From Sociology and Philosophy to Film

From Sociology and Philosophy to Film: Hermilio Santos’ documentaries

by Guido Alt

December 2023 – In this issue of Philosophy and Community we talked to Hermílio Santos, a sociologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, who films some outstanding documentaries. Hermilo’s documentaries are inspired by the methodology of interpretative sociology in the works of Alfred Schütz, rooted also in philosophy – you can watch the teaser of a documentary by Hermilio on Schütz here. We have talked about using documentaries as a tool for dissemination of science, and about Hermílio’s specific approach towards integrating them into sociological research. His documentaries and his sociological work – both intimately connected – spans widely, as did this interview: from teenage offenders to workers on oil platforms, the cotton industry, and the medieval lyrical inspiration in the Brazilian music of Elomar Figueira Mello.

About Hermílio Santos

The Interview

Guido Alt: I would like to start asking about your trajectory in the production of these documentaries, given your background in sociological research. How come you started to film documentaries, and why did you adopt this approach?

Hermílio Santos: That interest of mine has a biography. Before I started filming the first documentary, there was a history leading up to it. I come from Minas Gerais, and there was a movie theater in my town. Film rolls used to circulate, and everyday there was a new screening. So, I used to go to the movies every day during my vacations. I was always fascinated about cinema. When I turned 17 I traveled to Germany for a cultural exchange, and my intention was to stay there and attend the cinema school. I realized that this was kind of impossible. It was one of the most competitive courses, where Wim Wenders did his studies in Munich. I’ve met a lot of people who are applying but then got rejected, so I figured it was not for me at the time.

But I have always maintained that interest. In 2006 I was doing a job for the government, for a state office that was responsible for, among other things, teenage offenders. I elaborated a research project, and precisely at that time I was trying to adopt the methodology of biographical narratives. I’ve realized straight away that that kind of environment was inaccessible to many of my students. Even professors had a hard time getting access to these kinds of environments. When I’ve planned the research project, I’ve already thought of the idea of doing a small documentary giving access to this research environment. Originally, the project was conceived for a foundation connected with a shoe company, which had funded me the equipment. The equipment was, therefore, funded by a shoe company! Unexpected, right? I’ve filmed it by myself, I could only get in alone in that place back then. I even had support from the inmates, to hold the camera and so on, and they seemed to have fun. Then a student of mine – Eliane Fronza – edited a 12minte long film. It has subtitles in German. So always when I give a talk about this research project, I exhibit this film.

GA: Is that the Infância Falada?

JHS: No, this is Intimidade Vigiada. Infância Falada was the second. This was back in 2010, When I filmed the first documentary. So that’s how it started.

GA: In the middle of that trajectory Mundo da Vida came up, about Alfred Schütz – a sociologist and philosopher who in a certain way elaborated interpretative sociology. That seems an important influence on your work, and obviously in the corresponding documentary. What is interpretative sociology, and how it relates to your work? Also, how was it to transpose Schütz’s ideas to the screen?

HS: My interest in Schütz started very early on, although at first it was not an in-depth interest. It started during my undergrad in Minas Gerais. I was exposed to Schütz through a professor from Minas Gerais, who gave the same course that I then brought to PUCRS, a course we called Sociologia da Ação e da Estrutura. Some texts from my undergrad period I keep until today, with the pages turned yellow. So I got interested in Schütz’s sociology, because it says that the best way the sociologist has to know reality is by getting acquainted with the experiences of the subjects who experience a given phenomenon. Schütz criticized the way that sociologists sometimes create a reality without considering how subjects experience that reality in their concrete lives. I am talking about migration, practices of violence, really anything. As an heir of Max Weber, Schütz brought in Husserl’s phenomenology to develop problems that Weber had left open. Interpretative sociology, says Weber in Economy and Society, holds that actions carry meaning – but Weber did not develop more than that. Schütz picked it up, asking how we attribute meaning to our actions. Schütz went to phenomenology to talk about experiences, horizons of meaning, and so on. He thus created a highly innovative sociology, establishing a dialogue with philosophy, which is very common in German sociology, by the way. He creates a new kind of sociology, according to which the singularity of sociology is that it deals with an object that thinks about the world and about themselves in the world, that is, individuals.

Schütz will say that if sociology does not consider this singularity, it could be anything – biology, physics -, but to really count as sociology it must consider subjective perspectives. That has fascinated me, and it made sense to me, although it is not very popular in Brazil. It is not a kind of sociological approach widespread in Brazil or in France, nor even in Portugal. These communities have a very strong structuralist influence, in which the subject plays no relevant role in the understanding of reality, which is different from the approach popular in Germany, in which the subject is an intrinsic part of the way in which sociology must approach and understand reality.

So, I got fascinated about that. More than that, I have tried, for example in FASE, to do empirical sociology oriented by Schütz’s method. I brought a script of questions for the interviews. In the first week I realized that something was wrong in my approach, though. Why? If Schütz says that I need to be open to the subject, how can I bring in a script of questions for the interview? That is what Schütz calls a relevance system, and what I am doing is taking my relevance system as a researcher to be more important, asking people to react to it. I concluded that I was, so to speak, “colonizing” my subjects with my relevance system. So, I’ve found out that in Germany another approach had been developed, anchored on Schütz sociology – though not exclusively. There was a group directed by the sociologist Fritz Schütze (a very similar name!) which developed around the 70s and beginning of the 80s a reconstructive approach to biographical narratives.

Well, then I had some friends who hav done doctoral research in Germany using that approach, and it was easy to import it. I started training myself for it, went to Germany a couple of times for postdocs. My aim was precisely to train myself for an approach that was not very well known around here in Brazil. So Schütz’s sociology for me is important because it lays the groundwork for an empirical sociology which he himself did not develop – he had no idea how to conduct empirical research -, but that other sociologists knew how to adopt it to develop an empirical research program influenced by Schütz.

My interest is thus twofold, I am interested both in Schütz’s sociology and in the methodological approach. I do not intend to do exegetical work on Schütz’s writings. My interest is to develop an empirical approach with a strong epistemological foundation. I hesitate to call it a theory because it is not an explanation of the world. It is actually a script of how to do research, which does not anticipate our results. In that sense, it is a sociology without an expiration date. Differently from other sociological theories that try and explain everything, which people just adopt and reproduce, Schütz offers us a method to approach reality.

Since this approach is not very popular in Brazil, I thought that documentaries might be a way – coming to your second question – of helping to disseminate this approach among sociology students, showing that my interest was not exotic and isolated. I sought to interview people all around the world – in Japan, Germany, Argentina, United States, and in France where Schütz is also not very popular -, so that they could speak about the theoretical and empirical aspects of their research influenced by Schütz. That’s what I have done, without knowing whether there would be any repercussion. What happened, to my surprise, is that I’ve got invitations from all over in Brazil for exhibitions. I had basically no effort to disseminate it in Brazil, I’ve exhibited the film in Rio Grande do Norte, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo. One of the longest exhibitions was at USP (University of São Paulo), even though that department is very much influenced by French sociology and not so much by German sociology – we’ve done a 3-hour exhibition there, with a talk of mine, the film and discussions. It was one of the longest and most productive exhibitions I’ve done.

I’ve then circulated all over the world exhibiting the film. In Germany we’ve toured various universities, we’ve exhibited in Manila in the Philippines, in Cambridge, Newcastle and Manchester in England. Also here in Buenos Aires, where Schütz is very popular, and his works were first translated in Argentina in the 70s. For me it was wonderful that it had this repercussion. In fact, the documentary works not as a substitution of the text, but as an invitation to read the texts. What I see is that it facilitates interest in the texts. I often receive messages from PhD students from all over the world, including Brazil, because they have watched a teaser of the film. So, the documentary worked very well, even better than I had planned.

GA: The other documentaries seem to approach social issues, or a social concept from the viewpoint of the camera, or from the camera incorporated to sociological methodology. Such as, for example, Espaços de Fronteira and Desafios do Brasil Contemporâneo…

HS: The first one was Intimidade Vigiada, the second one was Infância Falada. First we had worked on a research project, funded by a Dutch foundation, about violence against children in favelas. At the same time, I’ve found a couple other projects that tried to reduce everyday violence, social projects that gave protagonism to children and teenagers. The documentary runs through 5 regions of Brazil, 3 of them in places that we have done research about. They are extremely interesting projects, not very well known in Brazil. And all of them use the languages of music, dance, radio, giving a central role for children and teenagers as a form to overcome everyday violence.

In Espaços de Fronteira, the research was about different perspectives that make borders in their everyday lives. I’ve chosen three regions of triple borders. In Acre (in which Brazil borders Peru and Bolivia), Corumbá in Mato Grosso do Sul, a city which borders Paraguai and Bolivia, and here in Uruguaiana, which is also a triple border region between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguai. So I’ve connected the documentary to the research, and I was bringing the documentary bit by bit inside the research. Before, it was something external and posterior to research, but I was bringing both together. I was recording the interviews with the diverse personas that participate in border making. The most important ones are not only the control agents, like the army, the police, border customs, but also even inmates that use borders for drug traffic. But also, indigenous people who were living at those borders before the Spanish and Portuguese colonization; and farmers who work in those regions, for example. So Espaços de Fronteira offers us, in contrast to research done about borders from the perspective of law, where it is thought that borders must be identical since they are part of a single national law and a single country – very far from it, they are completely distinct, even inside a single country. Each country has several different internal dynamics, several different institutions. That is what the documentary shows.

Desafios do Brasil Contemporâneo started because we were going to host the International Sociological Association Forum (ISA) here in Porto Alegre in 2020. I’ve presided over the committee, worked hard and got a small funding from CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) for part of the organization. Then covid came along and the congress had to be moved online. CAPES said to all organizers of scientific events in that period that they should either return the money or make a different proposal. I thought it would be sad to return the money, because it was not guaranteed to fund other academic activities, it could go to anything – even to motociatas. So I’ve talked to ISA that we could use these funds to produce videos about the topics of the congress, with people who experienced the social problems the congress was about. We could record statements of people who experienced problems closely, for example, problems emerging from the environmental question, problems associated with the pandemics, urban problems, challenges of black women in the job market, and so forth. In the case of environmental issues, we have connected it with issues related to indigenous people. After all, environmental issues also belong to issues concerning indigenous people, and vice versa. Foremost in the Amazon, where indigenous people are the main protagonists in its preservation. The way they use the environment there allows us to preserve it. It is not that the Amazon is intact and empty. There are people living there, dealing with the environment in an alternative way. So, throughout 2020 I’ve contacted various ethnicities from all over Brazil – many of them do use WhatsApp – and asked that they record a statement and have it sent to us. The terena, the Huni Kuin in Acre and in the Amazon, the Caiapó in Pará. Also, we got statements from individuals from complexo da maré – where we had done research before -, getting statements of people heading social organizations that acted on these spots during the pandemic. In some of these places, the civil organizations do the job that the state was supposed to be doing. They substitute it because the state failed to act in many cases. So, Desafios do Brasil Contemporâneo makes this overview of some problems facing Brazilan society.

Then there is a more recent documentary, which is not yet available, called Embarcados. It is a research we have done for 7 years, funded by Petrobrás and other companies, in oil platforms. It was a big and multidisciplinary team, and I headed the sociology team. We have done biographical interviews, and we also applied questionnaires with the employees. It was split in two stages, the first for 2 years, the second lasted 3 years. In the second stage I’ve proposed that we make a documentary registering part of these biographies and the dynamics of people living and working on platforms, whose lives are largely unknown to us. We are very dependent on the oil economy, we pretend not to know about it and we ignore these places. We often know next to nothing about how these workers live and what challenges they face. And they are there – working and providing resources for Brazilian society. They face a lot of biographical challenges, and the documentary registers some of them. This is Embarcados, it is the sixth documentary.

GA: What about future or ongoing projects?

HS: I have 6 simultaneous ongoing projects!

GA: One of these is about the idea of beauty right?

HS: That’s right, Ensaio sobre o Belo: Um documentário sociológico. We Always adopt a kind of biographical approach. What is this ‘essay on beauty’? There is an academic part, in which I invited a philosopher to speak about the idea of beauty in philosophy, how it appeared throughout the history of philosophy; an historian who talks about beauty in Brazilian history; a sociologist who will talk about beauty in everyday life in Brazil. I also invited people from specific areas who make beautiful things, for example, and architect who will talk about the beautiful in his work, a choreographer from the Grupo Corpo, the most important Brazilian contemporary ballet group, from Minas Gerais. Also, even with bakers, an activity which is not only tasty but beautiful! Also, we will have a conductor from an orchestra in Minas Gerais, a famous composer, Nelson Motta – many of the good things from the 60s and 70s in Brazilian music were composed by him -, we will have Ronaldo Fraga talking about fashion, who is a stylist also from Minas Gerais, a mathematician from the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA), who is a prized professor, who will talk about beauty in mathematics. So, this is an overview of what I take to be beautiful, of course there are many other beautiful activities, but I am not doing a documentary to cover everything. It is a limited overview of expressions of the beautiful.

I am filming another one that I’ve already started, called Tecidos: biografias tecidas em algodão. This one had a more biographical motivation because my father owned a clothing fabric store. He used to teach us to feel fabric, to identify what kind of fabric it was, if it is mixed, puro cotton, linen, etc. It is almost like a tribute. So, I’ve always had a proximity to this during my childhood years. We’ve started doing interviews with people who work with cotton from one end to the other – for example, in Embrapa – which I am visiting next February in Campina Grande, Paraíba -, which is a public institution with specific research areas, among them cotton. We also went to a quilombola community which does traditional fabric in Vale do Jequitinhonha in Minas Gerais. We’ve also had sellers in clothing stores here in Porto Alegre. We will have sellers and artists who work with cotton. It will be a panorama of biographies of people who work with cotton, that’s Tecidos.

