O som ambiente como recurso narrativo no documentário brasileiro contemporâneo

Abstract

This work seeks to reflect on the role of ambient sound in the development of the contemporary documentary film narrative. Based on the studies of cinema and sound in the audiovisual language, with reference to authors such as Michel Chion, Murray Schafer and Daniel Deshays, we understand sound as a narrative image, not just an "added value to the visual image" (CHION, 2008). Studies of the Brazilian researchers Clotilde Guimarães, Viviane Vedana, Joceny Pinheiro, Consuelo Lins and Cláudia Mesquita, among others that approach sound issues in Brazilian documentary cinema, indicate ways to investigate the modes in which ambient sound can narrate stories in these films. The objects of study to be researched are works by Evaldo Mocarzel (Quebradeiras, 2009), Maya Da-Rin (Terras, 2009) and Marcos Pimentel (Sopro, 2013), Brazilian filmmakers recognized for the production of documentaries that seek careful record and treatment of the surround sound. We start from the hypothesis that there is a set of productions in the contemporary Brazilian documentary that point to the same path of exploring the ambient sound as a figurative accessory of the image. Based on the concepts of sound landscape, sound design and sonic hyper-realism, throughout the filmic analyzes we try to understand the ways in which the sounds of the environment are no longer used as a sonic backdrop to the images, and they became, themselves, a narrative resource, producing senses and sensations. In order to perform such analyzes and to verify our hypothesis about the function of ambient sound in the narrative construction of a set of contemporary Brazilian documentaries, a perspective of internal analysis of the works was applied (AUMONT and MARIE, 2009). This is a methodology adopted by the Nanook nucleus of documentary cinema, from the Laboratory of Film Analysis, coordinated by Professor José Francisco Serafim. Understanding film as a means of expression, this type of analysis focuses on film space as a text, while taking into account its context, and uses cinematic concepts related to the image, sound and structure of the film to make explicit its operation and propose an interpretation.