Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Interview

Eduardo de Jesus: How did you discover and become interested in experimental cinema? Was it through your contact with concrete poetry?

Carlos Adriano: My first artistic interest was in poetry. And “not just any poetry”, but “out-of-place poetry” (as Augusto de Campos said in a poem). But the discovery of experimental cinema did not come from concrete poetry, which cited people like Eisenstein and Godard, but not what we would call experimental film in the strict sense today. Contact with the poetry, translations, and essays of Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari was crucial to my formation, teaching me the repertoire of rigour and radicalness and sharpening my taste for experimentation, which I was already cultivating. Perhaps what truly led me to experimental film was something more general: Ezra Pound’s advice to the youth: “curiosity”. If you develop an interest in something and dedicate yourself to it, then connections and references will appear. The remotest fact I can remember, crucial to my engagement with cinema, was a showing of Godard’s Le Mépris. It was 1981. This extraordinary film impressed me greatly, for both its theme and treatment. However, looking back prospectively today, I think that what impressed me as much, or perhaps even more, than the film itself was the conditions of the screening. It was a film club, and there on the table they used as a box office, beside the book of tickets and the money box, there were pieces of film. The viewer was warned in advance that the showing would be lousy because of the copy, which was literally in shreds, and that the film might not even run through to the end. The idea lodged in memory that the film was going to disintegrate during the projection. This might have something to do with my films on the rare artefacts of Brazilian cultural memory. 

Your theoretical production stands out for its rigorous research into experimental cinema, promoting a wider-ranging debate through the circulation of new information. Did your curatorship of Experimental Russian Cinema (2003) and Peter Kubelka (2002) serve as exercises in reflection? In what initial movement and to what degree does this activity dialogue with your own artistic and theoretical output?

All of my curatorial projects are only done with Bernardo Vorobow, the producer of my films. A notable programme curator, Vorobow was the director of the Friends of the Cinematheque Society during its more heroic phase. He created and directed the legendary cinema sector of the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo. He was invited to organise the Brazilian Cinematheque’s department of dissemination and promotion. In addition to the generosity of socialising pleasure and knowledge, curatorship allows for the development of both method and study. With the Kubelka project, we went to Vienna to get to know the artist better. Conversations, interviews, and repeated viewings of his films ended up “demanding” that we set the experience down in book form. I like watching films. And naturally this is part of the formation of any artist, though I cannot detect any particular influences on my own production. Curatorship can provide the critic with material for reflection. I believe that theoretical work has more to do with artistic production, in the sense of trying to investigate the creative process. 

Augusto de Campos defines your cinema as “cinepoem” as opposed to “cinesameness”. How would you define your production and to what degree do your films dialogue with Brazilian poetry, literature, and memory? 

I thought about studying architecture and history at university before opting for cinema. Added to the broader formation afforded by concrete poetry and ideological curiosity, interdisciplinary dialogue is almost a natural given. As a matter of temperament I don’t feel comfortable theorising about my own work, though I can, thanks to my academic research. I feel a certain awkwardness when I write about experimental cinema (like in the Caderno Videobrasil) and I hesitate to mention myself. In terms of dialogue, I prefer to think about the ideas my interlocutors have of my work. Tied-in with the synopses in this catalogue, I’ve had the honour of receiving certain depositions. In the interdisciplinary context you mention, I found Caetano Veloso’s statement very interesting, for example, when he says: “His films are made for the viewer-artist, that is, they make the viewer truly see an artist. And they make a difference to the critical perspective on our cinema as a whole”. I think that investigations are irreducible to the language of cinema, even when it dialogues with other disciplines and lives this transition caused by the digital impact. At the risk of simplification, I could say that I’m interested in working upon obscure material vestiges of Brazilian culture according to the structure of the audiovisual device and the aesthetic of shock or enchantment.

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. 104 a p. 105.