Theatricality as a vector of the film-essay in contemporary Brazilian documentary

Abstract

The current essay analyses Eduardo Coutinho’s Jogo de Cena (2007). The concepts at play are those of film-essay, and of theatricality, within the historical context of Brazilian documentary films. Designed as free exercise of the rules of genre, film-essay requires the explicit presence of a reflexive dimension, supported on the use of specific film forms and techniques. Unlike essays composed from the juxtaposition of comments over images, such as Godard’s Lettre de Sibérie, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1966), or João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007), Jogo de Cena is solely based on interviews with direct sound. The impossibility of distinguishing between voluntary women, who narrate their own experience and actresses following a script make their life reports to different extents expressive, if not ‘true.’ This indefinition, a way of commenting on the theatricality implicated in the relation between deponent, camera, and filmmaker, invites that one rethinks the relation between theatre and documentary report, person and persona, which calls forth a reflection on how the subject as construction, and his/her ‘life-reports’ as performances triggered by the camera-effect. Coutinho innovates in this film, for he operates on reflexivity at a crossroads where meta-cinema meets meta-theatre in a film-essay.