Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Researcher and documentary filmmaker Consuelo Lins, the author of a book on Eduardo Coutinho—and of the essay on your work featured in this FF>> Dossier—claims that “for Coutinho, cinema means interaction with the world.” This seems to apply to you. Does art mean interaction with the world to you? 

M: In 2002, we made a small anthology of ten works, and we wrote a book, O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo [The other begins where our senses meet the world], in which we attempted to discuss the alterity that drives our work. The question is: where does the alterity begin? I would say it begins when one abandons oneself. It begins when you abandon your own desire, your own direction, when you pause to aspire for something that comes from the outside. Like Oswald de Andrade, I am interested in that which is not mine. 

W: It is the desire to fulfill oneself. To make sense, I must connect myself to others. I believe I am a fragment, not a whole identity. No one exists as an island, only when connected. I become myself in this constant exercise of completing myself. 

I noticed that in many of your works, the other is the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, he who is stranded from his place. Is the other that you seek always distant?

W: If I search too close to myself, I might fall into a behavior that is structured after my own blind spots. But what does close mean? That is another question, because I may feel out of place, even though I am in place. This is not a geographic issue. This is about human condition: to be in one’s place or to seek one’s place.

M: Desire is what points to the other. It is subjective, and may point to something that is very strange to you. For example, the work that we are doing for Documenta is about desire. It is about the European fantasy of tropical culture. Hans Staden, who wrote the first ethnographic and literary texts about Brazil, in 1557, comes from the suburbs of Kassel. He wrote about the tupinambás and canibalism; he described his experience and called the book The True History. This part of his life, fantasized or not, lived or not, is told within another context, namely Europe circa 1557. No matter how precise his account was, it was still an account. The book was illustrated by someone who never came to Brazil, based on Staden’s account. Those illustrations of cannibalism became a visual archetype, which for three hundred years dominated the European imagery of the tropics, permeated all ethnographic literature about the tropics, and, naturally, determined the tropical political history within the universal context. 

Was the traveler always a narrator who preserved himself, much more than he preserved the other? Does an account reveal more about the narrator than the fact being told? 

W: It is important to realize that, when we look, we do not view what is there, but rather what we see. When I listen, I hear what I am hearing, and not what is being said. This is a relatively new awareness, which stems from psychoanalysis and other methods of analysis. The thing in itself exists outside the instrument of sight. This fragility is beautiful, it is complex, and it interests me. 

M: We start to become aware of a parallel story, which is the story of the perception of things. It is another story, one that is totally permeated, or driven, by the issue of alterity. Doing something, that is one thing. Now, to be seen doing something, that is a whole other thing altogether. And the other will tell a story parallel to the story you are telling. In the work of Hans Staden there is a whole intelligent notion of what the tropic is, but it is not the history of the tropic. One starts becoming aware of this problem that exists in narrative, be it ethnographic or journalistic. One cannot be so innocent as to think that a documentary film tells the truth. The documentary film delivers an account. We work with video. Video is not an image you create, it is not a line drawn on a white sheet of paper. When we turn on the camera, we are working with an image that exists, in principle. Is that making a documentary film? We must think about what defines a documentary film, because, in essence, image is neither documental nor fictitious. An image is an image. The literature that you relate to it will build the meaning of this image. I can put the camera in front of an acted-out reality, or in front of reality itself. Anyway, upon editing, I create a representation of what I recorded, no matter how real. Thus, the notions of documentary film must be reexamined, as the notions of recording are being reexamined. 

Your work aims precisely at exploring those instruments of peception. Each work sharpens new senses. But it is also possible to understand documentary films not only as representations of reality, but also as the creation of meetings and filmic happenings, in which all of the involved are aware that they are living a made-up situation. Given that the contemporary documentary film entails the awareness of a meeting between maker and reality, do you recognize yourselves as documentary filmmakers?

