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Milton Santos and the Radical Humanity of an Outsider Intellectual

Abstract

This article analyzes the documentary Encontro com Milton Santos: o mundo global visto do lado de cá (2006), by Silvio Tendler, focusing on Santos’s construction as an outsider intellectual and on the relationship between political cinema and the imagetic production of dissensus. Drawing on theoretical and film analysis, it examines three interconnected problems: the categories of “Black,” “Brazilian,” and “intellectual”; documentary image as political intervention; and the productive tension between outsiderism and militancy. It argues that the film does not merely represent Milton Santos’s thought, but stages a Tendler’s critical grammar in which discourse, montage, and visuality dispute the social imaginary while elaborating a plural humanity, here understood as “radically human.” The article concludes that Tendler’s political cinema operates as both narrative and counter-narrative practice, transforming documentary into a tool of social intervention.