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Clara Balbi

Professor Linda Williams

Film 128

14 May 2015

Sewing Subjectivities

Discussing identity politics and the interplay between subjectivity and collectivity in Karim

Aïnouz’s documentary ​Seams​ (1993)

There’s no place for contented characters in the films of Brazilian filmmaker Karim

Aïnouz. His leads are so fundamentally inadequate to their surroundings that surrendering

is never an option: from Madame Satã, the historical outlaw and drag queen of the 1920s

Rio de Janeiro of the homonymous film, to Hermila, the abandoned wife who decides to

raffle herself in order to flee her boring hometown in ​O Céu de Suely​, reconciliatiating with

their immediate social contexts would mean the death of their very identities. The choice

for highly idiosyncratic main characters doesn’t mean, however, that Aïnouz works within

the monomythical-inspired narrative parameters. Instead, his filmography, which now sums

up to five feature-length movies and a number of short films, television projects and

installations, is marked by a strong non-narrative style, in which cause and effect rules are

left aside in favor of a cinema centered in perception.

In these excessive, bigger-than-life personalities, a political agenda, albeit not obvious,

is proclaimed: whenever society places itself between these characters and theirs desires,

they are ready to confront it. It is then through the individual character’s clash with

normative society that change can begin: “I’m not interested in how the adverse social and
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economic situation killed those people or made them criminals,” he explains in an interview

to Bomb Magazine, “I’m interested in how they react to those adverse situations […].” In a

country like Brazil, characterized for its raging social inequality, tales of change, even if

utopian, are more than welcome—they are needed.

The requisite for political reasoning is already present in his first short film, the

documentary ​Seams ​(1993). Pointed by many critics as key to understanding Aïnouz’s

filmography, yet scarcely analyzed in depth in both international and Brazilian scholarship,

the short film ​appears to translate the Brazilian filmmaker’s main problematic into

documentary terms: how can a film be politically relevant while refusing traditional

narrative strategies, this time of the non-fiction realm? How does an epistemology of affect

work in a cinematic domain historically concerned with objectivity?

The answer enunciated by ​Seams refuses at once the Direct Cinema movement of the

1960s, which understood truth as inherent to the historical world, only waiting to be

captured by the cinematic apparatus, and the ​Cinema Vérité of the same period, which

believed documentary accuracy to be found in the meeting point between documentarist

and documented. Instead, it aligns itself to the “new autobiographical cinema,” as termed

by Michael Renov, of the 1980s and 1990s. Refusing the Cartesian dichotomy of subject

and object, this group of films and videos claimed the historical world could only be

perceived through particular, subjective perspectives. By adopting the maxim that all

knowledge is situated knowledge (Haraway, qtd in Negrón-Muntaner 67), it became a

powerful medium for historically marginal social groups—in this case, women, ethnic

minorities, gays and lesbians—to enunciate history through their own voices, thus offering

an alternative to official historiography.

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The movement was also characterized by a highly syncretic, unconventional approach

to filmic formats, borrowing aesthetic influences from the Avant-Garde movement of the

1920s and mixing videotape, Super-8 footage, archival images and still photos in its

attempt to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Along with Renov, Bill Nichols too

recognized the change of paradigm these movies represented to the documentary realm,

adding to his already established personal taxonomy a new mode of representation, the

“Performative Documentary,” summarized as “I speak about myself to you” (205).

If we were to think in Renov’s terms, ​Seams ​would fit a specific subcategory of the

“new autobiographical cinema:” the “Domestic Ethnography,” in which the

director-autobiographer engages in the documentation of family members as a way of

self-examination. Aïnouz clarifies that, at first, the desire to record his grandmother and her

fours sisters was foremost an urge to protect their memory—the director simply realized

their deaths weren’t as distant as he once thought they were (Avellar and Sarno 23).

