Controversial voices in the documentary

a polyphonic study of enunciation from the perspective of Event Semantics

Abstract

This article analyzes the enunciative marks of political agency present in the political documentary Democracia em Vertigem (2019), produced, directed and narrated by filmmaker Petra Costa. The work portrays a series of socio-political events, between the 2013 demonstrations and the 2018 electoral race, with institutional instability and the of Dilma’s impeachment process as the central event of this conjuncture. The discussion is elaborated from the perspective by the Event-Based Semantic Theory, with analysis procedures by Guimarães (2017). Furthermore, the Bakhtinian concepts of polyphony and dialogism are presented, considering the clash of articulated voices in a political context of democratic rupture. The corpus of analysis consists of four excerpts selected from sequential scenes that focus on the discursive tension around the impeachment process, contemplating the statements uttered by the following subjects: Eduardo Cunha, Petra Costa, Dilma Rousseff and an employee of the Planalto Palace not identified by name. The focus is on how the enunciative agency materializes the polyphonic conflict and the subject-positions in the construction of the meanings of democracy in the documentary. Under the primacy of the Event-Based Semantic Theory, the categories of polyphony (Bakhtin, 1977) and the modes of representation (Nichols, 2012) operate as a support to describe the clash of voices and the specificity of filmic language. The proposed analysis focused on the places of saying and places of enunciation that materialize in the statements, through the modalizers, the enunciative agency related to the political event portrayed, as well as the influence of the author's voice in the polyphonic conflict, which creates the sense of democratic vertigo. In the analysis of the utterances, it was possible to understand how enunciative agency and polyphony articulate individual and collective voices, it was possible to observe the way in which the sense of democracy is fragmented, tensioned and reconstructed in the midst of the plurality of discourses that cross the film. It was found that the polyphonic conflict is established in the center of the saying, crossed by the displacement of the enunciative figures and architected by the social place of the speaker-narrator, who articulates the dissident voices, configuring, in the temporality of the narrative, the conditions of speakability.