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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 1 Number 3 2007 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.1.3.199/1

The cinema of Eduardo Coutinho

Consuelo Lins Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Abstract
Filming the word-in-act, the present events and the characters uniqueness without proposing explanations or solutions, such are the principles of Eduardo Coutinhos cinema, plus another in his more recent works: filming in a demarcated space, in a specific favela (Santa Marta, Parque da Cidade, Babilnia), a garbage dump (Boca de Lixo), or an apartment building (Edifcio Master). Spatial geography became essential to Coutinhos films, which imposes certain lines on what is to be filmed, immediately accentuating the immanent nature of the images produced by this film-maker. These principles make Eduardo Coutinhos cinema one of the present, but an impure present, not only that of actuality, but of remembrance or evocation.

Keywords
documentary Brazilian cinema television

Documentary film-maker Eduardo Coutinho has enjoyed a unique career in Brazilian cinema. He is a contemporary of numerous Cinema Novo directors and a friend and collaborator of several,1 but he did not take make a mark as a director himself until the early 1980s, when he was nearly 50, in an entirely different context from that of Brazil in the 1960s. Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later, also known as A Man Marked to Die) (1984) made an immediate impression on the history of Brazilian cinema as a watershed and synthesis-film2 that resumed a certain vision of political cinema that intends to changes the world (typical of the 1960s), while shifting and pointing to new pathways. The film displays various elements from the documentary tradition, yet altered, transformed and reshaped, precisely to allow the emergence of anonymous characters and events, forgotten or shunned by official history and the media. Now approaching age of 70, Coutinho himself is a character in Brazils contemporary cinematographic scene. He created a unique and seductive kind of grumpy humour and optimistic pessimism. In just a few minutes of conversation one gets the clear feeling of witnessing a sort of thinking in the act, such is the vitality with which Coutinho expresses himself and discusses. If there is a common ground in his films, his interviews and his presence, it is precisely this live thinking in contact with the world, refusing ready-made ideas and prompt images and especially if they are of himself. Perhaps this is why the images and sounds he has produced in documentary cinema captivate us and demand another way of viewing and conceiving Brazil, far removed from the way we have become used to through TV feature programmes (although the latter draw on a similar raw material, namely real events and characters). Nevertheless it was on television, with a documentary programme by TV Globo, that Coutinho (previously a fiction film-maker3) became a

1. Among other work, he was production manager for four of the five short films comprising Cinco vezes favela (1962), by Cac Diegues, part of the first phase of the Cinema Novo, and scriptwriter for A falecida (1965), by Leon Hirszman, who was a close friend. 2. As defined by two great thinkers of Brazilian cinema: Jean-Claude Bernardet and Ismail Xavier. 3. Besides the first Cabra Marcado para Morrer (1964), unfinished, Coutinho directed the following fiction films: ABC do Amor (1966), O homem que comprou o mundo (1968), and Fausto (1970). None of these three actually got the film-maker very enthused. I dont deny them, but Cabra/1984 was the only one that I really enjoyed making, that really

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got me involved. Maybe Im just mediocre as a fiction film-maker. (Coutinho, in Molica, 1984) Fernando Molica, Coutinho: um filme contra heris, Estado de So Paulo, 2 December1984. 4. Coutinho worked for TV Globo from 1975 to 1984. 5. Eduardo Coutinho, in Cinemais, 22 (MarchApril), 2000, p. 66. 6. Eduardo Coutinho, interviewed in Cinemais, 22, p. 65.

documentarian. Television was an extremely fertile experience4 that would make a deep impression on his later films. The agility of filming, the possibility of trying-and-erring and the diversity of situations enticed Coutinho into making documentaries once and for all. While at TV Globo he made Theodorico, Imperador do Serto (Theodorico, Emperor of the Backlands) (1978), in which he fully practised for the first time an attitude that became the basis for his subsequent films: to listen and understand other persons reasons while not necessarily agreeing with them (Coutinho, 2000, p. 66),5 i.e. the possibility of putting himself in the other persons place in thought, without eliminating the difference between those who are on opposite sides of the camera. Both in the case of Theodorico, a character in the Brazilian rural elite (worthy of criticism on various counts), and with the anonymous characters from his other films, Coutinhos approach excludes either moral complicity with the person in front of the camera or disrespect towards the thinking of the person chosen as the character. Coutinho does not judge. It is up to viewers to draw their own conclusions based on what they see and hear. It is not a matter of neutrality or rejection by the author, but of an original relationship between his point of view and that of his characters.
For starters, the person does not want to be judged. [...] The person speaks, and if you as a film-maker say: this person is wonderful because hes typical of such-and-such a sociological behaviour youre finished, washed up, right there. [...] the essential thing is the attempt to put yourself in the other persons place without judging, understanding the other persons reasons without agreeing with him. Each person wants to be heard in his uniqueness. [] I try to open up a total void inside myself, you know?6
(Coutinho, 2000, p. 65)

