Issues

Conversation and Duration in Eduardo Coutinho’s Films

by Natalia Brizuela

from Film Quarterly Spring 2016, Volume 69, Number 3

I am not interested in the short take. I want the temporal dimension of things. Sometimes a person speaks… and it’s exactly that. It has a density, it has progression, the person hesitates, goes back.… People have a time, have a memory, have a past, but for that to become relevant there is a temporality, that needs to be in the shots, in the editing. That dimension of time is in the content and in the form, in memory and in the take.
—Eduardo Coutinho1

The Fracture of Meaning

In a moving essay by João Moreira Salles, Brazilian documentary filmmaker and longtime producer of Coutinho’s work, he describes a moment in Coutinho’s Seis dias de Ouricuri (Six Days of Ouricuri, 1976)—one of the documentaries that Coutinho directed during the nine years he worked in television as part of the Globo Repórter network.2 His observation is helpful in understanding the relationship between conversation and duration, and therefore words and temporality, as foundational to Coutinho’s films.

Seis dias is a documentary on the effects of the long history of droughts that the Brazilian Northeast had suffered, and in particular the devastating effects of the 1970 drought that had affected close to two million people in the region. In a move seen here for the first time, one that upset the rules of the television documentary genre and its propensity for hopping from spot to spot, Coutinho insisted on filming in a single location in order to make the specific speak for the whole, even as it remained profoundly particular. As he expressed in 1992 in a now-famous essay written for the catalogue of the Cinéma du Réel festival, he wanted “to try to understand the country, the people, history, life and myself, but always fixated on the concrete, on the microcosm.”3

“I like to work in the singular, not looking for a type,” Coutinho stated in that essay. He accordingly spent six days in the small town of Ouricuri in the sertão of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, whose population of sixty thousand had been devastated by the 1970 drought and subsequent famine. Salles observes that at a certain point in Seis dias, “a man begins to enumerate the roots that the town’s population is forced to eat” when nothing else was left, when it became a matter of life and death.4 For Salles, the power of that particular testimony, and the reason the scene should be read as the ground zero for all of Coutinho’s cinema, is that it is a shot taken to the edge of its own structural abyss, a shot on the verge of dissolution. In concrete terms, the man had been allowed to speak for “too long.” The sequence had not been edited down.

All market-driven production models would have required that the shot be cut before it went astray. Or almost went astray. In fact, the uninterrupted shot lasts for three minutes and ten seconds, and for the entire duration the camera is focused on this man enumerating and describing the many types of roots that he had been forced to eat during the time of recurrent droughts, roots that, as he repeats several times, make up the basic staple of certain animals in the region but had never before been used for human consumption, either because they were foul tasting or could not be cooked thoroughly. Salles stresses that the “quantity of examples” that the man offers is precisely what generates the shot’s affective power. Coutinho does not choose to edit out most of the enumeration and retain just the naming of a couple of the roots, omitting the others, which would have been enough to drive home the point; instead, he includes all of them, keeping the whole lengthy enumeration in the sequence. Staying with the speaking man and not editing out the “excess” makes the sequence repetitive, even rambling. The duration of the sequence, which is marked by the witness’s words, is, formally speaking, a risk.5

Why take that risk? Because something akin to a trance-like rhythm emerges, and the man touches the spectator through his rambling. It is this excess, the “misuse” of time in normative production terms, that temporarily dispenses with the logos of reason and delivers the shot to the realm of affect, into the affective being of that particular man, who is, of course, any man. What is offered and delivered through the accumulation of examples in this particular shot is human life itself: taken to its very limit, to the edge where life, at least momentarily, becomes undone and no longer is.

According to Salles, that shot enacts a shift in meaning. From its beginning as merely testimony to forms of survival—how do those marked by the hardship of the region endure and remain alive—the focus is shifted to “the fracture of meaning provoked by extreme famine.”6 Coutinho’s offscreen presence is perceived through his voice, as he asks questions, engaging the man in a conversation about these roots: “Have you already eaten that one? … when? … and that other one?” The fracture of meaning, indeed.

