“To respond by showing to the effect of being shown”– appearance and common world in two experiences of popular audiovisual production

Abstract

In the Brazilian cinema scene, both depicting and “giving voice” to the residents of peripheries and “favelas” constituted movements that defined an era and instituted genres. Recalling on later initiatives that “gave authorship” to young people from poor communities through “popular audiovisual schools” between 2004 and 2008, and contrasting them with an initially accidental experiment by children of “Morro do Pereirão” (slum located on the south side of Rio de Janeiro) in the late 90’s, this article analyzes the paradoxical ways through which for this youth the act of “appearing”, to stage an appearance, already allowed, at that time that cinema was a route (and a detour) of rupture with the cruel alternative of silence on the one hand, or, on the other, the not less shadowy version about their lives normally provided by the media. For this purpose, the study highlights angles from which it is possible to glimpse, in those experiments, the aesthetic and political phenomenon which, today, has achieved even bigger and more relevant proportions by the production and circulation of movies made by a growing contingent of filmmakers residents of “favelas” and peripheries that now, out of the guidance and tutelage of intellectual vanguards or institutions, stage new perspectives in the sensitive constitution of the common world.

Keywords: appearance, popular audiovisual production, cinema in urban peripheries.