Analysis Of Moreira Salles's 'Santiago'

In Santiago, Moreira Salles also uses the documentary idiom to construct a genealogical inquiry into his own family and class identity. Yet unlike in Um passaporte húngaro, the director’s reflexive attitude toward himself as both instigator and object of the film’s quest does not manifest through a performative intervention in the present that registers the effects triggered by the director-character’s presence. Rather, Santiago (subtitled Uma reflexão sobre o material em bruto, A Reflection on Raw Footage) offers a self-critical return to and reediting of footage from a frustrated project attempted fifteen years earlier, about the Salles’s family butler: material whose value is only recognized in and through posterity, as an after-effect,
Only upon revisiting the old footage years later, following the death not just of Santiago but also of his own parents and driven by “a desire to return home,” does Moreira Salles realize that the butler’s obedient self-revelation to the documentarian’s camera was, above all, a performative reembodiment of the complex class relationship between the child João and Santiago the manservant, who, in addition to being a domestic servant was also the Moreira Salles children’s confidante and educator. Moreira Salles’s revelation is stunning: “He never ceased to be our butler, and I the son of his boss.” However, as I hinted earlier, the voice that reads these lines is not that of João, but of Fernando Moreira Salles, the director’s brother. This displacement of the words of one brother onto another is interesting because it underscores yet again the film’s refracted, intersubjective construction of the memory of a lost past that can only reemerge on being confirmed in the voice and gaze of another. As Ilana Feldman puts it, Moreira Salles, on “adhering to a perspectivism that excludes from the outset any predetermined relation between subject and
Rather than turn the camera on the authorial subject, these films extend authorship to various kinds of “others” whose stories they set out to tell. O prisioneiro da grade de ferro: auto-retratos (Prisoner of the Iron Bars: Self-Portraits, 2004) was made from material shot during a series of video workshops that director Paulo Sacramento and his team organized with inmates of São Paulo’s Carandiru penitentiary complex in the final months before the jail’s 2002 demolition. The prisoners’ “self-portraits” were then edited together with footage shot by the professional crew; the result is a kind of audiovisual conversation not unlike those that happened during the workshops themselves, conversations about everyday life inside what was, at the time, South America’s largest prison, a prison that made international headlines in 1992 when military police killed 111 inmates during an uprising. Rather than narrate the prison’s history, however, this cinematic dialogue revolves around two questions. First, under what conditions does violence flourish? And second,