NCJCF 12 (1+2) pp. 17–41 Intellect Limited 2014

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 12 Numbers 1 & 2

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.12.1-2.17_1

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Keywords

personal collective cultural memory mediadigital technologythe sertãoBrazilian cinema

Tiago de LucaUniversity of Liverpool

Personal images, collective

journeys: Media and memory

in I Travel Because I Have

to, I Come Back Because

I Love You

absTracT

This article intends to explore the intersections of personal and cultural memory as expressed and mediated by the Brazilian film Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo/I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes (2009). Crossing the generic boundaries of the road movie, the essay film and observational documentary, I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You stitches together images shot on Super-8, 35mm, 16mm, mini-DVs and even still photographs, all of which testifies to the directors’ own personal memories. The film further appropriates literary and filmic references that together situate it within the vast terrain of cultural memory associ-ated with the backlands (the sertão) in the Brazilian imaginary. This article aims to excavate this kaleidoscope of personal and collective memories, and argues that their reflection provokes meditations on history, culture and the passing of time.

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1. Aïnouz was the assistant editor of Haynes’s debut Poison (1991) and co-wrote the script of Salles’s Abril despedaçado/Behind the Sun (2001).

2. All translations from Portuguese are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

Released in 2009, the Brazilian film Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo/I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You, by Marcelo Gomes and Karim Aïnouz, is a living proof that cinema continues to be a privileged interface where the individual and the collective, and personal and cultural memories mutually feed into each other in unpredictable and fascinating ways. The film is the result of a highly atypical production process. It was mostly filmed by both directors in 1999 as part of a personal, and at that point largely undefined, documentary project, and transformed into a fictional film only ten years later through the creation of a voice-over character: a geolo-gist who never appears on-screen and narrates the traumatic aftermath of a break-up as he travels through the Brazilian backlands, or the sertão. A hybrid of first-person road movie, experimental film and observational documen-tary, the film stitches together images shot on different supports and formats, namely Super-8, 16mm, mini-DVs and photographic cameras. This audio-visual assemblage, which testifies to the film-makers’ own personal memo-ries, materializes in turn the workings of the narrator’s mind while exposing the different recording technologies identified with moving images. The film further dialogues with literary and cinematic references that together situate it within the vast terrain of cultural memory associated with the backlands in the Brazilian imaginary. In this essay, I will argue that this multi-layered structure conceptualizes the fluid and interstitial zones between personal and cultural memory, as cinema itself stands at the crossroads of old and new media.

Gomes and Aïnouz are now established directors in contemporary Brazilian cinema. The former garnered critical attention with his Cinema, aspirinas e urubus/Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures (2005), a road movie of sorts that follows a German war expatriate selling aspirins with the aid of a port-able film projector in the Brazilian backlands in the 1940s. In 2012, Gomes released Era uma vez eu, Verônica/Once Upon a Time Verônica, the cinematic tale of a young woman making a life of herself in the city of Recife. In his turn, Aïnouz worked with the likes of Walter Salles and Todd Haynes before releasing his debut Madame Satã (2002).1 Co-written by Gomes, the latter is a loose biopic of black drag performer João Francisco dos Santos set in post-abolitionist Rio de Janeiro. This was followed by O céu de Sueli/Love for Sale (2006), the tale of a woman raffling her own body upon her return to a small town in Brazil’s north-east; O Abismo prateado/The Silver Cliff (2011), the story of a dentist suddenly abandoned by her husband; and more recently, Praia do Futuro/Future Beach (2014), a Brazil–Germany co-production about a lifeguard in Fortaleza who decides to start a new life in Berlin, and which premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival as part of its official competition programme.

For its part, I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You (heretofore I Travel Because I Have to) started out as a loose documentary project about the mixture of modern and archaic elements in the street markets of the sertão. In 1999, funded by a cultural incentive scheme (Itaú Cultural), the directors and a crew of four people set off to the backlands armed with an array of different cameras. Yet no sooner had they hit the road than they decided to abandon the project’s initial idea and start shooting, in Gomes’s own words, ‘anything that moved us’ (Bernadet 2010).2 The result was over 40 hours of documentary footage whose recorded events and places retained a highly personal and affective character for both directors. Yet these images proved of no use at this stage as the project was eventually reconfigured as a collage-like book comprised of still photographs, maps, e-mails exchanged by the directors and pieces of textiles acquired during the journey. Indeed, this

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3. For a brand new collection of essays on the topic see Brandellero 2013.

footage would only be revisited in 2004, giving rise to a short documentary, and then reconceived into a feature-length fictional film from 2006 (Paiva 2011; Paiva 2012). Crucial in this respect was the creation of José Renato (Irandhir Santos), the voice-over protagonist suffering from heartache and whose melancholy narration tentatively links otherwise disconnected shots. And as the viewer is never offered the sight of the narrator throughout, the observational images with which he or she is confronted would seem to attest exclusively to the protagonist’s subjective gaze – an aspect commented upon by most reviews but which, I would argue, cannot be entirely sustained.

In what follows, I thus start my analysis by proposing a different, and in my view more productive, reading of the film by focusing on the way it mimics the reflexes and patterns of the human mind rather than the human eye. I argue that the dissimilar film stocks and aural strategies deployed by I Travel Because I Have to convey the dissonant temporalities identified with mnemonic processes, and that the film’s experimental form, while attesting to the directors’ own personal memories, becomes itself a reflection on the cinema as the latter perpetually undergoes technological changes. I move on to examine how the film engages with the collective memory of a country through its sustained focus on the sertão – the site where questions of authen-ticity and national identity have been continuously problematized in Brazilian film in the last century. I conclude by demonstrating that the film provides a kaleidoscope of personal and collective memories whose mutually imbricated reflections provoke meditations on history, culture and the passing of time.

