The body, intimacy and the camera: an analysis on the meaning of torture in recent Brazilian audiovisual productions

• Grant number: 10/00602-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2010
• End date: December 31, 2010
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Mauro Luiz Rovai
• Grantee: Gabriela Peters Cremasco Gonçalves
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This study will focus on three recent audiovisuals, 15 filhos, Que bom te ver viva and Vlado: 30 anos depois, and investigate the different ways these works approached torture mechanisms that took place in Brazil during the military period. The various aesthetic elements present in these productions, such as for example camera framing, narrative rhythms, camera movements, articulation between image and sound (including dialogues), will be analyzed so to enhance the sociological aspects brought about by the three productions. In this sense, the centre of the analysis will be on the issues that surround the torture accounts, as, by and large, these accounts relate not only to a lived past, but to memory fragments that are strengthened each time the past is revisited by the present. This work will focus on the possible meanings that the practice of torture acquired within the accounts of the tortured, and not on the study of torture during the Brazilian military period. For such, it is essential to understand the way torture was experienced, and to bring the marks that may have been left on the body and memory of the tortured (or their friends and family) onto the foreground - the same people who also face legal efforts to let these marks be forgotten. By approaching the expression resources present in the audiovisual to the social and political dimensions of torture displaces, therefore, the concern for legal aspects involved in these issues, and replaces them by an analysis on how people were affected in what they have of more touchable: their bodies, their intimacy.