« Nada é mais doloroso, mais angustiante, do que um pensamento que se escapa a si mesmo, ideias que fogem, que desaparecem mal são esboçadas, já corroídas pelo esquecimento ou avançando para outras, sobre as quais não temos maior domínio. »

« Nothing is more painful, more anguishing, than a thought that escapes itself, ideas that run away, that disappear as soon as sketched, already corroded by forgetfulness or advancing to others over which we do not have a greater dominion. »

Body rice
Hugo Vieira da Silva
2006, 120'
Sáb, dia 13, 19h - King 1, Lisboa
sessão com a presença de Hugo Vieira da Silva e Natali Rajak
seguida de debate com José Bragança de Miranda e André Dias

Um olhar nunca é profundo. O que é profundo é a extensão, a extensão de uma relação precisa entre o desconhecido e o conhecido. Pensar. voz off de Comment ça va, Godard-Miéville

A gaze is never profound. What's profound is the extent, the extent of a certain relation between the unknown and the known. Thinking. voice over from Godard-Miéville's Comment ça va

Linguagem comum, direito de calar | Everyday language and the right to silence

« Nitidamente, com o choque do que tinham vivido, a faculdade de recordar estava em parte suspensa ou funcionava como compensação, segundo um esquema arbitrário. Os que tinham escapado à catástrofe não eram de confiança, testemunhas atacadas de cegueira parcial. O texto que Alexander Kluge escreveu, na verdade só em 1970, “o ataque aéreo a Halberstadt de 8 de Abril de 1945”, coloca finalmente a questão dos efeitos do chamado moral bombing citando um psicólogo militar americano que depois da guerra esteve em Halberstadt com sobreviventes e colheu a impressão de que “a população, embora visivelmente mostrasse um desejo inato de contar, perdera a capacidade psíquica de recordar, em especial dentro do perímetro das ruínas da cidade”. Ainda que esta conclusão, subscrita por uma pessoa pretensamente real, possa ser um dos artifícios de pseudodocumentalista a que Kluge costumava entregar-se, tem a sua razão de ser ao identificar o síndroma, atendendo a que os relatos dos que vieram de lá com nada mais que a vida são em geral descontínuos, têm um estranho tom errático, em tudo tão diferente do registo normal da memória que facilmente sugerem invenção e divagações. Mas esta espécie de inveracidade dos relatos das testemunhas oculares provém igualmente dos meandros estereotipados de que muitas vezes se servem. A realidade da destruição total, incompreensível na sua extrema contingência, dilui-se em fórmulas enredadas, como «presa das chamas», «noite fatal», «consumiu-se nas labaredas», «o inferno à solta», «vimos o inferno à nossa frente», «o terrível destino das cidades alemãs» e outras semelhantes. A sua função é encobrir e neutralizar vivências que escapam ao entendimento. A frase «Naquele dia terrível em que a nossa bela cidade foi arrasada» que o investigador da catástrofe de Kluge encontrou em Frankfurt e Fürth, em Wupperthal e Würzburg, tal como em Halberstadt, na realidade não passa de um gesto de defesa contra a memória. Mesmo a entrada do diário de Victor Klemperer sobre a queda de Dresden fica dentro dos limites das convenções verbais. Pelo que hoje sabemos da derrocada desta cidade, parece improvável que quem tenha estado no Terrasse Brühl no meio das faúlhas e tenha visto o panorama da cidade a arder pudesse sair de lá com o juízo intacto. A capacidade aparentemente ilesa de a linguagem normal continuar a funcionar que mostram a maioria dos relatos de testemunhas oculares levanta dúvidas quanto à autenticidade das vivências que recordam. A morte pelo fogo, no espaço de poucas horas, de uma cidade inteira com os seus edifícios e árvores, os seus habitantes, animais domésticos, equipamentos e instituições de toda a ordem há-de inevitavelmente ter sobrecarregado, tolhido as capacidades de pensar e de sentir naqueles que conseguiram escapar. Portanto, os relatos das testemunhas oculares têm apenas um valor limitado, precisam de ser completados com o que um olhar sinóptico, artificial, pode revelar. No pino do Verão de 1943, durante uma persistente vaga de calor, a Royal Air Force, apoiada pela 8.