Cinema, sertão e religião: as representações da Jurema Sagrada no Seridó Potiguar no filme Boi de Prata (1981)

Abstract

This work analyzes the representations of the Jurema Sagrada at the Seridó Potiguar from the cinematographic work Boi de Prata (1981), by Carlos Augusto Ribeiro Júnior. The feature film that was filmed in Caicó/RN in the late 1970s, still under the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship, was shelved for decades until it was remastered in 2018 and presented as a possible source of studies. In this research, we seek to analyze the Jurema Sagrada as a hybrid religion, which brings together Catholic, Afro-Brazilian and Kardecist spiritism elements, born in the sertão and with indigenous roots. Our gaze turns to religion for its central role in the plot of Ribeiro Jr. With the film as the main source, we mobilized interviews with Núbia Lima (actress, costume designer and cousin of Ribeiro Jr.), Amaro Lima (makeup artist and friend of Ribeiro Jr.) and Mirabô Dantas (musician), who participated in the production and recordings of the featurefootage, and that were part of the director’s life. In this sense, we use the method of Discourse Analysis to understand the discourses used in the plot, sewing the lines, scenes and cutouts in line with the political and social era in which it was recorded. In addition, we apply the approaches advocated by Oral History to give support and depth to our oral sources and the testimonies of memories of the interviewees. We work in this research with frames, or images that we capture from within the scenes, so that we capture static images of a scene of moving images (videos). To analyze these images, we use the methodology of observing by layers, what is in the main plan and what is in the background, making comments that accompany the discussion of the images in the context of each chapter. We operationalize the concepts of representations, cultural hybridism, sertões and landscape, to give theoretical support, enabling reflection on a hybrid religion, a Jurema, represented in cinematography in the cut of a Seridó Potiguar between the 1970s and 1980s. Our objective with this research, therefore, is to think about the sertões and the religiosities and hybrid practices Sertanejas, having the cinema as a source and, above all, a cinema made by a seridoense with bases in the Brazilian Cinema Novo.