Thefirst partof this conversation was published in the ninth edition of Revista Limite.
To present the second part of the interview, in which we talk about what I consider to be an extraordinary film, Leme do Destino (2023), I remember some details that I was able to witness while being part of the filming. Starting with how, confused, I was looking for number 301 in a building that only has 2 floors, when Alê, the location producer, opens a discreet door in the corner of the corridor and reveals a new staircase, which leads to the secret location. A huge apartment hidden in a building in Bairro Peixoto, custom-made many decades ago by the first man to sell imported car parts in Brazil. In addition to being a merchant, the former owner had a curious artistic streak. Of his many paintings scattered around the apartment, one ended up in the film and can be seen in the foreground of the dance scene. It seemed like the perfect location for a Júlio Bressane film.
This was followed by 6 days of intense filming, starting early in the morning and ending late in the afternoon. The script, very concise, was followed from memory by Júlio, who walked restlessly from one side of the apartment to the other, in a frenzy of creation. “He’s possessed!” Rosa Dias exclaims to me, as I ask eagerly, trying to find out about their past forays into cinema. “Cinema is a martyrdom”, she tells me, remembering the hardships they went through. Bressane and photographer Pablo Baião explored, in each of the scenes, unusual framing and lighting, images of pure photogenicity. A free camera, “drunk camera”. And the team followed behind, carefully preparing to make the scene happen.
The very familiar atmosphere seemed to perfectly balance professionalism and relaxation. Each day, different stagehands were chosen from the team to perform the film’s picturesque practical effects, pulling ropes, strings and performing the necessary pirouettes. Júlio and I got together to create a plan in which a pencil would roll out of a door on its own, passing through a beam of light. An apparently simple action, but which we found to be difficult to carry out: the pencil did not maintain its direction linearly and left the light. “Then you imagine what guys like Buster Keaton were doing”, says Júlio, and we remember the filmmaker’s impressive feats, the wall of the house falling, the bridge collapsing with the train on top. Josie Antello, a veteran of the filmmaker’s cinema, was delighted with the new propositions that she seemed to already know so well, while Simone Spoladore had an air of excitement and curiosity with those daring challenges. They made a beautiful duo.
On September 13th, we woke up with the news of Godard’s death. With everyone bewildered and impacted, there was nothing else to talk about. Júlio brings everyone together and pays an emotional tribute: “If it weren’t for him, we could be making other films, but not the one we’re making. We don’t know how much we owe Godard.” Then he asks how he died: “He killed himself, is it?” He looks up and smiles a wise smile. On the last day, no one wanted to say goodbye to the film and they continued inventing new ideas, under an incessant creative flow. Pablo shows Júlio the function that allows slow-motion on the camera, and they perform one of the most beautiful shots in the film, with Simone Spoladore’s flowing hair and her expression of astonishment. “Cut!” We filmed the scene with the psychic and Rosa ran to find me: “Vinícius, I told you that cinema is a martyrdom, but there is also a lot of pleasure, you know?”
Introductory text by Vinícius Dratovsky; interview conducted by Gabriel Linhares Falcão, Matheus Zenom, Paula Mermelstein and Vinícius Dratovsky
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Matheus Zenom: In our previous conversation, you commented about copying Limite (1931) in A Agonia (1977). Today, while we were watching Leme do Destino (2023), you commented on one of the shots, in which you copy the composition of a painting by [Jacques Louis] David. How is the matter of the copy important in your films?
Júlio Bressane: I consider copying not an obligation, I consider copying a duty. If you want to do something, especially in art, you have to start by copying. It’s like the question of language: the language you have is your mother’s tongue, but you can later learn others. Copying is necessary for your learning. When you say “made a copy”, people see it as a somewhat vulgar meaning, but copying is a difficult, important and necessary thing. It is precisely in the copy that we learn and see the difference. A few years ago, I attended an exhibition of a single painting by Raphael, the Madonna, and four more copies made in his studio, by his disciples. All copies had a small difference in the stroke, in the feeling of a color, and this difference was the learning process, how far you can get to the original and perceive, from that, an autonomous way of doing it. You had to copy the painting, that was a learning experience. Everything is original, including the copy, because there is your fingerprint there. You can’t take Newton Cavalcanti’s woodcut and make another one just like that.
Now, what I told you about this Limite thing, there were two things that I noticed in different ways. One was an unconscious perception of Limite; I saw the film, but it hadn’t passed through me yet. It was a first perception of Limite, an intuition of Limite, in the matter of the camera that approaches, moves away, that leaves the characters. This was the Limite that I perceived unconsciously and made in Cuidado, Madame (1970) an aberrant form of Limite. Then, later, both in A Agonia and in Gigante da América (1978), even in Monstro Caraíba (1975), there is already a more conscious copy of Limite, making those movements that Edgar Brazil and Mário Peixoto created into figures of syntax.
In A Agonia, I made a selection of four or five figures from Limite and recreated them there, a little bit by altering the camera and a little bit by altering the rhythm, but with that figure, that cliché that Limite knew how to reinvent. The camera leaving the characters, that’s something new, it didn’t happen in cinema. Making the camera the main character already existed: Buster Keaton and Marcel L’Herbier himself had already done it. But, making the camera the very existence of cinema, that was there, showing that what the camera sees is not what you see, and that the camera has its own constructional impact. The camera leaves the woman’s body, goes down the road, passes through some barbed wire, and there’s nothing else: there’s just movement and light. It’s cinema, in one shot. So, in this sense, they invented what I called the “I” in cinema, the last sign to configure itself. There is a literature study, about Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, in which the author says that there was a moment in the poem when the commander was expelled by the boat and the boat said: “I”. So, that’s a little bit of Peixoto and Brazil’s camera tour thing.
In the film I made in Morocco, A Fada do Oriente, I reproduced this movement in which the camera moves along the ground on a Paillard-Bolex camera. I did it in a brutalist way, because it was a hand crank camera, which had a 20 or 35 second limit. So, I winded up and went; when it ended, I would wind up again and go, only each cut like this is a jump, but I had already redone all of this thinking about Limite. This was from 1971 to 72, after Belair, already much more in touch with Limite than at the time of Cuidado Madame, Limite had already surfaced in me.
Gabriel Linhares Falcão: I’m very curious to know how do you work when the primary subject is music, especially in O Mandarim (1995) and in Tabu (1982) too. I wanted to know what is the difference between adapting, passing through or transposing a song and a literary text?
JB: This is all done with intuition. I don’t have a method, nor do I have a formula for this. It has two operations: one is a music/camera translation, an intersemiotic translation, from one language to another; and the other is an approximation, let’s say, of the signifier, an approximation through the acoustic box, through the sound, the camera and the music. So, it depends. In the case of O Mandarim, the film had as its central and formal figure Mário Reis, who was a very formalistic singer, very graphic as well. All of this was a bit what guided me in choosing the frames. Now, the music there was an intuitive thing, you do it on the spot, a rhythm that you think goes well with that camera movement, or another one that has nothing to do with that and then I suggest a proximity. I usually play the entire song because I try to dissociate it from the image, to give the song its own character; I leave it in its entirety, not just a little piece, because the music has a space within it that is untranslatable. You can connect to what the lyrics say, in the rhythm of the thing, and it can also be a daydream, in which you imagine how that comes to you, what it reminds you of. The important thing in all of this is the suggestions, what that is capable of suggesting. Instead of suggesting one thing to everyone, it might suggest many things to just one person.
