Moreira
Salles the father, for whom the movie also acts as a grave. It is a
fairly key moment in the movie because, while narrating the death
of his father, the director takes possession of his subjects figure and
declares that a memria de Santiago y da casa da G vea nossa a
(The memory of Santiago and of the house in G vea is ours). The
first person singular and the third person compromise to become
a first person plural, and the personal pronoun becomes possessive.
The inscription of the directors person into the film, which oscil-
lates between identification with the father and the butler, ends up
finding, in his fathers death, the very principle of his composition.
After the dance of hands that Santiago asks to be included in the
film, the director recovers various shots of the houses pool, the only
place previously shown in a color home movie of the family taking
a swim. Now the pool is without swimmers and the camera freezes
melancholically on the tree leaves that fall randomly. In the plot,
the leaves falling at random are opposed to the aestheticized hands
that rise up and make themselves the echo of the Brazilwood tree
no lesswhich, in this very patio, evokes the figure of the father,
according to the funereal prayer recited by one of the brothers. In
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 211
the anachronistic return of the leaves that fall in the present, the
image is transformed by the director into a rejection of the quadro
perfeito e a fala perfeita (perfect picture and the perfect speech)
that he had wanted to construct from Santiago. The hazardous fall
of the leaf, just like the casual shot of the monster, remits now to
Werner Herzogs statement the value of that which is leftover, that
which occurs fortuitously. Moreira Salles calls it os tempos mor-
tos em que quase nada acontece, (the dead times in which almost
nothing occurs): Santiago nosso, (is ours), the director may
inscribe his sobre mim in the story he narrates and the unexpected
death of the father opens the crack from outside through which the
force of chance seeps in, which ends up ruining the script and order-
ing the material laid to rest from Moreira Salless, until then, only
unfinished film. For Moreira Salles, Santiagoo is the return to his
parents home.
But the embalmed figure does not stay behind: it will not let any-
one take ownership over him so easily. He, who knew how to edu-
cate the young Joo, comes back from death, although alive in his
image, to reclaim his rights. In Santiago, temps mortss not only lead
to the discovery of the documentarys formal construction but also,
moreover, carry the testimony of a force from beyond or before the
mise-en-scne. With a disarming affection and reliability, Joo Moreira
Salles decides to include a very particular dead instant of Santiago
in his film. It represents his characters most intimate part, accord-
ing to the director himself, which had not been captured by the
camera because it had been turned off on the directors instruction
who decided that por esse lado a gente no vai (we are not going
down that route). What Santiago wants to tell the camera is a son-
net through which he reveals his own belonging to an order of
cursed beings. At the same time, the directors observationwhich
is almost an orderindicates that there is an entire area (the former
butlers demoniacal superstitions) that he prefers to erase (because
the film is the hybrid monster about him and about me, and
not about what they do not, cannot share). If we follow this route
(esse lado que a gente no vai), we would also have to recover what
Santiago says in two instances about his writings: they are abor-
tions of savagery. It would be tempting to associate this idea with
Benjamins well-known phrase on culture and savagery but I wish
to focus instead on the protagonist himself, his lack of descendants
and his decision to live among the dead. Here, indeed, is the films
central cue, the monsters true raison dtre: one body that is put in
front of another. A boxing match, but not an aestheticized one as
212 GONZALO AGUILAR
the first version of the film had imagined and rather, instead, a tragic
one, because Santiago (a foreigner, lest we forget) comes to dispute
the place of the father.
The demoniacal proliferates on all sides and above all in the but-
lers writing, which is Menard-like or similar to Joseph Mitchells Joe
Gould (the Portuguese edition of which carried a postface by Moreira
Salles): a maniacal, demented writing, serial but at the same time
displaced, subjugated by universal history and great men (a theme
that was not foreign to Moreira Salles whose previous film Entreatos
[Between Speeches, 2004] had been about Lula). A genealogy of
morals but written to sustain the powerful, at their service, with that
demoniacal component, that mauditt quality, which the director at
times pursues and elsewhere conjures through aestheticization. There
is no first person for the aristocrats without the third person of their
scribes. The image is not the product of a staging that pushes toward
the real, but a place of dispute in which that division is affirmed, all
the time effacing itself as it never manages to become definitively
stable. It is, in fact, akin to the monster.
F rom the Gaze to Touch

Despite being almost incomparable, Lisandro Alonsos Liverpooll is
as tied to the living organism as Moreira Salless Santiago. Alonsos
poetics stays faithful here to his prior films. The exteriority of the
protagonist, just as in La libertadd (Freedom, 2001) or Los muertoss (The
Dead, 2004), is embodied here in the containers representing the
quantitative world of commodities, which inevitably cross the path
of Alonsos characters. They are the equivalents of the wooden posts
that Misael must sell in La libertad d or the shirt that Vargas, the pro-
tagonist in Los muertos, has to buy, or even more so of his encounter
with a prostitute, the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity,
in Benjamins words. But this exteriority, this world of quantities, of
the three and two make five, as the merchant in Los muertoss puts
it, is something that Alonsos characters pass through or abandon in
order to immerse themselves in other types of incommensurable rela-
tionships, a force-field that is immeasurable and uncontrollable.
Staying true to his previous work, however, does not keep
Alonso from introducing a few novelties in Liverpool, as becomes
evident in the opening sequence. In a fixed frame, two young
men play with their joysticks as they watch a screen that is out of
frame. Behind them, Farrell, the protagonist, watches from a table.
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 213
Immersed in the videogame, the two players cheerfully manipulate

