Critical Arts South-North Cultural and Media Studies
ISSN: 0256-0046 (Print) 1992-6049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcrc20
Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary Jogo de Cena (2007) Deane Williams & Sarah McDonald To cite this article: Deane Williams & Sarah McDonald (2015) Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary Jogo de Cena (2007), Critical Arts, 29:5, 676-688 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2015.1125097
Published online: 17 Feb 2016.
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Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary Jogo de Cena (2007) Deane Williams and Sarah McDonald
Abstract This article examines Eduardo Coutinho’s Jogo de Cena (2007) in relation to documentary spectatorship across cultures. Coutinho’s documentary contains numerous culturally specific and localised references amongst the stories told by a cast of women actors. These stories and the figures that relate them make available a number of layers of knowledge production constituting a filmic experience that is multivalent and complex. In considering these complexities and their spectatorship, this article utilises Paul Willemen’s notion of comparative film studies as a springboard to begin a closer consideration of what is possible with a combination of Brazilian cultural knowledge and documentary film theory. Keywords: Brazil, comparative film studies, Coutinho, documentary film
Introduction In his 1995 article for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Paul Willemen proposed a theoretical framework for film studies utilising a model borrowed from literary studies. For Willemen (1995: 3), this comparative film studies would be beneficial because cinema is ‘particularly well suited to provide a way into the question of how socio-economic dynamics and pressures are translated into discursive formations’. Willemen’s intriguing and generative article, however, relies on a notion of cinema Deane Williams is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University Melbourne.
[email protected]; Sarah McDonald is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne.
[email protected] ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049 pp.676–688 29 (5) 2015 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2015.1125097
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that is industrialised and globalised in economic terms, emphasising a comparative approach to each region’s engagement with capitalism. Although springing from Willemen’s approach, this article will instead focus on documentary, the most artisanal, immediate and localised of the audio-visual sub-genres. In order to adapt Willemen’s framework, this article will propose that a careful attention to the vernacular intricacies of cultures available through the incorporation of on-theground geocultural knowledge can, at least, recognise and possibly provide a model for understanding the importance of a dialectic between estranged and localised approaches, in order to account for the images and sounds of the lived, historical world in a manner which will contribute to the ‘generation, sharing and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the South’ (Southern Screens 2013). This article arose from a collaboration between a researcher in Brazilian cinema, with extensive lived experience in Brazil, and a researcher in Australian documentary, with little experience in Brazilian geocultural matters. As Willemen (2006: 99) was able to propose himself, this comparative approach ‘must necessarily proceed by way of a collaboration between intellectuals from different geo-historical formations’. To assist in our discussion we turn to Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary Jogo de Cena (2007) which is, at once, a straightforward document of a set of stories belonging to women in contemporary Brazil, as well as a sophisticated essaying of personality and performance in relation to specific and vernacular geocultural knowledge.
