By LINA CHAMIE*
Commentary on the film directed by Eduardo Escorel
Antonio Candido Mello e Souza, writer, literary critic, professor and sociologist, died at the age of 98 in May 2017, leaving behind 74 unpublished notebooks. The documentary, Antonio Candido, final notes with script and direction by Eduardo Escorel, it focuses on the last two notebooks, written between 2015 and 2017.
Based on this apparently minimalist premise, we get to know, guided by the notes, different dimensions of the thinking and being in the world of Antonio Candido, a nonagenarian and aware of his last years of life.
Access to this material is, in itself, something precious, and that is precisely why the task of making a film and bringing to the public the notes of a great Brazilian thinker, on the verge of death, carries an immense responsibility. A responsibility embraced consciously, inspired and precisely by Eduardo Escorel.
To think about the film in its language aspects, that is, its form and the relationship it establishes with the viewer, it is worth referring to Antonio Candido himself in one of the notes present in the film, when he observes: “the perception of a work of literature is not uniform or constant because it varies according to our state of mind and our sensitivity – the act of reading is deeply linked to the moment”.
Further on, still referring to literature, but driven by the desire to listen to the songs he heard in childhood with his parents and siblings, Antonio Candido ponders in associative reasoning: “in the perception of the art of literature it is not possible to discard the state of the receiver at the time, the mental and emotional needs that are part of its reception”.
Bringing this concept to the perception of a film seems appropriate to me, since cinema is the art that most explores the sensory relationship with the interlocutor. A film attacks our senses; it is a living, breathing experience in that hour and a half; it happens in time through sound and image, audiovisual. In this way, the film is always a sensory object first and foremost. And when we say that we understand a film, in the order of factors, we first feel a film. It can be said that cinema establishes a direct relationship with the construction of the state of mind of the receiver.
Antonio Candido, final notes It is a film that works our perception primarily through the writer's words, as it could not be otherwise, it is the words that we hear, that we feel and understand, in a meticulously elaborated editing rhythm where silences are as important as speech. Behind an apparently stoic posture, whose hallmark is sobriety in gestures, emerges a language that has great subtleties and is quite bold in terms of the relationship it proposes with the viewer.
From the graphic design of the signs, signed by Ana Luisa Escorel, which suggests the cover of a book or notebook on the screen, Antonio Candido, final notes It is an articulately silent film, as if it were trying to reproduce the silence of reading, the silence of the act of writing, the silence of words written in notebooks, or even, the most generous of all silences, the silence of thoughts. Thus, the relationship between form and content brings us intimately closer to the character.
To understand this construction, I return to the origin of its narrative proposal. Eduardo Escorel found in a previous text, dated January 17, 1997, in one of the unpublished manuscripts of the notebooks, the key to organizing the film's narrative.
The text is “The Cry of Books” and begins like this: “Dead, locked in a coffin, I wait my turn to be cremated. The world no longer exists for me, but it continues without me.” We therefore have a story that will be told by a dead narrator, in this case it is the story of the books that cry for him, narrator and character, who loved them so much, cared for them and even read them. If the parallel is immediate with Machado de Assis in Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas, where the dead man tells us his story, or even if there is a possible comparison between the Brazil that is revealed in the layers of Machado's fiction and the way Antonio Candido thinks about Brazil and its social and political issues, what seems most intriguing is, beyond these formal parallels, the difference.
In the case of Eduardo Escorel's documentary, the idea is that in the exercise of fiction one finds the way to organize a narrative that essentially deals with documentary material of an intimate nature and reveals the writer's thoughts, without betraying him.
In the opening sequence, we hear Matheus Nachtergaele’s voice-over: “In the early hours of May 12, eight months before that rainy afternoon in São Paulo, I died.” This speech occurs in the only shot of the film in which we see something of the rainy landscape outside, from inside the apartment where Antonio Candido lived his last 21 years. By saying “I died,” the narrator throws us into an unusual dimension, since we are already talking about the place of silence, the supposed silence of the dead. In the internal and uninhabited space of the apartment that we now see, the speech appears as a rupture in this silence, surprising us. The film will be told from this place. By leaving behind his writings and work, the writer leaves behind something that transcends him – “a kind of afterlife.”
The sober narration, in fact, less narration and more interpretation, by Matheus Nachtergaele is an element that touches us directly. There is a work of timbre and intonation and times that contemplate pauses and movement, and which the editing by Laís Lifschitz and Eduardo Escorel understands very well. In other words, the words are heard in a certain rhythm and tone, which the actor says he sought based on the idea of “educated passion” that characterizes the intellectual.
The editing is sensitive when it presents the image, often syncopated with sound, whether speech or even music, which is also present in the film and has silent characteristics in its use, that is, an image can begin in silence and the music enters the shot as an extension of this already established silence. In the opening sequence, the interplay between speech, pause and music, syncopated with the image, constructs the perception of spaces and meanings, sometimes of the semantic hearing of words, sometimes of the intimacy of thoughts that echo silently through the empty apartment.
The intimate record of “Antonio Candido, Final Notes” is the place where the narrative takes place and transcends the personal space to the political, aesthetic and human.
