Pedra da memória - corporalities in transatlantic confluences

Abstract

This paper proposes to bring in an analysis of the documentary film Pedra da Memória (2011), by Renata Amaral, using propositions that observe the different languages and cultural dialogues synthesized in the work. In this effort, we transpose our gaze to the intermidiatic bias of this filmic reading. The narratives present in the film are observed as ways of making visible the transits of an ancestral body memory, that forcibly embarked on Africa, and which were and are reproduced and maintained in Afro-Brazilian religious houses throughout the country. In this opportunity, we conduct approximations and connections based on the possibility and potential that emerges within the artistic film construction, which expresses a tendency and need to converge languages, as a means of bringing together and reformulating historical narratives. In this point of view, two intermidiatic dimensions of the film work can be observed: one that aims to think about the use of image overlays, carried out through a media combination, and another that is dedicated to thinking of the body as an intermidiatic vehicle, marked by perspective and by the ancestor. In order to carry out this reading, we used, fundamentally, the theoretical references coined by the researcher Irina Rajewsky, regarding intermediality, and by the Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento, regarding the Afro-Brazilian corporeality as an ancestral vehicle that communicates knowledge.