Documentary Reflexivity In Brazilian Cinema

Although documentary reflexivity and the blurring of boundaries between the documentary genre and fiction were arguably present in Brazilian cinema from the outset—from the docudramatic travelogues of filmmaker-adventurer Silvino Santos (1886–1970) in the 1920s to Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s (1928-) urban chronicles of Rio in the 1950s, and the genre-bending work of the 1970s, such as Orlando Senna (1940-) and Jorge Bodanzky’s (1942-) Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, 1974), Aloysio Raulino’s (1947–2013) Tarumã (1975), or Glauber Rocha’s (1939–1981) own Di-Glauber (or Di Cavalcanti, 1977)—I would argue that it is only in the 1980s, with Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra, that reflexivity becomes the dominant mode of documentary filmmaking. The historical experience of struggle and traumatic loss provides Coutinho a matrix for seeking formal

Starting with Coutinho’s landmark film, then, in what follows I briefly sketch the progressive radicalization of reflexivity and performance in Coutinho’s own work, and subsequently move on to different formal responses developed, at least in part, in reaction to Coutinho’s work.

The Art of Interviewing: Eduardo Coutinho and the Theater of the Real

Shot between 1981 and 1984, Cabra marcado para morrer (1984) is, in a sense, the completion of the project from which it inherits its title; it integrates original footage salvaged after the Brazilian military invaded the Galiléia cooperative in Pernambuco at the time of the March 31, 1964 coup. Filming had begun just a month earlier. The original Cabra—made with the support of the National Student Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes, UNE) and the leftist Movement