Geographies of Love(Lessness), Space and Affectivity in Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque Te Amo (I Travel Because I Need to, I Come Back Because I Love You) (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009) and Turistas (Tourists) (Alicia Scherson, 2009)

Abstract

This article looks at how the idea of open space, articulated within a theoretical matrix that privileges affect, might be used to think through the inscription of subjects in the contemporary world. The audio-visual construction of space in the films Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (2009), by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, and Turistas (2009), by Alicia Scherson, resonates with Giuliana Bruno’s (2002) idea of a cinema informed ‘by a cartographic practice of the intimate that sets out a haptic route’, a ‘mobile geography’ that blurs the limits between external space and affectivity. In these films, the co-existence of inner and outer mappings on the same surface, as pure filmic materialities, visual and sound potentials, problematises the hermetic nature of the private, making inner space porous, open to flows and contaminations. I will give an account of this new mobile and affective geography by analysing the trajectories of the protagonists of these films – a geologist and a female biologist – along with the relations they establish with the flora, fauna and physical and human environment they traverse. The central claim of this article is that through a visual, sonic and tactile inventory of nature, these films introduce a haptic dimension which is both aesthetic matrix and a way of thinking affects and subjectivity in the contemporary world.

Keywords:

• Latin American cinema
• affect studies
• Brazil and Southern Cone
• haptic aesthetics
• geographical imaginaries

Notes

1. Ismail Xavier notes the recurrence in contemporary Brazilian films of displacements and ‘non-places’ that question the idea of space as a coherent totality (2003, 49). Gonzalo Aguilar (2006) suggests that we can see nomadism and sedentarism as two complementary signs of New Argentine Cinema: the first would be ‘a contemporary state of permanent movements, translations, non-belonging and the dissolution of any form of permanence’ (43). He also discusses the link between mobility and deterritorialisation as a characteristic feature of contemporary culture. However, despite the general nature of this nomadism, the very variety of displacements that Latin American cinema deals with makes it necessary, as Aguilar suggests in relation to Argentine cinema, ‘to define what sort of displacements we are looking at and what symbolic and material dimensions are in play’ (43).

2. Earlier Ismail Xavier had analysed territorial displacements as one of the tropoi Cinema Novo used to give an interpretation of the nation, associating the sertão with historical meanings and social allegories (1997, 236). In the 1990s, cinema also registered movements to the sertão but critics hold that contemporary films, despite certain thematics shared with the narratives of Cinema Novo, are marked by a depoliticised stance, since the representation of space is not transposed into a search for Brazilian identity (Oricchio 2003; Bentes 2003). In her discussion of a number of Chilean films, Carolina Urrutia (2013) suggests that a new hierarchy is set up between subject and space. In Chilean fiction films after 2005, landscape unfolds autonomously of the subject who inhabits it and constitutes a geography where ‘exactly at the point where the subject is silent there emerges a surface of discourse that possesses a powerful gaze of its own, the possibility of a narrative in itself’ (20). The Argentine scholar Andrea Molfetta (2011) analyses a corpus of recent Argentine, Mexican and Peruvian films where the characters’ encounters with nature do not set out or resolve questions of collective identity but rather display personal doubts that remain unresolved. For her, contemporary men and women travel ‘intransitively’ (53).

3. Going beyond the observation that current cinema lacks the links between space and politics articulated in earlier cinema, some academics from the English-speaking world have tried to analyse these new types of displacement in a way that gives cinema back its potential for thinking the conditions of the political in the present. Among these attempts, Joanna Page’s (2009) contribution is most interesting because she pays attention to the complexity of the concepts of space and place in the era of globalization. She shows how certain Argentine films in which the characters travel to ‘rural space’ take over the discourses of transnationality with the aim of reasserting contemporary forms of national identity. Taking as his point of departure the extensive study of the territorial and spatial logics of the literature and visual culture of Argentina and Brazil, Jens Andermann’s most recent book (2012) dedicates a chapter– ‘Margins of Realism: Exploring the Contemporary Landscape’— to the examination of the ways landscape is produced in films that are centred on non-urban spatialities, particularly the work of Lisandro Alonso, Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel and Mariano Donoso. Taking their distance from forms of perception based in action, and offering new modes of perception, these films work with different forms and regimes of visuality and visibility that give back to cinema the potential to trace new ‘cognitive maps’.

