WHEN ART REINSCRIBES LOSS: Grief and Subjectivity in the Documentary Elena by Petra Costa

• Grant number: 25/11771-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Psychological Treatment and Prevention
• Principal Investigator: Gustavo Henrique Dionisio
• Grantee: Ana Carolina Marques dos Santos
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project proposes an implicated psychoanalytic approach to the documentary Elena (2012), by Petra Costa, with the aim of investigating how cinematographic language can operate as a symbolic device in the elaboration of grief. Based on Freud's text Mourning and Melancholia (1917), the distinction between these two psychic modes of experiencing loss is articulated, analyzing how the film - by mobilizing aesthetic resources such as fragmented montage, voice-over, silence, and personal archives - transforms Elena's absence into image and symbolic narrative. The central hypothesis holds that Elena constitutes a form of "writing of the self," in which the director affectively reinscribes the loss, reorganizes her subjectivity, and shares a profoundly singular experience of pain with the viewer.The research departs from the premise that grief, when not symbolized, may stagnate and produce long-lasting psychic consequences, drawing closer to melancholia. In the director's case, her sister's early and silent death by suicide, and the absence of spaces for listening and elaboration, hindered the libidinal detachment necessary to the mourning process, resulting in a prolonged state of suffering and identity fusion. Years later, the making of the documentary emerges as an attempt to elaborate this pain. The aesthetic construction of the narrative is presented as a form of remembrance (De Matos & Gusmão, 2021), allowing affects, memories, and silences to be transformed into audiovisual language, creating meaning for the unspeakable.The methodological approach is qualitative and interpretative, grounded in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and contemporary studies on art, subjectivity, and autobiographical cinema. The analysis will be conducted in four main stages: mapping and contextualization of the work; filmic reading of formal and symbolic elements; psychoanalytic interpretation of the material; and reflection on its symbolic function in the elaboration of grief. In addition to Freud (1917), the study draws on authors such as Frayze-Pereira (2022), Dionisio (2014), Petrosino and Prudente (2024), and Fukumitsu (2013), who contribute to the discussion on the intersections between art, pain, symbolization, and psychic health.The relevance of this research lies in both academic and social domains. Academically, the project contributes to the interdisciplinary debate among psychoanalysis, art, and cinema, broadening the understanding of non-clinical modes of grief elaboration. Socially, the study highlights the role of artistic creation as a tool for subjective reorganization and symbolic sharing of suffering. In this sense, Elena is not only the account of a personal pain, but a gesture of resistance against silencing and of self-reconstruction through cinematographic language. By reinscribing absence, the documentary allows the director - and the viewer - to access sensitive ways of symbolizing loss, promoting a psychic and aesthetic passage through pain. (AU)