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Abstract
In 1927, Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade encountered in the Amazon a perceptual state provoked by malaria. The malarial gaze was a type of enduring, inactive, and embodied gaze that he imagines as a mode of resistance against capitalist modernity – a trope that finds its way into the critical discourse on national identity. Dialoguing with film theory and queer phenomenology, the article closely reads three scenes of looking in Andrade’s Amazonian photographs and travel notes, in which such a perceptual state is evoked and unravels a processual entanglement between capitalist modernity, the Amazon, and the modernist subject. The article shows how the inactive malarial gaze emerges through a mediated queer experience of the filmic image that gets suppressed in favour of a pure immediacy of the tropics, arguing that at the core of Andrade’s ambivalent politics of looking lies the problem of the impossibility of a “critical” national project. Fleshing out the political potentialities held by perception, the author suggests through Mário de Andrade a film-political constellation to understand the critical stakes of being an inactive spectator in the (geo)politics of extractive, peripheral capitalism.
Acknowledgements
This article was made possible through the support of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP) and their assistance with Mário de Andrade’s archive, Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Mário de Andrade (Citation1922) was a leading figure in the São Paulo 1922 Modern Art Week (Semana de Arte Moderna), deemed the point of entrance of avant-garde practices into the country. Besides being a poet and novelist, he was also a musicologist, art critic, theorist, photographer, professor, and for some years (1935–1939) a chief official in São Paulo’s Department of Culture, making him one of the most influential Brazilian intellectuals, whose work is inseparable from the very idea of Brazilian modernity. Andrade’s participation in Brazil’s public political life is central to the modernisation of cultural policy in the country, in the context of wide collaboration between modernist intellectuals and the State (see Santiago Citation2002; Calil Citation2015). Here he will be referred to as only Andrade, instead of “de Andrade”. All translations from Portuguese are mine. Andrade’s translations are accompanied by the original text, in footnotes.
2 During his two ethnographic trips to the north and northeast of Brazil (1927 and 1928–1929), with brief border-crossing into Bolivia and Peru, Andrade produced around 900 photographs, only sparsely published during his lifetime. Andrade’s travels unfold in many different artefacts: the travel diary O turista aprendiz published in 1976; several articles published in the newspaper Diário Nacional in the 1930s; and the novel Macunaíma (1929), which combined his travel notes with readings of European ethnographies of Brazil – notoriously Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s 1917 Vom Roraima Zum Orinoco. During the process of my research all his photographs were made public in digital form (1976/2015a). None of the images here analysed was published while he was alive.
3 um olhar embaçado, que não vê coisa nenhuma.
4 Idleness and a sensuous “tropical” resistance to modernity became commonplaces in the social thought on Brazilian identity, exemplified by classics such as Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 Casa grande e senzala (2003). The paradigm would live on in the 1960s and 1970s avant-gardes – Macunaíma was adapted to film in a Cinema Novo classic directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in 1969. Recently, Horst Nitschack (Citation2013), for example, has termed Macunaíma’s attitude as an example of a “tropical subjectivity”, and common media discourses have termed the recent rise of the far-Right as “tropical fascism”.
5 Emphasising the upper-class cosmopolitan composition of the modernist movement and of the movie audiences in the early twentieth-century Brazil, Maite Conde (Citation2018) has recently argued that one of the impacts of film on Brazilian modernismo was to bring its avant-garde high-culture ethos to dialogue with popular forms of modern everyday experience, mediated by the cinematic imaginary. Instead of mapping the filmic references in Andrade as others have done (Lopez Citation2005; Cunha Citation2011; Xavier Citation2017), my aim here is much narrower: to understand how the filmic gaze opens critical approaches to the politics of modernismo on the level of perception and mediation.
6 In Barthes’s now classic distinction, the punctum is the affective element that disturbs the general cultural, historical, and intentional “subject” of the photograph, which he terms studium. The punctum is “the element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me”, being thus in the non-descriptive, uncontrolled order of affect (Barthes Citation1982, 26). My reading of Andrade’s photograph here disturbs this dichotomy, since there are not only two temporalities to the image: its temporality is dispersed.
7 On the critique of the phenomenological “sensuous certainty” of objects, as opposed to their “histories of arrival”, see Sara Ahmed (Citation2006, 37–41).
8 I thank the discussants of the seminar “Displacing Latin America Film, Media, Literature” at the American Comparative Literature Association 2017 Conference for their contribution to this reading. I thank especially José Gatti, who called my attention to the unclearness of the photograph.
9 As Vivian Sobchack puts it, such a phenomenological emphasis on the lived experience would distinguish “the transcendental, posited moment of the photograph and the existential momentum of the cinema, between the scene to be contemplated, and the scene as it is lived” (Sobchack Citation2004, 145).
10 um peruano moreno, forte, com sangue vivo por detrás da morenez.
11 de uma beleza extraordinária de rosto, meio parecido com Richard Barthelmess.
12 Mas inteiramente devorado pela maleita, a pele dele, duma lisura absurda, era dum pardo tom terroso sem prazer.
13 Todo barulho que fazíamos, nada o interessava nem sequer para uma olhadela, não olhou.
14 ser maleiteiro, assim, nada mais me interessar neste mundo em que tudo me interessa por demais…
15 olhar apenas que recebeu a noção do que existia.
16 As defended in film publications such as Cinearte, in early twentieth-century Brazil, the cinematic body worthy of the silver screen was the white body modelled after Hollywood.
17 serena figura de pau, ornando a proa.
18 naquele fim de mundo, atrasado do mundo pelo menos de um mês em tudo.
19 [na Amazônia] todas as noções desaparecem, de tempo, de vida, de necessidade, de progresso, todas as atividades, mesmo as mais precárias, de constatar, de julgar. Não vale a pena a gente se mover mais, fazer um gesto ….
20 Curiosidade é maldição. E nas terras de calor vasto é simplesmente “made in Germany”.
21 há-de acabar minha curiosidade e acalmará minha desgraçada vaidade de precisar ser alguém nesta concorrência aqui no Sul.
22 (…) estes trilhos foram plantados sem reis do Egito e sem escravos… Sem escravos?… Pelo menos sem escravos matados a relho… Milhares de chins, de portugueses, bolivianos, barbadianos, italianos, árabes, gregos, vindos a troco de libra. Tudo quanto era nariz e pele diferente andou por aqui deitando com uma febrinha na boca da noite pra amanhecer no nunca mais. O que eu vim fazer aqui!… Hoje o poeta viaja com suas amigas, na Madeira-Mamoré, num limpadinho carro de inspeção, bem sentado em poltronas de cipó-titica, com perdão da palavra, estritamente feitas pelo alamão de Manaus. Vem um garçom fardado lhe trazer um guarana Simões, de Belém, bem geladinho, com o gelo mais lindo do mundo que é o de Porto Velho. Hoje o poeta come o peru assado feito por um mestre cook de primo cartello, que subiu no Vitória, destinado pela Amazon River pra adoçar nossa vida. Às vezes se para, as paisagens serão codaquizadas, até cinema se traz!
23 Exposure here has a twofold meaning. One is the analogy to the exposure of the photographic film to the environment. The other one refers to Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of exposure: a non-Kantian aesthetic experience that rejects a sensus communis of unity in feeling – “being-in-common” inasmuch as it “is not a common being” (Citation1991, 29).
24 I borrow the expression “slow violence” from Rob Nixon (Citation2011), for its capacity to grasp the semi-visibility of extractivist capitalism’s long temporality.
25 Qual a razão de todos esses mortos internacionais que renascem na bulha da locomotiva e vêm com seus olhinhos de luz fraca me espiar pelas janelinhas do vagão?
26 Índios legítimos, bancando negros, pintados com jenipapo. Não pintam as articulações dos dedos, que ficam parecendo cicatrizes claras, é horrível. Fotei.
27 On thinking race as technology, see Wendy Chun (Citation2009).
28 Gabara translates “máquina cinematográfica” [cinematographic machine] as “photographic machine” (2008, 95), erasing the tension between the aesthetic effect of the two media that seems central to Andrade.
29 O que é mais admirável na criação da cara de Carlitos é que todo o efeito dela é produzido pela máquina cinematográfica. Charles Chaplin conseguiu lhe dar uma qualidade anticinegráfica, a que faltam enormemente as sombras e principalmente os planos.
30 Esther Gabara translates “cara de desenho parado” as “designed face” (2008, 95), which I translate as “face of a still drawing”, to convey Andrade’s focus on the difference between moving and still media. I keep, however, her suggestion of “visage” for rosto, and “face” for cara.
31 dá a sensação de um homem real com cara de desenho parado, no meio de homens com caras em movimento, de gente mesmo.
32 [O elemento estético de Keaton] não faz parte da estrutura da cara, não vem da carne, da epiderme. E não vem muito menos da máquina cinematográfica.
33 Drawing, for Andrade, had its own complex temporality. As he wrote in his essay “Do Desenho”: “What mainly pleases me, in the so complex nature of drawing, is its infinitely subtle character, being at once transience and wisdom”. (“O que me agrada principalmente, na tão complexa natureza do desenho, é o seu caráter infinitamente subtil, de ser ao mesmo uma transitoriedade e uma sabedoria”) (“Do Desenho”, Andrade, Mário de Citation1939/1965, 72).
34 tanto mais objetivada a invenção, o artista deixa de existir se tornando logicamente espectador como toda gente.
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André Keiji Kunigami
André Keiji Kunigami is Assistant Professor at UC Irvine’s Department of Film and Media Studies. He earned his BA from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, Brazil), his MA from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF, Brazil), and his PhD from Cornell University. His research revolves around questions of perception, spectatorship, and temporality, focusing on Brazil and Japan, with particular interest in the intercrossing of phenomenology, historical materialism, critical race studies, and film and media theory. He has published articles and book chapters on comparative modernisms, contemporary film, and media criticism, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Of Clouds and Bodies: Film and The Problem of Embodiment in Brazilian and Japanese Interwar Avant-gardes”. Email: [email protected].