{"id":221490,"date":"2016-07-27T13:08:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T16:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=221490"},"modified":"2016-07-27T13:10:40","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T16:10:40","slug":"cinemas-scattered-fragments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/cinemas-scattered-fragments\/","title":{"rendered":"Cinema\u2019s scattered fragments"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Santos

Reproduction images<\/span>Santos Dumont in motion, as seen through a mutoscope found at the Paulista MuseumReproduction images<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t seek, I find,\u201d says S\u00e3o Paulo filmmaker Carlos Adriano whenever someone asks him about the historical importance of his experimental works. Adriano quotes Pablo Picasso to explain his \u201call but accidental\u201d finds\u2014rare, forgotten or unknown\u2014that constitute the raw material for his films. For more than 20 years, as filmmaker and PhD graduate in communications science from the University of S\u00e3o Paulo School of Communication and Arts (ECA-USP), he has delved deep into the archival record, in search of long-lost cinematic treasures.<\/p>\n

Adriano has turned up material that reveals, for instance, Brazilian aviator inventor Alberto Santos Dumont\u2019s interest and involvement in the origins of art form, in 1895; film fragments suggesting that Jos\u00e9 Roberto Cunha Salles, a physician, might have been Brazil\u2019s first filmmaker; and clues about the unfinished cinematic experiments of D\u00e9cio Pignatari, a poet and teacher who set out to make dramatic films (only to abandon his projects\u2014unknown until, years later, they were finally unearthed by Adriano).<\/p>\n

The work of Carlos Adriano Jer\u00f4nimo de Rosa is, at its essence, experimental, and removed from the commercial circuit of productions so often seen at international festivals and admired in academic circles. Today we find him in the in the midst of his second post-doctoral\u00a0\u00a0 residency at ECA-USP with his project, Found footage<\/em>: reapropria\u00e7\u00e3o de arquivo como m\u00e9todo para os estudos de cinema\u201d<\/em> (Methodology of archives collection for the study of cinema). \u201cFound footage\u201d is a method for which Adriano is today Brazil\u2019s chief exponent. In his view, the main features of the genre are apparent in \u201cfilms that renew, reedit, and give new meaning to alien images.\u201d Adriano continues his Found footage <\/em>project as a visiting professor of graduate film studies at ECA-USP, where he oversees graduate-level film workshops. \u00a0He also plans to make three films.<\/p>\n

It was with his third short\u2014Remanesc\u00eancias<\/em> (Reminiscences)\u2014of 1997 that Adriano made his mark in the genre. The film is presented through 11 of Cunha Salles\u2019 photogramic images from 1897, now thought to be the first film ever made in Brazil. \u201cAlthough I hadn\u2019t intended it to be a personal manifesto,\u201d Adriano says, \u201cRemanesc\u00eancias<\/em> presents itself in a substantially radical and allegorical format; but, 19 years on, and despite all of the film\u2019s radicalism, I would surely do it differently: I would make it even more radical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Scene

Reproduction images<\/span>Scene from Das ru\u00ednas \u00e0 rexist\u00eancia<\/em>, recovering the unfinished films of poet D\u00e9cio PignatariReproduction images<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In Adriano\u2019s 1997 Das ru\u00ednas \u00e0 rexist\u00eancia<\/em> (From the ruins to rebirth), as in his other films, one witnesses the various phases of research and production coinciding with the images that have been found and incorporated. Here one sees remnants of Pignatari\u2019s productions, from 1961 e 1962. The filmmaker superimposes scenes from Ru\u00ednas para o futuro <\/em>(Ruins of the future) on those of the 1910 S\u00e3o Paulo\u00a0 strike of the glassmakers from Osasco, and Ponto de encontro <\/em>\u00a0(The meeting point), a love story that takes place on the rail lines between\u00a0 Osasco and S\u00e3o Paulo. \u201cProbably, nobody has ever seen this material,\u201d says Adriano, who directed the work chosen that year for the Locarno Film Festival.<\/p>\n

One also notices a sense of historical justice underlying Adriano\u2019s films. \u201cI was not happy to see the way historians devalued the name of Cunha Salles and the role he played as the founder of Brazilian cinema,\u201d says the filmmaker. \u201cBecause he was a doctor who also \u00a0performed legerdemain and ran a numbers racket, nobody could recognize or accept that the film fragments that Salles left in the National Archives could have been his work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adriano returned to the subject of the Salles legacy in his 2008 doctoral thesis, which had FAPESP support. In one passage, he explains, \u201c\u2026should the film\u2019s authorship be in doubt, it follows that Cunha Salles appropriated the photograms.\u201d According to this logic, were Salles not the first in the history of Brazilian cinema to capture images, he would\u2014like Adriano himself\u2014be reworking images created by others. \u201cThe so-called birth of Brazilian cinema, then, would have happened with \u2018found footage\u2019,\u201d continues Adriano.<\/p>\n

Santos Dumont: Pr\u00e9-cineasta? <\/em>(Santos Dumont: pre-cinema?), a film\u2014Adriano\u2019s first feature-length and a product of his doctoral thesis\u2014examined Dumont the inventor\u2019s pre-cinematographic device, or mutoscope. The machine, which Adriano had found at the USP Paulista Museum, works along the lines of the world\u2019s first moving-picture devices:\u00a0 composed of cards, with frames arranged in a reel around a circular core. By turning the handle attached to the reel, one could project moving images onto a screen.<\/p>\n

According to his research advisor at ECA-USP, Professor Ismail Xavier, Adriano \u201creintroduces processes and the radical independence of 1970s American cinema\u2014what we call \u2018structural\u2019 but which is very little understood around here.\u201d Film director Cac\u00e1 Diegues, after attending the 2011 premier of Santos Dumont: Pr\u00e9-cineasta?<\/em> at the Tiradentes Festival in the state of Minas Gerais, wrote in an article for O Estado de S.Paulo<\/em> newspaper of his \u201cuncomfortable sensation witnessing another cinematic invention\u2014a cinema that had been lost and then recovered through the magical hands of its director.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Filmmaker delves into archives of Brazilian images to find material","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[216,241],"coauthors":[1265],"class_list":["post-221490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-film","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221490"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=221490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}