By RICARDO EVANDRO S. MARTINS*
Commentary on the film directed by Walter Salles
"I'm still here”
Walter Salles' film, I'm still here (2024, Brazil), premiered this week in Brazil. Fernanda Torres and her mother Fernanda Montenegro play the character of the human rights lawyer Eunice Paiva, in two different moments of her life.
Eunice Paiva is a real character from recent Brazilian history. Based on the book of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the film tells the tragic story of her family, starting with the kidnapping of her father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, who was tortured and murdered by the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship in 1971. The film shows the sunny joy of the Paiva family in their large house near the beach, in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s.
But we also see a process of darkening of life: from a house so brightly lit, surrounded by children's screams, friends' laughter, the sound of cutlery on soufflé plates, dogs barking, music on the record player, where we can even feel the sea breeze of Leblon beach, the texture of the sand and the cold humidity of clothes soaked by the sea water, we watch the curtains close, the cries and the very concrete feeling of impotence in the face of the brutality of the military regime.
Of the many scenes, two are still with me in my memory. The first is the scene in which we see how a plainclothes Army garrison enters the Paiva house. Without warning, identification or further explanation, and with ironic kindness, on January 20, 1971, the agents of CISA-Aeronautics Security Information Center take former congressman Rubens Paiva to supposedly provide clarifications about the suspicion that he was helping to exchange correspondence from Chile.[I] possibly from Brazilians exiled in the country of Salvador Allende — who would suffer a military coup led by General Pinochet a few years later.
Some agents are on duty at the house, and after a long and painful night of waiting for her husband, Eunice is taken with one of her teenage daughters, hooded, to the DOI (Information Operations Detachment of the 1st Army) in Rio de Janeiro. Her daughter only spent one night at the DOI, but Eunice Paiva remained there for days, giving testimony and being held in a dark cell without noticing the passage of time. A curious moment in the film is the scene in which, in addition to the interrogators, Eunice interacts with one of the soldiers who was guarding her and, before being released, he had even said that he wanted her to know that he “does not agree”.
Eunice Paiva and her children would never see their husband and father again. Until then, she had been very busy, with many children “to raise”, and was unaware of what Rubens was involved in. A few years earlier, he had been a member of the Brazilian Congress until his mandate was revoked by means of the legal provision of Institutional Act No. 1, decreed by the same military junta that overthrew the Brazilian democratic regime of the time, in 1964, with the coup against then-president João Goulart.
Rubens Paiva left the country, but returned to Rio de Janeiro to continue his life, working as an engineer, being a loving, cheerful and present father and husband. The film I'm still here It is also a rescue of the happy memory of Rubens Paiva's family. To this day, none of his torturers and murderers have been tried and convicted. Between this past and the present there is an Amnesty Law — or, as in ancient Greek, of amnesia, or even, lack of memory, forgetfulness.
But it is important to remember that in 2014, the National Truth Commission produced a series of reports on cases of crimes committed by the Brazilian State during the dictatorship, with the aim of not leaving this archaic violence that still exists in the country in oblivion.
I'm still here It deals, therefore, with a painful trauma of the Paiva family and one of the many rights violated: the right to be declared dead. In addition to torture, forced disappearance, kidnapping, and the “disappearance” of people as a civil war tactic were the norm of state violence against its citizens.
The second unforgettable scene in Walter Salles' film is the one in which Eunice Paiva finally obtains, in the 1990s, her husband's death certificate, declaring him officially dead. This was a complex process, marked by an inaugural fraud. In a handwritten decision, issued in Session No. 57, on August 02, 1971, the Superior Military Court decided to declare that Rubens Paiva was not in prison at the time of his disappearance and that, therefore, the request for his disappearance could not be granted. habeas corpus filed by lawyer Lino Machado in favor of the former Deputy.[ii]
Obviously this was a legal maneuver to confuse public opinion at the time and to hide, once again, the body of Rubens Paiva. And now, condemning him to the impossibility of having his legal death declared.
Life as a process of habeas corpus
Exactly 30 years ago, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published his first book in the series Homo sapiens (1994). In this text, he articulates Walter Benjamin's thesis of the permanent “state of exception” with the paradox of sovereignty discovered by Carl Schmitt, in an attempt to put into dialogue Hannah Arendt's reflections on totalitarianism and Michel Foucault's famous concept of biopolitics — a concept cited by the French philosopher for the first time in his work here in Brazil, in the 1970s, in the midst of the dictatorship.
In this book, Giorgio Agamben elaborates the concept of “bare life”: the reduction of human life, of citizen life, formally protected by constitutional and human rights and guarantees, to mere bodily, biological life, without qualities, without protection, in abandonment “before the Law” (Kafka), but without legitimacy, and before the mystique of pure legal force (Force-of-Law), but without legality; or, then, a life in a zone of indistinction between the body without rights and the body protected by the Law itself; a confusing space between being a citizen at the same time as being liable to be murdered without it being considered homicide — and even without a death certificate.
