Abstract

This text seeks to both reflect and analyze the way in which contemporary Brazilian documentaries are articulated as political reinscription by means of certain aesthetic strategies, such as the graphic recurrence in the construction of narrative identities (RICOEUR, 2010) as a propelling instrument of subjectivities. Part of this effort in revisiting the past by crossing temporalities can be seen in films such as Portraits of Identification (2014) and I owe you a letter about Brazil (2019). Both productions show characters who have been part of the resistance to the authoritarian regime, demonstrating the specifics of the period, such as the experience of trauma, exile and the failure of revolutionary ideals. These documentaries resort to the written word of personal and historical archives, exposing excesses, contradictions, and submerged texts, which eventually interferes in the representation of the biographed subject, revealing characters whose identities become difficult to apprehend. Therefore, understanding the potential of writing requires a film analysis in fragments containing the material presence of the word and its thematic suggestion. These fragmentary constructions, naturally open to deviations, present themselves as a political reinscription as they approach silences, historical absences; not fixing identities but only reaching the subjects in what remains of them as a trace (DERRIDA, 2010). Such visualities are reconfigured from the filmic inscription engendered there, in what is lacking in them, since filming is also seeking the outside, that what escapes us, making distances and intervals visible (COMOLLI, 2007) - in an image to come.