Music, which is one of the most difficult things to put in cinema today, because it has been explored from the inside out, ad nauseam. Everything has already been done, from the first one, which Saint-Saëns did for L’Assassinat du duc de Guis (1908), to today in these super sound films, like Top Gun (2022), from the high industry of sound and technique. I always tried to give the soundtrack autonomy, separate it from the image. Being able to say something, do something and have a sound that is different from that because it is autonomous. Today, 50, 60 years later, they are better known, but this type of music, these original records that I used, Lamartine, Senhor, Pixinguinha, Benedito Lacerda, all these records were not used in cinema. Since the existence of sound cinema, songs have been included in films, but not this type of music, nor did they let this primacy of playing a record with hissing for three and a half minutes, precisely because it was thought that the hissing was bad, that there was no point in adding noise to music. This was all very difficult to do and then very difficult to be accepted. In cinema, sound and music were another requirement, not this independence, this breaking away from the image.
But I don’t have any method, it’s something done purely by ear and intuition. A few notes in sequence in a song that I think can combine, contrast, go with or against this or that image, what kind of formalism fits with this or that image, that’s intuitive. Intersemiotic translation is a translation that has no rules, it depends on each person’s intuition. I consider that the music in the films I make is very important, because it always has its own story; the music is within the film, but it has a story within the film and within itself. I used this feature many times, in several different films.
MZ: About moving from one medium to another, I think about how at the beginning of Leme do Destino, in the initial dialogue, you pointed out to us that there was an excerpt from O Gerente, a story by Drummond [de Andrade]. Is that in there along with other texts, mixed in some way?
JB: Completely mixed, for me it’s a patchwork quilt. Or, better said, it’s a detail-work quilt. They are two women, writers, who are in a conversation. What you have there is a literary conversation. Each person’s feelings are very alive there, but it’s a literary conversation: phrases, thoughts, literary analogies. What attracts is always the result of a twist of the tongue, so to speak. This has a reason, even a literary one too, which is an observation by Plutarch. He was the guy who wrote the lives of Caesar and Mark Antony, in which Cleopatra appears. What there is about Cleopatra is in these two texts. Plutarch said that the thing that most attracted Caesar when he met Cleopatra was that she spoke ancient Greek, Hesiod’s Greek. He was impressed and seduced by her diction. Not because she was a beautiful woman, nothing like that; even more so for Caesar, who was a conqueror. He was fascinated by the way she spoke. And that’s what’s in there, in Leme do Destino. What attracts each one of them to the other is the way she says “nobody talks like that”; “your tongue,” she says. That’s what attracts, a literary thing, the text between the two. This is what defines, more or less, the formalism of each one of them.
A woman who carries an enigma within herself and the other who has another type of trauma; one has a collective experience of life, of the convent, of sexuality, and the other is a martyred, traumatized woman, who never had a lover, didn’t know how to kiss, never had affection from anyone, but who had misfortune and that’s what happens in the end. She tells us that she was a 15-year-old girl, who had a son, who she didn’t even want to see, left the hospital, gave up her son and disappeared. That was her. And for some reason, when she sees that boy washing the dishes, she freezes, not knowing why – because she was the boy’s mother. The key to this is what has been called “the metamorphoses of kinship”. All kinship relationships have been in use and of all times. All relationships that are prohibited by law today were customary relationships. The belt that Aphrodite and the others wore was called cestus, to prevent incestus. Whoever had that was defending themselves from incest, which was a common practice. Cleopatra belongs to a culture that was called Antigonos: it only reproduced among itself. It is Antigone, who belonged to this branch of culture, just like Cleopatra, too. Everyone reproduced among themselves, as a family: father, mother, sister, uncle, son.
So, there, there is a first moment in which it seems that there may be a spring in suffering. Which is a friend she has, two older women, writers. It might be that, through this, she gains some experience, learns something, finds pleasure in something. There’s that scene from the Bacchae there, which is precisely the celebration of this force. But this thing is interrupted by destiny, by chance, which is when she sees that boy, and she doesn’t know what it is, but she feels an attraction that she never felt – a woman who never had lovers, anything masculine horrified her. How can she stand in front of a person and feel that way? Something paralyzed her and, then, this destroys the continuation of a relationship that was most important in her life; not only of personal satisfaction, but of meeting a person who, like her, also writes; a more sophisticated, older person. But this is something she doesn’t expect, but senses. Above all, she also understands, because of her age. She did this when she was 15; 30, 40 years later, she would be 50, 55, and the guy was in his early 30s. She knew there was a possibility like that. Not that it was that one, but that if it was, he would be at that age, he would be that type. So, that’s the thing, a kind of taboo that exists in this relationship and that is in human nature. Those that are aberrations are part of human nature. They are aberrations, medicine has made a point of proving that the offspring of son with mother, brother with sister, is a producer of monsters. But this was done to strengthen a certain type of family relationship and we are here today.
The film has this mythological side and also a, let’s say, syncopated rhythm. Many things are happening within that. As if there were a bunch of gaps within each of those things.
MZ: There is a use of objects in the film that is quite different, too.
JB: Yes, because in there all this will take on a sense of suggestion – the shoe, the rope – and of cinema too. Objects always have this sense of extending the acoustic box. One sees herself in the mirror and the delirium begins, the walking shoes, the ropes, that sort of thing. It’s a kind of shuffling of contrasts. There are many things going on in there: drunkenness, cinema, cinema tricks, optical unconsciousness. There is the instinctual unconscious, but there is also the optical unconscious, which is what you see when there is a change in movement. If it’s a natural movement, you don’t notice it; but if it is a delayed movement, you perceive things that would not be in your perception in an ordinary movement. So, this is the optical unconscious, it is seeing what you don’t see, when things are moving normally. The film has a lot of things like that, back and forth. Sometimes, in the same plane, the reel goes back and forth. This is a Freudian metaphor, about the baby, who sees the spool go and then come back to him.
When the character looks and becomes paralyzed, the next shot is her face walking in slow motion, where you observe not only the movement of her face, but her hair moving, something you wouldn’t see. She keeps looking back and when the camera goes back and there is no one, while she is in the same position, looking. It could be that that scene is not a flashback, but, as Griffith said, a cutback, or a cutforward, it could be after that. So, the film has this whole setup. But, these things I’m saying, maybe the film isn’t that. This all led me to the film. It was based on what I organized myself, but once you do it, things get out of your control. There are things you did that had more force than you, meant more than you wanted; for other people, even more so.
Repetition in this film is like an affirmation. The idea of God is a repetition. There is an order of repetition of everything: the images, each person’s clothes… Always repeating, a little different, but the central things survive. They always survive. It changes a little in direction, in value, because in this repetition there is an interval and it is in this interval that the thing is restructured, gains another value, it changes, gains another perception.