the image on the screen while the image that contains them remains
imperturbable, as if the environment of action/reaction in which
the game players exist were radically different from the one pro-
duced in the film. And it effectively is: distance is one of Alonsos
stylistic features, but in this case its purpose is not to render the
distance of a gaze but quite the oppositeto narrate the drama of
human and organic contact. The completely unempathetic gaze of
the camera is deceitful because one of the films questions is how to
achieve the warmth of a hand by means of the filmic image, how
to mark out a space, within the framework of ethnographic inves-
tigation, for the trace of the other or the third person. The hands
of the videogame players that move the image from within are con-
trasted with Farrells, which interact with the physical world. We
see Farrell painting, Farrell cutting sausages, Farrell fixing some
headphones, Farrell eating, Farrell drinking from a bottle. The
proverbial manual dexterity of Alonsos characters is also present
here, along with something else: the hand that tries to touch its
ghost. Farrell returns to his hometown to find out if his mother is
alive but when he finds her, he cannot establish any contact with
her. Only in one moment does the mother suspend her delirium to
tell this manin whom she does not recognize her sonthat his
hands are cold.
What is Farrell escaping from that pushes him to leave even the
very film in which he is the protagonist? Why, when the fiction
hasnt run full circle yet, while there are still 20 minutes to go, does
the protagonist go missing and impose his own sovereign act on a
story told by another? Why does the camera prefer to stay put and
observe Farrell moving away into the distance until it loses him
forever? What extinguishes the character is the biological link itself:
first with a mother who does not recognize him when he asks her
Do you know who I am? Not even when he affirms, more than
once, I am Farrell. His alleged daughter, called Anal a, who is
mentally handicapped, also fails to recognize him: all she does is
ask for money, over and over. Faced with the curse of repetition,
Farrell chooses to leave, giving Anala a keychain with the word
Liverpoolthe name of the port city which represents the charac-
ters errancythat she will later clutch in her hands. Both women,
weakened by their motor or mental illness, are almost-characters,
pure life incapable of emitting the word I. A weighty inheri-
tance, as one of the characters states. Farrell decides to suppress
214 GONZALO AGUILAR
filiation or is incapable of bearing its consequences, but the film,

by virtue of staying behind in the village, abandons the protagonist
for the sake of remaining with the women. As if there were some-
thing in that reduced biological life that the protagonist refused to
understand: a life purely tactile, maternal, and feminine, that comes
forth with all its intensity in one of the most emotional scenes of
the film when the mentally incapacitated daughter rests her head
on a tree, as if seeking a rest she cannot find among men. Between
the vegetative state and the state of commodities, Anal a touches
what is most alive: the heart she draws on a leaf (which Farrell can-
not appreciate), the tree she leans against, the keychain she clasps
in her hands.
The butlers cursed side and the girls autism both foreground
something that escapes the mise-en-scnes intentions, and they are
literally uncontrollable: they cannot fit into a fictional program or the
orderly register of documentary. Like the leaf that falls, the appear-
ance of lifelike a force from outside that cannot be controlled, like
dead time that opens up at randomcompromises the image, the
enunciations of personhood, and thus the very modes of documen-
tary and of fiction.
*Translated by Jacob Steinberg
Notes
1. Testimonial use does not entail an affirmation of the truth of the
images. Rather, it establishes a link of credibility, which allows us
to cast doubt on the veracity of the image at the very moment of its
exhibition. It is a mode of reading, which relies on a very different
kind of pact with the audience than fiction.
2. Didi-Huberman, 2001: 639. See, on the same subject, Marrati,
2008: 40.
B ibliography
Burch, Nol. Life to Those Shadows. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990.
Daney, Serge. Cine, arte del presente. Edicin de Emilio Bernini y Domin
Choi. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2004.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the
symptom paradigm. Art Historyy 24, no. 5 (2001): 621645.
Marrati, Paola. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Translated by Alisa
Hartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
THE DOCUMENTARY
Y 215
Esposito, Roberto. Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the

Impersonal. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Rancire, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. Oxford:
Berg, 2006.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Remarks. Translated by Basil Blackwell.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
C on tr ibu t or s
Gonzalo Aguilar is professor at the University of Buenos Aires. His