ª esquadrilha aérea americana, desencadeou uma série de ataques a Hamburgo. O objectivo desta acção conhecida como “Operação Gomorra” foi arrasar e reduzir a cinzas o mais possível a cidade. No ataque da madrugada de 27 de Julho, iniciado à 1 hora da manhã, foram lançadas dez mil toneladas de bombas explosivas e incendiárias sobre a zona residencial densamente povoada a leste do Elba que incluía os bairros de Hammerbrook, Hamm Norte e Sul, Billwerder Ausschlag, bem como partes de St. Georg, Eilbeck, Barmbek e Wandsbek. Seguiu-se o processo já conhecido, todas as portas e janelas foram arrancadas dos caixilhos mediante bombas explosivas de quatro mil libras, a seguir ateados os últimos andares dos prédios com misturas ígneas leves enquanto as bombas incendiárias com 15 quilos de peso caíam nos andares inferiores. Dentro de poucos minutos tudo ardia nos cerca de vinte quilómetros quadrados da área-alvo em incêndios gigantescos, tão rapidamente ateados que um quarto de hora depois da queda das primeiras bombas toda a atmosfera era um mar de chamas até onde a vista alcançava. E passados mais cinco minutos, cerca da uma hora e vinte, elevou-se uma tempestade de fogo de uma intensidade que até então se julgaria impossível. O fogo, que se erguia a dois mil metros no ar, sugava o seu oxigénio com tal força que as correntes de ar atingiram a violência de um furacão e ressoavam como poderosos órgãos com todos os registos abertos ao mesmo tempo. Tudo ardeu assim durante três horas. No seu auge, a tempestade levantou coberturas e telhados de casas, atirou ao ar vigas e tabuletas inteiras, arrancou árvores do solo e levou pessoas à sua frente como tochas vivas. Por trás das fachadas em derrocada as labaredas disparavam com a altura de casas, rolavam como um vagalhão pelas ruas com uma velocidade de 150 quilómetros por hora, giravam nas praças abertas com o ritmo estranho de uma valsa de fogo. Em alguns canais a água ardia. Os vidros das janelas dos eléctricos derreteram, o açúcar armazenado ferveu nas caves das padarias. Os que tinham fugido dos seus abrigos afundaram-se, grotescamente contorcidos, nas bolhas espessas formadas pelo asfalto derretido. Não se sabe realmente quantos perderam a vida nessa noite nem quantos enlouqueceram antes de a morte os levar. Quando rompeu o dia, a luz estival não foi capaz de penetrar no negrume de chumbo que pairava sobre a cidade. O fumo elevava-se a uma altura de 8000 metros e alastrava como uma grande nuvem cúmulo-nimbo em forma de bigorna. Um calor trémulo, que os pilotos dos bombardeiros contaram ter sentido trespassar os flancos dos seus aviões, continuava a elevar-se dos montes de pedras fumegantes e reluzentes. Bairros residenciais, uma rede de ruas de uns duzentos quilómetros de extensão, ficaram totalmente destruídos. Por toda a parte havia cadáveres horrivelmente desfigurados. Em muitos deles luziam ainda chamas de fósforo azuladas, outros estavam queimados com uma cor castanha ou roxa e reduzidos a um terço do seu tamanho normal. Jaziam dobrados em poças da sua própria gordura derretida, por vezes já em parte solidificada. Nos dias que se seguiram, o interior da zona de morte foi interditado e quando as brigadas de condenados e de internados nos campos puderam iniciar a limpeza, em Agosto, após o arrefecimento dos escombros, foram encontrar pessoas ainda sentadas à mesa ou encostadas às paredes, vencidas pelo gás monóxido, e noutros sítios carne e ossos aos pedaços ou montes de corpos cozidos na água a ferver que jorrara de caldeiras rebentadas. Outros ainda tinham sido a tal ponto calcinados e reduzidos a cinzas, num braseiro de mil graus ou mais, que foi possível tirar de lá os restos mortais de famílias com vários membros em cestos da roupa.

