A tela encantada: filmes de visagens e a reinvenção das narrativas orais no cinema popular de Tefé

Abstract

ABSTRACT This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the popular film group known as Associação Fogo Consumidor, which operates in the city of Tefé (AM) for 11 years. This group is independent and produces films from the stories told by narrators of the region, usually their own parents and grandparents. The research seeks to understand how the storytelling is being reinvented in movie language, in a context in which orality has been weakened by the communication technologies. The research was built around the following problem: is it possible to reconstruct the visibility of oral histories through the cinema? In order to reflect about this question we were based upon the following authors: Paul Ricoeur (1994), Walter Benjamin (1994), Stuart Hall (2003), Mircea Eliade (2016), Michael Pollak (1989), Eduardo Galvão (1976), Tzvetan Todorov (2010), Wim Wenders (2013), Edgar Morin (2011) and Jean-Claude Bernardet (2006). In chapter 1 we discuss the theories that conceptualize the narrative and show the necessity of its cultivation by the people. We talk about industrial cinema, show how it negatively affects the minds of oppressed people, and then we approach popular cinema and reflect on how it can free the imagination and make visible those subalternized by the hegemonic culture. Chapter 2 presents the history of the Fogo Consumidor group, summaries of life histories of six members of the group and also reports of experience of their performance in this cinema. In chapter 3 we show the stories and narrators that are a reference for Tefé's popular cinema, and we analyze how these stories are being decriminalized and at the same time resisting. Chapter 4 reflects on how the oral histories are reinvented in movie language by the group Fogo Consumidor, and how the group organizes itself to make the films. The work demonstrates that the overshadow of storytelling is not occurring by the existence of communication technologies, but as a result of the way in which these tools are being used. On the other hand, we realized that between oral narrative and popular cinema there is an important dialogue that can decolonize and cultivate cultures, wisdoms and reflections. Keywords: oral narrative; popular cinema; resistance; decolonization; Amazon.