Petra Costa's documentary Elena, the sensorium in the embodiment of an elegy

Abstract

This article analyzes the movie Elena (2013) by Petra Costa, taking its memoir aspects from the lived body paradigm, present in the studies of Sobchack (1991) and Marks (2000, 2002). The phenomenological perspective of these authors, which understands cinema as a field where bodies result and share memory, understand the film spectatorship experience as a possibility articulated by the sensorium, cognitive capacity of interpreting sensations. Thereby, also consider the filmmakers’ subjective experience as something that interferes in the film perception. We observe how the body presence, material and sensorial allows us an analysis that involves aspects of the film authorship.