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Moving Image Review & Art Journal · Volume 1 · Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Features. English language. doi: 10.1386/miraj.1.1.59_7 ‘Situações-Limites’: the emergence of video art in Brazil in the 1970s Nick Fitch Columbia University with the collaboration of Anne-Sophie Dinant, Associate Curator, South London Gallery In the mid-1970s, at the tail end of the most repressive phase of the Brazilian dictator- 1. For a detailed political ship (1964–85), an experimental video practice fl ourished in Rio de Janeiro and São history of the Brazilian dicta- Paulo.1 When the new medium took root, artists’ fi lm-making in Brazil was already well torship, see Skidmore (1988). established: beginning with Lygia Pape’s fi rst fi lm, Letreiros/Cinemateca/MAM (1965, 35mm). Several other leading Brazilian artists worked in 35mm, 16mm and 8mm, among 2. A tradition of experimental them Artur Barrio, Paulo Bruscky, Antônio Dias, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino cinema in Brazil goes back at and Antonio Manuel.2 Properly speaking, with the exception of a few earlier experi- least to the 1950s, when the ments by the painter Rubens Gerchman, the history of Brazilian video begins in 1974.3 paulista (São Paulo native) Th e carioca (Rio de Janeiro native) artist Anna Bella Geiger, then a professor at the art fi lm-maker Roberto Miller school of the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, was approached by Walter Zanini, made his fi rst animations. the visionary director of the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of São Paulo, to fi nd videos for inclusion in the exhibition ‘Video Art’ at the ICA Philadelphia.4 Geiger 3. In 1971–72 Rubens Gerch- in turn invited fellow artist Ângelo de Aquino and her students Sônia Andrade, Ivens man, José Roberto Aguilar, Machado and Fernando Cocchiarale, and the group produced fi lms with the portapack Carlos Borda and Ralph equipment that the Brazilian diplomat Jom Tob Azulay had brought back to Rio aft er a Camargo took part in experi- stay in Los Angeles. Th ey recorded their videos in a single day in 1974.5 ments on ½-inch and ¼-inch Like Geiger and her students, most of the early practitioners of video art in Brazil equipment belonging to the came from a fi ne art rather than a fi lm background. Perhaps not surprisingly, Brazilian Ralph Camargo Gallery. See video of the 1970s evidences strong continuities with the proto-conceptual and fi rst- the catalogue Anon (1975). generation conceptual movement of the 1950s and 1960s and with the experimental practice of Lygia Clark in particular.6 Th e two primary aesthetic propositions that 4. Th is was at the request of the video artists found in Clark’s work were a concern with the human body and an the American curator Suzanne embrace of cultural marginality. Th ese preoccupations of Clark’s became a feature of Delehanty. 59 MIRAJ_1.1_Features_Fitch_59-68.indd 59 12/20/11 2:55:18 PM Nick Fitch Leticia Parente, video still from Marca Registrada (Trademark) (1975), b/w, sound, 11:44 min. Courtesy of André Parente. 60 MIRAJ_1.1_Features_Fitch_59-68.indd 60 1/17/12 6:39:49 PM ‘Situações-Limites’ avant-garde Brazilian culture across genres and mediums in the 1970s, when aft er the relative cultural freedom of the years 1964–68, offi cial censorship and political repres- sion markedly increased, and artists and writers turned their attention to the domain of individual subjectivity. By the early 1980s Brazilian cultural critics had already noted the contrast between the euphoria of the 1960s and the sobriety of the 1970s: If the decade of the 1960s in Brazil was that of New Cinema, of the popular musical festivals, of Tropicalia, of street parties and the play Rei da Vela (Th e Candle King); that is, years of Dionysian celebration, the 1970s may be consid- ered as a gaining of consciousness of a reality that was already inescapable, of open struggle and oft en of intense mourning. For Brazilian culture it was what might be called entering the age of reason, with all of its painful consequences. (Bittencourt 2009: 259) Like the confessional ‘diary-poetry’ that proliferated in artisanally printed and inde- pendently distributed editions in the 1970s such as Waly Salomão’s Me Segura qu’eu vou dar um troço (1972) and Torquato Neto’s Os últimos dias de paupéria (1973), Brazilian video was a self-consciously marginal practice, aimed at a tiny artistic public and imbued with social and political critique.7 Whilst non-Brazilian readers will most likely be familiar with the Cinema Novo movement, of more direct relevance for understanding the emergence of an avant- garde video practice in the 1970s are the feature-length fi lms O Bandido da luz vermelha/Red Light Bandit (Rogério Sganzerla, 1968), Matou a família e foi ao cinema/ Killed the Family and Went to the Cinema (Júlio Bressane, 1969) and