For a comparative film studies In his companion pieces ‘Detouring through Korean cinema’ and ‘For a comparative film studies’ (2002 and 2005 respectively), Willemen sets out on a project of defining what he terms ‘comparative film studies’, at once transforming comparative literature and addressing a need in film theory. The first of these, and probably the second, emerged from a 1997 moment when Willemen, we believe, was teaching film studies in Korea. He writes: The fraught problems of modernization and modernity in cultural practices such as cinema, and the narrative as well as the compositional peculiarities these tensions appeared to generate in films offered a way in to dialogues that enabled my interlocutors [Korean students] and me to test our models of understanding cinema. (Willemen 2002: 171)
Willemen chose to teach Korean cinema, a subject he knew very little about. He saw, within this framework, his own as a means of ‘explor[ing] the contours of the limits, to explore the limits of one’s mode of [the] culturally produced, historically produced limits of one’s understanding’ (STP interview 2008). Part of this process was to disavow the strength of Western film theory, that there was ‘a universal, international
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standard’ against which all cinemas are to be measured and to accentuate the notion that has propelled his own research since the 1970s, ‘that films are shaped by the cultural and historical constellations within which and for which they are made’ (Willemen 2002: 171). Leaving his Korean ‘detour’ to one side, Willemen’s (2005: 99) ‘working hypothesis’ ‘assumes that cinema, a cultural form on the cusp of the economic and the cultural, is particularly well suited to provide a way into the question of how socio-economic dynamics and pressures are translated into discursive constellations’. Without going into the assumptions and motivating questions which follow on here, it may be useful to see how, for Willemen, this hypothesis relates to the discipline of comparative literature, and his adaptation of this model through the positing of a collaborative approach, from which we have drawn inspiration for our own research. The precondition for such a collaboration is that the participants should be prepared to consider their own intellectual formations and thought-habits as symptomatic constellations shaped by the very same dynamics that animate historicity itself. To date, such a programme of work has been thought of, in my view correctly, in terms of the possibility of a historical materialist theory of culture. But in the same way that no theory has as yet been elaborated capable of reconciling Einsteinian physics and quantum theory, so there is no single theory available to us that is capable of articulating cultural dynamics with the socio-economic field. (ibid.)
Most of Willemen’s work in this area is a response to Franco Moretti’s and Christopher Prendergast’s recent work on comparative literature and how this relates to the discourse of World Cinema. For Willemen the idea of the ‘matching of foreign form to local social experience’ (Prendergast cited in Willemen 2005: 101) as the marker of success in world literature terms has been adopted by film studies. Also, in his view, notions around a certain maturity in different literatures, of ‘when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign (Western) form and local materials’, need some finessing (ibid: 103). In this configuration, Willemen’s emphasis on foreignness springs from his own personal approach as an ‘other’ to cultures and their films that he encounters. In an interview with Deane Williams, Willemen (2008) spoke about his deliberate positioning of himself as outsider to the cultural milieu and its films, in order to force a productive encounter: Increasingly I think, it is by exploring the contours of what you don’t understand that you begin to get a better grip on what you think you understand. I was invited [by] a friend in Korea to teach for a few months in Seoul. I deliberately chose a post-graduate class, to teach them about Korean Cinema which I knew nothing about. So I saw lots of videos and just asked ‘This is what I think is going on, what do you think?’ With the students, it didn’t work very well. They were far too polite and nodding, writing down
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Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies things they found interesting. But with colleagues, i.e. other people teaching there, I had, to my mind, very productive discussions where my own ignorances became apparent and they had to fill me in: ‘Well there are these things that you’re not taking into account because you’re not from here.’ So I’d make it a deliberate point to explore the contours of the limits, to explore the limits of one’s mode of a culturally produced, historically produced understanding.
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As Cecilia Sayad (2013: 37) points out in Performing authorship, Willemen’s approach outlined in his ‘The national revisited’ stems from his reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘creative interpretation’ as it relates to ‘the concept of alterity’: My own conclusion from Bakhtin’s discussion of creative understanding is that one must be ‘other’ oneself if anything is to be learned about the meanings of other cultures, of another culture’s limits, the effectiveness of its borders, of the areas where, in another memorable phrase of Bakhtin, creative understanding requires a thorough knowledge of at least two cultural spheres. It is not simply a matter of engaging in a dialogue with some other culture’s products, but of using one’s understanding of another cultural practice to re-perceive and rethink one’s own cultural constellation at the same time. (Willemen 2013: 37–38)
Key to Willemen’s approach (one that we take as a model for this article) is a recognition of one’s own otherness in relation to another culture, in this case for one of us, Brazilian filmic and larger culture, but also that this creative understanding is borne out of the combination of a researcher in Brazilian cinema and culture, and a researcher in documentary studies. The bringing together of these two researchers, both with an otherness to bring to bear on this topic, generates not only new knowledge about the object of study, but also ‘a modification’ in Willemen’s terms, of the secondary realm of documentary studies. It seems to us that this is one of the keys to particular documentary studies researchers’ engagement with Willemen’s ‘outsideness approach’. The simple directness of a documentary studies approach must be levened with a culturally and historically responsible accounting for the textual qualities of the text, but with the ‘uncomfortably cross-eyed’ mode of operation, ‘with one eye on their own situation, their other eye must remain focused on the potential effects of their discourses within the [other] situation’ (Willemen 2006: 41).
