Glauber, and the writing mise-en-scène apparatus of Eduardo Coutinho

Abstract

What kind of sensibility, half trickery, half-serious, the cyclops eye of Glauber Rocha brings to the scene of Câncer (1968), when he presents the personality-character ‘Eduardo Coutinho’ as the ‘man of the notebook’? In his creative ‘mise-en-scène,’ Glauber somehow mimics the way Coutinho himself, some years later, will deal with actors’ performances in another scene device called ‘documentary film.’ Glauber and Coutinho coincide in the distrust of writing and theory, as opposed to intuition and expression. Our point is to pay attention, in Eduardo Coutinho films, to the apparatus engaged in the search for identity, by the spoke expression of the social ‘otherness’ named ‘povo’ (‘the people’). The ordering mode of Coutinho’s documentary mise-en-scène deconstructs this ‘otherness,’ reducing the phonetic substance of voice as pure communion.