Film Show 069: Ana Vaz
Ana Vaz
Ana Vaz (b. 1986) is a Brazilian artist whose films and installations explore the complex relationships between environments, territories, and hybrid histories. Over the course of two decades, she’s crafted numerous short films that question documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, prodding at cinema as an art of the invisible. Sacris Pulso (2008) draws on her family’s art and Clarice Lispector’s Brasília, Occidente (2015) explores the hidden colonial histories of Lisbon, There is Land! (2016) draws from Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, and Apiyemiyekî? (2020) incorporates drawings from the Waimiri-Atroari. Vaz’s newest film is the feature-length Hanabi, a loose adaptation of Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain. Created over 10 years, this film premieres at this year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Ana Vaz on Friday, August 7th via Zoom to discuss ferality and motherhood, the collaborative nature of Hanabi, and how the contained self is the malaise of modernity.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I contacted you about three years ago for an interview, but somebody told me you were on maternity leave.
Ana Vaz: This must have been for It is Night in America (2022). I was pregnant when that film was released, and then I was quite pregnant afterwards and had to lay low for a while (laughter). And now Noa is already 3 and a half.
Given that your first short film, Sacris Pulso (2008), saw you grappling with your relationship to your parents, what reflections have you had since becoming one yourself? [Editor’s Note: Sacris Pulso is rooted in the 1986 experimental short film Brasiliários, which stars Vaz’s mother, Cláudia Pereira, and has a soundtrack by her father, Guilherme Vaz].
This is a great place to start. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this idea of lineage. Lineage is never really a repetition, even though there’s this construction around the idea of repetition. I’m more fond of the idea that every repetition is a form of dissonance, carrying in itself both a form of continuity and rupture, of betrayal. Similarly, the life of a newborn is never just the life of a newborn—it’s the different entanglements that come with life.
The arrival of new life into this world is always wonderfully troubling—it confronts us with the limitations and potentialities of life. In that sense, it was already very complex to have a child, to bear new life in a world where the possibilities of life are becoming increasingly asphyxiated. To bear new life during the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and as other regions are also affected by our world system’s necropolitical dimensions… to care for new life when we feel the hostility, the barbarity, the insistence on violence and destruction… and I’m bearing life in Europe, a continent that has been so heavily involved in the dispossession of lives in some many territories, including my own, which we could better name Pindorama or Abya Yala. All of these layers were there with me. At the same time, there was a furious desire to affirm life, to care for life at large.
Do you think these reflections and experiences have affected how you approach cinema?
There’s something very mysterious about cinema and this idea of transmission. I finished It is Night in America just as Noa was coming into the world, and it’s a very dark film about the impending extinction of life in the region I come from, but it’s also about this search for refuge in the most unthinkable places. It is Night in America has this affirmation of immanence, of affirming a desire to stay in instead of transcend. And ever since Noa was born into this mad, hostile world, that craving has been more affirmed. There’s something feral that comes with maternity, and this is something questioned in society. It’s not a coincidence that women are said to go mad, that women are said to be too instinctual, too furious, but in many ways I think that this is the ferality that allows for the care and affirmation of life.
This ferality also has to do with how I deal with cinema. I desire something that can escape the enclosures of how we are, of how we are to maintain order. So in a very roundabout way, with the arrival of new life there is this new ferality, and a great desire to transmit something of what came before Noa, before us. Then suddenly this timeline extends beyond my immediate parents, too. Guilherme is no longer with us, Cláudia thankfully still is, and through them I learned a lot about honoring what came before us and what will come after. There’s a radical humbling in the whole experience, which is undeniably represented in the way I practice cinema.
Can you expand on how it’s been humbling and how that manifests in the way you make art? What do you notice is different between how you made films prior to Noa’s birth and afterwards?
Time, duration, and fragmentation. I think this is something that any mother can relate to: time becomes fragmented. It’s no longer possible to spend hours on end on one idea. At first there’s a maddening effect of (gasps), “How am I going to reorganize my thinking, my body, my impulses, and my life if interruption is my new reality?” This is the reality of caring for another—you no longer have mastery over your time. There was already fragmentation in my previous films, and it was related to memory and lineages being broken. In post-colonial territories, we know that the erasure of one’s lineage and past is part of the devouring machine of colonialism.