« Obviously, in the shock of what these people had experienced, their ability to remember was partly suspended, or else, in compensation, it worked to an arbitrary pattern. Those who had escaped the catastrophe were unreliable and partly blinded witnesses. Alexander Kluge’s account of ‘The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945’, which was not in fact written until around 1970 but which finally raises the question of the effects of the so-called ‘moral bombing’, quotes an American military psychologist who gleaned the impression after the war, from conversations with survivors in Halberstadt, that ‘the population, although obviously showing an innate wish to tell its own story, [had] lost the psychic power of accurate memory, particularly within the confines of the ruined city.’ Even if this opinion, allegedly that of a real person, is one of Kluge's famous pseudo-documentary devices, it is certainly accurate in identifying the syndrome, for the accounts of those who escaped with nothing but their lives do generally have something discontinuous about them, a curiously erratic quality, one so much at variance with authentic recollection that it easily suggests rumour-mongering and invention. However, the rather unreal effect of the eyewitness reports also derives from the clichés to which they often resorted. The reality of total destruction, incomprehensible in its extremity, pales when described in such stereotypical phrases as ‘a prey to the flames’, ‘that fateful night’, ‘all hell was let loose’, ‘we were staring into the inferno’, ‘the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany’; and so on and so forth. Their function is to cover up and neutralize experiences beyond our ability to comprehend. The phrase ‘On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was razed to the ground’, which Kluge's American investigator encountered in Frankfurt, Fürth, Wuppertal, Würzburg and Halberstadt alike, is really no more than a gesture sketched to banish memory. Even Victor Klemperer's diary entry on the fall of Dresden remains within the bounds of verbal convention. From what we now know about the ruin of this city it seems unlikely that anyone who then stood on the Brühl Terrace, with the air full of flying sparks, and saw the conflagration all around can have escaped with an undisturbed mind. The apparently unimpaired ability – shown in most of the eyewitness reports – of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record. The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city, with all its buildings and its trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping. The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals. In the summer of 1943, during a long heatwave, the RAF, supported by the US Eighth Army Air Force, flew a series of raids on Hamburg. The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called, was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes. In a raid early in the morning of 27 July, beginning at 1 a.m., 10,000 tons of high explosive Ad incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, comprising the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-Nord and Hamm-Süd, Billwerder Ausschlag and parts of St Georg, Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek. A now familiar sequence of events occurred: first all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing 4,000 pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and at the same time fire-bombs weighing up to 15 kilograms fell into the lower storeys. Within a few minutes huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some 20 square kilometres, and they merged so rapidly that only quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at 1.20 a.m., a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising 2,000 metres into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out at once. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising hoardings through the air, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing façades the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over 15o kilometres an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of 8,000 metres, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering beat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts with a street length of 200 kilometres in all were utterly destroyed. Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorus flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. In the next few days, the central death zone was declared a no-go area. When punishment labour gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people still sitting at tables or up against walls where they had been overcome by monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to 1,000 degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.

