Memórias de velho

Abstract

The documentary film Memórias de Velho has a duration of 48 minutes and was produced with resources from the Government of the State of Pará, via the cultural selection notice Preamar Award for Art and Culture 2020 (Secult-Pa). The proposal of the production is to portray the narratives and reflections of life of elderly men and women, over 60 years old, living in rural communities and in neighborhoods in the urban area of the municipality of Santarém, Pará. Audiovisual is understood as a language capable of putting the memories and stories of these subjects in a protagonist way and with intergenerational communication accessibility.

The film is inspired by the book Memory and Society: Memories of the Old, by the writer Ecléa Bosi. In this work, Bosi (1994) focuses on his analysis of the memories narrated by elderly residents of the city of São Paulo. With criticisms of the capital society in which the old man has no value and is relegated to oblivion, the writer opens a leading space and publishes sensitive biographical reports of men and women who dedicated their lives to work and experienced the changes in São Paulo society.

This point raises the reflections of Norbert Elias (2001) in Solidão dos Moribundos, when approaching the theme from the experience of aging and death. Elias, perceives the aging process treated collectively as a deviation from the social norm and identifies denial of the signs that the old man represents, mainly as a repression of generations from other age groups. Aging brings with it a change in the person's social position in all fields of life, in relationships with other entities in daily life, with the family, often represented by the isolation of the old man's affection within the family. Deprived of the productive forces, the experiences and knowledge of the elderly are forgotten and their actions or desires are treated in a childish manner under the tutelage of adults, as if they regressed their first age, but without the patience and affections common to children. Or the author points out that the greatest fear in old age is to lose strength and independence for the basic tasks of everyday life and become hostage to the time of others.

The documentary Memórias de Velho is based on orality. It proposes a portrait of the collective memory (HALBWACHS, 1968) of the city of Santarém from the living experience of men and women, now aged between 65 and 99 years old, who effectively participated in the transformations of the Santarena society.

It should be noted that Santarém is one of the main cities in the Amazon. Considered one of the oldest in the region (PY-DANIEL, 2017) its demography expresses a pluri-ethnic picture composed of indigenous, quilombolas, riverside dwellers. In recent historical periods, Santarém has undergone political, cultural, social changes, motivated by the economic cycles of rubber (1939–1945), the State's integration policies for the occupation of the Amazon, the opening of the Transamazônica road (1950-1970) and the effervescence of gold mining (1950-1980). The fact of being recognized for having better conditions of structure, public services and trade attracted a large part of investments and migrant workers coming from other regions with the purpose of changing their lives. There are several communities in the municipality's plateau composed primarily of Ceará, Maranhão and Piauí people.

However, it is up to us to question what place of ordinary people in historical narratives about this place? And who are these people? What are the opinions, the paths, the trajectories of these characters within the narrated stories? Thinking of alluding to these questions, the documentary reflects the history of those who come from below (THOMPSON, 1992), in this case, imagined in the figure of the old man, who practically does not appear in official narratives, but has ancestral knowledge and is able to exchange experiences of life between generations and to communicate the facts that tell the local history from another point of view.