cinemas of the south

Writing the Speech
By José Carlos Avellar

Let's imagine for an instant that Brazilian cinema from the 1960s, not exclusively but especially Cinema Novo, could be comparable to talking. Starting from there we can perhaps imagine that Brazilian cinema in the 1990s is comparable to writing, a manner of writing much in the same way that cinema in the 1960s was a manner of speaking.

There is something natural, spontaneous, in the first trembling images of Barren Lives (Vidas Secas, 1963) by Nelson Pereira dos Santos; an expression not entirely articulated or not yet articulated in the way an expression is organised in a written text. First the long shot, fixed and apparently empty, almost entirely white as if there were only the projector's light on screen - the sun burning out all and any shadow and the image we have is no more than varying intensities of white. This white image on a white background is followed by the shot in which the cinematographer walks, camera in hand, along the dry riverbed next to the family of migrants from the drought areas of northern Brazil : Fabiano, Sinhá Vitória, the oldest child, the newest child and the dog, Baleia.

Barren Lives (Vidas Secas, 1963)

It is as if we were standing before an idea being thought aloud. The trembling and whiteness of the image can be experienced as a visual correspondent of speaking, as the most accentuated pronunciation of a work, as a sound half-swallowed by another; as a gesture that completes the sense of what is only half-said; as punctuation, at times irregular, that marks the search for true expression. In all, the image may be experienced as 'the imperfection' of spoken language whenever compared to the more organised written language.

Let us now think of what we call language is a kind of cinema resulting from the montage of two different shots, seemingly in conflict but in truth complementary - speech and writing. The first is a natural shot, open, alive direct like the shots of a documentary. The second is disciplined and constructed like a shot of a fictional film. Cinema from the 1960s is comparable to speech not because it attempts to interpret visually Brazilians' way of speaking; not because it attempts an operation similar to what is done when a film relies on writing to structure its narrative. Cinema from the 1960s was more speech than writing because the way it expressed itself has the directness, the vitality, the openness, the naturalness and the only partial articulation (saying in a better way: the particular spontaneous articulation) of spoken language. It even expressed itself with equivalents to (let's say) a word before the word, with equivalents of that instant in time when, in order to express some thing that has not yet gained a name, all that exists are interjections, screams, an unknown and never said before word or mute gestures.

Our first language is our presence - reality within reality - wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 60s. All of life, ".taking all its action together as a whole, is a natural living cinema: and, as such, it is linguistically the equivalent of spoken language." (Pasolini adds) "The process of dreams and that of memory, voluntary and involuntary memory, are the primordial outlines of a cinematographic language understood as a convention that fixes the language of action in the real world." All these archetypes of the language of reality gain concrete form in the cinema, which is, ".the written moment of this natural, total language constituted by men's action in the real world," the written language of reality, as Pasolini then imagined it. At that same time, the Cinema Novo imagined itself as natural, total, spoken language, action in the real world, almost as if what existed on the screen were not film, but reality itself, the representation proposing itself as presenting again the reality itself, as a pre-existent language, really primordial: thought being thought, at the frontier, in the instant between what is not yet conscious and what can begin to gain form and expression.

Glauber Rocha

Let us think like this, and imagine Brazilian cinema of the 1990s as equivalent to writing, just as in the 1960s it was equivalent to speech. Let us imagine this for a moment (for a moment, because this way of looking is merely a point of departure for a closer approximation to Brazilian cinema, then and now, and not an image capable of defining it entirely). Let us imagine a dialectic relationship between a certain manner of speaking and a certain manner of writing, a relationship not limited to writing what is said in the way it is said, but one that smoothes out the excesses of the naturalness of speech in the same way that, for instance, a steady cam disciplines and softens the movements made by a handheld camera of 1960s to incorporate into the cinematographic writing of the industry at large this speech introduced - among others new cinemas - by Brazil's Cinema Novo.

