Regina Guimaraes
Saying that film has become the memory of the 20th century is almost a commonplace. Judging by producers' efforts to engage cameramen whose profession was to collect animated postcards from all over the world, this feeling seems to have developed early on. Nevertheless, it would make sense to try and identify the material of which this memory is made, and perhaps to admit that it is the same material as "the stuff of which dreams are made". If Baudelaire had used a movie camera instead of his ingenious pen, then the passer-by whose ambiguous gaze he immortalized in a sonnet would in this instant forever be walking down the same noisy street, perpetually fading in and out, passing by in the exact time window made accessible by the moving images. By making it flexible, among other things, this is apt to objectify subjective experiences.
Gustav Deutsch's work amazes as it seems to answer the call of the images themselves, just like Baudelaire made himself believe he had shared impossible joys of love. The sensual "eat me" and "drink me" on the bottom of Alice's well, easily recognizable as a metaphor of "lens", given that the Reverend was a photographer, too, would in this case mean "touch me".
In the same way as Storck or Resnais were strolling around inside pictorial works, Gustav Deutsch penetrates into and literally moves about inside cinematographic images, yielding to an impulse that is at once voyeuristic and archeological, and making the demiurgical gesture of resuscitating human beings and granting them new lives - lived through others, true, but nonetheless available for reliving. Obviously, this leads us more or less directly to the problem of virtual and/or phantasmal existences that is essential to the definition of any genre of cinema, and inevitably reminds us of the moving novel "The Invention of Morel" in which eternity is on the brink of being conquered by the techniques of recording and reproduction.
The Vienna - Surabaya - São Mamede triptych surprises us from the start by the precision with which the author undertakes the eminently poetic, and in a noble sense surrealistic, task of finding faces and figures in the crowd in order to connect them with the sensual and mental energies of other faces and figures that resemble them in some aspects, however marginally in some cases. The moviemaker indulges in browsing through remote places and eras using film as a time machine. Singled out from the anonymity and loneliness of the urban masses (features appreciated by the dandy as long as some poor devil or other nobody foots his enormous bill), the persons whose activities the camera once filmed rise to the status of movie characters for short moments. On the other hand, since these persons are always shown near a movie theater, the director pairs fragments from the movies billed there, "Die schwarze Kappe" (Vienna), "Siegfried" (Surabaya), and "O Zé do Telhado" (São Mamede), with scenes showing passers-by singled out from the crowd.
A work like Deutsch's clearly demonstrates the usefulness of references. References only make sense to the extent that they enter into a dialog with other references to enlarge their scope of meaning.
The project of this moviemaker is intrinsically transnational, perhaps continuing a universal ambition of the silent movie era. I must confess, however, that I was immensely pleased with the precision of his approach to the episode of the film he dedicated to São Mamede, and the pertinence of the network of references between the master shot, a street with a movie theater in a suburb of sorts with a still markedly rural character, and the images originating from it in a mise en abyme. An old fado with disturbing lyrics ("Don't say no, say yes, … even if it's a lie") instantly transports us to the early years of repression by the self-proclaimed “Estado Novo” (the "New State", Salazar's Fascist dictatorship - translator's note). Deutsch is sensitive to such disparate phenomena as the ridiculousness of the ceremonies presided over by army leaders and the atavistic quality of the grape harvest ritual, emphasizing the importance of a recently proletarianized working class. And although the title O ZE DO TELHADO (Zé do Telhado is a kind of Portuguese Robin Hood - translator's note) appears on the posters by mere coincidence, it is very obvious that this is intended to amalgamate a fictional revolt with an awareness of the potential necessity of rebellion.
Gustav Deutsch deals with a type of problem cherished by post-modernism while avoiding the pitfall of negating the dimension of historicity that affects the vitality of the images, thus permitting (himself) a further pushing back of the frontiers of cinematographic reality.
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(1) "New State", Salazar's Fascist dictatorship
(2) Zé do Telhado is a kind of Portuguese Robin Hood