This Nervous Thing

A man who is tormented by his intuitions and by dreams goes away to find answers to his discomfort. Revelations are made to him along his path, until he meets his soul mate and is prepared to the Blue Desert.

Barravento Novo depicts correspondences between Antônio Pitanga—a Cinema Novo actor seen here delivering lines from Glauber Rocha’s first feature, Barravento, from 1962—and his daughter, Camila Pitanga, a well-known actor and filmmaker working today.

After living in the United States for decades, Brazilian geographer Camila decides to return to her native state of Minas Gerais when a mining-related environmental disaster strikes the area. A dam burst, destroying several villages with heavily polluted wastewater from an iron ore mine. In this documentary road movie, Camila shows how mining has shaped the state’s history.

Combining artfully designed sets and digital processing, Santos recreates the historic Apollo lunar landing for this essayistic video, which uses simulation to interrogate representation. Relating a long-circulated rumor that the landing was actually faked in a NASA film studio — an opinion reputedly held by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, among others — Santos delicately negotiates the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction. As he notes in his on-screen text, the coming of the Internet makes any purported fact "easy to say, hard to prove."

Santos bases his self-described "video letter from Hong Kong" on the ambiguity of the word "frame." He refers to the picture or camera frame, as well as to the variable frame rate of digitally manipulated video, and, finally, to the act of framing as a process by which one names, describes, and in some sense colonizes, the object of perception. Images of transit — commuters, buses, boats, subways — stop and start, run backward, and flutter across the screen, yielding brief glimpses of a face or a gesture, as if they are being scanned for meaning. Indeed, by directly addressing the viewer through flashes of text ("Have you ever been framed?"), Santos suggests the colonial history that haunts everyday life in modern Hong Kong.

Girassol Vermelho is a film inspired by Murilo Rubião, a master of Brazilian magical realism, about the journey of Romeu, a man who leaves his past behind in search of freedom. By chance, he arrives in a strange city where an oppressive and pathetic system, which does not allow for questioning, drags him into a series of interrogations and tortures. In this absurd world, Romeo realizes that he has lost his greatest value: freedom. Full of pain and fury, Romeu, delirious, embarks on a new and even stranger journey.

In this haunting work, Santos creates an elegiac mood that suggests both intimacy and loss. Based on a poem by Sandra Penna, which was inspired by a children's song about a couple who has broken up, this tape overturns the sunny idealism and rhymes typically found in children's songs. Contradictory feelings, imperfect remembrances and the inaccuracy of time are suggested by the poignant collage of home movies, voiceover, and music.

Santos constructs a lyrical meditation on his native Brazilian landscape, its culture and its inhabitants. Santos pays tribute to two important historical figures from Brazilian cinema — Humberto Mauro and Mario Peixoto — and their films The Ox-cart and The Limit. Contemporary footage, recorded in Death Valley and in Janauba, a town in the artist's native state of Minas Gerais, describes landscapes that appear to be untouched by time. In contrast, the reality of their inhabitants suggests an idealized, yet never realized, future.

During the night lived in 2020 with denialism, an actor in rehearsal and confinement, his and the character who rehearses, one of the thousand offered by the novel “A lua vem da Asia” by Campos de Carvalho. How to circumvent the taxes imposed by space, time and bodies? Narrative and language are structuring devices in these conditions. What's the way out? A memory? The affection? The imaginary? Liberation takes place through the singular path, that of authorship, imagination and poetry.

Lies & Humiliations is a haunting and lyrical work that merges poetic language and Super-8 images to invoke memory and its ghosts. Infused with an almost ethereal light, images of a house evoke its past — an old-fashioned kitchen and dining room, an ancient roof. Visions that recall childhood memories are superimposed like apparitions onto images of the present. Spoken in voiceover, a Carlos Drumond de Andrade poem, LIQUIDACAO/Special Sale, becomes a denunciatory litany that emphasizes the past's inability to cope with the future: "The house was sold, with/All its remembrances/All its furniture/All its nightmares/All its committed sins/Or those about to be..."

Neptune's Choice is Santos' self-described "letter to Amsterdam." With lush images, elliptical text and a haunting sound collage, this poetic work explores the artist's impressions of the cosmopolitan city. Defining Amsterdam through its historical and contemporary relation to water, Santos celebrates the rhythm and routines of the city from the point of view of an outsider. This work was created as an artist-in-residence project of the World Wide Video Festival.

A short film by Eder Santos

In this vivid pastiche of images, music and text, Santos addresses technology and image-making in the context of cultural formation. Writes Santos: "Technology is explored in terms of information speed — a feature that makes popular absorption and understanding all the harder. Metaphorically, this process is akin to obtaining information through the ultra-condensation of mere legends and subtitles. Though this may occur in developed countries, such a process displays and unleashes its greatest vigor in a culture such as Brazil's. I Cannot Go to Africa Because I Am on Duty indirectly touches upon values: instead of being concerned with the information-absorption process and with the likelihood of controlling the image-producing process, we are hellbent on running a race, whose sole goal is to employ the latest technological innovation in terms of image production."