Cinema de Favela, o real da ficção, a estética do político

Abstract

Contemporary Brazilian cinema, particularly the one committed to revisiting the urban periphery, ends up refreshing some aspects of relation between the film and the social context, aesthetics and politics, theme and form, between fiction and reality. And in doing so, it maintains an already long-standing background dialogue which has privileged sociology and anthropology as interlocutors. That said, three orders of problems guide the theoretical-analytical fabulation that I develop. The first is the problem of fiction as a space of conformation for certain phenomenological ambiguities and the articulations that follows; how certain exteriorities are internalized in the film in a blurring between the fictional and the nonfictional, the discursive and the empirical. Next, I investigate how the social sciences tradition and practice (in dialogue with documentary aesthetics) are mobilized as epistemological models and referent of privileged access to the real. The third is the problem of the real itself as a raw material on which the discourses are based, of the real as a value, and communicating with an argumentative vocation of the film, of diegesis as a corpus and narrative as a thesis. I start, therefore, from the form, from the level of the meaning of the cinematographic device properly, so as to reconstitute the bonds, affinities and assumptions of engagement of the film with the real 'in' and 'out'. In the first part of the thesis I present a theoretical-methodological and historical-conceptual approach to these impasses. Thereafter I propose five essays about five films that are quite different from each other, but which share the gravitation around the themes of urban periphery, poverty and violence in Brazil: Cidade de Deus (2002), Linha de passe (2008), Tropa de Elite e Tropa de Elite 2: O inimigo agora é outro (2007 e 2010), O som ao redor (2013) e Branco sai, preto fica (2014).