7:00pm | Saturday, April 6, 2019 | The Robin Theatre, REO Town | 1105 S. Washington Ave., Lansing, MI 48910
This edition of the Broad Underground Film Series features a selection of short experimental videos by contemporary Brazilian artists. In sensuous and surprising ways the artists’ cameras probe into a variety of cultural landscapes, which are populated by natural surroundings, religious climates and political currents. These works deliberately fracture the kind of power-laden gaze that is traditionally held on such subject matters. In order to uproot and refresh the hegemonically conditioned outlook of the present-day spectator, they engender a productive form of deviant and defiant anthropology by means of subverting the language of ethnographic film itself.
This screening is curated by Marcos Serafim and Mashya Boon. Mashya is a PhD candidate at MSU’s Department of English specializing in Film Studies and Marcos is a video artist and MFA candidate at MSU’s Department of Art, Art History and Design.
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Michigan State University Film Studies program, and the
Michigan State University Department of English. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing.
Special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center for their continued support.
The Open Forest (Barbara Marcel, Brazil/Germany, 2017, 24 min)
The Open Forest is a composition of found and produced images from the Amazon Forest; a landscape of imperialist imaginations. By conceiving landscape as a cultural medium which not only symbolizes power relations, but itself acts as an agent of power too, this video essay reflects on stories of accessing, framing and consuming the forest, while addressing the complex entanglements of human technologies and natural resources.
Terremo Santo – “Holy Tremor” (Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Brazil, 2017, 19 min)
With a strong interest on the impact of the accelerated growth of evangelical religions in Brazil, Terremoto Santo observes the gestures and the voices of people who see in religion a new form of entrepreneurship. This musical takes into account the moral, ethic and aesthetic elements of their religious practice expressed through their music and their relationship with space, media, pop-culture and desire.
Movimento – “Movement” (Duo Strangloscope, Brazil, 2018, 3 min)
Movimento investigates how our bodies respond to and speak within the artistic and social environments of struggle and action in the streets of present-day Brazil. In a corporeal ballet, which seeks to respond to current global and local crises, the images of this collage video viscerally play with the potent movements of counterattack, resistance and rebellion.
O Piexe – “The Fish” (Jonathas de Andrande, Brazil, 2016, 33 min)
On the waters of the Atlantic ocean and the São Francisco river in the Northeast of Brazil, a group of fishermen from Piaçabuçu and Coruripe enact an estranging ritual of embracing the fish that they have captured. The affectionate gestures that accompany this intimate rite of death and domination form a disturbing testament to the convoluted relations between species.
Gede Vizyon – “Gede Vision” (Marcos Serafim, Jefferson Kielwagen and Steevens Simeon, Haiti, 2018, 14 min)
Gede Vizyon takes its viewer on an unusual tour of the Grand Cemetery of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. While exploring the material and immaterial intricacies of the cultural, spiritual and historical space that is the cemetery, the camera takes on a life of its own. Running amok in the labyrinthine structure of its environment, it captures evocative sounds and images on its erratic voyage.