O espelho partido da metrópole: paisagens opacas/luminosas da Cicerópolis

Abstract

Juazeiro do Norte presents characteristics of metropolitan social, economic and cultural practices in increasing complexity and increasing elements in which modernity punctuates hybridizations with the postmodern. The expressive filmography resulting from a large audiovisual production carried out on the city accumulates an exemplary filmic representation of its landscape, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. This research aims to analyze Juazeiro do Norte as a filmic city, in the context of its current representation, in rupture to a metropolis when it brings new characters and a dynamic that does not depend only on the tradition of pilgrimages, the figure of Father Cícero, and the growth disordered; that distinguishes itself with a different look, starting from the constructions of diversified characters. This corresponds to a landscape/image of the city resignified by the new filmic representation that has a repercussion in the real city, in the same way that a new city is pronounced as a regional capital assimilating a growing process of metropolization. The actions and technical objects assimilate the fusion of time-space in the emerging metropolis in luminous areas, and at the same time the new production of documentaries about the city evoke a friction between representation-experience of landscapes that opt for aesthetic choices that result in highlighting areas opaque, those in which the “strength” is of the slow. To follow this path of investigation, a survey of the filmography about Juazeiro do Norte was carried out. The film repertoire is significant, which is in the appendix of this work due to its importance as a reference base for future research that is not limited only to the geographic field. It is, therefore, not only a source for this research, but is confused with empiricism. The films about Juazeiro do Norte and the city itself constitute the empirical substrate for the proposed discussion. The accomplishment of this research demonstrates that there is a force in the filmic representation that must be used as a political instrument of resistance to the crude game of homogenization or spectacularization of the spaces of life that are constantly threatened by the hegemonic representations of big capital.