books have been published in Spanish, Portuguese, and English,
among them New Argentine Film: Other Worldss (New York, 2011),
a (Buenos Aires, 2009),
Episodios cosmopolitas de la cultura argentina
and Poesia concreta brasileira: as vanguardas na encruzilhada mod-
a (So Paulo, 2005).
ernista
Jens Andermann is professor of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian
Studies at the University of Zurich and editor of the Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies. Among his books are New Argentine
Cinemaa (London, 2011), The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power
in Argentina and Brazill (Pittsburgh, 2007), and Mapas de poder:
ga literaria del espacio argentinoo (Rosario, 2000).
una arqueolog
Jos Carlos Avellar is one of Brazils most influential and long-
standing film critics. He teaches at the Escola de Cinema Darcy
Ribeiro, Rio de Janeiro. He has been vice president of Fipresci,
the international association of film critics, and has been a juror at
numerous festivals, including Cannes and Venice. His most recent
books are O Cho da Palavra: Cinema e Literatura no Brasill (Rio
de Janeiro, 2007), Glauber Rocha a (Madrid, 2002), and A Ponte
Clandestina: Teorias de Cinema na Amrica Latina a (So Paulo,
1995).
Ivana Bentes teaches at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
where she coordinates the project Esthetics of Communication:
New Theoretical Models in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism.
A regular contributor in the press and on TV and the author of
Canudos100 anoss (Rio de Janeiro, 1997) and Joaquim Pedro de
Andrade: a Revolu a (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), she has also
uo Intimista
curated ground-breaking social projects in audiovisual literacy.
Domin Choi teaches at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad
del Cine, Buenos Aires. Codirector of the film journal Kil
l metro 111,
218 CONTRIBUTORS
he is the author of Transiciones del cine: de lo moderno a lo contemporr-

neoo (Buenos Aires, 2010).
Tom Cohen is professor of English and codirector of the Institute
on Critical Climate Change at SUNY, Albany. He is the author
of Anti-Mimesiss (Cambridge, 1994), Ideology and Inscription
(Cambridge, 1998), and Hitchcocks Cryptonymiess (Minneapolis,
2005) His most recent titles are Theory and the Disappearing Future:
On de Man, On Benjamin n (New York, 2011), coauthored with Claire
Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, and Telemorphosis: Critical Theory in
the Era of Climate Changee (Ann Arbor, 2012).
Edgardo Dieleke teaches at New York University, Buenos Aires.
Coeditor of Pollticas del sentimiento. El peronismo y la construcciin
de la Argentina moderna a (Buenos Aires, 2010), he has also directed
the documentary Cracks de n carr (2011). Currently, he is shooting a
feature length documentary on the Malvinas/Falklands war, entitled
Back to Stanley.
lvAro Fernndez Bravo is director of New York University, Buenos
Aires, and Associate Professor at Universidad de San Andrs, Buenos
Aires. Among his books are El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura
y mercado en Amrica Latina a (with Luis Crcamo-Huechante and
Alejandra Laera; Rosario, 2007) and Literatura y frontera: procesos
de territorializacin en la cultura argentina y chilena del siglo XIX
(Buenos Aires, 1999).
Andra Frana is coordinator of film studies at Pontificia Univer-
sidade Catlica de R o de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and former vice chair of
the Brazilian society of film scholars, Socine. Among her books are
Terras e Fronteiras no cinema pol rneoo (Rio de Janeiro,
ltico contemporr
2003) and, with Denilson Lopes, Cinema, globalizao e intercultur-
alidadee (Chapec, 2010).
Csar Guimares is professor of film studies at Universidade Federal
de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte and editor of the film journal
DeviresCinema e Humanidades. He is also the author of Imagens
gvel e o Vissvell (Belo Horizonte, 1997) and
da memria: Entre o Leg
coeditor of O comum e a experincia da linguagem m (Belo Horizonte,
2007).
Davidd Oubia is an editor of Cahiers du Cinma a (Espaa) and Las
Ranass (Arte, Ensayo, Traduccin). He teaches at the University of
Buenos Aires and at Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires. His books
include El silencio y sus bordes. Modos de lo extremo en la literatura y
CONTRIBUTORS 219
el cinee (Buenos Aires, 2011) and Una jugueterra filoss

sfica: cronofo-
fa y arte digitall (Buenos Aires, 2009).
tograf
Joanna Page teaches at Cambridge. She is the author of Crisis and
Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema a (Durham, NC,
2009) and coeditor of Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary
Film from Latin America a (New York, 2009). Forthcoming is her
book Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature:
Between Romanticism and Formalism.m
Robertt Stam is professor of film studies at New York University. He
has published widely on Brazilian, French, and American cinema and
on cultural and postcolonial theory, including the books Literature
through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation n (2004);
Film Theory: An Introductionn (2000); Francois Truffaut and Friends
(2006); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race
in Brazilian Cinema and Culturee (1997); and Subversive Pleasures:
Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Filmm (1989). His most recent publi-
cation, coauthored with Ella Shohat, is Race in Translation: Culture
Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlanticc (New York, 2012).
Inde x
5 x Favela: Agora por Ns Mesmos Arroseur arros, L (The Sprinkler

