Listening to Others
Eduardo Coutinho's Documentary Cinema
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A collection of original essays and previously untranslated critical writings on the renowned Brazilian documentary filmmaker, Eduardo Coutinho.
Description
Listening to Others is the first English-language volume dedicated solely to the vast corpus of the preeminent Brazilian director, Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014). From his early work in the 1960s to his last, posthumous film in 2015, Coutinho transformed documentary filmmaking in Brazil and beyond. Described as an informal linguist and savage anthropologist, Coutinho filmed encounters with people different from himself that foregrounded their voices and his role as an attentive listener, creating a "cinema of listening." This collection brings together leading scholars of film, literature, visual culture, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies, from the United States and Latin America, to examine both Coutinho's masterpieces and less studied films. Using a range of approaches, the contributors invite new ways of understanding the documentarian's trajectory and importance as his work transformed in response to dictatorship, democratization, and other political, social, and technological changes over the course of five decades. The volume also features original translations of a selection of Coutinho's writings and key texts by Brazilian critics to offer a historical perspective on his filmmaking and its reception.
Natalia Brizuela is Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author (with Jodi Roberts) of The Matter of Photography in the Americas, among other books. Krista Brune is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Spanish and Director of the Global and International Studies program at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas, also published by SUNY Press.
Reviews
"Listening to Others offers diverse engagement with the work of Eduardo Coutinho and its various ethics of open conversation between cinematic subjects. While nearly all of Coutinho's films are examined, many of the essays dialogue with one another and offer analyses of the same films from different critical angles. The result is a rich reading experience that allows for further critical engagement with Coutinho's work and with documentary cinema as a whole." — Andrew C. Rajca, author of Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay