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BOOK TITLE: Listening to others: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary cinema

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CHAPTER TITLE: 4 - “From CPC to Videofilmes: Eduardo Coutinho’s Trajectory as a Political Filmmaker.”

BOOK AUTHOR: Brizuela, Natalia ; Brune, Krista

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PUBLISHER: State University of New York Press

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 Listening to Others
Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema

Edited by

NATALIA BRIZUELA and KRISTA BRUNE

Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:45.
 Cover image of Eduardo Coutinho (from his 2006 film O fim e o principio);
used by permission from the Universidade de Sao Paulo.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2024 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Names: Brizuela, Natalia, editor. | Brune, Krista, editor.

Title: Listening to others : Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary cinema / edited by
Natalia Brizuela and Krista Brune.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2024] | SUNY series in
Latin American Cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438497914 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438497907
(ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 4

From CPC to Videofilmes

Eduardo Coutinho’s Trajectory as a Political Filmmaker

Krista Brune

Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho often claimed, “What differentiates me

from many directors is that I don’t make films about others, but with others”
(qtd. in Lins, “The Cinema” 200). Throughout his career, he maintained a
political and social engagement with the popular that became increasingly
grounded in a cinema of conversation and an ethics of listening.1 Differen-
tiating his specific approach from a more generic one, he clarified that “the
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

formula ‘to meet the people’ repels me. I do not meet the people, I meet
persons” (Gardnier et al. 91).2 Coutinho’s investment in hearing the voices of
others became more radical as he stripped down his films to the essence of
conversation and positioned himself as a curious interlocutor. As Coutinho
moved from the Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC, People’s Cultural Center)
of the National Students’ Union to television’s Globo Repórter to the Center
for the Creation of the Popular Image (Centro de Criação de Imagem Pop-
ular or CECIP) to the Videofilmes production company, he embraced new
modes of production and corresponding technologies, shifting from 35 mm
to 16 mm to video and finally to digital. By examining the production and
circulation of his films in dialogue with evolving concepts of the popular, this
chapter contends that Coutinho’s development as a filmmaker parallels shifts
in the political landscape and in the creation, financing, and distribution of
films in Brazil over the past fifty years. Approaching Coutinho’s career with
an interest in modes of production invites us to think about how questions
of resources, access, and global capital shape political filmmaking.

89
Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 90 | Krista Brune

Brazilian critic Cláudio Bezerra has identified three phases in Coutinho’s

work. He defines the first stage as one of experimentation as Coutinho tran-
sitioned from fiction film to documentary work during his years at Globo.
According to Bezerra, the “gestation of a style” characterizes the director’s
second phase, spanning from Cabra marcado para morrer (1964–1984) to
Boca de lixo (The Scavengers, 1992) (“Um documentarista” 401). The third
phase, beginning with Santo forte (The Mighty Spirit, 1999), represents the
consolidation of his documentary style rooted in listening to characters.3
While these divisions prove useful to understanding the director’s overall
trajectory, they gloss over shifts in production, distribution, and financial
support. Focusing on the infrastructures that made Coutinho’s films pos-
sible, I conceive of his career in four moments: first, his early work with
the leftist CPC, which gave root to his masterwork Cabra marcado and
his vision of social and political commitment; second, his documentary
training ground of Globo Repórter; third, his venture into independent and
nonprofit documentaries with Cabra marcado and the CECIP productions;
and, fourth, his ongoing partnership with Videofilmes production company
starting with Santo forte. Coutinho’s evolving relationships with modes of
production and material resources impacted the technical specificities, ethics
of representation, and perceived politics of his films.
The turn to documentary as a space for political work is not unique
to Coutinho’s films. Documentary offers a realm to represent reality, to
examine truth claims, and to educate viewing publics. During the 1920s in
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Soviet Russia, documentary filmmaking developed in concert with political

beliefs as its construction of reality aligned with revolutionary ideology.
Dziga Vertov conceived of documentary as a dialectical phenomenon where
life-facts become film-facts that are then combined through montage into
film-truth. This concept of film-truth reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s
as cinéma vérité in French documentaries such as Chronique d’un été, the
1961 film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Cinéma vérité envisioned the
camera as a participant and the director as a provocateur who aimed to
bring hidden truths to the surface. In The Politics of Documentary, Michael
Chanan astutely links the political to documentary’s relationship with its
audience, noting that “documentary addresses the viewer primarily as a
citizen, member of civil society, putative participant in the public sphere”
(vi). Recognizing viewers as citizens who exist in a broader public sphere
heightens documentarians’ interest in their films’ political stakes and reper-
cussions, as Coutinho’s trajectory exemplifies.

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 91

Coutinho’s Early Years: Political Engagement with the CPC

Coutinho’s contact with cinéma vérité while studying film in Paris in the
1950s informed his vision of what cinema could be as he returned to Brazil
and became involved with the CPC’s efforts to create politically committed
film.4 In the 1960s, Cinema Novo in Brazil, tercer cine in Argentina, and
other iterations of New Latin America Cinema prioritized an attention
to modes of production in the face of limited resources as a political
gesture.5 Brazilian director Glauber Rocha’s concept of an aesthetic of hun-
ger underscores how the lack of financial support and material resources
among filmmakers demands an alternative aesthetic, one distinct from the
practices of Hollywood or European cinema at the time. According to
Rocha: “the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom:
it is the essence of our society [. . .] Cinema Novo shows that the normal
behavior of the starving is violence; and the violence of the starving is not
primitive [. . .] From Cinema Novo it should be learned that an esthetic
of violence, before being primitive, is revolutionary” (60). Though Rocha
theorized Cinema Novo as revolutionary films that would resist colonial
forces, his works had limited political potential given their epic allegories
and extravagant aesthetic language. In films like Deus e o diabo na terra do
sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964) and Terra em transe (Land in Anguish,
1967), he engaged with the popular in a mythical language disconnected
from the real, which limited his ability to enact political change and to
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

