Travessias (Sep 2019)
Making Joaquim present: from historic myth to the myth poetry
Abstract
The possibility produced by different works of art and their languages embodies dramas of their protagonists, sometimes of humanity, and may lead us on wondering about our condition nowadays. Thus, this study aims at analyzing, based on the painting Resposta de Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (Tiradentes) ao Desembargador Rocha, no ato da comutação de pena aos seus companheiros, depois da missa, of Leopoldino de Faria, on Cecília Meireles poem, Romanceiro da Inconfidência (1953), and in a film about Tiradentes, by Marcelo Gomes (2017), Joaquim’s image. So, painting, poem and cinema were ways of suitable languages and embodiment of a past/present. The philosophical contributions come from the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). This trial proposition is justified by allowing several artistic manifestations to bring the image of history, saving them in the present, creating a framing in which memory, history, and knowledge are procedural and changeable. Thus, when history is saved, there is a possibility to understand what these masterpieces show without crystallizing truths about Tiradentes as a Myth, pointing out clues to other versions, building a past outside a chronological timeline.
