Etnomusicologia visual: desafios na elaboração de um vídeo-documentário sobre o Cantar os Reis em Ovar

Abstract

“Cantar os Reis em Ovar” is a performative practice with money collection characteristics, taking place every year in the days immediately before and after the Magi celebration (6th of January) in various places of the Ovar county. Near the end of 2014, the Ovar municipality took the initiative to promote the process of application to the inscription of the Cantar os Reis in the Intangible Cultural Heritage Matrix of Portugal (PCI), initiating a protocol with the Aveiro pole of INET-md, within which a team was chosen for this purpose.

The collection of data for the construction of the application dossier, in context of fieldwork, resulted in an audiovisual archive (images, videos, written documents) that was used in the creation of a documentary.

In this article I’ll explore the difficulties found during the creation of the documentary, such as: the triage of the material to include, the adaptation to a specific aesthetic of material recorded before the writing of the script, the articulation between the documental and aesthetic paradigms in the organization of the contents and experimental organic creation versus premeditation and following the script. These questions will be explored from the point of view of a researcher that participates for the first time in an ethnomusicological investigation.