Souto, Mariana

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

46 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
ARTICLES · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · Núm 6. · 2015 · 46-49
Susana de Sousa Dias and the ghosts of the 
Portuguese dictatorship
Mariana Souto
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
Documentary, Portuguese cinema, Salazar dictatorship, found 
footage, photography, 48.
This article seeks to investigate Susana de Sousa Dias’ work as 
one of the exponents of the Portuguese cinema made about 
the Salazar dictatorship. 48 (2009) and Natureza Morta (2005) 
utilize portraits of political prisoners and found footage from 
the police in order to criticize and reflect upon the regime and 
its consequences on people’s lives. Thus, the director produces 
a discourse that resists from the inside, turning government 
material into her own weapons. Describing Sousa Dias’ work 
in editing and sound design (for instance the change of speed 
of the images, the lighting, the slow fades, the soundtrack 
composed of dissonant noises), the paper argues that these 
films set a phantasmagoric atmosphere and seem to be part of 
what we call “horror documentary”.
47Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
  António Salazar dictatorship, which ended more than 
four decades ago with the Carnation Revolution, still leaves 
traces today in both Portuguese art and society. Contemporary 
Portuguese cinema often addresses this historical period from 
different aesthetic perspectives, fiction films such as Cavalo 
Dinheiro (Pedro Costa, 2014) or Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012) 
and documentaries such as Linha Vermelha (José Filipe 
Costa, 2012) approach the issue in a variety of forms, subtle 
and direct, and regard subjects as diverse as the colonial wars, 
African immigration, the revolutionary process and the land 
occupation. Amongst the directors who deal with the ‘Estado 
Novo’ nowadays, Susana de Sousa Dias is one of the exponents, 
the dictatorship is the centerpiece of her movies 48 (2009) and 
Natureza Morta (2005).
The gaze on these films is characterized by a historical distance, 
radically different from the cinema made shortly after the fall 
of the regime. Torre Bela (Thomas Harlan, 1975), As armas e o 
povo (Union of cinema workers, 1975), Cenas da luta de classes 
em Portugal (Robert Kramer and Philip Spinelli, 1977), and 
O bom povo português (Rui Simões, 1981), for instance, were 
made at the heat of the moment and are endowed with a sense 
of excitement and urgency. Demonstrations, public speeches, 
the crowd movement, celebrating parades on the streets, and 
interviews with large groups of people are present in most 
of these films. Some of them use unstable images or found 
footage from amateur filmmakers. With a powerful sense of 
spontaneity, they witness a singular and special moment in 
Portuguese history. Leaving the censorship behind, they try to 
think about the Estado Novo and rewrite the events of those 
years.
Susana de Sousa Dias departs from this aesthetic and creates a 
specific way of reflecting on this same period. Her movies have 
a certain sobriety, a mourning reflection, even an introversion 
–which can be related to her belonging to another period in 
history, years away from the Salazar era and his fall, as well 
as a social context of individualization and micro–historical 
perspectives. While the films from the 70’s are forged in 
macro-historical and sociological tendencies, dedicated to the 
representation of groups (the Portuguese people, the soldiers, 
the marines) with little individuality, and the interpretation 
of the revolutionary process as a matter of class struggle 
(the fascism as an imposition of the dominant class and the 
revolution as a subversion of the working class), Sousa Dias’ 
focuses, mainly in 48, on subjectivity through the stories and 
the memories of individualized former prisoners. 
Her first feature-length film, Natureza Morta, is made with 
the use of pictures (from the PIDE-DGS archive –“Polícia 
Internacional e de Defesa do Estado/Direção Geral de 
Segurança”, the political police of the regime)– and moving 
images (of Salazar, official ceremonies, popular demonstrations, 
all from a variety of sources like news reports, propaganda 
films, television records, etc). She changes the speed of the 
images, slowing them down to a point when they seem more 
like photographs coming to life than slow motion movies. 
And if we think of them as ‘moving photographs’, it looks as 
if they are oddly provided with volume and depth. In addition 
to that, the director uses very long fades –the cinematography 
resembles candle lighting, and people merge with the darkness, 
giving them a similar look to an apparition, or ghost–.
The sound of Natureza Morta is also slowed down. The 
soundtrack is composed of dissonant and unfamiliar noises; 
some of them resemble the sounds of slamming doors, or old 
and squeaky hinges and chains. Therefore, the soundtrack is 
somehow disconnected from the images; working within the 
imaginary of the haunted house and the horror movies, its 
goal seems to be setting an atmosphere of danger, torture and 
fear. Even though the movie is categorized as a documentary, it 
has a great deal of abstraction and experimentalism as well as 
elements of the scary movies in the fiction field. Thus, from this 
perspective, perhaps we could say Natureza Morta is a ‘horror 
documentary’. In this sense, it is possible to track an affiliation 
with O bom povo português, which also uses very decelerated 
images, strange noises and transmits an idea of weirdness and 
haunting. These effects in Rui Simões’ film, made in 1981, 
also seem to put into perspective the images of the Carnation 
Revolution, but in his case he tends to the irony. Edited a few 
years later than the others films previously mentioned and 
past the moment of euphoria, O bom povo português sees the 
Revolution with a dose of frustration for its deployments. At 
last, the power did not go to the people, contrary to some 
socialist expectations.
