Proust Palimpsesto: Pastiches e Misturas

Experimental Short, Brazil

Experimental documentary about the life and work of obscure samba musician Vassourinha (1923-1942), born in São Paulo, who only recorded six 78rpm records, dying at 19.

The documentary’s starting point is the discovery and restoration of a rare and unknown photography reel reproduced from a mutoscope film, made in 1901 in London, about Santos Dumont (1873 – 1932). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.

Coleridge's flower in the garden of the paths that fork from Borges. Paper and film flowers; fossil flowers. "Panorama of all the flowers of speech" (Joyce), a "flower full of the real, of the current" (Wallace Stevens).

Burnings of a family home (by farmer security guards; September 2021) and a prayer house (by members of a Pentecostal church; December 2021), recordings on video by the Guarani Kaiowá people.

On September 6, 2021, private security guards burned down a Guarani Kaiowá house at the Ava'te Tekoha ("place for living the culture") in the Dourados Indigenous Reserve in Mato Grosso do Sul. The act was captured on video by the Guarani Kaiowá.

It rains; but still, it sings. Under the symbolic motto of the meteorological metaphor, a poetic constellation of edited "found footage" with excerpts of 99 films and 8 versions of a song. From the series "Notes for a Self-Biopic (in Regress)".

Film poem based on the theses “On the concept of history” (1940) by Walter Benjamin. Brazilian indigenous peoples in records from 1917 and 1922 and in anti-fascist demonstrations from 2022; the Palestinian cause in 1948 and in 2022; shots against the clock fired by French revolutionaries in July 1830 and arrows against the clock (commemorating the 500th anniversary of discovery) fired by the original Brazilian peoples in April 2000.

The sea taken by footages from XIX century (produced in 1891, 1895 ,1897 and 1900, in Brazil, United States, France and England) and listened from a song(in French, English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian). From the series “notes for a Self Biopic (in Regress)”.

A double love tribute: to the final film by Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) ‘An Autumn Afternoon’ or ‘Sanma no Aji’ (1962) and ‘A Rising Sun That Painted My Horizon' (2018). An archival re-appropriation cine-poem. A found footage haiku.