Eduardo Coutinho: Gaze and Voice is the title of the retrospective on the Brazilian director, presented at PdV 2013
Punto de Vista 2013 will present a brief retrospective of the film-maker Eduardo Coutinho, acknowledged as the greatest Brazilian documentary film-maker of the last three decades since, in 1985, he recovered an unfinished project from the previous decade, which would eventually become Cabra marcado para morrer, one of the key titles in Brazilian and Latin American filmography.
Born in 1933, Coutinho began his film career in his 50s. He belongs to a breed of film-makers for whom time is on their side and who are, in themselves, an increasingly eccentric category in today's audiovisual panorama. Film-makers who slip through the net of a production system which demands increasingly instantaneous success to survive, and which for Punto de Vista are the object of admiration and respect. Coutinho, throughout his fairly non-prolific career (17 films between 1967 and 2011, including some short films and work for television), has turned his cinematographic work into the voice of Brazil. His films are open spaces, offered with the consensus of their protagonists, where the film-maker looks, observes and portrays a vital country caught up in a process of change. Films that do not merely look and offer a space for their protagonists' voices to be heard, but which also become true human landscapes in a country where the imaginary is just as if not more important than reality.
In this humble tribute, Punto de Vista recovers some of his lesser-known work in Spain. Recently restored by the Brazilian Film Library, this season opens with a new 35 mm copy of his most famous (and unseen) film, Cabra marcado para morrer (1985), re-released at the last Cannes Film Festival, and closes with his latest film to date (premiering in Spain), As Cançoes (2011). The season also includes the two medium-length films Santa Marta. Duas semanas no Morro (1987) and Boca de lixo (1993), collective anti-miserabilist portrayals of the most vulnerable classes in Brazilian society, and Moscou (2011), a film made following his successful Jogo de cena (2009) in which the film-maker looks at memory, suggesting his own research into the real and the imaginary.
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