By Dana Khromov*
Your previous films and videos, made individually and in partnership with Cinthia Marcelle, are about the intersection between art and politics, considering questions of love and violence, chaos and order, performance and revolution. How do you see The Sleepwalkers in relation to these themes, and in relation to your other works?
The Sleepwalkers is the continuation of a trilogy that begins with the feature film The Residents (2010)—although they’re like night and day, they’re both films that mourn the end of the avant garde. Between those two, I made a trilogy of videos with Cinthia shown last year in Chicago as part of the exhibition “Divine Violence”. All of them form part of the same line of research, a sort of archeological investigation that aims at a way of accessing the present.
Since “O Século” (2011), the first video of the trilogy with Cinthia, my research turned toward original concepts of modern politics—its ruins—a path that ends with this dark and nihilistic film about the death of the political avant garde that is The Sleepwalkers, in a moment when every form of insurrection and political fight seems to arise spontaneously and horizontally, by contagion and discontent, without direction - kind of like Hanna Arendt said about revolutions: The cause of revolution is not conspiracy or secret societies. As spectacular as their crimes might be, as a rule, they are too secret to be heard. What makes a revolution is the contempt of the people toward those in power. Almost every revolution is a revolution of contempt.
The Sleepwalkers is a film about one of those too secret societies, a sort of adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons” for today’s Brazil, a Rivettian adaptation because, like [Jacques] Rivette, what always attracts me most is the idea of a plot, a plot that is always somewhat abstract and tending toward uselessness, a plot of art (the film itself, its creation, as a plot of those who came together to forge a new world). If The Residents is a film of aesthetic investigation that made a certain inventory of the modern artistic avant garde and neo-avant garde to try to propose, through cinema, a line of flight from the dead end of contemporary art, with The Sleepwalkers, I begin to try to trace an inverse path that culminates in The Sleepwalkers—kind of like what Godard said about Rouch: one must choose between ethics and aesthetics, but naturally, if you choose one of them, you will find the other at the end of the road.
The original idea of The Sleepwalkers was a political narrative in which “the current moves in the jungle of the Previous and the past is soaked in the Now” (Benjamin) but between the first stages of filming and the final edits came the protests of 2013, the coup against President Dilma Rousseff, the rise of the new right, the imprisonment of Lula and Bolsonarismo: in a way, this film, born of the world of ideas, became a struggle with the real and soon began to be devoured by a sort of black hole, a dark energy that contaminated the entire process.
How do you see your role as a Brazilian director on the world stage at this contemporary moment?
It’s difficult to define what it means to be Brazilian today, what remains of national identity in these times of irreconciliation, what could unite us again as a nation. I am of a generation that believed in “mestizo exuberance”, that is, in that positive, powerful idea present in Tropicalism, for example, of a syncretic and miscegenated nation, of a seminal creative impurity, a generation that ultimately didn’t stop believing in the myth of a Brazilian racial democracy.
My national identity, acquired late in life (because of a childhood in exile because of the military dictatorship), passed somewhat through that idea that for a long time masked our deep racism. An idea of the nation that fell apart in the same way the mask of the “cordial man”[1] did. Now is the moment to look at our real face in the mirror, to take this opportunity to better understand our fundamental barbarity, the slavocratic inheritance, the structural racism, the chauvinism, the tantrums of the former aristocracy, the violence of capital that kills what we carry inside ourselves, our everyday authoritarianism.
That’s where the role of the Brazilian filmmaker comes in: cinema must be that mirror, no matter how extensive the possibilities of the cinematographic apparatus are in its symbolic relationship with the real. But that image of Brazilians facing themselves in the mirror also carries other implications: because that subject who looks at himself is a narcissist in search of identity. And there we have the real problem: an era of narcissism and the authoritarianism inherent in narcissism. Inherent, in a way, to all identity politics—especially the reactionaries on the populist right, of course, a sort of reaction (a “return of the repressed”) to those on the left, their symbolic and practical conquests, albeit incipient.
The problem is that to arrive at a new idea of community, a new commons, we would have to overcome the limits of identity, of ownership, of property, in the direction of that which is alien, that in the Other which dispossesses me of myself—but this new commons cannot become a new mask and maybe for this reason this time the war should be carried out to the end. What seems to have happened, in general terms, is that we went from a multicultural era in which we cultivated the other-without-their-real-alterity to an era of polarization and identitarian desperation and demonization of the Other: more than a relationship to globalization, maybe it has to do with a new stage in which liberal democracy stops being the best show that capitalism can put on, as Badiou would say, and the stage is taken by macabre clowns, psychopaths, a grotesque circus put on to distract the naive from the ultraliberal reforms directed at the globalized precariat (the proletariat precarized by the new worker’s reforms, dispossessed of their rights, an “uberized” world). In this, Brazil, as a peripheral and formerly colonial country, eternal laboratory for capitalism, will always be at the forefront, in some way we were always a sort of state-of-exception-turned-rule where the only law that really matters is the law of the market.
What does it mean for you to show The Sleepwalkers as part of the 2019 Veredas retrospective in New York?
This is the first feature film I’ve exhibited in New York and I like the idea of showing Americans a little bit of our anguish and despair. The Sleepwalkers is a film laced through with melancholy, the impotence and despair of those who have lived the past decades in Brazil—perhaps because of this, it’s a film that speaks nonstop, a contemporary anti-cinema. A creative process contaminated by history, for better or worse. What began in philosophy books as an allegory about a world in which the state of exception came and turned into the rule ended up prostrate before reality, contaminated by the death drive (a real obsession with death) that has manifested itself in Bolsonarist obscurantism and its necropolitics. So, in a way, as fictional as it may be, the film (like the others in the Veredas series) is a testimony, but, as the protagonist himself says, the testimony is always somewhat suspect, because it is delivered by those who survived, by those who because of luck, ability, or cowardice, didn’t hit the bottom.
The Sleepwalkers will have its U.S. premiere on Sunday, December 8 as part of Cinema Tropical’s Veredas: A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers at Film at Lincoln Center.
[1] "The cordial man" is a concept developed by sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda that attributes the hospitality and generosity of Brazilians to the primacy of emotions but describes it as a mask that sustains the privileging of the individual over the social.
* Dana Khromov is a PhD Candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