affect lived experiences and socioeconomic conditions.6

Rocha articulated his vision for an aesthetic of hunger in 1965, a
year after the military coup forced Coutinho and his team to abandon
filming Cabra marcado. Coutinho shared with Rocha and, more broadly,
Third Cinema concerns about how to create films that were aware of and
responded to material realities. As Mike Wayne explains, “Third Cinema
can work with different forms of documentary and across the range of
fictional genres. It challenges both the way cinema is conventionally made
[. . .] and the way it is consumed. It refuses to be mere entertainment, yet
banishes from your mind a cinema that is worthy but dull or a cinema
of simplistic polemics” (5). This description resonates with what Coutinho
aimed to create with films that listened to voices often absent from Brazil’s
cultural imaginary. By viewing these interlocutors as his films’ subjects, rather
than objects, Coutinho grounded his political commitment in an ethical
gesture. He interrogated documentary’s relationship to the real, noting that

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 92 | Krista Brune

“every documentary is, in essence, precarious, incomplete, imperfect, and

it is exactly from this imperfection that its perfection is born. The docu-
mentary is always a subjective vision” (Figueirôa et al. 215).7 In response to
technological and financial demands, he adopted new modes of production
that would innovate documentary cinema in Brazil.
Indications of Coutinho’s contribution to producing and consuming
documentary films appear in his earliest work with the CPC, which informed
his vision of the popular as tied to the daily lives of ordinary Brazilians and
his approach to filmmaking as a collaborative process with nonprofessional
actors. Coutinho was a production manager for the CPC’s Cinco vezes favela
(Five times favela), a 1962 film consisting of five shorts shot in the favelas
in Rio de Janeiro by directors later recognized as leading figures of Cinema
Novo, including Carlos Diegues, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, and Leon
Hirszman. The experience of going into the favelas over the three-month
shoot helped establish Coutinho’s lifelong interest in the favela as a site for
filmmaking. He would return to Rio favelas in subsequent documentaries:
Santa Marta: Duas semanas no morro (Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Hill-
side Slums, 1987), Santo forte, and Babilônia 2000 (Babylon 2000, 2000).
After his work on Cinco vezes favela, Coutinho went with the Traveling
CPC caravan to the Northeast, where he learned about labor leader João
Pedro Teixeira, whose life and death served as the basis for Cabra marcado.
The unique speech and daily struggles of people in the sertão emerge as
recurring topics in his work with Globo and in his 2005 film O fim e o
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

princípio (The End and the Beginning). His interest in the favela and the
sertão resonates with a generalized fascination with these spaces in Brazilian
cinema, which Ivana Bentes associates with a “cosmetics of hunger” (124)
whereby contemporary Brazilian films transform Cinema Novo’s aesthetics
of hunger into stylized imaginations of impoverished realms.8 In contrast,
Coutinho portrays the favela and the sertão with a realistic minimalism. By
focusing on the voices, memories, and hopes of individuals living in these
communities, his films depict the popular as belonging to and emanating
from people, rather than as commercialized mass media.
Working with the CPC also introduced Coutinho to a model of
collaboration that granted a greater degree of agency to all project partici-
pants. This cooperative process anticipated the documentary techniques that
Coutinho developed as, in the view of Consuelo Lins, a “savage linguist”
attuned to the pauses, slips, and silences of language as a personal mode
of expression (“Eduardo Coutinho” 30–31). The CPC’s use of nonprofes-
sional actors like Elizabeth Teixeira to play characters modeled on their

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 From CPC to Videofilmes | 93

own lives blurred distinctions between documentary and fiction. Coutinho

would further question the porous line between the real and the fictional
in the final stage of his career, most notably with the intercuts of ordinary
women and famous actresses in Jogo de cena (Playing, 2007). Across his
filmography, Coutinho aimed to include people in the process of depicting
their lived experiences and personal expressions on-screen. His approach to
collaborative filmmaking grew out of the CPC’s efforts to represent Brazil’s
often marginalized peoples in a realistic and respectful manner.

Globo Repórter as Coutinho’s Documentary School

After the CPC and its projects abruptly ended with the 1964 military
coup, its ethos of social and political commitment continued to inform
the work of Coutinho and other filmmakers. While Diegues, Andrade,
and Hirszman emerged as prominent names in Brazilian feature films over
the next decade, Coutinho followed a different path toward renown as a
filmmaker. After writing screenplays including Lição de amor (Love Lesson,
1975) and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,
1976) and collaborating with Hirszman on fictional films like ABC do Amor
(ABC of Love, 1966), he sought stable employment as a journalist, first with
Jornal do Brasil in 1972 and then with Globo Repórter, starting in 1975.
During the dictatorship, artists and intellectuals operated within structures
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

of funding and production that seem to contradict their political views. As

Marcelo Ridenti notes, the decision of leftist filmmakers like Coutinho to
work at Globo, Brazil’s hegemonic television network, has been seen either
as “ideological capitulation in the face of the bourgeoisie” or as a “possi-
bility to bring a critical vision to the television spectator, contributing to
social changes” (324).9 In interviews with Ridenti about their Globo years,
directors like Coutinho and Renato Tapajós reveal that during the 1970s
they enjoyed greater freedom in terms of content and style (324–36). As
Brazil began to open politically, they suffered more restrictive censorship
due to market demands. According to Igor Sacramento’s study of the work
of Coutinho, Gustavo Dahl, Paulo Gil Soares, and Walter Lima Júnior,
among others, with Globo-Shell Especial (1971–1972) and Globo Repórter
(1973–1983), leftist filmmakers had a complex and often contradictory
relationship with the television industry in the 1970s and 1980s. As direc-
tor of Globo Repórter, Soares aimed to develop a specific, cinematographic
language on television that would attract an educated public and critical

