A journey from film to digital: about the embodied images of Terra Encantada

trajeto das imagens encarnadas de Terra encantada

Abstract

The paper discusses the paths taken by the film Terra Encantada (1923) since its resurgence in the late 1960s until its arrival in the cinematheque collection of the Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro) in 1985 and, eventually, its reuse in recent audiovisual works. It discusses the transformation of the status of the film, which becomes recognized as a document and, therefore, permeable to new possibilities of narrative and historicity. It argues that its renewal in different art works depends on the archiving gesture that preserves and erases its own production process. The proposal is to reconstitute traces of this erasure and of the operations that allowed the displacement of film images through different media. The paths of Terra Encantada - from its emergence in the 1920´s to the reuse of its fragments in the short films of the Rio Cinético gallery - show an experience of images linked to displacement by supports as conductors of different temporal forms.