Characters in displacement in the contemporary brazilian documentary

• Grant number: 12/03788-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2012
• End date: August 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Visual Communication
• Principal Investigator: Samuel José Holanda de Paiva
• Grantee: Gustavo Souza da Silva
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The settings of the characters of documentaries have show graditions and, above all, different presentations. This instance initially instigates the execution of this post-doctoral project, that, given the growth of documentary production in the country in the first decade of this century, elects a more precise route: the theme of displacement - an issue that is necessary to research especially in relation to Brazilian documentary. Six films constitute the corpus of analysis: Em trânsito (Henri Gervaiseau, 2005), Motoboys - Vida Loka (Caíto Ortiz, 2004), Handerson e as horas (Kiko Goifman, 2007), Andarilho (Cao Guimarães, 2006), Pachamama (Eryck Rocha, 2008) e Um passaporte húngaro (Sandra Kogut, 2003). This set of films is organized along two axes: one that cares about the person who moves (the first four films on the list) and another that is interested in the documentarist-character, searching for something specific that constructs the narrative of his film (the last two films). These documentaries provide a series of questions that can be structured as follows: (1) the settings and circumstances of the characters in their movements, (2) the relationship that establishes the character with the director, as both, the person who chooses his or her characters and as a proper character and (3) to investigate how the film narrative points to an ethics of realism resulting from these two previous instances. To answer these research problems, we will build a film analysis method (Aumont and Marie, 1989), which focuses on image, text and sound, to gather evidence to enable the development of the ideas proposed here.