Recycling Images and Creating New Meanings

In this article we intend to analyze three Brazilian contemporary short films made from preexisting amateour photography. The works embrace topics such as image appropriation and recycling in order to create new narratives. The short movies here analyzed can be defined as experimental documentaries made from material found in flea markets and family photographs. Travessia (Dir. Safira Moreira, 2017) starts with a photo found in the album of a white family in a flea market in Rio de Janeiro. The picture shows a black woman holding a white baby in her arms. The montage shows parts of the image while the voice over reads a poem by Conceição Evaristo. At the end of the reading, we see the full picture and then the verse, where we see the child's name written accompanied by his nanny, in a gesture that denies the woman's naming. The movie follows interviewing black families about the topics and changing the game. By using this and other imagens, the movie creates a critical fabulation, according to the concept developed by Saidiya Hartman. O Pantanal é Preto (Dir. Raylson Chaves, 2022), follows the resistance trajectory of the black population in the Pantanal between the 1980s and 1990s. By using analogical photos of his own family, the director demarcates that the Pantanal is made, like much of the country, by black and indigenous people. They are not just pawns or maids, they are the Pantanal itself. The montage shows pictures of Pantanal farms and uses quotes by Frantz Fanon. In the sound band, we hear dialogues that reproduce the accent common in the region, but little recognized externally, even within Brazil itself. The last short we intend to investigate, Thynia (Dir. Lia Letícia, 2019), uses pictures from a family album found in a flea market in Germany. The montage shows the photographs accompanied by texts from books such as Travel to Brazil, by Hans Staden, translated to the Yantê language and read by the indigenous woman Maria Pastora. The film problematizes a kind of archive image of the original inhabitants of Latin America created by European colonizers (BARRIENDOS, 2019), comparing, in the present, words from a then best-seller with photographs of an unknown German family. Through these films, we intend to analyze how, through the use of our own repositories of technical images, new narratives are created that confront colonialist perspectives and their legacies. The use of amateur materials, in fact, can be seen as one of the aspects of the subjective turn (SARLO, 2007) in memory studies, characterized, among other things, by disbelief in hegemonic points of view and the valorization of local stories and micronarratives .Through archives that would otherwise not be publicly deposed, these films show other perspectives through the appropriation of technical images, bringing, in the present, the opportunity to create from the erasures of the past.