"Tambor de Mina" : a Casa de Nagô sob a perspectiva da etnografia de tela em um filme super 8

Abstract

This work presents as a starting point the super 8 film "Tambor de Mina", made by Euclides Moreira in 1979. from the narrative proposed in the film. The film, in turn, shows a touch of Tambor de Mina at Casa de Nagô, a centenary Terreiro located in the center of São Luís, capital of Maranhão. Furthermore, we seek to develop reflections that establish the differences between the categories “drum de mina” as ritualistic and “Mina” as a religion and complex of relationships that go beyond the Terreiros. Based on screen ethnography - a concept developed by Carmen Rial -, transferring procedures that come from anthropological research to the filmic field, such as long immersion in the field, systematic observation, records in field notebooks and, associating this methodology to the tools of cinematographic criticism such as analysis of shots, camera movements, montage, over narration, we seek to analyze the work in order to identify its characteristics that may support such differentiations. As a result, we observe that our object of study, that is, the tambor de mina as a religion of African origin as it is presented in the film, is thus as being of a unique character, without nuances or differentiations, starting from an over narration that seeks to unify a set of religious practices, offering a synthesis of the heterogeneous practices of Mina based on the Casa de Nagô. Still, we observe that the documentary has characteristics in its construction that lead us to characterize it within the classic cinema as an expository documentary. Based on these observations, film analysis was configured as a guiding theoretical axis for the development of the research.