Cabra Marcado para Morrer (A Man Marked to Die)

What differentiates me from many directors is that I dont make films about others, but with others, Eduardo Coutinho always says. It was in A Man Marked to Die that this principle gained its full force, since this film was based on the directors search for (and re-encounter with) the actors who participated in the filming of the first A Man Marked to Die, peasants from the land struggle in north-east Brazil. Directed by Coutinho in 1964, the original film was interrupted by the military coup that year. Various peasant leaders were arrested, as were several members of the film crew. Sixteen years later Coutinho returned to the area to try to re-establish contact with the old comrades and characters. It was certain to be a documentary, but of a new kind, crafted around the unfinished film, with no script or preconceived idea. Coutinho managed to locate several characters and specifically Elizabeth Teixeira, widow of the murdered peasant leader who had inspired the original film. In the most troubling and moving scene, Elizabeth, who had been living underground since the military coup, reclaims her real name and experiences an unexpected re-encounter with a side of her life she appears to have forgotten. She is transformed right before the camera and in front of the friends who are witnessing her testimony slowly but surely her words regain their vitality. It is no longer a matter of telling what really happened, but of an operation of self-formulation in which she reinvents
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herself based on fragments of her life. She displays expressions, looks and gestures, embodying the character of the courageous woman she really was. Perhaps not exactly the same, but what matters is what happens to her inside the film: a vigorous metamorphosis. The scene is emblematic, because it announces an essential element in Coutinhos post-Marked-to-Die film-making. From that moment on he imposes a slow and steady cleansing of the aesthetic elements with which he worked and concentrates on what he already considered fundamental: the encounter, the speech and the transformation of his characters.

7. Jean Rouch, Le vrai et le faux, in Traverses, 47, Ni vrai ni faux, 1989, p. 181. 8. With the exception of Fio da memria (198991).

A Man Marked to Die and cinma-vrit

To a certain extent Coutinhos cinema, and especially A Man Marked to Die, belong to the French tradition of cinma-vrit, whose film manifesto is Chronicle of a Summer, directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in the Parisian summer of 1960, a tradition that affirms intervention in the making of a documentary, aware that any reality undergoes an alteration when a camera is placed in front of it, and that any effort to film reality untouched is entirely in vain. What is fundamental in Chronicle of a Summer and that withstands the test of time with such freshness is precisely the possibility of another kind of relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed, and the transformation of both as a function of the film. The interaction between the film-maker and those he films (which must happen in a documentary in order for it to exist) is resituated on a new basis and made explicit in the image. The viewer sees the encounter between the film-maker and the various characters (including some crew members) and the active participation by the directors to produce the events that will be filmed. What is recorded, according to Jean Rouch, is a unique metamorphosis, a cine-trance, when thanks to this little crystal and steel monster, no one is the same any more(Rouch, 1989, p. 181).7 This is the films interest, insists Rouch, the transformation of persons as a function of the film (Rouch, 1962, p. 28). Contrary to the rules of American direct cinema (preaching the crews minimal presence, in which reality is filmed as if the camera were not there, without interviews, with no looks towards the camera), the aim of cinma-vrit is to produce a specifically filmic event, which does not exist prior to the film and which must undergo a new transformation after it. Thus, in Coutinhos films the world is not ready to be filmed, but rather in constant transformation, and he intensifies this change.

