Violence and invisibility during Salazarism : the politics of visibility through the films '48' and 'O Alar Da Rede'

Abstract

This investigation analyses the relations uniting the long endurance of the Salazarist dictatorship in Portugal and the political processes of its cryptic violence. Departing from the differentiation between different types of violence, this thesis shows that structural violence was used intentionally by the regime within the limits of a spectrum of visibility, in an effort to create its own normalisation. This research examines the mechanism and manifestation of both direct and structural violence through a study of different filmic data. Film served as key propaganda medium for the regime, holding together the concealment of direct violence and generating structural violence. Undermining this authoritarian gesture, this enquiry further explores the device of visibility, intrinsic to filmic material, which challenges the Portuguese regime's politics of self-censorship. By articulating recent political theories and image philosophy with two films O Alar da Rede by Michel Giacometti, (1962) and 48 by Susana de Sousa Dias, (2012), this thesis reflects on the moment when a process of rendering visible exposes a form of resistance to violent hidden policies. With elaborated methods, both films manage to reinsert in the present, a violence from the past. The filmic paradigm described in this paper exposes original tools to fight a violence that was previously concealed within normative conundrums.