The Path to "Cabra"

THE RENEWING IMPACT OF "Cabra Marcado para Morrer" ("Twenty Years Later", 1984) by Eduardo Coutinho on the Brazilian documentary, above all for its reflexivity, seemed for at least a decade and a half that it would stigmatize its director as one more filmmaker remembered for one single great film. Coutinho's self-reinvention through the end of "Santo Forte" in 1999 with the consolidation of his "cinema of conversation" device put any early evaluation aside. The new direction in 2007 with "Jogo de Cena" altered the game board once again, making any diagnosis about the case of Coutinho in contemporary Brazilian cinema even more complex.

After a long period out of circulation due to the absence of copies in good condition, the digital restoration of "Cabra" by Cinemateca Brasileira returns the film to us with the same luxuriance of its resounding premiere in Brazil in the wane of the military dictatorship. There is no better opportunity to reexamine the work itself and the process of forming Coutinho, the documentary filmmaker, to the crystallization of his first classic.

The special retrospective "The Path to "Cabra"", with two debates and a series of screenings, has the privilege of counting on Coutinho himself as virtual cocurator. The two panels, one in São Paulo and the other in Rio de Janeiro, gather the filmmaker's principal partners in the resurrection of the "Cabra" project three decades ago, which was originally fictional and interrupted by the military government of 31 March of 1964, as well as those responsible for the film's restoration.

Many times Coutinho has dated his conversion to documentary cinema to his experience with the first phase of Globo Repórter in the 1970s, marked at the time by its partnership with independent production, a pioneer in recuperating a special program organized by It's All True in 2002 curated by Beth Formaginni. Of that production, he himself highlights four titles selected for this cycle: "Six Days in Ouricuri" (1976), "The Gunman of Serra Talhada" (1977), "Theodorico, The Emperor of Sertão" (1978) and "Exu, A Tragedy in the Back Country" (1979). Included in this cycle, the short "Coutinho Repórter" (2010) by Rená Tardin presents a summary of this experience from testimony by the filmmaker himself. "Cabra Marcado para Morrer" was shot essentially between February and March of 1981 with funding from Embrafilme and production direction by Zelito Viana. A colleague of Coutinho in his Cinema Novo beginnings, Eduardo Escorel assumed the editing. As the film itself explains, unlike the fictional "Cabra" of 1964 the new version was done without a screenplay.

1962, João Pessoa, Paraíba. A film team from CPC of UNE led by young Coutinho filmed a rally of protest against the murder of rural leader João Pedro Teixeira. The record intended to result in a fictional feature film about the life of Teixeira, a project given up due to the repressive wave of the new authoritarian regime. 1984, Rio de Janeiro. Eduardo Coutinho freed himself from the ghost of a rough cut preserved for twenty years in his house and the house of filmmaker David Neves. Fiction became documentary and the film about Teixeira transformed into a film about the interrupted film about Teixeira, but also a film about the repressive and socially disintegrating impact of the dictatorship, and still a film about cinema as a preserver of memory – only three of its levels of reading. Another landmark of the modern documentary helps us contextualize the conception of "Cabra" by Coutinho. He himself remembers the impact of "Crônica de um Verão" (1961) by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, the inaugural work of Cinema Verdade that he watched at the heat of the time but discards as a direct reference during the preparation of "Cabra". "Unconsciously, maybe," he recognizes, however, against the evident rhymes between the two films, like the explanation of the filming process as much as the relationship between filmmaker and subjects. No surprise. "Cabra Marcado para Morrer" is one of those rare works that synthesizes the history of the genre that preceeded and anticipated the history that would come – and will still come today.

Amir Labaki

	Twenty Years After EDUARDO COUTINHO (BRASIL / BRAZIL, 1984)
	Chronicle of a Summer JEAN ROUCH, EDGAR MORIN (FRANÇA/ FRANCE, 1959)
	Coutinho Reporter RENÁ TARDIN (BRASIL / BRAZIL, 2010)
	Exu, A Tragedy in the Back Country EDUARDO COUTINHO (BRASIL / BRAZIL, 1979)
	The Gunman of Serra Talhada EDUARDO COUTINHO (BRASIL/ BRAZIL, 1976)
	Six Days in Ouricuri EDUARDO COUTINHO (BRASIL / BRAZIL, 1976)
	Theodorico, The Emperor of Sertão EDUARDO COUTINHO (BRASIL / BRAZIL, 1978)