Marcelo Pedroso’s Pacific (2009) also plays with this tension by handing the camera over to a rather different kind of other: the passengers of a cruise ship who are on holiday, en route to Fernando de Noronha, the Atlantic archipelago off the coast of Pernambuco. Its premise is rather different from that of O prisioneiro. During a one-week cruise, Pedroso and his crew identify passengers traveling on the cruise ship “Pacific” who video record their experiences; upon returning to Recife, they ask these passengers if they would be willing to hand over their footage for a documentary project. The director’s intervention is limited to editing material previously recorded for other purposes. However, structuring a narrative for the film turns out
…show more content…
Drawn from different social strata, most of the youngsters are lower-to-upper-middle-class whites inquiring about the lives of their female black maids—although we also see a young, black favelada (shantytown-dweller) portraying her housekeeper and a woman presenting her elderly, white neighbor-turned-housekeeper. The various medium-length film portraits that comprise the work are intriguing for a couple of reasons. On one hand, they provide rare insight into domestic labor relations in contemporary Brazil and the impact that shifting models of family have had on these. But perhaps even more importantly, the individual portraits also showcase a fairly wide range of documentary modes and distributions of authorship and agency. The modes portrayed range from benign paternalism and fly-on-the-wall observation to more participatory and reflexive choices. At one point, one of the young documentarians actually decides to hand over the camera to his subject. For Mascaro, the interest in the film lies in being able to narrate, “the negotiations of the image the youngsters and their servants would undertake, each in (his or her) own way.” He emphasizes, “the political and ethical indetermination [that emanates] from the film from beginning to end,” an indetermination whose basis resides in whether the youths “were taking advantage of given power relations to access the intimacy of their servants, or if the servants were making use of [the] audiovisual artifice in order to fictionalize
Drawn from different social strata, most of the youngsters are lower-to-upper-middle-class whites inquiring about the lives of their female black maids—although we also see a young, black favelada (shantytown-dweller) portraying her housekeeper and a woman presenting her elderly, white neighbor-turned-housekeeper. The various medium-length film portraits that comprise the work are intriguing for a couple of reasons. On one hand, they provide rare insight into domestic labor relations in contemporary Brazil and the impact that shifting models of family have had on these. But perhaps even more importantly, the individual portraits also showcase a fairly wide range of documentary modes and distributions of authorship and agency. The modes portrayed range from benign paternalism and fly-on-the-wall observation to more participatory and reflexive choices. At one point, one of the young documentarians actually decides to hand over the camera to his subject. For Mascaro, the interest in the film lies in being able to narrate, “the negotiations of the image the youngsters and their servants would undertake, each in (his or her) own way.” He emphasizes, “the political and ethical indetermination [that emanates] from the film from beginning to end,” an indetermination whose basis resides in whether the youths “were taking advantage of given power relations to access the intimacy of their servants, or if the servants were making use of [the] audiovisual artifice in order to fictionalize