W: I don’t recognize myself as that yet. I would like to set an even broader scale. I hope our work leads viewers to feel that this meeting with reality is a flow, in which reality is permanently under construction. It is almost a performatic device for living the moment. I want to keep on encouraging meetings and conflicts with my material, and not to act like Hans Staden, who claimed to know the truth. That is misleading. 

M: I would categorically say I do not recognize myself as a documentary filmmaker. What interests us, regarding the issue of documentary film, is precisely questioning the existence of a material so clean that we might call documentary. You can make art using real material. Art is related to the issue of representation and of interpreting things. This is the difference between art and journalism, which does not have that concern. Maybe documentary films in the classic sense do not have it either, but documentary filmmaking has evolved into an art. The connection with aesthetic practices gave birth to a new genre, perhaps, but this new genre is art, it no longer has anything to do with information. Jean Rouch’s films, for instance...

Are those not documentary films?

M: They might be, but I don’t think so. Those are perfect works of art, like a work by Picasso. In an artist’s body of work, some works have all these qualities, and they are nearly sublime. You have it in painting, and you have it in documentary films. There is some sublime work by Jean Rouch and Eduardo Coutinho.

There is a nomenclature issue then, and certain works should not be regarded as documentary films?

M: There is a nomenclature issue. In the text O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo, we ask ourselves what the other is. And then we discuss this need we have of giving names to things. We have a need to classify and organize things so we can function in relation to them.

Is the word documentary a trap?

M: Every word is restrictive. The creation of a word is a decoding of something, and a word will never contain the complexity of that something. This is the problem with documentary films. They have the pretension of translating something, but they will never convey the complexity of that something. 

But isn’t thinking of your work strictly as art restricting too? Isn’t your work open to fields other than the artistic one?

M: Yes, just as every work of art is. I think every work of art is also open to the field of thought. Any good painting does that. 

This is, no doubt, an achievement of the last thirty years: speaking of art entails speaking of things that are beyond art. But has not the documentary film also attained this “expanded” status?

M: I think documentary film attained it in execution and in form. There are some wonderful documentary films, but it is not reality that touches you. It is the narrative. It is the way in which the story being told touches you or not.

W: Here we have an issue of testimony and truth. Speaking of things of the world involves very big problems. Suffering, for instance. Documentary films take on a burden that they cannot bear. This is a trap of the camera, which produces this illusion of reality.

M: A trap into which the media was the first one to fall. 

W: Yes, there is an expectation with regard to documentary film, which it cannot meet.

I would say many documentary films do not have a pretension of stating truths about the world. The career of Eduardo Coutinho, one of our most active documentary filmmakers, who worked in television, etc., is an example of that. Take O fim e o princípio, in which the film is a path seeking a subject.

M: To me, that is the virtue of documentary film. In journalistic documentaries, a given content is deemed more important than the way in which it is told. True documentary films, as art, never fall into that trap, because their makers know full well that the narrative determines everything. In this sense, when you ask whether our work consists of documentary films or not, I still say no, because they show great interest in the narrative, in telling stories. An artist has three roles of which he will never rid himself: the first one is to tell stories. Secondly, an artist also must entertain. The distance between things and ideas is nearly unbearable, and the artist works inside that gap, relieving people, making them entertain themselves. The third role of the artist is to make people think, to make room for reflection. In strictly documental journalism, if there really is such a thing, those three roles are lost. Even war reporters, being as close to the facts as they are, provide but an account of war. As Walter Benjamin put it, a ceramic vase will always be molded by the hand of the ceramist, the handwriting of its sculptor. 

When I first interviewed the two of you, Maurício told me about the Benjaminian narrator. In Devotionalia, the stories are told during modeling sessions. And the opening sequence for the documentary film is a telephone game, which translates the way in which oral knowledge is passed on, always bearing the marks of the places through which it passed. Is Devotionalia a tribute to the Benjaminian narrator?

