8/6/2019 A Film About a Film and Also About a Movement in Art That Was About

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A film about a film and also about a movement in art that was about political struggle and social engagement

Mihaela Brebenel

The Baudlerian concept of deriv, revisited by the Situationists; Goddards flagraised high on the frontispiece of cinema, reading his famous formula of making not

political films, but making films politically; a beginning paying homage to the LetteristInternationals subversive methods of tackling and attacking the everyday; close-ups andinter-titles; cultural revolutionaries undermining borders between public and private

property. All these elements act as layers creating the Brazilian film Os Residentes .On the surface, a strong impression of a common familiarity settles in amongst

viewing eyes. Resembling the sight of a cultural history wall calendar, its pages flippedthrough one by one, each showing a surprisingly arbitrary yet somehow familiar mountain landscape, a running river or a wild animal that would wonder one dusty path

in the centre of an autumnal forest.Mild to violent existential dialogues, appropriations on anti-art spaceinterventions and kidnapping an artist, as well as long monologues on The FrenchRevolution, seasoned with postmodernisms pride and joy of the free-flow of the signifier all create a preliminary sense of the film purposely sentencing itself to banality andartistic dj vu.

As if it is following and instructional email that one day fought spam into thedirectors inbox. But technology is eradicated from this setting, money is abolished andcontemporary values rejected by yet another group of urban revolutionaries. However,the substitutes are yet to be found, the protagonists of the revolution are engaging

permanently in critical discourse, leading to subversive action. The battle is constantlyfought and it is only interrupted by the lack of an opponent. The presence of a mirror isnot enough to keep the battle going. The space where the residents fight their battle ismore than anything a mirror. If we were to begin to understand what it stands for, itwould be a Foucauldian mirror, at once an utopia, but also a heterotopia, a space wherethe gaze discovers its presence and is confronted with its absence; a space where I come

back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitutemyself there where I am.

Os Residentes comes backs to itself with the choice to address critically only byshowing. Apparently, the film is following the instructions of the DIY political art film,ultimately becoming self-referential through its unabridged and uncompromisingstrictness of sticking to the instructions.

By doing so, it creates an inner critical language and achieves a visual performativity which could be referenced back to John Smiths 1975 Girl Chewing Gum.And yet again, we come full circle.

Os ResidentesBrazil, 2010, 120 minDirector: Tiago Mata MachadoBerlinale Forum