As Simões, Susana de Sousa Dias, uses material produced by 
the Estado Novo itself, but subverts its primary intentions. 
With the manipulation of the images and sounds of the Power, 
she produces a discourse that reflects upon it and resists from 
the inside, turning the found footage of the government into 
her own weapons –with similarities and differences when 
compared to the gestures of Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica 
in some of their films with found footage. The idea of working 
with the portraits of the political prisoners, present in parts 
of Natureza Morta, becomes central in her next movie, 48 
(2009). Her third and most well known film had a positive 
reception in festivals around the world and won the Grand Prix 
of the Cinéma du Réel in 2010. This documentary is entirely 
made from identification portraits of the PIDE and the vocal 
testimonies of these same people, interviewed years later by the 
filmmaker. While we watch the static, black and white, images 
of the photographs, we hear their voices from the present. 
They are survivors of the dictatorship, living in freedom some 
decades after the Carnation Revolution. The title ‘48’ stands 
for the duration of the Estado Novo –from 1926 to 1974, the 
longest dictatorship in Western Europe in the XX century–.
48 is built around an extremely simple and minimalist 
dispositive. However, at the same time, it is very rigorous, 
SUSANA DE SOUSA DIAS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE PORTUGUESE DICTATORSHIP
48 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
since it’s confined by its own rules for almost the whole 
length of the movie, with little variation. Behind the apparent 
simplicity of the dispositive, there is an exhaustive body of 
research as well as a meticulous conception of editing and 
sound design. The editing dedicates a long exposure time for 
each photograph and also to the silences in between the speech 
of the characters. These pauses are important and stop the 
images from being overpowered by the text, so that there isn’t 
a relation of subordination of the images by the sound. Each 
portrait appears and disappears in a sufficiently slow rhythm, 
so that the spectators can observe and investigate those faces 
and expressions with full attention, comparing or making 
associations with the words they hear. Sometimes the time even 
lasts long enough for the faces to become abstract forms, or 
outlines, contrasting points of light and shadow.
After all, time and duration are important to the film –one of the 
most violent aspects of the Portuguese dictatorship is precisely 
its duration, 48 long years. Some of the people interviewed 
by Sousa Dias grew old in prison. In other cases, we can see, 
among pictures from different times, an untimely and forced 
aging, due to the adverse conditions of the imprisonment. In 
other words, the film captures not only the aging that happens 
naturally in prison, but also the aging that happens because of 
it. The slow fusion between the pictures of a young face and an 
old one of the same person shows the endurance of the years in 
jail. Time deforms people.
Besides the silences already mentioned, the soundtrack of 48 is 
composed of little noises that come from the interview context 
at the present (a clock, some car at the distance, a person 
touching some object, movements of the clothes, etc). The 
testimonies are not registered in the studio, with a clean audio, 
but rather in an environment that evokes some closeness, 
maybe a home. The noises, then, contribute to the construction 
of a cinematic space –the spectator can sense the situation of 
co-presence between the interviewer and the interviewee that 
took place somewhere in the world–.
If, during the regime, the silence was both an imposition and 
a strategy (‘the silence is the cry of the dead and the word par 
excellence of the political prisoner: condemned to silence, it 
is also by the silence that he resists to torture’1) (LEANDRO, 
2012:35), at the present time, the word recovers its strength. 
The speech is not used for the interrogatory, against the will of 
the militant, but for the testimony, in his or her favor.
Some of the people interviewed in 48 mention that the 
possibility of resistance in prison was silence or their own 
facial expression. ‘We cannot escape from taking the picture, 
but we can choose the expression we put on’, says one of them. 
The face is the place of the enigma, screen to the marks of the 
time, sometimes the place of a contradiction (like the case of 
a young woman who takes a smiling picture to the police and 
feels guilty about it). In their essay on Faciality, Deleuze and 
Guattari (1996) say that the head, even the human head, is not 
necessarily a face. The face is produced by humanity, it happens 
when there is a social production. We could think Susana de 
Sousa Dias proceeds to something similar: she conducts an 
operation which transforms a number of heads into faces, 
giving them voices, subjectivity, dignity, identity, past, present, 
and history.
 
Of course other filmmakers in cinema history have 
experimented with the power of the faces watched very closely 
(Dreyer, Cassavetes, Bergman, to name a few), but not so 
many took this idea to the extent of making the whole film 
focused on it. As 48, Screen tests (Andy Warhol, 1964-66) and 
Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008) are examples of films that are 
exclusively made of human faces in all their duration, although 
moved by very different purposes.
In Sousa Dias’s work, we see faces in pictures –sometimes two 
or three portraits of the same person in different periods of 
time. Here and there, the faces stand for an idea of the identity 
and the theme of the recognition intersects the movie in several 
points. With the photographs in their presence, the former 
prisoners are stimulated to talk about this materiality: the 
way they looked at that time, the visible traces captured by the 
camera. One of them notices the wrinkles and remembers the 
greenish color of his skin as the result of the sleep deprivation. 
