Resumen de Alteridade próxima no documentário brasileiro: o mesmo de classe em “A opinião pública”
The representation of the poor and destitute has been, historically, the main trend of the documentary film in Brazil.However, because of the high costs of the means of production, as well as the movie tickets, in Brazil usuallydirectors and audience belong to the middle classes. This paper seeks to analyze, within documentaries about theBrazilian middle class, the contradictions and dilemmas that emerge by the encounter of a filmmaker and his ownsocial group. I speak about them to you – this is, probably, the most classical formulation of the relations betweendocumentarist, subjects and audience, according to Bill Nichols (2008). But how alliances are made between I, themand you in a film whose theme is the middle class? In order to pursue this question, we trace a path in the field ofstudies of alterity and its figures on cinema, appealing to authors like Eric Landowski, Jean-Claude Bernardet andJean-Louis Comolli.On this perspective, we analyze the documentary Public Opinion (1967), signed by Arnaldo Jabor on the years ofCinema Novo, one of the few Brazilian movies ever made about the middle class. We are interested in investigating,on the images and sounds, the relation with the otherness that rises not from the different, but from the similar. Onthis film, we observe an ambiguous and complex point of view, characterized by a mix of sympathy and contempt,identification and rejection. The class, a close alterity, many times is seen through a non-identified look.
