Ruídos raciais

In the early minutes of O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds, 2012), by director Kleber Mendonça Filho, photographs marked by extradiegetic sounds represent an aesthetic choice that describes how the experience of slavery in colonial Brazil actualizes its effects in a contemporary neighborhood of Northeastern Brazil. This article investigates how O som ao redor engages with Gilberto Freyre’s theories by exposing racialization processes and the impression that violence resulting from racism is inevitable. Through acousmatization, a resource that destabilizes the temporal and spatial limits of diegetic action, this film intervenes in a polarized debate around racism and makes it possible to criticize the hegemonic reading of miscegenation as the visual representation of racial harmony in Brazil. With a sound design that invokes the genre of terror and proposes listening as a racializing act, O som ao redor challenges the ocularcentric myth of racial democracy and the ideology of exclusivist classism.