There is another one, which will be a series, called Cidade das Mulheres. It is a development into film of a research that we did about favelas. We wrote an article called Rua das Meninas, which was about how young women saw the streets, which challenges they faced when walking or playing in the streets. And I was curious to know, after that, women’s perspectives about the cities they live in, not necessarily the ones that they grew up in. So the documentary is about cities of Brazil and the world presented exclusively through the biographical perspectives of many women. Not from a touristic perspective, but tracing the history of those places. I have already done Vienna, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Belo Horizonte, now I will do São Paulo, Recife and Salvador. The edition will be made by two students here at PUCRS from the cinema school, who will be my partners in this business of editing the series that lasts for 18 episodes, around 30 minutes each.

There is another one, which is a research I do with support of CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), called Herdeiras Negras. The research is based on biographical narratives of 3 generations of black women belonging to 3 regions of the slave economy, Pernambuco with sugar, Diamantina with diamond, Pelotas with meat (charque). So these are 3 economies and 3 generations of each family in each of these regions, women and families from Pernambuco, Minas and Pelotas. This documentary comprises interviews with these women, but it is prefaced by interviews with researchers – sociologists, historians, linguistics who are involved in research about slavery in Brazil. For example, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who did his PhD in the late 50s about slavery in Brazil. Laurentino Gomes, who has recently written a trilogy about slavery. Eduardo França Paiva, an historian who discovered former slaves that became rich, not by having married rich men, but by becoming rich still during the slavery period, and then they bought their freedom and the freedom of their husbands, boyfriends and family. These research projects give access to a slave society that was extremely complex, much more than we imagine. For example, an historian from Bahia, who has written about homens e mulheres de caminho, people who did the transport of goods in the sertão of Bahia and Minas Gerais, where the gold and diamond cycle was starting and supplies for that were needed, such as horses, dry fish, slaves, and who did this transportation were enslaved men and women. We may ask – why didn’t they just run away? If they could run while transporting that, how is it possible that they nonetheless returned? It is a complex question, and the answer that we find, for example, in Isnara Ivo, a researcher from Vitoria da Conquista, is that slavery was not exclusively based on extreme violence. Of course, slavery is violence in itself. But it was not just physical violence, you also created expectations of social mobility and trust. And slavery was not exclusively done by white people, there were also former slaves who then acquired slaves. What we find in her work, therefore, is that these people had a perspective of returning to their environments and generating some form of social mobility. Running away was, then, not necessarily the best option. Coming back and climbing up the social ladder was also an option.

I have also interviewed sociologists who talked about the realities of black women today in many of its aspects, including religiosity – I’ve interviewed a mãe de santo, an adept of an African religion, and also a Catholic Nun, beyond the women that I’ve interviewed belonging to those 3 generations of the 3 regions I’ve mention. That’s Herdeiras Negras.

There is another documentary I am filming which is not connected to my research, called Sertões de Elomar. Elomar is a composer from Bahia, a very peculiar and singular composer, because he has a clear medieval influence in his compositions. He is not very well known here in the south of Brazil, but he is in Sao Paulo, Minas and in the Northeast. He is not very keen on appearing in the media, and he does not give interviews, so he will not be interviewed in my documentary. But I was already with him and he approved the documentary. So I’ve started doing interviews surrounding his work. I went to Portugal in Sortelha, a basically intact medieval town in Portugal, near Guarda, where the Portuguese language was born – the first text in Portuguese was written in Guarda, in the north of Portugal. I have filmed there because that environment was a reference for the music of Elomar. I have interviewed a Portuguese singer who has interpreted Elomar’s music, Susana Travassos, and other musicians who have interpreted Elomar. I have filmed also in his farm, which is the ambience of his compositions. The documentary will therefore approach both the popular work of Elomar – which he calls the cancionero -, and symphonic and lyric work. I have interviewed music professors at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) who have conducted performances of his music. And we will also approach the written part of his work. So we have in this part many PhDs who have done research on his work. It is a panorama about Elomar’s music, a jewel of Brazilian music.
What I’ve found out is that the Brazilian northeast has a very salient medieval influence with the cordéis and everything. But I did not know this very closely, I thought it was a peculiar feature of Elomar. But it is not! I have interviewed people from the sertão, who are very much within the social culture of the northeast, to portrait the creative universe of this composer, which is also to talk about a part of Brazil.

GA: Thanks a lot for this interview!

HS: Thank you!