Cinestesia sobre o Sertão: a memória rural e a noção de urbanidade da Feira de Santana no cinema documentário de Olney São Paulo

Abstract

The site of transits and trenches, of the troops that promoted logistics between the Sertão and the coast, of the transformations that are inseparable from the northeastern migration process, Feira de Santana is a promising area for endless research. This study takes this maxim on board and plans to understand how the notion of Feira's urbanity is delineated and represented in the work of Bahian filmmaker Olney Alberto São Paulo. We start from the idea, defended by Raquel Rolnik (1995), that the city is a complex organism, capable of being written and producing meanings and, to this end, we use film analysis as a procedure for investigating a representation of it, as we see it as a possibility of understanding the city through the lens of the Communication Sciences. Two films served as the corpus for this work, the documentaries Como nasce uma cidade (1973) and Pinto vem aí (1976) — both made and produced in the municipality during the period of rapid industrialization and expansion of its urban sprawl. In them, we looked at the visual and sound aspects in order to understand what the author was working on. Thus, through internal analysis, in the shots and points of view, in the sequences and compositions of the frames, in the framing, in the content of the narration and the speeches, in the architectural elements and the subjects on stage, we sought to grasp the meanings, the agency and the enunciation of the discourse on space. Our effort was to break down and interpellate the narratives in order to interpret Feira. The breath used here also involved theoretical references such as the notions about memory and the erasure of rurality, developed by Oliveira (2011), the ideology around representations, unraveled by Hall (2016), and the considerations worked on by Nakagawa (2017) when dealing with Marshall McLuhan's explanations regarding the city as a means of communication.