“Tombstone Cinema” in Memória de Deus e o Diabo em Monte Santo e Cocorobó (1984): Agnaldo “Siri” Azevedo, the staging of impotence, and the crisis of New Latin American Cinema in the 1980s

Abstract

This article investigates a film by Bahian documentarian Agnaldo "Siri" Azevedo (1931-1997) as a symptomatic expression of the crisis of the New Latin American Cinema (NCL) in the 1980s. Starting from the historiographical problem of the marginalization of regional trajectories within canonical narratives of Latin American cinema, it analyzes how his short film Memória de Deus e o Diabo em Monte Santo e Cocorobó (1984) embodies an aesthetic response to the disenchantment of that period. Methodologically, it articulates film analysis grounded in Fernão Pessoa Ramos, historical contextualization based on Ignacio del Valle Dávila, and memory studies by Michael Pollak and Pierre Nora. It demonstrates how the documented circulation of the film at the VII Havana Film Festival (1985) legitimizes its insertion into NCL networks, at a moment when the foundations of this project (such as the defense of a “revolutionary” cinema) were in crisis. The analysis identifies in the film the elaboration of a "tombstone cinema" that replaces the revolutionary "gun cinema," materializing the "logic of defeat" of the NCL’s utopian project through what is defined as the "staging of historical impotence" and "documentary of hopelessness." It concludes that Siri's work transforms the sertão into a "site of melancholic memory," constituting itself not as a regional appendix, but as an aesthetic symptom of the project's continental crisis, demanding a historiographical revision that includes regional margins for a comprehensive understanding of the NCL.