O êxodo dos sobreviventes de Hamburgo iniciara-se ainda na própria noite do ataque. Começou, escreve Nossack, “uma viagem incessante de todas as ruas das imediações [...] sem que se soubesse para onde”. Os fugitivos, cujo número ascendia a um milhão e um quarto, dispersaram-se até aos confins mais extremos do Reich. Com a data de 20 de Agosto de 1943, na passagem já citada acima, Friedrich Reck descreve um grupo de quarenta a cinquenta desses fugitivos que procuram tomar de assalto um comboio numa estação da Alta Baviera. Enquanto isso, cai uma mala de cartão “na plataforma, rasga-se e mostra o seu conteúdo. Brinquedos, um estojo de unhas, roupa interior chamuscada. E por último o cadáver queimado de uma criança, reduzido como uma múmia, que a mãe semienlouquecida trazia consigo, restos de um passado ainda intacto há alguns dias”. É impensável que Reck tenha inventado esta cena terrível. Por toda a Alemanha, de uma maneira ou de outra, as notícias de horror dos acontecimentos de Hamburgo devem ter sido difundidas por fugitivos num estado entre o desejo histérico de sobreviver e a mais pesada apatia. O diário de Reck é no mínimo um testemunho de que, apesar do bloqueio noticioso impeditivo de informações pormenorizadas, não era impossível conhecer a maneira terrível como as cidades alemãs estavam a ser destruídas. » « Estas memórias em segunda mão e com meio século são bastante horríveis, e no entanto apenas uma pequena parte do que não sabemos. Muitos dos que fugiram para as partes mais remotas do Reich a seguir aos ataques a Hamburgo ficaram em estado de demência. Numa das citadas lições menciono uma nota do diário de Friedrich Recks em que ele conta que viu, numa estação de comboios da Alta Baviera, o cadáver de uma criança cair da mala de uma dessas mulheres tresloucadas de Hamburgo quando aquela se abriu. Embora não se perceba, como disse nos meus comentários algo confusos, por que razão iria Reck inventar tão grotesca cena, também é difícil inseri-la num qualquer quadro da realidade, por isso se suspeita da sua autenticidade. Mas há tempos fui a Sheffield, visitar um senhor de idade que, por causa das suas origens judias, foi forçado a deixar Sonthofen, a sua terra natal no Allgäu e partir para Inglaterra. A esposa, que veio para Inglaterra logo a seguir à guerra, foi criada em Stralsund. Parteira de profissão, esta mulher resoluta tem um forte sentido prático e não é dada a floreados fantásticos. No Verão de 1943, a seguir à tempestade de fogo sobre Hamburgo, estava, então com dezasseis anos, a prestar serviço como auxiliar voluntária na estação de Stralsund quando chegou um comboio especial com refugiados, a maior parte deles ainda completamente fora de si, incapazes de prestar quaisquer informações, aturdidos ou soluçando e gritando de desespero. E várias das mulheres que iam nesse transporte de Hamburgo, soube desta vez em Sheffield, levavam realmente nas suas bagagens os filhos mortos nos ataques, sufocados pelo fumo ou de qualquer outra maneira. Não sabemos em que se tomaram essas mães que fugiram com tais bagagens, se e como voltaram a ter uma vida normal. Mas esses fragmentos de memória talvez mostrem que é impossível resolver a profundidade do trauma na alma daqueles que vieram do epicentro da catástrofe. O direito de calar reivindicado pela maioria destas pessoas é tão inviolável como o dos sobreviventes de Hiroxima, dos quais Kenzaburo Oe diz, nas suas declarações de 1965 sobre esta cidade, que mesmo passados vinte anos sobre a explosão da bomba muitos ainda não conseguiam falar do que aconteceu naquele dia. » W. S. Sebald, «Guerra aérea e literatura», História natural da destruição, trad. Telma Costa, Teorema, Lisboa, 2006, pp. 28-33, 80-81.

