O Documentário como Autorretrato: a Autorreferência do Autor na Obra

• Autor(a) principal: Rui Daniel de Sousa Almeida
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/79551
• topic: Artes; Arts

This thesis project explores the documentary film as device for self-representation and self-reference (meta-cinema or meta-documentary, in this case). It relates tree main names and tree works from different time periods: "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) from Soviet director Dziga Vertov, "Sherman's March" (1986) from the American Ross McElwee and "Grizzly Man" (2005) from the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Despite the different time periods and the different styles of filmmaking, all of the tree films have something in common that is the reference to the filmmaker, the documentary and his own process, inside the documentary itself: talking directly to camera or using the narration to comment, in a very personal way, about what we are seeing in the screen. Presenting the film as an artifice and a construction, a "documentary inside the documentary". This is, I believe, one of the main characteristics that differentiates documentary and fiction, where documentary accepts itself as a midway between reality and the spectator, and not as an isolated representation. For example, in "Man With a Movie Camera", Vertov references clearly to the process of filmmaking, shooting and editing, when we see on screen his cameraman Mikhail Kaufman and when we see the editor Elizabeta Svilova. Equally, McElwee's "Sherman's March" is a search in the south of the United States for a documentary about William T. Sherman, a Civil War's general, where McElwee reflects several times about his life and the documentary itself. In "Grizzly Man", Herzog uses footage of Timothy Treadwell's wild expeditions to the Katmai National Park, where he was in close proximity with grizzly bears. During the film, we see an emotional and personal relationship between the director and the subject that grows itself until the moment of Timothy's death.