COM AS CORDAS À VISTA: RAÇA, OBJETOS E ABOLICIONISMO EM QUANTO VALE OU É POR QUILO?, DE SÉRGIO BIANCHI, E “PAI CONTRA MÃE”, DE MACHADO DE ASSIS

Resumo

Having premiered in 2005, the film Quanto Vale Ou É Por Quilo? is Sérgio Bianchi’s creative adaptation of Machado de Assis’ short story “Pai Contra Mãe” (published in Relíquias da Casa Velha, 1906). In the film, Bianchi unravels two parallel plots, each taking place in a diferente historical period. In this paper, I will address the relationship between Sérgio Bianchi’s film and Machado de Assis’ short story, focusing on the material elements that create a symbolic portal between the world of Machado and that of Bianchi. I am especially interested in how artifacts of the pre-abolition society are paralleled by artifacts in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. These relationships, which emerge through my reading of Bianchi’s film, complicate common ideas about historical continuities and ruptures in everyday life in that city. I argue that these objects are themselves interpreters of Brazil in the sense that they create, organize, and transform meaning around them. I find, in particular, an engagement between the rope of the short story and the police cars of the film, pointing toward a critique of the police apparatus as an afterlife of slavery, but also a controversial and complex critique of the “nonprofit economy” and the maintenance of structural inequalities. These networks of meaning, I propose, only become entirely visible once we understand Bianchi’s film as a mode of dialogue with Machado de Assis’ story.