There must be good reasons why contemporary “art” cinema often ignores the aesthetic power of humor. First, perhaps because humor suggests a lower form of culture, from the field of entertainment, which sits below a certain canon that this cinema would still need to envision, aiming for museological legitimation. Second, perhaps because an involvement with humor is viewed with suspicion by critics and academics of this "art" cinema, as if it were a trap—a trick to fool them into thoughtfully analyzing something that, from the outset, mocks any possibility of analysis (that is, which mocks the academics themselves). However, the contemporary ethos is so impregnated with humor and the profound stupidity that derives from it, from the psycho-political effects of memes to the ethical-discursive dimension of stand-up comedy, that laughter today seems imperative not only for the cinema of the masses but also—and even more so—for that cinema that intends to oppose it.

The four films selected by Gabriel Abrantes for the first screening of Contemporânea at Batalha Centro de Cinema intensely problematize the schemes of humor. They are art films, experimental films, which instead of fearing humor and stupidity, exalt them. They are films of ridicule and baseness, and as such they reveal our own ridicule and baseness, as individuals and as a society. Two of the films selected by Abrantes, PVC Feces Rig Tour (2022) and Mediums (2017), openly satirize certain contemporary social structures in their predisposition to absurdity. The other two films, The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (2017) and the short excerpt from If I Had a Million (1932), explore humor as a tool for historical construction and social resistance against these same absurd structures. Above all, they are hilarious films that fundamentally aim to make their viewers' bellies contract in spasms that even they might not be able to explain.

A few theoretical branches of philosophy inform what we know today about the nature of humor, abstractly understood. The first, Hobbesian, is a “theory of superiority,” according to which we would laugh at the inferiority of the other in relation to ourselves, by contrasting their embarrassment and inadequacy with our own impression of autonomy and normality. The second theory, rehearsed by 18th-century German philosophy (Kant and Schopenhauer in particular), is a “theory of incongruity,” according to which humor would emerge from an experience of paradoxical juxtaposition between an object and its representation. The third theory, described by Bergson in a short book from 1924 (still the most serious treatise on the comic), expands this idealist notion to stipulate a mechano-vitalist understanding of humor, suggesting it would be generated, in this case, by a sudden suspension of tensions which, once undone into a vacuum, would open up to their counterpart: the strangeness and freshness of a disarming.

Art has long recognized a weapon in this disarming, in the incongruity and difference of humor—from Aristophanes, who, with his scatological conscience, overcame Socrates's methodical irony, to Rabelais, who molded a metaphysics of the grotesque out of carnival, and then to Swift and Sterne and their avant-la-lettre manuals of emancipation from Victorian etiquette. The world's first joke book, the Philogelos, a compendium collected by Hierocles and Philagrios in 4th-century Greece, could even serve as an archaeology of the spectral presence of humor in universal literature. It is there, in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, in the personae of the bard and the jester, in the open environments of circuses, catch clubs and variety theaters—in other words, in everything that anticipates cinema, both in its recreational pretensions and in its critical legacy. To a certain extent, cinema is itself the ability to record, store, and distribute the kind of popular humor that floated by word of mouth in these peripheral spaces. If cinema and modernity are interchangeable, as Paul Virilio, among others, has argued, it is because both allow for the officialization of certain regimes of libidinal ejection, in the industrialization of products of human conviviality and the development of a public rhetoric of irony through mass media.

The films selected by Gabriel Abrantes are art films, properly modern films, because they are comic, and not in spite of being comic. They provide new themes for art cinema in order to fertilize it with the synthesis, required of all great art, between the popular and the erudite. It's as if they replaced the beautiful and sublime of cinema that considers itself art just because it is serious, with aesthetic categories more fitting for a cinema that considers itself art because it actually historicizes itself—categories like the stupid and the absurd. If beauty is purposeless and a universally recognized pleasure, can't intentional stupidity be understood in exactly the same terms, since it does not deny a laugh to anyone? If the sublime is the mixture of pleasure and displeasure that surpasses any recognition and directs itself towards limitlessness, couldn't we consider comic absurdity to be the most accessible form of it? Yet, cinema doesn't have to choose between the first and second pair of concepts. Like any great art that is already mature, and as Abrantes seems to understand well, cinema can easily combine symbiotically the beautiful and sublime with the stupid and absurd.