(Five times Favela: This Time by Sprinkled/The Waterer Watered)
Ourselves) (Diegues, 2010), 148 (Auguste and Louis Lumire,
n (Kiarostami, 2004), 33
10 on Ten 1895), 20
Assassinat du duc de Guise, L (The
Adorno, Theodor W., 35, 41 Assassination of the Duke de
Agamben, Giorgio, 50, 57, 104, Guise) (Calmettes, Le Bargy,
105, 117, 121, 127, 132, 136, 1908), 45
138, 193, 194, 196, 200 Aura, El (The Aura) (Bielinsky,
Aguilar, Gonzalo, 1, 8, 60, 61, 69, 2005), 181
70, 159, 171, 183, 184, 199, 201, Avellar, Jos Carlos, 6, 11, 217
203, 217
Akerman, Chantal, 37, 39, 41 Babenco, Hector, 142, 143, 145,
Allen, Richard, 100 146, 150, 151, 154, 155
Allen, Woody, 205 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37, 41, 152, 155,
Alonso, Lisandro, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 40, 219
6070, 85, 180, 181, 182, 184, Balibar, tienne, 161, 171
206, 207, 210, 212, 213 Balzac, Honor de, 176
Althusser, Louis, 139, 141 Bangma, Anke, 57
Amado, Ana, 159, 171 Barthes, Roland, 32, 80, 92, 100
Amado, Jorge, 152 Batata, Ailton, 112
Amaral, Tata, 108 Bates, Norman, 145
Amores perros (Loves a Bitch) Battista, Emiliano, 41, 200, 215
(Gonzlez Irritu, 2000), 107 Bauman, Zygmunt, 90, 100
Andermann, Jens, 1, 7, 8, 61, 64, Bazin, Andr, 4, 32, 41, 63, 66,
69, 70, 117, 157, 217 92, 160, 173, 174, 177179, 184,
Anderson, Benedict, 141, 156 207, 210
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 148, Beceyro, Ral, 41, 69, 70, 157, 171
217 Belsey, Catherine, 200
Andrade, Joo Batista de, 6, 44, 50, Beltro, Andrea, 19, 21, 79
51, 52 Benhabib, Seyla, 187, 200
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 183 Benigni, Roberto, 49
Aprea, Gustavo, 8 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 48, 99, 122,
Arendt, Hannah, 181, 184, 187, 200 126, 137, 211, 212, 218
Argentina latente (Latent Bennett, Susan, 80, 85
Argentina) (Solanas, 2006), 161 Benning, James, 38, 39
222 INDEX
Bentes, Ivana, 4, 7, 59, 70, 103, Carandiru u (Babenco, 2002), 140,

107, 117, 217 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 155
Bernardet, Jean-Claude, 57, 109, Carassai, Sebastin, 158, 171
117, 186, 200 Caro diarioo (Dear Diary) (Moretti,
Bernini, Emilio, 62, 69, 70, 161, 1993), 205
163, 171, 214 Carri, Albertina, 60, 85, 209
Bielinsky, Fabin, 5, 157, 159 Carroll, Noel, 88, 100
Birch, Nol, 204, 214 Casas, Fabin, 173
Boca de Lixo (The Scavengers) Cas, Regina, 105
(Coutinho, 1992), 24 Caso Norte (Batista de Andrade,
Bodanzky, Jorge, 7, 93 1977), 50
a (Caetano, 2001), 206
Bolivia Cassavetes, John, 183
Bonaerense, Ell (Trapero, 2002), Casting a Glancee (Benning,
171, 180 2007), 38
Bonanza a (Rosell, 2001), 35, 37, Castro, Fidel, 162
39, 40 Central do Brasil (Central Station)
Bourdieu, Pierre, 147 (Salles, 1998), 5
Brahim, Oscar, 34, 35 Certeau, Michel de, 48, 49, 50,
Brant, Beto, 107, 108, 110 55, 57
Brecht, Bertolt, 48, 154, 160 Cu de Estrelas, Um (A Starry Sky)
Bresson, Robert, 180 (Amaral, 1996), 108
Bruner, Jerome, 74, 79, 85 Chekhov, Anton, 80, 81, 97, 98, 99
Bruzzi, Stella, 3, 8, 83, 85 Chion, Michel, 144
Burch, Nol, 204 Choi, Domin, 4, 7, 173, 184, 214,
Burd, Marcelo, 160, 161, 163, 165, 217
167 Cidade de Deus (City of God)
Burman, Daniel, 59 (Meirelles, 2002), 5, 60, 85, 107,
Butler, Judith, 85, 172 109112, 117
Cidade dos Homens (City of Men)
Cabra Marcado Para Morrer (Morelli, 20022005), 105
(Twenty Years Later) (Coutinho, Cinaga, La (The Swamp) (Martel,
1984), 3, 45, 56 2001), 180
Caetano, Adrin, 59, 60, 76, 77, Cinco Vezes Favelaa (Five Times
172, 206 Favela) (Hirszman/Andrade/
Caetano, Daniel, 69, 70, 71, 200 Diegues, 1962), 148
Caixeta, Ruben, 100 Close-upp (Kiarostami, 1990), 46
Caja negra (Black Box) (Ortega, Cohen, Tom, 4, 7, 119, 138, 218
2002), 206 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 1
Campanella, Juan Jos, 4, 5, 7, 173, Comolli, Jean-Louis, 57, 65, 68,
174, 175, 184 70, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101,
Campion, Chris, 136, 138 151, 156, 185, 190, 191, 192,
Caouette, Jonathan, 205 193, 200
Capovilla, Maurice, 50 Como Nascem os Anjos (How
Caprio, Leonardo di, 208 Angels Are Born) (Salles, 1997),
Carancho (Trapero, 2010), 180 107108
INDEX
X 223
Copacabana (Rejtman, 2007), Er shi si cheng ji (24 City)

