To accompany the dazzling selection in this year’s Sinais Latinoamérica, below we present two lucid, rebellious texts by one of the filmmakers involved in it, the Brazilian Lincoln Pericles.
FOR A BRICKLAYER’S CINEMA
by Lincoln Péricles
For the most part, Brazilian cinema is made up of engineers and architects. They know everything, from a distance. They know through their mind, their intellect… and nothing else. Of course, there must be engineers and architects with a humanistic education, who know how to go further, but they still belong to a class and may or may not be traitors to it.
Brazilian cinema is missing a bricklayer’s cinema. One by those who help in the neighbourhood to build the neighbour’s house and their own. One that knows how to be a piece, knows how to be a brick, aware of everything involved in that purpose. A kind of cinema that knows how to be functional. The bricklayer knows how to build a house; their learning comes from their whole body, which means it also comes from the mind, from the intellect. The bricklayer knows through all of their pores how to be an architect and an engineer, not as a condition of an oppressive class, but as a raw need to erect a space, a place, a thing.
Working-class cinema means rebelling with one’s whole body against a clear oppression, an aesthetic-political oppression, an ideological oppression. A working-class cinema will emerge from public education in risk-taking cinema, or from the streets, but not from film schools and their layouts, which train robot-filmmakers to win competitions or work directing advertising and institutional videos (in addition to their facets that are projected on the big screens). These schools continue with the complicity and support of frustrated teacher-artists; public and private schools educate filmmakers and victims who are consumed in the hands of exploitative production companies and are machines for sucking out money and brains.
It is from a bricklayer’s cinema that some revolution in language, in the world, will emerge.
[…]
Originally published in the magazine Zagaia on 27th August, 2014
PERIPHERY OF THE PERIPHERAL IMAGE
by Lincoln Péricles
[…] “Our peace is a fruit that will always be forcibly torn from our stomachs, but now it remains to be seen, my son, if it is precisely that fruit with which we wish to feed ourselves,” said the mother.
There was a time when, on leaving one of those “cinema” debates, I was asked with the curiosity of an investigator how I managed to make the films I made, what the difference would be between someone coming to film something in my neighbourhood and me making a film here. Right then I answered categorically: “I don’t know.” And that bothers me to this day, because at that time I didn’t know that this sums up what those of another class hold to be certain: that they can be whatever they want, can even be us, and that for us to become whatever we want means… becoming them. That is an obvious process of capitalism that runs through the veins of today, where it is all too easy to “respect” or “become someone else” through the countless search mechanisms offered by money. It’s even easier to destroy self-esteem, ancient knowledge, and lives. In some ways, the young leftist and the modern fascist go hand in hand: they rape, kill, erase, or at least try to erase us. One does so because of the ideological cloak that they put on when any idiot shouts words that sound good, and the other because of the ability to systematically erase our history to absolve themselves of guilt for being what they are. “History is the story of violence against us,” the mother said.
We are the people who study and we are here. We are the ones who go out to earn our daily bread, be it in a precarious job or in a Nazi university, sometimes in both. We are the ones who learn here, stay here, and live here. If someone guards knowledge so jealously to perpetuate their power (academia, books, movies, etc.), why do we do the opposite? A friend once said: “You know, brother, we’re very good; we take knowledge conquered with a lot of bloodshed and, when one of them comes along and asks, ‘But how…?’, we go to them and give them everything.” […]
Originally published on the website Outras Palavras