We have an Antonio Candido who is always attentive to himself and interested in the world, his reflective, heartfelt and sometimes even perplexed notes move across several fronts; the sharp look at the country's political moment with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the considerations on the origins of a shamefully unequal Brazil, his own trajectory as an intellectual and political activist, the longing for his companion Gilda Mello e Souza is a theme that constantly inhabits his memories, as well as aesthetic and above all human issues.
All of these considerations by Antonio Candido are given under the prism of the awareness of “extreme old age” and the growing immobility, placing us on the threshold of the present impregnated with the perspective of death. These are the final notes, known to the author: “When I woke up, the idea came to me that perhaps I had already passed the right time to die”.
It is therefore a language that incorporates silence as a narrative value in the transcription of notes onto the screen, understanding that in cinema, silence is not necessarily the absence of sound, and precisely for this reason, it requires subtle, yet precise audiovisual syntax to construct our immersive perception of the different layers of silence and meanings of the lines and between the lines of the text.
Some examples: in a beautiful passage, among many, Antonio Candido, feeling unwell, walks around the apartment and looks at the Bergère armchairs in the living room, remembering: “…where your mother and I spent so much time side by side, either talking or communicating without speaking through silence, very rich silences because they were a source of deep well-being”.
Another passage that evokes silence, albeit in a different register: “The slow and incessant depopulation of the world to which we belong, suddenly begins to accelerate”. Depopulation is nothing more than an exercise in silencing.
There is also the comparison of the senses with the image that sometimes suggests a game of imprisonment whose developments imply other types of silence. Starting with the observation of extreme old age, failing legs and the reduction in walking around the blocks, when the film shows us in black and white the potholed and increasingly dangerous sidewalks around the apartment, thus materializing, in the image itself, the contrast between inside and outside and constructing the character's gradual isolation.
This contrast also occurs internally when Antonio Candido observes the dichotomy between his body and his mind, because in his mind he is still young and well-disposed, but his body does not seem to belong to the same person. Here we have the paradox of the mind imprisoned by the body. Or even the reflection on class and class consciousness based on the idea that we are in a certain way imprisoned by our social class, as this inevitably influences our worldview. And after all, the very concept that the perception of a work of art, literature or cinema in this case, is linked to our mental and emotional needs as receivers at that given moment, is nothing more than another type of imprisonment.
There is, therefore, a constant dialectic in the language of the film that places us between the violent and noisy world outside and the introspection that occurs in the confined and silent space of thought, an interiority that opposes the world as raw material, and that even allows for a “second reality” or the chance to generously resignify memories, the life lived.
Antonio Candido, final notes It is a film that connects us, sensitively, to the deep and intimate dimension of man and intellect, leading us through a progression of distinct layers of silence until the blank page of the notebook, perhaps paradoxically the most radical and libertarian manifestation, that is, the page no longer written: death. But the death of the “pacified man” as Antonio Candido defines himself at the end of his journey. We see the uninhabited apartment, already without furniture and books, a space left behind.
This structure of the film is in the notes and their connections, and in the chronological order of the writings that contemplate the detachment from the present, as Antonio Candido puts it, and the proximity of death with the awareness of its mystery, but it is materialized above all in the language of the film as a proposal for dialogue with the spectator based on the choices made by director Eduardo Escorel. It is a rare and fascinating dive, and perhaps only cinema that understands and dominates its inherent vocation as a sensorial experience can offer us.
One of the most structural notes in the film is perhaps this: “One of the good things is to reduce life to words. They can be a kind of survival.”
If there is the inevitable melancholy of farewell on this journey, there is also profound beauty, the beauty of intelligence as a gesture of life, thinking as a civilizing, pacifying element. And in the equation that is given by contrasts, faced with the vicissitudes of the “human beast” and the worst that is in him with his “horror show”, there will be the same counterpart of intelligence, capable of conceiving new ways of being in the world.
Epílogo
And here cinema, once again, performs its most characteristic miracle: it prevents death.
In a radical gesture, director Eduardo Escorel puts Antonio Candido on screen at the end of the film, alive and speaking, in a statement recorded in 1995. Now, in the opposite key to the silence of the written words, Candido in a full and vigorous voice, states that, when seeing governments succeed one another and utopias crumble, if we had to choose between freedom and equality, we should choose equality, because: “freedom is always my freedom, and equality is by definition everyone’s – If there is a choice between freedom and equality, I choose equality.”
This ending of the film and the vivid speech of its character, who affirms his political conviction about the collective as a gregarious space, touches us in a luminous way and presents a new paradigm, the paradigm of the place where something vibrates for everyone. Survival, after all, is part of life. And if we thus return to the starting point of “the world no longer exists for me, but it continues without me”, we can finally say that the world continues, but not so much without Antonio Candido.
*Lina Chamie is a filmmaker.
Reference
Antonio Candido, final notes
Brazil, 2024, documentary, 83 minutes.
Direction and script: Eduardo Escorel.
Narration: Matheus Nachtergaele
Editing: Laís Lifschitz and Eduardo Escorel.
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