| dc.description.abstract | Our contemporary society is increasingly manifested through audiovisual products of
diffuse and polyphonic characteristics, capitated and circulated by an unimaginable amount of
cameras and screens. At the same time, we routinely assign an appropriate functionality to these
images and sounds, especially when we distance their origin from their destination, in other
words, whenever we withdraw the audiovisual types from their particular context and we
resignified them with a new meaning (BERNARDET, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2004). This new
meaning can be derived from an essay expression of the subject who, starting from a subjective
manifestation embedded in the public experience, decides to think and act with the images and
sounds (CORRIGAN, 2015). In cinema, this movement of audiovisual appropriation, towards
the resignification, finds prosperous ground in the production of archive films and essay films
(TEIXEIRA, 2015). This understanding is present in the collective production of the films São
Paulo: Symphony e Cacophony (1994), by Jean-Claude Bernardet, and São Paulo: Cinemacity
(1994), by Aloysio Raulino, Marta Grostein and Regina Meyer, archive films that use pieces of
other films to build their historical and poetic narratives about the city of São Paulo. Based on
the film analysis, documentary research and bibliographic discussion, this work identified the
processes of resignification of the archival images of the Brazilian audiovisual that served as
primary material for the production of these essay films, which translate as essay expressions
of the authors to compose a representational cinematographic landscape of the city of São
Paulo. In this way, the montage is presented as a central strategy for the production of
audiovisual discourses that mediate the point of views of the artists, the archive images and the
freedom of the spectator to prolong the power of resignification of the film with others images
and sounds of the world. The work also recognizes that the inscriptions of subjectivities present
in São Paulo: Symphony e Cacophony (1994) and São Paulo: Cinemacity (1994) contribute to
the current entry of these films in the archaeology of the essay film in Brazil. | |