a cineMa of MeMories

Although the travel film spans the entire history of Brazilian cinema, it has gained renewed vigour and popularity in recent decades, a phenomenon that Gomes and Aïnouz are both part and parcel of.3 That said, despite their Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and Love for Sale, nothing anticipated the formal leap of I Travel Because I Have to, a film that stretches the frontiers of the genre to experimental heights. As Dimitris Eleftheriotis points out, one of the fundamental staples of the travel film is the way in which its focus oscillates between the traveller’s subjective perspective and the detached observation of their corporeal transformation: ‘While the traveller’s vision is an essential component of views on the move, his or her body becomes a site of inscription of the materiality of the journey and provides a physical anchor for the spatial exploration of the films’ (2012: 99). The immediate novelty of I Travel Because I Have to in relation to the genre would seem to reside in the way it exacer-bates the journey’s subjective character while eliminating entirely the travel-ler’s body from sight. As one critic remarks: ‘Even the silences shared with the audience are José Renato’s silences. We hear his voice and see through his point of view. But we never see him’ (da Silva 2011: 63). And yet, how exactly subjective are the images and sounds we see and hear on-screen and where exactly they emanate from? As I will now endeavour to demonstrate, more than the physical act of seeing, the film seems to emulate the associational and non-linear structures of mental processes.

In the first place, the hypothesis that we as viewers see strictly through José Renato’s eyes cannot be entirely sustained due to the simple fact that the film was not originally conceived to replicate the latter. Take for instance Russkiy kovcheg/Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002) and Enter the Void (Noé, 2009), recent films that convey first-person narratives relayed through the vision of

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protagonists whom we never see on-screen: in the former, a time traveller roaming though Russian history as encapsulated in different rooms of the St Petersburg’s Museum; in the latter, the ‘soul’ of a recently killed drug dealer hovering over the streets of Tokyo. These being films in which conception preceded execution, they deploy visual strategies intended to convey subjec-tive perspectives tethered by a body in motion – even if in both cases we have preternatural and invisible characters. Thus, whereas Russian Ark was famously shot in one unbroken take on the Steadicam support as a means to convey a mobile human vision, Enter the Void resorted to digital technology in its attempt to forge a floating point of view.

In I Travel I Because I Have to, conversely, images quite often fail to mimic the patterns and characteristics commonly identified with a cinematic human perception. With the exception of a handful of sequences filmed in 2009, in which an embodied perspective is overtly constructed as such (as in the penultimate scene when José Renato walks up the steps leading to a historical monument and his vision oscillates according to the movement of his body), most images resist being read in its own terms as point-of-view shots. At times, the stationary images (or still photographs, as will be examined later) are in disagreement with the human gaze as conventionally manufactured by the cinema, which by and large stresses the mobile vision of a body in space – whether through zooms, pans, dolly movements, Steadicam shots, etc. At other times, the subjective status of the image is diegetically incoherent, as in the scenes shot inside the car in which the frontally lateral passing images could not possibly be attributed to someone who is on the steel. On other occasions, the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of viewpoints, as in the static high angles and extreme close-ups of a market being set up at dawn, is hard to be reconciled with the spatiotemporal constraints of human vision. Indeed, this being essentially a montage film, its discontinuous editing style and fragmen-tary images seem to replicate not embodied sight per se but the mind’s eye.

Whether all or some of these images have been previously captured on recording devices by José Renato himself is another matter, and one open for speculation, especially if we consider his remark at the film’s beginning that he brought to the journey not only photographic but also Super-8 and digital cameras. This would explain in turn the different film stocks on display throughout, as will be discussed shortly. The scene in which the protago-nist inquisitively talks with the prostitute Patrícia further reinforces the idea that the narrator stands for the directors’ alter-ego. In a shot that emulates a documentary interview set-up, Patrícia is framed frontally and speaks to the ‘interviewer’ José Renato, whose off-screen voice, presumably superimposed upon those of the own directors, is equally audible (Figure 1). Significantly, however, this is at odds with the remainder of the film, in which his voice is primarily rendered not as a voice-off but indeed as a voice-over, thereby reiter-ating the idea that the film does not take place in reality but inside his mind.

Mary Ann Doane has observed that while the voice-over implies a bodiless voice free from the spatialized diegetic universe, the voice-off strictly pertains to this universe and thus ‘rests on the knowledge that the character can easily be made visible by a slight reframing which would reunite the voice and its source’ (1985: 340). In I Travel Because I Have to, few scenes convey José Renato’s speech or vocal sounds unequivocally as off-screen. In fact, even when this is the case, the embodied voice-off is superseded by the voice-over, which as a result demarcates their different sources. An example is the afore-mentioned scene in which José Renato, in the middle of a deserted town,

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walks up the steps leading to a historical monument. His breathing sounds, derived from physical exertion, are superimposed upon by the voice-over, which communicates his now buoyant state of mind. It remains uncertain whether this monologue conveys the protagonist’s thoughts at the moment events happen in the present time of the narrative or whether it emanates from a dislocated point in time.

The film similarly confounds the spectator in relation to the songs and soundtrack featured throughout. In its opening, for example, we hear the sound of static as José Renato presumably tries to find a frequency on the radio, and leaves it on a station playing Peninha’s heartache-themed song ‘Sonhos’/‘Dreams’. It is not long, however, until the song takes on a non-diegetic status as it gradually overlays other ambient sounds, such as those of passing cars. By contrast, when we are offered the images of a sunrise to the sound of another break-up song, namely Laírton dos Teclados’s ‘Dois’/‘Two’, the assumption that this song is located outside the diegetic world is undermined when it is interrupted by the sound of radio static, which the viewer assumes to be located inside José Renato’s car. At other times, the soundtrack is comprised of multiple layers that render impossible their localization in spatial as well as temporal terms. In the scene of a religious procession, for example, three aural tracks compete for the viewer’s attention: a melancholy soundtrack, the singing of pilgrims and José Renato’s ongoing narration. None of them can be immediately or at all located as pertaining to the present time of the diegesis, including the religious songs, which do not correspond with the images on show.

