Looking for writing peace

Tomorrow I go to the British Library to read: Chaves, Irma. A traição da linguagem : uma análise da poesia de Carlos Pena Filho. No funding to study, so I will be doing it by myself.

Other thoughts. An article about the film District 9 by my friend Alfredo Suppia.
Alfredo teaches cinema at UFJF in Brazil.

Connections to City of Men and Blindness. I don't like Science Fiction. AT ALL. I grew up in a house full of my father's collections of magazines and stories and typed personal sightings - he was a member of the local UFO society in the 1950s and 1960s. I hate the pornographic element of that era of Sci-fi. But the political implications of these recent films, is as Alfredo is pointing out, a matter of some deep seated fears of other people in the mass. Especially in Brazil as Rio now has to consider what to do about the divisions in that city before it becomes an Olympic unity. Discuss. Alfredo presented a paper about the film City of Men at a Leeds University World Cinema conference in 2007. There is some academic writing about the film which was made by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron for Universal as having a different concept to the very English work of PD James who wrote the book. It revolves around questions of aesthetics, politics and ways of representation. Here is my essay on the matter.....

Blindness which is based on a book by Jose Saramago, the Nobel prize winning Portuguese writer, which has had a similar discussion of the differences when the film maker (The Brazilian Fernando Merielles) has an apparantly different agenda. District 9 has South Africa ( Neill Blomkamp) and New Zealand (Peter Jackson). I know that race agendas in these two countries have a different history in some ways.

At the same time I bought the DVD of De Battre mon coeur s'est arrete (The Beat that my heart skipped (Romain Durais,2005)) which is set in contemporary Paris. I first saw it at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge. It has very specific points about identity and migration and talent to make, as a 'remake' of an older film called Fingers (1978) - about piano playing in actuality. Ironic as I now find I have a genetic condition where my heart does indeed 'skip' beats.

So an older question currently in my mind is the ability of personalised fictional story versus the more mass movement 'action' sort of story - a bit ying and yang of the range of story telling - to make similar points about the reaction of contemporary society to the issues of how others live and how threatening we might find that. Or indeed the prejudices and assumptions of our own experience as to what the 'genre' description might promise us as 'entertainment' or 'enlightenment'. I am also considering a book Filmosophy by Daniel Frampton alongside all this.

How much does what we 'think' we are going to see and learn affect what we think a film is about. We are conditioned by critical reviews that concentrate on plot, on the actors, on the director, on the location, on the 'genre', on the cinematic visuality. There are other ways we 'read' film on a personal enjoyment level. I saw very little film or television in that same house of my childhood. So my readings are not conditioned by years of exposure to all kinds of filmic experience. Each film I see is selected to suit my own formed prejudices and I won't waste time 'gazing' at things that don't interest me. Possibly a more obscure critical view that does not relate to those used to seeing a lot of visual entertainment. I don't know. And I don't have the time to replace 50 years of 'not knowing' about that kind of infiltration of the senses. So my film 'philosophy' might be very different from the next person. Or no two people see it the same. But they try to bond over shared 'likes' and 'dislikes' in media. Or at least the young do. A very powerful marketing tool for media as we all know. My own younger daughter was, and is, addicted to Science Fiction. From Buffy to District 9. But she did not read the latter film in the same way that I did. And it is not just the fact that I went to South Africa as a teenager when it was still under apartheid and have experience of the vast favelas of Brazil as well. She has a degree in philosophy from the University of Kent. Where they study this kind of thing.

This interesting interview with the director of District 9, Neill Blomkamp, shows how he attributes film and visual and graphic effects as his learning inspiration. The political side, as he admits, is much less knowingly absorbed as an influence, even as a child growing up with apartheid. A lot of film directors seem to have that awareness of visual language first, and story-boarding films comes out of that idea of how the film will look on the screen before all else. I call it the 'squared' effect - making boundaries first. Graphic or digitised films show this even more as the 'artificial' aesthetic strictures make quite limited visual shows. I am going to see the No ghost just a shell exibition of an Manga character called Annlee by two french artists at the Tate Modern again tomorrow just to check on this.

A sign to keep going ! Glauber Rocha at the Tate Modern

I often find that when I am very worried about keeping going on this work that I get a 'signal' - something I see on TV or read in the paper is about Brazil. I know it is just a nonsense and I see it because I am 'looking' for it mentally, but it makes me feel heartened, because despite the last post I really love Brazil and its people.



And just as I was working on this tragic 'knowing' episode my nephew arrived home from work and brought up the mail - because I really had been on the computer all day - a progress from television ! And there was the brochure for the Tate - I can't afford to be a member this year, but they still send the programme. And the Helio Otiticica exhibition is on, which I knew, and along with it in June and July - all the Glauber Rocha films the 'novo cinema' of the 1960s I need to see ! I have seen only one of them - O deus e o diable , which was shown to me by my Portuguese language teacher (Newton) in Recife. It features the music of Vila-Lobos and I knew about the film before I ever saw it thanks to another very clever Brazilian friend. You can see some of these on DVD, but it is far nicer to go to the Tate and watch them with other interested Brazilanistas and Brazilians living in London, because they are very political and interesting films - although like all such films, too intellectual for popular appeal, and then banned by the dictatorship. So I need to be finished!! I need to see these films so I need money and I need to be in London !!!!

The Oiticica exhibition is having a seminar about his use of colour - which is deeply involved in the same ironic work of the same period - essentially anti-symbolic, which is explored in my Amarelo Manga film also. So I have been on the right track, just far too slow to write it all down.

Oh god, I feel better.

I meant to give you all some detail about Amarelo Manga. It seems appropriate to choose one in relation to public grief and anonymous grief over death. One of the more shocking episodes in the film is when a dead male body - or 'yellow ham' is supplied by a corrupt official for a character interested in necrophilia, to use for target practice as a private 'turn on '. In contrast when the owner of the 'Hotel Texas' dies, there is much shock and consternation while the money is found for a coffin and he is laid out in the hotel with the residents singing traditional dirges. Both scenes are replete with referencing to other films and cultures, but the contrast is intended to reflect the difference between a community that 'cares' for whatever reason - and one that does not. One who 'needs' a priest and a ceremony and one who does not.

This picture is from 1973, by A H Amaral, called Banana in green and is typical of the ironic use of colour and 'realism' - the bananas and rope. The yellow and green as the colours of the Brazilian flag marked the artistic attempts to circumvent the censorship of the dictatorship and show the real truth. Amaral was in New York.
If you have never been to the Tate Modern in London, can I urge you to visit ? It is one of my favourite parts of London, and has completely changed the old 'South Bank' image. Cross the Thames from St Paul's Cathedral on the Millenium Bridge. Fabulous.
There is a seminar on Helio Oiticica and 'The Body of Colour' which will be webcast on 2 nd June 2007. See
www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents

See you all there!