In the Intense Now (No Intenso Agora) introduction and post-screening discussion with Bruno Carvalho, João Moreira Salles and Mariano Siskind.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Bruno Carvalho  0:07  

Good night. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. I'm Bruno Carvalho. I just joined the Harvard faculty this fall.

[HOOTS AND APPLAUSE]

[LAUGHS] I wasn’t expecting that! Thank you. Thank you all for—well for that—and for being here. I wanted to thank everyone in Harvard Film Archive for making this possible; my home department Romance Languages and Literatures; and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Above all I wanted to thank João Moreira Salles who's been extremely generous with his time.

So Haden couldn't be here—Haden Guest, our wonderful HFA Director. And I have some excuses for not giving the sort of exquisitely insightful introductions you're all accustomed to. I was asked very last-minute to introduce this film. And I've only seen it once; I saw it a year ago. So although it created enormous impact on me, I will say very brief words about it. So that's good for you, of course!

I do follow João’s filmmaking very closely. And, in his prior films, in very different ways, [he pursues] subjects as varied as urban violence and [UNKNOWN] and those that implicates; the classical pianist Nelson Freire and how he makes himself in the world; Lula and how he made himself in the world and the eve of his election to Brazil's presidency in 2002; and to those that came last night to see Santiago, we have the house João Moreira Salles grew up in, its butler Santiago, and the film he had tried to make thirteen years earlier and failed. So here, in this film, João, again, returns to archival footage, to newsreels. And here, his subjects are in film. And his subject is, of course, once again, film itself, its inner workings and the question of why people pick up a camera and especially how they film. No Intenso Agora / The Intense Now meditates on the past, and whether the director intends to or not, it invites us and compels us to reflect on how we can and can't imagine futures in our own turbulent present. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming João Moreira Salles.

[APPLAUSE]

João Moreira Salles  3:01  

Thank you all for being here on a beautiful Saturday for a fairly long film; it's a little bit over two hours. And so just like to thank Harvard, Bruno, David Rockefeller Center, Film Archive, and especially all of you for being here. And at the end, I’ll be there with Bruno. Thank you very much and enjoy the film.

[APPLAUSE]

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Bruno Carvalho  3:49  

We were starting to think there were barricades out there and you'd gotten stuck! Not yet! Not yet!

So thank you all for your patience and for waiting. First, I want to welcome my colleague, Mariano Siskind. We're both eager to hear from you. So we'll be very brief and just get the conversation going.

I'll ask a first question, João. It's a two-part question, and the first foregrounds form and process; the second a little more towards politics. I think part of what makes this film so new, so fresh is how you alternate so many modes and materials. It’s a very literary film. It sites so broadly and so precisely—both images and texts—and it sort of ranges from this expansive to this very intimate and it's very connective and includes very, very intuitive, lyrical and very analytical moments. So I think everyone would love to hear just a little bit about the archives you worked with and how you arrived at them. So another of the differences in the oppositions you bring into tension through the film are between very well known images, and some that, of course, hadn't been seen outside, I presume, your family until you made the film. So just some comments on the archives.

The other question is a little bit on, you know, to take for granted the future as very radically different from the present is a fairly recent experience in our history as a species. It's sort of a mark of modernity—or whatever we want to call what we've been up to in however long, however many decades and centuries, whenever he wants to start that. And that's in a lot of the reflections in the subjects in the film. And I think that's something we take for granted, too. Of course, we live in agora, in a now of all sorts of anxieties over our own futures. So, you know, if anyone went back from the future of ‘68, and told them, this is what was going to happen, they would sort of be laughed off. And that's almost always the case. So you started thinking about this film in 2011, if I'm not mistaken. And of course, if I went back to 2011, João, and told him everything that had happened since, you would laugh.

So the question is about the future’s–

João Moreira Salles 

Brazil, probably I would cry…

Bruno Carvalho

You would cry, right. Yeah. Well, yeah… [LAUGHS] So the question, and yeah, laughter is one answer. But the question is how we can and can't imagine a future. So how this film and the making of this film, what it can say about the futures that we can and can't imagine in our own agora?

Is that clear enough?

João Moreira Salles   7:24  

I'll try. First of all, I must apologize, because my recollection is that the film is two hours and 16 minutes. And I arrived here with a chronometer: two hours and 10 minutes; it was still six minutes... So I must conclude that I have a lousy chronometer. So–

Bruno Carvalho

[JOKING] We fast-forwarded a little bit...