Vinicius Dratovsky: I know you’ve had this script for some time, but it seemed to me that, during filming, while you were directing, you had a look that seemed like it was the first time you were seeing it, that it was something very new.
JB: The script, for me, is a kind of guide, which I organize in order to organize myself. Now, when it comes to filming, everything in there is already exhausted for me, so I try to put that aside and keep the things that kept me going. The script is something you do, as they say in French, aide pour mémoire, something you do as a reminder. When filming, I have an idea of what each thing is and what I can do. But it’s very important for me to write this guide, which is a kind of research that I do with myself. I spend a lot of time writing my text, I have a lot of difficulty writing. The script has 10, 15 pages, so when filming I try to see what is no longer there, something that is not what I wrote and organized. I always tried to make the film that I don’t have in my head. “I made the film I had in my head,” people say. I always said to myself that, if that was the case, it was better not to do it. [laughs] It would be better to try to do another one because, if it’s already in your head, it’s gone. Generally, what I do are text montages. I’m much more of a reader than a writer. I am a permanent reader, but not a permanent writer. So, what I do is assemble texts. All my texts are a few lines from certain pages of many books. So, it takes me a long time to organize things for myself; after it is organized, then I make an improvised film, but after this stage of collecting things. If I take a script that’s going to be easy, I end up getting stuck, I can get stuck in that conventional script.
VD: Based on what you said about the reminder, the aid to memory, do you think your editing process is similar?
JB: No, in that sense I don’t think so, because there’s something else about the editing. The images are already there. What you need to do is transform those images. Hence the strength, importance and soul of the montage. First, the work is to create those images; the second is to organize things, give everything another destination. The images already have, due to their framing, their duration, a suggestion of montage. The image is already a montage. You assemble each image, but you also assemble each frame. What you select inside a rectangle, you already make an assembly; the framing is already a montage.
There is something else about montage, which is what you can do not only by joining two images to give a suggestion of what is not there, but also by disrupting a rhythm, which is an important thing. Montage is a principle of disorganization of something that is archiorganized, which is that cliché image, organized by the camera, by the film, by everything, which is a kind of comfort. Editing is looking for a nature that is not evident there, a game of contrasts, surprises, unexpected things. Above all, it disrupts the rhythm dictated by the factory, dictated by the need to organize the world in this way. It should be changed, even so that there would not be this adherence to the spectacle. So that we can observe the opposite of this rhythm, this order of perception. The industrial rhythm is the spectacle itself. You make a 6, 7, 8, 10 hour film, no one can stand to watch it. Not just because you want to go to the bathroom and so on, but because the person can’t handle it, they can’t handle themselves. So, you need to create a process that disorganizes this, that disorganizes this perception.
Each film, for me, has a surprise editing. I film and, when I film, I imagine a type of montage for that material that I just filmed and today more quickly, because you see that material instantly. Before, you had to send it to the laboratory for development and there was an interval, it sometimes took four, five days, which brought another aspect that was also important and highlighted the difference between what you see and what the camera sees. When time passed and you went to see what you filmed, it wasn’t exactly what you had seen. Today, this critical resistance, this distance, has greatly diminished; you see it straight away and deceive yourself with something else. Today, when you finish the film, you have an idea of the editing for that, but it is precisely this idea that you will demolish when you are going to make it, because what you should see is not the idea you have of these images, but what is the idea that the images have of you. Then, yes, the assembly begins. When this is established, you find a montage for that material. All assemblies are exclusive, whether the most conventional or the most intricate. They are exclusive. You don’t repeat that, the images don’t repeat themselves. Even industrial films, which have the same editing pattern, do not have the same editing, because the shots are different.
So, one thing that is quite strong in Leme do Destino was this adherence of the editing to the film. The editing served the film more than the characters in the film. The fire scene dragged on more throughout the film, for example, things that change the center of gravity. A thing like that, if it has four or five seconds, it’s fine; when it’s two and a half minutes long, it creates an imbalance in the film. It could have been a five-second shot, I just had to count it there, but if I leave that salamander burning, burning, burning, it gives things a different rhythm. Never, when we filmed, nor after, did I imagine that it would be what it was later in the film; that came in the assembly. In fact, when we filmed it, the shot as it was filmed was a surprise. I did a test here at home, I took a piece of paper, put it on fire and saw that it burned. I said “let’s do this”. When it came time to film, the day Godard died, someone put down a huge piece of toilet paper, which must have been about five meters long. We set it on fire, the plan ran and I said “leave it a little longer”, because I thought it would go out, but it didn’t. So, it went on and on, until the end. An epiphany occurred, something unexpected, a fire that did not extinguish, that spread and even created an image, leaving a trail of phosphorescence. After I filmed, I didn’t feel the shot right, but it was precisely during the editing that I thought that would be the fire that came to interrupt that relationship that was not only one of necessity, but a relationship of discovery, of invention, between those two women.
A woman, already in her fifties, who suffered an inexplicable brutal trauma, of repugnance, which was having become pregnant. So violent that she donated the child in the hospital itself and did so with joy, with the satisfaction of being able to disappear. You don’t bury that. She stayed with that all her life and that meant never wanting to have any kind of sexual relations with anyone, especially with any man. A woman who had some kind of job, may have been a secretary, a health insurance saleswoman, and retired. When she was older, she met another woman who had another life experience, and became friends with her, had another type of relationship. She was a humble girl, who was raised in a convent, which is a school of puritan vices, where everything happens, among the women cloistered in that silence. She was a woman who had an experience there and was not traumatized by it; on the contrary, she learned and left to continue being a writer. The two meet and she gives the other a universe that she never had access to and never would have, the universe of her body. A woman in that state of self-loathing, who dreams her whole life of being on a boat, without a sail, without a mast, without a crew, sailing inside, who sees herself as a lost caravel and meets someone who gives her a type of pleasure she never had, of the body, she discovers this in her fifties. When that is interrupted, it is an uncontrollable force, stronger than her. Not even this revealing, liberating force of sexuality, of sexual enjoyment, was able to interrupt an ancestral, anthropological, human force, which was the family thing, the unconscious attraction for the child. She leaves with the boy, the two talking; she also had some convincing strength in relation to the boy. That was what, in the editing, I tried to distort. Set a rhythm that was not the one that was determined, especially because destiny reversed itself, another movement was needed for this aberrant suggestion. For you to make a suggestion today about a son falling in love with his mother is an aberrant suggestion, but it is aberrant for this current situation, the customs of today. The custom is the straitjacket of the time. But we already went through all of that back there.
MZ: During the first part, I thought a lot about Filme de Amor (2003), mainly because of the characters who are always inside the room, the relationship with objects, the sexual fantasy. The learning relationship that one transmits to the other also reminds me of the protagonists of Educação Sentimental (2013).
