We wanted to express ourselves through a cinema that was doable, that was possible. Edgard Navarro

Edgard Navarro’s “possible cinema” was born out of the 1970s “countercultural, Tropicalian stew.” A former aspiring writer, singer, and actor, influenced by Torquato Neto and Rogério Duprat, the then-young engineering student from Bahia discovered domestic Super-8 recordings as an ideal vehicle to do what he wanted to: “mess with language” and “send a message” which, even then, was already anarchic and iconoclastic.

Armed with that spirit—and virtually nothing else—, he created some of the most irreverent films in the history of Brazilian visual arts. Videobrasil will feature historical short films by the director of the feature film Eu me lembro (2005), grand winner of the Brasília Festival, from the delirious fiction work Alice no país das mil novilhas (1976) to Talento demais, an acid documentary film on cinema from Bahia (1995).

artists

Works

Interview Antonio Risério, 2007

Antonio Risério: You started out making cinema in Super 8, opting for something easier, cheaper, and lighter. However, at that time, back in the 1970s, there was a certain commitment and association between Super 8 and counterculture.

Edgard Navarro: Exactly. We wanted to film something that went beyond birthday parties, weddings, the domestic stuff Super 8 was invented for and that anyone could do, because it was fully automatic. But we had a message to send, we wanted to mess with language. Super 8 facilitated this, it had few resources, but it was affordable. We also wanted to subvert the uses it was put to back then. 

You can see other languages in the films, like music, Tropicália. 

Indeed. I was steeped in this countercultural, Tropicalian stew, it was a very powerful, potent reference for us, it represented the dream, the possible dream, it was a way of perpetuating this thing we had then, that was coming into its own, and we wanted to throw ourselves into the trip. We were militants in a way, but not like the leftist militants, whose militancy was connected with something more, shall we say, “serious”. Though I reckon our militancy was serious in its own right, it had an anarchistic feel to it, an incurable zaniness. 

So experimentalism in cinema was experimentalism in life too. 

Absolutely. We were sketching something out, and the sketch was part of the poem, we knew there was no way back and that we probably wouldn’t last long. We could be run over just around the next corner, or something awfully terrible could happen to us, or we might even do ourselves in, as suicide permeated all those magical and fantastical relations. 

In a sense, the left was the norm of divergence and counterculture the divergence from the norm (laughter). 

Perfect. It was divergence from the norm. We wanted to express ourselves through a cinema that was doable, that was possible; we didn’t have much money, but we had enough to buy some rolls of film. Super 8 gave you that much freedom, which went hand-in-glove with the freedom of existence itself—of being. That was all that mattered to us.

And that madhouse thing about Super 8? 

“The lunatic’s place is in the asylum.” Because madness was right there, up-close, I saw it. We flirted with it. We flirted with madness and death. I think I just about escaped being committed; in fact, I even asked my brother to have me committed. One day I said to him, “look, I’m about to lose control”. I used it later, there’s this beautiful scene inspired by a work by Arthur Bispo do Rosário, a text inspired by his own writings, in which he says: “Lock me up, lock me up because I’m about to turn into king. If you don’t lock me up I’m going to turn into king, I’m becoming a king, lock me up, lock me up”. He was aware that he was going over to the other side and he needed to be put away so as not to endanger himself or others. 

Did the relationship with counterculture apply across the board?

Yeah, man, counterculture just had to be, and it was the thing, as far as we were concerned. We wanted to be immersed in it. Young as we were then, we felt we were part of something rebellious (laughter), we wanted to be anti, we wanted to blow the lid on the Emperor’s nakedness, rub salt into the wound. 

Edgard, what about literature? 

I’ve had my readings, nothing methodical, nothing systematic: Jorge Amado, Eça [de Queiroz], Dostoyevsky, Allan Poe, and, of course, Lewis Carroll. That’s where it starts, isn’t it? In that mixture of fairy tale and smut. Alice is a smut story, for adults anyway, working the realm of loss of innocence, with the thinly veiled paedophilia, the insinuation. I also read those other poems, based on word play, that drain reason of all sense, where it’s all intuitive, totally exploding the structure of language and thought, of logic. All logic has to be pulverised. Cinema was also a victim of my insertion into that psychedelic world. Because I needed to disassemble it, mess it up, and show how messed up my head was. The words can go fuck themselves. Logic can go fuck itself. There’s man back in the 19th century and he’s already given me this powerful, super-human tip-off that I’ll keep with me till the end of my days, that I’ve kept with me to midlife.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 128 - 129.

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