Morrer, gestar, renascer: estetização e autorrepresentação nos documentários Elena e Olmo e a gaivota

Abstract

The documentaries Elena (2013), by the Brasilian movie-maker Petra Costa, and Olmo and the Seagull (2015), also carried for Costa, but directed in colaboration with the Danish director Lea Glob, represent the corpus of this research. Thus, these two movies are from a feminine authorship. Furthermore, in both movies women play the leading role and the narratives are centred on family core, from intertextuality among documental and fictional characters as an aesthetic resource, and establishing dialogues, mostly with feminine archetypes. In this thesis, we have noted, through a comparative review of those works, how these documentaries allow an exchange of personal experiences, how they perform aesthetically the daily life represented in themselves and present a sensible reading of their character, without losing the point the importance of the social issues that constitute both movies, and are considered taboos due to the silence which evolve them. Elena thematizes the suicide committed by the homonym character, Petra Costa’s own sister; and, in Olmo and the Seagull are portrayed the questionings of the protagonist, the actress Olivia Corsini, in her first pregnancy, about maternity and how this choice can change her career, freedom and routine. Both filmic productions are structured through a homodiegetic narration, focusing on the interiority of the characters, raising reflections about the specific characteristics of the documentary in first person and the selfrepresentation, either of the movie makers or the characters, and mobilizing the concepts of self-reflexivity, autobiography, autofiction e alterfiction. The works also enable us to make connections with two personal documentaries, the short films Undetow Eyes (2009) e Meeting my father Kasper Tophat (2011), directed respectively by Petra Costa and Lea Glob, that also focus on family relationships, laying observations concerning constant elements that represent stylistic traces.