39, 41 (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008), 87
Costa, Pedro, 3, 92 Espejo para cuando me pruebe el
Courbet, Gustave, 176 smoking (A Mirror for When
Coutinho, Eduardo, 3, 4, 6, 7, 16, I Try on the Dinner Jacket)
17, 2125, 45, 5657, 74, 78, (Fernndez Moujn, 2005), 160,
79, 8085, 87, 90, 93, 97, 98, 161, 168170
99100, 148 Esposito, Roberto, 187, 200, 207,
Cowie, Elizabeth, 69, 70 215
Esquenta a (Almeida/Ciavatta et al.,
Daney, Serge, 43, 53, 57, 207, 214 2011), 105
Darwin, Charles, 108 Estrellas (Stars) (Len/Martnez,
Day, Doris, 126 2007), 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 7478,
Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 111, 117, 160, 8284
171, 178, 179, 183, 184, 214
Derrida, Jacques, 136 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, 2004), 163
Diamond, Elin, 82, 85 Fala Tu (Speak) (Coelho, 2003), 109
Dirio de um Detentoo (Racionais Falicov, Tamara, 159
MCs), 109 Fanon, Frantz, 162
Diaz, Enrique, 98 Fantasma (Ghost) (Alonso, 2006),
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 6, 47, 66, 68, 184
48, 49, 51, 57, 199, 200, 214 Faulker, William, 209
Diegues, Carlos, 148 Favela Risingg (Mochary/Zimbalist,
Dieleke, Edgardo, 6, 59, 218 2005), 109
Dignidad de los nadies, La Feld, Claudia, 172
(The Dignity of the Nobodies) Fernndez Bravo, lvaro, 1, 8, 185,
(Solanas, 2005), 161 218
Dindo, Richard, 46 Fernndez Moujn, Alejandro, 160,
Di Tella, Andrs, 4, 8, 60, 185, 189, 161, 168170
191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, Ferrez (Reginaldo Ferreira da Silva),
203, 204 105
Di Tella, Torcuato, 191 Filho, Joo, 201
Doane, Mary Anne, 160, 171 Filipelli, Rafael, 41, 69, 70, 171
Dog Day Afternoon n (Lumet, Finding Nemoo (Stanton/Unkrich,
1975), 46 2003), 21
Duranty, Louis Edmond, 176 Flaherty, Robert, 44
Flaubert, Gustave, 32, 146, 179,
Edifcio Masterr (Coutinho, 2002), 182
24, 25, 85 Fontana, Patricio, 60, 70
Entreatoss (Between Speeches) Foucault, Michel, 113, 133, 136,
(Moreira Salles, 2004), 212 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 156
Entrenamiento elemental para Frana, Andra, 6, 8, 43, 46, 58,
actores (Elementary Training for 218
Actors) (Len/Rejtman, 2009), France, Anatole, 36
74, 7778, 83 Freyre, Gilberto, 154
224 INDEX
Gachassin, Diego, 160, 161, 163, Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino,

165, 167 2009), 137
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 82, 85 Invasor, O (The Trespasser) (Brant,
Gaggero, Jorge, 157 2002), 107110
Gandini, Gerardo, 162 Iracema, uma Transa Amaznica
Gaudreault, Andr, 143, 156 (Iracema) (Bodanzky, 1976), 7,
Getino, Octavio, 161 58, 92, 93, 94, 101
Gianvito, John, 38
Gil, Gilberto, 151 Jackson, Michael, 108, 109
Gladiator (Scott, 2010), 131 Jaguarr (Rouch, 1967), 45
Godard, Jean-Luc, 91, 99, 148 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 3, 9, 183, 184
Goffman, Erving, 74, 82, 85 Jenkins, Henry, 143, 156
Gonzlez, Horacio, 160, 171 Jogo de Cena (Playing) (Coutinho,
Gonzlez Irritu, Alejandro, 107 2007), 1623, 27, 28, 29, 56,
Gramsci, Antonio, 151 74, 7880, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93,
Griffith, David Wark, 204 96100
Guantes mgicos, Los (The Magic Juzo (Behave) (Ramos, 2008),
Gloves) (Rejtman, 2003), 180 1116, 23, 25, 2729, 56
Guimares, Co, 17, 30 Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), 183
Guimares, Csar, 7, 87, 100, 193,
200, 218 Kiarostami, Abbas, 3, 33, 41, 46, 91
Guimares Rosa, Joo, 27, 29 Kirchner, Nstor, 158
Kiss of the Spider Womann (Babenco,
Habitacin disponiblee (Room for 1985), 142, 146
Rent)t (Burd/Gachassin/Poncet, Kittler, Friedrich, 136
2004), 160, 161, 163, 164168 Klinger, Gabe, 60, 70
Haddad, Amir, 23 Kogut, Sandra, 8, 26, 27, 29, 60,
Hall, Stuart, 152 85, 185, 187, 188, 189, 195,
Hardt, Michael, 159, 171, 200 196, 200
Hartog, Simon, 156 Kohan, Martn, 41
Herschmann, Micael, 201 Kracauer, Siegfried, 4, 158, 171
Herzog, Werner, 211
Hevia, Hernn, 41 Laclau, Ernesto, 171, 172
Hijo de la novia, El (Son of the Lanzmann, Claude, 49
Bride) (Campanella, 2001), 5 Latour, Bruno, 83, 84, 85
Hirszman, Leon, 148 Lauretis, Teresa de, 84, 85
Hitchcock, Alfred, 7, 119, 120, 126, Lehman, Kathryn, 171
127, 135, 144, 145, 179, 218 Len, Federico, 6, 35, 36, 39, 41,
Holocaustt (Chomsky, 1978), 49 74, 75, 83, 84
Hora de los hornos, La (The Hour of Leonera (Lions Den) (Trapero,
the Furnaces) (Solanas/Getino, 2008), 180
1968), 161163 Levi, Primo, 49
Horkheimer, Max, 35, 41 Lvinas, Emmanuel, 49, 58
Hotel Monterreyy (Akerman, 1972), 37 Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 178, 179,
Huyghe, Pierre, 46 183, 184
INDEX
X 225
Lewkowicz, Ignacio, 171, 172 Melo, Luis Alberto Rocha, 199,

