Memória e encenação no filme de família

Abstract

The general objective of this dissertation is to examine how people used to film and appear in family films in the 1970s, when it was not as easy as today to record private life. The literature review covers studies on memory and private life, with authors such as Paul Thompson, Philippe Ariès and Anne Martin-Fugier, about home movies, whose authors are Roger Odin, Elizabeth Czach and Thaís Blank, and about mise-en-scène, based on the concepts of Jean-Louis Comolli, Jacques Aumont and Fernão Pessoa Ramos. One of the methodologies used were oral history interviews with two moviemakers: a photographer (Márcio Assis) and a public servant who is retired (Eliana Tolentino), pointing to similarities and differences between two people with distinct trajectories and filming styles. After a careful observation to their movies, we are able to define the family filmmaker as a participant camera: he/she is a subject who is a secondary character of the filmed action and records the events in a testimonial way, from his/her own point of view; sometimes he/she does not intend to interfere in what is happening, sometimes he/she acts as a "director" and demands interpellation from characters. In order to study self-mise-en-scène in home movies, we selected about two hours of digitized Super 8 home movies that make up our corpus. The film analysis was made, mainly, based on concepts defined by Carlos Gerbase about framing, camera movements, etc. With this study, seven categories of self-mise-en-scène were created: photographic (immobile character), normal (apparently does not perceive a camera), simulated, elusive (tries to hide from the camera) and spectacular (performance made apparently for the camera). This research intends to collaborate, especially, with studies on family films – which are scarce in Brazil - and on self-mise-en-scène in cinema.