Displacement and belonging

the place of passage in Rio Doce / CDU

Abstract

This paper deals with the film representation of belonging in space within the images built by Pernambuco’s contemporary cinema to discuss about the notion of place of passage and the subjective implications related to the subject’s identity in its relation to a certain urban space. The place of passage is the one built in Pernambuco’s documentary film Rio Doce/CDU (2013), written and directed by Adelina Pontual. From the analysis of the moving images of and through urban space of two cities: Olinda and Recife, it will be considered that the filmed and projected spaces (in their cinematic and geographic senses) are wrapped in a cultural frame of the perception of lived and imagined space which enables new understandings about the notions of identity and belonging to a place. Here we consider the links between the urban images in the film, by the speech analysis, from the spatiality of place that is evidently culturally built, to establish a paradigm of understanding of the relationship between the moving images of urban space, the human experience in space, and the geographic imagination that constitutes itself from the representation of spatial experience and the identity of place.