Or it's as if these films made the beautiful and the sublime compatible with the figure of the idiot, who secretly inhabits and conditions both the stupid and the absurd. In other words, beyond the problem of humor, the four films bring to the center of the exhibition the problem of human idiocy, which according to Deleuze is the problem of the century. In fact, we don't know how to measure idiocy; the tests of logical parameterization and IQ are even a constituent part of it, loved and glorified by the most complete dunces we can find anywhere. Because idiocy, properly understood, is not merely low-intensity intelligence, but the inability to fit different systems of thinking about reality together—different intelligences—in order to create a new one (in other words, it is the very desire to use an IQ test as a measure of intelligence). Typical of the contemporary is this difficulty in making models resonate with each other and reorient each other, to flex ways of life and creatively fit together everything that comes to hand. This is something that humor, even at its most idiotic, does with ease, through its transgression of conventions and taboos and its demented openness to the New.

Strictly speaking, we don't even know what intelligence is. The films selected by Gabriel Abrantes, for example, seem intelligent in their meta-schematization of stupidity—in using a language that is parallel to language, in their sometimes irrational, sometimes bizarre dynamics, always beyond prognosis. The films are intelligent because their humor breaks the expectation of one-dimensionality in every scene: the bureaucratic gravity of an employee about to resign suddenly bursting forth in the trembling of his tongue in If I Had a Million (1932); the clique-hunting vlog abruptly converted to intimate biographical horror in PVC Feces Rig Tour (2022); the government texts as indices of a subversive poetry originating from chance in Mediums (2017); the course deviations and anachronisms that are inevitable to the stabilization of national symbols in The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (2018). The praise of idiocy is not itself idiotic, because it doesn't suffer from that absence of interphase passages that so visibly characterizes idiocy. On the contrary, in each of these films there is a broad intuition of how concepts can be angled and deepened, even the most apparently ignorant ones.

Beautiful stupidity and sublime absurdity, sublime stupidity and beautiful absurdity: this is what is common to the four films selected by Gabriel Abrantes. Because their humor filters human experience down to its common denominator, flattening the scales, one after the other; because the four films immediately deny the far-fetched obviousness of intelligence; because their characters are broncos, virile, controversial, and predate any convention—in other words, they possess an almost fantastical frankness that allows them to criticizes everything; because their montages disrupt our attempts to understand what is happening, our desire to predict each next directorial move or to advance on the micro-temporalities of the image; because their narratives “write with blindness,” as Cixous recommends, saying without fixating on a single network of signs, but rather seeking the rupture, the dead zone behind the eyes, where every observation is already undoing itself. This self-admitted idiocy implies something politically, of course, as the portrait of a fictitious chauvinism makes clear. Peter Sloterdijk, in his long digression on Weimar, defines the man of that time as “homo stultus,” one who is defined by cynicism, which is idiocy as a moral defect. However, there is also an ideologically redeeming aspect to idiocy: for example, the ability to suspend consensus and take freedoms to their ultimate consequences, or even to imply truths that aren't there.

In a fragment from 1922, Walter Benjamin noted that “stupidity comes ultimately from analyzing ideas too up close." There is something stupid about this text too, of course—in analyzing from so up close such ludicrous cinematographic elements, such picaresque choices, which in fact actively throw off their analysts. What a relief to admit it! But it's better to analyze a comic film session comically than to capitulate to the cleverer (and therefore more acutely boorish) decision to subtract all comicality from the session, as if it were a mere accessory here and not its electric focus, its existential core.