O cinema testemunhal de Lúcia Murat

Abstract

There is evidence that both for the philosophy of narration, within the field of literary theory, and for the studies of cinema, especially for the documentary aspect, the selfenactment, fostered by the author's personal account, presents a persuasive rhetoric endowed with dialogical structure and fiduciary dimension, which allows us to reflect on the power and performativity of the testimony, especially the testimony of survivors. This research aims, from a phenomenological approach, to analyze textual elements of three films by filmmaker Lúcia Murat as well as the secondary and tertiary discourses of these filmic works in comparison to the director's biography, in order to understand the specific tessitura and rhetorics of a self-referential narrative, which deals with the life experience of the director – former guerrilla member, political prisoner and victim of torture in the Brazilian 1964-1985 Civil-Military Dictatorship. Furthermore, the intention is to debate how the performative mode (NICHOLS, 2005) – which is applicable, in principle, only to documentary narratives – could be used in the director's evocative fiction films, that is, in the films in which the filmmaker's self-representation is perceivable. The central hypothesis of this research is that Lúcia Murat, by providing an account of herself through self-enacting in the first person autobiographical documentary A Long Journey (2012), and also by constructing an alter ego character played by Irene Ravache in both the documentary Que Bom Te Ver Viva (1989) ), as well as in the feature-film The Memory That Tells Me (2013), allows the viewer to identify in the films, through a documentarizing reading, the real and factual referent of the director's life story and the director's identity, besides, and most importantly, allowing viewers to perceive the films as a testimony of the filmmaker. That, in turn, in the field of reception, makes it possible to transfer to the viewer the belief of the story conveyed through the filmmaker's testimony – not any story but a "story of the vanquished" (BENJAMIN, 1987), written from the unique perspective of a victim and survivor of a traumatic life experience and of catastrophic events. Thus, this work aims to formulate the basis of a testimonial cinema, which Lúcia Murat accomplishes with films that bear the sometimes invisible marks of violence, as well as elaborate on the unspeakable, nontransferable and unrepresentable trauma.