BANDEIRAS VERDES (1978-1987), BY MURILO SANTOS

AN EXPRESSION OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CATHOLIC SOCIAL ACTION AND CINEMA IN MARANHÃO

Abstract

This article investigates the relationships between Catholic social action and cinema in Maranhão, based on the trajectory and cinematographic work of Murilo Santos, filmmaker from Maranhão, taking as an object of analysis Bandeiras verdes (1978-198), documentary that emerged from the partnership between Murilo Santos, the Land Pastoral Comission and the Indigenous Missionary Council, linked to the Catholic Church. In his trajectory as a photographer and filmmaker, Murilo Santos became a diretor with ideological roots in common with more progressive sectors of the Catholic Church and close to Liberation Theology, which emerged after the impact of the Second Vatican Council, especially in Latin America, and clergy in tune with this pastoral line. The objective is, by comparing the production of Bandeiras verdes, to analyze the film with an emphasis on the plenitude of oral testimony, capturing, through film analysis, the tension of life in the countryside, in whose poetics of orality is dimensioned the perseverance of a new march towards the west, historically always presente in Brazil, and recorded by the film with subtle câmera frames, revealing instruments of the Amazonian landscape of Maranhão. Its is concluded that Bandeiras verdes constitutes an amalgam that reveals a set of cultural, political and demographic circumstances of the rural universe of Maranhão, updating, at that moment, the view on migratory practices in the Brazilian Northeast, foreseen, among others, by priest Cícero Romão Batista (1844-1934) when talking about the mythical “green flags” that appear to the west, on the way to the Amazon.