Nonetheless, the family footage was slowly put together with other images (an

Avant-Garde-like performance, archival images), and eventually the miscellaneous pieces

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were tied together through the use of a first-person voice-over, symbolically Aïnouz’s own

Seams thus presents a narrative that sews, at once, the five sisters’ and the director’s

tales, a characteristic that, for Renov, is primal in this new way of producing

Ethnographical knowledge; according to him, thanks to the intimate, often consanguineous

nature of the relationship between documented and documentarist, the representation of

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The voice-over that narrates ​Seams​ is not literally the director’s; it belongs, in truth, to an
actor, Fernando Linares. In this essay, however, we will refer to voice of Linares as
Aïnouz’s own, once it represents, in the movie’s diegesis, a first-person confession coming
from the filmmaker.
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each of the portrayed figures tends to implicate the director in complex ways. He terms the

problematic co(i)mplication, merging the notions of complexity and the continuous

interpenetration between subject-object that surrounds the subgenre of Domestic

Ethnography in a single word (218). It’s also interesting to note that the use of filmmaking

as a therapeutic practice, in which the director’s traumas are located and confronted with

the help of the camera, is another of the qualities that ​Seams shares with the Domestic

Ethnographic mode—even if, just like in psychoanalysis, this discourse’s consequences are

never final and, instead, are condemned to remain ongoing forever.

If ​Seams is affiliated both to the broader subgenre of “autobiographical documentary”

and to its Domestic Ethnography tendencies, I think the film also somehow surpasses that

body of documentaries through its unprecedented political proposal: that of identity

fluidity. When Aïnouz speaks through and with the women who raised him, he doesn’t

define his identity as one connected to that of the gay/lesbian Latino immigrant community,

in the likes of Marlon Riggs’ fundamental ​Tongues Untied (1989) in which gay, black men

are the ones responsible for the “revolutionary act.” On the contrary, he undertakes a

number of identities: that of a Brazilian, a feminist and, ultimately, anything he would like,

all of this while remaining himself. Through this syncretically-forged identity, that

employs, as written by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, a “discourse of affinity rather than

identity” (68), ​Seams presents a radical proposition of subjectivity while refusing

individualism: although Aïnouz renders the individual as potentially revolutionary on his

own, he also emphasizes the importance of community in the construction of the self.

Seams​’ complex, delicate intertwining of the director’s own subjectivity to that of his

grandmother and great-aunts’ is highly difficult to deconstruct. Just like the bilro lace,

typical of the region the film is set on, its beauty lies in great part in its indissolubility: the
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patterns created through its single threads, as fine as resistant, are not to be outlined, but

instead appreciated as a whole. Refuting analysis also acts as a manner to defend the bigger

philosophical frame of phenomenology the documentary associates itself to: to understand

experiences holistically rather than through their breakdown is one more way of denying a

Cartesian division of the world between object and subject.

Yet, for the sake of this paper, I will try to investigate some of the elements of ​Seams

that I believe are responsible for this more fluid identity politics, bringing together the

experiences of Aïnouz’s homosexuality and of his grandmother and great-aunts’ existence

as women in an extremely patriarchal society. Even if there is a series of narrative and

aesthetic techniques at work to enable the creation of such an impression, I would like to

highlight here two elements that are, in my opinion, the most striking: the statement of the

impossibility of translation of an engrained system of prejudice, and the collective telling of

the story of Maria, a melodrama that reaffirms the five sisters’ and Aïnouz’s similar

identities.

Before I begin, however, I would like to bring attention to the fact that this

omnipresent dynamic between subjectivity and collectivity in a lot of ways resembles the

one of closeness and distance of the “participant observation” of Cultural Anthropology. As

Renov recalls, however, in this case “there is no fully outside position available” (219):

objectivity in ​Seams​ is never an option.

Aïnouz’s goal in ​Seams is to explain homophobia in Brazil through the stories of his

grandmother and great-aunts, who also faced the consequences of an extremely

male-oriented, sexist society. Because male figures were practically absent in his

family—as the director acknowledges in the voice-over, after the death of his
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great-grandfather “it became patriarchy without men”—, these women had to resist a

complex historical context and negotiate their own survival in very specific ways.