Documentary For us, Willemen’s assertions about (in the main) narrative cinema are not as clearcut in relation to documentary film. As suggested earlier, we have been interested in Australian documentary film culture mostly in relation to what has been understood as dominant documentary film cultures – Britain, America, Soviet Union, Germany, France – and it is in this regard that the formal attributes of films are less in relation to
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a single entity (such as Hollywood), but are part of a large, international circulation of formal qualities in relation to local circumstances or materials, in Willemen’s phrasing. Documentary film is also closely connected to (and has been since the 1930s) a culture of journals, reading and writing, of film theory and criticism, film festivals and personnel exchanges. It could also be argued that documentary film, in some conceptions (such as that emerging from the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s) was understood as a reaction to Hollywood. This documentary film culture complicates the model of adaptation that Willemen works through and against. The other crucial point here is in relation to Willemen’s seeking out of tools to further his comparative film studies project. Key to this is his return to Charles Sanders Pierce’s work on semiotics, particularly the notion of the three dimensions present in any given sign: the index, the icon and the symbol. For Willemen (2006: 104), this leads to a type of textual analysis that can treat signs as partly representational (through their iconic and symbolic dimensions) and partly non-representational (in their indexical dimension). The latter does not involve a substitutive relation, but one of expressive contiguity, profiling an ontological connection between sign and referent.
As we know, in documentary film studies since, at least, Bill Nichols’ Ideology and the image, documentary has been explicitly linked with the indexical and the argumentative: in fact, this is what, we can assert, distinguishes it from feature narrative cinema. Of course, this is much more complicated than we have let on. That a documentary image is a representation of the world (as distinct from a reproduction, in Nichols’ terms), provides for us a set of circumstances to judge, to assess, about the value of the documentary insight or knowledge into a world we know already. Much of the understanding that spectators of documentary films bring to their experience is a confidence in the representational veracity born out of a long tradition of humanist internationalism which masks the genre’s construction of a knowing spectator. Although there are obvious deviations from this tradition in self-reflexive forms, the genre relies on this tradition: Any invocation of documentary recalls one of the primary goals of the form. The film shows one half of the world how the other half lives. It does so literally, by showing foreign countries to one another, and is thus a powerful instrument for promoting international understanding. Once you can bring home to ordinary people in every country that they are fundamentally the same problems – housing, health, education, working conditions, standards of living – you will have established a tie of mutual sympathy and understanding between them. (Stout cited in O’Reagan and Moran 1983: 164–165)
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One of the dangers for something like a reliance on a cross-cultural approach to knowledge, particularly involving documentary, is the temptation to follow this post-war definition, which adheres to a brand of humanism following the Second World War. Implicit in this is the idea that knowledge can prevail, that such terms as ‘understanding’ rely on a simple ethnographic schema where reproducing audiovisions will necessarily lead to that ‘tie of mutual sympathy and understanding between them’. For Willemen, in his later ‘Introduction to subjectivity and fantasy in action: for a comparative film studies’, the presumption of the transparency of cinema on an international scale, as an extension of the romance of comparative literature, with its attendant ideas of a ‘common language, culture and ethnic history’ within national borders, was adopted in film studies. As Willemen (2006: 96) notes, this was ‘because image-discourses allegedly operated without having to pass through the narrow defile of a particular verbal language, cinema was often described as the first genuine universal “language” capable of restoring humanity to its pre-Babel unity’. For us, discussions of Brazilian documentary films occurred across a gulf between a Brazilian cinema culture researcher and a researcher in documentary film, both grappling with foreign objects from Australia.
Jogo de Cena ‘If you are a woman aged over 18, live in Rio de Janeiro and have stories to tell ...’