Another one talks about his weight gain because he couldn’t 
move in prison. Others about the ugly expression they made 
to confront the police. A son of a character didn’t recognize the 
parent since they were separated so early in his life and he only 
had one old picture as a reference. In some cases, the characters 
don’t recognize themselves in the images. Thus, recognition is 
an important theme to 48, along with the way the dictatorship 
acts upon it: modifies, ages, mutilates, and deforms people. 
The torture, the fear and the long time imprisoned had very 
concrete and visible effects on these people’s faces, bodies and 
identities.
48 demonstrates the profound impact the ‘Estado Novo’ had 
on families, and not only in individuals. ‘I lost the love for my 
wife, I lost the love for my daughter, I just wanted to die’, says 
one character. Since the documentary is edited from black and 
white old photographs of faces, it conforms a certain sense 
of an album, perhaps a family album. In the structure of the 
film, there are some characters who return when another one 
1.  In the original: ‘O silêncio é o grito dos mortos e a palavra por excelência 
do prisioneiro político: condenado ao silêncio, é também pelo silêncio que ele 
resiste à tortura’.
MARIANA SOUTO
49Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. III · no. 6 · 2015
mentions him/her. So, the spectator puts the pieces together, 
recognizes links, identifies names and traces some kind of 
family tree.
Besides the faces, 48 leads us to think about the complex history 
of the looks that crossed those images (LINS et al., 2011). A 
variety of looks and temporalities dwell on the pictures: the 
people in the portraits look us directly in the eyes. First of all, 
the eyes of the prisoners meet the eyes of the police and then, 
years later, meet the eyes of the spectator. The look escapes 
the police device of the past and penetrates the present. They 
survive to make contact with us more than 30 years later. The 
recovered footage evokes the moment of its production, the 
unique instant of shared presence of the bodies and the camera. 
Some aspects of the relation of the police and the prisoners are 
impressed on the pictures and become visible to us. As Jean-
Louis Comolli says, the cinematographic document is, first of 
all, the document of its own realization:
‘In order to understand the coordinates of a shot or a 
photograph, it is important to considerate not only its space-
temporal and political-historical conditions, but also what 
happens between those who film and those who are filmed. I 
would say that if something is documented, it is that relation’ 
(COMOLLI, 2010: 339).
The photographs, by the way, are not just placed into the 
editing, they are not frozen frames, but rather filmed, which 
provides them with a breathing, almost imperceptible motion. 
In other words, they are not static, but cinematographic. As in 
Natureza Morta, they are slowed down, sometimes to 1% of the 
original speed. In both documentaries, the spectator feels the 
slowness of the passage of time, which, once again, is connected 
to the long duration of the Salazar dictatorship. In addition to 
that, the fusions, fades and voices separated from the images 
give her films a fearful atmosphere. Although the movie is 
made with the survivors of the regime, there’s still something 
phantasmagoric about it. Maybe the detachment of body and 
mind (the overlap of a mute body in the pictures from one time 
and the disembodied voice from another period) produces 
ghosts, splits the souls as isolated beings wandering around 
with no materiality.
If before the movie the PIDE photos were part of a catalogue, 
almost a taxonomy, now they can be seen as elements of an 
audiovisual album, an album filled with affection, but also with 
horror. In other words, Susana de Sousa Dias’ films work to 
implement a change in meaning and purpose of these documents: 
from being instruments of registration, identification and control 
of the political prisoners, they transform into important pieces 
in the creation of subjectivity and preservation of memory. The 
editing of 48 and Natureza Morta works against the intentions of 
those who first produced these archives. And this displacement 
is probably the biggest political gesture of the film: turning the 
production of a control apparatus not only into live testimonies 
of the violence, but also into an aesthetic expression of horror. 
SUSANA DE SOUSA DIAS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE PORTUGUESE DICTATORSHIP
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges (2003). Images malgré tout. 
Paris. Les Edition de Minuit.
LEANDRO, Anita. A voz inaudível dos arquivos. In: 
SOUZA, Gustavo; CÁNEPA, Laura; BRAGANÇA, Maurício; 
CARREIRO, Rodrigo. XIII Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual 
Socine. Vol. I. São Paulo: Socine, 2012. p. 27-37.
LINDEPERG, Sylvie; COMOLLI, Jean-Louis. Imagens 
de arquivos: imbricamento de olhares. Entrevista com 
Sylvie Lindeperg. In: Catálogo do forumdoc. bh. 2010. Belo 
Horizonte, Filmes de Quintal/FAFICH-UFMG.
LINS, Consuelo; REZENDE, Luiz Augusto; FRANÇA, Andrea 
(2011). A noção de documento e a apropriação de imagens de 
arquivo no documentário ensaístico contemporâneo. Revista 
Galáxia, 21, 54-67.
MARIANA SOUTO
Mariana Souto is a PhD student at the Communication 
Department at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 
(UFMG), Brazil, where she is finishing a thesis on the social 
class relations on Brazilian contemporary cinema. She was a 
visiting researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 
(2014-2015). She works with art direction and costume design.


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