João Moreira Salles

Could be that too. So I'm really sorry about that. I thought I was arriving five minutes before the end of the film.

So your first question? It all started with books, not with images. I began to read the memoirs of the people who lived through the period. And as I was reading, I made a list of things that I wanted to see—scenes that were described in the memoirs—and that I thought probably they have images of that. So after, I don't know, six months or seven months of extensive reading, I had a fairly large list of moments that I wanted to see. And when I got back to Brazil, after we met, during that long period here in the United States, I hired a researcher Antonio Venâncio who's, I think, the best image researcher in Brazil. And he started to look for the images. And I think we tapped on, if I'm not wrong, something like thirty or thirty-two international archives. The only thing that I– My limitation was ‘68 with a few exceptions—at the beginning of the film where you have a demonstration in ‘67, and you have my mother's trip to China in ‘66—all the rest is ‘68.

So I started to receive those images, and it's a different thing to make a film in which you have produced the images from making a film in which you are working with images done by others.

And you have to become familiar with the images unlike the films that I had made up until then, films that I produced the material. [With] those films, the material is kind of an extension of yourself. Here, they're not; they're almost foreigners, and you have to see them again and again and again and again and again and again and again, so that they become closer to you and part of your family. But it takes time. And you need to see them over and over and over again. As I was saying to some of your students this afternoon, I had the firm belief that by watching those images, again and again and again, things that I could not see at first would reveal themselves. And that's the basis of the film: looking at images and trying to see what they reveal about themselves in 2013, or ‘14, when I was making the film, that even the people who shot these images in ‘68, weren't able to see. This idea that archival images are always new, in a sense, depending on the moment that you go back to them. So they keep revealing hidden truths that after a certain point are not hidden anymore; they're just doing the service. So that's the whole mechanism of the film, so to speak.

I don't think you asked this question, but I will say also that the film was put together with no script, in the sense that I only knew that I wanted to touch upon certain subjects. But I didn't know if those sequences would, at the end, be part of the film, if they were part of the film, if they would be at the beginning, the middle or the end of the film. So because a conversation I had with Eduardo Coutinho—he’s great friend of mine—about the way people die in revolutions and the way they become martyrs and the way the corpses are used politically, I wanted to do a sequence about that. How did people die and how were the images used politically?

So I knew that I wanted to make a sequence about funerals in ‘68. And I did that. First putting the images together, and then writing the text in the editing room very quickly. And then it becomes a card—Funerals of ‘68—and it goes to boards, but it doesn't connect to anything. It doesn't have a before or after. It's just a sequence. And I wanted to do a sequence about how ‘68 in France was very quickly commodified, how it became a merchandise very, very quickly. So I did the sequence; it went to the boards, no connections with the funerals. And so it went after, I don't know, months and months of working. I had the board with a lot of cards, and that's when they started to organize themselves. And that's when the script starts to– It's almost as if the script is a result of trying to make the film. It comes not before but after. And so that's the first part of your question.

I must here say that Antonio Venâncio the researcher did a wonderful job. Some of these images were not seen even in France. And one sequence that for me is very important for the film, which is a sequence of a television interview where you have the three main leaders of the movement—Cohn-Bendit and the other two, Geismar and the other one. If you read the history of ‘68, that interview was very important in the sense that up until then, you didn't know who these guys were, you didn't see their faces, you didn't hear their voices. And so the government was portraying them as dangerous anarchists, etc, etc. And, in fact, Mitterand, the Prime Minister, when he got word that they were going to be interviewed, he taped an answer to what he thought they were going to say. And it was in the film up until the end. And it's a very stiff interview in which he’s sitting behind a very fancy desk with the flag of France, a photograph of de Gualle, and he says, “You have just seen three of the anarchists who are trying to destroy France…” but he couldn't know that this was the scene. The scene was three very lively, very smart, very intelligent and full of joy and of life…. And it changed immediately the public opinion, perception of the students. So, it was a very important program, and Antonio Venâncio wrote to the public television network in France, and they kept saying, “This does not exist. It has been erased. It was taped in video; we do not keep video,” etc. But he insisted and insisted and insisted and insisted, and after three or four months of getting negative feedback from the French—but he kept insisting—some marvelous, I don't know, low-level functionary decided to go down into the vaults and in fact, try to see if it didn't exist. And the person found the whole program. I have the whole thing. It's one hour, and I think it’s just marvelous.

He also found the images in Czechoslovakia which are amateur home movies. I hadn’t seen them. I think I have seen most of the films about ‘68. These images were very new to me when I saw them for the first time. So I think that's part of the strength of the movie, of course, is the images and the images are Antonio Venâncio’s work.

