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Disappearance and Reappearance of People and Images (35 years of VNA and 25 years of forumdoc.bh) CLÁUDIA MESQUITA, RENATA OTTO, RUBEN CAIXETA DE QUEIROZ1 Translation: Caroline Ferreira
1987 (35 years ago) – Let us establish by convention that this is the creation date of the Vídeo nas Aldeias (VNA) project. That marks the release of A Festa da moça, which depicts the ritual to celebrate the end of seclusion following the first menstruation of a young Nambiquara girl. Shortly before that, in 1985, FUNAI (Brazilian National Indian Foundation) indigenist Marcelo Santos denounced a massacre of indigenous individuals in Rondônia. Nobody wanted to see or believe the indigenous genocide, so Marcelo invites Vicent to record the traces, a means of fighting against obliteration and proving the massacre in the courts. Those who survived, in general, were invisible to the Brazilian society, interested rather in denying their reality in favor of granting lands to agribusiness. Vicent, then, begins to film it more as an indigenist, less as a cinematographer. What was being sought was an alliance to the indigenous through audiovisual – as a way to strengthen their way of life (returning and making the images accessible to the peoples filmed) and also making visible to this side (the “civilized” world) both the strength and vitality of the indigenous world and the brutality of colonial civilization. Only two decades later, the filmic records resulted from the encounter with the survivors of that massacre and other isolated indigenous peoples in that region of Rondônia, who were invisible until then (Akuntsu and Kanoê peoples and the Man of the Hole), were assembled; that is when the masterful Corumbiara (2009) is born. It is a film in first-person, where Vincent Carelli takes up and recounts in retrospect his trajectory as an indigenist cinematographer (not as an anthropologist or scholar, as he likes to emphasize in his interviews), starting with his experience with the Nambiquara. The opening of Corumbiara (2009) is precisely a quotation from the film A festa da moça, from the sequence that registers a dance and an effusive song, 1. With the collaboration of Junia Torres, who is part of the curator team, along with Luisa Lanna.