Killed the Family and Went to the Movies: Marginal Cinemas in Brazil after 1968

• In Event: Politics and Representation in Latin/o American Art and Visual Culture

Abstract

This paper examines the interrelation between the artistic and cinematic avant-gardes in Brazil after 1968, charting the embrace of an ethos of marginality by numerous artists and filmmakers during the most repressive years of the Brazilian dictatorship. Where the existing art-historical and film studies literature largely considers the artistic and cinematic production of these years as separate phenomena, I demonstrate that a broad cadre of avant-garde artists and filmmakers, including Raymundo Amado, Júlio Bressane, Ivan Cardoso, Neville D’Almeida, Anna Bella Geiger, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Manuel, José Mojica Marins, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Rógerio Sganzerla, and Carlos Vergara, were united by their shared political stance of opposition to the ruling military regime, their commitment to aesthetic experimentation, and their conviction that the moving image technologies of film and video were uniquely suited for expressing the aesthetic and political concerns. Particular consideration is given to influence of Oiticica and the graphic designer and poet Rógerio Duarte in articulating the common ideals of this disparate group of individuals, and in bridging the art and film worlds in Brazil.

Author

• Nicholas S Fitch, Columbia University