Now for the second part of the question, it’s more difficult to answer. You said something to me, I think, a year ago or two years ago, which stuck with me, which is the fact that—correct me if I'm wrong—that the work of the left, up until recently,was to propose new ways of thinking of the future, new versions of the future, right? And you can see that in ‘68. And you can see the reaction to that. Your idea of the future will not occur. De Gualle says that, and of course, in a much more brutal way, the ones who invaded Prague: “Your future will not come to pass.” But it was the labor of the left to propose endlessly those possibilities of the future.

Now we have a situation in which there's a failure of the imagination, I think, by the left. We don't have an idea of what the future can be. And it has become in a sense, reactionary, because they go back to an ideal past and propose that as a possible future. So when Cohn-Bendit was reviled by many people of his own generation, when he said, I think in ‘78 or ‘88, “One must forget ‘68. We should kill ‘68.” It was understood as a negation of his past. I don't understand it like that. For me, it was a statement of someone who's not nostalgic and who believes that you cannot go back and you shouldn't go back. You shouldn't strive to recuperate something that was historically defined, beautiful at its moment, but you have to let go. And you have to invent new ways of going forward. I think that that's the challenge we have right now, because, of course, the right, historically, has not fulfilled the task of imagining the future. It has been a task of the left, and apparently we have failed with that. And in a sense, it has been almost a switch, because if you think of the images that we have of the future these days, they mostly are things that come out of the very strange minds of people in Silicon Valley. And, of course, they are the ones now proposing the future. And, you wouldn't put them on the left, of course. So I don't know if ‘68 was the last moment in which something was proposed, as far as the future was concerned, coming from that political spectrum.

I don't know if I've answered your question, but that’s it.

Mariano Siskind  21:48  

Thank you very much, João. This is a beautiful film. I wanted to ask you also two questions.

One is more historical, political, and the other one is more personal. The historical/political was that in ‘68, in Brazil, there was a huge shift in the internal history of the dictatorship, and you decided to include Brazil in the film only for the scene of the funeral of these young men who were killed. And I assume, I'm sure—knowing your films—that the decision to leave the youth cultural, Tropicalismo, unions, mobilized scholars, intellectuals, mobilized around that same period in Brazil, the decision to leave that out is deliberate. And so I wanted to ask you about that decision that you made for the film.

The other question is—it was a similar question to Bruno's, and your answer actually gives me a perfect transition to ask this question. Your film is certainly not nostalgic, because it's very critical of, or underscores very clearly the failures of ‘68 in that generation. But it's very melancholic. And so I wanted to ask you about the melancholic tone of the film, particularly in relation to the ambivalence of the notion of the agora, of the now, because of course, in the Intensity of the Now, on the surface of the title is ‘68, the intensity with which those times that that moment was lived. But it also points to this now. And so, can you say more about

whether the melancholic tone of the film in relation to the now of the now says something about these failures of imagination and the fact that very, in my opinion, elegantly and intelligently, the film doesn't propose a new utopian horizon for this now, but leaves it open in a very interesting relation with that melancholic tone?

João Moreira Salles  24:57  

Thank you, Mariano. I'm glad that you asked the first question because… So what does it mean to be a Brazilian filmmaker? It means almost always, to tackle certain problems, Brazilian problems, so you have to tackle the problems of social inequality, of poverty, of violence, etc, etc. And that is important. And those films exist. I've done some of them.

The problem for me becomes when you should only do that. I mean, that's the only task you have, and you should not have any other task. I think there is a political component to that in which we from the south can only tell our own stories, and those from the north have the authority to tell their stories, of course, but also to come down to where we are, and to tell our stories.

So you have European films, you have American films on the dictatorships of Latin America, the horrors in Africa, and so on and so forth, and so on and so forth. Brazilian cinema, from a certain point on, recently, the films that important festivals expect are films about urban violence. And there is a kind of demand for that. And because there's a demand, there's an offer, also. And I'm not saying that filmmakers are cynical, and they do these films, because they want to have access to good distribution or to… but it is a dangerous thing. Because you are put in a place where you are expected to deliver a certain kind of film and not anything different from that.

