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Brazilian Retrospective Geraldo Sarno The Documentary According to Geraldo Sarno "It's hard to come up with a script for a documentary. What is real is always more complex than what we know about it; it holds surprises and it's tricky. Improvise, and the camera and recorder can only catch a part of what is seen and lived, and life is much larger than cinema. Every documentary filmmaker knows that once the film is made, it always falls short of the sum of the knowledge, relationships and feelings that accumulate during the filming. The documentary, when it is finished, builds its own reality. The struggle between the camera and reality, in building a non-fiction film, seems to me to be an attempt to organize elements in space. Let me explain: we shoot a scene, connecting it with the ones that came before and those that come after it. A sequence is structured. The final order of these filled-in spaces is done in the editing room. Only intuition has the power to guide, to plan ahead, while filming, for the timing and order of the sequences and of their many internal elements. This relationship of elements in time, which, for the documentary, is done in the editing process, seems to me, in the fiction film, to be the basic objective of the script. It traces out the itinerary, the route, the direction of the elements that can be transformed or substituted during the time that the film is made, including improvisations." (Section of the article "Às margens do cinema", published in the book "Coronel Delmiro Gouveia", editora Codecris-Pasquim, Rio de Janeiro, 1979) "Actually, what the documentary truly documents is my way of doing documentaries. Even at that, I must admit that this way of doing documentaries (supposing that it could be configured as an organic body of rules and philosophical and esthetic principles, among others) is a question of production, of technical situations and of limitations arising from my greater or lesser degree of skill with the means being used, from my greater or lesser degree of experience, etc. That is, between what is originally imagined - my way of conceiving a theme - and the final form of the finished work, there is quite a distance to be covered, during which the initial project goes through a series of changes. And this gets even more complicated when I see that the object to be documented, the other, the world, is alive, reacts and is most certainly richer and more complex than I had previously imagined. My initial statement, that what the documentary truly documents is my way of doing documentaries, will, perhaps, be more correct if I also conceive of it as a way of documenting my particular way of reacting to the concrete situations and issues that come up during production. Practice almost always forces me to act this way. But we are not always prepared to reject the subject/object dualism, to transform all of the production phases of a documentary film into truly creative phases, releasing subjectivity and assimilating the unexpected invasion of reality. When this happens, even before the viewer, I am the first one to reap the result, with the expansion of my previously imagined space. At any rate, subjectivity, whether or not it is a conscious act of the filmmaker, imposes its own rules, even when the filmmaker is attempting to be objective." (Section of the article "Quatro notas - e um depoimento - sobre o documentário", published in Revista Filme Cultura, issue 44, April/August 1984) "The editing is very important, like everything else is important. I already told you that the film is always a faded image of the experience you had. You're even a little disappointed. We can even compare a photo with the fact that the photo is documenting. But what really happens? You spend two months in the Northeast, filming almost every day. Today, you film a singer in the street market; tomorrow you hit the road and you come to an Indian village, where you stop for three days. You look around, get into tribal life, document it, film it, and all. Then, you hit the road again, taking your hammock, gear, equipment, in your car. You go somewhere; contact somebody, like a lawyer. Another day, you film a group of peasants on a farm. They are fighting to have their own land. You spend two months filming things, which you might even heavily identify with at that time, for four, five days. Then you say good-bye, leave and go on to establish new relationships. You spend two months doing that, enjoying the Northeast, the heat, scenery, back country. Then you come back. Filming means filling in the spaces of an empty framework, as you felt it intuitively, or in your planning. The scenes fill in the framework, so to speak, and the structure changes, according to what you're doing, and it goes on being modified, because surprising things happen, and that framework may, or may not be enriched.... But it actually goes through a transformation. At the end of this process, your framework comes back much more dense, loaded with content and meanings, even though somewhat disjointed. The editing blends the relationship between the planned and, now, transformed structure and the apparent chaos of the filmed material." (Section of an interview given to Patrícia Monte-Mór and Waldo César and published in ISER's Revista Comunicações, no. 10, year 3, October 1984)