Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Rafael França_ "A Radical Experience in Video Art" A Radical Experience in Video Art The first generation of Brazilian artists to dedicate themselves systernatically or sporaclicaily to video cropped up in the '70s. lt seems that the first Brazilian to publicly show works of video-art was Antônio Dias, but Dias showed his works in ltaly where he lived at the time. Critics all seem to agree that video, seen as a medium for esthetic expression, made its official appearance in Brazil in 1975 when two large shows of Brazilian video tapes were held. These shows featured the works of artists from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and were held in São Paulo and in Philadelphia.This first wave of video artists came to be known as the pioneer generation. lt is common knowledge that as of the mid '60s, many artists attempted to break away from the marketing and esthetic schemes of easel painting, seeking more dynamic materials with which to give form to their plastic ideas. Among the various alternatives proposed, one consisted of seeking material for innovative esthetic experiences in the technologies created by the image-generating industries as is the case of photography, cinema (Super-8, 16 mm), and video. Video was given preference due to its low production cost, its absolute independence of development and sound labs - which during the period of military dictatorship served as production-inspection centers - and above all, due to the fleeting and anamorphic characteristics of the electronic image, more suitable for plastic treatment. This preference for the electronic medium in the quest for alternatives in the expression of creative ideas was to encourage the appearance of the esthetic phenomenon of video-art in the Brazilian context. In Brazil, the whole first generation of video creators was made up of names already well known, or in the process of becoming well known, in the universe of the plastic arts.This was the case of names such as Antônio Dias, Anna Bella Geiger, José Roberto Aguilar, lvens Machado, Letícia Parente, Sônia Andrade, Regina Silveira, Júlio Plaza, Paulo Herkenhoff, Regina Vater, Fernando Cocchiarale, Mary Dritschel, Paulo Bruscky, and so many others. Video-art was thus already born as an integral part of the project of expansion of the plastic arts, as a medium among other media, but in the artist's creative process it never came to be seen as exclusive. At times it was even difficult to understand video art works outside of the overall context of the author's work. There was as yet no attempt made to explore the possibilities of a language actually inherent to video, except in one isolated case or another, at times even in an accidental manner. This situation was only to change a little later, when a new generation, more committed to exploration of the rhetorical resources of the electronic image, finally appeared on the scene.This was to be the generation of Rafael França. However, França occupies an intermediate position within the history of Brazilian video art, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a transient position. On one hand, he is an artist who is out of place in relation to the Brazilian video-art movement since he is a "gaúcho" (from the State of Rio Grande do Sul), and therefore extrinsic to the Rio-São Paulo axis that featured the greatest concentration of Brazilian video-art production. França carried out a sizable portion of his videographic work in Chicago where he initially went to study and later to teach. In addition, he is a contemporary of the second generation of Brazilian video, known more generically as the generation of independent video. The horizon of this generation is no longer the sophisticated circuit of museums and art galleries, but the mass universe of television and the attempt to conquer a more extensive public - a public not necessarily made up of initiates or specialists. Quite symptomatically, this second wave of artists was opposed to the video-art of the pioneers due to its tendency to feature documentaries and social themes. However, França never bowed down passively to the generation of independents. He staunchly retained his critical view of television, and like the whole pioneer generation, he felt that video was something quite different, something along the line of a significantly dense and radical operation that, without concessions, could never penetrate household screens. França was also skelptical about the main divulgation circuit set up by the independents - that of the video festivals - which he found lacking in seriousness, very little concerned with esthetic concepts, and more interested in revealing talents to the market. Although he appeared later than the pioneer generation - which soon abandoned video and went on to other plastic experiments - França was one of the few who remained faithflul to his basic principles and carried on with his tradition throughout the '80s. Actually, most of the works produced by the first generation consisted basically of registering the artists' performance gestures. The fundamental device of the first Brazilian video consisted nearly exclusively of the artist-camera confrontation. To exemplify, in one of the most disturbing works of the '70s, artist Letícia Parente embroidered the words "Made in Brazil" on the soles of her own feet pointed at the camera in a big close-up. In a certain sense, the experience of the Brazilian pioneers echoes a certain American video circle of the same period, represented by people such as Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Peter Campus, whose work, as Rosalind Krauss noted at the time, consisted of placing the artist's body between two machines (the camera and the screen), to produce an instantaneous image, like that of Narcissus viewing himself in a mirror. No one did a better job of carrying on the esthetic project of the pioneers - formal simplicity, moderate use of technology - "narcissistic" insertion of the image of the actual artist, public self-exhibition - than Rafael França. As was the case in nearly all the work of the first generation, the main character of França's videos is almost always he himself, either featured personally as an actor, or projecting himself in another. In video, França found a suitable medium to meditate and speculate on his own interior conflicts, above all, on his greatest obsession - the fatality of death. His work, of a quite personal nature, was also centered on a dramatic self-questioning as to the issue of homosexuality. Perhaps it could be said that "Without Fear of Vertigo" occupies a strategic place in his work. In this video, França himself and several American and Brazilian friends discuss experiences of suicide and of facing death, exactly at a moment (1987) when AIDS gradually begins to appear as a scourge, but a scourge that, up to that time, was restricted to the homosexual community. At the end of the same work, the artist shows the assumed police questioning of Peter Whitehall, condemned to five years in prison in the United States for having collaborated in the suicide of his companion,Yann Bondy. França died of AIDS in 1991 after having presented us with one of the most authentic testimonials of his faithfulness to himself. His