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This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil’s highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary’s rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production—including polished auteur films as well as rough-hewn collaborative works; films made in major metropolitan regions as well as in remote parts of the Amazon; intimate first-person documentaries as well as films that dive headfirst into struggles for social justice. The transformations of Brazilian society and of filmmaking coalesce and become entangled in this cinema’s preoccupation with archives. Historically linked to the exercise and maintenance of power, the concept of the archive is critical for the documentary as a cultural practice that preserves images from the present for the future, unearths and repurposes visual materials from the past, and is historically invested in filmic images as records of the real. Contemporary films incorporate, reflect on, and rework a variety of archives, such as documents produced by official institutions, ethnographic images, home movies, and photo albums—and engage not only with what is preserved but also with lacunas in the record and with alternate forms of remembering, retrieving, and transmitting the past. Through its interaction with archives, this book argues, the contemporary documentary reflects on and intervenes in the distribution of visibilities and invisibilities, centers and margins, silences and speech, living memory and its preservation in the record—thus locating the documentary on archival borders that concern Brazilian society and filmmaking alike.

Focusing on contemporary documentaries that deal with isolated indigenous groups in the Amazon, this chapter discusses a contact imaginary that was inaugurated by Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter of “discovery” to the Portuguese king in the year 1500 and re-elaborated ad nauseam in a vast corpus of films documenting encounters with indigenous people. The “contact film” constitutes an archive of predictable and endlessly repeated original contacts and “first” encounters. During the course of the twentieth century, however, this documentary subgenre becomes increasingly troubled by its own history and the destructive consequences of contact. Inheriting a burdensome legacy, contemporary films approach the remaining borders of contact with isolated indigenous groups while evincing the crisis of this imaginary and its archives—as illustrated in works by Werner Herzog, Silvio Da-Rin, Vincent Carelli, and especially by the feverish, formal experimentations of Andrea Tonacci.

Just as the exploration of geographic areas such as the Amazon is economically extractive, an extractive logic has informed ethnographic image production from its inception. Travelers collect valuable records to fulfill the interests and needs of metropolitan publics, as well as to furnish their museums, libraries, and archives—often leaving indigenous subjects diminished by the experience of contact. The cooperative Video in the Villages (VNA) attempts to invert this extractive pattern through the repatriation of archival images to indigenous communities and the introduction of video technology for indigenous use. Focusing on the group’s inaugural video and several recent works made in collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers, this chapter traces the group’s attempt to rework the contact imaginary and re-orient the ethnographic archive to serve indigenous needs.

Although Andrés di Tella is among the leading documentary filmmakers in South America, his work has received scant attention in the Anglophone world. Di Tella’s essayistic films mix personal and intimate perspectives with public and historical concerns, crafting a tentative filmic voice that is articulated on the borders between the public and the private. In his subjective explorations of personal and collective pasts, di Tella calls on material objects to play a vital role. Subjective recollections are accompanied by the constitution of collections of objects, material items that are the remainders from and the keys to the past. Remembering is remembering with and through things and senses of self and identity are forged and questioned in dialogue with constellations of objects. This article examines the interaction between subjects and objects in di Tella’s work with special attention to Fotografías (Photographs, 2007) and Hachazos (Ax Blows, 2011).

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This chapter discusses documentary approaches to subjects living in conditions of extreme marginalization. Though these subjects arguably suffer from social invisibility, becoming visible more often than not entails their capture in codes that lay beyond their control—such as the sensationalist narratives and stereotypes of the media or the incriminating gaze of institutions and representatives of the law. What are the possibilities and risks for documentary practices that, while aware of the dangers of the visible, insist on visualizing marginalized subjects? Focusing on Padilha’s Ônibus 174 (2002), Maria Augusta Ramos’ Justice (2004) and Behave! (2007), and Paulo Sacramento’s The Prisoner of the Iron Bars, Self-Portraits (2004), this chapter examines the strategies of films that locate their practice at sites where invisible subjects enter the purview of dominant society and reflect on cinema’s own forms of capture as well as on its possibilities for seeing otherwise.

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