4. In the book I am currently writing on ‘Geographical Imaginaries and Affectivity in Contemporary Cinema in Argentina, Chile and Brazil’, I analyse different films that privilege displacements into ‘open space’ in order to configure new ‘affective geographies’: La forma exacta de las islas (Daniel Casabé y Edgardo Dieleke, 2012), Radiografía del desierto (Mariano Donoso, 2013), Balnearios (2002) and Historias extraordinarias (2008) by Mairano Llinás, Liverpool (2008) and Jauja (2013) by Lisandro Alonso, Rabia (2008), by Albertina Carri, Las aguas del olvido and Toponimia by Jonathan Perel, El rostro (2014) and La orilla que se abisma (2008) by Gustavo Fontán, Ex-Isto (2005), Acidente (2006) and Andarilho (2007) by Cão Guimarães, Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus (2005), by Marcelo Gomes, Árido movie (2006) by Lírio Ferreira, O Céu de Suely (2006) by Karim Aïnouz, Sertão de acrílico azul piscina (2004) and Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (2009) by Marcelo Gomes and Karim Aïnouz, Mutum (2007) by Sandra Kogut, Serras da Desordem (2006) by Andrea Tonnacci, Cofralandes (2002–2004), Las soledades and La recta provincia (2007) by Raúl Ruiz, El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia (2008), Tres semanas después (2010) and Verano (2011) by José Luis Torres Leiva, Huacho (2009) and Sentados frente al fuego (2012) by Alejandro Fernández Almendros, Turistas (2009) by Alicia Scherson, Tierra en movimiento (2014) by Tiziana Panizza, De jueves a domingo (2010) and La isla (2014) by Dominga Sotomayor, La mamá de mi abuela le contó a mi abuela (2004) by Ignacio Agüero, Nostalgia de la luz (2010) and El botón de nácar (2015) by Patricio Guzmán and Los durmientes (2014) by Enrique Ramírez are some of the audio-visual works I look at in this study of displacement, spatial practices and affectivity.

5. It is not just in cinema that there has been a renewed interest in the spheres of privacy/intimacy and affectivity. In the field of human geography itself there is increasing interest in the thorough exploration of the spatiality of emotion and affect. In this vein, Joyce Davidson, Louis Bondi and Mick Smith (2005) propose an ‘emotional geography’ that understands emotions in terms of their socio-spatial mediations rather than as merely subjective mental states. On the other hand, in ‘Emotions and Affect in Recent Human Geography’ Steve Pile (2010) suggests that whilst studies such as those of Davidson and Bondi refer alternately to ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ there are differences between these two notions in that emotional geography puts the stress on emotions that can be expressed, whilst affective geographies insist on those affects that remain outside (textual, linguistic or visual) representation.

6. In new geography studies, scale is not simply a fact or methodological tool. Scale is in itself ‘plastic’ because its deformations are linked to certain dynamics. It is not a milieu in which events develop: rather the development of certain events changes scale. Thus rather than a ‘magnifying glass that lets us see phenomena’, scale is to be understood as a tool with which to understand relations, negotiations and tensions between actors and space. It is plastic because it is a network of dynamic relationships that expand and contract through the interactions of objects and persons (Jazairy and Vaughn 2011, 2). If scale serves to understand the changing relations between the subject and its environment, it is perhaps also a place of play and the unfolding of dynamic relations with others. That is, we have to think scale from an affective as well as a geo-epistemological dimension, as one of the ways in which subjects establish relations of similarity, distance and proximity with others.

7. In ‘Tourists and Vagabonds’ Zygmunt Bauman says that tourists begin their journeys ‘by choice’, because their place of origin is insufficiently attractive or offers too few surprises. This exit from routine and the search for adventure, however, is made easier by the comfortable feeling of knowing that they can always go home (1997, 116–117). So displacement here is not an instance of nomadic wandering, in the same way that human relationships in a society of liquid modernity move away from the danger of love understood as ‘a creative impulse … full of risks’ (2008, 21).

8. This intensity is linked to the idea of wounded masculinity. The protagonist is a man whose wife has left him, who is suffering from dor de cotovelo or ‘heartache’, a motif and affective modulation that is typical of brega, the romantic music which dominates the sound track. The decision to include this type of music on the sound track is not only linked to the need to have an ‘accurate sound’ (the local radios in the spaces where the protagonist moves around in fact play this type of music) but also helps redirect – albeit only in a certain way and even then only partially – the open and indefinite affectivity of the images that make up the visual track towards Renato’s individual emotions, as he goes through the suffering caused by the break-up with his partner.

9. In 2001 they had simultaneous projections of the material playing as an installation in the exhibition O Cinema dos Pequenos Gestos (Des) Narrativos,[The Cinema of Small (De)Narrative Gestures] and in 2004 they showed the medium length documentary Sertão de acrílico azul piscina at the Itaú Foundation. Finally in 2009 they went back to the images they had taken in 1999, put them together with a dramatic structure and with an actor’s voice-over to create the fiction feature Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo. For an analysis of the uses of the personal archive and the cross-over between documentary and fiction in the work of Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, see Vieira and Dídimo (2013)