My own experience with ‘68 is in the film: I was born in the US, never lived here, went back to Brazil when I was three or four months old. And my father was a member of the government deposed by the military regime in ‘64. So he thought that it was wise to send the family away. He stayed in Brazil, but we left and we left to Paris. And we lived there for four years. ‘68 came. The family very bourgeois became very anxious with the possibility of the revolution, and so we came back to Brazil. And we arrived in ‘68 in Brazil. So because I'm dealing with ‘68, and I'm dealing with my experience, my experience is this: I don't remember these things because I was really very young. But this is where I was. This is where my family was. And those events shaped my life in a sense, because I came back to Brazil because of ‘68. And it shaped the ‘68 generation in Brazil was very influenced by the events of May in France, not by the events in the United States, which for me, are richer and more interesting than the ones in Europe, particularly in France. But for us, Brazilians, May of ‘68, these are important events. So I didn't think like that. I mean, it was not it was not something rational what I'm saying now, but it became a thought after the film was ready. And after the film was ready and shown and opened outside of Brazil, in Europe, and I thought, well, I think this is important to go to Germany or to Paris, and show them a film about themselves done by someone who comes from a place where you don't expect that kind of film. I didn't remove the part of Tropicalismo because of that, but I'm glad it's not there. Because I don't have the obligation to do that. I have the right to propose an interpretation of ‘68. It can be very bad, can be poor, it can be lousy, but I have the right to do it. At the same time, it's not a history of ‘68. It's not a documentary in the Ken Burns modes, in which you tell the story and you touch every single base and every single..., this was not my concern, because I'm not a historian, and I don't have the authority to do that. This was not what led me to make the film.

What led me to make the film is the second part of your question, which is this wish to think about how you survive the end of something that is truly transformative and full. It fills you up completely. As I was saying this morning with Bruno and his students, fills you with a sense of certain [?known?], strong sense of connection to something that's larger than you.

If you read the memoirs, at some point, you will find that. It was like an ocean, and I was part of the ocean. I was myself. I was me and I was the ocean at the same time. It's a very powerful feeling, I think. And it's very painful to lose it, but you will lose it. The nature of the thing is that you will lose it. Trotsky had this idea of the permanent revolution. That doesn't exist. It ends. It always ends and then you go back to cotidiano, everyday life. And for me, intelligence and living is living in everyday life. Because it is very rare moments like May ‘68, like, as I always say, like any passion that you have—a romantic passion, you fall in love. At those moments, it's not difficult to live, because you don't have to strive to find meaning. Meaning is given to you from outside. It's there, and you know what you have to do. You don't have to struggle to build meaning in your own life. So I think that utopia is a false god because you don't control it, you will never reach it. And if you think that you can only love with a sensation that you have just lost, that's when you fall in despair, and that's when nostalgia comes in. And as I was saying nostalgia for me is the opposite of life and it's reactionary as a sentiment because you want to restore the past and not build a future. And I think that the wonderful thing is to be able to find meaning not in the big things but in everyday life, which always it has some measure of mediocrity. Somebody told me today there that we should not strive for the epic. And I think that's very wise. It's not the epic that changes things. It's the small struggle that you keep doing it every single day, day in, and day out, day in and day out. And, those who have survived ‘68, survived in the sense they didn't become widows of ‘68 or people who lament the fact that ‘68 was so wonderful. And these days, nothing is good anymore. The ones who have not fallen into that trap are the ones who—I don't say easily but courageously—said, “Well, this was wonderful, but this is there.” And now it's another thing. And now it's this and I have to work here now with these constraints, with these limitations. And it is in the limitation that I think beauty lies. So that's it.

Bruno Carvalho  36:05  

We have many questions. Do we have a mic?

Audience 1  36:27  

Could you say something about your decision to finish with that Lumière film. You said everything's from ‘68, but then there's one thing that's much, much older than 1968. And I was curious about that. Thank you.

João Moreira Salles  36:41  

So this is a film made with films. I wouldn't be able to make that film without the medium. So one, ending with Lumière is ending with the first image of the medium that made the film possible. So that's one thing. The second thing is that it is just the opposite, complete opposite of the image, of the sequence that for me represents the end of ‘68, which is the sequence that’s in the middle of the film—an extraordinary sequence—in which you have this worker, this woman being convinced by two union workers—it's not de Gaulle. It's not the police. It's not the CRS—two guys from the CGT, from the union, telling her “Go back and you'll have–

Unknown Speaker

“It was a success”

João Moreira Salles

Yeah...

Unknown Speaker

“It wasn't a failure.”

