The transformation of images in Um dia na vida

from the flow of television to the audiovisual archive

Abstract

This article analyzes the movie Um dia na vida (Eduardo Coutinho, 2010), from the point of view of the appropriation of images from Brazilian free-to-air television. We will see how these images, exposed in their materiality, that is, without important interventions in the way they were originally edited by the media outlets, reappear in contemporary space with a renewed meaning, once displaced from their usual means of dissemination and inscribed in a properly cinematic project. We will start by proposing a parallel between the detournement of the spectacle’s images present in Coutinho’s film and in Guy Debord’s work, in order to establish their respective differences. We also propose to deepen the debate on the detournement, a composition technique that offers the spectator with an aesthetic and political experience. We will also see how the interruptions produced by the montage of Um dia na vida invite us to a critical reading of television, by raising an estrangement in relation to television language. In conclusion, we state that the formal procedures of this movie, as radical as minimalist, operate, in short, a true conversion of the television flow into archival material, a transformation of the audiovisual production’s liquidity into a memory crystal of TV images.