O cinema vivido: antropologia fora do texto e a performance digital na apropriação popular de O Agente Secreto

Abstract

Abstract

This article analyzes the phenomenon of a Brazilian cinematic work overflowing into festive everyday life, taking as its object the tributes paid to the film O Agente Secreto (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) during the 2026 Brazilian Carnival. The research adopts Marc Piault’s concept of an anthropology outside the text, focused on lived space and time, movement, the body, and the visible expression of feelings. It investigates how cinema, by occupying the avenue through parades, street blocs, and costumes, ceases to be a static projection and becomes a collective performance and a provisional assembly of bodies, articulating the historical memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship staged in the film with a critique of the political present. The research maps how this physical experience is transposed into the virtual environment, configuring a digital performance through the circulation of images on social media. The methodology is based on an exploratory and qualitative approach, with the collection of 1,070 publications on Instagram and X (Twitter) throughout February 2026, using the Content Library tool (Meta) and the Export Comments tool. The results point to the promotion of kinesthetic empathy between the work and its audience, consolidating the audiovisual as a device for urban occupation, symbolic resistance, and the production of Brazilian collective imagery.