João Moreira Salles

“It wasn’t a failure.” That's the difference. Because she believed in ‘68. She believed that you could live in a different way. It was not about the race, it was about living in a different mode, living with other connections, with other relations, producing in a different way. And they're saying “No, it was about 20 cents, 30 cents, 40 cents... Go back to the factory.” And so [in] the middle of the film and the first part of the film, there's a subtitle “Back to the Factory.” It's that scene, which represents the end of utopia, the end of ‘68.

Now, Lumière is just the opposite. The doors open. And, workers leave. And where do they go? To their families, to their friends, to their dogs—there's a wonderful dog in the scene—to dance to drink, to life. So I'm very happy that you say that the film is not nostalgic, because it is not. And I wanted to end with the image of the opposite of possibilities to have closed down. Now, all the possibilities are open when you open the door and you leave that work. And then as I was showing that film at Princeton, our good friend [UNKNOWN] Tom Levin, Professor at Princeton, said—he raised his hand—“That's a very interesting, but I want to add another layer to that thing, which is: don't forget that the factory belong to Lumière. So he is deciding at what time the doors open, and who can leave. And more, it is his camera. So you could see that scene as the first surveillance in the history of the medium.” [LAUGHTER] So, as I said in the beginning, you never know what you're doing [LAUGHS] in a sense, because I never thought of that, but it is a very interesting thing. Once you know, I mean, once you realize what was obvious, right? As I said, images never cease to tell you new stories. So I thought it was something libertarian, but it's not.

Bruno Carvalho  40:20  

Everything's possible in all sorts of different ways.

Audience 2  40:30  

Yes, I would like to thank you very much for this film, because I think it's the most beautiful film [I’ve seen] on ‘68. I'm French, I was 16 in ‘68. I was at the Sorbonne. I was in school. And I was also a friend of Gilles Tautin. I was doing the same thing. I am the author of the image of Gilles Tautin you are showing on the eve of his death. I was working at Peugeot after Établi.

João Moreira Salles 41:11  

You were in Établi?

Audience 2  41:12  

Yes, yes. I’m in the book of Robert Linhart, L’Établi, because I was close to him. And after that, I went to Persia.

So I can say it's really very, very, very moving. It's a present you are doing. True present. And an aspect of the present you're doing is that you are not closing the things, you're opening to all what you are showing with those images you are capturing, which is fantastic [?reserves?] you made about the image you're opening with the comparison with the shock of the various situations. It's fantastic. And I would like to say to you, I understood things in your film, and also I understood things I was living them. But I think I would like to say [to] you: I'm disagreeing with you, because ‘68 is still saying something to today. And if you take the leaderless movements in the 2010s, they are really in resonance with ‘68 in Tunisia, Istanbul, Cairo, Kiev, Brazil in June, the Jornadas de Junho. And proof is that I was in Brazil after the– Not in June, but this time... I was in Ukraine also after Maidan. And people there asked me about ‘68, they wanted to know about ‘68. I spent a day, I don't know, in Casa do Povo in Sao Paolo speaking about ‘68. I could understand that also very well, in your film in some talks of Cohn-Bendit. They were exactly what the gilets jaunes [are] saying now. So it's a very powerful, powerful thing. Thank you very much.

João Moreira Salles 43:39  

Thank you very much.

Audience 3  43:54  

Thank you, I also found the film very moving. And I was struck by the way that you combine—I haven't seen your other films, so I can't compare—but the way you combine what is called the memoir film, you know, the very personal subjective film of your own family and life, and you relation to your mother, with the use of archives, so with what would be a much more objective kind of thing. And I've never seen, personally, this combination, which is really interesting. But I would just like to come back for a second to Mariano's question, because you answered it very nicely, but you didn't touch on the melancholy part. And what I felt at the end of the film was that it was a profoundly sad film in many ways. And it's hard to say why. Is it sad because that was when your mother was young and now she may be– I hope she's still here, but if she's not, then... You know, and so for me in a way the most striking sequence in the film—and I'd like you maybe to comment on it—in fact, went beyond your temporal frame. Because what we have is a series of images of Mao from the time he was a teenage revolutionary, to the time when he was a very, very, very old man. And you have this montage of Mao's face as he goes through his life. And sort of in a way, we see a human being, an important historical figure, who ends up simply as a man on the verge of death. And also that does go beyond your ‘68, way beyond your ‘68. So I’m bringing back Mariano's question, and would you like to talk about that sequence?