Edificio Master (2002) represents the maturation of Coutinho’s cinema of conversation.
Photo courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles

Edifício Master (Master Building, 2002) is Coutinho’s first film constructed entirely from the lesson learned in that three-minute-ten-second shot in Seis dias de Ouricuri, back in 1976. The women and men who speak to Coutinho in Edifício Master are allowed to keep going. They are given enough time to let go, so that meaning will fracture: their own meaning, the film’s meaning, the spectator’s meaning. If allowed to go for long enough, to leave the realm of the safe grounds of the typical answer, then a sort of momentary insanity emerges. Just as in literature, when sentences can be characterized as having lost their meaning because they have gone on for too long, so too the shot. If Coutinho’s practice has been aptly described as a cinema of conversation, it is also a cinema of duration, deployed as a fracturer of reason.

“It was the word”

With this phrase, “it was the word,” Coutinho summarized the impact that his first viewing of Claude Lanzmann’s nine and a half hour Shoah (1985) had on him in the 1980s. He was in Paris for a screening of his Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later, 1964-1984), when he saw it. Coutinho felt he had finally found the word that was otherwise absent in cinema, focused, as the medium was, on images and plot. Lanzmann had originally considered titling his film Le lieu et la parole [The Place and the Word], and critics have endlessly spoken about the film’s dark “symphonic” quality, due mainly to the vast number of interviews, in multiple languages, that it included. In a later interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, Lanzmann himself would describe his work “not as a seductive song, but as a musical composition … a search for a form of harmony, for a symphonic form that would also develop, and reuse, a ‘musical theme.’”7 Song, musical composition, harmony, symphonic form, musical theme: these characterize Lanzmann’s approach to words.

But what, then, does Coutinho himself mean by “word”? Coutinho means that the film is basically people speaking, speaking endlessly, one after another, in a terrifying, moving, and haunting accumulation. He means the utterances of speech. He means human orality. He means the direct sound in the audiovisual when the camera is focused on a person. He is referring to the way in which Claude Lanzmann chooses to keep the intervals of silence in the middle of a person’s testimony, to the way in which the camera does not shy away from the discomfort of looking at a human body for so long, just seeing and hearing that body talk, even ramble. He is referring to the way in which the film just took its time—like the three-minute-ten-second shot in Seis dias de Ouricuri, where, on an entirely different scale, Coutinho too just took his time, and let the man’s speaking go on.

Yet, really, it is not just the word. It is not just the accumulation of words, their sheer quantity nearing the nonsensical, the limit after which whatever form is still holding together the work of art would become undone. It is also, crucially, the duration through which the word—and through it, thought itself—is allowed to emerge and inhabit its own multiple, nonsynchronic temporality.

While this strategy becomes fully central to Coutinho’s cinema with Edifício Master, it appeared three years earlier in Santo Forte (The Mighty Spirit, 1999), and had already appeared briefly in 1976 in that singular shot in Seis dias. Actually, it had also arisen in his classic, Cabra marcado para morrer at the end of the film when, after Coutinho and the crew have said their goodbyes on camera, Elizabeth approaches the van and begins speaking again, and the camera, unbeknownst to Coutinho and Elizabeth, records those last forty-five seconds where she repeats again, yet with a different demeanor, what she had said earlier: “the battle must continue…it is necessary.”

For Coutinho, speech cut short offers nothing, for speech is nothing unless it is given the time needed by those words emerging through the voice of that particular body at that particular moment which can never be predicted. There is no set time for speech: it dictates its own inner temporality, always different, never the same, never programmed, always surprising. Speech needs to be allowed the time to become something, to offer itself, to deliver the body, and thus, to reveal the subject. By 1992, when Coutinho wrote on documentary cinema and on both the importance of what mainstream production models call “dead time” and the richness of speech, he had already begun to work through the necessary time of/for speech that he had captured in those couple of sequences in Seis dias and Cabra marcado para morrer.

It is speech—not sound, not the image—that is the determinant. Speech. Words: their demand might sometimes create long extended silences, a willingness to allow those stretches, not filling them, not interrupting them, not editing them out. This is the process through which thought—in all its restless, wandering, rambling digressions—is embodied. This is why Coutinho, from Santo Forte on, insisted on never “rehearsing” the conversations that would be filmed. In all his films thereafter, the filmed conversations happen just that once, that first and only time that he and the other meet and talk.

This embodiment of emotion that makes its appearance through time is, as Ismail Xavier has pointed out, the effect of the time granted by the presence of the camera, the time for the border between the real and the theatrical to be crossed.8 In Edifício Master, one man ends up singing along to a recording of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and another man starts to cry as he recalls how his boss told him “he deserved” the time off he was given when his mother died. Coutinho believes these moments of emotional power emerge because of the camera’s presence, that is, because the person knows they are being filmed. The emotional rawness of the words that are given the time to emerge, and to overflow, is therefore the product of time and Coutinho’s particular notion of theatricality. “Theatricality produces spectacular events for the spectator,” according to Josette Féral because, as she explains:

[I]t establishes a relationship that differs from the quotidian. It is an act of representation, the construction of a fiction. As such, theatricality is the imbrication of fiction and representation in an “other” space in which the observer and the observed are brought face to face.9

The “other space” that the observer’s gaze delimits, in a number of given settings outside the realm of theater per se, is the frame, and the camera’s gaze (which after Edifício Master becomes absolutely static in Coutinho’s films) thus represents a stage of sorts. It is within that frame, which can remain fixed for five, six, even seven minutes, that the person who is engaged in an unstaged conversation with Coutinho becomes an actress/actor, playing herself/himself; they are, then, an externalized, performative version of themselves.


Speech is the determinant in the films of Coutinho.

The subject that is allowed to emerge, through time and duration, is not quite itself while, at the same time, is closer to some kernel of truth that appears momentarily. This liminal position, made possible through duration and theatricality, lies at the heart of what has been termed “extimacy” (or extimité in Lacan’s writings, derived from the “ex” of “exterieur” with Freud’s “intimité“), that is, “neither interior nor exterior, but not somewhere else either.”10 According to Mladen Dolar: “It is the point of exteriority in the very kernel of interiority, the point where the innermost touches the outermost, where materiality is the most intimate. It is around this intimate external kernel that subjectivity is constituted.”11

The Modesty of History

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s proposal for the practice of a historical materialism, where the accumulation of the past’s ruins must be presented without being made whole, where history must be told by allowing the least obvious voices to emerge in a radically anti-heroic and anti-epic form, Coutinho made his films as attempts at such a practice. It is through Coutinho’s insistence on duration and the word, on temporality and speech, that his own historical materialism is exercised.

The first time that Coutinho evidences a desire to make a film that would be “only spoken” is Boca de lixo (Scavengers, 1992), where he turned his camera on the women, men, and children who worked in the garbage dump of Iacoca in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. There is no sermonizing or propagandistic contextualizing here—although, for the attentive spectator, the dump’s placement in the whole catastrophic and devastating machine of capitalism itself becomes inevitably clear. There is no romanticizing of these lives as heroes of resistance. Rather, Coutinho’s film gives these people’s stories through a collage of conversations: women who prefer the freedom of picking garbage to the master-slave relationship of domestic work; men who lose their already precarious jobs and join their wives, doing this “in the meantime”; families who salvage found pieces and adorn their homes in vintage style; people who confess to eating garbage.

Boca de lixo was shot on the analog video of the time which, even though it did not give Coutinho the temporal freedom or possibilities that digital would have granted, already offered him much more freedom than the medium (mainly 16mm film) he had previously used for the documentaries he had made at Globo Repórter in 1975–84. Radically less expensive, the new video format allowed Coutinho to explore further the discovery he had perceived in the three-minute-ten-second shot that somehow made it through the television network’s post-production team in 1976 and into Seis dias de Ouricuri.

One of Coutinho’s early forays into video, Boca de lixo (Scavengers, 1992), gives the people’s stories through a collage of conversations.
Photos courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles

While Seis dias had been made for television, financed and produced by the network, both Boca de lixo and the subsequent Santo Forte were produced by the CECIP. In 1986, Coutinho had helped found the CECIP (Center of Popular Image Creation / Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular), an NGO that is still in existence today and that addresses questions of citizenship in Brazil through educational and media projects. During the 1990s it was through the CECIP that Coutinho continued his documentary practice, making shorts and features such as Boca de lixo and Santo Forte. The CECIP allowed him to make a number of films and was his home until João Moreira Salles, an open admirer of Coutinho, offered up Videofilmes as his new home.