The fact remains that the indiscernible status of the film’s imagery is further complicated by its aural strategies, which resist clear-cut definitions. I Travel Because I Have to is thus more fruitfully understood as expressing the complex activities of a human mind rather than a human vision, including the non-synchronous temporalities and distorted mechanisms identified with the former upon the aftermath of a traumatic experience, in this case a break-up. In other words, these disconnected aural and visual tracks seem to spring not from reality as physically perceived by José Renato but directly from his mind. Take for instance the sequence where he talks about the botanical interest

Figure 1.

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of his former love, which is illustrated by an associative montage of slowed-down images of flowers and trees accompanied by an atmospheric sound-track (Figures 2 and 3). Even if these images are contemporaneous with the journey, which remains uncertain, we can only conclude they are memories selected and arranged at will by José Renato’s mind. In fact, flowers prove to be an important visual motif thereafter. We see close-ups of flowers in a street market; an elderly lady trimming plastic-made roses in slow motion; a flower-patterned mattress lying on a deserted landscape – images that remind the narrator of his lost lover and whose arbitrary and aleatory character lends form to his mental processes (Figures 4 and 5).

True, the film follows a certain chronology, as the narrator occasionally mentions the day of the trip in which events happen and remarks on the time left to complete the journey. In true road movie fashion, the narrative similarly

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

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conforms to a self-transformative pattern: if images of barren landscapes prevail at first, conveying José Renato’s solitude, gradually the protagonist begins to establish contact with people and resumes his sexual life with prosti-tutes before regaining his will to live. This skeletal structure, however, struggles to contain and organize what is fundamentally an assorted medley of dispa-rate images and sounds. Predominantly non-correlated and inconsequential in narrative terms, these appear as dreamlike memory-fragments, an effect particularly enhanced by the film’s ethereal soundtrack (expertly mixed by sound editor Waldir Xavier) and slow motion effects.

That the cinema is suited to emulate the mind is not a novelty, of course. As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener point out, already in 1916 Hugo Munsterberg, in his groundbreaking book The Photoplay, would contend that ‘there exists a fundamental analogy between cinema and mind, since many

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

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techniques typical of cinema (associative montage of different spaces, isolation of details) resemble the way the mind works’ (2010: 152). In the 1970s, film schools such as the American ‘visionary’ avant-garde would similarly be theorized for its ability to evoke mental configurations; its greatest aspiration, in P. Adam Sitney’s words, being ‘the mimesis of the human mind in a cinematic structure’ (2002: 305). More recently, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has expounded on cinema’s connection with the brain in that both elicit a conception of time as ‘becoming’ rather than linear and chronological (2000: 366). In fact, more often than not we resort to image-making terminology to illustrate the ways of the mind. Speaking of memory-testimonies, Anette Khun remarks on the way time ‘is rarely contin-uous or sequential in memory-stories, which are often narrated as a montage of vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, “snapshots”, flashes’ (2002: 11).

This is certainly what happens in I Travel Because I Have to, which lends audio-visual form to this ‘montage’ of memories by combining fragments into a disjointed narrative structure and assembling images captured on different supports. Stringing together images shot on a Super-8, two 16mm (Bolex and Minocker), a mini-DV as well as slide and photographic cameras, the film displays an array of images with their own patterns of movement, colours, textures and sensitivity to light – a sensory dissonance reinforced by their juxtaposition, which enhances their respective material qualities as contrasted with adjoining shots.

As such, Gomes and Aïnouz’s film resonates with the first-person nature and hybrid form characteristic of what has been described as the ‘essay film’. For Timothy Corrigan, the latter ‘highlight[s] a real or fictional persona whose quests and questionings shape and direct the film in lieu of a tradi-tional narrative and frequently complicate[s] the documentary look of the film with the presence of a pronounced subjectivity or enunciating position’ (2012: 280). For her part, Laura Rascaroli identifies, within the domain of ‘subjective’ or ‘first-person’ cinema, the sub-genre of ‘the diary film’ (as exemplified by the work of Jonas Mekas), in which the viewer encounters the formulation: ‘I [the author] am recording events that I have witnessed and impressions and emotions I have experienced’ (2009: 15).

In I Travel Because I Have to, one identifies the essayistic impulse as arising from the fact that the film shows the recorded impressions and experiences of what both directors avowedly deemed a highly personal journey. Yet, as we have seen, its images do not retain a strictly autobiographical character, being repurposed in the context of a fictional story and similarly ‘usurped’ by a fictionalized voice-over. Likewise, its old-looking footage does not attest to different historical periods as it testifies to events and places encountered in the period of a two-month trip, the decision to resort to different record-ing devices and anachronistic film stock being to some extent accidental and dictated by budgetary constraints.4 In any case, it is interesting to observe the ways in which this varied imagery evokes conflicting temporalities due to the dated technologies with which they are readily associated.

An obvious example is the film’s use of 8mm, which conveys past-relatedness by way of its physical qualities and corresponding historical connotations, as in the static shot of an elderly couple posing for the camera (Figure 6). Speaking of Chantal Akerman’s Proust-inspired La captive/The Captive (2000), Martine Beugnet has examined how the film connects the tactile 8mm images with processes of remembrance:

If memory as the kind of sensual experience described by Proust seems best encapsulated in these images, it is not merely because Super-8

4. Aïnouz has said that the decision to shoot on different supports was not an aesthetic choice but indeed a resourceful one. Both directors, together with cinematographer Heloísa Passos, brought to the journey their own, personal recording equipment with a view to capturing the largest amount of footage material (Aïnouz 2013).

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is associated with film as home movie and family memories, and, by extension, with the emotional pitch triggered by such feelings of inti-macy. Beyond its economic and sociocultural status, it is the material and aesthetic characteristics of the medium itself that endow its images with a specific corporeal and synaesthetic appeal.

(2006: 133)

In I Travel Because I Have to, the crackling and scratched 8mm film equally conveys an elegiac mood due to its particular material properties. In a similar fashion, the defective 16mm cameras resorted to by cinematographer Heloísa Passos produced images whose lens flares, warm glow and vivid colours also elicit a sense of nostalgia, such as the contemplative images of empty roads, a religious procession or the images of a circus with a ferry wheel on the fore-ground (Figures 7–10). In fact, ‘flaws’ found in the analogue footage, because

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

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Figure 8.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.

