Vida e filme: uma autorreflexão sobre a "mise-en-scène do encontro" no documentário A vida de São Jorge

Abstract

This paper aims to present a self-reflection on the conformation of the mise-en-scène in the documentary A vida de São Jorge, filmed by this documentarian-researcher, with the intention of describing, through the examination of its camera-images in movement, how encounters experienced in a take happened in the film, during the shooting. Through the analysis of the body-media that shows-off and invents itself for the camera, its interactions, attitudes and postures, the intention is to make the singularity of the encounter experienced with the Other emerge, in the “game” stablished in the moments of take, resorting to a descriptive approach with ethnoscenological nature of actions and expressions of the people on the scene, both the documentarian and the people filmed, in the camera shot. Based on the studies of theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli (2008), about the relationship between cinema and encounter, Claudine de France (1998) and Deleuze (2005), about profilmia and self-mise-en-scène, Armindo Bião (2007) and Jean-Marie Pradier (1999), regarding the spectacular rites, and Paul Zumthor (2005; 2007; 2010), about the performance vocality, the aims is to describe “the other filmed” in their ways of fabling and offering themselves to the camera and to the documentarian in a take, highlighting, in this case, the spectacular body practices of the playing mediums from São Jorge Umbanda yard and their relationship, in the filmed camera shot, with the art, the ritual and the sacred. This researcher intended to observe, in the process of assembling the images, his own work as a documentarian, both in the camera shot and the space behind the camera, through the processes of meaning production operated during the filmmaking, either intentionally or not, seeking to document the conflict “between the one who films and the one who is filmed”; action and expression in the take would be, for Fernão Pessoa Ramos (2008), the documentary acting essence, named in this paper as the “encounter mise-en- scène”. The filmed images represent vestiges. When producing the records and after organizing them in the editing process, the documentary ended up covering the construction of a memory of the artistic and spiritual ritual of that already lost space-territory because, due to the House Ialorixá’s death, in 2020, the festivity ceased to exist. As a filmed memory, A vida de São Jorge presents the spectator a culture of resistance and its symbols, through images of excluded people and their speeches – “behaviors that are unreplaceable and that cannot be reproduced” (RAMOS, 2016, p. 8), except through the technical reproducibility inherent to the filmed image – with the intention of contributing to fight the disappearance of peripheral existences in the spaces of power, imposed by the hegemonic discourse, putting them as the protagonists of their own stories.