Dos antagonismos no documentário biográfico: uma análise da poética das entrevistas na trilogia do mal de Barbet Schroeder

Abstract

This work analyzes the documentary films that make up the so-called Trilogy of Evil by french director Barbet Schroeder: Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait (1974), Terror's Advocate (2007) and Le Vénérable W. (2017). The three films, which can be located equally in the biographical genre, deal with important figures in contemporary history that are, at the same time, controversial in the political, ideological and social sense, thus intending to debate the antagonistic relationship in the film documentary. The objective is to investigate how this antagonistic relationship materializes in the three documentaries, in order to understand how the relationships between biography, adversity and documentary ethics are established. The analysis presented calls for the concept of “biographical space” by researcher Leonor Arfuch (2010), which locates the media interview as the “devires” of biography. From this perspective, the “poetics of the interview” proposed by researcher Leger Grindon (2007) is taken as the central operator of film analysis. From the results of the analysis, we highlight the way in which the relationship between the director and the filmed subjects is constituted in the films and how the poetics of the interviews can lead the viewer to ambiguous feelings regarding the biographical characters, which unfold towards to a particular view of the historical moments and political issues portrayed in the Trilogy of Evil.