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of the unexpected textures they yielded, were eventually welcomed by the directors. In the image of a sunset taken from a moving car, a defect in the camera shutter caused the image to tremble and the sun to assume a quasi-liquid form as though streaming down the image (Mahmoud 2009).

The evocative materiality of these images, derived from obsolete film stocks, becomes particularly pronounced as they are interspersed with digital images in the course of the film. In contrast to the dense texture and vibrant tonality of 8mm and 16mm celluloid, the images shot on the inex-pensive mini-DV support appear as flat and cold in comparison. They are washed-out and low-resolution, lacking contrast and depth of field (Figures 11 and 12), which, in opposition to the anachronistic photochemical images, connote nowness rather than pastness. And as these divergent temporali-ties are expressed though different formats, José Renato’s mental journey is

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

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mirrored and doubled up by the film’s form, which ‘thinks’ through its very images the cinema as a technological practice in constant mutation, going back to cinema’s foundational material: the still photograph.

As Raymond Bellour has noted, an ‘outstanding feature’ of ‘so many modern and experimental films, more and more resulting from technologi-cal mutation’ is ‘the presence of still photo in films, frozen images, every kind of interruption’. For him, it is as ‘if the work of memory in action mimicked, in this fashion, the very same energy that bears along the thread of move-ment and time’ (Bellour 2012: 19), a statement certainly applicable to I Travel Because I Have to, in which the elusive flow of images is continually inter-rupted by freeze frames and photographic stills (some of them taken when Aïnouz was filming Love for Sale). At one point, for example, we see images of the aforementioned prostitute Patrícia dancing with another woman in an empty ballroom only to be followed by freeze frames of them in the midst of dance movements, with zooms unhurriedly closing in on their ‘frozen’ legs and buttocks. Through their arresting stillness, these stills and freeze frames introduce yet another, arguably more poignant, layer of time in the film. As Laura Mulvey, building on Barthes and Bazin, has recently noted, the halted time inscribed in the photograph is ineluctably tied to absence and as such impregnated with a sense of ‘death’. Moving images, conversely, conceal the sense of past-relatedness of still images thanks to its life-like mechanical movement, which is doubled up and superseded by the forward movement of the narrative in conventional films (see Mulvey 2007, Chapter 3). Thanks to its experimental form, the presence of photographs in I Travel Because I Have to does not so much disrupt the present time of an orderly narrative as it instead connotes another temporal register amidst competing temporalities.

In its quest to collate footage obtained with different film stocks and from different supports, which evoke in turn different temporalities, I Travel Because I Have to thus calls into reflection issues of medium specificity at a time when celluloid acquires an increasingly outmoded and evocative aura. Curiously, in one of the film’s night-time sequences, the camera even lingers on a Kodak sign outside a shop as José Renato drives on the road (Figure 13). Yet the film

Figure 13.

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5. Gomes is originally from Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state; Aïnouz is from Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará state.

steers away from technological purism. Rather than mourning the irreplacea-bility of photochemical film stock, its indiscriminate blend of images highlights the perpetual variability of cinema’s technological and recording basis as its natural and inevitable process. At stake here is what one might call a principle of equivalence according to which images captured on different supports are granted the same status regardless of their material properties. Of course, as stressed by a plethora of recent studies, a digital camera transcodes reality into binary codes, while celluloid film connects with its referent through physical contiguity. These different modes of image capture, however, are more or less relevant depending on whether cinema is viewed as the fixed embodiment of a specific technological support or as evolving conceptual practices to which evolving technologies are always already subordinated.

The latter precept is given full audio-visual form in I Travel Because I Have to, which, just as it underlines cinema’s technological transformations, so too does it highlight that it remains a tool that preserves and reveals the material world irrespective of the technology at its service. Against the idea that the digital obliterates film’s connection with physical reality, the film’s seemingly aleatory combination of analogue and digital images render them equivalent in their value as personal and communal documents of an event (a trip), a place (the sertão) and an era (the end of the millennium) – all transfigured in the film into the memory-fragments of a traumatized mind. That this recorded footage updates an archetypal place within the collective imaginary of Brazil cannot be underestimated, for it further attests that cinema continues to be that privileged junction at which individual and collective memories fruitfully coalesce. It is here, moreover, that I Travel Because I Have to may come closest to the essay film as described by Corrigan, for whom it is ‘a kind of encoun-ter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity’ (2011: 6). Originated on the basis of the directors’ own mediated memories, the film crystallizes the inner workings of a personal memory that not only enables a reflection on the cinema as a mutating technological practice but also as the realm where the collective memory of a country is continuously rewritten.

MeMories of The cineMa

Although the signifier sertão is far from consensual in semantic and geograph-ical terms (see Debs 2010: 127–33), it is normally employed to describe the semi-desert and poverty-stricken areas of Brazil’s north-east. Generally known in English as the Brazilian backlands, it broadly designates the interior areas of the states of Bahia, Ceará, Pernambuco, Paraíba and Minas Gerais, in opposi-tion to the industrialized seacoast. Castigated by drought and neglected by the State, the sertão has been variously exploited as the most singular expression of cultural authenticity on the one hand, and as the site of economic back-wardness, social banditry and religious messianism on the other. As such, it is the place where questions of national identity have been recurrently staged and problematized, particularly in the cinema, where it occupied a central place in two momentous phases in Brazilian film history: the Cinema Novo of the 1960s and the ‘renaissance’ (the ‘retomada’) of the 1990s. In fact, Gomes acknowledges that inspiration for their trip through the sertão came from its cinematic aura. In his words, in addition to it ‘being a place we [the directors] knew only from memories, family talks, [the sertão] is a mythical place for us filmmakers. It is our western’ (Bernadet 2010).5

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Thinking about this duality of the sertão as being both a real ‘place we knew from memories’ but also a ‘mythical place’ manufactured by the cinema is in my view key to grasping the depth and breadth of I Travel Because I Have to. We have seen the ways in which the film’s observational and drift-ing focus highlights the sertão in its sheer material presence, conveyed to the viewer as fragments of a mnemonic journey. Yet the film also taps into the depositories of cultural memory associated with the backlands in the Brazilian imaginary. Superimposed upon its unplanned documentary qual-ity are added textual layers that, consciously or not, dialogue with tropes, conventions and the iconography identified with the sertão. Not only does the film evoke in some respects the cinema of the 1960s, and radicalize conventions and characteristics of the recent cinema of the 1990s, it trav-els even further back in time to reappropriate foundational sertão narratives. Before I examine the ways in which this intermedial patchwork of cultural references come together, let me first provide a brief survey of this canonical place in Brazilian cinema.

