Artist in Focus: Ana Vaz is now showing on MUBI in many countries.
It Is Night in America (Ana Vaz, 2022).
Immersed in the universe of the Brazilian artist Ana Vaz you may find yourself equally entranced by and alienated from the beauty of nature. The appeal of Vaz’s installations and experimental films resides in this dichotomy. It’s devastating to see the ways in which humans have the power to plunder natural habitats, by design or recklessness, yet it is also frightful to ponder post-human landscapes—particularly the sublime beauty that may yet arise in the world without us. Gifted with a formidable visual and aural sensibility, Vaz creates images that are as tactile and immediately graspable as her stories are multilayered. And while there’s something incredibly melancholic about her films, particularly her post-apocalyptic dreamscapes, she often portrays time as so vast, expanding into primordial ages and futuristic eons, that neither mankind nor wilderness has a definitive upper hand. Her films are informed by a nuanced dialectic: The human and the natural element don’t cancel out; they’re interconnected. Might glimpsing a pre- or post-human world then help us develop a higher sense of care for the natural world?
Given Brazil’s mineral riches, colonialist past, and long history of extractionary mining, the preoccupation in its national cinema with ecology isn’t new, of course. Vaz’s filmography belongs in the same lineage with Brazilian filmmakers such as Andrea Tonacci, whose late masterpiece, Serras da Desordem (2006), took on the subject of the massacres of Brazil’s Indigenous people, while employing experimental techniques to extol nature’s beauty, and to explore the themes of memory and passing of time. It also shares a history with Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, whose pseudo-documentary, Iracema, Uma Transa Amazônica (1981), viciously satirized the blatant plunder of the Amazon forest and the impunity of the garimpeiros, illegal extractionists—a history tragically repeated under the recently ousted ultra-conservative government that encouraged such illegal practices. Going back further, one can find Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, whose famous documentary, Brasilia: Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (1967), traced the close interrelation between Brazil’s modernity and dreams of progress and massive urban displacement of the poor and the vulnerable workers. Similarly to Vaz’s films, these documentaries took on the questions of modernity, colonialism, and ecology.
Perhaps closest to Tonacci in her wide range of subjects and her bold experimentation, Vaz enlists the power of magical thinking for her ecocentric filmmaking. The fantastical slips even into those of her stories ostensibly rooted in the here-and-now. Her 16mm short Amazing Fantasy (2018), for example, adapts a point of view of a child who passes her hand under a hovering disk-like object. The child then encloses it in a glass to make eerie sounds. Are these sounds natural, one might ask, a magic teased from body and air? Or machine-made? Or perhaps abstract, a whirr of spiritual, cosmic forces? The answer, of course, is possibly all these things. The child’s exploration reveals the human experience of natural phenomena as replete with possibilities. It bridges the factual and the seemingly impossible, the futuristic and the nearly-thinkable. This blending is playfully underscored by the phrase on the girl’s T-shirt that reads “Amazing Fantasy,” like a slogan from a poster for a science-fiction movie.
In Vaz’s Pseudosphynx (2020), the mythical and historical dimensions blend. The film’s title is also another name for fire-caterpillars, small insects that Vaz’s camera captures beating their near-colorless wings, before they transform into vibrant butterflies. Ugliness and beauty commingle to remind viewers of nature’s mysteries. But Vaz is also after an anthropological context that she ascribes, in the voiceover, to these tiny creatures. Since they’re also colloquially referred to as “witches,” they serve to conjure up a past when taboos surrounding female bodies and sexualities, and resentment over their inherited wealth or property, fed rumors about black magic—and provided an excuse to persecute and murder women. In this sense, the insect body, on one hand repellant when in cocoon-form, then mesmerizing once transformed, is used to underscore the humans’ dialectical relationship with nature, as one rooted in our conflicting response of both awe and horror, and permeated by social connotations. Not even the smallest of creatures are free of man’s imaginings: He remakes nature in his own image.
The Age of Stone (Ana Vaz, 2013).
In Vaz’s conceptually complex short The Age of Stone (2013), the director creates an indeterminate temporal zone, in which the present—the arid area of the mines around Brazil’s capital, Brasilia—evokes a primordial past (the Stone Age) and, simultaneously, a vision of apocalyptic yet faintly hopeful future. By crafting a circular timeline, Vaz suggests that biology and, by extension, a human concept of nature, are never merely about progressive evolution. Ecosystems collapse under human onslaught, but also stage post-mortem comebacks.
As the film’s opening shots of the mines, and of men laboring in them, give way to images of mining ridges and blocks, key phrases from a later Vaz film, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020), come to mind: “Do we ask questions? … About the cut out landscapes? … Where are the stories in the images?” Vaz reminds viewers that landscapes contain potential stories: For instance, in The Age of Stone, a young girl appears amidst the desolate land. Is she a future mother-creator? The question remains unanswered, but as the screen erupts with colors and images of exotic flowers, female fecundity is juxtaposed with barrenness and the futility of the miners’ toil. Similarly, in Vaz’s Look Closely at the Mountains (2018), an exploited natural landscape becomes a site of biological regeneration. Vaz filmed in the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil (“mina” in Portuguese means “a mine”), and in northern France. The former serves as an example of exploitative practices, the latter as a surprising manner in which plants reclaim an abandoned mine–yet again, a reminder that to think of nature, and of the full scope of our relationship with it, we must look not only to pristine habitats, but also to degraded ones.
The images in Vaz’s new film, It Is Night in America (2022), may at first seem overly familiar, as pandemic images par excellence: Wild animals encroach on city centers, as humans retreat into their homes during lockdowns. The film is set in the city of Brasilia, where Vaz was born, and which is infamous as the country’s deeply flawed modernist project. A sprawling metropolis of white curvilinear buildings, crisscrossed by winding highways, Brasilia was built in the middle of a vast plateau in 1960, displacing both local populations and pushing to the faraway “satellite-cities” the workers who built it—in this sense, proving disastrous to its citizens in most precarious circumstances. Now in the “abandoned” city, wild animals are spotted by residents who don’t know what to do with them and place calls to the local park services. Vaz plays some of these conversations in the voiceover: What to do with a cobra in one’s backyard? How to deal with emboldened, roaming capybaras? The film follows rescue rangers who tend to disoriented, caged, frightened, sometimes injured or starved animals—a thread that underscores that the animals, while treated as intruders and predators, are also extremely vulnerable, and intruded upon, as the pandemic confuses behavioral patterns of both humans and non-humans. Vaz’s camera stays so close to the animals’ point of view it is nearly subcutaneous. For example, when a fox is captured and caged, the eerie sound design induces a solemn sense of terror, as if the opaque human world were being registered from the inside of a rattling cage. Such proximity, intensity of the sound design, and the camera staying close to the ground, readjusting the human to the creaturely scale, induces a keen sense of being with other creatures.
The profound empathy with the natural world—and the desire to truly see and conceive it from other than a human-centric perspective—is perhaps what Vaz means when she says in interviews that one must film not only with one’s body and senses, but also with one’s feet. “To film with one’s feet” seems to imply being deeply aware of the constant shifts and changes in the ecosystems, as well as remaining humbly attentive to everything happening literally on the ground. Vaz enlists the camera in this episteme as a tool that is on one hand deeply human, as an invention stemming from our desire to see and to capture time, and yet, on the other hand, as a mechanical device, extends beyond the human eye. The dialectics of Vaz’s thematic approach to nature then extends to her dialectical understanding of cinema. If It Is Night in America is a dirge for man’s lost creaturely instincts, it is also an ode to the possibilities of cinema that serves to reclaim these dormant instincts, and to envision old/new worlds.