Indetermination under suspicion in contemporary Brazilian cinema: the distinct cases of Filmefobia and Pan-cinema permanente

Abstract

Among several recent Brazilian films – particularly those classified as documentaries – which invest in self-fiction and in questioning their own prerogatives, casting doubt over their procedures or producing their own equivocations, we choose to highlight Filmefobia (Kiko Goifman, 2009) and Pan-cinema permanente (Carlos Nader, 2008). Despite their undeniable differences and diverse esthetic and political effects, these films operate within a biopolitical realm of indetermination, shifting between the authentic and the staged, real individuals and fictional characters, experience and game, real life and acting performance, documentary and fiction. Far from simply praising the esthetic potential of indetermination, which, as we shall see, may function politically as a precondition of cynicism and of all sorts of states of exception, the case here is rather to place the concept of indetermination itself under suspicion.