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 94 | Krista Brune

acclaim (Sacramento 106). The program functioned within Globo’s network

expectations and general parameters of news reporting, even though Soares
and the filmmakers he hired strove to challenge conventions with longer
takes and more in-depth segments.
For Coutinho, Globo served as a school in documentary techniques
where he learned to research, write, film, direct, and edit, all within a
strict time frame. Globo granted directors a degree of freedom, as aesthetic
norms and content preferences were not as narrowly defined as they are
now. Coutinho has lamented that the relative freedom he experienced at
Globo during the 1970s no longer exists in the current television land-
scape, where censorship occurs based on consumer’s preferences and market
demands (Avellar 49). In Seis dias de Ouricuri (Six Days in Ouricuri, 1976)
and Theodorico, o imperador do sertão (Theodorico, the Sertão Emperor, 1978),
Coutinho challenged television norms with long takes that allowed him to
explore lived experiences and expressions of the sertão. These pieces reveal
how the less expensive reversible 16 mm film could create more adaptable and
portable films that better captured popular voices and images and, in turn,
expand the perspectives of Globo’s bourgeois viewers. Though the director
aimed to subvert expectations, his films still followed a dramatic arc typical
of television documentaries. In a 2007 interview, Coutinho underscored
the limitations of television work: “In some moments, it was possible to
make something that seemed like a documentary, but those moments were
rare” (qtd. in Sacramento 128).10 Conventional techniques of voice in off
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

and nondiegetic music typical of northeastern Brazil served to underscore

thematic points and evoke emotional responses. The Globo documentaries
preceded the importation from the United States of the newsmagazine
model where well-known anchors report on various stories.11 The format
of Globo Repórter evolved from three segments of ten to fifteen minutes
each to an episode-length film on a sole topic with Seis dias de Ouricuri, a
forty-one-minute documentary filmed over six days in drought-ridden Our-
icuri, a town of 60,000 in the interior of Pernambuco. Coutinho continued
this single-subject approach with Theodorico, about Theodorico Bezerra, a
federal representative and land baron from Rio Grande do Norte. The film
exceeded the time span for a normal episode but, to the director’s surprise,
was aired in its entire forty-nine minutes (Sacramento 137).
While at Globo Repórter, Coutinho explored how modes of cinéma vérité
and direct cinema could function to best render popular voices in documentary
form. Two representations of people talking about their own lives anticipate
Coutinho’s future cinema of conversation: one scene in Seis dias with a man
recounting strategies to survive drought and another in Theodorico with the

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 From CPC to Videofilmes | 95

protagonist reflecting on his life in a small town in the sertão. Using reversible
film reduced production costs and limited possibilities for postproduction
editing so episodes could be finalized with more autonomy (Hamburger 417).
With this technical freedom, Coutinho employed unconventional long takes
with direct sound that allowed him to develop a practice of listening to the
voices of others. In Seis dias, a long take of three minutes and ten seconds
captures a man detailing how and when he ate roots and seeds during previous
droughts. The camera shifts between focusing on the man and zooming in on
the roots with minimal intervention from Coutinho, whose off-screen voice asks
the man, “Did you eat that?” The question alerts viewers to the filmmaker’s
presence and reveals a mode of engaged listening perfected in subsequent films
to create what Natalia Brizuela has aptly described as Coutinho’s cinema of
conversation and duration (20).
Theodorico similarly approaches a cinema of conversation without an
additional voice-over narrator. The narration consists entirely of Theodorico’s
reflections and conversations either as diegetic sound or voice in off. A more
conventional soundtrack with nondiegetic music typical of the Northeast
opens and closes the film. After the title sequence introducing Theodorico,
the camera zooms in on the landowner sitting in front of his home as he
describes his life. His narration continues even after the camera cuts away
to panoramic shots of the landscape and the town. When asking his tenants
about their lives, Theodorico occupies a conversational position analogous
to the one held by Coutinho in later films, but the authoritarian landowner
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

maintains power imbalances and a disdain for listening that the director
would shun. Working at Globo Repórter was foundational for Coutinho as
a documentarian interested in representing specific voices, memories, and
experiences to transform viewers’ perspectives of social and political issues
affecting the poor or other people whose lives differ from their own. The
television documentaries solidified his fascination with the peoples and modes
of speaking in the Brazilian Northeast. A desire to depict the nuances of
spoken language and to capture the body that speaks would continue to
guide Coutinho’s work.

