The montage of “Cine Rabeca”: music, memory and ethnography in an expanded cinema experience.

Abstract

“Cine Rabeca” is a documentary that expands onto the stage and blends live music with ethnographic archive. It is a cine-concert, where musicians Luiz Paixão and Renata Rosa are permanently on stage, dialoguing with their own filmic memories. During the performance, a new time is composed out of what is seen, heard and imagined. The passage of time is felt in the contrast between images of the rural world of Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1990-2000 and the image of the presence of the musicians on stage. In this cinematographic re-encounter with their trajectories, Paixão and Rosa improvise with their rabecas (fiddles) and recreate themselves. Through music, they circulate amongst rural and ancestral festivities and the narrative is permeated with the language of memory, which explores traces and reminiscences.Time and memory articulate themselves in a singular space that experiments with a form of collaboration between the languages of music, film, and anthropology. This paper explores the process of making this expanded documentary and how it has remained live during the last years, constantly transforming itself amongst the borders of the stage and the screen, between life and film. It shows a process of unfinishing that transcends the finalization of documentaries; of the very life that follows ethnographic recordings.