Seizing the occasion: history and nation in Eduardo Coutinho's Metalworkers

Abstract

This article looks at the convergence of history and nation in the documentary Metalworkers/Peões (Eduardo Coutinho, 2004). The catalyst for Coutinho's project was Brazil's 2002 presidential race and the candidacy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former lathe operator and labor leader who was elected president toward the end of that same year. Metalworkers, however, does not focus on the presidential candidate and his campaign. Instead, it seeks out the past by means of a series of interviews with those who participated, under Lula's leadership, in the labor movement that surged in the late 1970s and challenged the country's military regime at the time. Inspired by performance-oriented theories, the article proposes that the film's particular encounter with the past offers an alternative to conventional representations of the nation and its history.

Keywords::

• Brazilian documentary
• memory
• experience
• workers
• presidential election

Notes

^1. This kind of nonfiction filmmaking is sometimes placed under the category ‘performative documentary,’ although the term often lacks precise definition. Authors such as Nichols (1994), Bruzzi (2006), and Jerslev (2005), for instance, tend to diverge on what to emphasize when they describe documentaries as performative.

^2. São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the country's industrial and financial center. The auto-industry, which employed most of the subjects interviewed in the film, was established in the outskirts of São Paulo in the late 1950s. The distance between São Paulo and Várzea Alegre is approximately 2000 miles.

^3. The footage comes from Linha de montagem [Assembly Line] (Renato Tapajós, 1982) and ABC da greve [ABC of the Strike] (Leon Hirszman, 1979–1990). Both documentaries are used later in the film, along with Greve! [Strike!] (João Batista de Andrade, 1979).

^4. See Lins (2004) for a broad discussion of how Coutinho's cinema negotiates the relationship between the individual and the collective.

^5. There are, of course, the documentaries used in Metalworkers, which represent a particular moment in that history. Referring specifically to those films, Lins (2004, 176) notes that it is not just the labor movement but also ‘a certain memory of Brazilian documentary’ that is honored in Metalworkers. The emphasis on the occasion allows us to further expand the references to Brazil's political cinema.

^6. The use of photographic records – both cinema and still images – in conjunction with the work of memory is a major feature in Twenty Years After as well. It is equally important in other Latin American documentaries that deal with the traumatic experiences of military dictatorships in the region, as is the case with Patricio Guzmán's Chile, la memoria obstinada [Chile, Obstinate Memory] (1997). For a discussion of memory in Twenty Years After, see Gervaiseau (2003). For Guzmán's film, see Palacios (forthcoming).

^7. Burke (1989, 101) also mentions the common roots of the verb ‘to record’ in some languages and the verb ‘to remember’ in others. In Portuguese, recordar normally means to recall; it is synonymous with lembrar (to remember).

As this article was going to press, we learned of the tragic death of Eduardo Coutinho. It is a huge loss for Brazilian cinema and for documentary filmmaking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vinicius Navarro

Vinicius Navarro is assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). He is the co-author, with Louise Spence, of Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Rutgers University Press) and co-editor, with Juan Carlos Rodríguez, of New Documentaries in Latin America (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan).