INTER[SECTIONS].

A Conference on Architecture, City and Cinema

Conference Proceedings. Porto, September 11-13, 2013

BRASÍLIA IN MOTION:

Cinema and the sense of place in the modernist city

Luciana Saboia Fonseca Cruz

Universidade de Brasília / Brasilia University, Brasilia, Brazil

Liz Sandoval
Universidade de Brasília / Brasilia University, Brasilia, Brazil

Abstract

Brasilia, inaugurated in 1960, expresses the modernist ideals of the Charter of Athens in the
compartmentalization of its urban design and the liberation of its urban ground for the free
transit of vehicles and pedestrians. Brasília represented the yearning for modernity in the
country, attracting migrants from all regions, and became a focal point of urban development
in the interior of Brazil. Today, with nearly three million inhabitants, Brasilia has outgrown the
boundaries of its initial Pilot Plan, and has become a conurbation of several “satellite cities”
that existed even before the capital city was inaugurated in 1960. This urban sprawl and its
conceptual principles lend a peculiar flow to the city’s movements that have not gone
unnoticed by the lenses of many filmmakers.

Documented by filmmakers since its construction, Brasilia reveals in film the metamorphosis
it has suffered. And beginning in the 1990’s, these films bear witness to the tearing apart of
the modernist narrative and unfold different narratives, transitory in nature, that place higher
value in the individual or in the life experiences of small social groups. The ephemeral
becomes key in the spatial reconfiguration of the city throughout its more than 50 years.
Films like Braxilia (2010), about the Brasilia-born poet Nicolas Behr, reveal the cracks in the
manner by which the contemporary city is appropriated, even when it is taken into account
the random flow of pedestrians through the green areas or the acceleration of the vehicular
traffic in the city’s immense thoroughfares.

Solà-Morales argues that the experience of the place of flow is kinaesthetic and, therefore,
fluid and ever changing. Consequently, if the fluidity perceived in the “duration” of the flows,
in a Bergsonian sense, is also a part of the city’s experiences, as opposed to merely the

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permanencies and rendezvous, it begs the question: how can the designed and built space,
represented by the distance to be travelled, build a sense of place in Brasilia? The article
aims to confront Brasilia’s cinematographic universe with the experience of moving around
the city, and has as its premise the speed of the automobile and the free transit of
pedestrians in the urban ground.

Keywords: Brasilia, Modern Urbanism, Cinema, Duration, Place.

Documentada por cinegrafistas, desde sua construção, Brasília mostra sua transformação
nos filmes, que testemunham, a partir dos anos 90, o dilaceramento da narrativa
programática modernista e multiplica-se em narrativas de caráter transitório que valorizam o
individuo ou as vivências de pequenos grupos sociais. O efêmero e o transitório ganham
importância na reconfiguração espacial da cidade ao longo de seus mais de 50 anos.
Filmes como Braxília (2010), sobre o poeta brasiliense Nicolas Behr, mostram fissuras nas
formas de apropriação da cidade contemporânea, ainda que considerados os fluxos
aleatórios de pedestres nas áreas verdes ou e a aceleração do movimento veicular nas
imensas vias da cidade.

Solà-Morales argumenta que a experiência do lugar do fluxo é cinestésica, portanto fluida e

em constante transformação. Portanto, se a fluidez percebida na “duração” dos fluxos, no
sentido bergsoniano, faz parte da vivência na cidade, e não somente as permanências e
encontros, procura-se responder a questão: como o espaço planejado e construído,
representado pelo intervalo a ser percorrido, pode construir um sentido de lugar em
Brasília? O artigo pretende confrontar o universo cinematográfico brasiliense e o circular na
cidade, que possui como premissa a velocidade do automóvel e a livre circulação do
pedestre no solo urbano.

Keywords: Flow, Duration, Sense of Place, Brasilia.

Introduction

Inaugurated in 1960, Brazil’s new capital city symbolized the yearning for modernity and the
possibility of a modern country. Lucio Costa’s 1957 design embodied the four basic
functions postulated by the modern urbanism (dwelling, work, recreation and circulation) as
expressed in the 1933 Athens Charter. The goal of the modernist program was to mitigate
the effects of the increasing population density in urban centers, originating in the XVIII and

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XIX centuries, by proposing to eliminate the traditional street-corridor and liberate the urban
ground for the inclusion of green areas, circulation routes, and free spaces for collective
appropriation.

The idea of “reconciling the natural speeds of pedestrians or horses with the mechanical
speeds of automobiles, streetcars, trucks, or buses” (Le Corbusier, 1993) materialized in
Brasilia when independent circulation routes were built, dividing the city into residential,
commercial, and governmental sectors, among others. Vehicles and pedestrians had
independent flows, defined by level crossings, paths without intersections and free transit,
which free the ground for circulation on foot by raising the buildings on stilts. On the other
hand, the movement of vehicles through rectilinear axes frame landscapes that repeat at a
continuous rhythm, glance at its designed, green, empty spaces, in a hierarchical circulation
network that results in a peculiar way of traveling through the city.

Nowadays, Brasília has a population of nearly 3 million inhabitants and its urban fabric is
made up of a contiguous agglomeration of nuclei, where the Pilot Plan, as originally
designed, constitutes its “center” and houses only around 8% of the population. There is a
pendulum movement between the center and the periphery – the majority of the population
lives in the periphery but work in the central part of the capital. Every day over 800,000
people move around the central sectors of Brasilia’s Pilot Plan, in the region around the bus
station which marks the intersection between the two main axes, the “Highway” and the
“Monumental”.

Brasília, in truth, has attracted migrants from all regions of the country, whose construction
was seen as an “adventure” - at least in the beginning of its construction, which lasted only
three years from the contest where the design was chosen to its inauguration. Moving the
country’s capital from Rio de Janeiro to the “Central Plateau” (as the area where Brasilia is
located is known) was a feat shrouded in myth and whose roots can be traced back to the
XIX century when the intention of moving the capital to the interior of the country began to
form. This idea was rejected by many, who did not deem feasible having the federal
government so distant from the traditional socio-economic centers of the country. Juscelino
Kubitscheck’s government suffered constant and fierce opposition during the construction
and even during the first years of consolidation of the new capital. Thus, it was important for
the State to reinforce the sense of progress and modernity desired by an underdeveloped
country plagued by severe social inequality.

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To better represent the notion of development, Brasília and its modern buildings, designed
by Oscar Niemeyer, were documented by the lenses of photographers, journalists, and
filmmakers, who arrived in the beginning of its construction, and so a strong relationship
between the cinema and the new city was born. Filmmakers - mainly the ones linked to the
Cinema Novo (New Cinema) movement, like Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
and Cacá Diegues, along with cinematographic records made by government official
sources - portrayed whether by documentary of fiction the changes that were taking place in
the country and especially in the new capital, which fascinated people with its modernist
charm. This myth of place representing the dream of a nation was, and still is, chased by
Brasilia’s cinematography well into the first decades of the XXI century.

From the observation of the images in the films about Brasilia, one notices that since the
beginning there has been this character of urban appropriation generated by the flow of the
paths followed within the city by both vehicles and pedestrians. The long routes followed by
the workers from the bus station all the way to the satellite cities, which in some cases could
last up to 3 hours, presented a stark contrast with the smooth routes between the blocks of
apartments and the wide expressways of the Pilot Plan, as can be seen in the scenes from
the film Brasília Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasilia – Contradictions of a New
City, by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1967).

A recurring theme in films from Brasilia is the use of scenes of automobiles dashing around
the city, connoting someone who is at high speed. It might be through the use of a camera
onboard a moving vehicle shooting the character/driver while showing the city moving in the
background, or it might be a camera traveling through the landscape conveying the
sensation of an observer inside a moving vehicle. Either way, Brasilia seems to embody the
speed of the automobile in its experience of life.

Marc Augé has advanced the idea, in his criticism of the contemporary city, that the
acceleration of the flows and the new technologies have allowed the multiplication of the so-
called non-places – places of transience and thus impersonal and devoid of identity.
However, if the movement, the fluidity, and the interval to be traveled are also a part of the
experience of living in Brasilia, in addition to the permanencies and rendezvous, how are the
places arranged in the Brazilian capital? The present study seeks to answer the question:
how can the modern space, appropriated by the fluidity of its pathways, build its own sense
of place? And so, it is our intent to relate the narratives found in the films about Brasilia

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(with their little stories and characters who become entangled in the living spaces) to the
designed space, taking into account the experience of duration in their flows and their
capacity to constitute a place.

This article is structured in three parts: the first one deals with defining the boundaries of the
problem – how the experience of routes and movements in the modern city, in the way they
have been apprehended by the cinematographic lenses, reconfigures the sense of
permanency and stability usually present in the city. We intend to select and analyze the
representations of experiences in the movements and routes shown in some of the
cinematographic narratives that are part of the capital’s filmography.

A new conception of space was a quest undertaken by the Modern Movement which,
through technological advancements, transparencies, spans, and new formal instruments of
abstraction, tried to understand the evolution and the essence of architecture as the creation
of space. These conceptions developed by the avant-garde oppose the volumetrically-
defined, identifiable, discontinuous, delimited traditional space. And yet, it has formatted
autonomous spaces, loosely and generically related to its surroundings. The recovery of the
idea of place is linked to a criticism of the contemporary city and to the retrieval of history
and memory, previously rebuffed by the International Style. Christian Norberg-Schulz,
however, opposes the theory of mobility and transitory spaces, and defends that “if one
eliminates space, one eliminates architecture … Existential space always consists of places”
(apud Montaner, 2000, p. 104). To him, existential space is always associated with the
genius loci and with the characteristic landscape of urban pieces and forms. However, Solà-
Morales argues that the transformations in the urban environment brought about by the
industrialization and, more recently, by the instabilities of the information society have
established processes that are more and more connected with time and flow. And from it, a
reflection arises: the “constructed” spaces, that is, the materialized spaces that make
“architecture a body of knowledge and techniques linked to permanency” (2002, p. 126) may
be related to movement and duration rather than to ordination, since contemporary society is
gradually abandoning stability in favor of permanent transformation and, as a consequence,
assuming dynamism and fluidity. This matter is dealt with in the second part, where we
intend to relate the appropriation of constructed spaces, understood as intervals to be
traveled, to the capacity of constructing a sense of place.

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Lastly, we will conclude by again bringing into focus the representations of those routes in
recent films made in Brasilia. There are cracks, ways of appropriating the contemporary
Brasilia, that are defined as intervals to be traveled and that are part of the city’s everyday
life. These intervals do not constitute places as fixed, stable permanencies, but rather as
experiences that linger in these places as memories.

Moving around modern Brasília

The functionalist urbanism inspired each and every design that vied for the chance of being
chosen as Brasilia’s Pilot Plan, and certainly defined the destiny of the new country’s capital
city. Brasília “was born of the primary gesture of one who marks a place or takes possession
of it: two axes intersecting at right angle, that is, the sign of the cross itself” (Costa, 1995, p.
285) In Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan, they would define the form and the pathways of the city and
for the city (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Descriptive memory of Brasilia’s Pilot Plan. Lucio

Costa, 1957.

The “eixo monumental” (monumental axis), comprised of 4 terraces, form the civic
landscape of the capital and its “monumentality” comes from the scale of its central lawn – a

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huge void framed by the architecture of the buildings that line it – but also from the
designated route that the automobiles had to follow, which allowed drivers to see the
repetition of the blocks of ministry buildings on both sides and the congressional towers in
the center of perspective. The Three Powers Plaza, due to its being situated on a lower
level, can only be seen when one arrives at the end of the last terrace, when one has no
other option but to traverse the square and finally see the two buildings that are part of it.

Intersected by the bus station platform, a 200-m wide overpass, which offers ample space
for the flow of pedestrians and vehicles and where the human scale is often forgotten, lies
exactly where the two main axes of the capital city cross (Figure 2).

The Highway Axis, which crosses the Monumental Axis through the bus station overpass,
forms the “wings” in the design. And that is where the flows of everyday residential and
business life happen, cutting the superblocks from north to south. On this arched axis, one
travels at highway speeds through a repeating landscape created by the uniform distribution
of buildings, glimpsed through the vegetation. Access to the residential blocks is made by
way of complete interchanges, without intersections or obstacles to the flow, through local
commercial streets. Within the blocks, streets that allow vehicles remain separate from
walkways.

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Figure 2. Bus Station. Still of Brasilia Planejamento Urbano,

Directed by Fernando Cony Campos, 1964

In scenes of such films as Brasília Planejamento Urbano (Fernando Cony, 1964) and
Brasília: contradições de uma cidade nova (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1967), made
within the first decade of the city’s inauguration, it is clearly noticeable their effort in showing
how the vehicle traffic worked and how the city was organized and compartmentalized,
showing it as an organism resulting from thorough planning. The buildings that are symbols
of the capital city, such as the Cathedral, the Palaces, and the Congress Towers, are also
shown with pride. As the city is traversed by ground or from the air, the routes are narrated
in order to introduce it to the viewer (most probably a non-resident viewer). In Brasília:
planejamento urbano, the main “innovations” in Lucio Costa’s Plano are thus presented:

And so it is that the city driver was given all the advantages of the highway driver:
unencumbered and continuous traffic. Add to that the introduction of complete
interchanges and level crossings, and the traffic of automobiles and buses, both in
the center and in the residential areas, take place without any intersections. Once the
general traffic network was laid out, autonomous networks for the local traffic of
pedestrians were established, granting them the free use of the ground1.

Nevertheless, another route, besides the wings and axes of the Pilot Plan, begins to present
itself: the route of the worker who leaves the bus station daily and proceeds to some satellite
city, still generic and impersonal, and whose name is known solely through the destination
signs at the bus station.

At the end of their commute, which usually lasts three hours, the workers finally
arrive at their place of residence: the so-called satellite cities or dormitory cities. They
sprung up spontaneously or were “designed” by the bulldozers in the huge deserted
areas around the capital city. Either way, these cities developed horizontally,
following an outdated urban scheme, opposed in every aspect to what Brasilia’s Pilot
Plan represented.2

Even before its inauguration, Brasilia was already composed by numerous distant nuclei,
where most workers and adventurers were able to settle. Others were created to absorb a

1
Part of the narration in Brasília: Planejamento Urbano, 1964
2
Part of the narration in Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova, 1967

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population of workers who had been settled at the center of the Pilot Plan while the
construction work was ongoing, but that were soon removed once the work had been
concluded.

If in its first decades the city was represented with either elation or disenchantment, in the
1990’s, when the country rediscovered democracy after years of military dictatorship, its
films portrayed a profound identity crisis. In A Concepção (2005), by José Eduardo
Belmonte, the residents of the Pilot Plan burn their papers and begin spending their days
continually rebuilding their identity, erasing their past and reinventing a present bound to last
only one day. In that period, the city’s bowels, underground, and byways were exposed. The
car rides around the city showed the forgotten places, the access roads, the unfinished
construction work, as in João Lanari’s film Mínima Cidade (1984).

By depicting Ceilandia, a satellite city located 26 km from the Pilot Plan and currently with
over 300,000 3 inhabitants, in A cidade é uma só? (2011), director Adirley Queirós
attempted to show the city where he lives and that came into existence as a result of a
governmental Campaign to Eradicate Intruders (in Portuguese, CEI - Campanha de
Erradicação de Invasões), which on March 27th, 1971 tried to remove nearly eighty thousand
intruders who occupied the newly-built city of Brasilia. In the scenes shot from inside a car
on the misaligned, unpaved streets of Ceilandia, the characters’ natural environment is one
of chaos. Even when surrounded by a dusty, fragmented landscape, the characters can
easily find the addresses they are looking for, in a spontaneous and familiar way. But when
they are on the residential axis of the Pilot Plan, they cannot orient themselves by its letters
and numbers, they cannot find their way out, and feel out of place. For the resident of the
Pilot Plan, it feels natural to guide themselves by a simple Cartesian map, where blocks are
sequentially numbered in increasing order northward and southward from Eixo Monumental.
Paradoxically, any outsider will “feel like a fish out of water” in the Pilot Plan.

The 1990’s witnessed the rise of a line of questioning that would become typical and that
one might classify as a “crisis of belonging”. These are films made by filmmakers who were
born in the city and are known as “the Brasilia generation”. The desire of belonging
translates, according to Raquel Sá, into “a feeling that the vast horizons of the Brazilian
savanna (Cerrado) presupposes not abundance, but instead a certain emptiness, a
communication deficit” (2003, p. 10).

3
(332,455 urban population, Source: SEPLAN/CODEPLAN – Pesquisa Distrital por Amostra de Domicílios - PDAD 2004)

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In Brasília, um dia em fevereiro (1996), Maria Augusta Ramos shows the loneliness felt by
the city dwellers, from diverse social classes, through the vast empty spaces of the city and
its architecture (Figure 3). The youth in A Concepção (2005) feel the need to create a new
identity each day and roam the city’s spaces. And in Insolação (2009), the emptiness and
the heat lead to a sense of twisted passion.

Figure 3. still of Brasília, um dia em fevereiro (1996).

Exacerbated autonomy and individualism were already a part of the city, which became a
metropolis in that decade. The movements that had once been collective became more and
more individual; protest and fight gave way to a sense of resignation that permeated the
whole decade of 1990 and continues into the new century, when a few points of resistance
have appeared, coming from the satellite cities. The metropolis is no longer peripheral to the
Pilot Plan, which has been suffering heavy pressure. The way to move around the city has
created its own metropolitan flow. That is when one notices that in Brasilia “the machine-era
society surrenders to the mass society, where the ephemeral and the transitory acquire
importance in the configuration of identities”. (Saboia, 2010, p. 5)

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This feeling of awkwardness or non-belonging in the city-turned-metropolis corresponds to

what Solà-Morales defined as an experience related to contemporary societies – connected
and virtual – and which originates “experiences of simultaneity, multiple presence, and
constant generation of new perceptual stimuli, [and which] at the same time has produced
deep feelings of strangeness” (Solà-Morales, 2003, p. 109)

Figura 4. Still de A Concepção, José Eduardo Belmonte, 2005.

On the other hand it is everyday life that goes by the monuments. The emptiness is filled
with memories by the inhabitants who work, move, and live the city and its ways.

Brasilia, away from its immenseness, loneliness, and generous spaces, is somehow
humanized in the films of the “Brasilia generation” when it is framed by human
landscapes that crisscross between the physical and the symbolic territories, the
axes and parallels that confine, segregate, isolate. Noteworthy is the profusion of
types living in the central area of the city, where the bus station, the Pilot Plan, and
the satellite cities cross (Montoro, 2012, p. 204).

Flow, duration and memory: configuration of places

The bus station is the central point of Lucio Costa’s design, and also the emptiness where
the various narratives of the Pilot Plan and the Satellite Cities have met, appearing in

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representations since the 1960’s. The bus station is an integral part of Brasilia as it was
imagined and built in 1960 as well as of the ever growing “peripheral Brasilias”.

In fact, the notion of place is connected with the notion of time. The cities have been
challenged to deal with time; its monuments accumulate memories, evoke people and
institutions, and struggle against oblivion. “They find their identity by fighting against the
passage of time, by capturing it through rite and myth” (Solà-Morales, 2003). Conversely,
one is able to notice the emergence of a culture of “happening”. In the more recent portraits
of Brasilia, where the moments that are necessary to appropriate the city as movements are
in evidence, the “happening”, as defined by Solà-Morales, can be observed.

A culture that, at the moment of the fluidity and decomposition that lead to chaos, is
able to generate energetic moments, capable of sifting through this chaos, of taking
some of its elements to build in the present, for the future, a new fold in the multiple
reality. Those that were many unfold into a few, which may hold in a single one.
(2003, p. 112)

They are meeting points, a conjunction of lines that cross, love stories that unfold on the bus
route in the center-periphery axis; they are political candidates that conduct their campaigns
in the flow of the bus station; the affectionate poet from Brasilia that invents a new Brasilia
while walks against the flow of vehicles on the Highway Axis; the utopian Braxilia, which
happens in spite of the norms and sectors. Films like Braxília (2010), about the local poet
Nicolas Behr, show the cracks in the forms of appropriation of the contemporary city, even
when the flows and the acceleration of the movement are considered. When one looks at
the representation of the city in the cinema and, like a two-way street, at the city from the
analysis of its representation in film, one begins to grasp how a city is built by, among other
things, time and its displacements – rhythm, movements, stops, and also the interval to be
traversed – which, like shelter, constitute the dialectics of dwelling, and the city becomes
the first locus of this relationship. (Ricoeur, 1998)

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Figura 5. Still de Braxília, Danyella Proença, 2010.

The interval to be traversed suggests space and its duration – as it is considered in the
main Bergsonian division, in which the duration is the bearer of the differences in nature
(qualitative) and the space presents the differences of degree (quantitative), but in which
both imply the notion of time (increase or decrease regarding space, and change, regarding
duration). Bergson argues that the physical experience of movement develops into a mix of
quantitative perception, seen from the outside, and the qualitative perception of the one who
experiences the movement:

As physical experience, movement itself is mixture: one part – the space traveled by
that which is mobile, creating an indefinitely divisible numeric multiplicity whose every
part, real or possible, is current and differs solely by degree; another, pure movement
that is change, qualitative virtual multiplicity, like Achilles’ run, divided into steps, but
that changes its nature every time it divides. (…) and that which, when seen from the
outside, appears to be a numerical component of the run, but which is, when seen
from the inside, merely an obstacle that has been overcome. (Deleuze, 2012, p. 41)

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Starting from Bergson’s premises, which emphasize the multiplicity of perceptions, he

argues that the experience of the movement recreates the perception of externality of space
for it is based on the relationship between things and durations. The notion of space is
directly related to movement, because the latter (which presupposes space and duration)
can be dilated depending on the experience of the duration. According to Bergson, the
perception of the duration dilates, narrows, or lengthens our experience of the spaces that
form the places of memory:

On one occasion, Bergson speaks of a movement that is exactly appropriate to

experience; on another, he speaks of enlargement; on another still of narrowing and
of a restriction (…) prodigious amplification that makes us think of a pure perception,
identical with all the matter; a pure memory, identical with the totality of the past. (…)
When in our experience we are favored by a glimpse that signals us with a line of
articulation, it still rests on us to extend it outward of our experience (…) but this
amplification does not consist of going beyond the experience toward concepts, on
the contrary, it concerns the real experience in all its particularities. (Deleuze, 2012,
p. 22)

For Bergson, the experience of real of the body in the space, through affectivity,
interconnects the moments in the form of memory recollections. Therefore, following his
argument, it is the memory that gives the body a sense of the duration in time.

First of all, it is affectivity that assumes, precisely, that the body is something else
than a mathematical point and gives it a volume in space. Then, it is the recollections
of memory that connect the instants to one another and intercalate the past in the
present. Finally, it is still memory that, under another form, under a form of
contraction of matter, brings about quality. Thus, it is memory that causes the body to
be distinct from instantaneity and that gives it a duration in time. (Deleuze, 2012, p.
20)

Documented by filmmakers from its construction, Brasilia discloses its transformation in the
cinematographic representations, which witness the destruction of a general statement “and
the conviction that architecture is not merely a productive activity like an industrial one,
based on principles and techniques” (Solà-Morales, 2003, p. 107) , and multiply the
narratives that value the individual or the small social groups and where architecture “is a

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handcrafted practice, committed to previously existing data from the genius loci, the history,
and the myths, and the symbolism, and the meaning of a place” (idem, p. 107). The
ephemeral and the transitory gain importance in the spatial reconfiguration of the city.

Às conclusion

The films made in Brasilia have also sought to represent the “real” from its contradictions, as
a synthesis of the country itself, in a reflexive synthesis, a responsible action, where Paul
Ricoeur can be understood when he says that “learning how to narrate is also learning how
to narrate oneself in a different way” (Ricoeur apud Saboia, 2010, p. 6), and so, “the reader
(viewer) takes on the main role in the understanding the narrative according to their values
and life experiences. Without reading and re-reading the narrative, their configuration in the
plot cannot be completed” (Saboia, 2010, p. 7) for, according to Schefer (1980), from the
point of view of the spectator, it is not representation: cinema is an experience entirely
anchored in the real, rendering the body of the spectator a field for experimentation.

Movies made in Brasilia in the 1960’s were simultaneously the political speech of the news
shows, the intellectual, almost utopian, effervescence surrounding the creation of University
of Brasilia’s Cinema Course, and the aesthetic influence and sociological research of which
the Cinema Novo (New Cinema) movement was a part and that had Brasilia as one of its
main proponents. Born in the middle of dichotomous representations, Brasilia was for the
longest time a victim of its own representations.

When one analyzes the most representative films of the audiovisual material that has been
produced in its 50 years of existence, one observes, as the years go by, the destruction of a
great narrative of modernity that attempts to deconstruct the mystic of the totalitarian
planning of its original plan, which presupposed the possibility of generating a more
egalitarian society. In its first decades of existence, its films reproduced a dichotomous
vision, as in Joaquim Pedro’s film Brasília Contradições de uma Cidade Nova, clearly
divided into two parts: in the first, we see a demonstration of what was proposed and
achieved by a portion of the population of the Pilot Plan; in the second, we see the dire
situation to which the thousands of workers who built it were relegated. When these
representations are analyzed, it is noticeable that since the beginning there has been a
search for the construction of identity by portraying Brasilia as a confluence and a synthesis

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between the Brazilian history and its culture. but which has a characteristic of urban
appropriation generated by the migrational flow as well as by the routes within the city itself.

In the more recent films it is possible to observe cracks in the forms of appropriation of the
city, when little narratives appear to show hidden corners, characters, poets, artists who built
themselves as they built the city. That is what stands out in Braxília (2010), a film that
portrays a utopian city created by the local poet Nicolas Behr in his poems, which spread
throughout the city. Or a love story that takes place during a bus trip between the bus station
and a Satellite City.

Thus, it is possible to state that these points on the route, named glimpse points by Deleuze,
capable of amplifying the experience, are like the “happenings” to which Sola-Morales refer,
where one can see singularity amidst the multiplicity. These amplified points in the
experience, are in the duration the points of rendezvous and contact with the place, rather
than the materialized place. They are the place as it is filled with time and memory. They are
the rendezvous and the points on the route that are able to constitute a sense of place.

References

A Cidade é uma só?. 2011. [Filme] Direção: Adirley Queirós. Brasil: s.n.

As Primeiras Imagens de Brasília. 1957. [Filme] Direção: Jean Manzon. Brasil: Atlântida
Empresa Cinematográfica do Brasil S.A..

Bicca, P., 1985. Brasília - Mitos e Realidades. In:: Brasília: Antologia Crítica. sao paulo(SP):
Cosac Naif, pp. 208-218.

Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova. 1967. [Filme] Direção: Joaquim Pedro de
Andrade. Brasil: Filmes do Serro.

Brasília: Planejamento Urbano. 1964. [Filme] Direção: Fernando Cony Campos. Brasil:
INCE - Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo.

Caldas, R. W. & Montoro, T., 2006. A evolução do Cinema Brasileiro no Seculo XX. 1 ed.
Brasília(DF): Casa das Musas.

Carvalho, V., 2002. Cinema Candango: Matéria de Jornal. Brasília(DF): Cinememória.

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Corbusier, L., 1977. Por uma arquitetura. 2 ed. Sao Paulo(SP): Perspectiva.

Costa, L., 1995. Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto (1957). In:: Lúcio Costa: registro de
uma vivência. São Paulo(SP): Empresa das Artes, pp. 283-297.

Deleuze, G., 2012. Bergsonismo. 2 ed. São Paulo(SP): Editora 34.

Le Corbusier, 1993. A Carta de Atenas (1941). São Paulo(SP): HUCITEC:EDUSP.

Martins, C. A. F., 2002. Construir uma arquitetura, construir um país. In:: Da Antropofagia a
Brasília: Brasil 1920-1950. São Paulo: FAAP - Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado e
Cosac & Naify, pp. 373-383.

Montoro, T., 2012. Imagens e Imaginários de Brasília. In:: Midia e Imaginário. 1 ed. Brasilia:
Annablume, p. 212.

Moriconi, S., 2012. Apontamentos para uma história. Brasilia(DF): Instituto Terceiro Setor.

Olivieri, S., 2011. Quando o cinema vira urbanismo: o documentario como ferramenta de
abordagem da cidade. Salvador(BA): EDUFBA, PPGFAU.

Ribondi, A., Pereira, C. & Schettino, R., 2012. O Sonho Candango: Memória Afetiva dos
Anos 80. Brasilia: Gabinete C.

RICOEUR, P., 1998. Architecture e Narrativité. Revue Urbanisme, pp. 44-51.

Ricoeur, P., 2006. Percurso do reconhecimento. São Paulo: Edições Loyola.

Saboia, L., 2010. O vazio moderno e o reconhecimento de paisagens culturais: O caso da

rodoviária em Brasília.

Sá, R. T. M., 2003. Cineastas de Brasília. Brasilia: s.n.

Schefer, J.-L., 1980. L´homme ordinaire du cinema.. Paris: Gallimard.

Solà-Morales, I. d., 1994. Representaciones: de la ciudad capital a la metropoli. In::

Territorios. s.l.:Gustavo Gili, pp. 55-74.

solà-morales, I. d., 1995. Terrain Vague. In:: territorios. s.l.:Editorial Gustavo Gili, pp. 181-
194.

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Conference Proceedings. Porto, September 11-13, 2013

Solà-Morales, I. d., 2002. Arquitectura Líquida. In:: Territorios. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, pp.
125-134.

Solà-Morales, I. d., 2003. Lugar: permanencia o producción. In:: Diferencias: topografía de

la arquitectura contemporánea. Barelona: Gustavo Gili S.A, pp. 101-115.

Author identification

Name. A short curriculum vitae of Author should also be included, 100 words Maximum.
If there is more than one author, the full text of CVs shouldn’t be longer then 200 words.

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