In October 2018, a year of overwhelming political, personal, and existential transformations, I decided to start filming a diary. I wanted to free myself from cinematographic practice as a constant exercise of projection and representation, and find a living cinema that would reflect the extraordinary quotidian side of life, with everything that usually remains on the sidelines, on the edges of a film. I found myself searching more and more for what I would call a “cinema of manifestations,” rather than a “cinema of representations.” Without scripts, without projections, without writing, the camera would become an accomplice of some moments of life that would remain stored on celluloid until the day they would be revealed—a kind of metabolism of the image, where the practice of filming would be nothing more than a vital metabolic exercise. The images would thus become a mere capture of energies—spectral, historical, emotional—in the form of visual representations.
With these ideas in mind, over the last few years I have been filming these little flashes that capture the moment where celluloid meets life in a series of small film-rituals. It has turned into a not very regular and quite instinctive practice. In 2020 I made my first film from the initial images-rituals recorded for the diary. To my surprise, the film became a first rite of metamorphosis. In PSEUDOSPHYNX (2020), a shattering political event [the 2018 elections which brought the extreme right into power in Brazil] was intersected by the appearance of a dozen fire caterpillars preparing to turn into “witches”1The Portuguese word for butterflies in Brazil. and also to transform the entire political horizon with their animalistic spell, stitching together the places I passed through: Paris, Brasilia, Serra dos Pirineus, and Lisbon.
The film became a brief and intense trance, in which everyday life is turned into a ritual by a magical act. It is worth remembering that magic is nothing more than the transformation of what we call “real” into something that was not there before (although perhaps it was latent, dormant, or invisible before the magical act-ritual took place). Today I think that maybe these diaries are a kind of magical exercise in everyday life, à la Bruce Baillie, I would later think.
I found myself searching more and more for what I would call a “cinema of manifestations,” rather than a “cinema of representations.”
It was then, at the time of these everyday magic exercises, that I accepted Garbiñe Ortega’s invitation to think about, film, and honor the memory of the beloved Bruce Baillie on the occasion of the exhibition “Somewhere from here to heaven.” With his generosity, poetry, and conviviality, Bruce transformed the cinema of an avant-garde and intellectual generation into a corporeal, intimate, and almost journalistic cinema. A cinema that does not deny “the first person.” In his films, Bruce is always “there,” exactly where his characters are: fences, cowboys, Native Americans, bees, donkeys, children, letters, or motorbikes, he is always “standing by what he films.” Thinking about Bruce, I believe this is his most outstanding quality: the ability to give himself over to the world he films, to embody each frame, place, or impression.
A “first-person cinema” is something that the rationality of the last century flatly rejected in favor of distance as a privileged way of existing and observing others and the world.
When I received the invitation, I decided to watch all his films again. As I let myself be carried away by each shot, it was impossible for me to imagine that for such a worthy figure as Bruce Baillie, the poet of the image, one could start from a single film or pay tribute to him in the form of an elegy. I suppose he would hate that: to be seen as an icon, a monument, a hero. It was something he constantly rejected through the films he made. So instead of an elegy, I decided to focus my reflection on the form of his soul and his cinema, and on the simplicity of his gestures, to think of a film shot alongside Bruce Baillie rather than in front of or behind him.
