Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Expanded Documentary Film of Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg

Meetings, conversations, tensions, conflicts, confrontations, negotiations with real people: such is the “raw material” from which Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg extract their various works since the early 1990s, through the construction of “relational devices” that are closely attached to the context in which they will function. In their artistic output, interaction with the other does not take place only during exhibitions in museums and galleries, in propositions to the audience at art premises. Rather it is the starting point, the “active” principle, the provoking element, that without which their works would simply not have the necessary conditions to exist. This is not about isolated artists at their workplace, with their tools, reflections and inspiration, but rather about installations, urban interventions, and public art projects that arise, from the very beginning, shared, coproduced, be it with more clearly defined social groups—street kids, inmates, delinquent adolescents, male prostitutes, policemen, immigrants, political refugees, street vendors, doormen who came from Northeastern Brazil to the Southeast, Egyptians, blind people—, be it with randomly-chosen individuals, anonymous persons, passers-by.

The very partnership between the Brazilian and the Swiss came to being little by little, in the production of a work, in the relationship with other people, in the elaboration of a situation. Dias graduated in fine arts, Riedweg in music, theater, performance. An unstable, yet powerful subjectivity came out of that partnership, overflowing from all sides with individual identities, liberating creative forces unattached to the notion of “author,” and to the effects of control that such a notion entails. Which is not to say that there is no auteurship, but rather that Dias and Riedweg invent, with every work, their own way of being authors, setting personal idiosyncrasies aside—theirs or their characters’—to favor a capacity for creation that is molded and invented every time it gets in touch with other universes.

The duo’s projects develop in different stages, involving several people, and are liable to take months or even years; they use varied strategies and materials, and may yield varied formal results. They often acquire aesthetic and political unfoldings that include museums, art galleries, and public spaces, as well as non-governmental organizations and public institutions in Brazil, Europe, Africa, Mexico, Argentina, the United States. To describe their work properly is a very difficult task, a challenge to critics, a lost battle, which only attests to the vitality of their artistic career. The very notion of an oeuvre seems insufficient to assess the creation procedures of Dias and Riedweg. Therefore, what concerns us in this article are the key elements of the devices used by the artists to establish relationships with the other, and to produce their work—on the one hand, it seems to me that those devices are in keeping with a certain documentary practice and, on the other hand, they expand upon the possibilities of contemporary documentary film.(*1) 

Let us take Devotionalia, the duo’s oldest project, made with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, as our initial example. How do Dias and Riedweg establish contact with such a socially stigmatized group? A stigma often renders a group impossible to approach effectively, since many kids incorporate, in their gestures and speech, the social clichés about themselves, and may react to an interview in a programmed manner. The proposal was to organize workshops for the children and adolescents to interact through a common action: to make white wax votive offerings based on the molds of their own hands and feet; each of these small “sculptures” was accompanied by a video recording of a desire for the child or adolescent who made it. Hundreds of copies of hands and feet, combined with the videos, comprised a large installation, presented for the first time in 1996 at the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro, a “large collective votive offering” which, according to Dias and Riedweg, was aimed at society, and not at God.

Thus, the project was not limited to interviewing the kids, in an attempt to find the “truth” about their situation, but rather it proposed, prior to conversation, a joint activity, related to their universe, capable of removing them from a location predefined by the media, by the discourse of power, and by the daily relationships they have in the streets. The idea for the votive offerings did not come out of nowhere, it came from the fact that many street kids wear amulets for protection and luck. The experience served to establish a relationship of trust, providing greater density to the interaction of all those involved; to scramble up preconceived identities, while indirectly disclosing the social tragedy in which they live. This is what stands out in the device used in Devotionalia, as well as in the devices featured in other works by the duo: a sort of “contract” with the participants, which forecasts not the reproduction of something real, but rather the sharing of an experience that surprises, and thus displaces behaviors, elicits words, expressions, attitudes that are unexpected. Something out of the program, out of the script, out of social control. 

