The essay entitled The experimental element in national cinema (published by Julio Bressane in 1990 in the collection Alguns), concluded with these two sentences: «Experimental cinema has existed in Brazil since 1898. I notice that our cinema is experimental or it isn’t!». In fact, the text began by stating that the first experimental film in Brazil was that of the Segreto brothers, who in 1898 from the deck of the ship had filmed the entry into the Bay of Guanabajara while traveling with a Lumière Brothers camera.
The text then evoked the footage of Major Tomás Reis who had accompanied Random’s expedition to the Upper Xingu in 1923 by filming the «Visão do Paraîso», images of the indigenous people of mythical Brazil, «which have left a lasting mark on our cinematography» , a true paradigm.
Then of course Limit, the great masterpiece by Mário Peixoto (1930), which « is already cinema of cinema, it implies the creation and recreation of the image». Cinema «as an immeasurably sensitive intellectual organism, which moves on the border of all the arts, sciences, life…», radicalizing Gance’s formula: «cinema is the music of light». And in the 1930s the Syrian merchant Benjamin Abraão had filmed the brigand Lampião and his men in the sertão, disturbing, brutalist images, in turn paradigmatic. «Major Reis and Benjamin Abraão form the central axis from which everything that is valuable in our cinema derives and passes through».
All this, and much more, we find today in Bressane’s new film, an assembly work created with Rodrigo Lima, which is presented as a world premiere in Pesaro, Relâmpagos de críticas murmúrios metafísicos: a journey over a century long, in which we see signs and clichés of the errant formalisms of the history of cinema transit and assimilate in Brazilian films of all decades, from José Medina to Humberto Mauro, from Paulo César Saraceni to Fernando Coni Campos, from Chiaca de Garcia to José Mojica Marins, from Rogério Sganzerla in Bressane itself.
Bressane had already returned several times in the past to reflect on cinema and its history, both international and Brazilian, and on the filmmakers who were most essential to him, not only in numerous writings but also in several films. And just last year, almost a premise to Relâmpagos, has created a short 12-minute montage film that will be shown at Fuori Orario: Ideograma: limit/fada do oriente/agonia/abismu, in which four sequence shots of the films mentioned in the title are compared in their transgressive repetition to reflect on the movement “of veiling and unveiling of cinema in films”.
In this sense, the founding Brazilian film was the limit, despite having remained for a long time «an invisible comet», the film that «distinguishes and configures its own cinematographic sign for the first time. The sign of the I cinema.” A Agonia, where it is no coincidence that Pessoa’s words resonate, will be the most extraordinary and brilliant work ever created by a director as a counterpoint to another film, Limite, of which the topos of some sequences are “recreated”.
Bressane encountered cinema as a teenager, when his mother gave him a 16 mm film camera. A Longa Viagem de Ônibus Amarelo, also made together with Rodrigo Lima, is a film of over seven hours that assimilates, re-edits and hijacks passages from 58 titles from his own filmography, including family films, made between 1959 and 2021, l the year of Capitu eo capitulo. The film is presented at Fuori Orario as an absolute premiere for Italy, and in some way precisely in connection with Relâmpagos in Pesaro. Not autobiography but Atlas in the style of Aby Warburg, but also phantasmagoria of light, musical fantasy, as Rua Aperana 52 had already been. In fact, it would be impossible to think of Bressane’s cinema as a simple “authorial” experience without instead evoking “all the names of history » and the persistence of the Americas’ ancestral past. A cinema, his, of signs, myths and wandering forms that come to us from the classical world and at the same time arises from the instinctual push of aboriginal forces, made together of anthropophagy and adherence to the ground, erudite and sensual, philological and erotic. In the land of his films, Saint Jerome and Father António Vieira, Fernando Pessoa and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mário Reis and Oswald De Andrade, the meta-fictional prose of Machado de Assis and the concrete poetry of Haroldo de Campos have gradually wandered,…
Julio Bressane therefore returns to Pesaro 66 years after having presented his first feature film in 1968, still under the umbrella of Cinema Novo (today we know how completely provisional and borrowed it was), Dear to dear. And this return to the Italian festival rightly more linked to Cinema Novo, after 56 years of absence, has almost a symbolic value. Bressane’s break with Cinema Novo, dating back to 1969, led him for decades to wander across the desert, from which in Europe (and in particular in Italy) he emerged very gradually only starting from the 1990s. And he returns to Pesaro not only with Relâmpagos but also with his most recent work of fiction, still unpublished in Italy, Leme do destiny, the last pearl of the rich flowering of works of recent years, of which one cannot fail to notice correspondences and differences especially with Filme de Amor And Sentimental education. But not only.
Let’s say it once again, of the filmmakers who emerged in the climate of the aesthetic and formal cinematographic revolution of the 1960s, Bressane is the one who, with Godard (and partly also Ruiz), albeit along different paths, went the furthest, compensating for the poverty of means and the isolation to which he was forced with the genius of the time and the tenacity of long duration, disseminating over the years an immense and now rich work of over 60 titles.
With Bressane, master and inventor in quotation and editing, and as restless researcher as the others, even more than with the others one feels the sense of the infinite, the getting lost in the vertigo, the permanent exit from oneself into the unconscious, aboriginal force, ancestral, of the creation of the world. Godard had written at the age of 21 that «artistic creation merely repeats cosmogonic creation». The “aboriginal force of cinema”, therefore, as an anonymous, unconscious force, by which we are dragged into an endless movement such as the sinuous and serpentine unraveling of the hairpin bends of Rua Aperana. The eternal return. The eternal repetition. The eternal Mnemosyne.
It could therefore only be Belair, already marked by the Nietzschean genius, to settle and once again forcefully undermine itself at the center of Relâmpagos, with the long citation of all his six films, three from Bressane, three from Sganzerla, which in 1970 triggered the harshest reaction from Cinema Novo. In 1975, in the aforementioned Viola Chinesa, Great Oteloaddressing Bressane, had well recited: «Belair is the wind that blows from a future cinematic homeland».
Bressane, discoverer of stars, is now working on two new films: Estrela Enigma And Pitico: Um Historiador de Província.