All of the five sisters were fated to unhappy marriages. Branca, Aïnouz’s grandmother,

was abandoned by his grandfather early on; Juanita, albeit having a rich spouse, had to deal

with his constant betrayals; Ilka, like her sister Pinoca, never truly loved her husband; Zélia

was never married (“I’m sorry to tell you this, Karim, but I never liked men,” she explains,

candidly). Most of the sisters had been obliged to get jobs in a time of Brazilian history

when, as Juanita reports, women who worked outside the realm of their private households

were considered “worthless.” Being denied a reputation of pride within the

male-constructed world, they reacted by building their identities autonomously from it. If

they were to establish relationships with men, they were not based on dependence, as it was

customary, but on caution. As Aïnouz observes in his voice-over, “the five of them taught

me an unusual thing for a Brazilian kid to learn: machos aren’t to be trusted.”

It is after the sisters’ telling of the extreme discrimination they suffered due to their

inability to occupy their allotted places in patriarchal society that the first movement of

Aïnouz’s alignment effort with his female counterparts occurs: the exposure of a common

prejudiced nature against both women and homosexuals entrenched in Brazilian Portuguese

speech.

Seams is a film made by a Brazilian about Brazil, and yet spoken in English. Maybe in

a way to compensate for the cultural barriers between Brazilian and North-American

societies, Aïnouz at first introduces a portrayal of Brazil equivalent to the clichéd imageries

of touristic pamphlets. But the exotic, female-like representation of the country is soon

shown to be deceptive, instead giving place to the filmmaker’s own apperception of

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Brazilian reality, shared by his grandmother and great-aunts: “Brazil is a very aggressive,

very 'machista' place. Very male. Very tough.”

The vocabulary elucidations are from then on persistent in the movie. “In Portuguese,”

the voice-over elucidates, “​viado ​means deer, but it also means faggot, which means queer.

Sapatão means big shoes, but it also means dyker, queer.” He later continues: “​Puta means

whore. It is the worst name one can call a woman, if one wants to insult her. If one wants to

insult a man, one calls him ​viado​, which means faggot. Every girl fears to be called ​puta​. I

have feared the word ​faggot​ since I was little.”

The tentative translation from Portuguese to English reveals, via de-contextualization,

the entrenched nature of sexism in the notions of women’s sexuality, vehemently concealed

from childhood, and homosexuality, so deeply rooted in Brazilian society that they became

over the years inseparable from the symbolic order of speech. As Negrón-Muntaner

summarizes, the patriarchal powers in action are “identified as hetero-sexist and

homophobic and [are] located in language” (68).

Even more surprising is the revelation of the complete nonsense of the association of

these words with such bias when they are converted to English. Translation is denoted

insufficient: these kinds of hegemony structures at work are so inherent to one’s culture that

they are simply not cognizant for foreigners. Through this artifice, then, Aïnouz

simultaneously declares the impossibility of ever being able to translate his personal

experience as a Brazilian to the American spectator, to whom the text is destined while, at

the same time, aligning his experience with any of those who were raised under the same

societal standards—anyone whom, like his grandmother and great-aunts, have ever been

afraid of being called ​puta​ or ​viado​.

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The second interesting method Aïnouz employs to unify his position with that of his

female relatives is the collective retelling of the story of Maria, a story he had heard over

and over as he was growing up and has its parts recounted by each of the elder sisters—“a

melodrama,” he says, “that reminded me of my mother’s and grandmother’s faith.” The tale

is a sad one, and centers around Maria, a bright young woman who was never allowed to

complete her studies. Maria got married, as expected, a loving-filled wedding. Her maiden

aunt, however, an ex-nun, disagreed to her niece’s choice of husband: in her opinion, he

wasn’t rich enough. Shortly afterwards the wedding, the young woman fell ill. When

Maria’s husband, a military official, was relocated, she wasn’t able to come with him. She

needed constant assistance, and was hence trapped in her old house in the company of her

aunt.

Maria wrote hundreds of love letters to her darling over the years, but never got any

answer. One day, however, after many years of believing her husband had abandoned her,

Maria’s aunt died; sometime afterwards, Maria found a box in the attic. It contained all the

letters she had received from her spouse, secretly stolen and hidden by her aunt. She wrote

to her old husband, hopeful, and they got together; but he had already formed another

family, and the dreams she had of their reunion were forever shuttered.