Libertad, La (Freedom) (Alonso, 200
2001), 4, 6, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, Memoria del saqueo (Social
69, 181, 182, 212 Genocide) (Solanas, 2003), 160,
Lingenti, Alejandro, 7, 173, 175 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 171
Lins, Consuelo, 196, 199, 200 Menem, Carlos, 162, 163
Lins, Paulo, 105, 110 Mihaileanu, Radu, 49
Lissovsky, Mauricio, 46, 58 Mitchell, Joseph, 212
Liverpooll (Alonso, 2008), 7, 40, 65, Mocarzel, Evaldo, 112
66, 181, 182, 210, 212 Mograbi, Avi, 3
Llins, Mariano, 40 Moguillansky, Alejo, 40
Longhini, 161, 168170 Moi, un noir (I, a Negro) (Rouch,
Lula da Silva, Luiz Incio, 105, 212 1958), 182
Lumet, Sydney, 46 Montoneros, una historia
Lumire, Auguste and Louis, 20, (Montoneros, a Story) (Di Tella,
28, 40, 64, 66, 69, 179 1998), 204
Lund, Katia, 107 Moreira Salles, Joo, 4, 8, 17, 30,
Lynch, Michael, 83, 85 109, 186, 187, 190, 194, 197,
198, 203, 204, 205, 207, 210,
M (Prividera, 2007), 209 211, 212
Madonna, Louise Ciccone, 108 Moretti, Nanni, 205
Mallarm, Stphane, 206 Morkin, Sergio, 34, 35, 40
Man Who Knew Too Much, The Moscou (Moscow) (Coutinho, 2009),
(Hitchcock, 1956), 126 8082, 84, 87, 90, 93, 9799
Manovich, Lev, 32, 40 Muertos, Los (The Dead) (Alonso,
Marcinho VP (Mrcio Amaro de 2004), 6, 60, 63, 64, 66, 85, 181,
Oliveira), 108, 109 182, 206, 212
Margem da Imagem, A (The Mujer sin cabeza, La (The Headless
Margins of the Image) (Mocarzel, Woman) (Martel, 2008), 40, 180
2003), 112 Mulher no Cangao (The Woman
Margulies, Ivone, 37, 41, 45, 58 among Bandits) (Penna, 1976), 50
Marinho, Roberto, 156 Mulvey, Laura, 32, 41
Marker, Chris, 147, 148 Mundo gra (Crane World)
Marrati, Paola, 214 (Trapero, 1999), 85, 180, 206
Martel, Lucrecia, 40, 180 Mutumm (Kogut, 2007), 26, 27,
Martnez, Marcos, 35, 36, 39, 41, 28, 29
74, 75 Myers, Jorge, 41
Martins Costa, Ana Luiza, 27
Marx, Karl, 35, 147, 156 Nabuco, Joaquim, 152
Matadores, Os (Belly Up) (Brant, Nadar soloo (Swimming Alone)
1997), 108109 (Acua, 2003), 181
Matrix, The (Wachowski, 1999), 183 Nagib, Lcia, 1, 2, 9, 69, 70, 117
Mdici, Emlio Garrastazu, 52 Nanook of the Northh (Flaherty,
Meirelles, Fernando, 4, 5, 7, 59, 60, 1922), 44, 62
85, 107, 110 Negri, Antonio, 159, 171
226 INDEX
Nichols, Bill, 61, 70, 165, 172 Pern, Juan Domingo, 162, 186,
Nia santa, La (The Holy Girl) 194, 196
(Martel, 2004), 180 Pinazza, Natlia, 188, 189, 200
Niney, Franois, 43, 49, 58, 101 Pieiro, Matas, 40
Nochlin, Linda, 176, 184 Pixotee (Babenco, 1983), 142, 146
Notcias de Uma Guerra Particular Plato, 147, 176, 179
(News From a Personal War) Poncet, Eva, 160, 161, 163, 165,
(Lund/Salles, 1999), 109 167
Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro
(Bielinsky, 2000), 5, 157 (Prisoner of the Iron Bars)
Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (Sacramento, 2003/4), 140, 149 ,
(Resnais, 1955), 49 150, 151, 154, 155
Prividera, Nicols, 209
Ocio (Leisure) (Villegas/Lingenti, Profit Motive and the Whispering
2010), 7, 173, 175, 176, 181, 183 Wind d (Gianvito, 2007), 38
Odin, Roger, 89, 101 Prxima estacin, La (Next Stop)
Ojos de fuego (Fiery Eyes) (Gaggero, (Solanas, 2008), 161
1995), 157 Psychoo (Hitchcock, 1960), 145
nibus 174 (Bus 174) (Padilha,
2002), 7, 112, 119, 120129, Ramos, Ferno, 101
133, 136 Ramos, Maria Augusta, 11, 12, 16,
Orfeuu (Diegues, 1999), 109 23, 25, 56
Oricchio, Luiz Zanin, 8, 9 Rancire, Jacques, 32, 41, 179, 184,
Oscarr (Morkin, 2003), 34 190, 192, 199, 200, 206, 215
Oubia, David, 2, 6, 9, 31, 41, 59, Rangil, Viviana, 172
69, 70, 71, 160, 171, 172, 218 Rap do Pequeno Prncipe Contra
as Almas Sebosas, O, (The Little
Padilha, Jos, 4, 5, 7, 59, 112, 119, Princes Rap Against the Wicked
120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, Souls) (Caldas/Luna, 2000), 109
129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137 Read, Justin, 133, 138
Page, Joanna, 2, 6, 8, 9, 73, 219 Rear Window w (Hitchcock, 1954),
Palavecino, Santiago, 41 145
Panh, Rithy, 46 Reguerraz, Jean Pierre, 76, 77
Pap Ivnn (Roqu, 2004), 209 Rejtman, Martn, 6, 39, 40, 41, 74,
Parker, Alan, 74 83, 84, 180
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 29, 146 Rembrandt (Rembrandt
Passaporte Hngaro, Um (A Harmenszoon van Rijn), 176
Hungarian Passport) (Kogut, Remedi, Claudio, 172
2002), 8, 60, 85, 185, 187, 188, Renoir, Auguste, 179, 180
189, 193, 195, 196, 200 Renov, Michael, 3, 9, 70
Pauls, Alan, 69, 70, 157, 171 Resnais, Alain, 49
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 205 Ricoeur, Paul, 80, 85, 89
Penna, Hermano, 50 Rocha, Glauber, 2, 217
Pera, Marlia, 19, 21 Romano, Silvia, 199, 201
Perio, Paulo Cesar, 93, 94 Roqu, Mara Ins, 209
INDEX
X 227
Rosell, Ulises, 35, 36, 39 Silvestri, Graciela, 41

