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Yet this same background also causes a considerable problem for Salles: namely, to figure out how to negotiate the challenge of trying to heed the “primacy of the object,” as Theodor W.
This background surely augmented his ability to get close to an important cultural figure such as the internationally acclaimed classical pianist Nelson Freire, who became the eponymous subject of Salles’ essay-documentary film from 2003, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the famous Brazilian labour leader who would become Brazil’s thirty-fifth president and who granted Salles and his small crew considerable access at the tail-end of his fourth and finally successful presidential campaign in 2002. As founder of the cultural magazine piauí (2006 – ) and president of the Instituto Moreira Salles, one of Brazil’s most important cultural institutions, João Moreira Salles is one of the most important progressive figures in Brazilian cultural life. Together with his three siblings, including Walter Salles, director of acclaimed films such as Central do Brasil ( Central Station, 1998) and Diarios de motocicleta ( The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), João Moreira Salles inherited the fortune of his late father, Walther Moreira Salles, who founded Unibanco, which is today Itaú-Unibanco, Brazil’s largest private-sector bank, and served as ambassador to the United States in the 1950s. Without question, this intense interest in the intersection of oppositional forces has to do with his personal background, which surely must be one of the most unlikely for any filmmaker who has ever worked. This moment, in my view, not only encapsulates the film’s essence but also can be regarded as a highly compressed distillation of Salles’ career as a filmmaker – a career defined by his attempt to investigate what happens “when opposites come together,” as he puts it elsewhere in In the Intense Now, a film consisting exclusively of archival footage. The film in which this moment of narrative intensity occurs is João Moreira Salles’ exquisite essay film, No Intenso Agora ( In the Intense Now, 2017) – a film I consider a peer to Chris Marker’s 1977 landmark (and quite different) film about 1968, Le fond de l’air est rouge ( A Grin Without A Cat, literally meaning “The atmosphere in the air is red”), which together with Harun Farocki’s oeuvre has clearly influenced Salles. She was happy in China, and that’s why I like to think of her there, back when everything seemed possible.”
She spoke of it with delight, with joy, with an intensity that time would come to steal from her. As I remember it,” he says, “nothing made my mother light up like the memory of that time. Instead, he admits that of all the images he has of Elisa Gonçavales, he always returns to those showing her in China in 1966, the moment of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, because these “poor, badly filmed images” provide a record of his mother’s “encounter with the reality of a country that was the opposite of everything she knew. 1 As we watch a short montage of images showing the director’s mother in home videos, his VO informs us that while his “mother appears in a number of home films seems happy, basking in being alive” in footage from the 1960s, this shifts from the 1970s on: images of her “become scarcer, and from ’80 onward, there’s hardly anything at all.” This gradual disappearance of the narrator’s mother from the family’s private filmic record – her becoming-invisible – might register for the attentive viewer as a sign of her death – indeed: of her suicide – not least because this scene appears towards the end of a long sequence of scenes in which death dominates, including the death of both Jan Palach, who burnt himself on 16 January 1969 in protest against the sense of resignation that had befallen Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring, and of Killian Fritch, who coined the most famous slogan of May ’68 (“Sous les paves, la plage!” ) and who committed suicide at Gaité, a Paris subway station meaning “joy.” Yet while the narrator comments on each of these deaths, carefully analysing how the images make use of – instrumentalise – them, he does not mention, let alone discuss, the death of his mother. Late in one of the greatest filmic encounters with what scholars have started to conceptualise as the “long 1968,” we listen to a voiceover (VO) calmly narrating the gradual disappearance of one of the film’s protagonists from the visual record.