'μετέωροςμετέωρος' / 'metéōros' [1]

In the exhibition O que aconteceu ainda está porvir, shown in an expanded and fragmented form at Solar — Galeria de Arte Cinemática and at Batalha Centro de Cinema, Ana Vaz presents three chapters from the series of 'cinematic poems' Meteoro. The title of the exhibition quotes a verse from the song 'Índios', theme of the album Dois, released in 1982 by the Brasília-based rock band Legião Urbana.

Meteoros is in dialogue with a vast genealogy that includes the urban symphony. Like this avant-garde cinematographic genre, the work explores paths that spatialise history and temporalize urban space, in the case of its two new episodes, the city of Porto. From the Monument to the Portuguese Colonisation Effort, built for the 1934 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition at Palácio de Cristal and installed in Praça do Império since 1984, to the D. Luís Bridge, the Arrábida Bridge and the Douro River itself, Meteoros examines the coloniality of the city and the Douro Valley, pointing to the existence and prevalence of forms of external and internal colonialism — particularly in terms of the infrastructure of agricultural and industrial production, the model of property and the social division of labour, as well as the circulation of raw materials, goods and capital between the zones of the world system and between the local bourgeoisie and English landowners and industrialists.

The work extends the spectral dimension of certain urban symphonies, such as Paris qui dort (René Clair, 1925), Douro, Faina Fluvial (Manoel de Oliveira, 1931) or On Africa (Skip Norman, 1970), through camera angles and framings that seem to manifest, in the Vertovian line, another possible reference, "a disdain for the mimetic", [2] as well as the work of the materiality of 16 mm black and white film. Overprints — a central film form in urban symphonies and avant-garde cinema in general — are here a material, spectral and metamorphic becoming, in dialogue with the texts by Kafka and Coetzee shown in the Sala-Filme (Film Room) and with the building's own murals.

Meteoros show what's inside and what's beyond: the material infrastructure and the immaterial and spectral infrastructure of the Empire — the industrial and traffic structures, the flows of electricity and the circulation of minerals, but also the monuments, the museum and the ruins, the rubbish, the malaise that inhabits the haunted colonial cities. Meteoric cinema is positioned here against the malaise cinema in order to also problematise one of the paradoxes of cinema: its function as an instrument of modernity-coloniality in the face of its ability to restore modes of perception and cognition that were historically suppressed by the imposition of modern rationality, 'cinema' as 'haunting', formulated in the fable Meteoro. [3]

Background and form

Two themes run through Vaz's work, intertwining and taking on an important formal expression. On the one hand, issues related to the multi-temporal nature of the event: experience, remembrance, multiple interpretations and multiplied perspectives. On the other hand, a demystification not only of the history of Modernism, but also of its visual forms, especially architectural and cinematographic.

From opera prima Sacris Pulso (2007) to more recent films such as Apiyemiyeki? (2020) and É noite na América (2022), including A Idade da Pedra (2013) and Occidente (2014), Vaz's filmography shows a remarkable balance between background and form. O que aconteceu ainda está porvir represents a point of opening and expansion of this exercise in funambulism.

From its earliest formulations, the filmmaker's filmography has systematically reflected on issues related to modernity-coloniality through forms that not only question the modern-colonial visual paradigm, but also formally deconstruct anti-colonial visualities in their historical manifestations. However, it is perhaps in the mirrored form of the diptychs (Meteoros mirror each other) — a form that reflects the mirrors and crystals figured by the image and evoked by the collectively acted word — that such a balance is most succinctly affirmed. These mutually reverberating crystalline forms, figures, structures and images are not merely figurative or figural: they are instruments of vision and thought that operate perceptual and cognitive ruptures.

The experience of Meteoros is one of estrangement (in the sense of ostranenia, остранениеостранение). [4] The viewer experiences the ontological instability of representation: a perceptual and cognitive estrangement, to which is added the impression that the discursive forms perhaps herald and are traces of profound transformations to come, and are already in the process of becoming, anticipating their concrete material manifestation. Meteoros is therefore an oracular cinema. [5]

Circulating in powerful metaphors, deeply rooted in world history as well as in the current geopolitical situation and in the ecological catastrophe, the work's material endeavour lies in the vehemence with which it shatters the structures of Empire and its conceptual edifice, making them elastic.

Crystal Image

Crystal and mirror motifs proliferate in Meteoros, beginning with the intertextual reference to the song 'Índios' by Legião Urbana. In the fifth and in the final stanzas of the song's lyrics, which recall the Portuguese colonisation of Brazil and the genocide of the indigenous peoples, composer and lead singer Renato Russo sings from the perspective and worldview of the colonised, a movement that runs through Vaz's work: 'they gave us mirrors and we saw a sick world'. [6] The verse refers to a practice widely described in colonial literature: the offering of mirrors to colonised peoples as a device that has historically contributed to underpinning the dualism between identity and otherness and the ideas of accumulation and multiplication, pillars of the capitalist-colonial system. In these, the crystal (which is also the material of the cinematographic lens) and the mirror inhabit the words and are imagined figuratively: the crystal as matter and flow in Déesse and, at the end of this diptych, the hands that, in deictic gestures, show a falling luminous mirror that shatters on the floor.

The diptychs transpose this narrative and aesthetic regime into the field of expanded cinema, creating temporal escape points and reciprocal agencies between history and effabulation: in Os Últimos Habitantes, based on the short story with the same title by Isabel Carvalho, crystalline sound images emerge that unthink the history of the exploration and export of uranium in Urgeiriça during the Estado Novo. [7]

Mirrors and crystals are reflective surfaces of the invisible, as well as instruments for refracting mīmēsis. Cinema is here a machine of thought and action, ontologically unstable and emancipated from the mimetic tradition, a machine that thinks the world, human and natural history, destructuring the representational model as well as the perceptual and cognitive modes of the cinematographic apparatus in its dominant uses.

Vaz's spectral cinema shows above and beyond the visible, within and far away, as a reflection and in the dark, touching and shattering mirrors, thus exposing, by dismantling them, the gears of the capitalist-colonial system. This is the condition of an active and ethical, de-fantomalising perspective.

[1] The word 'meteor' has its etymological root in the Greek word 'μετέωρος' / 'metéōros', , meaning 'suspended' or 'lifted'.

[2] Michelson, Annette. Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov / ed. by Annette Michelson. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985, p. XXV.

[3] Especially in the last section: "The traveller ceases to travel and becomes hostage to the haunting images, a cave out of which their body is made. The haunting was once called Cinema". Vaz, Ana. Meteoro, 2023, p. 1.

[4] Chklovski, Victor. L’art comme procédé (1917). Théorie de la littérature. Textes des Formalistes russes réunis / ed. by Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1965, pp. 76-97.

[5] Bakhtin, Mikhail. Marxismo e Filosofia da Linguagem. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1992.

[6] To listen to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoiW5NmrMbE (30 August 2024).

[7] On this subject, see Castaño, David. O Aliado Fiel. As negociações para o acordo de exploração e exportação de urânio de 1949. Ler História, no. 60, 2011. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ lerhistoria/1524 (19 August 2024).