In the vacuum of the past:

Brazil among weapons, books and narratives

Abstract

This article proposes the realization and problematization of conceptual and theoretical discussions about the narratives of the past in the present time and their tension related to the historical past. Based on preliminary inferences about the constitutive elements of the documentary “1964: Brazil between weapons and books”, which is placed as a revisionist discourse of History, we will point out characteristics that, on the contrary, reallocate it as a producer of a negationist narrative. We highlight how the documentary builds narratives that approach, in an expository and constructive character, the historical narratives, bringing coherence in the narrative and imagery production, creating an effect of reality and historical experience. Such observations endorse, in the collective perceptions about the past, the modeling of the apparently unprecedented movement of an object-phenomenon of the present time: the recursive movement of the interpretation and reception of the past that moves away from the close relationship of remembrance and existence in the past-time in towards the speculative projection of a past (mythical, idealized, manufactured or experienced) in the future-time. The contradictions and problems of this movement of narrative and interpretative displacement of / about the past, whether from the spectrum of history or other narratives, point to different challenges for the historian of the present time, while its intelligibility characterizes the evidence of a new way of connecting men to their experiences of past, present and future.