Fiction and subjectivity in the documentary by Eduardo Coutinho

Abstract

Literature and cinema have always kept open boundaries that separate them, cultivating, throughout their histories, the semiotic exercise.  Considering this perspective of mutual influence, this essay examines the construction of filmic narrative in the documentary by Eduardo Coutinho and raises questions that are also relevant to the scope of the theory of literature. Although the documentary has, in its most common sense, the character of objectivity, the work of Coutinho subverts this perspective and brings out the subjectivity. The filmmaker is very sensitive to the fact that something in front of a camera is no longer something in itself anymore. When something is before a camera, before another one, it is language; it is a representation of something. In Coutinho, the construction of the reality is shown as a fictional construction. This brings us closer to the literary narrative construction, and also to the conception of the subject in Psychoanalysis, whose constitution is given by the language and in the language as a structure of fiction.