Sioma Breitman, a vida com retoques: história oral, narrativa e arqueologias das mídias na construção de trajetórias de vida

Abstract

The thesis Sioma Bretiman, life with touches: oral history, narrative and medias archeologies in the construction of life trajectory investigate the memories about the Ukrainian immigrant Sioma Breitman (1903-1980). The study brings as a research problem: how can the imagery powers of the “memory media” produced by Sioma be mobilized to build her life narrative? The research tries to understand woh the imagetic powers of the media of memory (ASSMANN, 2011) that he constructed can be awakened and mobilized to build his life narrative. Sioma began his career as a retoucher of negatives and is considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century in Rio Grande do Sul. He is remembered as a photographer of tradition for having made portraits of the Porto Alegre elite, especially of brides, historical photographs, and having participated in salons in different countries. However, there are aspects of Sioma's work that have never been studied. It is to them that this research is dedicated. Among these works are an album of a military maneuver in 1940, his work in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul where he outlined communication strategies to promote his work, and what I call “window cinema”, films he made in Santa Maria under the title Cine Jornal Aurora and exhibited in the windows of his photographic studio. Since this is an unexplored theme, I seek support in oral history, narrative research, and I add myself to the studies of media archeology. In this path, I resort to bibliographic and documental research, and appropriate different images and texts, be they Sioma's films, a documentary made about him, newspaper clippings, articles he published, his self-portraits, photographs, and an autobiography written by the photographer. In this way, text, orality, and images add up to investigate his practices, identify his strategies. I propose to construct and re-signify memories about Sioma's trajectory, based on a narrative that activates the multiple dimensions of photography and the powers of different ‘memory media”. The research shows how he left Ukraine, how he sought to make his work known by projecting images of the city in his shop window and encouraging people to make “movies of their lives”. The result is a narrative that is not only a new approach about this character who was able, for example, to collect five autographs by Getúlio Vargas in one of his portraits. I build the trajectory and seeks to understand what he chooses to preserve about himself and the time as it investigates how “memory media” that Sioma produced.