O corpo como tela, a cidade como arena: as vias do corpo nos filmes Cidade Baixa (2005) e Ó Paí, Ó (2007)

Abstract

This dissertation responds to a call from the street and the city of Salvador by presenting themselves, recurrently in the cinematographic text, as a character and protagonist of several plots through which black bodies, homosexuals, transvestites, the elderly, children, prostitutes, homeless people, believers , candomblecistas, pastors vied for the right not only to be perceived as welcomed by public and cultural spaces in the midst of what was publicized, for some time, as a process that the city was experiencing from its spectacularization and from what managers of the public thing they stylized - in the image and television flavor - as works of requalification and policies of pacification. Two audiovisual productions from Bahia seem to be symptomatic of this context and interested in embodying the city not in the map format, that is, from above, but in a vague and errant way that experiences it on the ground floor. These films are Cidade Baixa, released in 2005 by Sérgio Machado, and Ó Paí, Ó (2007), by Monique Gardenberg, whose narratives invade the Soteropolitan postcard and intimacy through clandestine ways that make us infer that, in the dyeing of the blacker skin, in the colorful landscape of its historic buildings, in the mosaic of stones that form its pavement, in the warm, gayish, evanescent feeling of carnival, this city inscribes a memory that often uses forgetfulness to prevail as such. The analysis of the feature films led us to perceive the latent difficulty of framing the characters in the urban environment, constituting a class of people who do not fit the moral or aesthetic cognitive map of the world and are taken as a threat to the notion of purity, of social hygiene applied to societies. These observations brought with it the desire to investigate what is likely to be considered as a type of micro-resistance to this process of expropriation of the urban experience itself and, in particular, the bodily experience of the city. How does contemporary Bahian cinema record such phenomena and what attunements could we list, between the two films in order to narrow the dialogue with issues involving the pragmatic occupation of cities through inventive practices of space? The conclusion we reached is that an "Other" city, opaque, dark, and alive stands in the way of the spectacular gleam; and it is, therefore, in the gaps, margins and deviations from the “pacified” urban universe that the “escapable” of this disintegrating relationship makes resisting and surviving wandering and wandering as “profanatory tactics” of space occupation, operating, in both films, a reinvention of daily life.