JB: There is a big difference in relation to the Filme de Amor, because in it there is a celebration of this love that is represented in antiquity by the three Graces, a kind of rediscovery of Venus. There, what is happening is yet another celebration of the three forces of love. In any case, there is also an appeal to less sociable behavior. There is an orgy celebration, which is something banned today, despite being highly desired. There’s this session, a narcotic diversion that allows you to behave differently. In Leme do Destino there is something more linked to the human species, to the origin of desire, how it occurred in society. In Educação Sentimental, there is a teacher giving an innocent, virgin body some experience. In Leme do Destino, there are two bodies with a lot of experience, but mutilated as a result. In Educação Sentimental, there is an idea of the formative novel: someone who is capable of, through understanding and love, transmitting something to someone. It’s the concept of the formative novel, something found in Rousseau’s Émile.
But all of this could be, Matheus, because these things are signs that are still in rotation. You do it and they rotate, taking on other meanings, gaining other perceptions. It takes time, it’s difficult… I say for myself. It takes me a long time to understand, to understand things. I think everything is a bit like that. You do it and the thing is reproduced in such a way that you have to go after what you did, to see if you understand a little of what you did. Most things, or almost all things, you do because you don’t know what it is, you do it to try to understand this new thing. Hence this thing about the script that you leave aside. You have to have a certain shamelessness, a great risk of doing something that you are not expecting, something that sometimes contradicts what is written there, and that contradiction is even stronger than you, because you cannot control it and put it there.
Paula Mermelstein: Something that also reminds me of Filme de Amor is this play with objects, like when there’s that iron that fries the steak.
JB: Using unusual means to do certain things – frying an egg or heating meat with an iron – are things that are out of place there. I thought a little about you always producing something that is out of use. Not only due to disproportion, but also due to use, custom. The entire Filme de Amor makes all these unusual behaviors commonplace, which, if they exist, are very rare. This is the question of the limit of things, as far as you know or don’t know about them. In Filme de Amor I used a lot of the work by a painter called Balthus, Pierre Klossowski’s brother. He presents things as if they were quite banal, but there are scenes there that most people, in their life experience, have not seen. It transforms into common experience what is not. He was the painter I used as a reference for this in Filme de Amor. I reproduced several clichés from Balthus’ paintings to transform what I could from something banal into something unusual. This exists a lot in painting, where you can find things like this.
PM: There’s a lot of [George Bataille’s] Story of the Eye too.
JB: It’s because in Filme de Amor there are all these literary and pictorial clichés that border on pornographic. In other words, why is it called pornographic? And Bataille has this in his text, he makes very raw, very explicit discussions of things that are shocking for a prisoner world like ours. For him, Bataille, and for many others, it was something that gave him another feeling. He, as a man of society, a man of the world, also suffered from the guilt of that, but he knew that it was something like any other. All of his theories, both in the Story of the Eye and in The Solar Anus, talk about things that are quite innocent like desire, but that are considered an aberrant or immoral thing due to this difficulty of letting that sign transit with you; there is resistance. All these clichés from literary pornography I brought to Filme de Amor. Not only from Bataille, but also from the first texts in the Portuguese language, the Cartilha de Educação Erótica, old texts, from the 17th century, pornographic, very well written. In the critical comment I have here from Mária de Abreu Santa Cruz, he compares the prose of these texts with Francisco Manoel de Mello and Vieira. I put this in Filme de Amor too, at the beginning, with her reading the text on the phone. In other words, this entire repertoire of literary and artistic eroticism, which has very little or almost no eroticism itself, which is very diluted in everything.
I find it almost impossible to represent this truth of sexuality in the film. That is always a representation. The relationship, the sexual thing, is difficult or impossible to reproduce. All we do are approximations. You banning a pornographic film is pornography, the gesture of prohibiting, because it is a film like any other. Since cinema is cinema, it has a genre, like other genres. The fact that you cannot see that, or that disturbs you, although it is natural, due to society’s straitjacket, shows the degree of corporeal poverty in which you are, in which an elementary situation is capable of triggering censorship, putting someone in the chair because someone naked appears or something like that. Ruy Guerra made a film in 1962, Os Cafajestes, which was a scandal because a woman appeared naked on the beach. I consider all of this, in cinema, an aberration.
I made a film from 1980 to 81 which was Tabu, in which I gave a kind of contiguity to the meaning of “taboo”. Pornographic cinema, within the history of cinema, is a taboo cinema. Pornographic films have been made since silent cinema. There were pornographic films in 1894, even before the “invention of cinema”, they were already made using the kinetoscope. Pornographic cinema has existed at all times. I, therefore, wanted to include many references to pornographic films in Tabu. I managed to see a series of spectacular films – German, French – silent, from the 1920s. I found some magnificent shots in these films – shots that could be by Godard, Antonioni – and I put some of them in Tabu. This material, which could have been in the Cinematheque, was burned; the guy had cans and cans at home, he died and the family took everything, the only bits left were in Tabu. Spectacular film material, but here they didn’t even want to see it because it was a pornographic film. In other words, if it were cloak and dagger or western, people would accept it, but it cannot be pornographic, because there is no tranquility in the social contract that allows one to see that, it is something that is surrounded by all prohibitive and moral implications. In Filme de Amor I also included some of these shots, to insert this into a huge repertoire of censorship and prohibition of certain behaviors and certain expressions.
MZ: In Cinema Inocente (1979) you were already working with these ideas and this material.
JB: Yeah. I gave this ironic title to Cinema Inocente because these porn films that were made here were made by innocent cinema people, who knew nothing about cinema. They took the camera, put it in front of the woman, told her to take off her clothes and filmed it. There was nothing cinema about it, it was innocent cinema, as I called it. [laughs]
But in Cinema Inocente, returning to the issue of the separation of music and image, there is a great example of this, which is in a sequence shot when the camera is tied to a catwalk and crosses the Mangue River, rotating, without control, a blind camera. The song that plays there is by Noel Rosa, a dadaist, surrealist song called De babado em babado. It is a masterpiece of surrealism among us. Surrealism arrived in Brazil late. There were some poets who performed surrealism, such as Murilo Mendes and Jorge de Lima, but surrealism actually arrived in Brazil through a form of popular poetry, with Noel Rosa and Lamartine Babo. This song is like an improvisation, in a sudden musical format.
The scenes from censored films, from porn films, that I introduce in Cinema Inocente, are interesting due to the absence of cinema, the absence of any rules. They were films that did not make use of cinema.
The film is restricted to a bar where Brazilian filmmakers from Rio, who made pornochanchada, lived, who were old men, like Nilo Machado. He had a film that I really liked called A Psicose do Laurindo (1969), in which he filmed a guy watching a striptease show, and he put it together with the 1950 World Cup, with the people in Maracanã cheering for football. It was this group of filmmakers, older, people here from Rio, from Líder’s laboratory, who I put there at Cinema Inocente, it wasn’t the pornochanchada from São Paulo, that’s not there. Cinema Inocente is a local film, it has something that used to be called “sticking to the ground”. It’s made around the people who frequented that bar, made those porn films, sold those copies, it was a very local thing.