In contrast to the modernized urban centres of the south, the harsh back-lands emerged in the 1960s as a favourite location for directors eager to reveal the ‘real’ side of a country assailed by poverty, oppression and hunger, and thus in urgent need of social reform and political change. At the same time, the sertão was perceived as the site of a unique and authentic cultural production still embedded in popular roots away from foreign models. Binding together Cinema Novo directors Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra and Glauber Rocha was therefore a quest to unveil the region as an ‘allegory of under-development’, to cite the title of Ismail Xavier’s (1997) book. Of course, this brief summary does not do justice to the aesthetic nuances and particularities animating the films of these directors. Suffice it to say that they resorted in some measure to comparable strategies and devices – location shooting, non-professional actors, improvisational and low-budget modes of production – springing from their shared desire to ‘transform society by applying a new, critical and modernist vision of the nation, and to find a new cinematic language that better reflected Brazilian reality’ (Shaw and Dennison 2007: 82), retroactively conceptualized as an ‘aesthetics of hunger’ in Glauber’s epony-mous 1965 manifesto.

Yet political utopianism was buried from 1964, with the military coup that installed dictatorship in the country and the ensuing censorship and exile of many film-makers. Interestingly, however, after a 30-year gap the sertão would make an impressive comeback to screens in the mid-1990s as part of a new national project known as the Brazilian cinematic ‘renaissance’, or the Brazilian Film Revival. This took place after cinema in the country came to an unprecedented halt in the early 1990s upon the dismantling of the State-funded Embrafilme, by Fernando Collor de Mello. The first democratically elected President in twenty years, Collor was impeached in 1992 on corrup-tion charges; soon after he stepped down, film production gradually began to recover thanks to the promulgation of laws and other fiscal incentives. Subsequently, the sertão re-emerged in the cinematic imaginary as an omni-present theme and location – only now, critics observed, was it depicted in an entirely different light. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison summarize:

The treatment of the sertão since the mid-1990s has combined the unavoidable presence of material scarcity and deprivation, provoked by both the area’s climate and social injustices, with an embracing of high

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6. Aïnouz subsequently worked with Walter Salles as an assistant director. Salles also produced Aïnouz first feature-length film, Madame Satã.

7. In addition to Central Station, which follows the journey of a child travelling from Rio de Janeiro in search of his father in the north-east, we can cite Lírio Ferreira’s Árido Movie (2005), as well as Gomes’s own Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and Aïnouz’s Suely in the Sky.

production values and the provision of visually pleasing entertainment for a mainstream audience.

(2007: 114)

Regardless of the qualitative value we may choose to attach to this new, aestheticized and depoliticized sertão (see, in this respect, Bentes 2006), it is interesting to note that it resurfaces at the moment democracy is consolidated in the country after decades of dictatorship followed on by economic crisis. Once again, film-makers set off on a quest to depict the ‘authentic’ Brazil embodied by the sertão, with the difference, as Xavier notes, that there was now ‘the imperative to deal with and emphasize a cultural memory in distinct keys, given that, since the Cinema Novo, the issue of authenticity [had] force-fully presented itself’ (2010: 14). In other words, the sertão reappears as the means by which young cinephile directors find themselves within a cinematic tradition, which becomes, however hesitantly, a starting point as well as an object of reflection.

As I go over these points, I am aware they are common knowledge to anyone with an interest in Brazilian cinema. I rehearse them insofar as Gomes and Aïnouz’s documental inspection of the sertão was perfectly in tune with, and most likely influenced by, its ‘rediscovery’ as carried out by emerg-ing film-makers who nodded to their cinematic predecessors. We need only remember that I Travel Because I Have to was effectively shot in 1999, and thus at the peak of the Revival with the release of Central do Brasil/Central Station (Salles) a year before.6 However, due to its atypical production and delayed conception, the film was released only in 2009, a ten-year gap that ultimately turned the cinematic renaissance itself into a historically defined period to be reflected upon. In other words, rather than merely according to the character-istics identified with the sertão as expressed in the films of the 1990s, I Travel Because I Have to inserts them in the context of other references that reflexively illuminate each other.

On the one hand, as we have seen, the film frames the sertão from a strictly personal perspective thanks to a voice-over narration that conveys José Renato’s impressions and reflections while imparting to the on-screen images a subjective status. This emphasis on the individual complies with, and indeed radicalizes a crucial feature of the cinematic renaissance, which displaces the revolutionary, allegorical attitude of the 1960s in favour of focali-zations around personal stories. As Luiz Zanin Oricchio remarks, ‘what was once a battlefield’ in Cinema Novo becomes ‘a stage for cathartic reconcili-ation or existential redemption’ 30 years later (2006: 156). This is certainly what happens in I Travel Because I Have to, in which the journey of José Renato becomes an existential one, and the sertão the backdrop of a subjec-tive, rather than collective, crisis. In fact, as Samuel Paiva (2012) notes, this grieved masculine subject coming to terms with his own emotions could not be further removed from the heavily masculinized figures of the sertanejo (the sertão man) and/or retirante (the north-eastern migrant) populating Cinema Novo, with the film even reversing the ‘sertão-sea’ dislocation route prevail-ing in films of that era. This is also in keeping with a recent trend going back at least to Central Station, whereby the generic conventions of the road movie are appropriated for personal journeys from the littoral into the sertão.7 Thus, José Renato tells us, he is driving from the coastal city of Fortaleza (the capital of Ceará state) through to the backlands in a geological expedition, which is miles away from the starved migrants of Vidas secas/Barren Lives (dos Santos,

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8. In 1938 Ramos, already an established writer, released his most famous novel Vidas secas/Barren Lives, which tells the story of a poverty-stricken family fleeing the drought in the backlands. The book was famously adapted to the screens by Nelson Pereira dos Santos in the 1960s.