Language reinvented
Coutinhos documentaries after A Man Marked to Die are no longer linked to Brazils history8 but to the interviewees present, whether as residents of the favela, the garbage dump, or a middle-class apartment building. They were shot mostly in video and Santo Forte (The Mighty Spirit) (1999), Babilnia 2000 (2001), and Edifcio Master (2002) were transferred to film. Today, with his numerous films based on the speech of the various characters, Eduardo Coutinhos cinema is one of the filmed word (in which he wagers on the narrative potentialities of the people he interviews). Coutinho is an acid critic of a certain theory according to which cinema is essentially the image. Such narrow thinking fails to glimpse the wealth
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and complexity of the image and the sound of the others word, the silences, slips, rhythms, inflections, differentiated retakes of the discourse. And the gestures, pursing of the lips, frowns, looks, shrugging of the shoulders, etc (Coutinho, 1992). Coutinho thus distrusts foreign documentaries whose directors lack deep knowledge of the language in the country they are filming and who despite the best of intentions, end up reproducing ethnocentric stereotypes, or at best, missing reality by miles (1992). An exemplary scene of what Coutinho does with his approach can be found in Babilnia 2000 a travelling take around a girl in the favela, like Janis Joplin singing her famous hit song Me and Bobby McGhee, on the highest part of the hillside slum, with Copacabana Beach and Sugarloaf Mountain in the background. Her English is entirely invented from the first to the last word, but the conviction with which she belts out the words makes us believe that this is indeed the true English, the oldest English, the most original English, the first language whence came all others. By inventing this English, the favela singer, an ex-hippie who lost both her son Siddhartha and her husband to the drug traffic, expresses in a concentrated way what we see happen with the Portuguese language over the course of the films in which Coutinho filmed the poor. Seeing precarious lives racked by terrible violence, we are faced with a vigorous word that invents meanings, creates vocabulary and mixes terms with different origins: a word (in a word) that attempts to write its own grammar. A personalized Portuguese, each with his own, which is how the filmed characters express themselves in a world manifested in the dominant language (grammatical rules, social behaviours, conveniences, good manners, general culture) and which simultaneously reveals the oppression to which they are submitted and the various forms of micro-resistance to this state of things. We (the viewers) often laugh at what is said because we are surprised by this creative capacity in a population bombarded by a multiplicity of discourses, with the transformation of speech in a battle against the horror of not being able to communicate, with this pleasure in the expression emerging from the blunders and slips of the tongue. The humour often surfaces precisely in fleeting moments of crisis in the language, revealing minor triumphs against the oppression of speech.

The word in act

It is thus not easy to work with the filmed word. How does one tackle the immense saturation of the word on television? How does one extract the word from the ocean of clichs in which it constantly submerges? Interviews, the-man-on-the-street, surveys and anonymous testimony: the information is confirmed as real through these mechanisms. Coutinho succeeds in retrieving vigour in his characters testimony through radical shifts in both filming and editing. Contrary to news stories and documentaries that approach the subject with predefined knowledge, Coutinho concentrates on the present moment of filming to extract all its possibilities and in this movement he attempts to somehow break free from the preconceived ideas that inhabit our minds without our realizing it. Still, what permeates these choices and radically opposes his films to TV production are his rigorous ethics in relation to the people he films. Coutinho gives his characters time to formulate some ideas about their lives, and he
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truly listens to them. He asks few questions, but gets answers that surprise both the film-maker and the characters. We have the distinct impression that many of his characters are thinking certain things for the first time, in front of the camera, as if they had not had the time or the stimulus to do so before. This may sound paradoxical in light of a new procedure he has adopted in his last four films: before filming, he conducts extensive preliminary research work. It is necessary to have an idea of what will be found in the chosen universe in order to decrease the shooting costs. In Edifcio Master, five researchers conducted five-minute preliminary film interviews of all the residents who were willing to talk. Coutinho selected those he was going to film based on the reports, the conversations with the research team and the images. Only then did he himself contact the interviewees at the actual moment of filming, with the complete crew. His interviewees had to be aware that he was hearing their stories for the first time. Coutinho is convinced that working with a larger crew (seven members) does not hinder the interaction, quite to the contrary. The characters feel they have to do their best at that moment of the interview. This does not change much as compared to his previous films. There is a psychoanalytical dimension to his films: analysis is primarily a place of listening. Often something is constructed between the word and the listening that does not belong to either the interviewee or the interviewer. It is a telling, in which the real transforms itself into a component of a kind of confabulation, in which the characters formulate some ideas, confabulate, invent themselves and, just as we learn about them, they also learn something about their own lives. There is a shortcut in this process between the person and the character created in the act of speaking.9 If the filming is what creates the conditions for the emergence of this word that confabulates, the editing process is also essential to keep it unique. There is never a generalization, a classification, first because Coutinho refuses to exhibit the interviewees as examples of anything. They are not psychosocial types. The slum-dweller, the garbage picker, the Protestant, and the middle-class apartment resident are not part of a statistic, nor do they justify or prove some hypothesis. In short, they are not seen as part of a whole. Second, because the interviews often contradict each other, pointing to a heterogeneous world, with multiple directions. The worlds that the filmmaker reveals to us are not centred on a commentary or on precise information, but on testimony that traces out a network of little stories without centres that communicate with each other through tenuous, non-causal links. These worlds are echoes established between different elements of the characters image or speech. What the viewer perceives is the result of a mixture of characters, speeches, background noises, images and expressions, and never ready-made meanings provided by a voice in off.

