Imaginário e espectros da violência no filme O som ao redor (2012), de Kleber Mendonça Filho

Abstract

Neighboring Sounds (2012) is a film written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, a film critic and filmmaker from Pernambuco. The film, his first feature-length fiction, brings up recurring themes from his filmography, such as real estate speculation, memory (of people and places, personal and collective), violence and insecurity in urban spaces. Kleber Mendonça's film makes reference to two works by Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves and The Mansions and the Shanties. In this way, the director proposes an updating of the themes and structures addressed by Freyre: the slave owner's house, the senzala and the mill. The aim here is to understand how the unease present throughout the film's narrative, both visually and sound-wise, evokes the opacity and veiled racism present in contemporary Brazilian society. To this end, the research's theoretical foundation is based on three authors and their concepts: Gilbert Durand's Anthropological Imaginary; Jacques Derrida's Spectre and Fantology; and Gaston Bachelard's Poetic Space. The specific objectives are: to explore the concepts of the imaginary, spectrality and poetic spaces, to address how Kleber Mendonça's work fits into the tradition of modern Brazilian cinema and represents violence, analyzing the film based on its frames, shots, scenes, soundtrack etc. This research is justified by the curiosity to explore fear and terror in Brazilian cinema and the desire to know and understand part of the country's cultural, social, economic and historical roots through one of its cinematographic works. The research methodology is divided into two parts: bibliographical exploration and film analysis.