Irresolution, mourning, and elaboration in Orestes

a historical proposition

Abstract

In the path proposed by the German historian Andreas Huyssen (2014), who identifies a primary concern with memory in contemporary Western culture, we propose in this article an approach to the film Orestes. The focus here is its effort of critical remembrance of the military dictatorship in Brazil, understood as a force that acts in the present (perpetuating a history of police arbitrariness and violence). Without disregarding its singularities — notably the use of tragedy as a mechanism for historical understanding — Rodrigo Siqueira’s film allows us to examine and specify some of the hypotheses we drew in contact with the broader contemporary film production. In particular, the bet on an “aesthetic of elaboration”: under the shadow of a “past that does not go away,” the present gains centrality in this work in which the same work of elaboration of experience, assumed in its processual nature, guides the narrative. Methodologically, we seek to “historicize aesthetics”, as Naara Fontinele dos Santos (2020) proposes: by analyzing the images, we entangle them in the complexity of broader historical processes in which the films participate.