1. HO, Ivan Cardoso, 1979. 13 min
In his Parangolés series (1964–79) Oiticica reached a crucial stage in his investigation of the embodiment of colour. Parangolés* are capes or habitable paintings that were designed to be worn while dancing to the rhythms of samba. HO is constructed like a collage where the director Ivan Cardoso presents original footage of Oiticica working with the Parangolés in the 1960s. Some of the most important members of the Brazilian avantgarde appear in the film, including singer Caetano Veloso and artist Lygia Clark. Also included are some of Oiticica’s friends from the Mangueira shanty town, whose participation influenced Oiticica in his work.
* Parangolé is a slang term meaning an animated situation and sudden confusion and/or agitation between people.
2. Hélio Oiticica, César Oiticica Filho, 2012. 94 min
César Oiticica Filho, the nephew of Hélio Oiticica, combines expert research with his special access to his uncle’s films and documentation of artworks. This dynamic film immerses the viewer in the universe of Hélio Oiticica through works like his Bólides, Penetráveis, Núcleos and Parangolés. The “Heliotapes” – sound recordings of Oiticica’s ideas and thoughts – make up the documentary’s soundtrack.
3. Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé, 1979. Photo: Andreas Valentin.
4. Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália, PN2 and PN3, 1967 at Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1996. Photo: César Oiticica Filho.
Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) is an internationally renowned Brazilian artist whose work has influenced many contemporary artists working today. Oiticica used the traditional conception of the artwork (going via concretism and neo-concretism) to generate renewal and experimentation. He made the viewer an intrinsic part of the art experience and was a true innovator of interactive and experiential artworks. Hélio Oiticica was an artist, writer, and a driving force in the formation of the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s. His own lived experiences (vivências) were an emotive part of his works and the merging of art and life was crucial for his installations and sculptures. The architecture and his involvement with the people living in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shanty towns) greatly inf luenced his environmental installation Tropicália (1967) and wearable Parangolés.
5. Hélio Oiticica & Neville D’Almeida, Cosmococa CC1 – CC5 Trashscapes, 1973, São Paulo, 2003. Foto: César Oiticica Filho.
When Hélio Oiticica lived in New York in the early 1970s, he created a series of innovative room installations with filmmaker Neville D’Almeida. These multi-sensory experiences constructed out of slide projections, hammocks, mattresses, and music encompassed the viewer. Oiticica referred to the installations as “quasi-cinemas” and are examples of the embodiment of Oiticica’s efforts to integrate the viewer into the artwork. Oiticica and D’Almeida conceived five pieces in the series entitled Block-Experiments in Cosmococa. Each Cosmococa involved an individual print and included images of famous personalities, such as Jimi Hendrix, John Cage, Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono, and entailed drawings made out of cocaine. To Oiticica, cocaine was a symbol of rebellion and the alternative community.
6. Tropicália, Marcelo Machado, 2012. 87 min.
This documentary revisits Tropicalismo, a powerful force in Brazilian culture in the late 1960s. Through rare footage of Brazilian music legends Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa and Tom Zé, director Marcelo Machado tells the story of a period that combined fine arts and popular culture. Today Tropicalismo is most immediately associated with popular music. Tropicália was also the title of one of the most celebrated albums in Brazilian music history, featuring Caetano Veloso and others.
7. Preparation I, Léticia Parente, 1975. 3.30 min;
Preparation II, Léticia Parente, 1976. 7.40 min
Trademark, Léticia Parente, 1975. 9 min.
Letícia Parente was one of the pioneers in experimental video art in Brazil. Due to the technology available at the time, her early video experiments consisted of a fixed camera and her body as instruments of artistic investigation. In the three videos exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall, Letícia Parente took her body to extremes. In Preparation I the artist veils her face with adhesive plaster in order to make herself up to face a patriarchal society; Preparations II consists of Parente giving herself four injections and filling out a vaccination card before leaving the country. The vaccines are entitled “anti-cultural colonialism”, “anti-racism”, “anti-political mystification” and “anti-art mythification”. Trademark involves the artist sewing the words “Made in Brazil” into the sole of her foot.
8. Terra em transe, Glauber Rocha, 1967. 111 minuter.
Glauber Rocha, one of the predecessors of Cinema Novo* (New Cinema), presents a poetic masterpiece about the political trance into which Latin America entered under the military regimes of the mid-1900s, which were backed by the US’s interest in economic expansion. The absurdity of a bipolar geopolitics during the Cold War, which justified violent investments all over the Capitalist/Communist world, in particular the dictatorship in Brazil, is enacted in the fictional Eldorado Republic.
*Cinema Novo A genre and movement of film inspired by Italian Neorealism and French Nouvelle Vague, as well as the cinema branch of Tropicalismo. Cinema Novo first appeared in the late 1950s as a reaction to the cultural alienations being produced by mainstream cinema at the time. Filmmakers took an intellectual approach to the social reality surrounding them. Glauber Rocha’s maxim “a camera in the hands and ideas in the head” illustrates the cinematographic language of Cinema Novo.
