Santiago

Studio: Videofilmes
Director: Joo Moreira Salles
Producer: Mauricio Andrade Ramos; Beto Bruno
Screenwriter: Joo Moreira Salles
Cinematographer: Walter Carvalho ABC
Art Director: Marlise Storchi
Editor: Eduardo Escoral; Lvia Serpa
Duration: 80 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Year: 2007
Synopsis:
Joo Moreira Salles started to make a documentary thirteen years before making Santiago, but
he never finished it. That film was about Santiago Badariotti Merlo, the butler of his family, a
wealthy and influencial Brazilian family. Santiago is a film about that failed film. Even if its
theme is based on the prior footage and maintains its focus on the butlers life, it is much
more ambiguous and ambitious. It is still a movie about Santiago: an Argentine who served
the Moreira Salles family for thirty years and who spent most of his free time writing about
royal European dynasties. However, the movie is also a brilliant reflective, melancholic and
autobiographical work that dwells on the directors childhood home and memories and on
the hierarchical relationships between a servant and the bosss son, and between an object of
documentation and a film director.
Critique:
Santiago begins with a self-critique. A narrator in first person imitates the director and tells
the spectator how he wanted the original movie to open. The film we watch starts the same
way he intended the original failed film to start. However, the ironic distance of the
narrators comments highlights the impossibility of adopting a simple linear narrative when
taking on personal memories, or of assuming an objective point of view when making a
documentary. The butlers perspective is in this sense privileged. Internal enough to the
directors family, but not completely part of it, Santiago has an ambiguous status as a
member of the house. Joo Moreira Salles assumes this displaced position to talk about his
childhood and about his family. In this move, he creates a tension between his earlier nave
stance as a filmmaker and the current one, which is highly reflective and critical.
In the course of the film, we watch repeated scenes from the old movie in which we hear the
directors voice giving orders to Santiago. Toward the end of the movie, the critique of the
directors position is made explicit: the narrator says the absence of close-ups of Santiagos
face, the distance he maintained with the person behind the butler and the way he conducted
the interview are due to the fact that he never ceased to be the bosss son and Santiago, the
servant. In this sense, Santiago is a film about power, about the hierarchy conveyed in being
the masters, but also in being the director of the film, revealing the documentalists
position as hierarchical. However, in this gesture the film reverts the problem. The director

could have chosen to talk about a family such as his from a magnificent angle, highlighting
the opulence and the famous names of Brazilian political and cultural life that passed
through their lives, but he chooses instead the servants perspective: a domestic-behind the
scenes point of view.
Santiago talks about his favorite characters of the Royal European dynasties and about the
parties at the Moreira Salless house longing for a world that no longer exist. This
melancholic tone is highlighted in the film by the beautiful black and white images of the
Moreira Salless huge and empty Modernist house in Rio de Janeiro, probably meant for the
spectator to imagine a past that is now gone: children playing inside the house; elegant
dinners and parties; servants walking around eminent characters such as Christina Onassis,
Jucelino Kubitschek or Joo Goulart. But the detailed and minor perspective Santiago
adopts to talk about his favorite characters gives a domestic perspective that is taken up by
the director to regain an intimacy with his own personal past. Toward the end of the movie,
we watch close-ups of Santiagos writings while the director reads aloud some sections in
which the lives of famous people are rescued through anecdotes that seem insignificant and
gratuitous, showing that these tiny details are also part of History. In this way, we end up
having the feeling that even public families such as the Moreira Salless have intimate lives
and minor stories to tell. Its just a question of finding the right critical, reflexive, displaced
perspective to do it.