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Fernando Birri A Constructor of Utopias
Fernando Birri A Constructor of Utopias
revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/2006/09/01/a-constructor-of-utopias/
Mariluce Moura
The plenary lecture was part of the 1 st Latin American Cinema Festival, promoted by the
Memorial and by the São Paulo State Secretariat for Culture, which, coincidentally, is
headed up at this moment by the filmmaker João Batista de Andrade. The event had been
opened on the night of Sunday 9, with the most recent film by Fernando Birri, the
documentary ZA 2005. The Old and the New, a mega clip, as he himself defines it, a
collage of scenes taken from some of the best productions of the continent at different
times. In it, excerpts from such classics as Memorias del Subdesarrollo [Memories of
Underdevelopment], by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Vidas secas [Barren Lives], by the Brazilian,
Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Tire Dié [Throw me a Dime], by Birri himself, considered a
founding masterpiece, dialog with scenes of recent cinematographic works by pupils from
the San Antonio de Los Baños International Cinema and Television School, in Cuba
(EICTV). As critic Luiz Zanin Oricchio said in O Estado de S. Paulo [The State of São Paulo ],
the film “is the perfect image of its author – it talks of the dream of a Latin American
cinema that imposes itself for its rigor, for its strength and quality, and grows aside from
the great worldwide entertainment industry.”
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Fernando Birri, for 46 years married to Carmen, is, let it be registered right away, far more
than a filmmaker: he is a theoretician of the cinema, a professor and an educator who has
planted multiple experiences in teaching cinema and television, amongst which the school
in Cuba is without doubt the most glittering and advanced. He is a painter, writer and poet.
He is a visionary, a libertarian – and a fine sample of all this together lies in the compact
and vigorous text of ‘Acta de Nacimiento de la Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV’ [Birth
Certificate of the International Cinema and TV School, which is part of the book El
alquimista democrático [The Democratic Alchemist], the Brazilian version of which should
be published shortly, thanks to the endeavor of Sergio Muniz, a Brazilian documentarist,
EICTV’s the first teaching director. Birri is, finally and above all, someone who has never
given up his right to construct things based on his most utopian dreams, with method and
rigor.
Below, the main excerpts from the interview that he granted to Pesquisa FAPESP.
I would like to begin by the end of your lecture: you said that there is something new
emerging in the panorama of the image, that may go far beyond a new cinema. How is this?
I still see it as very cloudy, the crystal ball is still dim, in a mist, we do not know it entirely,
because what has to come is never know for sure until it comes, tautologically. But my
feeling, my intuition is that there is something, that is glimpsed more than seen. This
festival, very serious, very fine, has acted a lot for this perception. On the other hand,
Brazil has always been an environment of quests, disquiets and concerns, capable of
signposting directions. Here, the theoretical elaboration of the cinema has reached a very
high level, compared with other countries of Latin America.
In the universities?
Yes, in the universities, in the criticism, amongst filmmakers like Glauber Rocha, Nelson
Pereira dos Santos, Roberto Santos, Leon Hirzman and so many others, is that not so? I
would have to do a list of names, with Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Cacá Diegues, Ozualdo
Candeias, Geraldo Sarno, in short, all filmmakers who have had made their work be
accompanied by supremely important theoretical developments. This injection of
theoretical material characterizes the new Brazilian cinema.
Does this ‘new’ that you are now catching sight of have more to do with filming techniques,
with esthetics or with theoretical reflection?
The truth is that I would never be capable of separating all these things. I think that they
are only separated as an object of study, when, for example, Leonardo da Vinci dissects a
body and analyzes a small muscle that runs towards a finger that moves. But you have to
analyze the man himself, and I believe that one and the other are indispensable, the small
tendon of the fingertip and the soul of the man that moves the finger. In this sense, what is
going on now is that there are things that are coming with regard to all of a material, a
background that the new Latin American cinema has drawn up in almost half a century of
life. And, yes, what is happening, with all sincerity, is that many of the things that were
drawn up are no longer valid, or rather, they are valid to help one to think, but in the
circumstances no longer suffice. For example, there are two things that are arising from
this encounter that seem to me very important. The first is that here is being launched,
with great insistence, not the new Latin American cinema, but cinemas, half a century
later. There is a plurality in this movement, and that is absolutely new. In a poem called
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Horizons that I wrote in the 80’s for a large encounter in Germany, a prolog for an
enormous catalog, I did this ‘Poem in filmographic record form’, in which I said that we are
one in diversity and diverse in our unity. I said that this characteristic, this tao, this
dialectic, always had to be kept, which definitively enriched this moment, antidogmatic par
excellence. I mean that this diversity is now taking on much more strength, more
evidence, and in a simplistic explanation we can say there are many more cinemas. 50
years ago, to talk of cinema in Latin America was to talk almost exclusively of the
Argentinean, Brazilian and Mexican cinemas. Afterwards, in the 60’s, Cuban
cinematography appears with great force. But today there is no Latin American country
that does not have cinema production. And I would not limit the word ‘production’ to the
cinematographic set, but use it as production in all the cinematographic senses, thus
extending it to the production of magazines, of criticism, analyses.
