Juliano Gomes

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Limite

Peixoto's Limite is a suggestion of what experimental narration in cinema could be – in a South American way. Melancholy functions as a tool for abundance of elements. Sadness doesn't necessarily mean scarcity – and that's a classic underdevelopment formula. It's a prolific poem, a rhythmic gem, that inspires and haunts Brazilian cinema. It's an open path still not completely explored. Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes frequently talked about our "creative capacity of copying". That's what Peixoto maybe tried to do with French Impressionist Cinema, and, as always around here, invented a new thing, in a totally different context. It's the best film of the next century, I guess.

Makwayela

Probably the best remake of the Lumiére Brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. It's about the necessity and the need we share of creating new tongues. The meeting of Rouch and the African continent changed the art of cinema forever. There's an atmosphere, a tone, that infected all small budget fiction all around the world. Even when it tries to pretend, cinema is an amateur tool, an experimental machine. Makwayela - the dance - is an advanced technology for expression and for remembrance: cinema, after all. Possibly, the most beautiful militant film ever.

Trouble Every Day

Cinema has always been about desire. Denis created one of the most gorgeous fables about this fundamental topic. Somehow all of us have wanted to enter through the surface of the celluloid, to break the barrier of skin. The boundary between the intense desire and the annihilation of the other is really a daily problem. All figurative arte deals with the question of contour - as all living creatures. Most of the history of human imagery is about touching. And that’s the definitive parable about that subject.

TERRA EM TRANSE

Nelson Rodrigues, Brazilian greatest playwright, once wrote that Glauber Rocha's third feature “is a triumphal vomit”. There has never been a political thriller with such and perfectly unbalanced form, with such a mastery of flowing through different tones and modes of narration. Glauber is not making a theory about trance, but creating a trance about theory. An opera out of synch, an essay film, a sound piece, an anti-colonial masterpiece.

UNSICHTBARE GEGNER

One of the most beautifully edited comedies of all time. Speculative fiction with such a perfect pace. This is one of those films that seems like could last forever, in the sense that it keeps producing one more great idea per second, and one more, and another… It’s a bit like Fellini with estrogen and paranoia. A very precise study of masculinity. A great double bill with Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship.

Twenty Years Later

To be colonised is to have your history stolen. And naturally, to build it up again, and again. Coutinho’s cinema is always about the modes of this exercise of building it. And about this imposed intimacy with death and erasure.

Histoire(s) du Cinéma

Cinema is where we echo André Bazin’s question “What is cinema?”. Cinema usually lies where we doubt its presence. Godard made the masterpiece of film essays combining a unstoppable childlike enthusiasm with electronic video tools and a consistent conscience of visual history.

Twin Peaks: The Return

The glorious end of the myth of storytelling. Lynch knows exactly how to evoke and provoke through the tropes of American narrative culture and reveal its its inherent void. There’s nothing behind the door. And the door, maybe it’s a window. It’s never clear whether Lynch is creating a proto-cinema or a post cinema. But nothing is in time. Lynch is such a gifted film critic.

Meshes of the Afternoon

Another poem about trance. Another trance about poetry. There are some films that exhale the strong power of spreading the independent desire of one to make its own film, to discover their own language, to develop their own way of production. Every single object in the film has a very intense sense of presence, of being a living thing. Dreaming is essential. That’s why capitalism wants to kill it.

Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death

A militant film against property. An inappropriate film about history. An exciting film about death - about what some call the “death of cinema”. Cinema is everywhere. Is within the cut. Death is somehow a matter of rhythm, a matter of falling. So, falling on the ground is, somehow, rehearsing. This is a masterpiece about repetition, about practicing, and the process of transmitting things through other modalities of languages. This is like Oscar Micheaux remaking Histoire(s) du Cinéma.