By RAFAEL VALLES*
Commentary on the film directed by Eduardo Escorel
Right in the foreground of Antonio Candido — final notes From the balcony of a building, we see the rain and a large number of neighboring buildings that make up a cold and melancholic landscape. Accompanying this image, we hear the narrator say: “In the early hours of May 12, eight months before that rainy afternoon in São Paulo, I died. When I died, I left my notebooks in the closet in the hallway of the apartment where I had lived for 21 years.” The narrator’s voice, played by actor Matheus Nachtergaele, is serene, revealing no emotions, as if the realization of death could be calm, natural, expected.
Both in this introductory text written by Eduardo Escorel to introduce the film's protagonists (Antonio Candido and his notebooks) and in the visual and sound composition of this scene, it is possible to find the tone of the film. It is also possible to identify a connection with the text that the filmmaker took as a starting point for making this documentary.
Already in the introduction of The crying of books, by Antonio Candido, written in 1997 (and published in Revista Piauí in October 2018), the author states: “the world no longer exists for me, but it continues without me. Time does not change because of my death, people continue to work and go for walks, friends mix some sadness with the worries of the moment and remember me only at intervals”.
Further on, when describing what would be his imaginary cremation, the author comments: “It was the subtle, very light fire that consumed my clothes, my bald head, my shoes, my tasteless flesh and my fragile bones”. In the same sentence, the dramatic density of the images he describes and the serenity in the way he narrates. Antonio Candido — final notes It is a film that understands these interconnections constructed by the sociologist and literary critic, one of the main intellectuals the country has ever had.
The documentary makes narrative choices that highlight this mix between density and serenity in Antonio Candido's words. By abandoning the more predictable paths for the documentary genre (the film does not feature interviews or testimonies from friends, family or the character himself, except for the final sequence), Eduardo Escorel places the spotlight on the notebooks, on the notes that filled Antonio Candido's thoughts in the last three years of his life (2015-2017).
There is no shortage of reflections on old age, mourning, death, and Brazilian culture, but they all reveal a certain degree of serenity, in which even antagonisms can remain in relative harmony (“When I woke up, the idea came to me that perhaps I had already passed the right time to die”). In this sense, words soften the pain, coexisting with Antonio Candido in a constant literary exercise that seeks to alleviate the adversities imposed by age (“Note well. One of the good things is to reduce life to words. They can be a kind of survival”).
In this afterlife, the texts show a character who, even though he had retired from public life, was not alienated from what was happening in the country at that time. Just as Antonio Candido was experiencing his “erasure from life” (“I am an inactive politician, I don’t even want to be anything else in my erasure from life”), the country was also experiencing the “erasure of its democracy”.
Although aware of the gravity of events such as the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the coup led by Eduardo Cunha (then President of the Chamber of Deputies), the imminent arrest of Lula and the seizure of PT documents by the Federal Police, Antonio Candido tried to maintain his serenity (“I do not give in to despair in the face of the immeasurable disaster the country is experiencing”).
Even without having witnessed the Bolsonaro Era, he was also aware of the dark state that Brazilian politics was going through (“In the future, when they study our time, they will be perplexed as we were”), and he even points out a path that, to this day, the progressive camp has not been able to find, with regard to Lula and the Workers' Party (“I even think that both the party and its main figure have already fulfilled the historical mission that fell to them. Now a new wave is needed”).
The reflective serenity of Antonio Candido's words only manages to give way to a more emotional tone when the notes refer to his wife Gilda de Mello e Souza, a philosopher and literary critic who passed away in 2005. It is also the only moment in the film in which the texts are directed to someone in particular (his daughters), when he states: “sometimes I feel the reality of your mother so intensely that it is as if she were alive, encouraging me with her incomparable grace and charm. And I think: what am I still doing here?”
Further on, he states: “Having lived with her seems to me the justification of an entire life”. Underlying the intensity of these phrases, the voice interpreted by Matheus Nachtergaele continues with a calm and subtle tone, respecting the timing of each word, accentuating, with due moderation, the feelings expressed by Antonio Candido.
The same can be said about the sobriety of the film's colors and the choice of frames that reveal the different spaces of the house (very well done by Carlos Ebert and Guilherme Maranhão), as well as the editing work of Laís Lifschitz and Eduardo Escorel himself (who, due to the more measured editing rhythm, not by chance, reminds us of the documentary Santiago (2007) by João Moreira Salles, also edited by Eduardo Escorel). With its discreet sound and visuals, with a narrative that maintains a certain distance from the emotional appeal, Antonio Candido — final notes It seems like a film from another time, with a character from another time. However — and this is important to emphasize — with the awareness of its present time.
Even touching on themes such as the political crisis in the country, the definition of the terms “freedom” and “equality”, the importance of thinking about black people in the construction of Brazilian culture, the film does not fall into generalities, because it understands that, in the words of Antonio Candido, we find a reflective power that we so lack today (“We see, we get old, we see governments succeed, utopias crumble and we think, in the short term, do we have a solution for this?”).
At a time when words are being so mistreated and vulgarized, the documentary opens the doors to the moderation and lucidity of an intellectual in the face of his most intimate universe, the daily notes in his notebooks, a habit he maintained from the age of fifteen until the last days of his life.
*Rafael Valles He is a writer and audiovisual director. He holds a PhD in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). Author, among other books, of Essay on the Scream. He directed, among other films, In search of Jonas Mekas.
Reference
Antonio Candido — final notes
Brazil, 2024, documentary, 83 minutes.
Directed by: Eduardo Escorel.
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