The exodus of survivors from Hamburg bad begun on the night of the air raid itself. It started, as Nossack writes, with ‘constant movement in all the neighbouring streets ... going no one knew where.’ The refugees, numbering one and a quarter million, dispersed all over the Reich as far as its outer borders. Under his diary entry for 20 August 1943, in the passage already quoted above, Friedrich Reck describes a group of forty to fifty such refugees trying to force their way into a train at a station in Upper Bavaria. As they do so a cardboard suitcase ‘falls on the platform, bursts open and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago.’ It is hard to imagine that Reck can have invented this dreadful scene. All over Germany, one way or another, news of the horrors of the destruction of Hamburg must have been spread by distraught refugees vacillating between a hysterical will to survive and leaden apathy. Reck’s diary at least makes it clear that in spite of the news blackout suppressing all detailed information, it was not impossible to know how horribly the cities of Germany were being destroyed. » « This second-hand memory going back over half a century is horrible enough, yet it is only a tiny part of what we do not know. Many who fled to the most remote parts of the Reich after the raids on Hamburg were in a demented state of mind. In one of my lectures I had quoted a passage from the diary of Friedrich Reck, who describes the corpse of a child falling out of a suitcase belonging to one of these deranged women from Hamburg when it springs open. Although, as I said in my rather baffled comments, it is difficult to think of a reason why Reck should have invented this grotesque scene, it is also hard to fit it into any framework of reality, so that one feels some doubt of its authenticity. But some time ago I was in Sheffield, where I met an elderly gentleman who, because of his Jewish origins, had been forced to leave his native Sonthofen and emigrate to England. His wife, who came to England immediately after the war, grew up in Stralsund. A midwife by profession, this resolute lady is extremely down to earth and not given to flights of fancy. After the Hamburg firestorm, in the summer of 1943 when she was sixteen years old, she was on duty as a volunteer helper at Stralsund railway station when a special train came in carrying refugees, most of them still utterly beside themselves, unable to speak of what had happened, struck dumb or sobbing and weeping with despair. And several of the women on this train from Hamburg, I heard quite recently on my visit to Sheffield, actually did have dead children in their luggage, children who had suffocated in the smoke or died in some other way during the air raid. We do not know what became of the mothers who fled carrying such burdens, whether and how they managed to readjust to normal life. Yet perhaps such fragmentary memories show that it is impossible to gauge the depths of trauma suffered by those who came away from the epicentres of the catastrophe. The right to silence claimed by the majority of these people is as inviolable as that of the survivors of Hiroshima, of whom Kenzaburo Oe says, in his notes on the city written in 1965, that even twenty years after the bomb fell many of them still could not speak of what happened that day. » W. S. Sebald, «Air war and literature», On the natural history of destruction, trad. Anthea Bell, Pinguin, London, 2004, pp. 28-33, 88-90.

A sua mente está no espaço exterior a maior parte do tempo, para que quando regresse tenha uma escala cósmica de valores. de Providence, Alain Resnais/David Mercer

His mind is in outer space most of the time, so that when it returns it has a cosmic scale of values. from Alain Resnais/David Mercer's Providence

Já não estamos habituados a ler | We’re not used to read anymore

« Se Straub foi e é único, isso terá mais a ver, pensamos, com a sua extrema secura e com a sua extrema rarefacção de processos, combinadas com a extrema atenção à materialidade das imagens e dos sons (o que não é forçosamente o mesmo que “materialismo”), reabilitando os mais pequenos detalhes da presença, que o cinema de “acção” desperdiça. Ou seja, uma procura do despojamento último, limpando a imagem e o som dos excessos e dos efeitos do cinema mainstream, tentando fazer com que apenas fiquem gravadas as pequenas coisas que “já não estamos habituados a ler”, por termos aprendido a “ler” demasiado. O que fica na banda imagem e na banda som não tem assim a força de nos engolir na voragem dum fluxo narrativo, antes nos dá espaço e tempo para o nosso lugar, separado do ecrã. » José Manuel Costa, Folha da Cinemateca Portuguesa de Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht | Não reconciliados ou Só a violência ajuda onde a violência reina (1965) de Jean-Marie Straub

« If Straub was and is unique, we think this has more to do with his extreme dryness and his extreme rarefaction of processes, combined with the extreme attention to the images and sounds materiality (which is not necessarily the same as “materialism”), rehabilitating the smallest details of presence that “action” cinema wastes. That is, a search for the ultimate detachment, cleaning the image and sound of the excesses and effects of mainstream cinema, trying to keep recorded only the smallest things “we’re not used to read anymore”, for having learnt to “read” too much. What stays in the image and sound tracks doesn’t have thus the strength to swallow us in a whirlpool of narrative flux, giving us instead space and time for our place, separated from the screen. » José Manuel Costa, Cinemateca Portuguesa’s screening sheet for Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht | Not reconciled or Only violence helps where violence rules (1965) de Jean-Marie Straub