A Masterpiece and Some Experiments:

The Years of Cabra marcado and CECIP

Coutinho returned to the project of Cabra marcado para morrer from 1981
to 1983 while still employed by Globo Repórter. He brought the skills gained
during his years at Globo to the footage of Elizabeth Teixeira, her children,

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 96 | Krista Brune

and other rural laborers that the 1964 coup had forced his team to abandon.
Rather than re-create the fictional film as it was first envisioned, Coutinho
turned a documentary lens on the story. He found the people involved in
the original project, talked with them about their lives, and, in the process,
captured the passage of time and the changing visions of political commitment
in Brazil. As Carlos Alberto Mattos rightly notes, “In the Brazil of 1964,
one tried to build a more just country and a cinema that united creativity
and utility. In the Brazil of the 1980s, one sought to break the silence of an
oppressive regime and to heal wounds” (117).12 Coutinho embarked on this
task while receiving his Globo salary and having access to their equipment,
which allowed him to draft the screenplay, shoot additional scenes on 16
mm film, edit the film, and blow it up from 16 to 35 mm for its debut
in Rio de Janeiro. He finalized the film during a six-month unpaid leave,
from which he never returned (Avellar 50). Cabra marcado was a watershed
moment that served as the culmination of experiences and influences from
his years at the CPC and Globo. The success of Cabra marcado solidified
Coutinho’s position as one of the preeminent Brazilian documentarians and
leftist filmmakers of the twentieth century.13 Moreover, the film foreshadowed
his development as a documentarian invested in conversation and his role
as an ethical listener, as the penultimate scene most evidently illustrates (fig.
4.1). Coutinho is in the car, ready to leave, and Elizabeth is in the house,
looking out at the director. He rolls down the car window and the two
exchange a goodbye that points to the ongoing presence of the other and
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

the power of the encounter. Allowing these encounters between the director,
his subject, and the camera to unfold in front of the camera would emerge
as an essential trait of Coutinho’s conversational films.
After the resounding success of Cabra marcado, Coutinho completely
dedicated himself to documentary by creating films for nonprofits like the
Superior Institute for the Study of Religion (Instituto Superior de Estudos
da Religião or ISER) and CECIP. As Brazil transitioned to democracy, the
director moved toward the single-location cinema of conversation that would
define his style. In 1986, the filmmaker helped to establish CECIP with
his friend Claudius Ceccon as a nongovernmental organization committed
to collaborating with popular Brazilian subjects to create short videos and
documentaries with a pedagogical intent (Mattos 136). By developing projects
in areas of education, communication, technology, memory, and culture,
CECIP aims “to contribute to the strengthening of citizenship, producing
information and methodologies that influence public policies promoting
fundamental rights” (“Quem somos” n.p.).14 Coutinho’s work with CECIP

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 From CPC to Videofilmes | 97

Figure 4.1. Coutinho and Elizabeth Teixeira in the penultimate scene of Cabra
marcado para morrer. Source: Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later).
Directed by Eduardo Coutinho, 1964–1984. Instituto Moreira Salles, 2014. DVD.
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ranged from educational videos like the 1989 O jogo da dívida: Quem deve
a quem? [The Game of Debt: Who Owes Whom?], which employed animated
graphics and a didactic tone, to medium-length documentaries Santa Marta
and Boca de lixo, where he refined the site-specific, conversational mode of
filmmaking that characterized the last fifteen years of his career. Like the
CPC before it, CECIP focused on popular voices and images, suggesting
that explicit depictions of the popular as part of a mission of social and
political engagement are more possible in Brazil during periods of democracy.
With CECIP, Coutinho returned to a mode of socially committed
filmmaking reminiscent of his work with the CPC that also incorporated
techniques and styles learned during his years at Globo.15 The documen-
taries with CECIP represented a continuation of his stylistic development,
as he used video and incorporated his subjects more fully in his films’
conversational process. The director filmed in a single location for a fixed
period with Santa Marta, where he limited himself spatially to the favela

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 98 | Krista Brune

and temporally to two weeks. According to Lins, Coutinho found these

restrictions creatively fruitful, as they forced him to work within confines
and to examine carefully the words generated in conversation (Lins, O
documentário 65). By filming in Santa Marta, a slum situated on the hills
between Botafogo and Humaitá in Rio’s wealthy southern zone, Coutinho
returned to the marginal space of the favela, which he had previously explored
with CPC’s Cinco vezes favela. Sequences of Coutinho and his crew walking
into Santa Marta render the director as a character who listens attentively
to people reflecting on their varied life experiences and, thus, serves as the
film’s proxy for its viewers. This positionality enables Coutinho to propose
a documentary practice foregrounding conversation as essential for listening
to the popular and recognizing its political potential.
Though Coutinho does not visibly appear in the documentary after this
initial sequence, his voice remains present as he asks residents about where
they came from, how long they have lived in Santa Marta, what they think
about life in the favela, and how they relate to daily tasks of parenthood
and work. This style of questioning forms the basis of Coutinho’s cinema
of conversation in subsequent films like Edifício Master (Master Building,
2002), where the director asks questions that everyone could answer based
on their own experiences. Consisting of brief encounters with Santa Marta’s
residents, the film does not reveal the director’s later interest in duration.
The residents are identified by their jobs rather than by their names, as
they will be in subsequent films Babilônia 2000 and Edifício Master. Across
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

these works, a focus on individuals and specific experiences shapes Coutin-

ho’s approach. According to the director, “When I film a person, she is a
person. When I am going to edit, she becomes a character of the film. I
forget that she is a person, she is a character” (Avellar 53). Fascinated with
the line between the real person and the fictional character, Coutinho pays
attention to how people speak and embody language. An interest, apparent
in Santa Marta, in language and music becomes fleshed out in later films
as Coutinho connects these creative corporeal expressions to the popular as
a lived experience, a documentary subject, and a political potential.
From 1988 to 1991, while affiliated with CECIP, Coutinho made O fio
da memória (Memory’s Thread, 1991), a feature-length documentary that exists
as a relative outlier in his filmic production. Commissioned to commemorate
the centennial of abolition in Brazil, the film received financing from, among
other sources, the Fundação de Artes do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (State
of Rio de Janeiro’s Art Foundation, FUNARJ). Distributed by RioFilme,
an entity supported by the city government, this longer ­documentary was

