Rafael de Luna Freire (Universidade Federal Fluminense) Cinematographer Esdras Baptista’s Film Collection (1940s-80s): Rediscovering a Brazilian Communist Filmmaker;
music performed live by Landscape of Hate (Vivek Venkatesh & Jessie Beier)
Professor de Luna presents research and new film digitization work conducted with Laura Batitucci at LUPA, Laboratório Universitário de Preservação Audiovisual, which he founded at his university in the city of Niterói. Recorded June 17, 2022, NYU Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives, at Concordia University.
The presentation concludes with a premiere screening of previously unseen documentary footage, accompanied by live guitar music and an audio mix that sampled recent political protests and petroleum extraction in Brazil.
Click to enlarge or go to vimeo.com/736984078.
(News of this screening was reported in the Brazilian press.)
Abstract: Esdras Baptista was an active filmmaker in Brazil from the 1940s to 1980s, but not in the “auteur” meaning of the word. He worked as a cameraman at Rio de Janeiro’s TV station, as correspondent for foreign broadcast companies (such as Hearst and BBC) and as a cinematographer for Rio de Janeiro’ city hall and Brazil’s Minister of Health. He did direct documentary short films, advertisement and medical films, but most of his collection of films consist of non-edited documentary footage he shot for more than five decades and of which he kept copies with him. Significant portion of the footage present political protests, rallies and ceremonies, many of them related to communist or left-wing militants. After his death in 1988, his widow Hilca Pappi organized his collection of films and in 1992 released a documentary on the noted communist Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953), with the only existing moving images of him, shot by Esdras in 1946. Hilca organized a catalogue of the collection and tried to get funds to preserve it, but had no success. Hilca died in 2013 and the films had already been packed and forgotten. After the couple’s only son, Markos, died in 2018, his daughter donated her grandfather’s films to LUPA-UFF. More than 1,000 reels (most silent B&W 16mm film) were brought to LUPA and started to be inspected. In 2021, the first films from Esdras started to be digitized with LUPA’s newly acquired scanner. The richness and variety of these images make this collection a true database of the cultural, political and social history of Brazil. This presentation introduces the life and work of Esdras Baptista and shows some of the historical footage, presented to the public for the first time.
It is a strange coincidence that during President Jair Bolsonaro’s extreme right-wing government — which persecutes artists, professors and actively destroys film archives as the Cinemateca Brasileira, and which is characterized by a ferocious and unjustified anti-communist rhetoric — a small regional film archive in a Brazilian federal university has rediscovered and preserved films that, among other subjects, registered crucial moments and figures of the labor and communist parties in Brazil, specially during the democratic years between the end of the Estado Novo in 1945, and before the 1964 military coup.
Esdras Baptista started working as a photographer for communist newspapers just after the end of Estado Novo, which returned the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) to legality. In the 1950s, he became the official cinematographer for Rio de Janeiro city hall, filming official events that were supposedly provided to TV broadcast companies. As interviews with some of his relatives and friends have indicated, Esdras also shot for himself many kinds of rallies, protests and meetings. Right after he heard on the radio that something was happening, he went to the place with his motorcycle and his 16mm camera to film the news. Esdras shot, for example, the visit of Fidel Castro and other Cuban politicians to Brazil and visited the country himself in 1962. He also filmed mass protests and many left-wing politicians that would be arrested or exiled after the 1964 coup. To digitize and present these images in today’s Brazil is to confront the attempt to rewrite the recent Brazilian history that Bolsonaro’s (military) government is supporting, trying to erase the fact that there was a military dictatorship that persecuted, tortured and killed those who fought against it, especially those from left-wing parties and groups.
The film prints of the Esdras Baptista’s collection went through a difficult archival life and can be considered orphans as they consist of works that have unknown legal status or have never been finished as a complete work, being better defined as non-edited historical footage. On the other hand, the films that Esdras did finished are the ones more usually neglected by film preservation actions in Brazil, such as short documentary, advertisement or institutional films. He also shot many government films for the Ministry of Health that haven’t been preserved by the Brazilian government. Its collection was preserved by Esdras’ family itself with its own funds, without any official support. In the early 1990s, at the time of a huge crisis for Brazilian cinema, Hilca tried to get a sponsorship to preserve the films of her deceased husband, but she was not successful. In this way, this collection has been forgotten and completely outside public attention for the last three decades. Esdras and Hilca’s granddaughter, who inherited the empty house where the film cans were stored, donated the collection to LUPA-UFF. This makes the Esdras Baptista collection “orphan” quite literally, as it has been overlooked since their former caretakers (or “parents”) died or got sick. Now, Esdras’ film collection finally got a new home.
Bios
Rafael de Luna Freire is a professor of film history and the head of the Audiovisual Preservation University Lab (LUPA-UFF). He was responsible for the restoration of Antes, o verão (Gerson Tavares, 1968) and the reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários (Luiz de Barros, 1929), together with Reinaldo Cardenuto. He curated the 1st BRICS Audiovisual Preservation Meeting in 2019. @Rafael_de_Luna
Laura Batitucci is an undergraduate film student at UFF and a cultural and audiovisual producer, having organized film festivals and retrospective screenings. She is a member of the LUPA-UFF staff, participating in the cataloguing of UFF’s filmography and a film equipment exhibition at the BRICS Film Festival. Today she conducts research about LUPA’s Esdras Baptista collection.
Vivek Venkatesh is a research-creator focused on building community resilience and tolerance against hate through a resolutely public pedagogical approach. He is the UNESCO co-Chair in Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism; President of the UNESCO Chairs Network in Canada, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University, where he is Professor of Inclusive Practices in Visual Arts and Chair of the Department of Art Education.
Jesse Beier <jessiebeier.com>”is a teacher, artist, writer and conjurer of strange pedagogies for unthought futures. Working at the intersection of philosophy, artistic production, and radical pedagogy, Beier’s practice experiments with the potential for ‘weird pedagogy’ to mobilize a break from orthodox referents and habits of repetition, towards more eco-logical modes of thought. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Alberta is entitled “Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Future” (2021). She is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Centre d’études sur l’apprentissage et la performance, as well as a member of Landscape of Hate.
Landscape of Hate “is an improvised multimedia project with the objective of promoting and favouring the public voice in framing pluralistic dialogues about how we negotiate various forms of hate in our society.” Vivek Venkatesh and Owen Chapman explain: