Profanar o arquivo: Zweig – a morte em cena, de Sylvio Back

Abstract

The main goal of this doctorate thesis is to analyze the documentary Zweig: a morte em cena (1995), by the Brazilian filmmaker, journalist and writer Sylvio Back. This, aiming to prob-lematize in which degree this cinematographic return (out)dates the files on this Jewish writer which, in the attempt to escape Nazi-fascism, turned out to move to the New Brazilian State during the Vargas Era. Although when we sum up the visits and residency time of Stefan Zweig in Brazil, we obtain, approximately, one year of living, it is worth noting that the con-nections between the author and this South American country are quite potent, when consider-ing, for example, that it was here in this time-space exiguous, where re revised his autobiog-raphy: o mundo de ontem – memórias de um europeu (1941), wrote the novel Uma partida de xadrez (1943) as well, as unseen in his literary career, he took this nation as the main charac-ter of one of his books, Brasil, um país do futuro (1941), forging, thus, this untimely epithet which still haunts us even nearly eighty years after his enigmatic suicide, along with his sec-ond wife, Charlotte Altmann, in the city of Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro. Situation initially ex-plored in the mid-1980s, decade of the centenary of Stefan Zweig birth, by the Brazilian jour-nalist and writer Alberto Dines, in your biopranhy Morte no paraíso: a tragédia de Stefan Zweig (1981). No wonder, this text is one of the great responsible not Only for influencing Sylvio Back, bur for (re)bringing this intellectual to the surface in this part of the world. Re-garding the methodology, we used the film analysis, and also, often, we utilized the works of some literary critics, philosophers and psychoanalysts, as Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, in order to engender the exegesis of some of the constitutive elements of the medium-length film which drew our attention during the leaning over the screen, such as the off-voice, soundtrack, archive images, framing and montage. Thus, from the gathering of our reading about this film in contrast with all these theoretical interlocutors, without losing sight from other film works, we defend, in short, that the thesis which states that Sylvio Back, in Zweig: a morte em cena, desecrates excerpts of the Zweigian life and work as the film agencies the document mise-en-scène not in order to fix senses, but actually to stay coherent to its other cinematographic productions, with the pur-pose of, fairly, shed light in the movements, in the diversity, which is proper to man and, therefore, couldn’t go further away than any representative enterprise in the contemporary. Lastly, we justify this investigation, since, although there’s plenty of intertext and intermedia – critics regarding both artists, the preceding studies, as it seems to us, still weren’t contained in the examination of this particular film, and also due to the actuality in face of all evidence about this humanist intellectual who, amidst the Nazi-fascist thanatopolitics still garnered Herculean forces in order to defend, in his books and lectures, a more fraternal society.