João Moreira Salles  45:58  

Yeah, I think the sadness has to do with the fact that it is a film about the passing of time and passing of time is intrinsically sad. I mean, for me at least, there's no way of... I'm not able to think about that fact without sadness. And making a film about ‘68 in 2011, or 12, or 13, or 14, you're dealing with that whole generation who retrospectively think about that moment when they were young, and they're not young anymore. And what do you do with that? And you touch upon the subject of the mother, my mother, it's got a little bit personal, but it is part also of why I think the film is infused with a certain sadness. And it has to do with the fact that the film– This might sound a little bit, again, sentimental or naive, but the mother I knew is not the mother that you see here in the film. She was very young here. I don't recall her like that. And the film started when... first, I found the images of China. The end of my last film, which was shown here yesterday—it's a personal film, also—I needed some images from home movies. And I tried to look for them. And I found a box. The box I found [contained[ typical home movies of birthdays, and things like that. It was two cans of 16 millimeter films. It was two cans of what we see in China. I knew about the trip, but I hadn't seen the images. And when I saw the images, I saw a mother I cannot recognize, not because of her youth, but because of her happiness, of her joy. And then after a certain time, two or three years after that, I found the article she wrote about the trip, which I read extensively here. Putting words and images together, I discovered the mother that for me was very, very unknown. Because as I became a teenager, my mother started to get sadder and sadder and sadder. And at the end of her life, she was incapable of any kind of joy. She was extremely, extremely sad. And, I don't have any problem saying that. It's not in the film, but at some point, she decided that it was not worth it. The pain was too much for her and she brought her own life to an end. And when all of that happened, I didn't have a close relationship to her. And the film was a way of, in a sense, trying to understand her, trying to understand and trying to reconnect to her at a moment where she was fully alive. But she was not there anymore. So there was, I think, the sadness of making a film about a mother who was dead at the moment that I was making the film, but that at the time, I wasn't able to understand her pain and understand her sadness and be close to her when she went through this very difficult illness, because it was an illness.

And that's when I started to see a connection between the ability she had to be fully connected to life to the ability—for different reasons—that those militants of ‘68 in France and in Prague had to be connected to political projects and they lose that. And when they lose that, they lose the ability to keep on going. A lot of people killed themselves after ‘68. A lot of them. Robert Linhart… didn't kill himself; he is still alive, but he had a breakdown.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]

João Moreira Salles

Hmm? Yeah, yeah, he tried to. And there's a very moving book by his– He was a Maoist and a very beautiful book by his daughter Virginie Linhart, and the title in French, translating, is The Day My Father Went Silent, because he actually went silent. He spent, I think, almost a year, or more than that, without saying a single word. So much was the shock of losing what he had.

And it's funny that you've mentioned Robert Linhart because I arrived in ‘68 because of Robert Linhart. Because he was in China a couple of months after my mother went to China. And he wrote a beautiful letter to his then-wife in Paris, saying, I'm paraphrasing, “My love, I have just arrived in what is undoubtedly the paradise on Earth. This is what we have always dreamed of, and it is true: China in ‘66, so I want you to know that I will bring you here. And this is the beacon of the future. China is what the world will be in the future.” And two years after that, there was ‘68. The Maoists didn't take part in ‘68. He could never come to grips with that decision. And he went really [INAUDIBLE].

So because of Robert Linhart... he was in China the same period of my mother. He had the same kind of ecstatic—extático—in a sense, the ecstasy that my mother had for different reasons. And then he lost that as my mother lost it. And the connection was done like that. And, so it's not one kind of sadness; it’s a whole idea of a generation–

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Precisely. No, precisely. And again, the film, I mean, you never know what you're seeing, and you're not seeing what is in front of you, because Robert Linhart went there. And it was at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He didn't see that. My mother didn't see it. I mean, there are some brief descriptions of people holding theirsmall red books. But after a certain time, the Cultural Revolution disappears and she only sees—as I say—there's a sequence in which I compare her to Moravia??? The way Moravia sees China and the way she sees China. She sees something that's below the surface, something that will remain. And I think then she was right. I mean, she was more right than Moravia.

Audience 4  55:08  

Hello, João, thank you so much for the film. It's very, very thought provoking. My question may be a little bit anachronic, taking into account the dates that you said that you were thinking and making the film. But what I thought—and I would like to pick on the word quotidian that you mentioned in the first question and the relationship between film and the quotidian. So the film relies a lot on personal archives and individual generation of footage, as related to other more public archives. What I was wondering is how do you read the montage now in a moment in which politics is shaped by the production and reproduction of quotidian images? That is, how do you place the film within this political landscape in which the making sense and the generation of politics goes through this new semiotic process? Because when I was watching the film, I was thinking, for example, in Blackkklansman, by Spike Lee, it also begins and ends with this type of operation with footage. Thank you.