And of television?
…And there comes the critical point, and it is precisely that the word ‘cinema’ is no longer
enough.
That was the most instigating thing in your talk: how do you mean that the word ‘cinema’
isn’t enough, what has to be created in its place to expand the very sense of what it names?
A word has to be invented that pre-dates the actual invention of the medium. For now, we
can settle for tying up a few that exist for this, such as, for example, audiovisual ‘imagery’,
which I find very pleasing. Or imago, image, which has a very great prestige, almost
phantasmagorical. It’s like an audiovisual phantom, perhaps we may even say an
ectoplasm, a nebula that is being completed in various forms and of which the cinema is
only one expression…
Beyond cinema, you see something that shows itself by various media…
Of course, but let’s not exaggerate, let’s stay a bit closer, and to begin with we can keep to
all these forms that there already are in fact, not in an anticipatory way. And in this sense
there is what Pasolini called contaminatio: the contamination of genres. Accordingly, even
in the cinema seen on the normal screen, it is often very difficult to separate things, what
is a documentary, what is fictional… And there is at once in many films an intersection, an
inter-influence of the traditional genres with things that we do not yet know.
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criticisms, they carry on together, they are not things that point some in one direction,
others to another. Yes, it is possible to separate them with the purpose of vivisection, of
study, like anatomy, but for the body to walk, live, breathe and love, it has to be complete.
Are we talking here, amongst other things, of the experiences of the MIT’s Medialab?
Yes, of course, they have one of the most advanced laboratories in the aspect of the
virtual image, and, one assumes, of all the anticipations that in some way overturn the
current classifications, or that we consider present-day and that are old to the cinema.
Is what you seeing as new in some way bound up with the work of half a century of
teaching cinema on the continent, which begins with the Santa Fé school? How are these
dots joined together in your reflection?
Lamentably, for now, they do not join up. We are still not at the moment of synthesis. If
you allow me to say, like you, I am still trying to understand, there is no prefabricated reply
to that question. Let us all thing together in this direction… in some way, though, what may
perhaps really help us to think out a little the production of the cultural phenomena of
Latin America is one of the most revealing and illustrative of them, that is, the religious
phenomenon, I would almost say anthropological-religious – in concrete terms, I am
referring to syncretism.
That is, we are at the moment of the flowering of varied things, far before one reaches a
new form for the old cinema, although, however, we do not know what it is.
Yes. I believe that the virtue and the risks of this moment is that it is an anticipatory
moment. And before any moment at which the new presents itself in some form, is
perceived intuitively, the human spirit has various attitudes, but there are two fundamental
ones: the first is to dare, to throw oneself into a double somersault without a net in the
void… and to fly. Then, anything can happen. The second is to go backwards.
In ZA 2005, was the concern to show a bit of this possibility of collages, of syncretism, in
Latin America? What is the relation between the film and everything that you see as a
panorama of contemporary imagery?
There are two questions in one. The first answer is: in this film, I am looking for what I
want in all of them, but a bit more, because I try to embrace a historical period by facing
some sequences of the founding films of the Latin American cinema and films from
theses produced by the students of the school [in Cuba] in these 20 years. So, that gives
me a reason for putting some before the others, like mirrors, firstly to see whether one
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production reflects another, or whether, on the contrary, they do not look at each other,
they repulse each other, they break up entirely, or, the last alternative, they turn their backs
on each other with indifference and, instead of mirrors, they are simply surfaces of glass
and mercury that do not reflect anything. That is the concern of the film, a verification of
something that one tries to understand. And let each one take up his position, draw his
own conclusions. In this sense, the film does not have the pretension of imposing
anything, it tries to propose. The second question: what does this film have to do with
what we were talking about before? A lot, everything. Because, by doing this kind of
balance, in some way we are also closing a window and opening a door, which means to
say, that is from one way we are going to another. Cultural cycles begin and reach their
conclusion, they end. I consider that, in this sense, the film also fosters this kind of
concern that I have at the moment, and, as I say in the beginning, it is a question of
sharing all this with a sort of didactic and collective mega-clip, to try to understand
something – look, not to teach, but to try to learn something, collectively. As nothing is
born of nothing, the part by Zavattini was much present, not in sequences, but the name
and the spirit. Also very present is another Italian director who in the last few years of his
life worked a lot in this direction, who was Rossellini. The great director of Rome, Open
City and Paisan, of fine films, in the last few years of his life dedicated himself to television
(1970), making films one hour long each, like Socrate [Socrates], Atti degli apostolic [Acts
of the Apostles], like La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV [The Rise of Louis XIV ]. They were
films of one hour, very simple, intended to disseminate the life, the paradigm, the point of
reference into which great personages of humanity constituted themselves. And very
open, not very academic in their way of telling the story.