M: No, we became acquainted with Walter Benjamin after we made Devotionalia, through critical observations about the work. We almost always do things in a very intuitive way. Only when we put ten works together and wrote O Outro começa... did we find that the entire work was about the other, the other as a complement of our own selves. It has everything to do with desire, because we worked with specific groups—street kids, male prostitutes, policemen, doormen, human beings like ourselves—, who had identity labels that we did not have. But, and maybe because we are not like them, we had a need to reflect about them. 

How do you create the devices for these encounters, which are very different in each case? 

W: In order to reach a level of interesting conversation, we need different devices in order to become close with the subject. There always is an exchange between the inner and outer worlds. For us, it is key to get to that place, when we speak to others. These works using audio, tactile, and olfactory aspects were very productive ways of creating a totally different context for conversation, of creating other words. A constant concern of ours is that somebody should disrupt the choreography of everyday life, because we are almost always self-portraying. People often talk about everything they learned, but they will not say what they think. I really like moments when a person searches for a word, finds it, and then speaks. 

In the work you are developing with funk carioca (from Rio de Janeiro), which ways of breaking these conditionings did you find? What relationship devices did you create?

M: The work is not about funk carioca, but rather about the perception of the exotic. In fact, exoticness may be generated by empathy or fear, or by a certain disliking. In either case, it results in a problem of interpretation. When something is turned into a myth, it becomes difficult to understand. Becoming close with it brings understanding. This is how we work, we need to grab things. Therefore, the visual universe of our work will be that of funk carioca, but the script for it will be chapter twenty-eight in Hans Staden’s book. He begins that chapter by telling how women would capture, decorate, have sex, and then eat their male enemies. He gives an account of how, in the act of eating their enemies, they would increase their own powers. The script is about the tupinambás, who in principle have nothing to do with funk carioca. We are taking this script from 1557, transposing it into this subversive visual realm, and doing what the canibals did. We are acting out those illustrations with them. Funk carioca balls in favelas are subversive to the State, to culture, to trade, just as canibalism was subversive back in 1557. Therefore, the decision of bringing those two things together provides the work with shape and content. Our work is not about funk carioca or about Hans Staden; it is about this bringing together. We are working with an instrument called ibirapema, which was used by those women to strike the fatal blow. We built an ibirapema using three simultaneously recording cameras. We do not know what is being recorded, because we are participating in the man-eating party.

You are subverting Hans Staden. He did not eat flesh, but when you go out in the funk dance floor, you are symbolically eating the flesh. Or not?

M: I guess so. The idea is not to be like Hans Staden, but he is a link to Kassel, because this work is for the Documenta. When we found out he was from Kassel, we said, it’s him. It will all come together. Funk carioca, which is a deeply local reality... we always seek local realities that translate universal issues. No work of ours is about its context. Voracidade máxima is not about prostitution. It was made in collaboration with male prostitutes, but it is a work investigating similarities between subjectivity, sex, and economy. The only possible encounter in which all those things will mix is in bed. Nothing links the customer or ‘trick’ to that illegal immigrant who became a gay prostitute, but in a given moment he is going to pay to go to bed with the guy. Just as this improbable meeting takes place in bed and in prostitution, it also takes place in art. We go out and seek, in what is strange to us, to understand what is very close and essential for us. This can happen where you least expect. For example: I don’t even like eating meat that much, but I find it very interesting to know the universe of Hans Staden, who is allowing me to understand a whole story of perception about life and culture in the tropics, according to the European mentality, which still drives our culture. Until this day, everything that we sell bears the label of exoticness. 

W: The very Brazilianness is a construction made using those myths. The imagery of funk carioca, of the bodies, is hallucinating. You take the most sensationalist tabloid in Rio, O Povo, and you see pictures everyday, of the meeting between policemen and this world of people from favelas. What you have is very close to the illustrations in Hans Staden’s book: arms cut off, mutilated bodies ready to be publically devoured at every corner newsstand. People buy human flesh and eat it visually. And how is the story of this similarity being told? The funk itself discusses it, as it is a translation in the form of music and art. The text by Hans Staden is an account, and sometimes the time lapse between the two events is nearly imploded. 

