15 - Impure Cinema as Method: The Last Films of Eduardo Coutinho

Summary

Purity doesn't exist. Purity and perfection are the only things that revolt me. Purity and perfection are fascist. My films are about life, because life will always be imperfect, because life will always be incomplete.

Eduardo Coutinho (cited in Ramia 2013: 321)

Filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014) is a fundamental figure in Brazilian cinema. His work contributed immensely to the consolidation of the documentary genre in Brazil. In the last fifteen years of his life, he produced almost a film every year, serving as a continuous stimulus to debate and critical thinking. Not only do Coutinho's films help us to understand Brazil better, but every one of them questions the very process of documentary making, raising issues around the possibilities and limits of the genre. His cinema can be seen as a corpus of films that forged, over the 2000s, a solid ground for other documentary productions to develop in different directions.

This chapter analyses the last phase of Eduardo Coutinho's production, encompassing Jogo de cena (Playing, 2007), Moscou (Moscow, 2009), Um dia na vida (A Day in Life, 2010) and As canções (Songs, 2011). Unlike his filming on real locations, which had come to a close with O fim e o princípio (The End and the Beginning, 2005), these last four works were shot in closed spaces, three of them in stage settings and based on unique strategies of interweaving artistic media and forms, as well as intensifying reflexive procedures already present in his previous work. The interpenetration of Coutinho's last films with theatre, television and music is so radical that it allows us to revisit his entire oeuvre through the notion of ‘impure cinema’, the famous expression coined by André Bazin (1967) to signify the multimedia nature of cinema, which inspired generations of filmmakers and critics, and was more recently transformed into an analytical method by Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (2014).

Between Cinema, Video and Television

In late October 2010, filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho conducted an experiment that left a mark on the history of Brazilian documentary and astounded the audiences accustomed to his conversation-based films. In a surprise session at the São Paulo International Film Festival, Coutinho presented a ninety-six-minute film made entirely of recorded material from open Brazilian TV, with no commentary, interviews or any other interventions besides the montage itself.