to Home page  

The Way of the Vampire

Filipe Furtado

ROUGE
to Index of Issue 13
to Next Article
to Previous Article
to Subscribe page
to Rouge Press page

 

  Technical mistakes? This is a Brazil’s specialty, this land without know-how. The documentary which, as Marcio Souza said in his modesty, should be to current Brazilian cinema as Aruanda was to Cinema Novo, will be shown in Brasília – we hope – and should fall like a thorn inside the throat of all idiots who are yet to discover Brazil – by the way, Oswald de Andrade, anthropophagous, language designer, revolutionary and whatever more that could exist in this section of the Third World: Brazil.
– Jairo Ferreira

‘Brazilian cinema is so bad it can only start to get better’.
‘Brazilian cinema is so bad it can only start to get worse’.
– Rogério Sganzerla, in different moments of Horror Palace Hotel
 

 

 

In August 2007 the Brazilian Cinematheque held a rare screening of Jairo Ferreira’s film works, almost none of which had been shown in years. A strange sort of conspiratorial mood soon took over the room; there were around fifteen cinephiles in the screening who all knew each other, and the first row was taken before anyone thought of sitting anywhere else. Most of the bureaucrats in charge of current cinema would probably qualify such event as a flop, but I believe Ferreira would have liked it. That night, something unusual happened: the man who once made a film called The Vampire of the Cinematheque presided over a hijack of that well-meaning, overly large, official film institution. The Cinematheque was finally his.

But then, Ferreira’s work has always been the most invisible of all Brazilian filmmakers. When he started as a film critic in 1967 writing for the São Paulo Shimbum (the Japanese community newspaper), his column was the only part of the paper in Portuguese; he made the effort of personally distributing it to whomever he thought should be reading it. As a (literally) underground critic, he decided to use that space to document the São Paulo underground film scene that almost no one even knew existed. I am relating all this because, more than any other critic-turned-director, Jairo’s film writing and filmmaking were one and the same thing. Just as his writing often felt cinematic in its eye for specific detail and his taste for the juxtaposition of ideas that at first do nit seen to belong together, his films were driven by the written word and longed to build a bridge between life and movies – which was also the same desire that made him take a film column in a community newspaper, and use it to discuss obscure shorts. Sometimes just a conversation in a bar between some unknown filmmakers is what motivates his films, as if he could only pick up a camera if something he cared about was happening in front of him (he even titled one of his films Before I Forget).

Ferreira’s entire work runs around four hours, and it is mostly shot on Super 8. His two hour-long features, O Vampiro da Cinemateca (1977) and O Insigne Ficante (1980), mix a very free essay format with a diary-film, while his shorter films have more specific subjects and are usually more obviously closer to either the essay form or a reportage of events. O Guru e os Guris (1973) is a documentary about Maurice Legrand, a cineclub owner; Ecos Caoticos (1975) deals with Brazilian symbolist poet Susândrade; O Ataque das Araras (1975) shows an expedition that a São Paulo film crew took to the Amazon; Antes que eu me Esqueça (1977) documents the launch of a book by poet Roberto Bicelli; Horror Palace Hotel reports on the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival and the state of Brazilian film (also the subject of his text 'Horror in Brasilia'); Nem Verdade, Nem Mentira (1979) is a fake documentary on journalism; and Metamorfose Ambulante (1993) is about rock singer Raul Seixas. That all these starting points (‘subject’ is probably not the right word to describe what Ferreira’s films are like) deal with some sort of cultural exchange is no accident. The desire to shoot everything comes with another: to shape everything, as if the filmmaker cannot resist commenting on it all. In some ways, Ferreira’s films feel like a more anarchist version of Jonas Mekas’ work; in other ways, it is very specifically Brazilian, unlike any other non-fiction work – even experimental non-fiction – one has ever seen.

Ferreira’s two 35mm films, O Guru e os Guris and Nem Verdade, Nem Mentira are the only works that he did not initiate himself. The former began with his filmmaker and friend Carlos Reichenbach giving him some unused film material and access to the structure of his production company; the latter is a more typical for-hire project produced by the very successful low-budget mogul Antonio Polo Galante, who asked for a institutional short on journalism. At first they may seem the antithesis of each other, as the former is a non-fiction piece that often feels staged, while the latter is a fiction that has the authenticity of a doco – but both are portrait films and lovely tributes to their central characters. O Guru e os Guris is Ferreira’s most exquisite film, shot in lovely black and white by Reichenbach and in visible awe of Legrand. As Ferreira follows Legrand, the subject goes about some ordinary tasks and other more clearly staged ones – in a memorable moment he lights a film projector on fire – while all the while talking about cinema and showing movies. The film is perfectly paced as it grows together with Legrand’s rage; it is a beautiful tribute to cine-clubism, but also a reminder of its power as a political weapon – as its opening quote says. Cine-clubism is an avant-garde act.