By staging canibalism in a funk dance floor, are you using drama to express some truth? 

M: We must replace the word truth with the word precision. There is a quest for precision, a nearly technical perfection in what we do. We are not concerned with truth, but rather with concept, we are concerned with conveying a concept using the most precise language possible. When we start a work, we have more questions than we have ideas. Our work is much more investigative than it is affirmative. It is always born out of some interest, some curiosity. We have very few things to affirm. But we do have a passion for precision. 

Do you include yourselves in your work whenever you can? 
 

M: It is impossible not to include myself. I am the one who turns on the camera. 

W: We do include ourselves, because we do not make a spectacle in order to hypnotize the audience, as cinema often does: a virtuous application of formulas designed to satisfy, to get you out of the real world and make you unaware. In that sense, we are much more Brechtian, we are trying to keep a resistance, which makes you feel as if you are in space, but we also work with seduction, and we try to be entertainers. Brecht was always an entertainer who kept an antidelusional resistance, all the while remembering the audience of the fact that they were in a theater. 

Do you envision your work in movie theaters? 

M: Nothing we ever did to this day could be shown at a movie theater. We work at the edge of visual arts. Why would someone buy our work? At the same time, we do not make the type of cinema that could sell out a theater. Therefore, our work bears issues that we are unable to answer. 

You do not speak only to the art crowd, you speak to a much broader audience, so I would also like to ask what you think about going on television. 

W: It would be nice. I think it would be a challenge, but television would also have to open itself up. Everything would need to change.

Maybe the access is more of an infiltration-through-the-breaches type thing... 

W: I agree, I see a lot of space opening up on the Internet and in television. This whole field of image and content circulation will see a lot of changes over the next five or ten years. The monopoly of TV Globo aesthetics, for instance, here in Rio, is suffocating. But I am very optimistic about the opening of spaces for production.

M: There are breaches and there are gaps. You enter a breach because you want to, and you enter a gap because you fall into it. We fell into visual arts through a gap. It was like falling in a hole, because we never really decided to do it. Walter never had anything to do with it, and when we started working together, I was sick of the visual arts system. We joined forces out of being fed up. And we started working precisely with those methodologies and investigative actions. 

W: The field in which our work is being presented is the visual arts field, where we were welcome, where there was receptiveness. In the world of theater it did not happen, and in the world of cinema there was a weird feeling. But that does not bother me, because if you get too used to one place, you become too safe. This permanent trouble in positioning ourselves does not bother me.

Do you struggle to find places other than the establishment?

M: Juksa was one of those attemps of leaving the gap. It was made in an island in the North Pole, we went there to meet three people. The first screening of the work was presented to those three people alone, and we brought in a singer from another country to sing an aria during the screening.

W: One element that has not been mentioned yet, which is very important to us and present in several works, is our use of archival material. Not in the sense of memory, but in the sense of producing contemporary meaning. Memory is always a construction as well.

In Devotionalia, the newspaper texts function almost as a counterpoint to the personal character of statements. What is the role of archive in that work?

M: Our goal in using archival material is precisely to create a counterpoint, because what interests us is the subjective story of what we are telling. In other words, we want to insert subjectivity into contexts in which it has been lost. The last thing a middle-class person thinks, when it comes to policemen, street kids, doormen, or prostitutes, is that these people have a subjectivity. This is what Suely Rolnik very cleverly called “trash subjectivity.” What we attempt to do in our work is to reinsert subjectivity into the stories we tell. This is the case with Devotionalia, because the newspaper text is something that we read everyday, and it makes us numb. We tried to bare the mechanisms through which subjectivity is taken out of context, in order to facilitate our relationship with the world, through media. When a boy says his friend died, and then you read the exact same story on the newspaper, then you see the distance between the two, as if those were two different universes. Which, in fact, they are. 

This creates a revelation, which is maybe the precision you were talking about.

M: Yes, exactly. The possible truth lies there, in that formal play of including counterpoints.