The past in the present: personal memory, collective memory, discrepancies

Abstract

This article analyzes the central plot of Body (Rubens Rewald & Rossana Foglia, 2007), a film inspired in a political event, which took place in the Perus Cemetery (São Paulo periphery): piles of bones of unknown persons buried decades before were found in an unidentified common grave. Among those bones, some were later identified as belonging to ex-political prisoners buried in the 1970’s. In Body, mixed with the bones sent to a Medical-Legal Institute, a young woman’s body arrived exhibiting marks of torture. This body was in a paradoxical state of conservation, as if she had died the day before. This body creates many tensions involving the physician that decides to identify it and his director. He insists and his research ends up involving other characters, who he understands could give him new information about the dead young woman. At the core of those tensions there is a clear conflict between individual memories and the collective social memory. “Thematic motive” is the basic notion that guides this analysis which focus on the “the past comes to present” thematic motive, all around the enigmatic body.