Documentary: movies, windows and pendulums

Review

Abstract

Based on a critical bibliographical review, Eduardo Baggio problematizes established concepts about documentary cinema, not to reject them completely, but rather to refine and bring them later into play with new contributions. In this sense, the author mobilizes phenomenology as a philosophical current that deals with that which “appears”, “which shows itself to us” (Baggio, 2022, p. 32) to propose a thought about documentary cinema based on the correlation of four elements: the filmmaking process, the film itself, spectatorship and the experiential factual world. Avoiding what he calls “centralizing points of view” in documentary historicization and questioning closed, almost untouchable concepts (such as indexing), Baggio presents a study that weaves together previous narrative and stylistic questions, but extrapolates them from the text to the contexts, that is, it brings to the fore the audience and their experience of the film and the world (and, consequently, of the windows that serve as its interface). The title Documentary: films for cinemas with windows ends up announcing and underlining this positioning of those who look at the documentary between different windows; experiencing the cinematographic, but without forgetting the windows that open onto the factual world, both connected by the film, a pendulum process between these two openings.