By VITOR GUIMARÃES VIANA*
Commentary on the recently released novel by Mauricio Salles Vasconcelos
The protagonist Ivo de Arruda Salva wrote that each speech opens a portal. THE scholarship book (subtitle of the novel) which draws on what was written in so many small booklets, notebooks and notebooks carried always so close to the body (“marsupial”, it is added, in reference to such a support/receptacle placed in transit), brings together countless portable portals, through which one is taken to an intense movement through time-space.
The diversity of records, events, feelings, meditations, reflections, poems, theses, film criticism (whose limits blur and overflow), which are united in it by a strong sensitivity, allows whoever reads it (including the one who reads it) wrote), be simultaneously in São Paulo, Finland, Mexico City, Petrópolis and New York. Thus, one penetrates incessant layers of spaces and times, always remade. To the last decades contain futures, armed heels, lurking.
As the title of the book indicates, Last decades in cinemas are, on the one hand, those brought to discussion with the presence of recent films (also characters from the novel, together with some filmmakers, such as Sean Price Williams and Aki Kaurismäki) arranged together, with the history(ies) of cinema , to quote Godard's cartographic work. This is another filmmaker approached,[I] from the epigraph – whose essayistic movement is shared by the narrator in his cinephilic-critical capacity to capture, amidst the whirlwind of images received (over the course of a lifetime), a diversity of connections in serial progress.
See, for example, the point of contact drawn between The Broken Lily, by Griffith, and Twin Peaks, Lynch, as well as Glauber Rocha's untimely connections with Carlos Reichenbach, and also those between Shirley Clarke and the African Rosine Mbakam, in endless reinterpretations of filmographies and cinematic formats.
Stories of cinema and of existence accumulate in varied recurrences. They appear directly when they do not go subtly unnoticed, hidden or repressed, pointing to an extra-field, to “the intricacy of the documentary and the fable” (p. 138), in order to reveal the power of fiction to touch the real in a unique way , in what cannot be reported, talked about, extracted from ongoing existence.
On the other hand, there are also the many decades spent in cinema, inside and outside the theaters, by someone who was born together with the height of an art, in large rooms and scopic dimensions, and lived with it passionately. Ivo’s “life/trip” to the cinema, which, in addition to (and together with) the many years working as a critic, presents an inseparable amalgam between existence and film, for example, from the beautiful scene remembered from childhood: the mother sitting in front of the toilet mirror, a frequently repeated gesture, especially in Douglas Sirk's films, extended to the plane of intimacy, of domesticity.
This is a sequence of the novel-essay by Salles Vasconcelos capable of highlighting the movement between layers of time-space, in different registers, as it comes to light from a flow of memory of the narrator when contemplating his mother's body at her funeral. This moment is interspersed, not only with her past image, but continues, delving deeper into the protagonist character's current trips to the cinema, in recomposition of the memorial refuges (mother/mirror/grave, as occurs with the women's circuit in the classic Imitation of Life, 1959, by Douglas Sirk).
The act of remembering does not stop at evocations, remembrances. It shows itself to be both personal and historical, when, for example, it presents the relationship between Ivo Arruda Salva's parents closely traced with cinema images from a certain period under the sign of mechanical transports/transcriptions.
The speed of the father's taxi (under the incessant cinematic gaze, compared to the heartthrob Tyrone Power) corresponds with the mother's stenographic typing (in a melodramatic figuration typical of Sirk as well as equipped with technical devices), equipped with writing in codes that the critic-narrator somehow recognizes in his own work, by perceiving the signs of a film as familiar as it is documentary from the decades, between one century and another.
Simultaneously, everything that is experienced (present or memory) is also reflected, redoubled, or dubbed, like a voice that thinks about what is happening, or that rereads what was noted in that circuit, within a movement between zones of text/times that define the essayistic power of the novel. That is why the association, made by the narrative, of the scholarship book with the figure of marsupial, conveys deep intimacy, bodily encapsulation, but at the same time, it induces an openness, an ongoing gestation, even if already exposed as a past life story (the character's existence heads towards the end of his sixth decade).
scholarship book appears as a type of moving support. It proves to be portable, always ready for a new beginning (of what is narrated, written down, archived over time), not considering the writing process and the course of decades/epochs as necessarily closed. Quite the contrary, it allows what is written in a scholarship book, in its multiple formats, to always be a beginning, a rediscovery of what has been forgotten, but also a recurring cultivation of obsessions, of thoughts that always return and redesign the present, in incessant becoming.
The intimacy of the writing that is kept in the bag certainly has an (auto)biographical character, detailed in the details and multiplicities of the experience. However, it is always permeable to clashes with the outside, especially contemporary political agony. It is worth mentioning here the reference made to director Philippe Garrel, present not only in the analysis of the film Le Grand Chariot (in whose fable one can also find an element in common with the book: the effects that the death of a parental figure produces on children), but also in the character named after the filmmaker, Garrel das Neves, already present in Baby Bezos (2023), previous novel by Mauricio Salles Vasconcelos.
Garrel (das Neves) becomes a type of experimental therapist who in his mission, often, thinking precisely about the relationships between the intimate and the political, reaches a point of near death (something at the same time, different and very close to the Garrelian films and their characters, survivors par excellence – close to an exasperated limit – but also ghosts, suicides).
With Garrel we share both the autobiographical aspect and something present in the idea of political love films[ii], for moments sought by the French director, whose production takes a look at intimate life in living connection with the constant shocks of exteriority. Or, approximating the words of Garrel das Neves, think and act on the tiny and unnoticed History that happens day after day.
A form of resistance, inseparable from an act of creation (to speak in Agamben's terms, in dialogue with Deleuze's propositions), from the production of language, occurs in the way the pages of the book are written. Scholarship book. From there, the intertwining of recent decades with cinemas is projected – inseparable portals of existence, art, culture, memory and historicity.
Hot filled lines print the high voltage of the micro urgencies that trigger them. However, in constant retrospection, they embrace poetic subversion (the sound, the rhythm of writing, the ability to expose meanings and resignifications of the word).
Read in Last decades in cinemas (Scholarship book) a project radically opposed to the unreflective snapshot, the mass and robotic verbiage of a simple record (something recurrent in “autofiction”), as well as destabilizing itself as the elaboration of a document rooted in historicist purposes. Everything that goes against the current literary standard.
*Vitor Guimarães Viana He has a degree in cinema and a master's degree in literature from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).
Reference
Mauricio Salles Vasconcelos. Last decades in cinemas (book). São Paulo, Letra Selvagem, 2024, 248 pages. [https://amzn.to/4dOywa3]
[I] Note the fact that the author is also the essayist of Jean-Luc Godard – History(s) of Literature. Belo Horizonte: Relicário, 2015.
[ii] GARREL, Philippe. “Mon but c'est de faire de films d'amour politiques”. Interview with Nicolas Azalbert and Stéphane Delorme. Cahiers du Cinema, n. 671, Oct 2011c.
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