9. Um domingo con Frederico Morais, Guilherme Coelho, 2011. 60 min.
This documentary tells the story of Brazilian curator and art critic Frederico Morais, who created “Sundays of Creation”, a notorious series of events held at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art between January and July 1971. The events took place on six Sundays, and Morais dedicated each Sunday to a certain material, such as paper or fabric. The general public was invited to interact and work with the material along with artists, who set the process in motion. The aim of the events was to achieve “creativity for one and all”. This documentary also includes interviews with artists such as Cildo Meireles, who discusses the relationship between artists and critics.
10. Archive for a Work-Event: Activating the Body’s Memory of Lygia Clark’s Poetics and its Context, Suely Rolnik, 2002–2010. Series of 64 interviews with Lygia Clark’s students and friends.
The work of Lygia Clark is currently recognized as one of the founding expressions of contemporary art in Brazil, and plays an important role on the international scene. Her artistic trajectory occupies a singular position in the critical movement that shook the international art world in the 1960s and 70s. Clark’s artistic research unfolds from the formalist object in the late 1940s to a more therapeutic relation between the object and the body, which the artist claimed to have surpassed in the field of art, calling it a Relational Object. Lygia Clark held therapeutic sessions in her studio in Paris with art historians Guy Brett, Yves Alan Bois and Thierry Davila, poets and composer Caetano Veloso and Jards Macalé, filmmakers Gaëlle and Claude, to name a few. Renowned Brazilian psychoanalyst and curator Suely Rolnik interviewed Lygia Clark’s “patients”, 5 of which will be shown at Bonniers Konsthall.
11. O Rei da Vela, José Celso Martinez Corrêa, 1982. 160 min.
O Rei da Vela is a play written in 1933 by Oswald de Andrade. It wasn’t published until 1937 due to its aggressive, visceral depiction of the 1929 world financial crisis. The plot develops around figures of the rural elite and bourgeoisie, painting them as ridiculously deviant, involved in corrupt financial and political systems, exploitative, amoral and sexually disturbed. The play was first staged in 1967 by José Celso Martinez Corrêa as a Tropicalismo theatrical manifestation. The film depicts Celso’s stage interpretation.
12. Macumba Antropófaga, Teatro Oficina–Uzyna Uzona Company, 2012. Approx. 5 hours.
Macumba Antropófaga is a theatrical interpretation of the seminal “Cannibal Manifesto” written by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928. The five-hour play pays homage to the poet who put into words what came to found the Modern movement in the arts in Brazil: a “cultural cannibalism”. Brazilian had just recently been a colony, and in the 1920s local artists longed to turn “the other” into something “ours”. José Celso Martinez Correa, the founder of Teatro Oficina-Uzyna Uzona, met Oswald de Andrade. “We drank milk from the same goat,” said Celso. The play is a ritual (macumba) that revisits this historical period and provides an overview of contemporary anthropophagic manifestations in our globalized world.
13. O Bandido da luz vermelha, Rogerio Sganzerla, 1968. 92 min
“My film is a western about the Third World. It is this, and a fusion and mix of various genres since… I made a film-summa. … I squeezed sincerity out of the documentary (Rossellini), violence out of the police film (Fuller), anarchic rhythm out of the comedy (Sennett, Keaton), and brutal narrative simplification out of the western (Hawks). I wanted to make a magic and twisted film, where the characters were sublime and stupid.” Rogério Sganzerla’s words are about his film loosely based on the life of João Acácio Pereira da Costa, the Red Lantern Criminal, known for his numerous offenses. The plot is the least important factor here. At the age of 22, Sganzerla directed a film which did not follow the traditional construction of film narrative, instead involving a rich web of critical references, where society and cinema are intertwined and presented to the spectator with powerful virtuosi.
14. Copacabana mon amour, Rogerio Sganzerla, 1970. 85 min.
In Rogerio Sganzerla’s unique cinematographic language, Copacabana mon amour is an aesthetically stunning ode to Rio de Janeiro, divided into beauty (the rich Copacabana inhabitants, the remarkable landscape) and horror (the favela, prostitution, addiction).
15. Macunaíma, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade 1969. 108 min.
This film is based on the 1928 novel by Mario de Andrade, which was one of the first Modernist novels written as a rhapsody. In a formal sense, the novel resembles The Iliad and The Odyssey, except for the fact that although Macunaíma, the hero, possesses remarkable abilities, he is an anti-hero, lazy and without character. The novel follows Macunaíma to the city and then back to the forest where he
was born. In the city, he encounters industrialization and urban culture, where he constantly states, “ai, que preguiça”, which is a pun in both Tupi and Portuguese, as “Aique” is a Tupi word for sloth and “preguiça” is Portuguese for sloth. This is an example of how Andrade used a fused language to write this novel, which is one of the most important examples of Brazilian literature.