The interview as a method: A talk with Eduardo Coutinho

Abstract

The name Eduardo Coutinho occupies central pages in the history of Brazilian documentary cinema. Known for interviews with anonymous people, his movies revolutionized the documentary production: they have helped to break the myth of the neutrality of the documentary and abolished the separation between the director and the characters. The modifications that his work produced at the aesthetics and epistemological fields particular to the cinema have relations with paradigm changes experimented by human sciences in the last century. This essay presents an interview with Eduardo Coutinho, where the film maker discusses the conception of reality present in his movies and the power of the cinema of transformation on men and society; mainly, he talks about the interviews, method in evidence in human sciences and in the cinema.