revision COMPLETE scheduled for publication
Bruno Vianna
Bruno Vianna An artist's statement
I keep wondering whether a cinema still exists. As I look through my window at night, my retina imprints an image, my brain processes it into what I suspect is the
reality. I refuse this assumption. There is no real in what see, much less in any of the images I have ever produced. Time, though, was always able to infiltrate these flat pictures through small cracks, building surfaces, carving reliefs. It spreads out quietly and subtly takes complete control,
Dwarf Planet is a social observation in time and image making. As many (or most) image makers, I negotiate time by taking pictures, shooting frames. This has led me to photograph and videotape different types of decay, including demolitions, ruins and mold growth. In this video, I put together a few different experiments. I like the way some inexpensive video equipment looks. Cheap webcams can get very noisy in low light conditions. This noise can create an atmosphere that relates to the pointillist style, but when pointed to a downtown neighborhood of Rio, evokes expressionist sensations. I highly refuse definitions and resolutions – lower will be better, lower will be more accurate, more impressionist, more touchable. This was a timelapse of a whole night, with many passing clouds that helped compose a dynamic landscape. After combining the pictures into the animation, I used some open source filters from a package that is almost forgotten, named freeframe. These effects deal with expansion and repetition of time, as well as image decomposition and deconstruction. The music was a leftover from a feature film I made in 2008.
Planeta AnĂŁo
driving glances into hidden corners and imperceptible events. It slowly stitches the pieces of my being. It exasperates me as it flows through my fingers. It exists there; time is the reality.
Remixing, digging old and underrated technologies, compressing and stretching time, are some of my dearest methods in image making. In this video, these methods blend into a feeling of a desultory fragility, of hundreds of subjectivities entangled in an ephemeral night. Dwarf Planet is a visual sketch about what the world I can see from my window. Its fuzziness is a charm that protects me from the years, a vaccine made from slow microbes found in minutes, seconds, instants.
An interview with
Bruno Vianna Live editing is a fundamental aspect of your filmmaking practice: in your hands footage is never a static "materia", we daresay that interaction is a trademark of you style. In your early feature film Cafuné you stimulated downloaders to modify the edit. Could you introduce our readers to your revolutionary vision of live cinema? I think my vision relates more to a research than a revolution; in fact, I believe revolutions happen in timeframes much longer than we are used to think. So my vision of live cinema reflects my curiosity for the classic cinema apparatus – the dark theater, big screen, comfortable chair, and storytelling. I wanted to understand whether it was possible to combine the immersion of the movie experience with some level of interactivity. The problem is, every time we propose some level of agency for the moviegoer – such as deciding the fate of a character – the unwritten contract of the cinema is broken. That would mean removing the audience from its state of enchantment, and thus disrupting the pleasant flow of the story. At the same time, I was fascinated with the idea of a storytelling that wouldn't be linear. As I was editing Cafuné, my first feature, I realized that the fiction I created would work even if I permuted the order of scenes or removed some of them. In fact, the multiplicity of possibilities was creating a richer piece. How could I ever come up with a final cut for this film, with so many interesting possible cuts? So I started to dig into non-linear literature experiments – Perec, Borges, but specially Cortazar and the interactive structure he proposed for the Hopscotch novel. Books, though, are different: the turning of pages gives already some level of agency though which the reader will control the speed of reading, may jump boring parts or return to re-read something. And movies are expected to be watched without breaks: TV commercials are considered a major annoyance. I ended up with two different versions for Ca-
Bruno Vianna (photo by Betãnia Dutra)
funé. Both of them were released simultaneously on movie theaters; you could watch one or another depending on the movie theater you went to. It was the best that the distribution technology in 2006 could offer. But at the same time, I was writing this screenplay about a teenager who was living the years of the re-democratization process in Brazil: a decade with every conceivable plague such as hyperinflation, impeachment, deceased presidents. And I realized that the memory of that time is pretty much non-linear: most people don't remember exactly, for instance, which currency preceded another. So it made even more sense to propose some new kind of cinema that embraced a combinatory narrative: not a narrative of bisecting paths like Borges, but a Cortazarean narrative landscape offering many entangled roads. And I had to build the exhibition system to go with it: not one where the audience would be
Warping the architecture
called upon every 5 minutes, but one where I, as the storyteller, would be able to be constantly recreating the fiction, based on subjective events such as my mood, the public's reaction, or even performing mistakes. That is how Ressaca was born. How did you get started in filmmaking in Rio ? That is somewhat easier to tell: I went to film school. The only curious fact is that in the middle of film studies I decided to start computer engineering – I always had an interest in technology. And it was only at the engineering school that I started to make my own movies – Geraldo Voador was the first. Until then I though of myself as some sound technician, producer or screenwriter. For this year's Videofocus Edition we have
selected your film"Planeta anão", a work revealing a refined minimalist approach. How did you come up with the idea for Planeta anão? I'm very interested in the relation between images and time – which is, at first sight, a way of seeing what cinema is. But I think time expresses itself in images in a number of ways, and therefore I'm investigating images where time has left some kind of mark, or building new devices for capturing light in different timeframes. I did Planeta Anão when I was playing with time lapse captures and time based filters. The video depicts the view from my window in Lapa, a neighborhood known for its night life, from sunset until the dawn. I used a cheap lowres webcam because I like the grainy aspect of it. When I put all photographs together, I really enjoyed the overall look.