Perhaps because the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s imagined itself (we did not exactly film like that, but we imagined so) to be the illustration of a something thought before writing; perhaps because, then, cinema imagined itself as the art of coordinating a limited possibility of shots (close-ups, foreground, pan shots, field and counter-field, travelling, tilts, the angle shots the French use to call plongé and contre-plongé). For whatever reason, the image made with the handheld camera (all those camera shots in one and, at the same time, none of them) and the improvisations during shooting quickly emerged as the most important trademarks of the 1960s. To make cinema then (we did not exactly film like that, but we imagined so), it was enough to have an idea in your head and a camera in your hand, as Glauber Rocha once said.

Glauber said more: "We are going to make our films anyhow: with handheld cameras, in 16mm if there is no 35mm, improvising in the street to get people's true gestures"; "..a cinema on the basis of whatever means are possible, at low cost and in a short time"; "..a political cinema that intends to inform not by logic, but by poetics." Making films anyhow. Not making films anyhow. In fact, filming with a hand-held camera revealing its nervous presence in the scene more than the scene itself properly speaking, was not a way of simplifying and impoverishing cinematographic writing, but a creative intervention to make it more complex and rich. Glauber's Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe, 1967) is a good example, the scene improvised, not because it had not been thought through properly beforehand in the screenplay, but because it continued being thought through there in the shooting; the image tremulous; not because of any failure or lack of skill on the part of the photographer, but because at that time reality was being discussed like that in speech, nervous and tremulous. In fact, this cinema, with an idea in its head and a camera in its hand, enriched the speech of itself. It helped people think of screenplays as a challenge to shooting, of shooting as a response to the challenge of the screenplay, of the camera as a challenge to the eye. It helped people think of cinema as an expression finished, on the screen and, at the same time, unfinished, just in the imagination, part of a process that does not end with the film on the screen; it helped people think of film as a work print, a not yet finished print for the spectator to clean up and bring order to; cinema as an inventor and stimulator of images.

Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe, 1967)

It may be possible to say that today's Brazilian cinema seeks to discipline and bring order to what at one time appeared on the screen as if it were no more than a work print, an unedited film. It is not a question of going back to the same themes and solutions, of expressing anew (and now in proper order and in proper keeping with the grammar) what we said before very incorrectly. It is a question of setting up a dialogue with the recent past, a dialogue that is half conversation and half duel, half acceptance and half refusal, a duel like those between the Brazilian popular poets of the northeast at a recital. It is a kind of spoken-duel; a dialogue not because the films of that recent past are necessarily better than today's, but that they should, therefore, be taken as models. We write today neither what, nor as, we had spoken yesterday. We write today because we spoke yesterday - because we now speak a language that is common to us and belongs to us.

Let's say that the studied aspect of the image in Foreign Land (Terra Estrangeira, 1995) by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas is the writing of the improvised aspect of the image of Earth Entranced.

Let's say that Walter Salles' Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998) - with the letter writer woman driven from the big city to the sertão hinterlands, making backwards the same migration as the characters did in Barren Lives - does not exactly write the stories of the 60s, but rather the sentiment evoked by those spoken stories; this is writing not as a direct transcription of speech but rather a complement, a diverse, parallel form, another and the same way of expressing ourselves, writing as an integral part of the process of expression, nurtured by speech and in turn feeding back into speech.

Is writing not actually a way of challenging speech and allowing oneself to be challenged by it?

Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998)

Let's also say that in Life Somewhere Else (Socorro Nobre, 1995), a short documentary made by Salles between Foreign Land and Central Station, one finds the story that Brazilian cinema is writing today, whether directly or between the lines. We write moved by a sentiment similar to that which led Maria in Life Somewhere Else to write a letter to Franz Krajcberg from inside prison saying that she had burned up her own life and wanted, like Krajcberg, who produced works of art with the remains of burned trees; to give new life to what had been burned down; to be reborn. It is not by chance that the real Life Somewhere Else appears in the first scene in Central Station dictating a letter to Dora. Brazilian films now are trying to write words that burn in our mouth.