Com a habitual inconstância das coisas humanas... intertítulo de As duas órfãs de Griffith

With the usual inconstancy of human things – Griffith's Orphans of the storm intertitle

As filmagens de «The cool world» | Shooting «The cool world»

«– How did you find the novel about Harlem youth gangs for your next film, The Cool World?
SHIRLEY CLARKE: The novel was popular in those days. Fred Wiseman, who had put about $3,000 into The Connection, got hooked into filmmaking. He had read the novel. He came to me, asked if I would be interested in making a film, and I said yes. He thought he could make a deal to pick up The Cool World. We went to visit Warren Miller, the author, and he was a wonderful man. He had seen my work. He liked it. But he himself did not participate in the making of the film. He was not even going to read my script. When the film was finished, he would come and see it.
I would not have been able to make The Cool World had I not been living with Carl Lee at that time. [A Harlem-born black actor, Lee had previously been in the stage and film versions of The Connection.] It took Carl three months of going up to Harlem all the time, gathering kids, and bringing them down for us to interview. For awhile, we really thought we weren't going to be able to cast the film because we were getting all the “good” kids in school, and they weren’t giving us believable readings. When I finally persuaded Carl to try to get to the gangs and bring some of those kids downtown, most of them couldn’t read scripts. What we would do was improvise with them. It was very exciting because the “real” kids started to improvise the script we had written right back to us. That’s when I knew our script was ok. From then on we got to work, and my relationship with the kids was wonderful.
I told Fred that I really thought we had to shoot the film in the street and that it could be tough. But if we could get a mixed crew, a few real supporters, and I was lucky enough, we might be able for the first time to make a film about Harlem in Harlem. This wonderful woman, Madeleine Anderson, was helping Ricky Leacock, who was doing a number of films that dealt with black people. He was also teaching black people to become cameramen. He had a volunteer class, and many of them became the major black cameramen in the city for a long time. Madeleine was this amazing lady who wanted to make a movie herself and subsequently made a film for WNET and the Children’s Workshop. She agreed not only to be my assistant but to stay with me through the whole film. Eventually she became my assistant editor. She would go out on the street, and it was her job to explain to the people in the street who were upset by the filming why we were doing the movie and what it was all about. For the most part, that cooled the street.
– Tough job.
SC: Very tough. She did it wonderfully. But there were times when it didn’t work. Baird Bryant, who was the white cameraman (the other cameraman, Leroy Lucas, was black), myself, and the two black kids were on 125th St. right next to a black nationalist bookstore. The owner of the store thought the film was anti-Harlem, and so he started chasing us down the street. Then there were times when crowds collected that were not always friendly. But, in general, we had enough black people on the crew and with Madeleine going around, we were able to work very successfully in the real streets of Harlem.
The look of The Cool World is not only authentic but very beautiful and moving since you get a chance to see in a documentary style the real life the children live in ghettos like Harlem. Up until then, no one had shot in Harlem. I think they didn’t do it because they thought it was dangerous. They didn’t even think it was necessary. Who would be interested? If that hadn’t happened, my film would not have been as successful as it was.
It finally took two years to make that film, and by the end of it we were $50,000 in debt, which I’m still paying off. I did something that I do all the time. I make terrible financial deals because my interests are basically making the film, and it never occurs to me that I’m going to lose money for other people and that I’m always going to feel very bad about that.
The only film that I don’t have any resentments about is Portrait of Jason because I put up the original money myself which turned out to be a good investment since it only cost $10,000. I was given the film stock by NBC. I gave Jason some money, and I made a deal with him that any money I got from the film, half would go to him. To this day, he still gets bits of money. But I don’t really know if there are any profits or if I ever got my original money back. But I sure am glad I made the film! »

Lauren Rabinovitz, «Choreography of cinema. An interview with Shirley Clarke» [pdf], AfterImage, December 1983, p. 10.