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of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 99

filmed on 16 mm rather than the cheaper video to which Coutinho had

become accustomed. Unlike Coutinho’s other feature-length films, O fio
da memória was not a project he chose. The director still found his own
“fio,” or thread, to ground reflections on the history and ongoing legacy of
slavery in Brazil. To complement Ferreira Gullar’s voice-over narration of
key historical dates, the film centers on the memories and experiences of
Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos (1892–1985), a descendant of enslaved peoples.
Coutinho paired Afro-Brazilian actor Milton Gonçalves’s voice-over narration
of Gabriel’s story with historical footage of slavery and more recent images
of Gabriel and other Afro-descendants to craft a narrative of slavery and its
repercussions in Brazil focused on the specific. Using individual experiences
to tell a broader story became a common practice in Coutinho’s documen-
taries with his increasing interest in the lives and languages of people on
the margins of history. By listening with care and insisting on co-presence
in front of the camera, the director collaborated to create films as an ethical
space of political potential.
Aesthetically, O fio da memória has more in common with the explicitly
pedagogical impulses of the Globo and CECIP documentaries and, perhaps
most relevantly, the earlier project of the CPC. The documentary has two
narrators, Gullar and Gonçalves, which recalls the narrative structure of
earlier films Cinco vezes favela and Cabra marcado. Gullar was one of the
poets affiliated with the CPC’s Violão da rua imprint and had previously
narrated part of Cabra marcado. Coutinho’s later films rarely feature nar-
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

rators, and, when they do, he is the sole narrator. More often, his films
aim to capture his encounters with others in front of the camera without
a narrator as guide. The educational and moralizing elements of O fio da
memória betray the pressures from funding sources to explicitly condemn
slavery and clearly indicate the film’s point of view via narration. Although
an exception in the director’s career as a commissioned piece, the film also
reveals continuities given its use of individual stories to shed light on social
and political concerns.
Coutinho’s next film, Boca de lixo, produced by CECIP and released
in 1992, employs similar techniques to those used in Santa Marta. Unfold-
ing mostly at the single site of the landfill Itaoca in São Gonçalo, Rio de
Janeiro, the documentary features conversations with the garbage pickers.
The film retains traces of Coutinho’s Globo years in its more conventional
use of nondiegetic music and his voice-over narration to heighten emotional
responses to images of daily life at the dump. By foregrounding conversa-
tions with the scavengers, the film aims to capture on camera encounters

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 100 | Krista Brune

between the director, his subjects, and their mediated images. With video,
Coutinho could film continuously without a set plan, which allowed his
interlocutors to participate more fully in the documentary process. As the
director explained in 1998, “Now I only film on video, because on film,
you are required to be so economical that it doesn’t work for telling a life
story” (Macedo 19).16 Rather than ask pointed questions, Coutinho let peo-
ple describe their lives, thus establishing more rapport with the community.
Some scavengers initially looked down or turned away, a discomfort with
being filmed that Coutinho respected by asking for permission to photograph
them. He later gave these photographs to the scavengers, granting them
ownership over their image and providing them with an indexical reminder
of their encounter with the director. In this process, Coutinho examined
tensions that exist between imagined, real, and mediated images in the realm
of documentary.17 Reflecting on these mediated interactions in Boca de lixo,
Lins rightly surmises, “Filming and being filmed, the image of oneself and
the image of the other, the media images, these are the questions that will
traverse many of Coutinho’s films from here on” (O documentário 89).18
Santo forte marks the gradual transition into the final stage of Coutinho’s
career as a film funded and produced by CECIP that received supplemental
support from other sources. It also inaugurated the director’s collaboration
with editor Jordana Berg, which continued through his final, posthumously
released film, Últimas conversas (Last Conversations, 2015). To complete Santo
forte, Coutinho sought additional funding from government sources including
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

RioFilme. With film critic José Carlos Avellar as its director, RioFilme was
more likely to support a project like Santo forte, which proposed filming
in the single location of Vila Parque da Cidade during Pope John Paul II’s
visit to Rio. Coutinho asked residents about their spiritual beliefs and then
used these conversations to make a documentary more generally about reli-
gion in Brazil. The film lacks the pedagogical tone and melodrama of his
earlier work with Globo and CECIP, but remnants of a more conventional
documentary style remain, namely transitional shots filmed separately that
link conversations and underscore religious themes. Sequences of Coutinho
entering and leaving the favela turn the director into a character whose
body appears on-screen occasionally but whose voice is a constant presence
as he invites residents to share how Catholicism coexists with Afro-Brazilian
religions in their lives.
Returning to a favela to depict popular cultures and knowledges,
Coutinho honed the site-specific, conversational format of documentary
that he would perfect during the rest of his career. In a 1998 interview,

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 101

Coutinho explained that “my vision in the films is anthropological, albeit

savage” (Macedo 21).19 As a participant-observer in the favela, he collabo-
rated with residents in a mode of “savage anthropology” documented via
film. Through these interactions, Coutinho realized that representations
without excessive mediation could affect how his viewing public understood
the daily lives and religious practices of others whose realities differed from
their own. Because Coutinho wanted his first encounters with his subjects
to be caught on camera, his crew vetted residents and suggested whom he
should meet and what questions he should ask. Shooting on video facilitated
this process of collecting footage to be edited over four months into the
film’s final cut. Critics have recognized that this interest in the moment of
encounter and the corporeal expressions of language indicate the consolidation
of Coutinho’s style, which would be fully realized in his productions with
Videofilmes.20 His work on Santo forte benefited from his belief that, as he
explained in Carlos Nader’s documentary, “Only I want to and can make
this film.” Santo forte was a personal project that facilitated his exploration
of relevant interests such as faith, language, and creative expression among
people living in favelas. By delving into these topics, the film inaugurated
what Esther Hamburger describes as “a series of experimental variations
about the nature of the interaction between the filmmaker, his crew and the
characters that come to life in his films, in front of the camera” (430–31).21
Capturing these encounters on film emerged as Coutinho’s main concern as
his cinema of conversation and duration coalesced over his years working
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

with Videofilmes.

