Writings of the self from the cinema of archival images in Santiago and No Intenso Agora, by João Moreira Salles
Writing of the Self; João Moreira Salles; archive images; essay
The study proposes to analyze the writing of the self of the Brazilian documentary filmmaker João Moreira Salles in the movies “Santiago” (2007) and “No Intenso Agora” (2018), highlighting specific aspects of this discursive construction such as the affective relationship with the historical-audiovisual material, which is appropriate to the subjective and memorial experience of the director-author, having the audiovisual archive as a device to trigger a narrative of the “Self”. From this perspective, the relationship with the archive images glimpses in these records other layers of meaning, other readings and understandings of the past, whether this reading is linked to the personal experience of the director who (re)appropriates them, or an attempt at a historical review. In this way, an exercise of narrating oneself is configured discursively and narratively. In the analyzed films, this discursive-narrative procedure followed by the director is configured as a kind of essay based on archival material.