1963) or the cowherd Manuel and his wife in Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1963), who attempt to flee the inhospitable sertão as a matter of survival.

Yet if this focus on the personal could result in an idealized depiction of the sertão, an accusation often levelled at the films of the retomada, one must not fail to take note the documental and exploratory impetus informing I Travel Because I Have to, meaning that its images also retain the sense of harsh physi-cality normally associated with the sertão as formulated by Cinema Novo. That is, despite its carefully constructed first-person narrator, who codes its images as subjective, this is a film whose deserted, crude landscape imagery highlights the sheer materiality of the backlands in all its vastness, precariousness and aridity; which is to say that there is none of the aestheticization that became a hallmark of retomada films in their depiction of the sertão, with their polished and accomplished cinematography. On the contrary, the film is comprised of spontaneously filmed images that, in spite of their mnemonic role within the diegesis, greatly retain their value as a document, revealing the reality of the sertão in a given epoch.

It is thus fair to say that I Travel Because I Have to carries within itself an aesthetic tension that is materialized through the disjunction between its aural and visual components, each of which evoke different cinematic tradi-tions associated with the sertão. Crudely put, the film is a subjective narra-tion with existential overtones accompanied by raw images largely devoid of fictional value. Interestingly, in order to reconcile these opposing registers, the directors resorted to foundational sertão narratives that predated and influ-enced its cinematic counterparts, turning the protagonist José Renato into a geologist in transit.

Indeed, whereas the decision to create a traveller narrator was most likely dictated by the film’s original footage, the directors avowedly constructed the protagonist José Renato on the basis of two main literary sources. The first was the 1930s travel reports on the sertão by regionalist writer Graciliano Ramos, when he was the mayor of the city Palmeira dos Índios, in the Alagoas state.8 The second was the first section of Euclides da Cunha’s monumental Os sertões (1902), often described as ‘a sacred book of National Memory’ due to its foundational importance to questions of national identity in the cultural imaginary of Brazil (Abreu 2002: 225). Originated on the basis of Cunha’s articles to O Estado de São Paulo newspaper, for which he worked as an in situ reporter during the legendary battle of Canudos (1986–1987), the book depicts the peasant insurgence commanded by the messianic leader Antônio Conselheiro against the newly proclaimed republican regime. Divided in three parts, its first section ‘The Land’ is a geographical as well as geological treatise on the Brazilian backlands told from the perspective of an outsider venturing into the north of the country. As Roberto Ventura observes: ‘Cunha adopted the point of view of the traveller in movement, who gives artistic or scien-tific expression to the landscape’. This situated the writer within ‘the tradi-tion of travel reports and scientific expeditions’ that was in vogue in Brazilian Romantic literature at the time, where the narrator had ‘a similar profile to the that of the travel narrator, the cartographer and the landscapist’ (1998: 66).

To some extent, the geologist José Renato also assumes these roles as a means to justify the quasi-empirical interest in the land conveyed by the film’s visual track. His geological inquisitiveness conveniently provides the cue for contemplative images of the sertão, being occasionally commented upon by the narrator as he remarks on the monotony of the unchanging landscape

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(Figures 14 and 15). At the beginning, for example, José Renato observes that ‘the region’s climate is arid; the terrain, tertiary: clays of limestone, formed by sandstones, siltstones and purplish-red ferruginous conglomerates from the Cambrian age’. Later, he notes that the land’s ‘folded vein texture indicates a state of plasticity during the genesis’, a statement illustrated by a series of close-up stills of rocks and instruments, obtained from a real-life geologist who provided the directors with photographs as well as technical information.

These geological descriptions resonate with the scientific rhetoric of Os sertões (1902), and allow the film to refer to a real social issue, namely the diversion of a river aiming to alleviate the impact of the droughts in the area. Thus, José Renato tells us, he is in an expedition that aims to inspect whether the region can accommodate the construction of a water canal. Although the river is referred to as ‘Rio das Almas’/‘River of Souls’, one cannot fail to

Figure 15.

Figure 14.

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9. As Regina Abreu argues, the sertão-seacoast opposition underlies the entire book, being also an aspect picked up on its release by critics, who saw its representation of the sertão as emblematic of the ‘social Brazil’ in opposition to the ‘politicking Brazil’ of the littoral (2002: 240).

notice an allusion to the transposition of the São Francisco river – a contro-versial (and as of yet, largely unfinished) Brazilian project the origin of which goes back to the late nineteenth century. In fact, Cunha himself had already defended the construction of a canal in the area (Ventura 1998: 66). Drawing on geologists Emmanuel Liais and Charles Frederic Hartt, he also flirted with the polemical idea that a cretaceous sea had originally covered the area of Bahia’s sertão, which thus prefigured the legendary prophecy, famously attrib-uted to Conselheiro and transcribed in Os sertões (1902), that ‘the sertão will turn to seacoast, and the seacoast to sertão’.9

Water is also an invisible presence throughout I Travel Because I Have to thanks to José Renato, who ponders about the feasibility of the canal, remarks that ‘it never rains’ and complains about the lack of water and the ‘dust in his throat’. More remarkably, in the surprising penultimate sequence, the viewer is unexpectedly offered the image of an expansive river seemingly from José Renato’s perspective as he sails on a boat (Figure 16). He tells us that the canal will originate from that part of the river – ‘if the river doesn’t dry out until then, that is’ – and the viewer is subsequently confronted with the image of a small town, in reality the city of Piranhas, in the Alagoas state, which, he goes on, ‘will be the first to flood with the canal waters’. This unannounced sight of aquatic imagery stands in stark contrast with the arid lands prevailing in the film’s entirety, and proves premonitory in view of the following sequence, which closes the film. As José Renato climbs up the steps leading to a historical monument overlooking the river (in reality, the São Francisco itself), he communicates his urge to ‘dive into life’ again with ‘the same courage of those men in Acapulco, when they plunge from those rocks’, concluding with the following words: ‘I’m not in Acapulco but it is as if I were’. This statement, which is visually accompa-nied by an image of the São Francisco down below, is then followed by a cut to images of the Acapulco sea, edged by giant cliffs, taken from a myriad of static angles, as divers acrobatically plunge headlong into the water.

