CARTAS DO ABSURDO (LETTERS FROM THE ABSURD) begins with fire. Fire reminds us of violence but also of the Potiguara spirits. The text is based on recently discovered letters written in Tupy, dating from the seventeenth century. These are important documents because they are some of the rare records that deal with the history of Brazil not from the side of the victors, but from the side of the vanquished – the Indigenous people. Gabraz uses these letters as a starting point to propose a reading of the contact between civilization and the original Brazilians, but his film proposes this operation not as an explanatory manual along the lines of a sociological analysis. On the contrary, the film proposes investigating, in a poetic way, the implications of this contact, in which violence is trespassed by the very formation of the image.
Cinema is also a civilizing apparatus of white culture.
The letter describes the oppression that the Indigenous suffered during mining. In a creative gesture, Gabraz proposes a time arc, relating it to the recent environmental imbalances in the state of Minas Gerais with the collapse of the dams in Mariana and Brumadinho in 2015 and 2019, which killed more than 300 people and affected more than 1,000 families. The multi-artist Sara Não Tem Nome appears in a performance. In one of the shots, the greed awakened by the land overshadows Narciso, who looks at himself through a twisted mirror. The sounds contribute to constructing a suggestive atmosphere that invades the film in a mixture of delirium and dream.
This shot could be one of the Lumière brothers’ travelogues but seen through the prism of contemporary cinema, in James Benning’s style.
In an excerpt from the letter, the Indigenous man states that, upon waking, he saw the large boats approaching the pier. And this is precisely the last movement of the film: a very long sequence shot, whose point of view is seen from the vessel’s bow. The captain’s eyes dominate the vessel, which is reminiscent of the “Age of Discovery,” when Portugal arrived on the South American continent, a symbol of colonial domination. This shot could be one of the Lumière brothers’ travelogues but seen through the prism of contemporary cinema, in James Benning’s style. However, we can read it differently: this is the counter-shot of the image of the Indigenous person in the foreground of the film. It is the image of the colonizer arriving on dry land. And, with him, the film camera. The arrival of civilization coincides with the arrival of cinema itself. Cinema is also a civilizing apparatus of white culture.
Marcelo Ikeda
Marcelo Ikeda holds a PhD in Communication from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and is a professor of Cinema at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). He writes film reviews for the website www.cinecasulofilia.com.