Triste tropic/Sad Tropics (Arthur Omar, 1974–78). All three were made subsequent to the heyday of Cinema Novo and are associated with the underground fi lm movement – Brazilianized as ‘udigrudi’ – that fl ourished during the exile of prominent Cinema Novo directors such as Glauber Rocha and Carlos Diegues. Th e diff erences between Cinema Novo and the udigrudi are illustrated by a comparison of the most paradigmatic fi lms of each movement: Glauber Rocha’s Terra 5. Th ese fi lms were fi rst em transe/Entranced Earth (1967) and Rogério Sganzerla’s Red Light Bandit. Rocha’s shown at the ‘8th Jovem tale is of a populist provincial governor in the imaginary state of El Dorado who Arte Contemporânea’ chooses not to fi ght off a coup headed by the right-wing politician ‘Porfi rio Diaz’. isTh exhibition at the Museu de is an obvious allegory of the deposition of left -wing President João Goulart by the Arte Contemporânea da technocratic regime of General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco in 1964. Universidade de São Paulo, Sganzerla’s fi lm, on the other hand, is a fi ctionalization of the exploits of the notori- before travelling onto the ous bandit João Acácio Pereira da Costa, who carried out a string of burglaries and Institute of Contemporary sexual assaults in São Paulo between 1966 and 1967. To quote the Brazilian fi lm histo- Art, Philadelphia, where a fi lm rian Ismail Xavier, Red Light Bandit, ‘characterizes the passage from the “aesthetics of made by Antonio Dias in Italy hunger” to the “aesthetics of hunger” to the “aesthetics of garbage”’ (Xavier 1997: 18). was added. According to the fi lm historians Randal Johnson and Robert Stam: 6. For a helpful overview of As Cinema Novo decided to reach out for a popular audience, the Under- Clark’s artistic development, ground opted to slap that audience in the face. As Cinema Novo moved toward particularly with reference to technical polish and production values, the Novo Cinema Novo, as it also came her move away from conven- to be called, demanded a radicalization of the aesthetics of hunger, rejecting the tional object-making, see dominant codes of well-made cinema in favour of a ‘dirty screen’. Th e Under- Rolnick (1999). ground movement proclaimed its isolation in the names the fi lmmakers gave to their movement: marginal cinema or subterranean cinema. Although they 7. Regarding the importance were intentionally marginal, identifying socially downward with rebellious of poetry as a literary genre in lumpen characters, they were also marginalized, harassed by the censors and Brazil in the 1970s, see Süsse- boycotted by exhibitors. (Johnson and Stam 1995: 39) kind (2003). 61 MIRAJ_1.1_Features_Fitch_59-68.indd 61 12/20/11 2:55:26 PM Nick Fitch Anna Bella Geiger, Passagens no 1 (1974), video, 13 min. Courtesy of the artist. 62 MIRAJ_1.1_Features_Fitch_59-68.indd 62 1/17/12 6:41:28 PM ‘Situações-Limites’ At fi rst glance Lygia Clark’s contemporaneous work with alternative forms of psycho- therapy in her ‘Nostalgia do corpo/Nostalgia of the Body’ workshops at the Sorbonne in Paris and sober, diaristic videos such as Geiger’s Passagens nº 1 (1974) would seem to be the polar opposites of the boisterous udigrudi and its aesthetics of garbage. But on closer examination, strong parallels emerge between these diverse bodies of work. To varying degrees, they were all responses to the deterioration of the political situation in Brazil in 1968 and the repression that followed the promulgation of the Institutional Act No. 5 (regularly abbreviated as AI-5) in December of that year. AI-5 marks a major turning point in the Brazilian dictatorship; it is the moment when the military defi nitively abandoned the relative political moderation of Caste- lo Branco’s presidency (1964–67), and took such authoritarian measures as closing Congress, subjecting all crimes against ‘national security’ to military justice and offi - cially instituting censorship (aimed particularly at television and radio). Writing on Brazilian video, art historian Elena Shtromberg emphasizes the thematization of politi- cal censorship, judging that ‘artists viewed their practice at this time as off ering unique opportunities to confront censorship by symbolically enacting it – to underline the “reality” of its existence – and, at the same time, by directly challenging it’ (Shtrom- berg 2008: 276). Such a confrontation with censorship is certainly at play in the body of work under discussion, but Shtromberg is insuffi ciently attentive to the cultural nuances and contradictions of the Brazilian dictatorship, and thus overestimates the impact of direct artistic censorship; for as the literary historian Flora Süssekind cautions: ‘To the contrary of what is generally believed, censorship was by no means the only, nor the most effi cient strategy of repression adopted by the military govern- 8.

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