Performed image and image attestation: the Brazilian documentary and the reemerging specter of dictatorship

Abstract

The vindication of the memory of the Civil-Military Dictatorship in contemporary Brazilian cinema intensifies. This article recollects documentaries of the 1980s, and ideas and authors that have been examined before in order to attain to discuss the use of testemonies and film footage from the period of the dictatorship on recent audiovisual production, and their mode of performatively assuming the lack – of documents, memory, and images. Uma longa viagem [A Long Journey] and Que bom te ver viva [How Nice to See You Alive], both by filmmaker Lucia Murat, will be analyzed, among others, from the standpoint of these issues.