Rodrigo Lopes de Barros

Chacal: Forbidden to Write Poetry, documentary, approx. 25min., 2015-2018.

I dare to say it: Chacal: Forbidden to Write Poetry is a film with an almost ethnographic approach. As Jean Rouch would posit, Africans can very well see another Paris when making their films (Europeans, on their turn, certainly registered different Africas from those experienced by the native inhabitants, as the latter are called). Consequently, what could someone such as I see in a 1970s literary movement born in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro? I am an outsider, someone who matured on the margins of the Brazilian cultural establishment. Obviously, the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro are a time and space that can bring me only fascination as a result of a sentiment of distance, exoticism and otherness because of how that epoch emerges before my eyes, and empathy due to the audacity of those who proclaimed themselves marginais, when the easiest path would be to follow in the footsteps of movements and people who today are institutionalized as high culture.

I had no choice other than to deal with this paradox of a tradition that is, at the same time, both real and foreign to me. The film about Chacal represented the possibility of immersing myself in political and aesthetic issues still latent: How can I approach a certain cultural memory that is neither totally inside nor completely outside of what Brazil predominantly is and of what even I am? I, who was unable to have any stronger feelings of belonging or identification with that country because of structural forces and who cannot extricate my mind from that nation?

The first version of these two paragraphs were published in Portuguese in Revista Pessoa, Oct. 30, 2015.

Literary Ménage: An Investigation into the Writing of Jacques, documentary/fiction, approx. 17 min., 2017-2019.

The task of filmmakers is often to subvert what is presented to them, as if they were a bad guest who sneakily changes the disposition of decorative objects in the house in which one is being received. When I was invited by Maria Eduarda de Carvalho and Jacques Fux to turn the short story Ménage à Trois into a film, I made two requests that in my view could take the entire project to a different level. It would not be just a simple attempt at an audiovisual reproduction of a written piece, but I do not know if I was ultimately able to subvert anything. In any case, I believe that the end result should give spectators more material for discussion.

First, I wanted to make the project a hybrid; that is to say, the final product must be somewhere between fiction and documentary, inhabiting a threshold. I would define the film as a documentary and, as a response, would see the bewildered looks on the faces of other people, people who thought the film was actually a work of fiction, and vice versa. The resulting cinematographic piece, titled Literary Ménage: An Investigation into the Writing of Jacques Fux, should also be an audiovisual research on the creative method behind a short story that, at first glance, addresses a theme that is too mundane to be worthy of deep speculation. One would most likely abandon the short story to the shadows of history had Fux not hidden in the text small traps for his readers. The short story actually includes fragments from the works of other authors, all of them canonical. However, those insertions of third-party works do not carry clear and decisive credits. There is no bibliography; there are no footnotes. It is not indicated to whom those passages belong. Moreover, through the voice of the narrator, those passages enter into dialogue with the observed woman, with the very personality of the voyeur who spies on her, and with that phallic object that weaves its spell over both of them.

Second, I asked the female character depicted in the short story to interview Fux. The character should be interpreted by Carvalho herself, also the co-producer of the film. In other words, the female actor would continue embodying the character while Fux would appear in the film as himself, in a performance of himself, and he would reply to the questions posed by Carvalho without my interference. With this gesture, the woman now has her own voice, breaking with something that could be criticized as her complete objectification. At the same time, it inverts the locus of fiction and documentary. I caused the documentarization of a fictitious being and the fictionalization of a real writer.

Excerpt from:  Lopes de Barros, R. and Fux, J. (2020) Ménage Literário, Literary Menage, Ménage Literario. Belo Horizonte: Relicário.

Rodrigo’s BU faculty page can be found here.