last video, "Prelude to an Announced Death" (1991), finished only a few days prior to his death, is a true celebration of the values that guided his life, values that he never relinquished, not even in those moments of greatest agony of his illness. In the video, França himself exchanges caresses with his companion, Geraldo Rivello, while the names of all his Brazilian and American friends who died of AIDS appear on the screen and the sound track features a dilacerating interpretation of La Traviata sung by Brazilian soprano Bidu Saião, recorded in 1943. The last thing that appears on the video is the text: "Above all they had no fear of vertigo", which clearly links Without to Prelude. lf on one hand França carried on in the '80s the esthetic project of the pioneers in terms of existential posture, radical nature of the undertaking, and refusal to be subordinated to market values, on the other hand, he was also a pioneer in breaking away from this project in as regards its semiotic indifference, its aversion to issues related to the rhetoric of the medium and a certain merely instrumental concept of video (video as a mere recording device). In fact, França was one of the first Brazilian video producers to devote himself seriously to the expressive media of video and to point out creative ways to organize plastic and acoustic ideas in terms of suitability to the medium. This concern was never marginal in his work, despite the fact of the semantic aspects, so strong and imposing, often leaping more emphatically to the forefront, obscuring his innovations on the syntactic level. lt must be kept in mind that França, besides being a producer, was also a researcher of electronic media: he taught, wrote for newspapers and art journals, handled the curatorship of video-art exihibitions, and it is impossible to imagine that all this metalinguistic activity had no repercussion on his work. On the contrary, França's ideas about the expressive potential of the video contaminated not only his own work, but the work of many of his contemporaries of the independent video generation as well. lt could even be said that several generations of Brazilian video-artists developed thanks to the ideas and courses that he pointed out. Even now, França's videos constitute one of the best repertoires of creative ideas ever made in Brazil, and could be serving as a source of inspiration to new generations, if it weren't for the fact that everything that is good in our poor colonized culture is immediately relegated to the underground. Let us take a look at an eloquent example. Ever since the origins of video-art in the '60s, one of the most complicated discussions, and which to date has not been entirely resolved, has to do with the problem of fiction in the electronic medium. There are those who have defended the idea that video is not a suitable medium for narrative proposals, an idea which, although it may be debatable on the theoretic level, is corroborated by the effective practice of the medium. Actually in its slightly less than forty years of history, video art accumulated scant narrative experiences truly worthy of attention, while television, on the other hand, demonstrated that the narrative form (serials, soap operas) proposed for the small screen were never really more than mere stylizations or dilutions of models provided by the big screen, the movie industry. One of the richest features of the work of Rafael França is exactly the experimentation of creative alternatives for videographic fiction. lt could even be said that, with the exception exactly of the two works mentioried above - Prelude and Without, rare examples of documental recordings in França's work - the remaining works are always experiments of invention of new narrative form-is for video, but without ever relinquishing his most basic confessional or self-witnessing aspect. Moreover, one does not expect to find in França's videos any classical narratives, like certain types of literature or cinema, that accustomed us to some canonical models of fiction. França's narratives are totally experimental, absolutely elliptical and uncontinuous, exploring things such as the dynamic contrast between very quick and very slow cuts, whole sequences presented frame-by-frame (like the projection of slides), faux raccords with planes split in the midst of a phrase, images out of focus, a lack of synchronization between sound and image, dialogues presented backwards, the use of different textures of colors or black and white, and so on. O Silêncio Profundo dos Coisas Mortas (The Profound Silence of Still Lives, 1988) for example, is a story of love and betrayal between two homosexual lovers, where past. and present, reality and memory, experience and desire are intricately mingled as well as contaminated by the intrusion of the social, the urban (the city, traffic, carnival) the lovers' intimacy. Reencontro (Reencounter, 1984) gives the impression of a modern interpretation (set in the hard times of the military dictatorship, with explicit references to methods of torture) of the parable of William Wilson, the famous narrative by Poe about a character pursued by his alter ego, and who ends up killing himself to escape from himself. "Getting Out" (1985) is a tense and claustrophobic narrative about a woman who simulates the situation of being locked up at home in a building that catches fire. In their turn, "Combat in Vain” (1984) and "Fighting the Invisible Enemy" (1983) work with a creative absorption of the zapping effect (chaotic paste-up of images and sounds, similar to quick scanning of television channels), in such a way as to suggest shattered narratives, just a step from complete dissolution. To this effort to renew fiction in the electronic medium, another, equally systematic, must be added: that of re-interpreting video's techinical resources from the inventive and authorial viewpoint. Unlike a large portion of his colleagues of the independent video generation, França did not allow himself to be seduced by the machines of effects, increasingly frequent in electronic media, but nor did he simply reject them. On the contrary, he was one of the few creators who seriously devoted himself to study the expressive functionality of each of these effects, in terms of their dramatic yield. For example, in "Insomnia" (1989), a free adaptation of a text by Graciliano Ramos, once again set in a homosexual context, one can see a quite contained and nearly minimalist use of certain digital effects used on television, such as the compression of the image, or the multiplication of screens within the videographic frame. França went so far as to make a version of this video for video-wall, a device characterized by excessive and spectacular presentation, used almost exclusively in the realm of advertising. In this version, he manages what up to then had seemed impossible: an intimate, concentrated, and reflexive use of the video-wall, thus successfully placing it at the service of the narration instead of technological ostentation. For a generation that grew up subject to the excessive images of MTV, França's intervention worked as an illuminating and necessary counterpoint.

MACHADO, Arlindo. "Uma Experiência Radical de Videoarte". In: "Sem Medo da Vertigem" (org. Helouise Costa). São Paulo, 1997.