By ANNATERESS FABRIS & MARIAROSARIA FABRIS*
Considerations on Anna Bella Geiger as a video artist, on the occasion of her retrospective exhibition in São Paulo, which presents this lesser-known facet of her work
1.
Brazilian cultural production in the 1970s can be considered a field of tensions between margin and history, between an explicit desire to disrupt established codes and attachment to traditional models, which could be both critical and corroborate the jingoistic image that the military regime was forging during that period.
Two margins will be highlighted in this panorama: the one represented by Marginal Cinema and the one represented by the first videographic experiences, which attempt to seek new possibilities for the visible outside of traditional supports.
Having its peak between 1968 and 1973, Marginal Cinema can be considered a type of production that openly claims its marginal character, as a consequence of the loss of cinema's social function, in two senses: (i) as a political action, due to the intensification of the repression scheme in the country; (ii) – as the conveyance of an idea that, coming from an author, should reach (and change) the public.
The realization of the impossibility of political participation leads the directors of Cinema Marginal to turn to their own selves, abolishing from their works the urgency of intervening in the social order to try to transform it.
By repudiating the messianic vocation of the filmmakers who had preceded them, the marginal directors, however, did not fail to express the political repression in force, although they did so in a non-rational way: the climate of tension in which the country lived was translated by the absence of perspectives and by the idea of death and bodily dismemberment present in almost all of their films.
A similar situation can be detected in the field of visual arts. Living in a climate of self-censorship after the enactment of AI-5, art in the 1970s was placed by Frederico Morais under the aegis of a negative stabilization, within which some more radical experiences assumed a marginal position in relation to the system.
At that time, the system acquired two fundamental configurations: (a) the manifest interest, from the government of Ernesto Geisel, in including culture within the scope of the goals of the social development policy; (b) the intensification of the market since 1972, thanks to the promotion of auctions, the expansion of points of sale, the multiplication of salons and the growing appreciation of the main exponents of Modernism.
In light of this institutionalization, a considerable number of artists have retreated and turned to the exploration of extra-artistic means, through which they have begun to challenge traditional practices and concepts of art. Among these means, video art stands out, initially conceived as a research instrument that allows the incorporation of sound and time into the process of configuring the image and developing a critical view of the artistic circuit and its main product, the work-commodity.
2.
Anna Bella Geiger, who in the 1970s engaged in a critical reading of this circuit, found in video art fertile ground for presenting situations that simultaneously challenged the institution of art and the institution of television.
Attracted by what defines the “graphic visuality” of video – that two-dimensionality that allows us to think of it as a page in a notebook –, the artist sees in the new medium an instrument to challenge conventional representation codes (and their respective supports), without adhering to the communication model inherent to television. If it derives from this the insertion of action in real time, it distances itself from it when it emphasizes what, in the logic of television, would constitute a technical error.
That's why it approaches the Truth cinemaa job like Passages no. 1 (1974), in which imperfections and noises are incorporated as structural elements of the video narrative.
Made with a portapack equipment, which Jom Tob Azulay had brought from the United States in 1974, Passages no 1 can be considered a videotransposition in the terms proposed by Costa: it uses the technological device to record an action-operation, whose meaning is beyond it.
Although Anna Bella Geiger is the protagonist of the three actions that make up Passages no 1, the proposal cannot be defined as a video performance, since the use of the body is not conceived as a means of personal expression. On the other hand, nothing in it refers to that image of alterity-identity, typical of the narcissistic conception that shapes this specific category of video art.
Anna Bella Geiger's simulacrum-body, defined by herself as an "Egyptian figure" due to the two-dimensionality it acquires in the third segment, conducts an action that, although self-referential, is not closed in on itself, gaining a broader meaning that unequivocally refers it to the dominant political climate at the time of its production. What is self-referential in Passages no 1?
Interest in archetypal issues related to difficult situations, following the example of thinkers such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gustav Jung. The vision of Rio de Janeiro as a place of myths and symbols. The evocation of childhood.