The opening shot of Eduardo Coutinho’s 2007 documentary, Jogo de Cena (Playing), features a newspaper advertisement asking women to take part in a screen test for a documentary, if they have a story they want to tell. The film that unfolds from this initial premise is a complex and multi-layered set of stories that are established as both personal testimony and professional intervention. The opening shot suggests the parameters for what the viewer is about to see – a set of personal stories specific to the figures we see in medium close-up, narrating what can only be presumed to be their own stories. However, the appearance of the third character-subject in the figure of well-known Brazilian actress, Andréa Beltrão, whose narration overlaps with that of the preceding character-subject, signals that something else is occurring and the viewer’s confidence in the story and its ownership is destabilised. Set in the confines of the Teatro Glauce Rocha in Rio de Janeiro, Jogo de Cena shows a series of women, mostly framed in mid-shots, speaking either to the camera or to a director/persona just off to the side. The camera trails several of the women as they wind their way up from the dark recesses below the stage onto the brightly lit stage which is crammed with cameras and people. Once there, all the women sit with their backs to the theatre, the rows of seats forming the backdrop to their stories, locating them firmly in the realm of the acted, the constructed.
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On many levels, the stories told by these women appear as universal human testimonies to love, loss and life. However, the particular structure of the story/ testimony and the way in which each story is interweaved between the embodied ‘owner’ of the story and an actress who takes on the testimony as their own, faking (as the Portuguese title would suggest) or ‘acting’ the story of another and in turn creating through this act a story of their own, presents a challenge to the ‘reader’ of the film. This challenge is more than just deciphering to whom each story belongs, who is faking and who is not, but rather it represents a challenge that can be understood in terms of the literacy of the reader/viewer – this literacy requires a reading of the mise-en-scène that is cultural; it is a literacy of space, place and person rather than of cinematic device. Each of the stories told on screen, and indeed the premise of the film itself, can be read in a particular cultural context. To some degree an engagement with the structures at work in the film rely on a multi-layered cultural knowledge: multilayered because this is not simply a question of the understanding (or the absence of understanding) or perhaps misunderstanding that occurs between cultures, i.e., us as readers/viewers located in an Australian Anglophone context and Coutinho’s documentary telling the stories of working and middle-class brasileiras, told in Portuguese. The richness of the text lies in more than its broad national-cultural context, it is its cultural specificity, the ability for culture in this sense to be read at the micro-level, at the level of the city, the barrio or suburb, of particular landmarks that have deeply embedded socioeconomic connotations easily missed, not just by the foreigner but also by others in the same national-cultural context who are uninitiated in the norms of the micro-cultures. We have no intention of arguing that non-national, non-context-specific readings of film are invalid or necessarily deficient, rather, these readings are themselves culturally specific and offer an understanding not just of the documentary being read, but also where it is read from. The appearance on screen of Andréa Beltrão, as mentioned above, is the first clear intimation that the stories seen on screen are perhaps not a series of unmediated stories told to us in a direct-acting mode. However, the ability to ‘read’ this sign would depend on a type of literacy that exists outside the bounds of the film. It is the initial recognition of Beltrão as ‘star’ that first destabilises the viewer’s understanding of the documentary premise. This moment of destabilisation is extended through the partial repetition of what appears to be the story of women we see prior to Beltrão’s appearance, and then the editing between the ‘characters’ and the two narrations of what seems to be the same story. This calls into question the testimony before the viewer not necessarily in terms of its veracity, but certainly in terms of its ‘ownership’. It also disrupts the reception of the story. While it is not necessary to be aware of Beltrão’s ‘star’ persona to understand this disruption, the immediacy of that disruption and the association between the star persona and
