Counter-TV: Experimental Practices in Video in the 1980s
by Ruy Luduvice
about Focus 1 of 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil's Public Programs
The first panel of the public programs’ opening focus featured Tadeu Jungle, Walter Silveira, and Pedro Vieira, former TVDO members, and the theater director, actor and playwright José Celso Martinez Corrêa. The second panel featured Fernando Meirelles, Marcelo Tas and Marcelo Machado, former members of Olhar Eletrônico, and the journalist Goulart de Andrade. Both panels were mediated by the journalist Gabriel Priolli.
The mediator outlined to the audience the context in which these two groups surfaced: In the first half of the 80s, the press censorship that existed in the past had ended, allowing for greater freedom of expression. The late 70s saw the emergence of portable equipment (though heavy enough to cause back problems, as Corrêa pointed out). Production costs decreased with the advent of U-Matic and of the domestic videocassette recorder, in 1982. That was when the first generation of electronic audiovisual artists emerged in Brazil. Until then, in order to produce electronic image, one had to be in a TV station. It is important to add that this was a context still far removed from the world of visual arts and even from the Super 8 experiments made in the preceding decade by artists like José Roberto Aguilar, Letícia Parente or Anna Bella Geiger. Anyway, this reality – so distant from the present time and its profusion of images, social media and apparatuses of all sorts – was gradually altered by young university students who set out to make independent video. Their dream was to take over television, to take it by storm. This task, however, proved ungrateful as the decade progressed. Goulart de Andrade was one of a handful of TV producers who took notice of the burgeoning movement and invited the Olhar Eletrônico crew to his show 23ª Hora (23rd Hour), on TV Gazeta. Afterwards, Nelson Motta would also invite the TVDO team to produce the show Mocidade Independente (Independent Youth), on TV Bandeirantes, a short-lived experience, since the channel’s owner deemed it too far from standards.
The dearth of outlets for electronic image was coupled with the political control and manipulation of television media, which, according to Priolli, was much stronger than today. As a matter of fact, debate about the enactment of media democratization laws began concurrently with the first editions of Festival Videobrasil. Thus, the fledgling production companies were not against “The Television,” they were against “That Television.” And according to Priolli, even today, television remains attached to a paint-by-number language that is largely closed off to renewal. But this eagerness to change the medium and fulfill all of its potential was approached differently by each of the two groups.
Interaction with poetry, theater and the visual arts was the trademark of the TVDO group, which nurtured the desire to introduce their poetical and artistic repertoire into the programming of open TV channels. Jungle highlights the importance of Antônio Abujamra in training the group’s members and supporting their early productions, encouraging the young producers’ impetus to subvert a programming they saw as reactionary and conservative. It was about doing the opposite of what had been done before that time, and advancing experiments like those made by presenter Chacrinha and filmmaker Glauber Rocha in the early 70s in the show Abertura (Opening). Another major source of inspiration was the director José Celso Martinez Corrêa.
Corrêa worked with video at his Oficina theater, and even had an ambitious project to shoot a soap opera across all of Latin America. Even prior to the advent of videotape, he was already experimenting with Super 8. This technical apparatus, rendered obsolete by the advent of film gauges like VHS and U-Matic, had emerged as an alternative to record and publicize the group’s theatrical productions, as a workaround to the tightening of censorship that followed the enactment of institutional act #5, in 1968. Footage from plays like Graça Senhor, by Jorge Bodanzky, dates back to that period. Thus, electronic image was important as a register of political manifestations and as a form of protection, as noted by Tadeu Jungle. There is a connection between the visibility afforded by this language and the survival of projects situated outside the bounds of the cultural mainstream. This becomes clear in Caderneta de Campo, which portrays the struggle of theater group Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona to physically and spiritually survive the pressures from the real estate market – which vied to occupy the plot around its headquarters – and from the culture industry; these pressures, by the way, were consubstantiated in clashes with the State Secretariat for Culture, the Association of Theater Businessmen, and theater union representatives. Later on, the group’s cultural militancy would continue in the famous attempts by the owner of TV network Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão, Sílvio Santos, to occupy the area where the group’s headquarters were located. In the same piece of work, this bevy of adversities is discussed in statements from the group’s members, taken as bona fide accounts from the trenches and barricades, and the video closes with footage of urban confrontations and police brutality. Thus, these artworks were addressed and regarded both by Corrêa and the TVDO members as combat strategies. In TVDO’s Frau, Corrêa declares: “We are in a state of cultural war!” Therefore, video and politics share an umbilical connection that is made explicit by the participants in this panel. To this end, there is a similarity between the situations faced by the founder of Teatro Oficina and the one retold by in Jungle, in the convergence between the conquest of space and of broader possibilities of expression. In this sense, Festival Videobrasil was supposedly a means to these achievements, alongside graffiti art, which Jungle and Walter Silveira also did at the time, writing poems on walls in the city of São Paulo.
A dear idea to TVDO was the camera “on eye” (as the group’s members themselves put it), which relates to the desire to achieve a register that is closer to the sphere of real life. Therefore, it is about an “eye camera,” one that does not require instructions from a TV director, as Walter Silveira explained. In Frau, Corrêa speaks from a lectern, from whence he was supposed to accept the Gramado Festival’s prize for his film O Rei da Vela, but the spectator is placed beside the director, rather than in the place theoretically allocated to the audience. The image catches on fire as the director rants against the colonization of cinema language by television. The confrontation with authoritarian television took place in the very material, in the technical apparatus, in a defiance of the hierarchy of classification of images as adequate or inadequate, as proper or improper for screening on national television. As an example of the reigning conservativeness, both Jungle and Fernando Meirelles cite the news stories of then, which concealed their editing, employing artifices to hide the production process from viewers, and offering image as an absolute truth. Therefore, one had to allow the editing to be seen, and TVDO did so by means of abrupt cuts. Such arbitrary, authoritarian stance is also the object of satire in Heróis da Decadensia, which sees Jungle, smartly clad in a suit and tie, intercept passersby on São Paulo streets the way TV reporters do. However, instead of hearing people speak, he simply poses for the camera beside them, highlighting the embarrassment and harassment that news report subjects are submitted to, as they passively receive the reporter who most of the time is only seeking accounts that corroborate his own interpretation of facts.