The Videofilmes Collaborations

and the Maturation of Coutinho’s Style

In the final stage of his career, Coutinho refined his role as a savage anthro-
pologist and linguist fascinated by the creative expression of others. He crafted
films documenting memories, lived experiences, and daily routines of Brazil’s
peoples to present a more inclusive portrait of the popular beyond the lim-
ited realms of the favela and the sertão. These documentaries illustrate how
listening to diverse voices, recognizing their value, and representing them
with care could affect social and political change. Embracing a collaborative
model of filmmaking that recalled his experiences with the CPC, Coutinho
now worked with prominent figures of contemporary Brazilian film, including
João Moreira Salles as producer, Lins as researcher and writer, and Berg as

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 102 | Krista Brune

editor. These prolific fifteen years at the end of his life coincided with a
renewed investment in culture in Brazil as the passage of Lei Rouanet in
1991 allowed companies to make tax-exempt donations to cultural projects,
the National Agency of Film (Agência Nacional do Cinema or ANCINE) was
established in 2001, and the Brazilian economy expanded.22 In this period,
Coutinho’s documentaries received support from RioFilme, ANCINE, and
cultural initiatives of corporations like Petrobras. With these funds and his
partnership with Videofilmes, Coutinho had access to better equipment,
which allowed him to shoot Edifício Master and O fim e o princípio on 35
mm film and to use digital video starting with Peões (Metalworkers, 2004).
This investment in Brazilian film contributed to a professionalization
of the field of national documentaries, a process that, in Coutinho’s case,
was enhanced by his personal relationships with Salles as the Videofilmes
producer and a fellow documentarian. Coutinho’s films achieved a more
polished look given the better financing, equipment, and technical support
from working with a larger crew. By collaborating with a similar group of
people on successive films, Coutinho developed a process of research, filming,
and editing that let the spontaneity of the conversational encounter unfold
on camera. The films produced with Videofilmes benefited from govern-
ment incentives and cultural initiatives as they circulated domestically and
internationally via film festivals, university and museum circuits, and career
retrospectives. With his greater visibility in the documentary scene and as
a character in his own films, Coutinho became increasingly recognized as a
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

preeminent documentarian in Brazil and beyond. He was even the subject

of documentary films, including Coutinho Repórter (Reporter Coutinho, 2010)
and Eduardo Coutinho, 7 de outubro (Eduardo Coutinho, October 7th, 2013).
Recent films like Edifício Master, O fim e o princípio, and Jogo de
cena reached a relatively widespread audience in Brazil and abroad, but
their receptions have paled in comparison to the success of his seminal
work Cabra marcado. After debuting at the 1984 International Film Festival
in Rio, where it received a gold prize, it won best documentary or jury’s
choice at festivals in Havana, Italy, Paris, and Berlin in 1984 and 1985. In
New York, it was featured in the New Directors/New Films series in 1985
and received a favorable review in the New York Times, which asserted that
“Coutinho’s commitment to his characters is all the more effective for being
cool, controlled, and unsentimental” (Canby n.p.). This statement holds true
over the next three decades as Coutinho stripped down the filmic apparatus
to better capture his encounters with his subjects in front of the camera.
As the director explained in a 2010 interview, “In my personal trajectory, I
discovered that what interested me in film [. . .] was the conversation with

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 103

the other, the encounter, the conflict with the other always and when there
was a camera in the way” (Paiva and Russo 153).23 Whether talking with
people from the favelas of Santa Marta and Babilônia, the sertão of Paraíba,
or the middle class, theater groups, and public school students of Rio de
Janeiro, Coutinho listened attentively, remained open to their experiences, and
strove to capture their distinct forms of speaking and embodying language.
Shifts in film production, distribution, and consumption in recent
decades have made Coutinho’s documentaries more accessible through the
DVDs released by Videofilmes and, informally, YouTube. While his films still
circulate at festivals and retrospectives, these new distribution technologies
allow people to see his films without having to pay for a ticket or attend
a specific screening. The versions posted online, often without the proper
rights, tend to lack subtitles; they are intended primarily for a Brazilian
public. This comparatively easy access to Coutinho’s work was achieved,
paradoxically, while his films were produced by Videofilmes, a company run
by members of one of the wealthiest families in Brazil, brothers Walter Salles
and João Moreira Salles. The production work of elites made it possible for
the voices of often-marginalized peoples to reach a broader audience with
greater political and social capital. Digital technologies may democratize
modes of creation and consumption, but these processes remain embedded
in structures of cultural and material capital, especially for leftist artists
and intellectuals of an older generation like Coutinho. While their films
benefit from more widespread circulation in the digital age, they remain
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

most praised and discussed in social and academic circles where people gain
access to popular voices and cultures via artistic mediation.
The expanded distribution now enjoyed by Coutinho’s films resonates
with earlier efforts by the CPC to share their films with people depicted in
them. In both moments, filmmakers mediated the experiences and expres-
sions of poor, working class, or otherwise marginalized peoples primarily for
comparatively elite viewers who might be moved to enact political change by
hearing these stories. What has changed over the intervening decades are the
forms of production and distribution that diminish technical and financial
barriers to making films not only about, but also with and for, the people
represented in the films. In earlier films, Coutinho created a feedback loop
by showing individuals involved in the documentary their photographic or
filmic images. For instance, Cabra marcado depicts Elizabeth Teixeira, her
children, and other film participants gathering in the early 1980s to watch
black and white footage salvaged from the original CPC project. The camera
uses parallel editing to capture their responses to seeing their younger selves
on-screen, which underscores the passage of time and reveals Coutinho’s

