Résumé

Just over a decade separate the films Santiago (2006) and In the intense now (2017), by João Moreira Salles. Despite the temporal detachment, both share the director’s essay gesture on the archive footage. The proposal of this article is to set a comparison between the two films, establishing their interlocutions, their approximations, but also their distancing. We seek to show how each film promotes the fold of the past with the present in the mainstay of what we call archeology of image, the act of digging the files and reworking them in the discourse.
For JMS, the documentary film contains two distinct natures: it is, at the same time, the record of something that happened in the world but also a narrative, i.e., a rhetoric built on what was recorded. This rhetoric comes from examining the nature of images, that triggers the discourse in the form of voice-over, or from its confrontation with other documents (imagery/sonorous). This article is intended to analyze how this metanarrative is constituted in his essay films. A process that goes through the material and seeks to understand what the files evoke from the intimate memory, but also what they evoke as an image.