The Soft Intensity of the Archive in “The Secret Agent”

The word "archive" is certainly not unfamiliar to the liberal arts-educated readership of this magazine, so I will not spill ink over its connotations. Yet, in light of the recent Oscars, it seems fitting to discuss some of the works that have made the shortlist and the archives they draw upon. 

The Oscars nominations list this year certainly is long and varied. We see nominations from animations, car porn, and a range of arthouse films that would, in previous years, escape the box office. In many ways, the Oscars and the larger American audience have opened up to new forms of cinematic experience. Among these experiences, there is one in the international film section that is particularly intriguing, and that is the Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. The story follows Armando, a former university professor turned fugitive (Wagner Moura), as he lives in hiding, attempting to flee persecution and resist an authoritarian regime.

There is beauty in Filho’s depiction of Recife, and even more sorrow in the story that he tells against this backdrop. There are, of course, the common suspects of a tropical setting: the characters are sweaty throughout the film, and there is no shortage of humid suffocation in tandem with the high tensions of a manhunt. But what makes the film such a spectacular sequence of storytelling is that it refuses the macho project of political drama. The film makes clear that the story is not about Armando. The story is not about how he was killed or how he was hunted down. It’s rather about how the generations after the period of political instability take it upon themselves to locate themselves in a longer national history, and the difficulties and emotional obstacles that prevent us from doing so. When an archivist finds the son of Armando, she decides to leave with him a flash drive stored with recordings of his father’s voice during his hiding. However, the son, now a doctor at a local clinic, chooses to leave it buried in the past. 

The experience of the film was unsurprisingly museum-like. Filho maintains a great critical distance from the story. The experience was evocative so far as viewers begin to see the characters with the same sympathy Filho has, but never enough (at least for me) to shed a tear; in part because Filho’s subjects do not possess a heroic quality—even though the protagonist possesses a soft masculinity that would make for an excellent feature film—but more importantly, due to the film’s lack of a need for dramatization. When one is faithful to the archive, looking back at distant memories that cannot be immediately recalled in one’s mind, the subjects refuse dramatization. The result of this investigation is us gazing upon a gigantic repository of stories, piecing together pieces of information that were never written for an archive to create an imagination in our mind of a story that is faithful and sympathetic to a national past. There is grandeur and honor in such a mission, and as The Secret Agent proves, a great tenderness to relish in. 

Now, in the list of Oscar nominees, this somewhat patriotic sensibility through which we view The Secret Agent stands out against the rest. Even as a political drama, it is still distinct from, perhaps, One Battle After Another. It would perhaps be inaccurate to say that American films are not interested in the archive, but more fitting to say that when films look to their political immediacies, the political content from which they draw is much more distinct. Marty Supreme is filled with doggedness and Americaness of a post-war U.S., and One Battle After Another’s comedic absurdity comes from a not-too-distant version of American politics. Still, deep in the understanding of all these films is the understanding that there is no new world if our culture does not examine the ones that came before, and that the most salient distinction for this year’s nominees is that when international films can look to its turbulent political history and seek reconciliation from those memories, the U.S. is still reckoning with the full violence the American berserk.