In the two projects executed in São Paulo, the documental approach was more direct. In Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos, Dias and Riedweg made a documentary film about doormen from Northeastern Brazil who work in the Southeast, and in Mera Vista Point, they made short, one-minute long videos about thirty-three street vendors who work in the Largo da Concórdia square, in the Brás neighborhood, in the city of São Paulo. In both cases, though, the participation of the characters was not limited to telling the stories of their lives. For the installation presented at the Bienal de São Paulo (1998), the doormen staged a short sequence, in a space reproducing a “standard” bedroom, perhaps in the building garage, painted with colors chosen by the doormen themselves, and equipped with their own furniture and objects. They simulate coming home after a day’s work, entering the bedroom one by one, acting as if they were not seeing one another, and when they are all set, they look straight at the camera, making clear their complicity with the act of filming. This is the video’s final scene, which, in the installation, was projected onto a screen in front of the setting, which became illuminated at the end of the documentary film. 

Mera Vista Point was a public art project and a video installation carried out in Largo da Concórdia square, for the Arte/Cidade event (2002). The idea came up during the work with the doormen—this is where they go shopping. Each street vendor makes short, one-minute long product announcements, which are very revealing of the Brazilian popular imagery. For the duration of Arte/Cidade, this work caused changes in the functioning of local trade, involving vendors in the elaboration and exhibition of the videos. A video bar was built on a six-meter-high tower over the stands, and from there one could watch, over the tents, large portraits of the participants in the project. Each vendor received a television set and a video player, to screen the final video edit during the event, and gave copies of the video as a gift to customers who made purchases worth over 30 reais (approximately US$ 15) at their stands in Largo da Concórdia. 

Three Times Documentary Film

If Devotionalia, Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos, and Mera Vista Point deal with important issues related to contemporary documentary filmmaking, neither of the two artists elaborate projects based on documentary, and they do not claim to do so. Their work does not participate in the documentary film production and screening circuit either—at least not until now. Why, then, should their work be labeled as documentary film? First of all, because theirs is an art form that would not exist without the meeting with the other. Amidst the multiplicity of forms invented by cinema over the course of more than a century of history, documentary film bears the particularity of being born out of the interaction between at least two people, in specific contexts: the filmmaker on one side of the camera, real people on the other side, individuals who accept to become part of a film project, thus becoming “characters” in the documentary film.(*2) 

The second reason for the association with the documentary film genre is concerned with the convergence of the duo’s work with the guidelines of what has become known as “modern documentary” and, more specifically, with the films of Jean Rouch, from France. If on the one hand the relational dimension is the basis for this type of cinema, on the other hand it remained hidden until the mid-1950s. It was as if there had been no meeting: the documentary film would reproduce, onto image, preestablished realities, identities, and worldviews, without combinations or contaminations between filmmakers and characters. Rouch departs from that stance and affirms the intervention of filmmaker in documentary films, because he knows that any other reality is altered from the moment a camera is placed in front of it, and that the effort of recording it as such is useless. In films made in Africa (I, a Negro /1958, Jaguar/1954-1967, among others) or in Paris (Chronicle of a Summer /1961), the interaction between filmmaker and characters is taken on, accepted, and the film arises out of it. Travels, hunts, rituals, luncheons, dinners, intimate or group conversations, the search for a job, these are some of the situations created by Rouch and his partners to be filmed. And what the camera records, in the words of Jean Rouch, is a “singular metamorphosis,” a “cine-trance,”(*3) when, “thanks to this small crystal and steel monster, no one is the same anymore.”(*4) 