MZ: How does Marcel L’Herbier get in there? [laughs]
JB: In these films everyone has a kind of freedom and L’Herbier was a man who, despite being a great technician, had a lot of audacity for freedom. What I invented there was a way to pay homage to a man that I loved very much, which was Nunes Pereira, and I used him as if he were L’Herbier. It was a kind of tribute with another cover, I paid homage to a man and put another man’s cover on him. I stood there praising L’Herbier’s genius and him acting as if he were, speaking in French with that accent of his, from Maranhão, it’s a very beautiful thing. I think it’s a good moment in the film, because it has the pages of Cahiers with French avant-garde films from the 1920s, with Delluc, Dulac, Epstein, Gance and L’Herbier. The camera is rolling with them and L’Herbier appears, as if he were the representative of this, and at the same time it is Nunes, to whom I am paying homage. In A Agonia, Maria Gladys’ dress has the same pattern and the same cut as the El Dorado dancer’s dress, it’s the same outfit that a seamstress made just like it, it’s the L’Herbier that’s in A Agonia.
MZ: And the gun that Radar carries really belongs to James Stewart?
JB: No, nothing like that. [laughs] This is all invention. That film is actually fiction, there is no documentary in it. Radar never went to the United States, but he really liked American cinema, the ones you saw in the countryside, those ordinary cowboy films, American trash that showed in the countryside. His big idol was an actor called Alan Ladd, who he knew everything about, and it seems Alan Ladd wore a bracelet. So, I invented the story about the bracelet and the Winchester ’73 that he bought at auction, I invented all of that. [laughs] Everyone thought that Cinema Inocente was a documentary, even important people, who said to me: “Radar made fun of you, called you Pedrinho”. Like Radar would do that. [laughs] I even answer: “It’s not Pedrinho, it’s Julinho”. Radar despised me, saying he was tired. This was all a joke, but the guys believed it was really a documentary, as if I were filming this place for the first time.
MZ: It’s a very different film, a different form of fiction.
JB: It’s the principle of Flaherty’s Nanook (1922). Everything in Nanook is fiction. “Documentary about the South Pole, the life of the Eskimo”: that is fiction. He didn’t film anything that wasn’t staged, except the ice. “Come in here, sit down, light the fire.” The guy went there and did it. This is Cinema Inocente, everything is a fiction, a fiction of a documentary.
MZ: In my research, I found a news story about the making of the film, which said that you would play a “film buff” [Note: Portuguese, “rato de cinemateca”, literally a “cinemateque’s mouse”].
JB: Exactly, it’s a film about a guy who was making a documentary about a pornochanchada editor. I mean, a guy who actually went into the cinema, saw everything, to worry about a pornochanchada editor! It was a movie theater possum, it wasn’t a mouse! [laughs] And then I did that, I went into the editing room, took the microphone. But it was a syncopated riddle that no one in the circle deciphered, you know?
GLF: You mentioned Cahiers du Cinéma, did you read it a lot?
JB: I did, but Cahiers for me was mainly about the photographs. I had some difficulty reading the texts at the time, like those by Nöel Burch. I saw the criticism, but it wasn’t what impressed me, I was the choice of films and photographs. I have some old Cahiers, with yellow covers, but I was never a fanatical reader of this entire collection. I read, I followed Cahiers a lot, but I followed more the photography, the layout, the interviews they did. The theoretical part was less so, because it was written in French and they were complicated people. I learned a lot from the photographs and I gave importance to the films they selected, I knew there was a good selection. That was between 62, 63 and went on until the beginning of the 70s.
There was a cinema session at Maison de France, on Antônio Carlos Avenue. There were always French films, some previews, old films, I saw wonderful things there. It was in one of these sessions that I met Glauber. Next to the Maison, there was a spectacular bookstore, Livraria Francesa. I used to go there a lot and it was where they sold Cahiers. I was still starting to scratch my French, so I looked at magazines a lot, I saw books and covers a lot, I looked for photography and film magazines. Unfortunately, that bookstore there is gone.
Then, from a festival that, if I’m not mistaken, was the Venice Festival, Cahiers published for the first time a color cover of an American film that ended up winning an award. Truffaut was in the same competition. It was a guy who I don’t know if he made other films and they say he paid to have the film on the cover of Cahiers, one of the first color covers. If I’m not mistaken, it was at the Venice Festival in 66. [Note: The film mentioned here is “Chappaqua” (1966) by Conrad Rooks. Not only does it appear on the cover of issue 183 of Cahiers du Cinéma, it also fills the first 10 pages of the issue with advertising, something unusual for the magazine. The only citations to it are present in the “comments” section, in a short text, without a signature, with an extremely negative and ironic tone, in which it is recognized that “the strong point” of the film is its advertising campaign, “of beautiful colorful covers in specialized magazines”. A note at the end of the section indicates its collective authorship by J.-A Fieschi, S. Godet, J. Narboni et Y. Koichi.]
GLF: Around the time you went to the Cannes Festival with Cara a Cara (1967). Was it the first time you went to Europe to show a film?
JB: No, I did Cara a Cara from 66 to 67, I showed it at the Pesaro Festival in 67 or 68, I don’t remember. I also attended the Locarno Festival, the Berlin Festival, Karlovy Vary, Cannes and here at the Brasília Festival.
GLF: It was very close to May 68. What was your impression at that time?
JB: Face to Face was very poorly received at all the festivals. [laughs] In Pesaro, it was more or less.
GLF: It was a more open festival, too.
JB: It was, and there were two people there who were very kind to me. One was Jean Rouch, who wrote a thing, who liked the film. I think he liked it because I was young, I was 19 to 20 years old, I think it was generous. The other one, who didn’t like the film, but spoke about it fondly was Marco Bellocchio, who I had known for some time. He didn’t like the film, I’m sure, but he was generous, he was kind, he spoke highly of the film. At Cannes, there was a critic who really liked it, Marcel Martin, and who later liked even more Matou a Família e foi ao Cinema (1969), which went to Cannes the following year and was an event there. Labarthe came out of the cinema clapping his hands and calling people to come in and watch. I wasn’t there, that’s what a director from Manchete magazine, Justino Martins, told me, who called me and asked me to go to Cannes, saying that the film was very well received. I was already in England and didn’t go. So, in Cannes there was this thing, but in relation to May 68, no…
Face to Face was a cinema movie. It has its things there, let’s say, high schoolers, but it was already a cinema film, it had its clichés already well cut out, distinction between the clichés, but it wasn’t noticed at the time, although some people understood it very well. It was before May 68. In fact, all that literature that started to appear after May 68, I only learned about that later. I didn’t know those texts that came out there, by Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Face to Face had no apparent influence on this side. With Matou a Família e foi ao Cinema and O Anjo Nasceu (1969) it was different. Not that it had any influence from May 68, but there was a sign that things would prosper. Every film, every creation, many writers, philosophers, art historians have spoken about it, has the influence of their time, the straitjacket, the custom of the time in which it was made. It’s very difficult to do something out of your time, almost impossible, because you have no reference for it and you will only recognize it later.
