Apocalipopótese and After – Friday, May 16, 2014, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2Artistic experimentation in Rio during the 1960s culminated in the collective exhibition Apocalipopótese, in Rio’s Atero do Flamengo park. Documented in beautiful 16mm by the marginal poet Raymundo Amado, the exhibition included Lygia Pape’s Ovos (Eggs), cloth boxes from which an enclosed person breaks forth; Antonio Manuel’s Urnas quentes, wooden boxes that participants broke open to reveal slogans like “Down with the Dictatorship” and “Power to the People”; and poet Torquato Neto and critic Frederico Morais donning Oiticica’s Parangolécapes. The exhibition marked the passage from the 1960s to the 1970s in the work of the group of artists around Clark and Oiticica.
Apocalipopótese
1968. Brazil. Directed by Raymundo Amado. 9 min.
Cinemateca-Rio
1963. Brazil. Directed by Lygia Pape. 1 min.
Hermetic Triumph
1972. Brazil. Directed by Rubens Gerchman. 12 min.
Semi Ótica
1975. Brazil. Directed by Antonio Manuel. 7 min.
Agripina é Roma-Manhattan
1972. USA. Directed by Hélio Oiticica. 15 min.
HO
1979. Brazil. Directed by Ivan Cardoso. 13 min.
The great Cinema Novo movement’s leading light was Glauber Rocha, whose manifesto, “Aesthetics of Hunger,” and passion for finding a cinematic language capable of reflecting the country’s tremendous social and human problems was frequently discussed in the circle of artists around Lygia Clark (an alternative artistic milieu of which Rocha was also a part). The film is the frenzied parable of a peasant who has killed his master and seeks help first from a holy man and later from a cangaceiro (a peasant “social bandit” of northeastern Brazil). It is inspired by Brazilian—mostly black—theatrical tradition, but the poetic, almost baroque, style is Rocha’s personal signature. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 125 min.
In this “fake documentary” a doctor returns to Brazil after studies in Paris. Setting out to practice medicine, he becomes an indigenous messiah and, in time, a cannibal. Omar’s cinema distinguishes itself from both the aesthetics of Cinema Novo and Marginal Cinema’s extreme photographic realism by what he has called a “hyper-language,” a collage constructed with many kinds of images, printed words, letters, drawings, symbols, documentary material, archives of family films, snapshots, and, in the voice-over, dozens of texts from anthropological research, baroque narratives, popular almanacs, sermons, poems, and citations of all sorts—all set off with a purposeful and radical lack of perfection in its overall visual look. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 80 min.