No accident, Passages no l, whose action takes place in three specific places – the stairs of a building about to be demolished in the Botanical Garden, the staircase located on Santo Amaro Street ino 29 and the staircase of the Benjamin Constant Institute on Pasteur Avenue no 350 –, presents a strong image in symbolic terms, as it is connoted with the idea of ascension, of verticality.
3.
Of the various symbolic meanings that the ladder carries, the artist seems to have wanted to exhaustively explore the psychoanalytic one, by making it a vehicle of anguish. The repetitive action, which leads nowhere – testimony to a futile effort that ends abruptly with the reduction of Anna Bella Geiger's body to a graphic symbol –, does not evoke any of the other meanings of the ladder/staircase: spiritual ascension, gradual passage from the sensible world to the intelligible world, transcendence of the human vocation, integrated elevation of the whole being.
The three segments are articulated in different ways. In the first, the artist climbs the stairs of the Botanical Garden building three times in an iterative movement that makes one lose sight of the exact notion of the referent in temporal and spatial terms.
In the second, the difficulty of the action is accentuated by the chosen staircase, that of Santo Amaro Street, dirty, with worn steps, climbed with a stumbling gait captured by an equally stumbling camera, which, in this way, does not hide its presence.
In the third, the abstraction of the image is the dominant element, so much so that the building that serves as the setting for the action ends up becoming unrecognizable. The camera is positioned in such a way as to make the staircase wider and to give the image a two-dimensional appearance. The most conceptual approach sought by the artist is not just the creation of a flat image.
It must also be located at the intersection of diagonals that punctuate the climb, from which an X originates, a symbol of a centrality that, in the first version of the video, could refer to the power of the State, as it is accompanied by a sign of mourning: two crossed black cloths.
By creating a circular route through Rio de Janeiro, encompassing three distinct places – Jardim Botânico, Glória and Urca –, Anna Bella Geiger is guided by a spatial idea that progressively expands and becomes even more geometric in the third segment.
In this particular geography, the moment of greatest self-referential intensity is represented by the steps on Santo Amaro Street. A window opened up to the past, allowing the girl Anna Bella to see a world different from that of her everyday life: one of marginality and poverty.
4.
For Julio Bressane, too, the past is an element to be explored, and in his films he carries out this operation thanks to metalanguage and the rescue of a mythical image of Rio de Janeiro.
From the magic lantern to the surrealist film, from the detective film to the musical, from avant-garde à new wave, from the beginnings of Brazilian cinema to chanchada – by homage, imitation or parody, an entire consecrated cinematography ends up being present in the creative process of Julio Bressane. The director, however, escapes the canons of diegetic cinema, by privileging narrative discontinuity, fragmentation, reiteration.
If, within the same film, the order of shots or sequences is often interchangeable, from one film to the next it is as if the filmmaker were writing and rewriting the same story, in an operation very similar to that of Anna Bella Geiger who, in Passages no 1, through the circular structure, seems to be inviting the viewer to follow a path whose beginning, middle and end are dictated by chance.
Like the films of Julio Bressane, the pioneering video art of Anna Bella Geiger (and other Brazilian filmmakers of the 1970s) can be classified as “impure.” Although she detects in an already established medium such as television a structure and luminosity that allow redefining the field of the visible, the artist uses these possibilities in a disturbing way, denying the fundamental ideology of the medium: the status of realism and objectivity conferred on the image.
Furthermore, video art can be defined as hybrid, as it is situated at the intersection between art and technology, and because it refers to other forms of visuality such as, for example, cinema and photography. In fact, the third segment of Passages no 1 evokes the staircase of The battleship Potemkin (1925), by Sergei Eisenstein, and the photo staggered (1930), by Alexander Rodchenko, for the diagonal that structures the sequence.
