The object of study of this project is the connection, built by the assembly, between the images of the past. In an interdisciplinary approach of historical documentary, this project evaluates the testimonial reach of the images of the past and deepens the theoretical debate on the cinematographic assembly, proposing different strategies of valuation of the archives in the contemporary space. The research is the development of an aesthetic and historical research begun in 2010, together with the ECO / UFRJ Graduate Program, in partnership with the Public Archive of the State of Rio de Janeiro (APERJ) and support from CNPq (project "Word , File and memory ", Edital Universal 2010). The work resulted, initially, in the documentary Portraits of Identification (Anita Leandro, 2014), the first Brazilian film about the photographic and textual documents produced by the political police during the military dictatorship. In dialogue with the contemporary documentary, the process of realization of this film had acted as a laboratory of aesthetic experimentation of record of testimony and of assembly of fixed and soundless images, such as photographs and textual documents. The project gave rise to different publications around the assembly of archives in the cinema and, at the end of 2013, a cooperation agreement signed between UFRJ and the Ministry of Justice (Amnesty Commission / Memory Marks Project) allowed a more effective intervention Of the project in the archival valuation policies. The theoretical research and technological development is now supplemented by extension activities and the film Portraits of Identification. The term of interinstitutional cooperation will also allow the installation of an exhibition-installation (Archives of the dictatorship, from 05/08 to 21/09 of 2014, CCJF), which gave visibility, outside the academic circuit, to the important collection of the DOPS of Guanabara , Under the custody of APERJ. From 2014, the field research was extended to the archives of the Superior Military Tribunal, in Brasilia, and to the national archives, bringing to the fore an important documentation, hitherto unknown. In its theoretical dimension, the project deepens the reflection on the historiographic reach of the cinematographic montage, proposing new approaches of the archive image and new methods of organization of the speech of the witnesses. In the film Portraits of Identification, two survivors of the resistance to the dictatorship are confronted with a series of photographic and textual documents on their respective prisons. Copies of identification portraits and medical records were taken to the set and analyzed by them, allowing a dialogue between the past and the present, between the documents of the story and the living testimony, in a direct and anticipated assembly of the files and the speech , Which is substituted for the classic form of interview. In place of the conversation between interviewer and interviewee, we obtained a direct relationship between the filmed person and the material remains of the story. It is the archival material that drives the speech, not the interviewer who, in this case, merely delivered the documents to the interviewees in the chronological order of events.