At the start of Nem Verdade, Nem Mentira, Ligeia de Andrade (Patricia Scalvi) announces to camera her credos about life and journalism, truth and fiction. She is clearly Ferreira’s surrogate (her name is taken from one of the pseudonyms that he sometimes used at the tail-end of his years at the Shimbun); she functions as a guide to this film about journalism. Scalvi was one of Galante’s biggest stars, so the documentary stops dead at the first shot, immediately giving a way to a sort of documentary-fiction. Ligeia talks with many real journalists and Ferreira takes special care in shooting the newsroom. In an especially inspired moment Ligeia try to talk an editor into giving a political opinion, but while she keep throwing out names of left-revolutionaries, he keeps hiding under some sort of journalistic objectivity: ‘Dead’, he repeats, over and over again. It is this very objectivity which is at the film’s centre; more important than the way its fictional structure eats up its documentary objectivity is its portrait of Ligeia herself – the more fictional element, but also the truest one. A true brother in arms to Maurice Legrand, Ligeia, in Scalvi’s powerful performance, is the journalist-as-revolutionary, as attentive to the world around her as she is able to filter it through a discourse that Ferreira celebrates for its honesty.

As impressive as it is, Ferreira’s 35mm work is his most conventional, perhaps a consequence of working with standard film crews. At his best, Ferreira is the wild man with a movie camera, throwing his dispatches at the audience. In Ecos Caoticos he starts with the mostly forgotten symbolist poet Sousândrade, going to his hometown São Luis to capture its con emporary daily routine. What he achieves here in seven minutes is a cross-section between the physical world, and poetry as mediated through film. For once, Ferreira’s off-screen narration feels less like a running commentary than as a musical accompaniment to his images; as they follow ordinary downtown movement, a local fight, historic buildings or the countryside, one gets a sense of a concrete world and how it might have shaped a poetic sensibility. Two of Ferreira’s biggest intellectual influences were concrete poets, Augusto & Haroldo de Campos, and they wrote a massive 650-page critical study on Sousândrade, one of the key studies of Brazilian literature, a few years previously. Ferreira opens a dialogue with them here, but he is also coming from an opposite end: he only need seven minutes, a sharp eye and the sensorial power of film to show that the poet is a worthy subject.

O Ataque das Araras is a Hawksian adventure. The story of an invasion, as a film crew from Boca do Lixo, São Paulo’s low budget film industry, gets on a boat passing through Rio Negro in the Amazon. The destination is a meeting with filmmaker Marcio Souza, who is there directing a play with locals, but along the way Ferreira finds time for many digressions. Numerous names from Boca do Lixo are present with different agendas: João Calegaro, whose excellent gangster film O Pornografo was co-written by Ferreira, is shooting a commercial, while the more low-brow Osvaldo de Oliveira is leading a second unit crew with Carlos Reichenbach at hand as cinematographer. And there’s Souza himself, the one player who is not there as an outsider, who got his start in the São Paulo underground scene. All these multiple views and agendas – plus those of Ferreira himself – in order to explore the Rio Negro, thus underscoring the way in which the more inventive avant-garde cinema from São Paulo has a curious incestuos-commercial relationship with the low-brow industry. More than any other of his films, O Ataque das Araras collapses the distinction between written word and filmed world, as well as that between the possibilities of film analysis in an avant-garde essay-film and the thrills of a narrative. Ferreira’s off-screen narration is a tour de force in which he comments, jokes, narrates and finds meaning in the most unexpected situations. It is a true film of exploration, a laboratory to examine exploitation, and a celebration of inventive cinema.

Ferreira is at his freest in his hour-long films. O Vampiro da Cinemateca and O Insigne Ficante are blunt, direct works that take us by surprise with their candidness. One feels they were intended only for an audience of friends. Like the best work of a Raúl Ruiz or a Monte Hellman, one never knows what will show up in the next shot; the film’s tone shifts between every sort of emotion. In one of the great scenes of Vampiro the poet Orlando Parolini is giving a passionate reading, when the sound starts to get worse and Jairo, in a rage off-screen, announces that the sound is crap due to Kodak attempting to cheapen its product by using a low quality sound range. There is a fragile quality to those films in how home-made they feel; when Paulo Sacramento – the young filmmaker to whom Ferreira left his films and who was at the time working on a limited DVD edition of Jairo’s complete oeuvre – presented a special screening of O Insigne Ficante, he told the audience that this would be the first time the film would ever be project by a different projectionist. This says a lot about how private these films were. Later, at the end of the screening, the previous projectionist showed up to talk with Sacramento, and told him that he might not be up there in the projection booth, but that did not mean he would let the film be shown without him – and that which says a lot, too, about the passion these films can generate.

