https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0647-6400
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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to show how various modes of representation employed in the Brazilian feature film Jogo de Cena (Playing, Eduardo Coutinho, 2007), are used as a narrative resource that allows life stories told by Brazilian women to escape from their present, individual and private temporalities, and thus become part, as narratives, of a historical, collective and public time. These modes make the story prevail over the person who tells it as his own, represented and representative meet and share the same narrative identity without annulling each other, and through an ethical pact create a Third Party built by hospitality to the word. These encounters of varied nuances, propitiated by the montage, free the word from its ties to the speaking body and allow it to explore new forms, genres and narrative practices, without discarding digital ones, in the contemporary audiovisual.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professors Maria Luisa Ortega (PhD) and Patricia Ruiz Acero (MSc). Also, acknowledge the Audiovisual Investigative and Creative Group (VideOsferas), and the Humanity and Research Departments, University of Magdalena.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bernardet 2012, Jogo de Cena y Moscou, 105–106.
2 I have used for this article a DVD copy, with original sound in Portuguese, subtitled in Spanish, 100 min long, color, provided by Video Films, the film’s production company.
3 Eduardo Coutinho, with his documentary Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later, 1964–1984), won the Coral Award at the 1984 Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, and the following year won the FIPRESCI and the InterFilm-One World awards at the Berlin Forum, as well as awards at Cinema du Reel and at Festroia for best documentary film. Retrospectives of his work have been programed at a number of important festivals and cultural centers in Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
4 Últimas Conversas (Last Conversations, 2015), because of the death of the director, it was completed by producer João Moreira Salles and editor Jordana Berg.
5 Brizuela 2016, Conversation and duration, 25. Coutinho tells Sexta-feira magazine (Friday): ‘what interests me is making films of conversations.’
6 Lins and Brizuela 2016, Eduardo Coutinho, Savage Linguist, 29.
7 Lins and Brizuela 2016, Eduardo Coutinho, Savage Linguist, 29.
8 Although this third woman is the well-known soap opera actress Andrea Beltrão, the confusion for any viewer is the same because, outside of Brazil, Andrea is not so well known, and neither has the premise that there is going to be an acting representation of the stories told.
9 In the extras of the Jogo de Cena DVD we can learn the identity and testimony of the woman to whom the events happened.
10 In fact, the first woman to appear, Jackie, is an actress, as the film features Jackie Brown, the girl who was selected in the test.
11 Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2008, La Hospitalidad, 81. For Derrida one is the law of hospitality and another thing are The laws of hospitality, ‘those rights and duties always conditionated and conditional, as defined by the Greco-Latin, even Judeo-Christian tradition, all the law and all the philosophy of law, up to Kant and Hegel in particular, through the family, civil society and the State.’
12 Palacio 1998, El sexismo en la ética de Emmanuel Lévinas, p.8. Once the sexism of the works studied has been purged, Palacio invites us to discuss some issues addressed by Lévinas that well deserve the attention of feminist thought.
13 Ricoeur 2009, Tiempo y Narración III, 994.
14 Ricoeur 1996, Sí mismo como Otro, 107.
15 Ricoeur 1981, Narrative Time, 165–166.
16 Ricoeur 1981, Narrative Time, 176.
17 Ricoeur 1981, Narrative Time, 178.
18 Moreira et al. 2017, Eduardo Coutinho: El arte de filmar, 19.
19 Derrida 1978, Violence and Metaphysics, 82–83.
20 Schutte 1989, Irigaray y el problema de la subjetividad, 1.
21 Xavier and Brune 2016, Inquiries into Eduardo Coutinho, 39.
22 Avellar, et al. Citation2016, The emptiness of the backyard, 53.
23 Lévinas 1998, La huella del otro, 56.
24 Bernardet 2012, Jogo de Cena y Moscou, 107.
25 Moreira 2016, Lecture on Coutinho, Campus Universidad del Magdalena, Marzo, 2016.
26 Berg et al. 2017, Editando a Coutinho, 30.
27 Peleshyán 2011, Theory of Distantial Montage, 51–93. I use in this case the meaning of “distantial montage” given by the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshyán.
28 Berg et al. 2017, Editando a Coutinho, 31.
29 Chanan 2014, Eduardo Coutinho, 112.
30 Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2008, La Hospitalidad, 81.
31 Deleuze 1987, in a conference given at the “Tuesday Lecture” of the FEMIS, in 1987, on What is the act of creation?, asks himself: ‘What is the mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance? Malraux develops a good philosophical concept. Malraux says something very simple about art. He says: “It is the only thing that resists death”.’
32 Mitchell 1986, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chapter 1: What Is an Image?
33 Williams and McDonald 2015. Reading across cultures, 686. On this topic and Jogo de Cena the authors state: ‘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.’
34 Bernardet 2012, Jogo de Cena y Moscou, 104.
35 Ortega 2021, El mañana empezó ayer, 13. (Work paper).
36 Ramos 2014, What is documentary mise-en-scène?, 151.
37 Lins and Brizuela 2016, Eduardo Coutinho, Savage Linguist, 29.
38 Bernardet 2012, Jogo de Cena y Moscou, 106.
39 Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2008, La Hospitalidad, 137.
40 Brizuela 2016, Conversation and duration, 21.
41 Lins 2003, Eduardo Coutinho, 228.
42 Irigaray 1987, Any Theory of the ‘Subject’, 142.
43 Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2008, La Hospitalidad, 25. Derrida comments that the right to hospitality is, above all, for foreigners.
44 Oroz 1998, El rostro del otro, 46. Oroz summarizes Lévinas’s attitude in De otro modo que ser, o más allá de la esencia [Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence].
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Luis Fernando Botía
Luis Fernando Botía holds a degree in Political Science from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá) and a Master’s degree in Artistic Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He has directed short films, television series and feature films. He is affiliated with the Film and Audiovisual Department at the Universidad del Magdalena, Santa Marta, Colombia, in the area of fiction narrative. Other academic activities include classes on film noir aesthetics in the Master’s Degree in Audiovisual Writing at the same university. In 2020 he published the article ‘The Sound Art in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Sound Ambiguities amid Visual Certainties’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video.