Following this line of reasoning, one could say that, before the 1960s, we tried most of the time to write before speaking, as if language could be born first as writing, only then to emerge as speech; we were trying before to write what cinema was speaking in Europe or in Hollywood. We could also say that, now, just as we started to write our speech, and to write so well as, for instance, in The Oyster and the Wind (A ostra e o vento, 1997) by Walter Lima Jr, now, writing feeding back into speech, new spoken films emerged: like Perfumed Ball (Baile perfumado, 1997), by Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira, as alive and passionate as the first films of Cinema Novo; like Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil (Carlota Joaquina - Princesa do Brazil , 1995) by Carla Camurati, as spontaneous and popular as the comedies before Cinema Novo; like Crede-mi by Bia Lessa and Dany Rowland, initially not even intended as a film, but as a video record of theatre laboratories held in Ceará State around Thomas Mann's The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte): hand-held camera, cinema that went along inventing itself, just as speech invents itself whenever an idea in one's head is thought out loud.

Walter Salles directing Central do Brasil

Let's say that today's camera, almost always on the tripod, writes just as yesterday's camera, almost always hand-held, spoke; that stories like Dora's and Josué's write not what was said, but the way things were said in Brazilian Cinema in the 1960s, with the same passion. Brazilian cinema, after a vacuum lasting three years, between 1990 and 1993, has something from the 1960s' desire to make cinema anyhow. The retaking took place as fast as it did because of the existence of a cinematographic culture, a cinematographic language that we began to speak in the 1960s and did not disappear with the suspensions of the means of production.

For all these reasons, it is especially significant that Central Station communicated so immediately and easily with Brazilian (and not just Brazilian) viewers. A retired teacher who makes a living writing letters for people who can't read may also be seen - even though not so intended - as a metaphor for the process of the reinventing Brazilian cinema in the 1990s. By reinventing itself, it discovers a common and shared language (each one with its own manner of telling stories, but all telling stories using the same language) of a specific space and time, like Dora. She goes through a process of re-sensitisation.

The film passes across landscapes and through characters that mark on the films of the 1960s - the northeast, the hinterlands, the migrants, the pilgrims, the average worker from the outskirts of the big city - following the path of a woman who, gradually, by turning into writing what is said to her, undergoes a process of re-sensitisation. This expression used by Walter Salles is a perfect definition of Dora's experience and, by extension, that of Brazilian cinema in recent years. Cinema as a whole, films and their viewers, also went through a process of re-sensitisation. An uninterested distant woman who writes letters that she does not send, winds up, on her journey in search of Josué's father and, reconciled to the memory of her own father, she ends, in a certain way, as part of Josué's family.

Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998)

Something similar is happening to Brazilian cinema today. Writing is a process of sensitisation, just as speaking was in the 1960s. It is also a process of re-encounter with a symbolic father (the old Cinema Novo?); a re-encounter made with all the ambiguity and tragedy that the story of Central Station confers on the image of the father. He is at once the figure that Josué admires without having met, that Moisés despises for destroying himself with drink and that Isaias expects to see return home, to the family and to working with wood. Dora does not forget that her father is the half crude drunk who abandoned his family and who tried to chat up his own daughter one day when he met her on the street and failed to recognise her; but he is also the train driver who (Dora finally remembers) treated his daughter tenderly and who one day let her (then a little girl) drive the train he worked on. Just as the father in the story of Dora and Josué becomes the starting point for a journey that leads to a reunion of brothers, so too is the spoken cinema of the 1960s a point of reference, the challenge, that makes writing possible.

When, in the final passage of Central Station, Dora places the letters written (or, more exactly, dictated to a letter writer) by Ana to Jesus and by Jesus to Ana side-by-side beneath the portrait on the wall, an image is formed which later, much later, (long after it has been seen as part of the story in which it figures), can also be felt as a representation of the relationship between the cinema we made as a manner of speaking and the cinema being made today as a manner of writing: They are letters that did not reach their addressees, but which nonetheless function as a joining line, to form a family portrait.

José Carlos Avellar
© FIPRESCI 2006

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