A quarta parede da loucura: estética e realismo em “Em Nome da Razão”

Abstract

This study analyses the documentary Em Nome da Razão: um filme sobre os porões da loucura (On Reason’s Behalf: a movie about the insanity’s basement”, directed by Helvécio Ratton and produced by “Grupo Novo de Cinema e TV” (New Group of Cinema and TV), in association with “Associação Mineira de Saúde Mental” (Mental Health Association from Minas Gerais). The documentary portrays the reality of the patients hospitalized in Hospital Colônia, situated in Barbacena, in the state of Minas Gerais. The segregationist model observed in that institution, created in 1903, alludes the exclusion that, after Classicism, has taken place in mental health institutions. The institution was created in the late 1970s and its facilities gained public knowledge through denunciations by the local media and its audiovisual interventions, supported by the anti-asylum movement. The knowledge that understands perception and feelings, after the contemplation of art works, are included on its main objective: to understand how relations between tragedy and aesthetics, specially regarding the historical approach of the realistic image in its context of production of affections is composed and formulated. As domain structures may appear, resistance forms, observed in artistic field, can be comprehended when the reality’s transformation into language, as well as the empathic processes that followed the films exhibitions, make up the studies that analyze how perceptions of real can be inserted in the film and how the compendia of sadness can be approached. Therefore, it can be observed that cinema, as a political tool, can be an instrument of a strong social transformation when acting towards the construction of a collective memory capable of resulting possible plural realities.