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 33, 41 Silvia Prietoo (Rejtman, 1999), 180
Rosi, Francesco, 49 Sinatra, Frank, 25
Rossellini, Roberto, 91, 176, 178, Smith, Murray, 100, 144
180 Smithson, Robert, 38
Rouch, Jean, 45, 182 Solanas, Fernando, 2, 160172
Ra, Fernando de la, 34, 158, 162, Sortie des usines Lumire Lyon
168 (Leaving the Factory) (Auguste
Rubios, Los (The Blonds) (Carri, and Louis Lumire, 1895), 20
2003), 60, 85, 209 Spielberg, Steven, 49
Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983), 176 Spivak, Gayatri, 149, 156
Russo, Mary, 37, 41 Sprinceana, Andreea Iulia, 80, 85
Stam, Robert, 7, 139, 219
Sbado (Saturday) (Villegas, 2001), Stanislavsky, Konstantin
206 Sergeyewitch, 154
Sabotagee (Hitchcock, 1936), 127, 137 Stanton, Andrew, 21
Sacheri, Eduardo, 173 Stewart, James, 126
Sacramento, Paulo, 149, 150, 151 Stewart, Susan, 37, 41
Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, 33, 41 Stiegler, Bernard, 136
Salles, Murilo, 107 Stites Mor, Jessica, 171, 172
Salles, Walter, 5, 29, 59, 85 Svampa, Maristella, 171, 172
Santiago: Uma Reflexo Sobre o
Material Brutoo (Salles, 2007), Tan de repente (Suddenly) (Lerman,
8, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197, 2002), 181
203, 205, 210, 211, 212 Tarantino, Quentin, 137
Sarlo, Beatriz, 41 Tarkovsky, Andrej Arsenyevich, 183
Sarno, Geraldo, 17, 30 Tarnationn (Caouette, 2003), 205
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 88, 101 Televisin y yo, La (TV and Me)
Schechner, Richard, 74 (Di Tella, 2002), 8, 185, 186,
Schindlers Listt (Spielberg, 1993), 49 191, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198
Schollhammer, Karl Erik, 191, 201 Third Memory, Thee (Huyghe,
Schwarzbck, Slvia, 41 2000), 46
Scorer, James, 160, 172 Thomas, Daniela, 85
Scott, Joan Wallach, 83, 85 Tonacci, Andrea, 4, 6, 44, 53,
Secreto de sus ojos, El (The Secret in 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 67, 69,
Their Eyes) (Campanella, 2010), 70, 199
7, 173, 174, 175, 176, 183 Torres, Fernanda, 19, 21, 22,
Senna, Orlando, 7, 93 23, 30
Serras da Desordem (The Hills of Train de vie (Train of Life)
Disorder) (Tonacci, 2004), 4, 6, (Mihaileanu, 1998), 49
44, 5356, 6164, 67, 68, 70, Trapero, Pablo, 59, 85, 180, 206
199, 200 Tregua, La (The Truce) (Rosi,
Shakespeare, William, 153 1997), 49
Shoaa (Lanzmann, 1985), 49 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the
Silva Mariz, Tiago da, 27 Will) (Riefenstahl, 1935), 131
228 INDEX
Tropa de Elite I, II (Elite Squad) Vita bella, La (Life is Beautiful)

