IMAGES DROUGHT IN CINEMA AND THE ELABORATION OF A MEMORY OF VIOLENCE

Abstract

The drought in the northeastern sertão is a historic calamity. Deaths due to drought in the region in the 19th and 20th centuries alone exceed 4 million people. The inefficiency of the State in dealing with these disasters, the abandonment of the victims and the silencing around the memory of this violence favors the erasure of the historical trauma. For Seligmann-Silva (2008), artistic narratives are a fruitful field to re-elaborate the memory of violence, and it is in the expression of the imaginary that the untranslatable of trauma achieves a certain translatability. This work aims to analyze the imagery-discursive construction of the subject punished by the drought and the sertão as a scenario of a historical and political calamity in the cinema. For that, we will make a comparative analysis of the construction of the image of Fabiano and Severino; protagonists of Vidas Secas, by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1963) and Morte e Vida Severina, by Zelito Viana (1977).