{"id":325,"date":"2014-02-10T08:50:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T08:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/?p=325"},"modified":"2014-07-14T11:56:33","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T11:56:33","slug":"coutinho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2014\/02\/10\/coutinho\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating the Work of Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last update July 14, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"coutinho\"\u2018What differentiates me from many directors is that I don\u2019t make films about<\/em> others, but with<\/em> others\u2019<\/div>\n
Eduardo Coutinho<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Today, <\/em>Medi\u00e1tico celebrates the work of one of the most important Latin American filmmakers, the Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho<\/a>. Coutinho died in tragic circumstances on February 2, 2014<\/a>. We are very grateful to be able to present an essay in his honour by Cecilia Sayad<\/a>, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and a co-director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image. Dr Sayad is the author of <\/em>Performing Authorship: Self-inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema<\/a> (I.B. Tauris, 2013), which has a chapter on Coutinho, and she is co-editor, with Mattias Frey, of the forthcoming<\/em> Film Studies journal, to be re-launched in 2015 (Manchester University Press).<\/em> Medi\u00e1tico is also grateful to\u00a0Michael Chanan<\/a>, Adrian Martin<\/a>, Tiago de Luca<\/a> and L\u00facia Nagib <\/a>who each provided a number of further links and material for this tribute, joining those collected by <\/em>Medi\u00e1tico co-editor Catherine Grant<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Eduardo Coutinho\u2019s Films Were About Gaps and Creative Frictions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cecilia Sayad<\/strong><\/p>\n

When announcing Eduardo Coutinho\u2019s tragic death, Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo <\/i>reported that the director had recently revisited the place and the subjects he interviewed in Twenty Years Later <\/i>(Cabra Marcado para Morrer, <\/i>1984) to film a bonus feature for the long overdue DVD release of his most acclaimed documentary.[1. Roberta Pennafort, \u2018Cineasta Eduardo Coutinho \u00e9 assassinado a facadas no Rio\u2019, O Estado de S. Paulo, <\/i>2 February 2014, accessed 3 February 2014, http:\/\/www.estadao.com.br\/noticias\/arte-e-lazer,cineasta-eduardo-coutinho-e-assassinado-a-facadas-no-rio,1125918,0.htm<\/a>; Guilherme Genestreti and Juliana Gragnani, \u2018Eduardo Coutinho deixou inacabado filme sobre adolescentes,\u2019 Folha de S. Paulo, <\/i>4 February 2014, accessed 4 February 2014,\u00a0 http:\/\/www1.folha.uol.com.br\/ilustrada\/2014\/02\/1406967-coutinho-deixa-filme-sobre-adolescentes.shtml.] Twenty Years Later <\/i>is itself about going back\u2014in that case, to trace the fate of a fiction film (Cabra<\/i>) aborted by the 1964 military coup in Brazil, as well as to reconnect with the militant peasants of the state of Para\u00edba who, in neorealist fashion, would have enacted a fictional version of their own struggles.<\/p>\n

In his obituary for Coutinho, critic In\u00e1cio Ara\u00fajo stated that Twenty Years Later<\/i> might have been about the peasant movement, the military coup, political persecutions and fear. \u201cBut above all,\u201d says Ara\u00fajo, when Coutinho went back to Para\u00edba in 1982 he made \u201ca film about time: about the 18 years that separated the two shoots. With this, he introduced also what would be an essential element in his filmography: fiction.\u201d[2. In\u00e1cio Ara\u00fajo, \u2018An\u00e1lise: Mestre absoluto, cineasta ainda poderia chegar muito longe,\u2019 Folha de S. Paulo, <\/i>3 February 2014, accessed 3 February 2014, http:\/\/www1.folha.uol.com.br\/cotidiano\/2014\/02\/1406648-analise-mestre-absoluto-cineasta-ainda-poderia-chegar-muito-longe.shtml<\/a>. Translation Sayad’s.]<\/p>\n

The temporal gap between a lived experience and its account is indeed integral to any documentary film; fiction, here, is precisely the inevitable artificiality that comes into the organisation of past events in a narrative. But the most illuminating element of Ara\u00fajo\u2019s argument lies in the emphasis on time as the encounter between present and past experiences, as a tension which allows for the fiction to take over\u2014not to replace a presumed truth, but on the contrary, to bring us a little closer to it. The key to his oeuvre is thus the idea of an encounter\u2014the retrospective of the director\u2019s work at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in 2003 was aptly titled \u2018O Cinema do Encontro.\u2019<\/p>\n

