Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Imagem Política

Contemporary audiovisual production ebbs and flows through the most varied paths and possibilities of creation. The multiple processes of image building lay bare several vectors, lines of force and of continuity that somehow strengthen the bonds that tie together an audiovisual history-of-sorts (or a “Media Archaeology,” as Siegfried Zielinski puts it). The heritages of video art, of Cinema Novo [New Cinema], of the avant-gardes, and of the first video productions are often rearranged into new productions aimed at revealing the crooked paths of audiovisual devices and their maneuvers around reality's shards.

The videos of Daniel Lisboa lie somewhere along the lines of continuity that tie together, sometimes almost paradoxically, experimental images based on formalist principles and the restlessness of a political and anarchic view of social events, especially the political and social situation of Bahia. Lisboa seems to have inherited the M.O. of the technical apparatus used by the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s, or of the first video productions of the 60s, and the uneasiness of producers who soon thereafter migrated to the experimental and community TVs that characterized U.S. audiovisual output during the 70s. Lisboa's work seems to belong to both these lines, that often seem to exclude each other, as pointed out by Martha Rosler in her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” published in the collection Illuminating Video* :

The attempt to use the premier vernacular and popular medium had several streams. The surrealist-inspired or influenced effort meant to develop a new poetry from this everyday "language" of television, to insert aesthetic pleasure into a mass form, and to provide the utopic glimpse afforded by "liberated" sensibilities. This was meant not merely as a hedonic-aesthetic respite from instrumental reality but as a liberating maneuver. Another stream was more interested in information than in poetry, less interested in spiritual transcendence but equally or more interested in social transformation. Its political dimension was arguably more collective, less visionary, in its effort to open up a space in which the voices of the voiceless might be articulated.

In the work of Lisboa, these two trends mix with each other in videos that, if on the one hand treat image formally, on the other hand reveal political and social issues. The highlight of this mix-reminiscent of Paul Garrin's videos, particularly Home(less) Is Where the Revolution Is (1990)-is precisely the use of formal procedures typical of experimental video, fused together with documentary elements, bringing forth a natural tension between image, its form, and the social contents presented. In the work of Daniel Lisboa, this feature is clearly present in U Olhu Du Povu, Freqüência Hanói, and in O Fim do Homem Cordial, a video that was awarded a prize at the 15th edition of Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival.

The long black-and-white sequence shot of ordinary people in the streets that lasts nearly the whole duration of U Olhu Du Povu reveals an interesting aesthetic approach. People are cut off from the background, which becomes a mere vestige, a thin reference of place. This image of the solarized background, with people standing in front of it, seems like a xerox copy of the real space, a worsened, unfaithful reconstruction, unable to reveal anything. Pure image construction. Thus, we are slowly lulled by the music of Chico Science (Coco Dub) and by images of perplexed people staring. The tension persists until the video's last minutes, when we realize that we are watching a demonstration of students, left-wing parties, and the general public in the streets of Salvador during the expelling process of Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães, a central figure in the most conservative end of politics in the state of Bahia who was exonerated for tampering with an electronic voting panel. A statement by a woman at the end of the video collaborates to lend the images of the people a new meaning. Perplexity, passivity, and stupefaction; Lisboa managed to capture these feelings and to build an instigating narrative-of-sorts, that culminates with the revelation of the reason why people are so amazed. 

In the disquieting Freqüência Hanói, codirected by Diego Lisboa, beautiful images of an intensely blue sky crisscrossed by electric wires, antennas, and other “urban gadgets” serve as counterpart for the candid discourse of an inmate (or is he?) as he tells his story, expresses his indignation and his dreams. Throughout the entire video, the inmate's voice is interrupted by static, radio-like sounds. The interesting thing is that the static also interferes with the image, which blacks out at times, revealing small fragments of images. We also see very quick flashes of a police district, and of graffiti. Tunings that meet each other in the angry political discourse of the inmate and in these images that cut through the blue sky. In this game between losing and finding the right tuning, Lisboa gives voice to those who usually can't reach the media. 

The result is sheer potency, a revelation of the state of affairs, particularly regarding politics in Bahia and in Brazil. The images do not show the inmate, therefore they are not structured around a representation of reality, thus enabling the tuning possibilities of this “image-radio-voice” to reveal to us, in depth, a voice we are not so used to hearing. A voice that usually gets lost in the mainstream media. 

If Freqüência Hanói provides some space to the inmate's voice, in O Fim do Homem Cordial the fiction that develops around a terrorist device reveals the marginal voice of the excluded. The video is comprised of images taken from the afternoon newscast of the most-watched Bahia TV station and, just like the terrorists of the Al-Qaeda Network, demands that the material they have sent to the TV station, about the abduction of a well-known senator from Bahia, be broadcast. What we see is brutal and seems to rub in our face the daze in which thousands of Brazilians live, constantly affected by the corruption of politicians. Upon turning video into a terrorist device (the image breaking into the TV schedule, the lack of camera motion, the violent discourse, the low-quality image, visual interferences of all kinds), Lisboa seems to subvert the location of the audiovisual, alluding to a reality that is built upon mediation, and of which image is already a part. Out of this subversive appropriation of images emerges the “not-so-cordial” discourse of those who usually have no voice. “Cabeça branca vai rolar” [White head will roll], shouts out the “terrorist from Bahia” as he fearlessly brandishes his knife for the camera. Lisboa delves deeper into the terrorist device, as he subtly switches the subtitles from English to Arabic, and includes an Arabic soundtrack at the end of the TV newscast. The strategy consists of using video as a device that violently fakes reality, covering it up with fiction to see how far its image shards go. This is a media short circuit, image as a vestige of actual media.

The work of Lisboa reveals, in a very blunt fashion, a trend in Brazilian audiovisual production that oscillates between formats and genres, using the current multiplicity of images to soak up possible situations of subversion, re-creation, and appropriation, such as, for example, television in its mediation (news, information, entertainment, numbness), in O Fim do Homem Cordial, or the tension between documentary, fiction, and experimentation, in Freqüência Hanói.

Moreover, the typical tensions of the meeting with the Other, revealed in the works, belong in a repertoire of strategies devised to involve us as spectators and to place different worldviews into conflict. The result is an impactful body of work that is intensely connected with social life, and capable of giving voice to the Other, thus laying bare in explicit fashion certain Brazilian political issues that are often left out from national newscasts.