Julio Bressane also made Rio de Janeiro the territory within which his characters wander. The Rio itinerary he proposes, similar to that of Anna Bella Geiger, is a very personal journey, in which the landmarks are never the city’s traditional icons, but fragments of a reality that often no longer exists. In this uncontaminated landscape, in this original setting, Bressane’s “heroes” wander through labyrinths, climb ladders, and continue on their journeys, always aspiring to the sky, in search of an identity that has shattered and that they are unable to rebuild.
The interior deterritorialization is reflected in the absence of naturalistic concerns in spatial terms: which is in line with the ideas of some art critics (such as Gazzano) when they state that the referent of an image, of any image, “is not the 'reality' naturalistically understood, but the subjectivity and 'culture'” that each artist carries within themselves.
The notion of time also becomes absolutely subjective: this is made clear in the lengthening of the shots and the fragmentation of the narrative, which correspond to the absence of perspective for the characters and their tearing apart. It is as if the perception of the impossibility of intervening in reality led to assuming an importance that translates into the impossibility of dramatic evolution in the films.
5.
Anna Bella Geiger also, although she privileges real time in her shots, transforms it into a subjective temporality through the reiteration of the same action. An action closed in on itself, since, in Passages no 1, the staircase is something that extends and ends without leading anywhere, just as the wanderings in Bressane's films lead nowhere.
Finding the place you want to reach would mean finding a meaning, a center. The center, which ends up being configured in the third segment of Anna Bella Geiger's video, is problematic. It is close to that impossibility of determining a homogeneous spatial orientation that shaped Circulambulatio (1972) and that fragmentation of the totality of the image of engravings as Centro (1973) and Right-Wrong (1973), in which the X that cut out the composition testified to the cancellation of any fixed point, of any determined place.
Not seeking meaning means breaking with the parameters of rationality and its conventions of representation. It means not discarding those spurious elements that are part of the act of creation and that are eliminated when finishing the work, as in the case of Bressane and other marginal filmmakers who opted for a “dirty” aesthetic form, a “bad” image that bordered on the lack of adequate technical conditions for exhibition, which often led to a conscious renunciation of dialogue with the public.
Anna Bella Geiger, also voluntarily isolated from the conventional artistic circuit, did not give the image any formal refinement. By removing any sign of subjectivity from her body, she transformed it into a plane of tension, reducing it to a line that runs across the surface of the work, in a procedure, again, close to Bressan's, in which the body of the work is exposed with all its marks, that is, with all those impurities of the film that would be eliminated in a traditional montage.
The elevation of “dirt” to a constitutive element of the work itself is also made explicit in the ambient sound (street noises) incorporated into the works of both artists. It is a kind of return to silent cinema, or to an “innocent cinema” (in Bressanian terms), in which the image speaks for itself or, at most, is accompanied by primordial sounds or music.
In several of Julio Bressane's films, the characters seem to be looking at a white screen, far away, where the viewer's gaze cannot reach, just like Anna Bella Geiger, in Passages no 1, seems to be looking into the void, because there is no reverse shot. But are they looking into nothingness or inside themselves?
In this inner dive, the incessant crossing of Rio's passages, anguished and distressing places (due to their very configuration, the way they are focused), does not lead to a point of arrival because there is nowhere to arrive. The non-homogeneity of the spaces of the actions symbolizes a situation “in which no orientation can be achieved” (as the artist declared to Cocchiarale).
This conception, which permeates Circulambulatio, can be extended to Passages no 1 and Bressan's filmography. These works do not merely seek to problematize the current notion of rationality. They also seek to give vent to a feeling of provisionality, of loss of references, symbolized by the incessant and aimless wandering of Julio Bressane's characters and by the aimless action of Anna Bella Geiger.
* Annateresa Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Visual Arts at ECA-USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reality and fiction in Latin American photography (UFRGS Publisher).
*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Italian cinematographic neo-realism: a reading (Edusp).
Reference
Anna Bella Geiger – Threshold
June 28 – September 21, 2025
Sao Paulo Jewish Museum
128 Martinho Prado Street – Bela Vista
Tue-Sun, 10am-18pm (Sat, free)
REFERENCES
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