Warping time
At the same time, I was playing with a open source video filter set called freeframe, which has some very interesting effects dealing with time – it blends the frames back and forth, bending the seconds to achieve this beautiful weaving of time waves. And as a finale I used another effect that messes up the architecture in the frame, bending the city itself. So I guess it was not a preconceived idea, but a result of several little experiments that by chance and effort resulted in something interesting. Your video production is very miscellanous: how has your production processes changed over the years? I gradually and constantly have made the move from classic film making – both production wise and content wise - to a freer, more open image creation method. It used to be that my short films would be produced in a very formal way: I would write the script and either apply for grants or just shoot them with friends. The process now happens in a much lonelier way: I'm basically collecting images all the time, storing them in my computer, and editing and treating them with software, sometimes written by myself. When they reach a point that I think is interesting enough, I'll just add a title and send it off to some festivals and publish it on the web. Defining your artistic vision, we daresay that your personal experience is your main source for your works, even when they face sociological themes. Where do you get the ideas for your work? When I do narrative works, they are always based on experiences I'm living at that moment. When I shot Little Ball Satellite, I was doing a lot of satellite monitoring, and ended up doing an installation that was a water fountain that listened to satellites. Planeta Anão is the view from my window. I was very close to the squatting movement and that inspired to write a feature screenplay about the landless movement in Brazil. But the fact is that besides my own lesser interest in classic storytelling, film incentives in my country in the last 10 years have been devoted almost entirely to commercial movies, which actually translates into comedies with soap opera actors. This feature project, which is a very political story, has been rejected constantly since 2008, even though the screenplay won
two development awards. Ressaca (Hangover) is a feature narrative film that is edited live, a titanic effort. Could you describe this experience? There were many fascinating things about the live editing experience. The act of re-editing the same material over and over ended working as a ritual. Every time I did it, I would find more possibilities of connections, more meanings that were created as tried different juxtapositions and combinations. And then there was all this plethora of information that I realized I could obtain from watching the audience – being in a session facing the seats, under the screen, is a radical change of paradigm for a filmmaker. We are used to follow the screening from some seat, when we do follow – most of the times, the film is presented without our presence. But what fascinated me the most was the chance of error. Mentally, editing was a daunting task already, and adding to that, the interface was somewhat hard to maneuver. So I made mistakes every now and then, like starting a scene in the middle of another, or skipping some dialog. But these errors just opened new layers of possibilities, they reconfigured the history in ways totally unexpected to me. Sometimes I would be a bit sloppy just for the expectation of what the mistakes would cause. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Bruno. What's next for Bruno Vianna? Are there any film projects on the horizon? Besides the projects eternally applying for funding, I have a few on going research lines. For instance, I have been obsessed with computer vision. This is the field of computer science that creates programs to analyse and interpret video, looking for information such as faces, objects, movement. I'm playing with these software libraries, writing algorithms to create visuals and filters from captured images. I have been using it for some street art videos I'm shooting and other footage. I'm also developing gadgets to capture images. This is an investigation that started at the LABMIS/La Chambre Blanche/Avatar residency in Canada last year. I was able to build two or three devices there, and I have a few more planned – just need the time to get them off the paper.
Warping light (research image)