This encounter produces a creative friction that is indeed the main topic of Coutinho\u2019s documentaries. It is present, for example, in the tension between the subjects\u2019 experiences and their narration of them\u2014in the tension between fact and fiction. Coutinho\u2019s decision to reveal a young woman\u2019s admittance to lying in Edificio Master <\/i>(2002)\u2014\u2018I\u2019m a truthful liar; I lie but I say the truth\u2019\u2014puts faith in the potential that the performance to a camera has to elicit other \u2018truths\u2019: especially those concerning the very making of a documentary film. The discrepancy between an experience and its narration was more radically explored in Playing <\/i>(Jogo de Cena, <\/i>2007). Shot on an empty stage, Playing <\/i>juxtaposes real testimonies given by the subjects who experienced them with the reproduction of their speeches by professional actors\u2014some of whom were unknown to audiences, preventing the discrimination between \u2018real\u2019 and \u2018performed,\u2019 thus making a statement about the very futility of discerning between the two. Coutinho\u2019s documentaries do not only have an element of fiction, as all documentaries do\u2014they are about<\/i> fiction, just as they are about documentary filmmaking. The Mighty Spirit <\/i>(Santo Forte, <\/i>1999) is as concerned with the religious and mystical experiences relayed to the camera as it is with the ways in which both the director and the apparatus shape these testimonies\u2014or the subjects\u2019 performances.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Coutinho was averse to reenactments\u2014he referred to them as \u2018impure images.\u2019[3. Consuelo Lins, O Document\u00e1rio de Eduardo Coutinho <\/i>(Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004), 116.] Performance, here, is restrained by the structure of the talking-head interview shot straight on, and usually framed in medium close-ups. (Even when subjects sing in As Can\u00e7\u00f5es, <\/i>2011, they for the most part do it while sitting on a chair.) Coutinho\u2019s presence is certainly a catalyst, but it is as self-effacing as the performances it ignites, reduced as they are to the verbal expression. In the theatrically released documentaries <\/i>that followed The Mighty Spirit <\/i>the director refrains from voicing his own views, from analysing, interpreting or judging what we see. His questions to the subjects are very open and simple, asking them about their origin, work, civil status or children. The intended mundaneness of his queries suggests that the uniqueness of the interview must lie with the documentary subject, not maker\u2014but it would be more accurate to say that it lies with the encounter between the two. It is Coutinho\u2019s presence that propels the tensions that his films document\u2014a woman from the slams humorously asking, \u2018Do you want poverty?\u2019 in Babil\u00f4nia 2000 <\/i>(2001) when Coutinho\u2019s crew stops her from putting on lipstick; or a resident of the apartment building in Edif\u00edcio Master <\/i>(2002) diplomatically admitting that Copacabana is \u2018anthropologically\u2019 interesting for its mixed quality (presuming Coutinho\u2019s fascination for that Rio neighborhood), while the exasperation that surfaces in her comments on the bustling streets implies the impracticalities of living in an area that for outsiders may seem excitingly exotic. Coutinho\u2019s presence in the image highlights the sociocultural gap and produces the friction between subject and filmmaker that his documentaries are all about.<\/p>\n

2014 marks the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the coup that interrupted the making of Cabra <\/i>and the 30th<\/sup> of the historical documentary that came out of that abrupt ending\u2014albeit twenty years later, as the English title suggests. But this anniversary is all the more significant because it leaves us with yet another production brought to a halt\u2014Coutinho had a documentary about public school teenage students underway when he died. Film editor and longtime contributor Jordana Berg told Folha de S. Paulo <\/i>that the director had agreed to open the film with a scene in which he tells an interviewee that the documentary is probably not going to work out.[4. Genestreti and Gragnani, ibid.] It is too soon to know whether we will see a posthumous release. Never seeing it might confirm Coutinho\u2019s skeptical prediction, leaving the unfinished film to the fate that Cabra <\/i>was rescued from. Seeing the footage in any form would bring Coutinho\u2019s career full circle, adding a new term to his repertory of creative frictions by juxtaposing what a film is with our idea of what it would have been.<\/p>\n

Other tributes to Coutinho:<\/strong><\/p>\n