10. Laura Marks takes the notion of ‘haptic visuality’ from Alöis Riegel, an art historian who specialised in textiles and who tried to give an account of the way a carpet was perceived. This was through a form of vision that ‘touched’ the person who was looking at it rather than through a mode of optical vision (162). This distinction between haptic and optical crops up numerous times in the course of the 20th century, especially in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari define ‘smooth spaces’ as those navigated by means of a haptic perception of the immediate environment, by contrast with ‘striated spaces’ that correspond to a more distant optical vision. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Marks plays with this fluidity between optical and haptic visualities in different media. Riegel also inspires Deleuze in his studies on art: when he analyses Francis Bacon’s work, he suggests that painting is not simply a historical representation or meaning, but a language addressing the body, a language with the power to generate determinate sensations: ‘real sight discovers in itself a function of touch which is proper to it, that belongs only to it, and is different from its optical function. One could say then that a painter paints with his eyes but only in as much as he touches with his eyes’ (2005, 158). Then in his studies on cinema Deleuze touches briefly on the haptic dimension. The Deleuzian ‘affect-image’ calls forth a visceral response from the spectator and takes us away from the dominant mode of the ‘movement-image’ because it prevents catharsis in action and opens us up to an experience of time. Marks herself recognises her connection to Deleuze’s typology of images: ‘Haptic images are actually a subset of what Deleuze (1994) referred to as optical images: those images that are so ‘thin’ and unclichéd that the viewer must bring his or her resources of memory and imagination to complete them. The haptic images force the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative. Thus it has a place in Deleuze’s time-image cinema. Optical visuality, by contrast, assumes that all resources the viewer requires are available in the image’ (163).

11. How can cinema appeal to the senses that it cannot technically represent, such as smell and touch? How do haptic images destabilise the dividing line between the spectator-subject and the characters on the screen? Basing herself on Deleuze, Laura Marks extends his idea by articulating it with another set of concerns. Firstly, from a formal point of view, Marks tries to describe haptic images, setting out how this haptic visuality is seen, but also what produces these images in the spectators. According to Marks, in optical visuality the eye perceives objects from a distance that is enough to isolate them as forms in space. By contrast with this separation between the seeing body and the object, haptic visuality is a more close-up way of seeing, since it tends to move across the surface of the objects before sinking into an illusionary depth, and seeks not so much to distinguish forms as discern textures. In this sense, haptic vision is more based on touch and is closer to a corporeal form of perception, as if the eyes themselves were ‘organs of touch’ (162). While still concerned with the ‘surface of the image’ Laura Marks nevertheless differs from Deleuze when she posits the existence of a phenomenological subject, which derives in large part from Vivian Sobchack’s work (The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). If Marks thinks films are produced for a spectator to feel and to be part of an act of perception, for Deleuze the array of movement-images that make up cinema addresses no one in particular: they are an appearance where nothing exists, ‘not even an eye’ (Deleuze 1992, 59). For Marks, in haptic visuality, the spectator’s gaze is not involved symbolically in identifying or dominating the image on the screen, but in creating a tactile space of intersubjectivity between spectator and screen. So, the critical discourse of ‘haptic visuality’ moves away from virtual or abstract and decontextualised spaces, to come closer to the physical, to embodied experience. Moving from Deleuze’s ‘visceral gaze’ to a focus that seeks to understand the ‘senses of perception’ in terms of a sensual and tactile proximity, Marks celebrates the power of images to destabilise film’s ‘system of suture’.

12. Reis Filho analyses a number of films that involve haptic visuality, including Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo, and stresses the sense of futurity that can be glimpsed in this type of image. None the less, in my reading of Sertão de acrílico azul piscina, I also think that Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes’s cinema transcends ‘becoming’ and makes it possible to touch the past. The tiny gestures of this travel documentary poetically re-map a space by the affective appropriation of inherited figures of the landscape, real traces and echoes of an archive of images and sounds of the desert. As if dealing with remains and residues, the allegorical meanings of the landscape are the object of an exercise of an affective gaze made possible by the predominantly haptic visuality of the documentary. In this sense, we are not just dealing with sensations transmitted in the course of an idle journey. In the physical displacement and the affective reading there is a sort of historical trajectory that plays with sounds and images of the sertão that belong to the cinema and literature of previous decades. Like an echo of this affective matrix, this new writing of the desert stages the absence of the ‘people’ and the drift towards a poetics of the everyday existence of ordinary human beings (Depetris Chauvin 2014a, 188–189).

13. Iris Sadek (2010) deals with the relations between spatial practices of mobility and the world of affects in fiction film and finds that in films like O Céu de Suely or Eu Tu Eles, the point of view and itineraries of the protagonists turn the sertão into a ‘practiced place’ with a private or intimate meaning. Alessandra Brandão (2012) has also looked at various films of ‘dislocation’ in which the affective gaze is preferentially centred on the paths that women take. In my study of La forma exacta de las islas I suggest a notion of ‘practices of the landscape form’ (in the cinematic, anthropological and geographical sense of the term) that can ‘spatialise’ the work of mourning (Depetris Chauvin 2014c); in films by Raúl Ruiz Patricio Guzmán the ‘spatialision of memory’ is associated with ‘spatial practices’ that articulate new ‘affective cartographies’ (Depetris Chauvin 2015a, 2015b). A perspective based on affective geographies allows for alternative readings of a similarly diverse corpus of films. For example, in a more playful sense, some narratives of displacement appeal to affectivity and humour to offer impossible geographies (Depetris Chauvin 2014b and Carla Lois and Depetris Chauvin 2015) or reinvent spaces that have already been traversed, and these privilege work on the haptic spaces of the image and movement (Depetris Chauvin 2014a). We should also note that Laura Podalsky (2011) and Cynthia Tompkins (2013) have explored the affective dimension in their books on recent Latin American cinema, the former from a theoretical framework that uses ideas of the emotions, whilst the latter is based more on Deleuzian theory.