Matter and Memory: Reasserting the (Political) Present in Eduardo Coutinho’s Edifício Master (2002) and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (2016)

To what extent does recent Brazilian cinema explore individual stories as a way to illustrate the fragmentation of the public sphere in the long aftermath of the vastly ambitious sociopolitical landscapes created by the Cinema Novo movement in the 1960s? Classic transitional films such as Arnaldo Jabôr’s Tudo bem (1978) and Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye Brasil (1980) depicted a society with shifting priorities, where social utopias were coopted by new forms of national identity emerging from an all-powerful mass media. More importantly, those films showed a move from political responsibility to “neoliberal discourses of responsibilization (Competing Responsibilities, Trnka and Trundle 3) that left little to no room to popular resistance against the forces of global capitalism. From then on, Brazilian cinematic productions (both fiction and documentaries) have largely singled out underdog stories not to further victimize their anonymous subjects but to empower them with a renewed sense of belonging to the (political) present. The aim of this discussion is to argue for a new interpretation of this imaginary in Brazilian cinema through a reading of Eduardo Coutinho’s Edifício Master (2002) and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (2016). Both documentary and fiction film represent, by and large, cultural objects that make ample use of powerful cinematic techniques enacting personal memories to vindicate the underdog’s side of the story. A deconstruction of grand narratives of modernization, effected in both productions, calls for a rethinking of the role played by the underdog, from the oppressed subject living in the Brazilian backlands (a topic of the politically engaged 1960s cinema) to a vulnerable middle class living precariously in contemporary cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Recife