Democracy in Vertigo

Abstract

The analysis we present starts from the premises that cinema is a privileged historical source for research on the cinema/history interface,  since Ferro's pioneering work (1992). In this relationship, the documentary genre provides contact with “representations of history” in the terms of Nichols (2016) and a possibility of rethinking the historiographical practice itself, according to Barros (2007). The choice to study films that deal with Brazilian political history of the last decades, within the framework of a “history of the present time”, was made as an attempt to try to better understand the days in which we live with the support of the past. In this sense, we will use the film Democracy in Vertigo as the main source and, as auxiliary sources, interviews in which the director Petra Costa explained her goals and worldview, on the occasion of the film's release. The methodological perspective will be that of film analysis in which, according to Napolitano (2018), the aesthetic options of the direction must also be taken into account in its political and historical developments.