Cinema: Music of Light

Jairo Ferreira

For those few who knew where to find his work, Jairo Ferreira was, from his beginnings as a critic in 1965 until his death in 2003, always a unique voice to reckon with. He is still best known, even in his home country, for his excellent book on Brazilian underground film, Cinema de Invenção (‘cinema of invention’ – a few excerpts in English appear in Framework, no. 28). He was also a first-rate filmmaker, working mostly in Super 8; his filmography includes Antes que eu me esqueça (1977), O Insigne Ficante (1980), Horror Palace Hotel (1978) and the ultimate critic-turned-director movie, O Vampiro da Cinemateca (1977). As well, he was a frequent collaborator of many of the most obscure and inventive names of the Brazilian film scene, as a writer, assistant or actor.

The two essays selected here come from two different moments in his career. ‘Cinema: Music of Light’ was commissioned for a 1986 book about how critics saw their work. It is more conventional and direct than Jairo’s usual work, but it allowed him an opportunity to talk about almost everything: his passion for movies (and especially those that try to do something different); and what he disliked about criticism and Brazilian film circa ‘86. The short essay on Shohei Imamura (died 30 May 2006), a very typical example of Jairo’s unconventional approach to criticism, was written in 1967, early in both his and the director’s career, for the São Paulo Shimbum – the newspaper of São Paulo’s Japanese community, where he had a weekly column at the time.

The cinema, architecture in motion, succeeds in awakening musical sensations that become solid through space, by the way of visual sensations that become solid through time. In reality, it is music that touches us through the gaze.

Cinema is the most mysterious invention among all the arts – illusion, music of light. Jean Renoir claimed he had the conviction that the cinematograph is a more secret art than all the others. People believe that cinema is made for six thousand spectators at the Gaumont Palace, but it’s not like that; it is made for three among those thousands of spectators. But one of the most prophetic essays about cinema’s enigma is still the declaration of Abel Gance (quoted in Marcel Lapierre’s 1946 Anthologie du cinéma):

The age of the image has come! To explain? To comment? For what? We walk, some riding cloud-horses, and when we clash it is with reality, to coerce it into transforming itself into dream! The magician’s stick finds itself in every camera, and Merlin’s eye has turned itself into the lens.

The age of the image has come! In one way or another, cinema’s invention – a teenage art with only ninety years behind it rather than the millennium of the more traditional arts – should be moulded by poetry, so that we can have today a cinema of invention, of synthetic-ideogrammatic narratives and new perceptions. If that does not happen, as Orson Welles said, cinema will remain a whale packed with straw, just a mechanical curiosity.

As to what formation a film critic should have: I think it should be as wide and eclectic as possible, since I see cinema as an anthropophagic art, polarised and transcendental in the way it synthesises all six previous arts and metamorphoses itself into an uneasiness about its future in this fin-de-siècle in which people talk too much about the holographic and laser cinema of the leisure era. Or, as I place it at the beginning of the twenty-first century (viz. my own Cinema de Invenção): Amphicinema. New old Greece, techno-pop, electronica. Slow substitution of film by hi-def tri-dimensional tape. Cinema without a screen. Sign cinema, satellite cinema. Since informatics is synthesis, the critic’s formation should not limit itself to cinema, but range over, at the same time, the reading of classics, comics, occultism, everything about painting/architecture/theatre, journalism, radio, television, circus, science, astrology, not forgetting philosophy and sociology, but with special importance placed on poetry and music – everything that is truly lived.

Criticism’s function, seen as a specialist activity, is thus to establish a creative bridge between film and spectator, always radiographing the narrative structures that generate elations of multiple orders, from metaphysics to dialectics. Great films demand from the critic a true leap into the depths of the abyss – and it is not always necessary that he return to the surface with articles, or even spoken words. Sometimes a critic simply returns as a filmmaker, like Jean-Luc Godard, who was a great critic in the ‘50s and started to film so as to better understand cinema’s mystery – and he remained a critic after becoming a filmmaker. In this sense, it is worth remembering what Ezra Pound said: the best critics are those that effectively contribute to improving the art they write about.

Standards of film analysis: here is a controversial matter. One might not accept a critic’s judgement, but we cannot accept a total lack of standards, or any irresponsibility. Among us, it is often the case that these standards are derived more from editors than critics, when it is the critic’s personal standards that should rule. Those standards should vary from film to film. To write about a film like Battleship Potemkin (1925), the critic should know a lot about the 1917 revolution, Eisenstein’s position among the vanguards of his time, his writing about montage, and so on. But, to analyse some Brazilian popular films, one does not have to know more than a few soap operas. As for my own standards, my basis is Poundian perception, so I value the films of invention (those made by filmmakers who find new ways into the aesthetic process) and films by masters (those that assert a certain number of processes and use them as well as, or better than, the inventors).