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the concept of ‘character’ create an immediate impact that, for the ‘naïve’ viewer, is revealed more slowly. In this context, the viewer’s perceptions are called into question in an environment where the story is not clearly attributed and this disrupts the viewer’s ability to trust the story. This position of not knowing continues until Beltrão’s representation falters then fails completely as she turns to the director to explain her approach to, and struggles with, interpreting this real story she has been given. One of Coutinho’s widely recognised talents was his ‘ability to tease out, through conversations with people, remarkable narrative acts’ (Furtado 2014). Jogo de Cena is an exemplary enactment of this talent. The stories captured and conveyed on screen draw the viewer in through their broad human elements: the loss of a child, an unplanned pregnancy, disappointment in love. However, these stories also speak to moments not just in individual lives, but also form part of a broader social narrative. At different moments characters speak of particular beliefs and aspects of those beliefs, and we hear mentions of spiritualism, Mães de santo, candomblé. They also give testimony to the specific spaces and places of their lives, and these geographic and social locations are made apparent through the mention of actual places such as Praça da Sé in the old downtown area of São Paulo, or the sprawling favela Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro, and social locations such as the theatre group Nós do morro, which is located inside Vidigal. In addition, sociocultural artefacts such as children’s songs are invoked and serve to reveal the intimacies of individual lives. All of these potentially tell us a great deal about the context of each of the stories being told, moving the themes from the universal to the local. Notwithstanding the importance of these clues of context and specificity, all the examples given above are short snippets of broader monologues and are usually not elaborated on – it is unnecessary to do so from the storytellers’ point of view; the story is for them, not for the viewer. There are no visual indications of context or hints at meaning other than the words and faces of the women speaking. In the absence of all other cues it is the personal knowledge of the reader/viewer that shapes the understanding of these very personal stories. The depth of intimacy created between the viewer and the storyteller in the sharing of these personal tales is disrupted by the overlapping of the same story told by different women. In his article ‘What is documentary mise-en-scène? Coutinho’s mannerism and Salle’s “mauvaise conscience”’, Fernão Pessoa Ramos examines the layering of narrative and the use of direct and constructed-acting in Jogo de Cena. Ramos (2014) skilfully unpacks the interplay of what he terms ‘character’ (a person who, in this instance, is narrating their own story in a direct-acting mode); unknown or little-known actresses with whom the broader Brazilian audience would most likely not be familiar; and the ‘stars’, three of Brazil’s best-known actresses, Marilia Pêra, Andreá Beltrão and Fernanda Torres. In the intermingling of the narration
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of characters and little-known actresses, we are all on the same footing: it is only evident in the links between stories and in the occasional verbal hint, such as when, at the end of what appears to be a ‘true’ personal story, the amateur actress turns directly to the camera and speaks the words ‘that’s what she said’. It is only with this specific revelation that the viewer realises that the story being told does not necessarily belong to the woman on screen. In fact, in this case the camera follows the amateur actress, Débora Almeida, as she winds her way up a dark staircase and out onto the brightly lit stage, where she exclaims in surprise at the number of people present. This, combined with the nervousness she expresses, feeds the viewer’s own expectations that she is unfamiliar with the stage as a place of storytelling, thus reinforcing the sense that this ‘character’ is real. The only interaction with the story and the owner of the story happens onscreen, and is not mediated by any prior understanding of or identification with the woman on screen. This produces an effect which is markedly different from the stories told by professional actresses, where the public persona exists simultaneously with the character being developed and the story being told. The stories represented by the well-known actresses, Marilia Pêra, Andrea Beltrão and Fernanda Torres, offer another moment of layering and insight. It is important to understand that these three actresses are recognisable across the national context – all have worked in Globo telenovelas as well as other television series, films and in theatre.1 They all have public personas as actresses and are all considered highly skilled, with Fernanda Torres viewed as one of the best Brazilian actresses today. As actresses, their public roles are viewed inherently as performances. The knowing viewer would understand from the appearance of such well-known faces that the stories being told are representations of the tales of another. As mentioned above, in the case of Beltrão this realisation would be immediate, or at least there would be the suspicion that this is not her story. As each actress in this ‘star’ category progresses with ‘her’ story, it becomes apparent that they are offering, and often struggling with, an interpretation of someone else’s story. Indeed, each actress directly addresses questions of this representation in her on-screen dialogue with the director, who questions her on aspects of her performance. Coutinho asks whether Andréa Beltrão practised her tears, as she breaks down when telling her story. He points out that the real character does not cry and asks Beltrão why she does. The director also questions Fernanda Torres, who appears constrained and becomes incapable of delivering the level of performance for which she is famed. In fact, the struggle of these stars to engage with Couthino’s direction or what is, in reality, his directorial ‘absence’ as he ‘dislocates the actresses into the arena of improvisation’ (Ramos 2011), creates another set of narratives that run parallel to the stories being portrayed. In this sense the actresses represent another and themselves, and the immediacy of their own
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struggles in coming to terms with a project that requires them to construct a character from a real story, in the absence of script or formal direction. This struggle on the part of the three actresses and its layering personal storytestimony pushes Couthino’s documentary aesthetic into another realm: it is no longer the stated scope/project of the documentary, the telling of stories of these everyday women acted/reinterpreted/represented by the actresses as a kind of conduit to retelling, but in actual fact these stories are displaced, or perhaps it would be better to say they open a space for the stories of the actresses themselves, their engagement and personalised struggle with their craft, which in turns brings out private stories of their own. In the case of Beltrão, one of the difficulties focuses on the question of faith. When she talks on-camera to Coutinho and he questions whether or not she had rehearsed the part where she cries, she tells him she did not want to cry, but that she found it impossible to narrate the loss of this woman with the tranquillity and acceptance that she shows. She attributes this to a difference in faith, saying she does not have the spiritual faith that Gizele, her ‘character’, has. For her it is impossible to narrate the loss of a child without crying, therefore she finds it impossible to reach that level of tranquillity in her depiction of the story. The question of faith also appears in Fernanda Torres’ interpretation. In this case, the story she presents reflects aspects of Afro-Brazilian religions and she speaks of terreiros and Mães de Santo as well as some of the specificities of the rites performed as part of these beliefs. It is moments such as these that the layering of meaning occurs in its deepest manifestation. Several things occur at once in connection to this part of the story. For the naïve viewer outside the national context there may be either a lack of understanding, or an understanding tied to more popular, mainstream comprehensions of Afro-Brazilian or African religions, tied to dominant cultural forms such as North-American cinema and television shows. These have a tendency to equate all African religious practices transplanted to the Americas in terms of voodoo – and a very limited interpretation of voodoo that serves as a narrative tool. Within the nation there may also exist a naïve viewer whose geographical or socioeconomic position influences their understanding of Afro-Brazilian belief systems and their associated practices. In both instances, these understandings of particular signs that form a relatively small part of the story can influence how both the story and the storyteller are viewed/constructed. This interpretive role on the part of the viewer also happens in small ways in other stories. The examples of the favela Vidigal,2 home to the theatre group Nós do morro3 (see above) serve to illustrate the layering of meaning that can be read or unpacked through a literacy of space, place and person. The reference to both Vidigal and Nós do morro in the stories told is fleeting, yet it imbues the stories with a subtext that says a lot about the socioeconomic background of the storyteller
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as well as the link to a broader social community. We also see this literacy of space and place in reference to Praça da Sé, a square in downtown São Paulo, which is considered the geographical centre of the city. It also has strong connotations as an assembly-point for the homeless, and often (but not always) young people, and it carries all the connotations of marginality associated with that disaffected body.4 Located in this specific spatial context, the story of having sex with a bus driver on the fringe of that square speaks not only of a transitory sexual encounter, but carries with it connotations of class and poverty as well as the story of the naïve migrant to the urban megalopolis. In this case it especially highlights the vulnerability of female migrants as they struggle to find work and establish networks in the city. The cultural knowledge of a