The other day I watched Matou a Família [Note: The film was shown at the Midnight Session organized by Estação Net Botafogo, in Rio, on March 24, 2023] and I saw how the film was linked to that moment. That was all a reaction against the time and for the time, which is there. In fact, seeing this time how the film owes to the two actresses, Renata Sorrah and Márcia Rodrigues. Sorrah hadn’t done anything yet and Márcia Rodrigues had made one or two frustrating films. I saw how I owe the film to them and how they knew how to take it and had courage with it, the film is owed to them because I found someone who did that, pushing the limits of the time.
The sign that remains, in that entire interval, from 1969 to now, in that long interval, what survived there was a sign of something that came later, which is the question of the plot, the characters, and even the author himself, remaining in the background. What takes center stage there is the cinema itself, its original shell. There is a cinematic disturbance. The enlarged 16mm, in which an aboriginal force passes through, and which dominates you. There’s this movie thing there. Cinema is becoming a protagonist. In modern cinema, even the most conventional directors made films in which cinema appeared. That was the sign of Matou a Família.
O Anjo Nasceu and Matou a Família were made in 15 days. The last day of filming for The Angel Was Born was the first day of filming for Matou a Família. O Anjo Nasceu came with a more recent disturbance. Matou a Família, even so, still has one foot in Cara a Cara, with the fragmentation of the story, several things. The line is more radical, much more advanced. But O Anjo Nasceu is even more pathological, it has a more uncontrollable force, it is possessed by an aberrant force, a strange thing, that came out in one piece, like a tapeworm, a roundworm. It’s much stronger, but they both pass all of this into the background; the foreground is in this hermeneutics of space, the original shell, which is cinema, the film.
MZ: When you made these two films, did you already have a sense of breaking with what you had done before and with what Cinema Novo was doing?
JB: Yes, but there is very little awareness. People say “I did it consciously”, but “consciously” must be 10%, 15% of the thing. I did it, I wanted to, I felt at a dead end in relation to Cara a Cara. It’s a film that had too much control. As it was a first film, I wanted to control the cliché, show it in a childish way, let’s say, that I knew how to do. [laughs] I took three or four films to reproduce the clichés, recreate those clichés. I did this very carefully and, precisely, that was the problem, because I needed to get rid of it. You do it, it’s great, but you have to find a way to get rid of it. How can I get rid of a spectacular photograph like that? It was beautiful, but I needed to get out of it. I had this realization shortly after I finished Face to Face and went to Europe. There I saw, marginally, in the cinema, at the Festival, some 16mm newsreel films enlarged to 35mm. Whoever made the presentation apologized, saying it was bad because it was grainy. When I saw it, I thought my salvation was there. I need to get into this, to get the film out of that normality. Saying that Cara a Cara is normal is a distortion. [laughs] But I needed to get the film out of that control. I looked for it and, when I saw it, I thought: “I’m going to make an enlarged 16mm film.” In Brazil, this wasn’t done.
I’ll tell you a story. After leaving the Cannes Film Festival, in May 69, we went to an unforgettable dinner at Miklos Jancsó’s house. A good director, of whom I had already seen two or three films. He became a very good friend of mine. He met me in Pesaro and was one of the very rare people who liked Cara a Cara. He said to me: “I liked your film. Very good. You are a person who believes in cinema.” He gave me good compliments. He had made a beautiful film, called Sirocco d’hiver (1969), with Jacques Charrier, and had presented another very good film at Cannes, called Ah! Ça ira (1969) [Note: French titles of “Sirokkó” and “Fényes szellek”, respectively]. In the latter, there was a spectacular thing, where the girls and boys were all naked, it was a spectacular thing, which caught attention and was a bit scandalous. Leaving there, Jancsó said he was going to have a party and invited us to his house. It was me, Glauber, everyone. The actresses from his film were there, all in transparent clothes, it was a moment of great joy there. Jancsó came to me and asked if I was already going to Brazil and I told him: “I’m going to make two films in 16mm and black and white”. He turned to me and said: “Good luck. You’re getting fucked”. [laughs] He was going to do the opposite, a co-production with Hollywood in Tel Aviv. He thought: “Wow, the guy is going to make a film in 16mm, black and white, in Brazil. This is the way to the grave.” [laughs]
I had this in my head, I came to Brazil and did it. On the way back, I took a ticket from Paris to New York. There, I went to Kodak and bought a box with I don’t know how many boxes of 16mm double-x negatives, black and white, and brought it to Brazil to make these two films. I finished the filming without seeing any copy and sent it to São Paulo, where there was the only laboratory that tested blowup from 16mm to 35, Rex Filme in São Paulo. I sent all the material there, which together must have been about 3 hours. They enlarged it 3, 4 times, and the owner of the laboratory called me to say: “Your material is lost, because you had this material developed in black and white in Rio, in a small laboratory” – the only laboratory in Rio that developed film 16mm, on the way up to Santa Tereza, on Rua Alice – “the laboratory developed it with a dirty bath and the negative was covered in dust”. He sent a piece of the negative for me to see and everything was full of black dots. I went to São Paulo, spoke to a technician there and he said there was a way, which was to polish the negative. This statement alone is a monstrosity: polishing the negative means ending the negative. The guy was right and it improved almost 100%, but the polishing highlighted the grain and that was spectacular. I wanted to enlarge from 16mm to 35 to enhance the grain, but that ended up being huge; the grain would already appear, it became huge. That is the end of O Anjo Nasceu, that pointillist painting.
This was a structural thing that saved the film, which started with a cinema operation, the polishing of the negative, which brought out the grain, and that was precisely the important thing about the film. The negative is a paste where each micro-grain has a little bit of light, which forms the whole of the photogram. In other words, the photogram is made up of millions of micro-grains and each micro-grain has a light. So, cinema has to be seen from the grain, because it is from the grain that it is organized! This was the idea we had and, later, at Belair, we wanted to keep it and it was not possible, which was to do the same thing with Cuidado Madame and Sem Essa, Aranha (1970), so that the grain would pop, but it was not possible, there was no production capacity to do so. But this was a distinctive thing about both Matou a Família and O Anjo Nasceu, which brought cinema to the foreground.
VD: You have been working, if I’m not mistaken since Cleópatra (2007), with Rodrigo Lima, who co-wrote A Longa Viagem do Ônibus Amarelo (2023) with you. I wanted to know how this partnership started.
JB: I already knew him from home, because he was married to Noa [Bressane’s daughter], but it was on Cleópatra that we started working. I was very lucky to have found Rodrigo because he has practical experience in editing, a great command, and is very sensitive, an artist. In this last film, it wasn’t because of knowledge, but because of nature itself. A Longa Viagem do Ônibus Amarelo is its own film, it is not a film about other films. That is a copy of 80 hours that went into making that film. It has no reference to anything, it has reference to itself. It’s a shuffling of fictions, it’s a chess of fictions. I did it with him. Every collaboration is mysterious, as a great writer said, and it is true. You always need to have someone you talk to, who can do this with you, and Rodrigo was someone with whom I found the possibility of doing this together, of letting go and concentrating on an object. He’s a film director who has the same concerns I have. Every collaboration is central, everyone who collaborates with you, if you stop collaborating, there will be a hole there, in every sense. All collaborations have the same value. It’s like a wall that you break down: if you remove a brick, everything falls down. There is no frivolous collaboration or one greater than the other; all are necessary. They all have the same strength, the same mystery, the same indecipherable action of collaborating, which is the most difficult thing in the world, achieving something with someone, a collaboration. What there is not between us is communication; there is an abyss that separates. So, sometimes finding a way out of this abyss, someone who is able to come out and see what you do, is very difficult. I was lucky to find Rodrigo, someone who is capable of this development.
