The cinema of Adirley Queirós: criticism of the urban-social space as a punitive landscape or how to narrate about from the margins

Abstract

The contemporary ways of watching and punishing are systematically developed until the fact that we can hardly notice them. The exercises of social isolation seem to be functional to the authorized social power institutions. This power is the one that proclaim social discourses about the socio-economic differences, justifying projects about physical and geographical distribution of people who conforms the urban area. Exposed as a indirect punishment, but being public-explicit in the level of the facts, a punitive logic is reproduced in the discourse/s that legitimize certain way of social distribution. Tense discourses about the complexity of this topic also have their treatment in the Latin American film field. In the filmography of Adirley Queirós (1970, Brazil), the narrative focus is developed through the historical problematization of the urban design of Brasilia. Building a particular aesthetic that manages to conjugate the fantastic and documentary about of Ceilandia, the satellite city of the Brazilian capital, Queirós contrasts not only geographic-spatial differences, but also the consequent socio-political implications. To analyze the representations of the cinematographic language that are reformulated in the discussion with respect to the subject, the theory developed by Michel Foucault on Discipline and Punish (1975) and the semiotic contributions of Eliseo Verón will be considered. The representation that Queirós works on physical displacement as punishment is the starting point to think about a political dimension in his filmography.