Were you in any way already familiar with the cinema? How did your interest arise?
You see, I came from a family of artists, my uncles, everybody, was in some way
connected with art, music, painting… My father was a professor of political and social
sciences, but this actually was a career that befell him and suffocated his true vocation,
which was painting. I grew up in that environment, and the cinema was a bit of a
substitute from my childhood, of the activity that dominated my life, which was a puppet
theater. Afterwards I would write poetry, I have painted since being a boy. I also began a
lawyer’s career, but that created a terrible problem for me, a crisis, in the end I sent that
career to hell. Do you know that when the devil presented himself to Luther, he threw the
bible at him for him to read? In my case, I didn’t do it with the bible, but with a tome with a
red cover. Political economics, by Gide, a French economist. At the height of my crisis, I
would read, read and read, and I didn’t understand a word, so I threw it against the wall,
like Luther against the devil, and I decided then that I was not going to be a lawyer, but a
cinema director.
And so the two youngsters from Latin America received their education in cinema from the
great Italian masters.
Precisely. And afterwards other Latin Americans came, Garcia Márquez came, Tomás
Gutiérrez Aléa, from Cuba, came, even Glauber Rocha passed through the Experimental
Center, and so many more folks… Tarik Souki, from Venezuela, Julio Garcia Espinosa, also
from Cuba… a large number of companions.
And for how long did you end up staying in this period in Rome?
I finished my studies at the Experimental Center, which were two years, I graduated, and at
the same time I began to work in the Italian cinema, at various things. I worked as an
actor, in the first film of Francesco Maselli, Gli sbandati, with Lucia Bose and other people,
afterwards I worked as director’s assistant for Carlo Lizzani, a great filmmaker who
afterwards was also a director of the Festival of Venice, I worked as assistant to Vittorio
de Sica and to Cesare Zavattini, in the film Il tetto. Zavattini was my great friend, he was
the person with whom I had the most serious and deepest dialog, and the most
determinant for my future career, because he was a volcano, in a permanent eruption of
ideas, a great innovator, a precursor of many things, of what was afterwards to be the new
cinema, the free cinema, the democratic cinema, the democratic video of which there is so
much talk now. He was the first man to have launched the famous cinegiornali liberi, the
free cine journals, which were like the newsreels, but absolutely anti-official, against the
rhetoric of the official culture, very provocative, in those strongest, most flourishing and
productive days of neorealism. To Zavattini, and precisely for that, I dedicate ZA 2005. Lo
viejo y lo nuevo, a didactic and collective mega-clip, in homage to the 20 years of the
EICTV, which are being completed now.
And, after all, how many years did you spend in this time of Italian studies and works?
I stayed until 1955, so I spent six years, counting from 1950. And afterwards I went back,
because it seemed that Argentina was going to take another direction, there was an
interest in my experience, and I believed that I now knew how to make a film. I had already
done several documentaries, I’d done Immagini popolari siciliane, Selinunte, Alfabeto
notturno, I had also worked as an assistant in several fiction films. Accordingly, I decided
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that the moment had come to go back to Argentina, I came back already with a project for
a film, which was Los Inundados [Flooded Out], and had already read, matured and written
a sort of first treatment.
But you are the director. How is the film, if it is your work, a collective work?
It’s because I was never a director in the traditional sense of the world.
Are the roots of this approach, of this way of yours of doing things, being planted in your
case in a Marxist upbringing?
Yes, one part of the things, but not just that. Because I’m a Marxist, but I’m also Tantric,
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I’m Zen, I repulse the little labels, because I am cronopio, I am fame… But it is true that
there are Marxist roots, this conception sets off from a communitarian view of life, or of
life as a community and utopian project, two concepts that have animated the whole of my
work, and I hope to be able to tirar la pata, as they say, or to breathe my last breath (viva
Buñuel!) living within this that I am saying.
So then you started again at the beginning of the 60’s. This time, where to?