In my critical vision of cinema (Brazilian or not), I emphasise exactly the inventive potential of our more independent filmmakers, from Mário Peixoto to Júlio Bressane. There is a whole lineage of adventurous filmmakers, like Major Thomaz Reis, who exposed his film negatives in the heart of the jungle. In uncertain production conditions, these filmmakers achieved, in their films, excellent aesthetic and poetic results. At other times, when the filmmakers had favourable conditions, the results were not always satisfactory. From which I draw the conclusion that medium-size productions are the most functional for Brazilian cinema. There was, in a certain way, much more creative independence early on than we see nowadays. Those who made cinema had to have real talent, whereas now it is the era of those that have the best knowledge of political manipulation. Hopefully, new winds have started to come from short filmmaking, the reserve land of general revitalisation.

If it is true that a good critic is one who improves the art he writes about, Brazilian criticism should offer solutions for Brazilian cinema. But that does not always happen. Critics who really contribute to this necessary improvement usually do not stay in their jobs long enough. Our critics talk a lot from a critical distance – the film is there, and they are far away from the problems of our cinema, very aware of the latest Hollywood gossip. We lack critical intimacy, direct involvement of the critic in production: only in this way can we create a new movement, a new tendency, a new creative period.

1. Boca do Lixo was the São Paulo neighborhood where Brazilian B films were made (as well as the home of most of the São Paulo-based underground cinema).

2. Embrafilme was a government-owned production company/distributor that functioned from the late 1960s to 1990.

3. Vera Cruz was a large studio established in the 1950s and based in São Paulo.

4. This is mainly a reference to how financing through Embrafilme worked in the ‘80s, when government money was thrown at either a few established auteurs with the right connections (usually former Cinema Novo filmmakers) or mediocre, middlebrow commercial films.

The key element in my filmic formation was criticism. It helped me see movies with other eyes. So I started to see films a second time, and discovered that criticism is only respectable when the critic has seen the film many times. (I’m talking about the great films – for the crap films, you don’t even need to stay until the end). Since my teen days, I have always been interested in a more dynamic criticism, of the kind that I found in theoreticians like Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc, André Bazin and, here in Brazil, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes. The essay genre should have more space, since that is where the critic can better develop his ideas.

Film schools have a key role but here, among us, they do not fulfill this function. They are saved by their technical usage, when one of the good cameras ended up in the hands of a Boca do Lixo craftsman. (1) This is the way that seems to have been recently found by Embrafilme, which started a new technical center in Rio, as well as promoting seminars for exhibitors, inviting foreign technicians to talk about theatre acoustics, (2) in the old way that Vera Cruz opened and maintains to this day a true school. (3) The problem is that the talents never go to school, and good cinema is always the work of self-taught filmmakers – who won’t pass their tricks on to new people.

The State could do a lot for Brazilian cinema, if it got in the way less. In the last fifteen, twenty years its role has been that of an opponent, killing promising careers and establishing a constant festival of well made mediocrities, without any creative force. (4) The State should limit itself to creating a courageous legislation, staying away from feature co-production, encouraging the cultural area with short and medium-length experimental films, as well as developing the publishing of magazines and books.

I usually do not separate Brazilian cinema from foreign cinema, as cinema’s country is cinema itself. Among the ten best films of all time, I’d include three Brazilians: Mario Peixoto’s Limite (1931), Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964) and Rogério Sganzerla’s O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit, 1968). The best is still Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), for its creation of a complex aesthetic structure that represents a challenge to the better critics – that used to amuse its inventor, whom I still believe is also the greatest filmmaker of all time. Godard is another passion, but I would only include one film by him in a Top Twenty (One Plus One, 1968): in any case, he is the perfect example of the ceaseless experimenter and inventor. I can also mention those filmmakers whose almost every film I like: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Fuller, Ford, Bressane, Ozualdo Candeias, Chaplin, Hawks, Lang, Buñuel, Glauber and many other inventor-auteurs.

The future of cinema? I’m with Roberto Santos: "The cinema hasn’t been born yet. It’s too young, it’s just taken its first steps". Truthfully, ninety years is too few in relation to the millennium of the arts that came before it. Laser cinema has already shown its trailers, and the twenty-first century will consolidate the expressive force of this synthetic art.

Film – but never the cinema – is already past. Film and its mechanical process have already been superseded by the video of electronic cinema. Cinema now is television, and Godard already makes his movies on video. At the moment, video is closer to cinema, but the tendency is that cinema will get closer to television.

As for the role of the alternative circuit and production: this is the usual way for experimental work which, in Brazil, used to be shown on conventional screens, with exceptions like Limite, which never received this privilege because it was shot at sixteen frames per second, and thus needed a projector that had this speed. It is from the alternative circuit that the ideas and forms – that later standard cinema spreads on an industrial scale – will come. Every film culture has the alternative cinema as its headquarters, its capital.

Criticism usually regards the film subject as its priority, thanks to its content and socio-ideological formation. But I don’t split the film’s subject from its form: from the form is born the idea (Flaubert), and there is no revolutionary language without a revolutionary form (Mayakovsky) and, like the poet Roberto Piva, I only believe in the experimental poet who lives an experimental life.