Numa bela e conhecida carta, a justificar a recusa de um prémio do New York Film Critics Circle, Godard lamentava não ter conseguido “compeli[-los] a não esquecer Shirley Clarke”. Por sua vez, neste excerto de entrevista, Shirley Clarke menciona o aqui produtor Frederic Wiseman (importante documentarista e, mais que isso, sem dúvida um dos maiores cineastas da segunda metade do séc. XX), que se encontra ainda em actividade como realizador e continua a distribuir este filme. No ano passado em Serpa, Wiseman deu a entender (apesar da delicadeza com que não se pronunciou quando directamente interrogado), não apreciar particularmente o filme nem as pessoas que o fizeram (repetindo algo semelhante ao que terá dito algures numa entrevista que agora não encontro). De memória, creio que se terá expresso mais ou menos assim, quando procurava contextualizar o seu começo no cinema: “se aquelas pessoas conseguiam fazer um filme, então também eu”. Do ponto de vista inocente, ou talvez demasiado sensível, de um espectador que encontra uma clara afinidade, mesmo que não estilística, entre este belíssimo filme e a obra de Wiseman, estas afirmações podem parecer cruéis. Não escapam os autores, pelo contrário, à generalidade da estranheza das relações entre as pessoas. Apesar de todas as condicionantes, tem sido possível ver entre nós The cool world na Cinemateca, bem como The connection (que esteve inclusive na verdadeira monção cinematográfica que foi O olhar de Ulisses no Porto 2001), e Ricardo Matos Cabo programou recentemente alguns filmes de (e sobre) Shirley Clarke na Culturgest no âmbito das suas Figuras da dança no cinema. No filme sobre ela, pudémos antever alguma da grandiosidade desse Retrato de Jason sem ressentimentos de que fala orgulhosa. Quando o poderemos, simplesmente, ver? Por vezes sinto que são os filmes menores que mais nos faltam.

In a beautiful and well-known letter, while justifying the refusal of a New York Film Critics Circle prize, Godard expresses his grief for not having been able “to compel [them] not to forget Shirley Clarke”. As for Shirley Clarke, in this interview excerpt she mentions the then producer Frederic Wiseman (an important documentarist, and more, without doubt one of the major filmmakers of the twentieth’ century second half), still in activity as a director and that keeps distributing this film. Last year in Serpa (Portugal), Wiseman gave away (despite the politeness as he didn’t pronounce himself when directly asked) the fact he didn’t really appreciate neither the film nor the people who made it (repeating something similar of what he said in a interview that I can’t find right now). Quoting from memory, I believe he expressed himself more or less like this, while trying to put into context his cinema initiation: “if those people were capable of making a film, then so would I”. From the innocent, or perhaps too sentimental, perspective of a spectator that finds a clear affinity, even if not a stylistic one, between this beautiful film and Wiseman’s work, these statements might seem cruel. Authors don’t escape, on the contrary, to the general awkwardness of relationships between people. Despite all conditionings, it has been possible to see among us The cool world at Cinemateca (Lisbon, Portugal), as well as The connection (that was even included in the O olhar de Ulisses authentic cinematographic monsoon at Porto 2001), and Ricardo Matos Cabo recently programmed some of (and about) Shirley Clarke’s films at Culturgest (Lisbon) in the context of his Figures of dance in cinema. In the film about her, we could foresee some of the grandeur of this Portrait of Jason without resentments about which she so proudly speaks of. But when will we be able, quite simply, to see it? Sometimes I feel its the minor films we're really missing.

