The End and the Beginning

A few immediate notes after the 35mm screening at the MAM Cinemateca, on August 12, 2023:

"If I'm filming the other, it's because I don't know myself, and I need to know the other in order to see myself. Cinema is my way of living because it's the way I have of relating to the other. There are other, healthier ways too, but mine is cinema." — Eduardo Coutinho.

Eduardo Coutinho's cinema has, as its central method, the exploration of a subjective, experiential otherness. Unlike other documentary filmmakers who blend an autobiographical, confessional style into their work (Petra Costa's cinema, for instance, comes to mind here), his cinema — especially the work made after the release of Cabra Marcado Para Morrer (1984) — is founded entirely on the principle that the interviewer must interview a human being who resembles him in nothing, whether in social class, religion, ethnicity, or geographic environment.

In O Fim e o Princípio (2006), Coutinho opens his narration by saying the film was made without a script, without prior research, and without any kind of planning — just a film crew, over a two-week stay in São João do Rio do Peixe, in Paraíba, to interview the region's oldest residents. The accounts captured by Coutinho's camera are dazzling for the lack of distance the camera places itself at from its subjects — his close-ups turn every face, every figure, into a landscape of years, of decades lived and rooted in the skin.

The method of inquiry is less about denouncing something — be it misery, poverty, or any kind of social outrage — and more a tool for creating a fabulating language: each interviewee's life is converted into fiction, into narrative. And the process of telling the story of their lives is essential to creating a record, not to turn its subjects into objects of study (which would be abominable, since it would create a sense of intellectual or social hierarchy in the viewer watching) but rather to give them a kind of screen, a way of inscribing their subjective views of themselves, and of their values, without any kind of moral judgment.

This idea of inscription can be seen in the scene where one of the residents writes out a cartography of the cities she and her family have lived in, creating a kind of genealogical tree of life capable of structuring an entire field of relationships and shared lives. Relationships are the key to the characters in his work, and it's no accident that we see so many grandmothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children around them.

This idea of building a historical cartography that isn't guided by pamphleteering, by the "informative" work, but rather solely and exclusively by the telling itself, places the viewer in a double zone: everything we see is the way the characters see themselves, and memory, for any human being, can be treacherous, and may not correspond exactly to reality. But what Coutinho's work manages to conclude, magnificently, is that the truth of the accounts and the power of meaning they carry is already enough — no data of objectivity or parallel information is needed for the affect of their stories to carry force. In his cinema, fable becomes a way of knowing the other. Of inscribing oneself into the world. The human being truly becomes human through the capacity to fabulate their trajectory on the planet. In Coutinho's cinema, the human face becomes a landscape, a map for locating lines and traces inhabited over decades. The record of time is inscribed onto the body, in the shape of each voice's diction, and in the way each person presents themselves.

The key question driving Coutinho's cinema since Cabra Marcado Para Morrer has a disarming simplicity: What does it mean to live? What is it like to live in a community, in a country, in a region? What is it to create a fable, an oral narrative that manages to be truer than any "realist" objectivity in itself? How does a human being define themselves, what character are we to ourselves?

One of the most moving moments in O Fim e o Princípio is when one of the interviewees, a man who lives alone in a house in the backlands, recounts his old trajectory as a poet, and recites one of the poems he composed in his youth — and within that poem we can see the way he manages to give voice to his feelings about women, about the collective feminine presence in his life (his mother, the women he loved), in a way that creates a record of self-expression, of self-affirmation, so that an entire lifetime can reveal itself in a few minutes before our eyes.

And that's the beauty of Coutinho's cinema: showing the human being as a fabulator of their own life, the oral creation of a narrative line that spans classes, geographies, marriages, loves, sorrows, failures, and successes, and through which the individual develops an emancipatory process of becoming the owner of their own story. Language as a form of human liberation to define one's being, one's affects, and one's map of interpersonal relationships.