9. It was Gilles Deleuze (1985), who picked up on Henri Bergsons concept of fabulation to approach the films of Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault.

The immanence of the world

Coutinhos films possess a kind of radical immanence, something that the French philosopher Clment Rosset (1989) calls the principle of sufficient reality, or the principle of cruelty, the intrinsically painful and tragic nature of reality [] the unique and thus irremediable and irrevocable nature of this reality (Rosset, 1989, p. 16). It is an ethics of cruelty, not in the common sense of maintaining suffering, but in the rejection of complacency towards
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any object, the thing stripped of its ordinary ornaments or accoutrements (Rosset, 1989, p. 17), a kind of practice which Coutinhos cinema expresses in the refusal to add a truth or a piece of information to scenes that suffice in themselves, that need nothing more. In terms of the aesthetic result, this option for immanence, reinforced in Santo Forte, Babilnia 2000 and Edifcio Master, is manifested in one of the strictest narrative economies, the absence of any soundtrack which is not linked strictly to the filmed environment, the absence of illustrative, picturesque or cover environments, the refusal to edit based on themes rather than the flow of words, and emphasis on the fact that the film is the result of a negotiation between the film-maker and the filmed. Coutinho films what exists, which, however, does not mean that the reality speaks for itself. Such documentary clichs have never been part of his cinema. What does exist is an un-resigned acceptance of the world and a refusal to provide pre-shaped solutions. The ethics of cruelty established by Rosset finds echoes in the way critic Andr Bazin defines the cinema of cruelty, a cruelty that rejects pious humanism, creating an ethics/aesthetics that can be found in authors like Buuel. Concerning Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950), Bazin (1989, pp. 5253) writes:
Buuel does not issue any value judgment on his adult characters. [] These beings have no reference other than life, this life that we think we have domesticated by morality and social order, but which the social disorder of misery returns to its initial virtual state [] Nothing more opposed to existentialist pessimism than Buuels cruelty. [] Because he eludes nothing, concedes nothing, and dares to unleash reality with a surgical obscenity, he succeeds in rediscovering man in all his grandeur and forcing us [] into love and admiration. Paradoxically, the main feeling expressed [] is that of inalterable human dignity [] this presence of beauty in atrociousness, this perenniality of human nobility in the midst of decadence [] does not spark any sadistic complacency or pharisaic outrage in the audience.

According to Bazin, this cruelty is nothing more than the measure of trust that Buuel placed in man and the cinema. Eduardo Coutinho generally approaches harsh realities in his films, but little by little the images find a tone that leaves this harshness in the background. The main interest focuses on daily life: difficulties, little sources of joy, fears, repose, love, encounters, friends, education and concern for ones children. The approach takes place between the filmmaker and the characters based not on the principle that their life is a horror, but from a generous look, fundamentally with no pity, seeking to see how they get by on a daily basis, wherever it may be. Even when Coutinho approaches themes with a certain repulsion (the repulsion of belonging to a society that produces scenes of children, adults and the elderly picking through garbage to eat, which is embarrassing to say the least), his films revitalize: they display symptoms of health and life in the midst of obvious degradation and show a little of what we can continue to love in this Brazil submerged in corruption, misery, individualism and indifference.

