Navegantes: from cinematographic ethnography to montage narrative

Navegantes: da etnografia fílmica à narrativa da montagem

Abstract

The research that inspired this text was carried out with the aim of investigating intersubjective experiences lived around the feast of Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes through the mediation of audiovisual recordings. It is a traditional popular festival that celebrates the patron saint of the community of Coqueirinho, a Potiguara indigenous village, belonging to the municipality of Marcação/North Coast of Paraíba.

For a few years we followed people/characters who make up the procession of Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes. Characters who experience the event in different ways and relate to the sacred with equally different meanings. The narration proposed by the film brings together these characters in a recreated feast, where they intersect through the juxtapositions of shots and sequences of scenes set up in an alternating and parallel manner.

This text is the result of reflections on the film's editing process. It proposes an approximation between the cinematographic art of editing, the chaining of shots, and ethnographic writing. Narratives elaborated in a creation process that reorders facts and temporalities in order to tell a story with intentionality. The result is the articulation of a system of which the editor is part, a circuit in which filmed characters, objects, movements of nature and the researcher/editor form a system of images that think.