The third reason concerns the central position that the notion of device holds in the works of Dias and Riedweg, as well as in some of the contemporary documentary production, especially in the work of Eduardo Coutinho. The device, in these two contexts, is a productive, active procedure which creates situations, images, worlds, sensations, perceptions that did not exist before it. It is not at all something that takes place similarly in every work, but rather something that is created with each work, immanent, contingent to the circumstances of the present, and submitted to the pressures of what is real. In Eduardo Coutinho (Santo Forte, Babilônia 2000, Edifício Master, O fim e o princípio) the device is, first and foremost, a machine that provokes meetings, and allows for them to be recorded. Relationships that take place inside spatial lines (a favela, a building, a village), temporal lines (the recording time for each documentary film), technological lines (the equipment used), activated by him every time he approaches a social universe. How to discuss religion in Brazil? Traveling the entire country? How to discuss the favela? Recording several ones? Coutinho’s approach is clear cut: to record in a demarcated space and, from there, to extract a vision, which evokes a sense of “generality,” not by representing or exemplifying, but telling us a whole lot about Brazil. 

Context and Interterritoriality

In most of Dias and Riedweg’s devices, context is a key element. From it they extract strategies to relate to the participants in their work, building what we can also call relational machines. At the same time, context, for the duo, is always associated with an interterritorial element that prevents the closing of a situation over itself, thus favoring intersections, passages, exchanges, contaminations between different territories. It is an element that allows them to “make the process in one place and then take it to another place,”(*5) but also to produce combinations in the process. In their installation with the doormen, the duo placed in interaction architectural elements (the spaces destined for doormen in buildings), technological elements (the video, but also the electronic gadgets in the entrance of a building), discursive elements (the conversations with the doormen, but also the “gossip” of inhabitants about the doormen), and also historical, social, and individual elements related to the coming from the Northeast, to civil construction in São Paulo, to the consequences of immigration in their lives and to the city. The “interterritorial” element consisted in taking the doormen to an institutional art space, not as spectators, but as actors, creating conditions for them to have a truly aesthetical experience. 

What effects does that machine produce? There are many, but perhaps the most important one is showing that beings and things only exist through relationship, that no one can live without changes effected by others and that, depending on the interactions to which we are exposed, we can create new identities, have unusual reactions, live different roles and not those that the social world forced us to live. By the same token, this device makes it clear that there is no such thing as “the doorman,” a psychosocial type with a fixed identity, equal to all other Northeastern doormen, but rather different ways of being a doorman or, quoting the beautiful title of the installation, different ways of being Raimundo, Severino, or Francisco. When we get in touch with the works of the duo, we, the spectators, are granted access both to the state of affairs in different social groups they work with—in the case of doormen, the history of humiliation crystallized in the small spaces they inhabit, and updated in their relationship with the inhabitants of buildings—, and to what resists this state of affairs, the small freedoms, the small movements of creation, “like so many other escapes and clevernesses, coming from ‘immemorial intelligences,’”(*6) which are so well illustrated in the good-tempered last scene of the video. 

Nevertheless, there are important differences between the documental devices and the practices of Dias and Riedweg, which can be approached from at least two perspectives. On the one hand, we can think that they expand and intensify the relational procedures of documentary films through space-time agencings that are different from cinema. On the other hand, we can think that the duo brings, to a moment prior to public exposition, physical, mental, and expressive experiences that were up until then restricted to viewers of many installations, documental field notwithstanding. 

Anyway, the most outstanding difference concerns the propositions made to the individuals that the duo deals with, which do not restrict themselves to the average requirements of documentary film: to speak of oneself, and to let oneself be recorded in everyday situations. Be it by exercising their senses in sensorial laboratories, be it by contributing to the construction of certain situations, or acting per se, the persons involved often end up entering never-before-seen logics, rehearsing other identities, testing expressive capacities they did not know existed; in some cases, they seem to give in more easily to arbitrary requests than to requests with a reason, as if they wanted precisely to be seduced, as Baudrillard would say, “outside their raison d’être.”(*7) 

In Voracidade máxima (2004), the male prostitutes of Barcelona wear masks reproducing the faces of the artists and talk to them for several hours, lying on an apartment bed, all of them wearing robes, surrounded by mirrors, in a situation of extreme intimacy. In Throw (2004), Helsinki citizens gladly accept to throw various objects at a camera protected by glass plates, while that same camera records them in the moment they attack it. Book, cell phone, paint, flour, egg, alarm clock, teddy bear, cream pie, all are thrown at the surveilling and provoking camera, in a reincarnation of a gesture essential to the political demonstrations that took the central streets of the city throughout the 20th century—only now, instead of throwing at the police and the army, the throwing is aimed at a camera, a key technology to the control system of contemporary society. 