To the only place where I thought that in some way could have doors and windows open. I
spoke to a friend in São Paulo, I told him we were in an unsustainable situation, we had to
leave Argentina, and I wanted to know whether there was any possibility of our coming to
Brazil. And then this friend, who was dear Vlado [Vladimir Herzog], simply said to me
“come, we’re waiting”. It was 1963, and Brazil was experiencing an incredible democratic
opening. Argentina… well, in a few words, we left the school behind, we were four
companions, men and women: Edgardo Pallero, his companion Dolly Pussi, Manuel
Horácio Gimenez and my companion Carmen. In São Paulo, they organized a talk for us at
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the cinematheque, where Paulo Emílio [Salles Gomes] was. It’s Rudá de Andrade who
organizes it, and together with him is Vlado, and Sérgio Muniz as well, there’s the whole
gang with which, when the talk ends on that same night, we all go out with a single
enthusiasm, saying that you have to make films, and so on and so forth – we had shown
Tire Dié and other documentaries from the school – and then a gentleman draw close, still
young, although a little bit older than us, and says ‘that’s good… I have a photography shop
that has equipment”… and this gentleman…
Thomaz Farkas!
Yes, the great Thomaz Farkas! The São Paulo documentary movement is born then.
Thomaz decides to go ahead with this company, takes it on economically, and produces
the documentaries. We stay a few months more, then we go to Rio, because I had already
been preparing a project with Ferreira Gullar, which was João Boa Morte. I work with him,
and then that incredible things is produced, when the land is given to the peasants. These
were also the months of the debut of Vidas secas and Deus e o diabo na terra do sol [Black
God, White Devil].
When you returned to Italy, did you go back to work with the directors of neorealism?
No, my body went back to Italy, but my soul did not go back. My soul went on I don’t know
where, and a very hard period began, that some call ‘internal exile’… Well, it may be,
external exile, internal exile, everything is a great absence, and, in exchange, I evoke it in a
film that took me ten years of work, which is called Org. It’s an invented name (the
etymological root of which is in the word orgasm), and it is a film that I dedicate Che
Guevara, to Méliès, the filmmaker of La Voyage dans le Lune [A Trip to the Moon ], and to
Wilhelm Reich, the author of the sexual revolution. Because I believe that they are three
emblematic figures who remain from the end of the 60’s, when man reaches the moon, in
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1969, and before, in 1967, when the death of Che is produced, and when the political
situation explodes, in 1968, in France in May, in the project for a new world and a world
that transforms itself. The film deals with all of this, and it is also a manifest “for a
cosmic, delirious and lumpen cinema”. It’s an absolutely demential film, but which
translates the Utopias (positive) and Dystopias (negative) of this moment of unique
dementia. In a way, it is a film that participates in the tensions of Glauber’s A Idade da
Terra [The Age of the Earth ].They are two brother films.
Could you give a brief summary of the foundation of the school in Cuba?
I would almost tell you that it was born, in 1986, in a logical consequence of the movement
of the Latin American cinema, as a project of the Foundation of the New Latin American
Cinema, formed by all of us, including many Brazilians, like Cosme Alves Neto,
determinant in this process, Geraldo Sarno, Silvio Tendler, now Wolney Oliveira as well, so
many companions…. It is an absolutely autonomous, original project, because it
recognizes all the experiences, but doesn’t want to imitate any model. When I was charged
with preparing it, amongst other people I called to collaborate were Sérgio Muniz and
Orlando Senna, afterwards my successor at the school. He introduces the concept of
docfic, an esthetic tendency where in some way the old arteriosclerotic forms of fiction
are surpassed, on the one hand, and of the documentary on the other. But, when I arrived
in Cuba, I saw that García Márquez was already there and had already confabulated with
Espinosa, then president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry
(ICAIC) and with Fidel Castro. The idea was to put me in charge of the management –
more than the management, it was really the foundation of the cinema school. I imagined
the great work that we were going to have to do, which was going to mean not doing
anything dejá vu. But the work would be collective. We summoned companions from all
the countries of Latin America. Sérgio Muniz came as the teaching director, Tarik Souki as
production director, Orlando Senna, as professor of the direction staff. And, to begin with,
the real name would be School of the Three Worlds: Latin America and Caribbean, Asia
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and Africa, to contrast with the idea of a Third World, a denomination that I have always
abominated, because it seem to me unworthy… but that has remained like a surname.
Well, the school was born with very specific and very innovative parameters. Today, it has
a great and just international prestige, it keeps a connection between practice and theory,
the pupils film like crazy, there’s not a day or a time when they are not involved with
cameras and recorders… But I believe that it is time to expand the area of the electronic
technologies.
And so we come back to the beginning of our interview. Looking at the future.
Precisely. And that is the sense of the thing: to stimulate an imagery and an imagination
that in some way anticipates the future. If the audiovisual, the old cinema, no longer serve
for anything, if they are obsolete, if they mean dreaming the old dreams, every night we
need to close our eyes to dream the new dreams.
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