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 104 | Krista Brune

desire to involve his subjects in various levels of the project. Working with
film, however, posed technical limitations to integrating his subjects into
the filmmaking process and granting them ownership over their images. As
the video and digital era made printing photos and showing clips easier,
Coutinho could more readily share his in-process film and other visual
images with his subjects, as evidenced in Boca de lixo. The director presented
the scavengers with photographs of themselves and included in the film’s
final cut a scene of them standing in front of a television, watching video
footage of the documentary they were currently creating.
Coutinho’s efforts to involve the people he filmed in the creative process
and grant them agency over their own images unfolded within an imbalance
of power between a director and his subjects. He aimed to minimize this
gap by insisting on having conversations, not interviews, with his subjects
where he listened carefully without judgment. Despite Coutinho’s desires to
make films with people, transcending divisions between the director and the
lower middle-class residents of Edifício Master or the former metalworkers of
Peões proved difficult. The filmed subjects often referred to Coutinho as “o
senhor” (mister) rather than the more egalitarian “você” (you). As Roberto,
an older, unemployed man living in the Master building, reminds viewers,
Coutinho was a filmmaker with no power to directly change the lives of
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.2. Roberto asks Coutinho if he would give him a job in Edifício Master.
Source: Edifício Master (Master Building). Directed by Eduardo Coutinho, Video-
filmes, 2002.

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 105

those he filmed (fig. 4.2). Even if they, like Roberto, asked for a job during
their conversations, Coutinho could not provide it.24 The director’s political
commitment remained confined to the realm of cinema, where he could
suggest more ethical models of listening and documenting the popular, not
as an idealized, folkloric vision but rather as the experiences and expressions
emanating from the diverse peoples of Brazil.

Concluding Thoughts

In the last decades of his career, Coutinho occupied a different landscape

as a politically committed filmmaker because of changes in production
and distribution that rendered obsolete the explicitly leftist approaches of
the CPC in the 1960s or the possibilities of radicalism within the Globo
network. Coutinho’s concern with underrepresented voices persisted, as his
depictions of favelas in Babilônia 2000 and the sertão in O fim e o princípio
exemplified. Rather than portray these realms as isolated enclaves of “authen-
tic” popular culture, his films illustrate how these historically marginalized
spaces have become less separated from the rest of Brazil given expanded
media networks and shifting geopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes.
Coutinho’s fascination with how people on the margins use language and
express themselves in unique ways led him to explore the voices of other
forgotten groups like the metalworkers who participated alongside Lula in
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

labor strikes without gaining political renown. With representations of these

laborers in Peões, middle-class apartment dwellers in Copacabana in Edifício
Master, and students from public high schools in Rio de Janeiro in Últimas
conversas, Coutinho’s later films reveal the proximity between favela, sertão,
cities, and peripheries.
By expanding understandings of the popular and the politically engaged
artist, Coutinho’s work speaks to the shifting political and cultural landscape
of contemporary Brazil. Organizing his career into four distinct phases, as I
have outlined in this chapter, helps to highlight the continuities, divergences,
and, more importantly, the ways that modes of production and distribution
have impacted his approach to filmmaking. Coutinho’s documentaries force
his audience to rethink the national-popular as a living concept defined
not by populist politicians or leftist artists and intellectuals, but rather by
ordinary people who embody the words, memories, and rhythms of Brazil
in their distinctive use of language and their daily lives. Though Coutinho
died tragically in 2014, before the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 106 | Krista Brune

election of Jair Bolsonaro, one cannot help but wonder what the director’s
film about these political events testing the state of Brazil’s democracy and
ignoring the voices of its most marginalized citizens would have looked
and sounded like.

Notes

1. In this chapter, the “popular” refers to ideas, expressions, artistic works,

cultural traditions, and practices of everyday life among people, including the poor,
powerless, or uneducated, historically marginalized by elites. See Flores for more
on how ideas of the popular shift with time and the emergence of mass media
(17–29). Chauí’s essays on the people, popular culture, and politics offer insight
into the construction of these concepts in Brazil. See Bernardet for an original study
of images of the people in Brazilian documentary films from the 1960s and 1970s.
2. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. Coutinho stated in a
2002 interview, “A fórmula ‘encontrar o povo’ me repele. Não encontro o povo,
encontro pessoas.”
3. Bezerra’s essay in Ohata’s edited volume provides an overview of these
phases. See his 2014 monograph for a deeper analysis of the phases in relationship
to the role of characters and performance in Coutinho’s documentaries. See Mattos
for another division of Coutinho’s trajectory into seven phases: student, fictional
creator, reporter, social documentarian, filmmaker of conversation, experimental
director, and a character of his own life.
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

