Memory, testimony and representation

a comparative analysis of the works Que bom te ver viva, by Lúcia Murat and O que é isso, companheiro? by Fernando Gabeira

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to try to establish a relationship between the works Que bom te ver viva, by Lúcia Murat and O que é isso, companheiro?, by Fernando Gabeira, in order to investigate how the military dictatorship, through Institutional Acts and violence, curtailed individual and collective freedoms and how this stance fostered the emergence of organizations that, through armed struggle, opposed state repression. Therefore, it is of interest in this article to verify how individual memory becomes collective memory through testimony and how this is capable of elaborating a representation of the temporal cut between 1968 and 1979, when dealing with the hierarchization of opposing militias, the organization of joint actions, female participation and torture. For that, we will use the two works that will be approached according to the theories of Nichols (2005), about the conception of the documentary and De Marco (2004), to analyze the memorialistic novel and the testimony, Chartier (1989), for the social representations, in order to verify at what point the audiovisual and the book converge or diverge.