The group sought the opposite of this relationship between electronic image and the spectator in the live show Fábrica do Som (Sound Factory), directed by Viera, presented by Jungle and recorded at SESC Pompeia. The show strove to depart from what was considered a transfer of the Italian stage onto TV. The presenter-audience hierarchy was altogether eliminated, allowing all passersby to be the actors and authors of the show. These principles often endowed TVDO productions with a chaotic feel, as Pedro Viera remarked. However, according to him, one must keep in mind that the experience of multitudes or mass events, so commonplace to 21st century Brazilians, were a novel thing then. Rock concert recordings were proliferating, since large gatherings of people were no longer met with repression and prohibition, as was the case during the days of the military rule. The ambivalence of this phenomenon was explored in Pedro Vieira’s documentary Duelo dos Deuses (Duel of the Gods), which depicts a humongous event sponsored by priest Edir Macedo’s Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), and held at Pacaembu Stadium in 1988. Alongside the signs of emancipation brought about by mass gatherings and multitudes, new vistas were opened up for the shady experience of mass domination and ideological manipulation through neo-Pentecostalism-based spirituality, ushered in by the embracing of consumption that liberal democratization entailed. Winning over hearts and minds, this new protestant ethic replaced Calvinist austerity with consumerist frenzy and the hedonistic self-complacency of instant gratification, whereby the mystery of the holy trinity reveals itself in an automobile, and a leap of faith is attested by a bottle of ketchup. All of this, of course, is brought about and intermediated by the spread of electronic image, and endorsed by the TV channel concession policy.
Both Walter Silveira and Marcelo Machado mention the fight against the so-called Vênus Platinada (Platinum Venus) – as the Rede Globo TV network was nicknamed, because of the silver-toned façade of its headquarters in Rio’s Jardim Botânico neighborhood. Machado recalls that the 80s saw the peak of power of the Roberto Marinho-owned channel, which counted on powerful postproduction to wipe out any “leftovers” or “dirt” before airing any product whatsoever.
Working closer to the language of broadcast journalism, although they strove to subvert it, the Olhar Eletrônico crew was more successful in its inroads into television channels, using the doors opened by Goulart de Andrade. Fresh out of TV Globo after the channel’s failed attempts to add his independently produced show to its journalism department, Goulart frequented the Videobrasil Festival, where he became acquainted with the young group and extended them an invitation. Marcelo Tas recollected that this came after a few unsuccessful attempts in open TV channels. In one such attempt, Fernando Meirelles, wearing a tuxedo, tried to persuade TV Globo professionals that Garotos do Subúrbio (Kids from the Suburb) – one of the group’s productions – was viable as a TV series. The deconstruction of the established language of television was viewed differently. It was not as much about operating at the formal level, like TVDO did (although this was also a factor), but rather about showing the backstage of TV, how the shows were made. On the other hand, the idea of staging and parodying traditional television genres – especially newscasts – were key to the group. Marly Normal, from 1983, can be seen as the representation of the life of an average television viewer, summing up an entire journey into a fast-moving, compressed 7 minutes.
As noted by Fernando Meirelles, this strategy largely became the standard in major channels, including Globo, which shows the newsroom as the background for its newscasts. But while one can see traces of Ernesto Varela in contemporary comedy shows, the concern with unveiling how image is created – and therefore the quest to activate a critical relationship between the audience and the television product – is hardly anywhere to be found in TV programming today. Varela na Copa (Varela in the Cup), for one, uses humor to denounce the concealment of important political events in Brazil through the massive attention imparted by media to the FIFA World Cup in Mexico. The piece culminates with a notorious interview with Military Regime supporting party member and Brazilian Football Confederation chairman Nabi Abi Chedid, aired on Globo’s Fantástico show, as part of a news report by Lucas Mendes. The character emerges from the growing space left by Goulart in his shows for the group to fill. Beginning with anonymous interviewees, the group moved on to celebrities and politicians. In Do Outro Lado da sua Casa, by Marcelo Machado, not only is the subject of the news story given the leading role, he also conducts the interviews. A clever street dweller renders explicit the physical existence of the reporter, of the eye that sees, by making mention of the interviewer’s body: “How much do you weigh? – he asks -, “I weigh 72 kilos” – he answers –, “Then you have to lug around 72 kilos of yourself 24 hours a day.” Therefore, a TV newscast would hardly implement Olhar Eletrônico’s practices fully, and the assimilation ascertained by Meirelles came at the cost of letting go, or at least paring down the radical quality of those videos. By the way, it is understandable that the language of newscasts was a constant target of parody and critique in works by the two groups, for it was considered the spitting image of the authoritarian image of Brazil, presented as the absolute truth about national reality. This aspect of productions by both TVDO and Olhar Eletrônico remains utterly contemporary.
Finally, the speakers at the meeting regard the future of television as uncertain in the face of new technologies. Its “electromagnetic space,” as Priolli put it, is precious, and perhaps the political-economic establishment will decide to use it for other more profitable and strategic activities. Or maybe it will survive as a collective ritual, above all in national events like football games, was the hypothesis outlined by Marcelo Tas. For his part, José Celso Martinez Corrêa, in one of his final interventions in the panel, said he does not even watch television anymore, and favors other types of increasingly available screens.