From narrative to identity: the representations of the strikes at ABC paulista and the testimonials contained in the documentary Peões by Eduardo Coutinho (2004)

Abstract

The documentary Peões, by Eduardo Coutinho (2004), was produced in 2002 to document the memory of the metallurgic strikes in São Paulo in the early eighties – the movement which projected Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in the Brazilian politics, as president of the union and then candidate to the Republic Presidency. With films and photographs as archive material, Coutinho uses images to meet anonymous people, industrial workers in their majority – so called “peões”. From the dialog with documentaries such as Greve! (1979), by João Batista de Andrade, Linha de Montagem (1982) and ABC da Greve (1991), Coutinho defines which are the “rules of the game”: films and photographs would be shown to them in order to help them to recognize their old fellows in the strikes and to provide their present locations. Coutinho do not mix interviews with images of the archive. On the contrary, he keeps the interviews separated in blocks, and the witnesses do not “dialog” with each other nor even with other images that testify their strike or their work at the industry. From the methodology of the documentarist, is possible to analyze the relations between producing a documentary and making historical research, the modes through which are established memory and meaning of the individual an historical experiences.