Eduardo Coutinho Occupation

Responsible for masterpieces of Brazilian cinema, such as Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later), Edifício Master (Master: A Building in Copacabana) and Jogo de cena (Playing), Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014) was a restless creator and a skilled interviewer. Constantly re-thinking his approach and experimenting with the limits between reality and how it is represented, he created a documentary approach that was his own and became a legitimate thinker on film theory.

During his career, Coutinho was many things.
He worked with fiction, television reporting, social documentary, the so-called cinema of conversation and on the borders between all these fields – always with the same interest in the act of filming itself and open to hear what others have to say, letting the scene develop freely in front of the camera.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to learn more about Coutinho’s work, revisiting it with a transversal cut across time, highlighting the director’s themes, preferences and constant interests during the various phases of his career, both in fictional works and in documentaries. Amongst the topics which receive special attention are his relationship with theater, television, religious belief, memory, orality and parody.

A selection of clips from his films, videos and interviews are shown alongside documents and other materials which reveal something of his creative process, whether it be seeking and choosing his characters, on the film set, or during the laborious work of editing.

Conceived and realized by Itaú Cultural in São Paulo in 2019, the Eduardo Coutinho Occupation took place in collaboration with the Instituto Moreira Salles, currently responsible for the director’s collection. The exhibition traveled to IMS Rio in 2020 and this unprecedented immersion in the filmmaker’s world has now come to Poços de Caldas.

Eduardo Coutinho grew up in São Paulo and was a dedicated film buff in his youth. He abandoned a law degree to study cinema at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. While he was there, he directed his first and only fiction short, Le téléphone [The Phone] and the unfinished documentaries La Maison du Brésil [The Brazil House] and Saint-Barthélemy. On returning to Brazil at the end of 1960, he worked on a newspaper proofreader, with short periods in the theater and as a film critic. He got to know the Cinema Novo group through Leon Hirszman and moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1961.

The fruit of his subtle humor and his permanent questioning of the concepts of authorship and originality, his liking for quotes and parody is one of his less well known facets. It can be seen in his films, writings, and even in his dedications in books by other authors. In his only short fiction film, Le téléphone [The Phone], the female lead speaks in phrases from a French grammar book. Rosinha`s shopping list in O homem que comprou o mundo [The Man Who Bought the World], which the director himself added to the existing script, is a fine example of oral surrealism. At the end of his career, Coutinho was planning a film made only of quotes, to be used as parodies. His research for the film produced a compilation, which was informally entitled “Dossier of Human Stupidity”.

During his lifetime and career, Eduardo Coutinho had a relationship with television, at times productive, at times critical. Having won a prize in a TV Record quiz on Charles Chaplin, he traveled to Europe in 1957 and started learning about cinema. In the 1970s, he developed his skills in documentaries while working for Globo Repórter, the seed for the resumption of Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later). In 2000, he made a short, Porrada! (Beating), in partnership with TV Pinel, for an event commemorating 50 years of television in Brazil. Finally, in 2009, he condensed all the nonsense on broadcast television into the protofilm Um dia na vida (A Day in the Life), which cannot be shown due to copyright issues.

Few documentary makers had such a personal approach as Eduardo Coutinho as he perfected his method. The freshness and the profound humanity of his dialog-based films come from his judicious choices in the selection of characters, in the ritual of the film-shoots and the editing. Much of his working method involved manuscript notebooks, where he noted down his impressions of the interlocutors and many other idiosyncrasies, which are often undecipherable by mere mortals. By working extensively with the same people, he progressed and improved continuously, and created a rare convergence of purpose around a certain idea of cinema.

Cinema cannot change the world, but it can have an impact on the lives and egos of the personalities in a documentary. Coutinho was aware of this. His films leave us with clear evidence of this phenomenon. It is the case with Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later), which freed Elizabeth Teixeira from 17 years in hiding, she who is reaching 100 years old in 2025. Or Theodorico, o imperador do sertão (Theodorico, the Emperor of the Backlands), in which the director lets the main character “kidnap” the work, revealing everything about himself with his own words. In Santa Marta, duas semanas no morro (Santa Marta, Two Weeks in the Slums), the presence of the camera gives a resident the strength to face up to a policeman. When he filmed Boca de lixo (Scavengers), Coutinho faced rejection by the scavengers on the rubbish dump and, by insisting on filming them, transformed them from extras into richly human figures.

In his documentaries, Eduardo Coutinho usually included an explanation of how he worked and what he intended (or not) with a particular shot. He called these devices “prisons”, which set out the parameters for time, space, social context and strategy for making the film, which were fundamental to his creative process. Most of the times, this explanation was inserted, in his own voice, at the beginning of each documentary.

Although he was an agnostic, Coutinho always recognized the role of religion in people’s lives. Romeiros do Padre Cícero (Pilgrimages of Father Cicero), O fio da memória (The Thread of Memory) and Santo forte (The Mighty Spirit) were completely or mainly concerned with religion but did not completely satisfy Coutinho’s interest in the subject. In almost all his documentaries, from his early research, he took into account the faith and spiritual life of his characters. Religion was seen not only as an aspect of the imaginary but also as a decisive factor in practical life and in the values of each of us. He himself said that he was a “magical materialistic”, subject to superstitions and revering mystical objects.

Most of Eduardo Coutinho`s films were nourished from memories – of life, of love, of work. In some cases, however, he was concerned with reconstructing personal memories from the well of important historical recollections. In Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later) he dealt with events in the rural heart of Brazil, the military coup of 1964 and an unfinished film. With O fio da memória (The Thread of Memory) he returned to the theme of the history of the black population in Brazil and the evocation of a certain popular artist. While, with Volta Redonda, memorial da greve (Volta Redonda: Homage to a Strike) and Peões (Metalworkers), he sought to recall the events of workers standing up for their rights. It is not by chance that these films are the most directly political ones in his body of work.

In the 1960s, Coutinho made very brief and entertaining appearances in his own films and those directed by others. In Glauber Rocha’s Câncer (Cancer), he alluded to his much-loved notebooks. Later in his career, he would lend his peculiar voice to characters who did not appear on the screen.

While he was always out of tune and couldn’t remember the lyrics, Coutinho liked to sing. But he mainly liked to hear others sing. From the start of his career, he would ask his characters to sing, as a way of revealing another aspect of them. With As canções (The Songs), he dedicated an entire film to this enjoyment.

In an oeuvre concerned with the oral, there is also a place for unsettling moments of silence. When they occur, we understand better how Coutinho constructed his films from a tension between the word and its absence, between what was said and what was silenced.

A regular theater-goer in his youth, Coutinho directed Pluft, o fantasminha (Pluft, The Little Ghost) in Paris in the 1950s. He also worked with Amir Haddad and Chico de Assis at the beginning of his career. He adapted Nelson Rodrigues’ A falecida (The Dead Woman) with his friend Leon Hirszman and he brought Shakespeare closer to the cangaço on Faustão (Falstaff). In his documentaries, he encouraged his characters to blur the edges between reality and fiction, searching for some sort of ‘theater of life’. He diligently explored boundaries between documentary reporting and staging, and between real characters and actors in his films As canções (The Songs), Jogo de cena (Playing) and Moscou (Moscow), which were filmed in theatrical locations.