João Moreira Salles  56:37  

Well, I'm not an expert in the use of images in politics and to shape political discourse these days. I think it's an important subject, but I don't think I'm qualified to say anything about that. My process is the opposite of the urgency that you see in the production of images these days. So I think I would be able to make a film about what's happening now through the images that are being produced now. But I wouldn't be able to make that film in two months. What I mean is that, for me, time is absolutely necessary. Time in a sense that I must have a distance [from] the moment where the image was produced in order to understand what the image can relate.

If I had those images in ‘68, I wouldn't be able to make that film. I need the thirty years that have gone—more than thirty—between the images. And what interests me is to dislocate an image from the moment it was done to another moment and see what that image is saying now that it couldn't say back then. So for me to do anything now, is almost impossible, which doesn't mean that it is impossible for everybody else. But for me, it has become a way of working to see images out of their moments, and to speak about the moments, but through images that have been dislocated in time to another moment in which they are able to produce new meanings that for me, were not were not possible to be discovered or seen at the moment they were produced.

And so I feel now that it would be interesting for me to go back to the images produced in 2013 in Brazil. 2013 in Brazil was a very interesting moment for media. Because some of you might know, something original happened in Brazil at that time. Networks were not able to show what was happening in the country. Only collectives were and there was one collective called Media Ninja made images from cell phones inside the protests in more than twenty, thirty series in Brazil live, and you would connect to those live streams to see what was happening in Sao  Paulo, in Rio, in Porto Alegre, and for a brief period of time, the gatekeepers just disappeared. They were not allowed inside the protests. And they were also relying on those collectives to report. And those images exist. They are very raw, just sequences, unedited sequences of people on the streets, doing all sorts of things. And now, looking at Brazil now with the government we have now, with the impeachment that happened after 2013, I think those images now are able to show things that probably are highly interesting and were not able, at the moment... At the moment, they were seen only as information of what was happening. That's important, but that's not interesting for me. I don't know if I've answered your question, but this is how... I want to collect images, store them for a couple of years, and then go back and then do something with them.

Bruno Carvalho 1:01:51  

We have time for one more question [from] this very patient gentleman.

Audience 5  1:02:00  

I spent a lot of time in China in the 80s. And one thing that struck me about your mom's images is that every single one of those Buddhist statues which she so admired, every single one had his face cut off by the Red Guard, every single one in the whole country, in the most godforsaken corners. And what looked to her and others at the time as some revolutionary spirit parallel to what was happening in Paris ended up being a horror show that brought China to its knees and is why Mao and his immediate entourage were “goodbye.” So that's that's one thing. And I was really struck by your mom's photos because I've seen the statues without the faces, but I've never seen them with the faces.

João Moreira Salles 1:02:51  

She got there early!

Audience 5  1:02:53  

Yeah, good for her. Well, I think the Red Guard phenomena got more and more hysterical and more and more manipulated as the years went on. And they obviously hadn't accomplished this task yet. It was a racist attack on people who are non-Chinese, actually, not just religious.

I really want to thank you, as this gentleman said, for making it. I'm a product of that period myself. And I followed all these events. Unfortunately, I wasn't in France, but I followed France and Czechoslovakia and Brazil, all these occurrences day by day. They were the story of my life. So for me, I agree completely. This is by far the best telling of the meaning of that period, the spirit of that period, the feeling of that period, I want to thank you so much for not offering any prescriptions. A huge percentage of what's made about that period, either romanticizes it in nostalgia-izes it or tells us what we should believe now based on the failure of that period.

I also want to thank you for your method. Listening to you describe—it was wonderful—this idea of starting with funerals. “I want images of funerals,” and letting the story tell you about its own flow and about the movement from one theme to another theme. I think it's an absolutely brilliant way of making a film. And I think you should copyright it right away. [LAUGHTER]

And what I like most about it was that it really captured this feeling which is momentary and always lost, like all our great loves, like all our great accomplishments, because it's life. Nothing, ecstasy wouldn't be ecstasy if it was twenty-four hours a day for our whole lives. It would just be boring as shit. So you've captured so well and I agree with you the most important thing to me by far was this worker, this young woman worker, but she wasn't being told by two union workers, she was being told by two union bureaucrats from the communist party who were telling her “No, we did an amazing thing!” They who had done nothing except take over from the students, and try to steer it away from its potential as seen by this young woman. I've only seen one or two films with a scene like that before, and I really, really appreciate it.

So my question is this, given what you said about the US, that it was so much richer for you, in your mind, it's a so much richer thing, how did you resist including the US and also Mexico, which was another really seminal event at that time, but particularly the US: how could you resist including? And what were your own rationale for thinking No, this is not the story I want to add here.

João Moreira Salles  1:05:56  

Thank you very much. The US was not a difficult decision. If I had added the US, I would bring a whole new dimension to the film, which escapes from this idea, the main idea… There is a biographical component that leads to my mother, France, China... We all know of the big influence of the Maoists in the French left. France is a wonderful country. It's the only place where Maoists have a hold…

[AUDIENCE COMMENT]

João Moreira Salles

India, but that's close, right? That's close and also Sendero Luminoso, right? But France, they were really… to say this is a strange place. And so there was the strong biographical thing, that the nucleus of Brazil, China and France. The United States a whole new thing, because there that mentions there that are much more libertarian than in France. You have the music, you have culture, you have drugs, you have the whole thing.

If I add the US, why don't I add Mexico, which was the most consequential ‘68 in Latin America, the most violent also in ‘68. And then it becomes a Ken Burns film, in which you have to tell the whole thing. Every single instance of ‘68. Italy was very interesting. Because in Italy, there was a very, very– Unlike France, where students and workers were not able to come together because of the Communist Party because of the CGT. In Italy, there was a connection, there was a true connection. And so there were many. And of course it starts in Germany. Cohn-Bendit was radicalized in Germany in ‘67, late ‘67. And so I had to limit myself. You might ask, “Why Prague?” Prague is there for one reason. Prague is the end of the possibilities of ‘68. So students went out into the streets in Paris against two main things, the Vietnam War, and De Gaulle and the Soviet Union and bureaucratic socialism. They were as against centralized communism as they were against imperialism, the United States, and they had two beacons of hope at the time. Cuba was one. And the experience in Czechoslovakia was another one.

On on the 21st of August, the Prague Spring came to an end. And Chris Marker writes in his book, in his memoirs, “My whole generation–” He's a little bit older, but he's speaking of the ‘68 generation. ”My whole generation waited to see what Fidel was going to say.” And in fact, Fidel said something forty-eight hours after the invasion of Prague and the sequence is in Chris Marker’s film about ‘68—and you can find it on YouTube also. You see a Fidel with the deep sense of the weight of the moments. This is a moment in history where there is an inflection. He knows that and you see by his demeanor, and he says something like that. “What has just happened?” And, they all thought—Chris Marker—all the others, they thought that Fidel was going to sever his ties with the Soviet Union. And he said, “What has just happened in Prague is morally indefensible. A country was invaded by six (I think it's six) foreign armies. And a people, a citizenry is not able to define its own destiny anymore. And this is indefensible.” And then there's a long silence. And he continues, “But politically, it is absolutely necessary that invasion is successful. Because we cannot let a country from the Eastern Bloc float or deriva—drift—to the west. So if it is morally indefensible, it is politically necessary.” And then he says, “And I will do everything that I can to help the Soviets and all the other ones, to control the situation in Czechoslovakia.” And at that moment, Chris Marker writes, “The curtain fell. We didn't have any role, any model anymore.” And then Chile occurred, Allende, a little bit later. So you could say that Prague was in ‘68 the moment of the curtain when it falls, and then you had an afterlife with Allende and then in ‘73, everything... then it really ends. So Czechoslovakia for me is the embodiment of when it ends.

Last thing that I want to say about your thing about the working process. I said this once and I think it's the best way to define the way I–  The previous film was also made like that. I entered the film with doubt. I had failed, so I didn't think I was able to make a film. But I wanted to deal with the material just a little bit because it was very personal. And I thought it was good for me at that moment to do small sequences with that material. And suddenly it became a film, but I didn't have a project before. With this film, I knew that this process works, the system works, at least for me it does. So that's how I started to do the film. And it became very clear to me that the only thing that truly exists is the work. And you work. You work. And as you work, as any work does, you sweat. And the film is the sweat. The film is the result of the work. If you don't work, there's no film. The film does not precede the work. The film is the result of the work. And for me now that's very clear. This is how my films become films.

Bruno Carvalho 1:14:19  

Obrigado. Thank you, João.

Mariano Siskind

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

João Moreira Salles  1:14:22  

Thank you very much!

And again, my apologies for my chronometer

Mariano Siskind  1:14:33  

You made up for it.

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