Cinema of reencounters

forms of history in Cabra and in the trilogy by Vincent Carelli

Abstract

This essay starts from situations of “to suggest an open map of comparisons between Cabra marcado para morrer (as well as the subsequent film A família de Elizabeth Teixeira) and Vincent Carelli’s trilogy (constituted by Corumbiara, Martírio and Adeus, Capitão). Whether between people or with archival images, these reencounters suggest affinities and differences between the works, thus characterizing two modes, among many other possible ones, of political cinema in Brazil. In the first mode, the interrupted experience turns the film into a process; in the second, the processes, recorded over years of activism, become films. Born in the ruins of the Coup, the first film uses fragments to show hiatus and produce bonds, elaborating the history through the dialectic between the two terms; born from processes of extermination, the second uses a fragment as an enigma that propels a work of translation and narration, while preserving the opacity of the narrated experience, which would lead to the expansion of the avaricious and restricted concept of humanity as forged by Western modernity.