Boca de lixo‘s longest conversation takes place roughly halfway through the film. Coutinho had been talking to Jurema, a woman who was scavenging in the garbage dump at Iacoca, when at one point she states, “I have six more [children] at home.” The film then moves to her home where Coutinho, and the audience, meet her children, her partner, her mother. There, in the private sphere, the person becomes public. Contained within the space of her home, the camera stops roaming and begins to listen to her story. Prior to this moment, the film has been marked by a camera that is constantly on the move, with a number of long takes made without a dolly or steadicam, in which the image is blurry and at times dizzying.

It is important to underline, once again, that Boca de lixo is one of Coutinho’s early forays into video. He had made only two earlier video documentaries, Santa Marta: Duas semanas no morro (Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Hillside Slums, 1987) and Volta redonda: Memorial da greve (The Strike’s Memorial, 1989). Analog, and later digital, video formats afforded Coutinho many advantages, as the technology allowed the extended long takes he began to employ.

Despite the temporal possibilities allowed by the new medium, the sequence is not in fact composed of a single long shot. The roughly five-minute-thirty-second sequence remains situated in the entrance to the character’s home, but cuts prevail, and multiple shots make up the sequence. Nor does the camera remain immobile, offering a “portrait” of the woman through numerous angles, takes, and voices, for it is not only she who speaks during the sequence—her mother speaks, her partner speaks, and through the symphony of voices the spectator perceives the woman’s life.

It is in Santo Forte, and eventually Edifício Master, that Coutinho lets the camera sit still, where he finally gets rid of the external movement and focuses on the temporal unity of the subject’s utterances and speech. Santo Forte‘s opening shot appears as if a photograph: for twelve seconds, the static shot is focused on a man and a woman standing still, outdoors, in front of what appears to be a house. This shot is followed by a second static shot: a close-up of the man who had appeared in the first shot. To be more precise, his voice is heard before his image appears. That is, before the camera sits with him for almost three minutes, inside his house, as he rambles about his wife’s encounter with her grandmother’s spirit (while stressing that he does not believe in spiritism and has told her repeatedly that her type of faith would be the end of them as a couple), the spectator has already heard him speaking, in a ghostly offscreen speech.

The voice precedes the body. The voice does not emerge from a body; rather, it is the voice that announces the body’s appearance. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this film’s opening, from voice, utterance, and speech to language’s materialization in a body, will define, from this moment on, the central axis—even the doxa, despite Coutinho having expressed his hatred for dogmas of any kind—of Coutinho’s films: voices, that is, and nothing more.

Duration, Words, Conversations

It may be redundant today to state that time lies at the center of any particular film, regardless of which moment in the history of the medium such a film belongs to. Critics and theorists have carefully dissected the effect that the late nineteenth-century standardization of time and the lure of the contingent – which escaped that very standardization in the larger cultural, social, political, and economic setting of the nineteenth century – have had on the emergence of cinema. They have studied the development of formal continuity and discontinuity through the use of montage. Critics and theorists have also studied the ways in which chance and ephemerality were taken up as the instruments for self-reflexivity by experimental cinema. More recently a number of critics have worked on the global art film phenomenon of slow cinema, while others have studied the types and meaning of acceleration in the last decades. These are just some of the many cases that highlight the centrality of the question of time to film scholars and critics of various different historical periods or genres, and perhaps also point, if unintentionally, to the exhaustion of that category as useful for film criticism.

Risking a charge of obviousness, redundancy, or exhaustion, I want to insist that it is important, even mandatory, to think of the ways in which Coutinho uses time in his films—because time is at the very center of his approach to documentary cinema. This centrality can be traced initially and primarily back to the dual temporalities that constitute Coutinho’s first feature-length film, Cabra marcado para morrer. Begun in 1964, interrupted that same year due to the military coup, revived and then finished in 1984, the film’s rhythm is marked by the constant movement between the black and white images of the 1964 production and the color ones from 1984. The film’s English-language title makes this complex temporality explicit with the inclusion of the phrase Twenty Years Later, followed by the production credits which read “Brasil, 1964–1984” even though the original Portuguese title Cabra marcado para morrer does not.

