Exemplarity and contingency in the stage of evidences

Abstract

For their iconic and indexical properties, cinematic images and
sounds are usually taken as the privileged occasion of an “encounter with the real”, to which operations like framing and editing can give particular meanings. Documentary films take this into account to create specific “effects of the real”, sometimes through strategies borrowed from classical narrative cinema, when the filmmaker focuses on someone who is seen as an exemplary character vis-a-vis social reality (one side of Bus 174), sometimes through a self-conscious mise-en-scène which explores the almost inevitable theatricality implied by the presence of the camera, but also calls our attention to what is contingent, unexpected, in the interaction between the filmmaker and the subject before the camera (Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films). Given the set of tensions involving words, bodies, gestures and visible evidences, there are sequences in which the exploration of those emblematic properties create what we can call micro-realism (the other side of Bus 174).