Here are some examples of arbitrary, albeit not reasonless, proposals created in close connection with specific contexts, and with great potential for displacing established identities and views. Those examples possess, as we have seen, complex aesthetic and political implications; they elicit change, not in the real situation of the people involved, as political art intended, to no avail, but rather in the participants’ sensibility, the moment they are captured by different flows, thus managing to become free from themselves and from the formulas and preconceived notions that constitute them, fabricated in the daily confrontation with different realities, as well as from the “social brand image” that subjugates and imprisons them, intensifying discriminations, segregations, isolation. This is the primary function of devices: to create mechanisms for displacing or dissolving, even if only provisorily, stiffened ways of perceiving self, the world, and the other, thus opening up possibilities for new ways of seeing and being.

The projects of Dias and Riedweg renew the dialogue between documentary film and contemporary art, and the strategies used for activating the real can be regarded as a possible horizon for the current impasses in documentary film production. There is a series of other aspects of the duo’s work that could be elaborated on, within the perspective of connections with documentary film. I would like to point to at least two such aspects. First off there are the ways for interacting with the public in art institutions and urban spaces, produced in this final stage of works by relational devices for exposition, and no longer for creation of artistic processes per se. Secondly, attention must be called to the importance of having, as a backdrop for this analysis, a reflection about the relations between media and art, because we are surrounded with and formed by spectacularized images of poverty and of the social groups Dias and Riedweg work with. And it is against those images, or in an attempt to shatter them, that the works of the duo find their production conditions. 

Consuelo Lins is a documentary filmmaker and a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned a doctorate from the University of Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle) with a thesis on documentary films, focusing on the work of North American filmmaker Robert Kramer. Lins made Chapéu Mangueira e Babilônia: histórias do morro (1999), and Jullius Bar (2001). She worked as a researcher and director of film crews in the documentary films Babilônia 2000 and Edifício Master, by Eduardo Coutinho. Lins directed Leituras (2005), a short film made using a portable telephone camera, awarded at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (2006). She earned a postdoctoral degree from the University of Paris 3 (2005) with work dealing with the more markedly subjective side of documentary production. Lins writes articles about contemporary audiovisual creation on a regular basis, and published a book entitled O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho: televisão, cinema e vídeo (Jorge Zahar Editor, 2004), which is currently in its second edition. 

*1 For other possible avenues of analysis, see the excellent texts by Catherine David, Guy Brett, and Suely Rolnik, among others, which include the duo’s projects in the tradition of fine arts, pointing to the 1960s, and especially to the work of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, as the source of inspiration to many of Dias and Riedweg’s artistic strategies.

*2 There are also, of course, other forms of documentary film, such as archival films, for instance. But the relational sphere prevails in the tradition of this form of cinema, from Nanook of the North (1922), by R. Flaherty, considered the first documentary film in the history of cinema.

*3 Jean Rouch, “Le vrai et le faux”. Traverses, n. 47 (Ni vrai ni faux). Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989, p. 181.

*4 Rouch, J. and E. Morin. Chronique d´un Été. Paris: Domaine Cinéma, 1962, p. 28.

*5 Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg in Encontros com o outro, interview to Glória Ferreira in: Concinnitas Revista do Instituto de Arte da UERJ, year IV, No. 4, March 2003, pp. 104–120.

*6Luce Giard, in Introduction to the book by Michel Certeau, A invenção do cotidiano. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, p. 19.

*7 J. Baudrillard. A arte da desaparição. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 1997, p. 52.