13th May to 27th May
Cicle Counter-Cycle: Images in Trance
Auditório Ilídio Pinho

With a ciné-eye and a ciné-ear, I am a ciné-Rouch in a state of ciné-trance in the process of ciné-filming. That is the joy of filming, the ciné-pleasure. For this to work, the little god Dionysus must be present. We must have luck; we must have what I call ‘grace.’ [1]

In his last short film, shot at home, Jean Eustache films photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud as she describes her photographs to the filmmaker’s teenage son. A stripped-down premise which, through the asynchrony between image and sound, leads to Alix pointing at a photograph showing the reflection of a naked female body and stating: “This is a sunset in Fez.” It is this moment-shock that opens the cycle Counter-Cycle: Images in Trance.

The first screening presents five short films that, in a continuous and demanding rhythm, compel us into a relationship of resistance and commitment with moving images. The first resistance is a return to photography, particularly in its substitution for the durational record of action and ease of production, endowing it with both a subjective and intimate quality. As Alix puts it, “Une photographie peut être personnellement pornographique tout en étant publiquement décente” [2]. In Les Photos d’Alix, the manipulation of discourse is conducted by Jean Eustache, while Agnès Varda, in Salut les Cubains (1963), reclaims a photo-reportage she created during a 1962 trip to Cuba, reviving the dancing movement she witnessed during the Revolution.

Jean Rouch’s Drums from the Past (1971) inaugurates the mobility of the camera, revealing a double movement focused on the other and dependent on the body's capacity for otherness—the body that holds the camera. This mobility enables Rouch to participate in a possession ritual of the Songhay community. It is through his experience in Nigeria that Rouch developed a unique mode of filmmaking:

“Thus instead of using the zoom, the cameraman-director can really get into the subject. Leading or following a dancer, priest, or craftsman, he is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye accompanied by an electronic ear. It is this strange state of transformation that takes place in the filmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession phenomena, ‘ciné-trance.’” [3]

Following this, Revolução (1976) by Ana Hatherly brings this proximity back to the national territory, capturing—through implication—the popular paintings that covered Portugal’s walls during the revolutionary period of 1974–75, which heralded the construction of an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist country. The final film in the session, Unsere Afrikareise / Our Trip to Africa (1966) by Peter Kubelka, detonates the illusion of the photographic image as an ideological-free document. Commissioned by an Austrian couple to film a private hunting trip to Africa, Kubelka produced a film as meticulous as it is violent, where an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position is made visible through the shock created by image and sound editing.

The second session features two films: Les Maîtres Fous (1955) by Jean Rouch and Catembe (1965) by Faria de Almeida. The first, once again drawing on the work of Rouch, depicts a possession ritual. This time, with a less performative camera-body, we observe how the ritual is characterised by the appropriation of figures of power, which the workers subjected to the ritual are dominated by in their daily labour. Baudrillard notes how in the film:

“The Black workers in the city gather at night in the forest to mimic and exorcise, in a sort of trance, their Western masters: the boss, the general, the bus driver. It is not a political act, but a sacrificial acting-out—a stigmatization of domination with the very signs of that domination.”

Yet Baudrillard continues: “These Whites—the boss, the general, the policeman—if they are not already caricatures of themselves, are indistinguishable from their masks. The Whites are carnivalised, and thus cannibalised, long before any of this was ever exported to the world.”

The screening of Catembe (1965) by Faria de Almeida and the sequences that were censored at the time highlight the agitational quality of the dancing body. The scenes cut from the final version by the Estado Novo censorship mainly depict a dance hall in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique.

In the third and final session, we screen the film that marks the birth of Mozambican cinema: Mueda, Memória e Massacre (1979) by Ruy Guerra. Guerra films the Mueda community’s reenactment of the June 16 massacre. On that day in 1960, the community confronted Portuguese imperial authorities to demand independence, leading to the killing of demonstrators. Since then, the community gathers to reenact the massacre so that younger generations may perform the gestures of resistance of their ancestors.

This cycle aims to question the cinema’s direct and communicative capacity in relation to cultural and political transformations by highlighting films that embody a vital condition of Culture: continuity through the necessity of a certain rhythm or gesture. It is through this necessity that movement, even in pantomime, becomes gesture. As Agamben states: “Cinema is not about images, but gestures.”

It is through these films—which position themselves both in and in relation to the world—that this cycle explores cinema’s capacity to elude carnivalisation and transgress its technological quality of reproduction and representation.
 

[1] Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, “Cine-Anthropology”, 150.
[2] Uma fotografia pode ser pessoalmente pornográfica enquanto ainda é publicamente decente em Les Photos d’Alix (1980) de Jean Eustache (tradução livre)
[3] Jean Rouch, “The Camera and Man”, in Cine-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 38–9.