VD: You seem to maintain a regular filming crew.
JB: That’s the question of the power of repetition. Repetition is an important thing, you only learn from repetition. We need to be repeating it all the time. Repetition always repeats itself in a different way. It would be a fabulous thing if you could always keep the same crew, but that’s not always the case. You renew here and there and perhaps there is a repetition in the whole, in the spirit of the thing. In this sense, I always try to surround myself with people with whom I have had some experience before and the experience is always renewed. When you go to do it, you accumulate experience, but you are going to do something else. So, if you have already accumulated some experience, it is more possible to do something else than if you have no experience at all. Renewal depends on repetition. You only renew what you repeat. You don’t innovate from nothing and keep innovating, that doesn’t exist. From your previous step, you can take the next one.
GLF: In an interview, you talk about being aware that cinema is an industrial art. Now, you have demonstrated that you also have this desire to escape the constraints of the industry. I was thinking that you find in the family environment, in working with people close to you, a way of bringing what is industrial and beneficial, creating your own industrial model.
JB: You put it in a very idealized and happy way, as if what you said was true, but it’s not like that. It would be good for you to always be familiar, always bringing together the same people, but that’s not the case. Of course, cinema is an industrial thing, it always has been, but that’s precisely why there are gaps for you to do things differently. Cinema took a wrong turn. They made cinema what was not meant to be made. Cinema was not supposed to be industrial art. Cinema was a way of understanding things, understanding the world. It was a way for you to perceive thought. A way that could give a vision of that essential thing, which is to see what is inscribed in what cannot be seen. This is the difficult question of cinema. Cinema was a way for you to think. Vision was something you had, an organ that allowed you to be outside of yourself. Cinema was a way of, let’s say, reproducing this view in a more intellectual way. Cinema was a scientific invention. They say: “cinema started at the fair”; no, the cinema ended at the fair, that’s where it started to end. When people started paying to see films, that’s what resulted in that. It wasn’t made for that, but to perceive things in your thoughts. It was a radical instrument of self-transformation. What we want and need is to be someone else; you don’t want to be you, you want to be someone else. Cinema offered you a radical opportunity for this, by its very nature, something that crosses the arts, the sciences, your own life. So, it was an instrument of self-transformation.
You needed to know a little about poetry, literature, music, painting, mathematics, geometry, chemistry, physics. Cinema demands this. Today, with electronics, even more so. You need to make an effort to acquire this. It is not a magical object that falls from the sky, as in Voltaire’s story. You need to make an effort to seek this and this effort that is transformation. You start to have things you didn’t have. The learning effort, you learn to study physics, chemistry, history, mathematics, psychoanalysis, your life, your suffering, everything that accumulates. This is the strong point of cinema, providing you with a tool for self-transformation. Today, unlike industrial art, through the transformation of industrial art itself, you can make a film with very little. In other words, that cinema patent was broken. The industry itself broke that, allowed you to do things with simple cameras, and familiarized cinema, made everyone familiar with it, which before was something that was closed in a studio, with technology that you not only had access to, how I couldn’t handle it. This familiarity with cinema is important.
You want to be someone else, always, but in some sense you depend on someone else. Without each other, you do not exist. You need others to organize yourself too. The film depends on all these others. You get people who are familiar with that and can group together there. In this sense, it is “family” for me: the photographer, the editor, the person who elaborates the first thoughts with you, as is the case of Rosa, the case of João, the case of Tande [Note: wife, grandson and daughter of Júlio, respectively], where the first things happen. Then, it’s the familiarity of the whole: the actors, the set designer. In this sense, familiarity with cinema is important; not in a social sense, but something around which you bring everyone together, where everyone can have their contribution to it. Cinema, in this sense, is the heir of studio painting, where the picture was made by many hands. You arrived and there was one who did the lines, another specialized in coloring the waves, another did the frame, another did the varnish. Cinema is like that too and depends on many hands. What you do in the film is what is outside. What is on the field will only make sense of being there if you are aware that what is important is what is outside the frame. This means that all opinions, influences, participation count. It’s like group psychoanalysis, let’s put it roughly.
[A storm hits and a loud sound of thunder interrupts the conversation.]
JB: Here, in the past, 60 or 70 years ago, there was a terreiro [Note: place of worship of Umbanda and Candomblé religions in Brazil], near Morro Dois Irmãos, owned by a pai de santo [Note: a priest of Umbanda or Candomblé] called Nilo. When there was this lightning, this thunder, he would make a drum beat up there. Now I only heard the lightning. You saw that there was an echo, but there was no drum. The old Nilo is gone. Here was an ancient sacred place, where an important ceremony took place. These two hills, one is shaped like a pyramid and the other like a cone. For the Tupinambá Indians who lived here, it was the day of the dance they performed in honor of the moon and the sun, Tupã and Jaci. The women danced in this part down here and the men up there, during the entire cycle from the full moon to the rise of the sun. It began when the moon appeared and ended when the sun appeared; not the sun’s rays, but the sun itself. There is a Capuchin priest who wrote a text about this, he saw the Tupinambás do this here, in front of all these lagoons that were Leblon and facing the sea, which they called Ipanema, which is the water that you don’t drink, because it is salted. They drank the water from the various water sources. This hill has a very strong ancestry. All these stones have it. The Leme stone is an ancestral, prehistoric stone. It reminds of the world in the 16th century, in the form of caravels, but it is from much earlier. All these things are linked to a very large ancestry, which is still alive in them.
MZ: I wanted to ask a question about dates. I’ve read in several places that you and Sganzerla met at the 1969 Brasília Film Festival…
JB: No, I met Sganzerla in 65. He had made Documentário (1965). A spectacular film he made with Andrea Tonacci, which is Godard’s first manifestation in Brazil. Masterful. I met Rogério there. Then, I met him here in Rio, we were together. I went to the filming of O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (1968), I was present on several days of filming, in which Helena Ignez was an actress. At the Brasília Festival, it was something else. At that Festival, that’s when we got together, it was a kind of opposing coincidence. Rogério made a film called A Mulher de Todos (1969) and I made O Anjo Nasceu. They are two very different things, with one thing in common: they are both experimental. It was there when there was a magical meeting, because Rogério was very impressed with O Anjo Nasceu and I was very impressed with A Mulher de Todos, very impressed, I even thought it was better than O Bandido da Luz Vermelha. He told me that O Anjo Nasceu was one of the best films he had seen.
