Sound in the Mise-en-Scène of Contemporary Brazilian Documentary: An analysis of Aracati (2016)

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the study of the relationship between sound and mise-en-scène in contemporary Brazilian documentary cinema. Based on the work of Michel Chion, Murray Schafer and Daniel Deshays, as well as Virginia Osorio Flôres’s reflections on the place of sound in contemporary cinematic mise-en-scène, we investigate ambient sound as a staging element in cinematographic narrative, especially in the documentary genre. How can the “fundamental” and “archetypical” sounds of the environment be captured, edited and inserted in a way as to become an important mise-en-scène element in documentary film? Taking as case study the Brazilian documentary Aracati (2016), by Aline Portugal and Julia De Simone, we start from the hypothesis that ambient sound participates, as much as the visual elements, in the spatial mise-en-scène and its transformations, by playing with the differences between the materialities and the meanings of visual and sound images. Our methodology involves internal image and sound analysis, as systematized by Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie. Our study shows that the fundamental sounds in Aracati, especially the sounds of the wind, are used as staging elements in two recurrent ways. Firstly, by using off-screen sound, and secondly, by using sound variations whose sources or visual traces are seen on the screen, having as an aesthetic and narrative effect the contrasting representation of the wind on the boundaries between nature, culture and artifice.