particular space or perhaps the cultural meaning that becomes embedded in particular locations recasts the story, taking it from the purely personal and tying it to a much larger community. In a similar way, it is both the spatial and social location of Nós do morro that creates a broader link to a community through a very personal story of individual experience. The Nós do morro theatre group was founded in 1986 in the Morro do Vidigal, a hillside Favela in Rio de Janeiro that overlooks the well-to-do areas of Leblon and Ipanema. Founded by journalist Guti Fraga, Nós do morro was originally conceived to give children, young people and adults access to a creative arts environment.5 The mention of the story of a young girl’s involvement with the theatre group and the connotations this has through its social and geographical location serve to add another layer to the context of this documentary, which has at its heart a layering and blurring of the lines between individual women’s stories and the ‘common’ people, non-professional actors and stars who communicate those stories. The reading of this nuanced level of layering becomes dependent on both contextual and cultural knowledge, the absence of which has the ability to limit the reception of the multiplicity of stories in the documentary. This is not to argue that non-national or non-regional readings are invalid or do not achieve a level of deep engagement with the film. Rather, it is the development of cultural literacy that allows one to translate the experiences of others and place them within a nuanced context that enriches the reception/reading of the documentary film. This nuanced contextualising of Jogo de Cena functions less to enrich the reading of the film for audiences external to Brazil, than it does to point to the kinds of readings available in a comparative, cross-cultural context. This context excludes author-based, historical, even sociocultural readings, at the same time as it utilises an oscillation between a geocultural perspective and a neo-Rouchian appreciation of documentary performance in a direct cinema context. This is not the model, but more a model developed out of the textual material, followed by a collaborative accounting for an understanding of Brazilian cultural nuances and scholarly frameworks for
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telenovelas, stardom and sociocultural mores, in tandem with their representation, in an international documentary product.
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Notes 1 Part of the media conglomerate Grupo Globo, Rede Globo is the largest television network in Brazil, and the largest producer of telenovelas worldwide. The Latin-American telenovelas are different from their Anglophone counterparts in form, reception and sociocultural importance. For more information see Ana M. Lopez, ‘Our welcomed guests: telenovelas in Latin America’ and Jesús Martín-Barbero, ‘Memory and form in Latin American soap opera’ in To be continued…: soap operas around the world, ed. R.C. Allen. London: Routledge (1995); and John Sinclair, ‘Latin America’s impact on world television markets’, in Television studies after TV: understanding television in the post-broadcast era, ed. G. Turner and J. Tay. London: Routledge (2009). 2 One of Brazil’s sprawling favelas, the Morro do Vidigal, is located in the hills overlooking the exclusive suburbs of Leblon and Ipanema. In 2011, Vidigal was part of a government process which involved the military ‘pacification’ of selected favelas and the installation of police pacifying units (UPP) in communities, with the stated aim of wresting control back from drug traffickers. 3 See Nós do morro, http://www.Nósdomorro.com.br/ 4 Praça de Sé has undergone sporadic renovations since 2006. Plans to reinvigorate the space have received criticism from groups working with homeless people, who see these projects as reducing the already limited public space available to the homeless. 5 They gained most attention through their involvement in the film City of God, in which they worked with the directors to improvise and deliver some of the hardest-hitting scenes of the film. The group is involved in film and theatre productions and has also travelled to the UK to perform interpretations of some of Shakespeare’s plays that they recast in a decidedly Brazilian cultural context.
References Fraga, G. 2009. TedX lecture: Arte, transformação e possibilidade Nós do Morro, São Paulo, 14 November. http://www.tedxsaopaulo.com.br/gutifraga-sub/ (accessed 14 March 2015). Furtado, G. 2014. A living cinema: notes on Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014). Panoramas, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh. http://www.panoramas. pitt.edu/content/living-cinema-notes-eduardo-coutinho-1933-2014 (accessed 14 March 2015). Nichols, B. 1981. Ideology and the image: social representation in the cinema and other media. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. O’Regan, T. and A. Moran. 1983. Two discourses of Australian film. Australian Journal of Screen Theory 15(16): 163–173.
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