To further complicate the film’s diegesis, there is yet a third temporality that the 1984 film offers in its final form: footage from 1962 when Coutinho was traveling in the Brazilian Northeast as part of a student union caravan documenting life and culture in the region, during which he had his first chance encounter with the story and family members of a recently murdered peasant leader who would then a couple of years later offer up their stories for the film’s script. The production credits, then, should actually be corrected to read: 1962–1984. Even though the film offers images from all three moments, and is ostensibly about the beginning and the end of a period marked by military rule and by the demise of a cultural politics that the coup brought to an end, the film should more properly be considered as an exploration of the time between the years, marked by the dash in “1964–1984” (or the corrected dash of 1962–1984), and of what happened to the lives of the people involved—those onscreen playing themselves as characters, those performing as extras—in between the three moments when Coutinho was in fact able to shoot his film with them: 1962, 1964, 1981.

Even though the reason for the two-decade gap between the beginning and end of the film’s production life is fascinating, it is rather the effect of that interruption that is key to understanding Coutinho’s method of work. At the most obvious level, the twenty-year interruption forced a film that was originally a drama into documentary mode. The whereabouts of its characters had to be discovered, and its script’s initial status as a pressing story that needed to be told had, by that time, expired, replaced by a wandering documentary of a process. In truth, it was already close to being a documentary: a film about the life of farm labor leader João Pedro Teixeira who had (in 1962) recently been murdered. It was going to be made with nonprofessional actors, using documents from Teixeira’s life, with his widow Elizabeth “acting” as herself. Yet Coutinho called it a “story” [historinha] and often described it as a film about poor people who had decided to put on a play.

Coutinho’s film, in this first stage, belongs to the new cultural practices that emerged around the Popular Cultural Center of the National Student Union (Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes, or the CPC of UNE). The CPC was organized around the belief that culture was what was going on in the streets, not in dressing rooms or studios, not in the translation or appropriation of European and North American culture, and it was thus pointedly critical of the massive influx of cultural products from “developed” nations like the United States. Founded in late 1961 in Rio de Janeiro under the presidency of João Goulart, the CPC, like the earlier Popular Culture Movement (MCP, Movimento de Cultura Popular) from Pernambuco, believed they were the cultural vanguard of a socialist political moment and movement in Brazil.

This was the umbrella under which Coutinho’s first feature-length film was to be made. The “quasi-documentary” mode, which Coutinho chose for the film, was precisely a tenet of both the CPC and MCP. His return to the story in 1981 after the nearly twenty-year hiatus dislocated the material and ideological structures that had made the initial project possible. Returning to the same film would have been in some ways impossible, in other ways impractical: some of the actors-protagonists were long dead; Elizabeth Teixeira, the murdered leader’s wife who had played herself, had to be found; the farm labor movement had become a metal workers movement; and the most pressing political question was the return to democracy. Crucially, the CPC itself had closed in 1964 due to the same coup that had shut down the film production. Yet Coutinho knew that most of the film footage had survived, hidden throughout the period of military rule.

In returning to the film twenty years later Coutinho establishes a conversation between disparate, multiple eras. This detail is crucial, because, as critics have long observed, and as Coutinho himself described early on, his film work from Cabra marcado para morrer onward should be called a conversational cinema.12 A practice of unstaged conversation becomes his structuring method in O fio da memória (1991), Boca de lixo (1992), Santo Forte (1999), Edifício Master (2002), Peões (2004), O fim e o princípio (2005), Jogo de cena (2007), Moscou (2008), and As canções (2011). The back and forth between 1964 and 1981 establishes the “first conversation” and thus articulates conversation as a durational practice for all that will come.

In a 1998 interview Coutinho was asked about his relationship to anthropology, to which he answered that there could be no real lineage between his work and that discipline because his method was so anti-systematic but he acknowledged that Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind had been extremely influential for him, particularly the distinction between the “bricoleur” and the engineer.13 For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur is the person who makes do with what is at hand, reusing, reorganizing, and putting together things in unexpected ways, adapting to whatever situation and type of means he might encounter. The bricoleur is a version of Lévi-Strauss’s “savage mind.” Later in the interview, Coutinho admits that his films are, in fact, anthropological, but in a “savage” way. Taking a cue from Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the “savage mind,” then, it is possible to see Coutinho’s cinema as a form of “savage anthropology” that references an untamed, undomesticated approach to the “other.”