It is in this same sense that the jurist Paloma Sá Simões explains that “(…) the places used for the practice of torture, during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship, are the biopolitical fields where the individuals who were persecuted, tortured, disappeared and killed became bare lives, living beings stripped of legal and political status (…)”, thus becoming “(…) simple pieces in the hands of the sovereign power exercised by the military.”[iii] As Giorgio Agamben explains, it is through this life reduced to biological life that “it is possible to understand the otherwise inexplicable speed with which in our [20th] century parliamentary democracies were able to become totalitarian States (…)”.[iv]
And, when making a genealogy of the concept of “bare life” in his Homo sapiens, Giorgio Agamben argues that the “first record of bare life as a new political subject is already implicit in the document that is unanimously placed at the basis of modern democracy: the write [court order] of Habeas corpus of 1679.”[v]
Created to be a means of defense against the arbitrariness of legal-political authorities, the so-called “constitutional remedy” of habeas corpus reveals the ambiguity inherent in democracies.[vi] Corporeal life lives submissively under violent and arbitrary power, capable of killing it without due legal process, at the same time that it must be protected by this same power, which would also have to guarantee its individual freedoms.
So, here is a paradox of bare life: abandoned to arbitrariness and violence, at the same time that it is constituted and recognized by rights and guarantees, in an insoluble biopolitical paradox. And the film I'm still here reveals once again this condition of life in Brazil, lived in a state of exception for most of our republican history.[vii]
More than showing the ambiguities of the relationship between Rubens Paiva's body and the Law and its sovereign power, Walter Salles' film also stages the mysterious, violent, fictitious and arbitrary nature of every legal process — his Mysterium bureaucraticum, in which guilt and punishment are mysteriously intertwined.[viii] But my central interpretative hypothesis about Salles' recently released film is that I'm still here also seems to tell us that our lives are like a judicial process, and perhaps like a process of habeas corpus.
Life begins with an initial “accusation”: with a name that is given to us, at which point we have the right to remain silent (as infants) or to defend ourselves, since we also gain legal personality and, with it, our rights and duties in the contradictions, or rather, in the contradictions of this legal life. And in this vital “process”, we attach documents: old photos, Super 8 films, notes, Christmas cards, cards from a relationship that ended without saying goodbye, and even “baby teeth”, kept as a memento, until this process ends with a death certificate — and without a fair conviction, nor the proper notion of when the sentence would begin.
Eunice Paiva fought until the end for the release of her husband, his memory, information about his whereabouts, and above all for the recognition of his violent death. But there is still another type of habeas corpus: the release of the dead body of Rubens Paiva, never found. For this, it would be necessary to think of a habeas corpus different, one that operates not only with sovereign biopolitics, but with what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics.[ix]
It is necessary to think of a habeas corpus under a political regime not only of life, but also of the dead body. And this is the policy on corpses, proper to nomos of colonial land, in an exceptional relationship to the European public law, which is expressed as a principle (Arch) reigns to this day — as in the recent cases, it is worth remembering, of the disappearance of Amarildo and the summary execution by ex-military personnel of Marielle Franco and Anderson.
I'm still here becomes a new archive among all the evidence of life attached to the records of the family of Eunice and Rubens Paiva; an archive so that we do not forget our recent past, which insists on remaining, like an unconsciously performative repetition of a trauma.
Salles' film is a testament to resistance to the tyranny of dictators, but above all to resistance to the tyrannies of time, the pain of longing and all the external and internal forces that still call for the return of the Dictatorship and the subordination of our country. I'm still here It is proof of our innocence regarding the crime of being alive and of wanting to live and die in peace and with dignity in Brazil.
*Ricardo Evandro S. Martins Professor at the Faculty of Law at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA).
Reference
I'm still here
Brazil, 2024, 135 minutes.
Directed by: Walter Salles.
Screenplay: Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega.
Cinematography: Adrian Teijido.
Editing: Affonso Gonçalves.
Art Direction: Carlos Conti
Music: Warren Ellis
Cast: Fernanda Torres; Fernanda Montenegro; Selton Mello; Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Guilherme Silveira and Cora Ramalho, Olivia Torres, Antonio Saboia, Marjorie Estiano, Maria Manoella and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha.
Notes
[I] BRAZIL. National Truth Commission. Preliminary research report on the Rubens Paiva case. February 2014, p. 3-4.
[ii] BRAZIL. National Truth Commission. 037 — Decision of the Superior Military Court. August 02, 1971. Available at: https://comissaodaverdade.al.sp.gov.br/arquivos/documentos/037-decisao-superior-tribunal-militar-rubens-paiva
[iii] SIMÕES, Paloma Sá; MARTINS, Ricardo Evandro S. (2021). Spaces of torture during the dictatorship as a biopolitical field. desecrations, 8, p. 63. Available at: https://doi.org/10.24302/prof.v8.3305.
[iv] AGAMBEN. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I. Trans. Henrique Burigo. Belo Horizonte: UFMG Publishing, 2010, p. 127.
[v] AGAMBEN. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I. Trans. Henrique Burigo. Belo Horizonte: UFMG Publishing, 2010, p. 129.
[vi] See AGAMBEN. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I. Trans. Henrique Burigo. Belo Horizonte: UFMG Publishing, 2010, p. 130.
[vii] Cf. GOMES, Ana Suelen Tossige Gomes; MATOS, Andityas Soares de Moura Costa. The state of exception in republican Brazil. Law and Praxis Magazine, Rio de Janeiro, v. 8, n. 3, p. 1760-1787, 2017. Available at: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/revistaceaju/article/view/21373.
[viii] AGAMBEN, Giorgio. The fire and the story. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018, p. 33.
[ix] Cf. MBEMBE, A. Necropolitics: biopower, sovereignty, state of exception, politics of death. Translated by Renata Santini. New York: N-1 editions, 2018.
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