Epilogue

Abstract

This epilogue briefly discusses the interconnections between the three parts of the book and considers additional examples of recent films that deal with contemporary issues of social justice and post-dictatorship memory while maintaining an engagement with questions of the archive. As this book has explored in several contexts, Brazilian documentaries engage critically with archives while performing archival functions of their own—producing records of what would otherwise be lost and incorporating fragments of the present and the past that are preserved for the future. At the same time, films can be the vehicle for the de-archivization of documents and materials that are unearthed from unseen records and placed into public circulation as well as given new futures through their filmic inclusion. Functioning in liminal and transitional terrains, the documentary’s interaction with concepts of the archive and archival materials allows it to reflect on and intervene in the distribution of visibilities and invisibilities, centers and margins, silences and speech, forms of authority and forms of resistance, living memory and its preservation in fixed forms.