4. The CPC existed from December 1961 to March 1964 as the culture
branch of the student union affiliated with the Brazilian Communist Party. Carlos
Estevam Martins’s manifesto for a popular, revolutionary art guided their artistic
and cultural initiatives. See Ridenti, Hollanda, and Garcia for more on the CPC
and the 1960s in Brazil.
5. Argentine directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino coined the
term tercer cine as one form of New Latin American Cinema with “Hacia un tercer
cine,” originally published in the Cuban journal Tricontinental in October 1969. See
Taboada for more on the theoretical foundations of tercer cine in the manifestos of
Solanas and Getino, Rocha, and García Espinosa. For a reconsideration of global
Third Cinema, see the volume edited by Guneratne and Dissanayake. Part Four of
Schroeder Rodríguez’s Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History provides an
overview of key films and theories of New Latin American Cinema.
6. See Xavier’s seminal work on allegory in Brazilian film for more on Cinema
Novo’s political limitations. Brock’s chapter in this volume examines the differences
between Rocha’s mythical sertão and Coutinho’s real sertão.
7. According to Coutinho, “todo documentário, no fundo, é precário, é
incompleto, é imperfeito, e é justamente dessa imperfeição que nasce a sua perfeição.

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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 107

O documentário é uma visão subjetiva sempre.”

8. Stam emphasizes the favela and the sertão as central to Brazilian cinema
since the 1930s. Cinco vezes favela, Rio 40 graus (1955), Black Orpheus (1959), Orfeu
(1999), and City of God (2002), among others, are set in favelas. The sertão is key
to Vidas secas (1963), Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (1964), Bye Bye Brasil (1979),
and Central do Brasil (1999). See Bentes for more on the continued iconicity of
these spaces in contemporary Brazilian film.
9. Ridenti identifies “capitulação ideológica diante da burguesia” and a “pos-
sibilidade de levar uma visão crítica ao telespectador, contribuindo para mudanças
sociais.”
10. In Coutinho’s words, “Em alguns momentos, era possível fazer alguma
coisa que parecia documentário, mas eram raros os momentos.”
11. See Tardin’s 2010 documentary Coutinho Repórter for more on Coutinho’s
experience at Globo Repórter.
12. Per Mattos, “No Brasil de 1964, tentava-se construir um país mais justo e
um cinema que unisse criatividade e utilidade. No Brasil dos anos 1980, procurava-se
romper silêncio de um regime opressor e fechar feridas.”
13. At the time of the film’s release, Bernardet described Cabra marcado as a
“divisor de águas” (6). Thirty-five years later, Da-Rin used the same phrase to clas-
sify Cabra marcado as a watershed for Brazilian cinema and Coutinho’s work (64).
14. See its website (http://www.cecip.org.br) for more on its mission: “con-
tribuir para o fortalecimento da cidadania, produzindo informações e metodologias
que influenciem políticas públicas promotoras de direitos fundamentais.”
15. See Mattos for an astute reevaluation of Coutinho’s work as a social
documentarian with CECIP (135–77). His analysis includes lesser-studied films
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Volta redonda—Memorial da greve and Os romeiros de Padre Cícero. Some films from
this period, like Santa Marta and Volta redonda, were created for ISER. Mesquita
and Oliveira offer a thoughtful study of how audiovisual mediation contributes to
social and political struggles and engages with ethical questions by examining the
alliances between Coutinho, CECIP, and other social organizations and movements
in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
16. In a 1998 interview, Coutinho explained that “agora eu só filmo em
vídeo, porque em cinema, você é obrigada a ser tão econômico que não dá para
contar história de vida.”
17. See Furtado for an original study of archival gestures and practices in
contemporary Brazilian documentary. He positions Cabra marcado as noteworthy
for establishing dialogues between archival images and living bodies, exploring a
process of remediation that Coutinho would refine in later films like Boca de lixo
and Peões (10–18).
18. “Filmar e ser filmado, a imagem de si e a imagem do outro, as imagens da
mídia, estas são questões que irão atravessar muitos filmes de Coutinho dali por diante.”
19. In Coutinho’s words, “a minha visão nos filmes é antropológica, embora
selvagem.”

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 108 | Krista Brune

20. For Bezerra, films in this final phase are invested in the image of the
body as central to language. Lins recognizes the importance of the encounter in
front of the camera for Coutinho’s process given his interest in the spontaneity and
specificity of language within social contexts (O documentário 109). Emphasizing
the centrality of these encounters of bodies and voices, Sayad considers Coutinho’s
work a “cinema of the corporality of voices” (144). Dias associates the absence of
an omniscient voice-over and the visibility of the crew in Santo forte and Babilônia
2000 as characteristic of Coutinho’s cinema of conversation, where “orality prevails
over spectacle” (113).
21. According to Hamburger, Coutinho’s films represent “uma série de
variações experimentais sobre a natureza da interação entre o cineasta, sua equipe e
os personagens que ganham vida em seus filmes, em frente à câmera.”
22. See Dennison for a detailed study of the shifts in Brazilian film culture
from 2003 to 2019 that stresses the importance of laws promoting cultural invest-
ment and the democratization of film production and consumption.
23. Per Coutinho, “En mi trayectoria personal yo descubrí que lo que me
interesaba en el cine [. . .] era la conversación con el otro, el encuentro, el conflicto
con el otro siempre y cuando hubiese una cámara en el medio.”
24. A similarly tense interaction unfolds at the end of Peões when Geraldo
asks Coutinho if he had ever been a metalworker (“já foi peão?”), to which the
director responds no.

Works Cited
Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
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 From CPC to Videofilmes | 109

Da-Rin, Silvio. “Eduardo Coutinho e suas últimas obras.” A família de Elizabeth

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of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.
 110 | Krista Brune

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Copyright © 2024. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Listening to Others : Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema, edited by Natalia Brizuela, and Krista Brune, State University
of New York Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=30979395.
Created from qut on 2025-01-21 03:29:33.