Now, this unexpected and impossible geographical conflation, dictated on a whim by José Renato’s imagination and accordingly carried out by the film’s montage, cannot but evoke the illustrious ending of Black God, White Devil, itself inspired by Os sertões (1902). In Glauber’s film, the phrase ‘the sertão will

Figure 16.

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turn to sea, and the sea to sertão’ is continuously uttered by different charac-ters throughout and visually materialized at its end: Manuel races across the sertão, and an image of his running is replaced by that of an undulating sea, which materializes the film’s utopian call for revolution (Figures 17 and 18). For Lúcia Nagib, ‘the replacement of the promised “seacoast” [as transcribed

Figure 17.

Figure 18.

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10. Aïnouz has confessed that the Acapulco sea was chosen to close the film partly because of its green colour, which brings to mind the equally green waters of the São Francisco river (Aïnouz 2013).

in Os sertões] with “sea” provided the film with its most powerful audiovisual motif, which has become the most recurrent utopian trope in Brazilian cinema ever since’, being particularly recycled in the films of the 1990s (2011: 54).

Thanks to montage, an otherwise impossible continuity between geograph-ically separated waters is established in I Travel Because I Have to. Here, it is not the sertão that turns to sea, but indeed a river, and that this river is the São Francisco is significant not only because of its current transposition but also because of its status as a signifier of national identity in the country. Often referred to as the ‘river of national unity’, it is the only river that runs entirely within Brazilian territory, connecting the south-east and north-east. This final sequence thus condenses the film’s aesthetic polarities by fusing the personal and the collective into a delirious geographical conflation that extrapolates national boundaries. The green waters of the Acapulco sea, which in the film directly follow those of the São Francisco, become, if not a reality, at least a utopic and symbolic promise of waters to come in the sertão (Figures 19 and 20).10 Yet,

Figure 19.

Figure 20.

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unlike the Glauberian sea, which causes the disappearance of Manuel and ‘thus consummates the immolation of the individual for the sake of social revolution’ (Nagib 2006: 12), here the sea is conquered by the individual through spectacu-lar jumps that crystallize the protagonist’s wish – even though they take place within an imagined realm (Figure 21). As such, the sea is also reframed as the locus of a cathartic and personal liberation in contrast to José Renato’s suffering, itself associated with the arid and harsh backlands throughout the film.

In her comprehensive survey of the place of the sertão in the Brazilian imaginary, Sylvie Debs identifies three main phases and approaches:

If, in 1902 [with the publication of Os sertões], it was a matter of found-ing the legitimacy of the country, and in the 1960s that of expressing the political and social malaise, in the 1990s it becomes a question of preserving the collective memory elaborated throughout the century.

(2010: 322)

By radicalizing the project kick-started by the retomada, I Travel Because I Have to encapsulates in its form these three phases. Yet, in doing so, it contextual-izes the renaissance as yet one more chapter in the cultural history associated with the cinematic backlands, thereby provoking reflection on the process of stratification of cultural memory as performed by canonical texts, narrative tropes and aesthetic trends over the last century.

concLusion

With its superimposed layers and temporalities, I Travel Because I Have to is a vertiginous mise en abyme through which cinema, understood as the conduit of personal and collective memories, is exposed as a historically dynamic prac-tice. Like its protagonist José Renato, who probes the backlands as a means to unearth its geological strata, the film excavates different technologies and iconographies. Its technological promiscuity, which throws into relief the vari-ability of film supports, is matched in turn by evocative images and narrative strategies that underline the continual presence of the sertão in the cultural and cinematic imaginary of Brazil. By way of conclusion, I would like to

Figure 21.

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suggest that this kaleidoscopical form not only provides a privileged historical glass through which to reassess the historical force of cinema, but that it also looks forward to its future.

In an illuminating essay titled ‘Then and now: Cinema as history in the light of new media and new technologies’, Laura Mulvey examines the signif-icance inscribed in the act of looking back to Cinema Novo prevailing in the Brazilian films of the 1990s. For her, beyond the fact that these films dissociate the political from previously revolutionary subjects such as the sertão, this look backwards to an epoch in which utopias and dreams of social change were thought to be achieved through and by cinema is summarily relevant if only because they attempt to negotiate across a historical divide that culminated in a perceived sense of powerlessness, failed utopias and a generalized denial of history. To confront these cinemas of the past would be, in this context, to confront ‘what meanings these cinema histories might have for the present’ (Mulvey 2006: 262). This, she goes on,

would not constitute an a-historical, nostalgic, return to utopian hopes. But it could acknowledge the problems posed by historical caesura and recognize that culture, particularly in the privileged form of cinema, might be able to forge continuities of aspirations across traumatic politi-cal and economic change.

(2006: 266–67)

Mulvey concludes by stressing that such attempts to bridge historical gaps is dramatically facilitated as cinema ages and new technologies take over: ‘By a knight’s move across into a different technological medium, [celluloid cinema] allows reflection on how time is inscribed into culture and politics and how it gets lost in the elusiveness of history’ (2006: 269).