The tale is especially similar to Branca’s own life: abandoned by Aïnouz’s grandfather,

her hopes of being reunited with her husband showed to be utopian when she discovered,

also through a letter, that he had married another woman. However, it also stands in for the

lives of Juanita, Ilka, Pinoca and Zélia whom, like Maria, were never granted a happy

ending when it came to love. It is thus evident that Maria’s melodramatic narrative

represents all of the women. The question, then, is: how does it represent Aïnouz?
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Frances Negrón-Muntaner offers an interesting perspective on the topic. In her essay

“Drama Queens: Latino Gay and Lesbian Independent Film/Video,” she identifies the

melodrama’s role in ​Seams as a site for pleasure and pain (68): pleasure achieved from the

expression of desire, disavowed by the five sisters throughout the whole narrative, and pain

felt thanks to Maria’s, and theirs, tragic fate of solitude. It is in this interplay between

pleasure and pain that we can recognize Aïnouz’s persona: he, like his grandmother and

great-aunts, desires men; yet he, too, believes to be destined to a lonely life, once the

patriarchal structures restrain him from assuming such pleasures—at least in Brazil. In fact,

it is in that melancholic note that ​Seams ​ends. Aïnouz asks Zélia whether she had ever slept

with a man. She answers she had never been married. The filmmaker then narrates his

nightmare in voice-over: Zélia asks him whether if he has a girlfriend. “No, I don’t. Not

exactly. Life’s complicated,” he answers. It seems that while in Brazilian territory, where

all the biases and prejudices against gays are still in the works, the narrator’s homosexuality

can’t be fully acknowledged.

Moreover, it is interesting to notice the fact that the movie scenes that represent

Maria’s tale are the only ones whose representation belongs solely to Aïnouz. For, even if

the story is said to have come from his grandmother and great-aunts’ lips, their voices are

never present in the segments, only the filmmaker’s. It is only here, too, that a completely

fictional realm is set, dream-like performances of Maria waiting for her husband,

accompanied by a loom.

I find the presence of the loom in Maria’s performance scenes particularly

serendipitous. Within the documentary’s ​diegesis​, the loom can be literally traced back to

the director’s grandmother Branca, who used to work as a seamstress; it also represents, in
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last instance, the tying in of perspectives that conjures both the structure of the movie and

Aïnouz’s own subjectivity.

I can’t ignore, however, the long history the instrument has in classical mythology:

Medea used one to act up her vengeance plan against Jason, weaving together poisoned

threads to create a beautiful wedding dress for Glauce, his to-be bride; Clytemnestra’s plot

to murder Agamemnon first started with the weaving of a purple carpet, over which the

Greek hero walked when he first stepped in Argos. Most remarkably, one of the more

virtuous women in the totality of Greek myth, Penelope, too, has her destiny inherently tied

to a loom, with which she weaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes by the day,

only to undo it at night, every night, while she waits for her husband.

Not unlike the narrative of ​Seams​, these women found a way to negotiate with an

extremely patriarchal society in their own terms—sometimes for not quite honorable

purposes, like Medea and Clytemnestra; but also sometimes, following Penelope’s model,

with cunning and creativity. My proposal of Aïnouz’s fluid “politics of identity” as

revolutionary may, finally, be formulated by the following (very) hypothetical question: if

anyone else, might it be man, gay, black, Brazilian, any or all of the above, had ever

aligned his own identity to that of these Greek mythological female figures, isn’t it possible

that the political possibilities of the women of the time had been vaster, then?
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Works cited

Avellar, José Carlos, and Geraldo Sarno. "Karim Aïnouz: Um Olhar Poético e

Político." ​Cinemais​ 2003: 20-47. Print.

Eduardo, Cléber, and Ilana Feldman. "A Política do Corpo e o Corpo Político - O

Cinema de Karim Aïnouz." ​Revista Cinética​. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.revistacinetica.com.br/cep/karin_ainouz.htm>.

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. "Drama Queens: Latino Gay And Independent

Film/Video." ​Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts​. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minesotta Press, 1996. 59-76. Print.

Nichols, Bill. ​Introduction To Documentary​. 2​nd ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 2010. Print.

Renov, Michael. ​The Subject Of Documentary​. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.

Seams​. Karim Aïnouz, 1993. DVD.

Tongues Untied​. Marlon Riggs, 1989. DVD.