I’ve told this story before: I was in my room, early in the morning, the doorbell rang and it was him, alone. He came in, talked about O Anjo Nasceu, I talked about A Mulher de Todos and we kept talking, talking, talking, until the morning. Talking, drinking, smoking, and we left there with Belair. I said: “The two of us are going to do something in the same spirit of what we talked about here” and we did. The meeting from where Belair came from was in Brasília, not that I only knew him there, but it was a really rare meeting because I never imagined that he would like O Anjo Nasceu, nor that I would be touched that way by A Mulher de Todos. I thought it was a brilliant masterpiece when I watched it, better than O Bandido da Luz Vermelha, much better.
It was this mutual love for each other’s work that brought us together there and Belair came from there, because we had a bit of the same thing at Belair about getting out of that straitjacket, especially the political issue that also existed at the time, which was influencing. There was a certain difficulty of expression, of freedom of relationship with the film. It was a magical conversation and we left there with Belair. I came to Rio and expanded the contract I had with Severiano Ribeiro, which was to present a film, Divina Dama – Eu amei Greta Garbo, which was replaced by four films. I suggested to Ribeiro that we make four films, I would make two and Rogério two, and Rogério accepted immediately. The two of us, each one produced in his own way, Cuidado Madame and Sem Essa, Aranha.
MZ: I’ve also seen you talking about the way this work was done being a “very fine” and “very delicate” production. What do you mean by these terms, in this context?
JB: It was delicate in the sense of the way we approach cinema, that was what was new there. There was a certain sophistication in relation to the use of material and staff. That production was also a luxury, because we had everything, unlike what became known as “marginal cinema”, because we had money for the production. Now, it was the films that were made in an experimental way, this is what made them “marginal”, as if they were developed in the bathtub at home. But on the contrary, they were films made with great craftsmanship, very well photographed, in 35mm. I filmed and edited it at Éclair, in Paris, there was very good laboratory work. It was sophisticated in that sense, so we were able to undress and free ourselves from the weight of things, the cross of cinema, production, teams. Also because I had already made 3 feature films, 5 films; Rogério had also made 5 films. We already had a practice and the first thing we realized was that reducing it changed the texture, that the way of producing it was already the result. The way we organized ourselves, the result was more or less already there. So, in that sense, it was a very big advance, which was difficult at that time, and perhaps even today, to understand where the sophisticated side was at Belair, not only in terms of a more sophisticated repertoire, elements, music and so on, but sophisticated like a production. Transform a tube radio into a transistor radio; go from a steamboat to an atomic submarine. Realize this possibility, reduce that long heavy tail that cinema brought, of many, many things, even before this radical modification of cameras and devices. Nagra already existed, but not what it has today; It was something that anticipated what we have today. It demystified the thing about quality, standards. It was seen that this was all just a defense of class, let’s put it that way, and not of art.
VD: After that moment, when you had this very strong affinity, your careers took paths that I consider to be quite different. I wanted to know what you would have to say about Rogério’s later films, such as O Signo do Caos (2003), his last film.
JB: We are very different people, who have a very different relationship with things, of sensitivity, of expression, of language. Rogério followed the path he followed and made it to the end, he did very well. His last film is brilliant, O Signo do Caos. Rogério’s change was earlier. When he started, he was a director who could have made big films, big productions. He had a talent for it. Belair modified Rogério, and O Anjo Nasceu. When he saw that, he took a step to the other side. He was going to make, after A Mulher de Todos, a film called O Rei dos Ratos, which was a super production. I met with Alfredo Palácio and Galante, who was a producer, here in Santos Dumont, and they had made a lot of money with O Bandido da Luz Vermelha and A Mulher de Todos, they were even importing a camera to make this super film, but Rogério gave up. When we talked about the Belair business, he said: “I’m going to leave all that aside, I’m carrying a very heavy cinema jalopy”. Belair’s brilliant photographer was Renato Laclete, who created the light for the films with a camera; he didn’t have a light meter. Even here things were simplified. Rogério, when he saw this possibility, went headlong into it, so much so that all his films were there, he started to worry more about the materiality of the film, with the language. It was his path to the end. He made two or three brilliant films, O Signo do Caos, Nem Tudo É Verdade is spectacular, Tudo É Brasil too. From an Orson Welles interview, from a voice on a tape, he made a film. This is an intersemiotic translation. He took the images of that there. All of Rogério’s films are spectacular, without exception. He followed the path he carved with Belair, on the issue of the materiality of language, he went all the way with that. Not because he didn’t have money, because he did it with little; none of that. This is a wrong device. He did it because it was what he wanted to do. If it weren’t like that, it wouldn’t be like this. Everyone in Brazilian cinema was stuck in time, delayed in time, precisely because of this. They standardized a type of production and began to live according to that production; no longer about the film, but about the budget: the film had to cost so much so that you could also have money to live on. This standardized the films and cinema froze, remaining the way it was afterwards. Rogério, on the contrary. He was an artist, too, who had his own nature dragged into this fate. He was a great director, a great director. A very, very big, very big film artist. That’s it. Anything else, gentlemen?
GLF: A quick yes or no question: have you met Godard?
JB: I saw Godard. I never talked to him. I saw Godard giving a series of lectures at the Venice Festival in 1966 or 67, when he re-screened La Femme Marieé (1964), which had premiered a few years earlier. I watched him give two conferences in Venice about this film, but that was it. I don’t remember a single word he said. I remember his figure, speaking with a certain lisp. I saw him this time and never saw him again.
MZ: What about Straub?
JB: I met Straub. [laughs] I met Straub when I was old, in 2002 at the Turin Festival. Poor guy, it was quite an unhappy festival for him, because they paid tribute to him, he took copies of his own films, there was a fire and they burned all the copies. [laughs] Straub was like crazy, but they had other copies, so the films weren’t lost. He was another guy who was also quite tormented and did a curious thing. Straub had such strength in his thing that he couldn’t do anything else, he could only do that, he could only do it that way. In fact, all the shots in his films are made from the same point of view. He would put the camera here and shoot the entire film with the camera here: there, here, here and there, without ever taking the camera away. There is a certain anguish that arises, an artistic anguish, so to speak, that occurs in Straub’s films, when you see that he can’t do anything else. Which is pretty strong; When you have a force you can’t get rid of, that’s an important artistic symptom. I met him at that festival, I met him three or four more times. He was a very tormented man, but he made a film that caught my attention when I saw it, right at the beginning, which was the Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967). I had seen a previous film of his, Nicht versöhnt (1965), Not Reconciled, which wasn’t much, but Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach impressed me. I saw this film in Berlin, I saw it with Saraceni and Helena Ignez. This film is impressive, very strong, very interesting, very new. He found a different cinematographic format, he exhausted the sequence shot, which is something that has existed since silent cinema, but he did one after the other and it was very good. Afterwards, he made many other films. I saw several of his films in a retrospective, all inside that thing. All very good, but from a man tortured by imprisonment, who couldn’t get out of there. This is interesting.
Rio de Janeiro, April 30, 2023.
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