Coutinho often described Cabra marcado para morrer as a film about poor people who had decided to put on a play.

Photos courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles

His conversations with the other do not attempt to bridge the social, economic, and cultural gap that separates him from the people he makes films about. Instead, Coutinho’s curiosity, his endless “why?” or “what do you mean?” which gives the other the possibility of plotting their life stories, also underlines the difference between them. Even though there never is any prior unifying element that would establish a common ground between him and the people about whom he makes his films, Coutinho expressed his conviction that “it is by assuming that difference that a certain equality can be established.”14

Coutinho’s anthropology is not “savage” because he has any kind of fascination with traditionally objectified classes of “the poor” or “the illiterate” or “the people.” No, his anthropology is savage because he makes do with what he has. He gathers and applies structures when faced with the need to do so, using whatever is at hand. It is also a “savage anthropology” because of his insistence on capturing spoken events in an unrehearsed way, as they arise.

This “savage anthropology” is built around the contingent: the unexpected, precarious, fleeting emergence of aspects of human testimony and behavior that point to contradictions, and so to kernels of truth. It is an emergence that can only happen over time. Through time. In a process of duration. As Coutinho said, again in 1998, “I want the temporal dimension of things.”

Notes
1. From an interview with Valéria Macedo for the magazine Sexta-feira (Friday) in April 1998. See Valéria Macedo, “O silêncio depois de uma fala é a coisa mais linda que há,” reprinted in Eduardo Coutinho: Econtros, ed. Felipe Bragança (Rio de Janeiro: Beco de Azougue, 2008), 70. This and all translations from Portuguese are the author’s, unless otherwise noted.
2. Coutinho’s nine years working in television coincided with the middle period of Brazil’s military regime, which began with the military coup of April 1, 1964, and ended March 15, 1985.
3. The essay was originally written for the Cinéma du Réel festival catalogue in 1992 and reprinted as Eduardo Coutinho, “O olhar no documentário,” in Eduardo Coutinho, ed. Milton Ohata (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013), 16.
4. João Moreira Salles, “Morrer e nascer: Duas passagens na vida de Eduardo Coutinho,” in Eduardo Coutinho, ed. Milton Ohata (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013), 368. The essay was originally written for and published in the academic journal Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem (2012–13).
5. Eduardo Coutinho, “O olhar no documentário,”, 18. Coutinho goes on to comment on the paradox of Seis dias: such a shot had made it through the censorship of the mid-1970s, when under military rule all contents were strictly monitored, but in the early 1990s it would not make it on the air because of television’s market-driven form of censorship that would ban it because of its duration. Coutinho explains that a shot in television journalism, in the early 1990s, lasted for an average of three or four seconds, unless someone was speaking, when it could last for up to thirty seconds. See José Carlos Avellar’s interview in this dossier.
6. João Moreira Salles, “Morrer e nascer: Duas passagens na vida de Eduardo Coutinho,” 368.
7. Quoted in Liliane Weissberg, “Odysseus, Rowing,” Panic and Mourning: The Cultural Work of Trauma ed. Daniela Agostinho, Elisa Antz, Cátia Ferreira (Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter, 2012), 118. For original interview see Jean–Michel Frodon, “Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann: Le travail du cinéaste,” in Le Cinéma et le Shoah: Un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du XXe siècle (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), 111-125.
8. See Ismail Xavier’s article in this dossier.
9. Josette Féral, “Theatricality,” trans. Ronald P. Bermingham, SubStance 31, nos. 2/3, special issue, Theatricality (2002), 105.
10. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Book VII—The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (London: Routledge, 1992) for mentions of this term.
11. Mladen Dólar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), 78.
12. As early as April 1998, in an interview for the magazine Sexta-feira [Friday], Coutinho said that “what interests me is making films of conversation.” See Valéria Macedo, 75.
13. Ibid., 71-72.
14. Ibid., 67.