Propriedade | Property

E se no suicídio que se deram tantos sobreviventes dos campos não encontrássemos uma qualquer angústia existencial do ser-para-a-morte em acção extremada, mas antes uma tentativa derradeira de reapropriação da propriedade da morte, se uma tal coisa pode existir, em gesto de estranha soberania, em si quase alegre, e que constitui talvez a mais terrível, insuficiente, única resposta à morte de que inúmeros foram expropriados (de que Primo Levi dizia nem sequer se poder chamar propriamente de morte, mas, como indica Agamben, simples fabricação de cadáveres), como o da subtil personagem d’Os emigrantes de Sebald que acabava nos caminhos-de-ferro?

What if one would not find, in the suicide a lot of camps survivors committed, some extreme action of existential anguish of being-towards-death, but one last attempt of re-appropriation of death’s property, if one such thing can exist, in a gesture of strange sovereignty, in itself of almost joy, and that perhaps constitutes the most terrible, insufficient, unique reply to the death innumerable were expropriated (and that Primo Levi said it could not even be properly called death, but, as Agamben indicates, a simple corpse manufacture), as the one from Sebald’s subtle character in The emigrants that ended in the railroads?

Listas | Lists

«Este livro nasceu de um texto de Jorge Luis Borges. Do riso que sacode, à sua leitura, todas as familiaridades do pensamento - do nosso; do que tem a nossa idade e a nossa geografia -, abalando todas as superfícies ordenadas e todos os planos que tornam sensata para nós a pululação dos seres, fazendo vacilar e inquietando por longo tempo a nossa prática milenária do Mesmo e do Outro. Este texto cita “uma certa enciclopédia chinesa” onde vem escrito que “os animais se dividem em: a) pertencentes ao imperador, b) embalsamados, c) domesticados, d) leitões, e) sereias, f) fabulosos, g) cães em liberdade, h) incluídos na presente classificação, i) que se agitam como loucos, j) inumeráveis, k) et caetera, m) que acabam de quebrar a bilha, n) que de longe parecem moscas”. No deslumbramento desta taxinomia, o que alcançamos imediatamente, o que, por meio do apólogo, nos é indicado como o encanto exótico de um outro pensamento é o limite do nosso: a pura impossibilidade de pensar isto. » Michel Foucault, As palavras e as coisas. Uma arqueologia das ciências humanas, trad. António Ramos Rosa, Edições 70, Lisboa, p. 47.

«This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. » Michel Foucault, The order of things. An archaeology of the human sciences, Vintage Books, New York.

Alguns filmes de Janeiro

Le mépris Jean-Luc Godard 1963, 103’ 5ª, dia 4, 19h Cinemateca, Lisboa	Nicht Versöhnt/Não reconciliados Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet 1965, 53’ 6ª, dia 5, 19h - Cinemateca «O pior filme desde 1895» «The worst film since 1895»	The cool world Shirley Clarke 1964, 102’ Sáb, dia 6, 22h Cinemateca
Au hasard Balthazar Robert Bresson 1966, 95’ Dom, dia 7, 18h30 Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa	Sicilia! Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet 1999, 76’ Dom, dia 7, 21h30 Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian	India song Marguerite Duras 1975, 118’ 4ª, dia 17, 19h30 Cinemateca
Lilith Robert Rossen 1964, 114’ Sáb, dia 20, 15h30 Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian	Zir-e derakhtant-e zeytun / Através das oliveiras Abbas Kiarostami 1994, 103’ Dom, dia 21, 21h30 Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian	Antigone Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet 1992, 100’ 4ª, dia 24, 19h Cinemateca
Sunrise F. W. Murnau 1927, 95’ 6ª, dia 26, 21h30 2ª, dia 29, 19h30 Cinemateca	Roma, città aperta Roberto Rossellini 1945, 90’ 3ª, dia 30, 21h30 Cinemateca

[dada a natureza recente da reformulação gráfica, agradece-se alguma condescendência em relação à disposição dos textos e imagens anteriores.]

[due to the recent nature of this graphical reshaping, one would appreciate some indulgence regarding the previous text and image dispositions.]