The Documentary: Between Reality and Fiction, between First and Third Person

Abstract

In the freeze-frame one barely recognizes, inside an apartment decorated with floral-patterned wallpaper, a body with four arms. The voice of the producer comments: “Aqui eu apareco ao lado de Santiago. De todo o material e uma das duas unicas imagens em que fui filmado ao lado dele. Foi feita por acaso,” (“Here I appear next to Santiago. Of all the material this is one of only two images where I was filmed next to him. It was taken by chance”). The film in question is Joâo Moreira Salles’s Santiago, and the people in the shot are the protagonist, the butler of the Moreira Salles household, and the director who, in a shot “taken by chance,” completely eclipses him. An image shot in 1992 returns in 2007 to resolve the conflicting and traumatic relationship the director had maintained toward this material he had abandoned, only to return to it 15 years later. With this remainder, this shot that, in the 1992 version, would have been an outtake, Moreira Salles discovers that the film is not only about Santiago but “tambem e sobre mim” (“it is also about me”). “Comecava ai,” asserts the offscreen voice of the director himself, “um novo tipo de relacionamento,” (“There began a new type of relationship”). In a similar vein, Argentine documentarist Andres Di Tella, on different occasions when he was screening Montoneros, una historia (Montoneros, a Story, 1994), paused his film in the instant where his body, also by chance, eclipses that of Ana, the protagonist.