O Impeachment de Dilma Rousseff no Documentário: análise de aspectos internos de O Processo (2018), Democracia em Vertigem (2019) e Alvorada (2021)

Abstract

This work brings together three Brazilian documentaries, made by 4 female directors, that deal with the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, they are: Democracia em Vertigem (2019), by Petra Costa, O Processo (2018), by Maria Agusta Ramos, and Alvorada (2021) by Anna Muylaert and Lô Politi. Our analysis sought to answer questions and work with different hypotheses that were formulated from contact with these audiovisual works. This strategy proved to be both a possible working procedure to face the analytical corpus and an internal organization. The dissertation is divided into two sections, in the first, we analyze a specific aspect of Democracia em Vertigem, the unannounced intervention by director Petra Costa in an archive image of the murder of Pedro Pomar. Seeking to elaborate, based on this specific analysis, an interpretative generalization regarding the persuasive strategies that characterize the work. The questions that guide this process are (1) is it possible to recognize this personal trait in other moments of the film?; (2) what are the implications of not announcing the change made to a file photo and (3) what are the characteristics of the photograph that ensure we correspond to the real thing and (3.1) why should we preserve them? Thus, based on these questions, we elaborate two working hypotheses: (1) the decision to edit the photo is based on a rhetorical and persuasive factor internal to the film itself: its imagery appeal, its capacity for similarity and, because of this, its remission to an object or phenomenon external to itself. (2) And the analysis of the use of the photo as an argument within the documentary, or as an illustrative part of it, cannot ignore the creative procedures specific to cinema and documentary making. Thus, in this first part, we reflect on, respectively, the essay film, the internal elements of photography and the dynamics that are inserted and, finally, on the archive image. In the last part of the dissertation, we analyzed O Processo and Alvorada based on an initial working hypothesis resulting from a theoretical digression: the observational style and access to the reserved environment give the observer an interesting place for observation. Consequently, raising material aspects of the two documentaries for discussion based on the questions of (1) what are the privileged points of observation practice and (2) how does the appeal of the unknown political image occur in O Processo and Alvorada? From the questions and hypotheses, we make considerations about subjectivity, narrative and authorship; we discussed the opposite of the official image; we address the camera's entry into the institutional space and, finally, time and observation.