Entre o cinema e a locomotiva: os documentários de Edivaldo Moura como escrituras fílmicas de um passado castanhalense (1940-1995)

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the process of filmic writing of part of the urban daily life of the 20th century (1940-1995) in the city of Castanhal (Pará) through two documentaries produced by the paraense filmmaker Edivaldo Moura, which are O Cinema de Seu Duca (2016), that addresses the multicultural trajectory of Cine Argus during its nearly six decades of operation in the city; and A Última Maria (2021), that focuses on some of the structural elements of the Bragança railway (EFB) in the daily life of the inhabitants of Castanhal, safeguarding the Castanhal locomotive and the railway station as protagonists. Both films are structured in similar ways by inviting residents of the city to share their past personal experiences with the main elements that the films envision – the Cine Argus and the Castanhal Locomotive. Film analysis (internal reading) was utilized in conjunction with documents sources to assert the films not as mirrors that represent a past already given by a passive social externality, but rather as producers of a historical movement proper to the Castanhal period addressed and, mainly, to its present producer. As a result, the films were understood as creators of a temporal intelligibility that anchors the present-past by formulating their own specific writings of part of the urban transformation of Castanhal, having the cinema and the locomotive, along with the social experiences developed in these spaces, as supplanted symbols – and at the same time resistant – of the policy of urban-commercial remodeling of Castanhal initiated vigorously from the second half of the 20th century in the city.