Vampirism is a central concept to Vampiro, as Ezra Pound and the ideogram are for Insigne Ficante. The vampirism concept haunts Ferreira’s film work as a sort of filmic update of modernist writer/theoretician Oswald de Andrade literary anthropophagy – one of the many refreshing things about Ferreira’s work is that, although he is a hardcore cinephile, he takes just as many ideas from poets like Andrade, the Campos brothers, Pound, Blake, Lautreamount and Mayakovsky as from other films. So, if Andrade talked about how the Brazilian poet had to become a cannibal in order to eat European modernism for his own ends, the cinephile has to learn to become a vampire in order to deal with our expansive audiovisual memory. Ferreira’s vampirism is nothing if not democratic: Citizen Kane (1941), F For Fake (1974) and Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) are key texts, but so is Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), which pops up again and again throughout. The vampire filmmaker learns to suck the blood from his influences and puts it back into the streets of his city, as he literally does in a great montage where Fuller’s film loses itself inside São Paulo’s own underworld. Earlier on, the film announces itself as ‘notes left in a napkin’, and that is how it proceeds. Julio Bressane’s O Rei do Baralho (1973) turns into a Bruce Lee film, and the Marquise in The Towering Inferno (1974) becomes a symbol for the Brazilian filmmaker’s state of mind.

A recurring motif throughout is showing filmmakers who act as if possessed by an unknown entity – the exception being José Mojica Marins, who can reign supreme as the creator of avant-garde horror, both a popular filmmaker and a true inventor of cinematic forms. In one of its most inspired moments, as the narration tells us that what we are seeing is a homage to the very popular Brazilian sex comedies of the period, we get a close-up of a man masturbating – an act of extreme provocation to be sure, but also registering as a genuine gesture towards an audience which critical discourse usually only condescends to. Whenever Jairo finds time to turn away from cinema and back to the street, the film – for all its anger – breathes as a sublime São Paulo movie, with a great eye and ear for the city’s everyday movement.

O Insigne Ficante, on the other hand, is a film haunted by the idea of meaning. Ferreira’s most reflexive work, it begins as a discussion of Pound’s ideas about literary criticism and how they can relate to film criticism – but soon becomes something else as it takes one detour after another in a sea of digressions. The film keeps getting interrupted from excerpts that came from nowhere (a scene from Ozualdo Candeias’ AOpção with Ferreira himself as a crazy preacher who ends up naked, a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, a making-of a Julio Bressane picture), or a conference with Werner Herzog. In the film’s centerpiece, a trip to Europe is illustrated by a lengthy analysis of Bressane’s early work and critical reception. As the discussion goes on, we start to understand that we are hearing a letter that Ferreira received from a friend, and with this the meaning changes: the sequence ends with the revelation that this friend – film critic Inácio Araujo – was hospitalised at the time and that Ferreira was meeting him in Paris, which again shifts the focus by adding context to the letter and explaining why it had been juxtaposed with random images of London and Paris. A later scene, in which Araujo talks about Jorge Luis Borges and cinephilia, is shot in such a way as to underline its theatricality: one begins to suspect that maybe the letter was a ruse, or maybe not – but that it does not really matter. Insigne Ficante is less angry and more contemplative than Vampiro, but it has time for some unforgettable images, and finds its centre in the notion of the critic as inventor. And while the previous film found its peace in São Paulo’s streets, this one carries a portrait of Jairo’s milieu and friends, who get much more screen time than in any of his other films.

Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.

Ferreira always exhibited a taste for the supernatural, and he puts it to great use here, as horror becomes both the main metaphor and general state of things. The Hotel becomes a true haunted house, but the ghosts here are those of Brazilian cinema’s failure. Off-screen is put to fine use, as the film concentrates on what is usually never shown – whether those filmmakers who are ignored, or life at the hotel rather than the movie theatre. Horror Palace Hotel is Ferreira’s most negative work, its bleakness much greater than its small victories. Its dissatisfaction works like a contagious disease. Late in the film, Ferreira asks respected mainstream critic Francisco de Almeida Salles and Rudá de Andrade – Oswald’s son and then one of main administrators of Brazilian cinemateque – to play dog for the camera; as an almost possessed Andrade happily throws himself into the task, the film’s mad logic seems to finally take over everything. The repressed get their victory; the horror sidebar devours the main selection; Mojica Marins can take his place as the total genius which the film promises.

Jairo Ferreira lived for cinema, including Brazilian cinema; his filmic and written work can be seen as a vast map that involves the richness of Brazilian culture, movies and life – and the path one must take in order to turn it all into what Ferreira valued above all else: invention.

 

to Rouge Press page  
© Filipe Furtado and Rouge April 2009. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.
ROUGE
to Subscribe page
to Previous Article
to Next Article
to Index of Issue 13
to Home page