O presente como história: estéticas da elaboração no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo

Abstract

Following the path proposed by Andreas Huyssen (2014), who pinpoints a pivotal concern with memory in contemporary culture, a sort of response to Western societies’ decreasing confidence in the future, the article seeks to examine how contemporary Brazilian cinema has been elaborating historical experience. To do so, we have created a small inventory, experimenting with the grouping of films in series, in order to indicate and characterize recurring "figures of historical elaboration" in such filmography – as well as to study their variations by comparing films. The emphasis on the "present as history" stands out in our mapping: under the shade of a "past that does not pass" or designed as "the reverse of the future" (as it is promised by the progress and the modernization discourses), the present becomes the center of films that take to themselves, in different forms and approaches, the task of critical recollection.