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Geography and its histories

To film what exists is to film the encounter, the word-in-act, events in the present and the uniqueness of the characters, without proposing explanations or solutions. Coutinho adds one more principle to his methodology: he films a limited space, like a favela (Santa Marta, Parque da Cidade, Morro da Babilnia), the So Gonalo garbage dump, or an apartment building in Copacabana. In recent years geography has been essential to his film-making, which immediately imposes certain lines on what is filmed, accentuating the immanent nature of the images. It is the principle of the single location, as defined by Coutinho, which fosters complex relations between the uniqueness of each character and each situation with something like a state of things that we experience today. How can one speak of religion in Brazil? Travelling all across the country? How does one speak of the favela? By filming several? Coutinhos approach leaves no doubt. Filming in a demarcated space and extracting a view that evokes the general but does not represent it, he does not exemplify generality, but speaks to us intensively about Brazil. Taking geography as his point of departure, history and memory gain renewed substance, connected to the land, to the people, to their confabulations, their encounters, mixed into daily life. The imprints of different pasts coexist with the present, without any relations of causality or succession in what is being shown. There is a non-chronological juxtaposition of histories, a criss-crossing of different forms of violence committed against the poor (the majority of whom are black) in the past and today. Todays badly-paid work, the most backbreaking and demeaning tasks, unemployment, disrespect and prejudices coexist with the marks of past slavery, misery and humiliation. Likewise appearing in the image are the little freedoms, the little gestures of creation, like other forms of escape and astuteness, stemming from immemorial intelligence (Giard, 1996, p. 19). Coutinhos cinema is thus one of the present, yet an impure present, one that should be understood in a broader sense, not only the instantaneous present of actuality, but one of remembrance or evocation. If Coutinho makes films that deconstruct the notion that peoples lives are a horror, he does not fail to reveal the intolerable dimension of what we are experiencing. Precisely because he does not propose a causeeffect or problemsolution structure that makes the viewer tolerate and withstand anything, what is unacceptable in the image does not undergo any reduction. Many scenes are similar to science-fiction films: a garbage-dump desert landscape where children and adults wallow for food while buzzards circle over (Boca do Lixo): scraps of western industrial civilization, the dregs of wealthy countries, the Fifth World, the end of the earth. And yet we see ourselves left face-to-face with people who not only survive off the garbage (the only aspect that normally interests the media) but who, indifferent to state indifference, live with dignity and even with a certain joy. References
Bazin, A. 1989. Luis Buuel in O cinema da crueldade, ed. Martins Fontes, So Paulo. Coutinho, E. 1992. Un cinma de dialogue rejet par la television in Catalogue du cinma du reel, ed. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Coutinho, E. 2000. A palavra que provoca a imagem e o vazio no quintal, in Cinemais, n. 22, Rio de Janeiro. Deleuze, G. 1985. LImage-temps, ed. Les ditions de Minuit, Paris. Giard, L. 1996. Introduction in Certeau, M., A inveno do cotidiano, ed.Vozes, Rio de Janeiro. Molica. F. 1984. Coutinho: um filme contra heris, 1984. Estado de So Paulo, 2 December, p. 2 Rosset, C. 1989. O princpio de crueldade, ed. Rocco, Rio de Janeiro. Rouch, J. 1989. Le vrai et le faux in Traverses, 47, Ni vrai ni faux, ed. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Rouch, J. & Morin, E. 1962. Chronique dun t, ed. Domaine Cinma, Paris.

Filmography
Theodorico, Imperador do Serto (1978) Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later or A Man Marked to Die) (1984) Santa Marta: duas semanas no morro (1987) Fio da Memria (198991) Boca de Lixo (1993) Santo Forte (The Mighty Spirit) (1999) Babilnia 2000 (2001) Edifcio Master (2002) Pees (Metalworkers) (2003)

Suggested citation
Lins, C. (2007), The cinema of Eduardo Coutinho, Studies in Documentary Film 1: 3, pp. 199206, doi: 10.1386/sdf.1.3.199/1

Contributor details
Consuelo Lins is a director of documentary films and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has a PhD from Universit Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle), having written her dissertation on documentary films, focusing on the work of Robert Kramer. In 1999, she produced and directed Chapu Mangueira e Babilnia: histrias do morro (52 min), a documentary on the history and day-to-day life of two slums located in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. In 2001, she directed Jullius Bar (58 min), a film centered on transvestites from the peripheral areas of Rio de Janeiro which was selected to participate in several festivals, including the Brazilian Competition of the International Documentary Film Festival Tudo Verdade (Its All True). She worked with Eduardo Coutinho, considered the leading Brazilian documentary filmmaker, in Babilnia 2000 (2001) and Edifcio Master (2002). In 2005, she directed Lectures, a documentary short film entirely shot with a mobile phone, exhibited in several festivals and winner of the Best Brazilian Short Film Award at the International Festival of Short Films of Belo Horizonte. In 2005, she also won a post-doctorate grant at Universit Paris 3, where she conducted a research on subjective documentary production, including first-person, confessional, and autobiographic films, as well as filmed diaries and essays. She writes regularly on cinema, video, and television, having published, in 2004, a book on the work of Eduardo Coutinho. Contact: Consuelo Lins: Av. Atlntica 928 apto 608, CEP 22010-000, Rio de Janeiro RJ Brasil. E-mail: consuelolins@gmail.com

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