Educação e linguagem cinematográfica: experiência estética, resistência e elaboração do passado no cinema de Silvio Tendler

Abstract

In problematizing the process of relativizing historiography and knowledge, I rely on Adornian dialectics to defend the empirical character of Bildung as a broad cultural formation. To this end, I take as the germinal point of reflection the upsurge of the national film industry from the 20th century onwards, with the expansion of cinemas, film clubs, training schools, film magazines, studios and filmmaking groups - a period in which national cinema was consolidated, to the setbacks imposed by American television and cinema, especially from 1950 to 1960, when Cinema Novo was established in Brazil. The main focus of the research is to discuss the formation and consolidation of filmmaker Silvio Tendler as a documentarian and participant of diverse phases in Brazilian cinema, aligned with revolutionary ideologies and political and social resistance. Thus, the aim is to understand the experimental aesthetic of essayistic character in the representation of his socio-historical films, which seek to (re)elaborate social memory. I consider that the filmic aesthetic of Tendler's cinema seems to "operate" at the level of integration between form of exposition and critical-political content, which I call form-content. The filmmaker's deliberate choice to work with cinema as a shaper of meaning, concerned with a possible elaboration of the collective historical past of Brazilian society, is present in the vast filmography produced between 1980 and 2023. In this research, the autobiographical film Nas asas da Pan Am (2020) served as a scope for analyzing these aesthetic issues of the film (or anti-film) to grasp aspects of the film narrative, the form of expression of the filmmaker's memory, experience and living as a narrator and cultural shaper. These elements were conceived as a constellation of concepts for dialoguing with the filmobject through critical-objective hermeneutics, a method of theoretical-reflexive investigation. From the possible interpretations, I argue that Silvio Tendler is a director-filmmaker, whose gaze turned to the past (re)presents the culture of orality; and, by narrating the story in a contradictory way, he can offer at the moment of shock, the clash with the impure film, provoking dialectically timeless experiences.