(Padilha, 2007, 2010), 5, 7, (Benigni, 1997), 49
112114, 133, 136, 137
Truffaut, Francois, 145, 219 Warburg, Aby, 48, 214
Turner, Victor, 74 Warriors, Thee (Hill, 1979), 176
Turma do Gueto, A (Malin, Watt, Ian, 176, 184
20022004), 105 Weber, Max, 139
Webster, Joseph, 83, 85
ltima parada 174 (Last Stop 174) Welles, Orson, 35, 177, 178, 204
(Barreto, 2008), 121, 122, 137 Weudes, Paulo, 52
ltimo dia de Lampio, U Wieviorka, Annette, 49
(Lampios Last Day) (Capovilla, Wilsinho Galilia (Baptista de
1973), 50 Andrade, 1978), 6, 44, 5052
Una Novia errante (A Stray Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 205, 215
Girlfriend) (Katz, 2007), 181 Wolf, Sergio, 59, 69, 71, 85
Unkrich, Lee, 21
Uspensky, Boris, 144 Xavier, Ismail, 56, 58, 67, 68, 70,
71, 92, 101, 154
Varela, Drauzio, 142145, 150
Veloso, Caetano, 140, 151155 Zambrano, Mara, 207
Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (Pereira Zhang-ke, Jia, 3, 87
das Santos, 1963), 148 Zibechi, Ral, 171, 172
Villegas, Juan, 7, 173, 206 iek, 121, 127, 133, 136, 138,
Virilio, Paul, 136 158, 171, 172

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New Directions in Latino A merican Cultures

A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & Jos Quiroga

New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zonee

New Concepts in Latino American Cultures

A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & Jos Quiroga

Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age

Jens Andermann and lvaro Fernndez Bravo

All rights reserved.

List of Illustrationss vii

10 Decembers Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and

Notes on Contributorss 217

1.1 Juzoo [Behavee] (Brazil, 2007), directed by Maria

Jens Andermann and lvaro Fernndez Bravo

In what ways can the resurgence of national cinemas in Latin America,

of conventional genres (Nagib, 2007: xviiixix), effectively provid-

successorthe modernist avant-garde and postmodernismrealism

Di Tella, Joo Moreira Salles, Andrea Tonacci, as well as the most

a unified new Latin American cinema and instead call attention to

and auteurs from the immediate context of their vernacular recep-

self-referentiality, reflect on the radical wager an actors perfor-

duration and deep focus, he suggests, the advent of digital technol-

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992.

Jos Carlos Avellar*

the composite image of the various mothers who accompany their

Figure 1.1 Juzo [Behave] (Brazil, 2007), directed by Maria Augusta

To a greater or lesser extent, while they are filming, documenta-

To make a documentary, agrees Geraldo Sarno, is to empty yourself

elements of fiction. To put it more precisely, it takes place in a space

feeling; the viewer, during the screening of the film, is reduced to a

Asking a question stimulates an encounter; it can provoke a con-

fragmented way, limited by a form of short-sightedness, contributes

the life of the sert

Footprints: Risks and

In the nineties, a new type of cinema emerged in Argentina, made

The New A rgentine C inema : Reality and

concrete points of reference, how to unrealize the real city, how to

Exotism and S pectacle

is the way in which it imposes itself, its authoritarian and ultimately

too makes a rather unconventional livelihood: being a slum dweller,

Toward a D ocumentary without O bject

expressive function is prioritized, then other meanings come to the

Benning and Akermans influences are clearly present in Copacabana

film that, instead of agreeing to give a meek testimony, blurs what it

Politics of the N ew Cinema

Documentary Cinema and the

During my visit to Phnom Penh and the Cambodian interior for

appears as a procedure capable of demonstrating the idea that the

in favor of naturalized images of that past (this is when documentary

However, in contemporary art as well as in documentary film, this

assemblies of different artistic and temporal fields, such that a mem-

He remembers that the gesture of the historian is to provoke incon-

History is repeated in these films not on the scene of the histori-

Reenactment in Documentary Television:

complexity of the image, is the repetition of places, gestures, bodies,

newspapers, to gradually show the discontinuities between those

aesthetic experimentation that the military government aborted dur-

Reenacting the Solitary Body of

m [The Hills of Disorder]

zone of death, understood as the suppression of othernessthe

Frana, Andra. O cinema entre a memria e o documental, Revista

The Return of the Natural:

Contemporary Latin American film, particularly Argentine and

in which the viewer perceives the fiction as real. More than a