It is precisely a reflection on this elusiveness of history, this unrelenting pass-ing of time that is at the very core of I Travel Because I Have to, a reflection that it formulates on two, interrelated levels. Being on the one hand a product of the ‘renaissance’ period, it shares with works of that time the yearning to ‘bridge the gap’, to use Mulvey’s words, and go back to Cinema Novo’s subjects. Yet the film radicalizes the historical continuities forged by the ‘renaissance’ both because it openly attempts to go further back in time and bridge Cinema Novo with pioneering sertão narratives, and because it was ultimately able, after a ten-year period, to look at the ‘renaissance’ itself from a historical perspective, to insert it within the connective chain spanning the history of the sertão in the Brazilian imaginary. As far as its form is concerned, the film endeavours to negotiate across the historical divides that have marked the history of cinema as a recording tool. Going back to the still photograph, through celluloid film to digital images, I Travel Because I Have to forges continuities between differ-ent historical eras as encapsulated in different technologies. More than their ruptures, the film highlights their continuities as part of an inevitable techno-logical process whereby celluloid and digital images can be put on an equal footing due to their personal and collective, documental and archival value.

Here, the sertão is revealed as reality and image, matter and myth, docu-ment and citation. Ultimately, then, the film probes reflection on the evolv-ing transformation of culture – its technological and discursive bases – at the same time that it recognizes its own historical situatedness in relation to the apparatic contingency and representational history of cinema within culture at large. Yet it eschews mere nostalgia by acknowledging that cinema also has

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a future, regardless of the technology at its disposal. Certainly, the dive into the Acapulco waters imagined by José Renato is not informed by the same utopian drive, the belief that cinema can change the world that propels the cowherd Manuel to run. It is, nevertheless, a reminder, and an affirming one at that, of the uncharted waters into which cinema is yet to plunge.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Karim Aïnouz, who took the time to give me an interview via Skype in September 2013. Special thanks are also due to Samuel Paiva, who generously provided me with two of his unpublished essays.

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Aïnouz, Karim and Marcelo Gomes (2009), Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo/I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You, Recife: Rec Produtores Associados Ltda.

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—— (2002), Madame Satã, Rio de Janeiro: Video Filmes.—— (2006), O céu de Sueli/Love for Sale, Rio de Janeiro: Video Filmes.—— (2011), O abismo prateado/The Silver Cliff, São Paulo: RT Features.—— (2014), Praia do Futuro/Futuro Beach, São Paulo: Coração da Selva.Akerman, Chantal (2000) La captive/The Captive, Paris: Gemini Films. Bellour, Raymound (2012), ‘The cinema spectator: A special memory’, in

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Debs, Sylvie (2010), Os mitos do sertão: emergência de uma identidade nacional/‘The myths of the backlands: emergence of a national identity’, Belo Horizonte: Editora C/Arte.

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—— (2012), Era uma vez eu, Verônica/Once Upon a Time Verônica, São Paulo: Dezenove Som e Imagem.

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Mahmoud, Laila Abou (2009), ‘Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo: jornada poética geografia adentro’/‘I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You: A poetic journey into geography’, BRAVO! Online, http://bravonline.abril.com.br/materia/viajo-porque-preciso-volto-porque-te-amo-jornada-poetica-geografia-adentro#sthash.338EAdHf.dpuf. Accessed 17 June 2013.

Mulvey, Laura (2006), ‘Then and now: Cinema as history in the light of new media and new technologies’, in Lúcia Nagib (ed.), The New Brazilian Cinema, London and New York, pp. 261–70.

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—— (2011), World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, London: Continuum.Noé, Gaspar (2009) Enter the Void, Paris: Fidélité Films. Oricchio, Luiz Zanin (2006), ‘The Sertão in the Brazilian imaginary at the end

of the millenium’, in Lúcia Nagib (ed.), The New Brazilian Cinema, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 139–56.

Paiva, Samuel (2011), ‘O deslocamento do sujeito masculino no sertão contemporâneo: estudos de caso na literatura e no cinema’/‘The displa-cement of the masculine subject in the contemporary Brazilian backlands: case studies in literature and film’. Unpublished. Paper presented at the VII Week of Theatrical Studies (UNESP-Araraquara) – Theatre, Cinema and Literature: Confluences, 27–29 September, Araraquara, São Paulo.

—— (2012) ‘From documentary to fiction and vice versa, the experience of displacement in contemporary Brazil’s hinterland’. Unpublished. Paper presented as part of the panel ‘Road Movie in Brazil and Beyond: Breaking Boundaries’ at the XXX International Congress of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 23–26 May 2012, San Francisco.

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Rocha, Glauber (1964) Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God, White Devil, Rio de Janeiro: Copacabana Filmes.

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New York: Oxford University Press.Sokurov, Alexander (2002), Russkiy kovcheg/Russian Ark, Moscow: The State

Hermitage Museum.Ventura, Roberto (1998), ‘Visões do deserto: Selva e sertão em Euclides da

Cunha’/‘Visions of the desert: The jungle and the backlands in Euclides da Cunha’, in Beth Brait (ed.), O sertão e Os sertões/‘The backlands and Os sertões’, São Paulo: Arte & Ciência, pp. 63–78.

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—— (2010), ‘Prefácio’/‘Preface’, in Sylvie Debs (ed.), Os mitos do sertão: emergência de uma identidade nacional/‘The myths of the backlands: emer-gence of a national identity’, Belo Horizonte: Editora C/Arte, pp. 11–16.

SuggeSted citation

de Luca, T. (2014), ‘Personal images, collective journeys: Media and memory in I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You’, New Cinemas 12: 1+2, pp. 17–41, doi: 10.1386/ncin.12.1-2.17_1

contributor detailS

Dr Tiago de Luca is Lecturer in Film and Head of Portuguese at the University of Liverpool. His writings have recently appeared in Senses of Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Cinephile, among others. He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and the co-editor of Slow Cinema (EUP, 2015).

Contact: University of Liverpool, Modern Languages and Culture, Cypress Building, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZR, UK.E-mail: tdeluca@liverpool.ac.uk

Tiago de Luca has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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