The child also confronts you with the present. And it’s not a denial of the past, but there’s something really of the present—even the future seems really abstract. It’s interesting that for so many Indigenous societies, the future isn’t something that’s necessarily ahead of us. The present is so primordial—everything is kind of there, even the past is there. So I feel like this idea of fragmentation has increased in my way of writing and editing and composing.
There’s also length and duration. I think this is the big change I’ve noticed starting with It is Night in America: the need for time to be enlarged, for time to slow down. We’re in a society that craves novelty, so time is also fragmented—it’s a fragmentation of one’s attention—and editing Hanabi (2026) was a way for me to say, for the hours in which this child is at school, it’s something precious, it’s something to uphold, care for, and sustain—like a note. There’s something very musical with Hanabi, this idea of sustaining a note or frequency for as long as possible. And sleeping. Sleep deprivation is a real thing, and I’ve always edited my films sleeping and dreaming, but even more so now. Editing allows me to dream, to sleep, to drowse. And this is all part of its tapestry.
How do you think your films would be edited differently if you didn’t invite this notion of dreaming and sleeping into your practice? You brought up music, and so many experimental musicians talk about trance-like states in the creation of durational works. How do these things all connect for you, and how did that come into play with Hanabi?
This work is a mad synthesis of them all. I don’t know if I have the distance yet, but it’s what my intuition tells me. It seems very different, but all the obsessions and furies and trance-like states of perception and awareness—it’s all there. When I first learned how to use an analog camera, I realized that because of its limitations and the weight of the equipment on my body, all of it invited me into an entranced state of perception. When I start filming, I’m already kind of editing, and there’s an enlarged mode of attention that’s there.
Hanabi is a 10-year film made from 2016 to 2026, and I was pregnant when I filmed the last rolls in Japan. Because of maternity and the transformation of the world around me, it was an interesting change. For example, I didn’t edit alone. This was a duet between me and Chaghig Arzoumanian, who is a very fine editor with an incredible sense of musicality, time, and rhythm. We spent a few days talking—there were no images, just talking. We were talking about desires, hesitations, the political complexities of the film, the notion of clandestinity, of camouflage, of maternity, of an atomized understanding of the body. It came to a point where she said, “Great, now you can leave.” (laughter). I looked at her and said, “What? I can leave?” “Yes, come back in 10 days.”
Noa at the time was only 6 months old so I needed to pay attention to him. This was the first time that this trust was really reassuring. I left, and when I came back after 10 days, I was astounded by what she pieced together. I looked at her and said, “Chaghig, how could you look inside my mind?” Her answer was very wonderful and sphinx-like. “Don’t you trust your images?” She then said, “Everything you shot was already expressing a clear intention and desire, so I’m just listening to your images.”
She showed me what she edited and it was great, but I felt it was too structured, so I brought some disorder, or an accentuation of rhythms. That’s how we advanced with this complex monster that is Hanabi—it was a tapestry of materials, intuitions, concepts, and ideas that emerged in a polyphonic way. It’s different from my other works—and I think the 10 years were necessary for this tapestry to be made—because more than anything else I’ve done, this was not something I made in any way alone. The other works were made entirely alone, but this one asked for a very particular form of call and response, and that’s why I think the appearance of improvisational music in the film is important. There’s something about the way the film was made that had to do with improvisation—the capacity to listen to another and to respond. And perhaps the response is always partial and incomplete, which means it has to be passed on to further complexify it. That was one of the greatest delights in making this work.
And then of course there were the sonic materials that Nuno Da Luz collected over all these years, and he was so attentive and careful with recording. We also had a kind of duet. I would film and I’d say, “I’m going over there, and I’ll be back.” Synchronicity was never an imperative with Hanabi. We have this word in Portuguese, fareja, when an animal sniffs something out. It’s in the air but you can’t name it, though you sense it from an environment you enter—you can sense that something is expressing itself.
Your older films are made on your own, like you said, but you’re sometimes referencing other artists. With Sacris Pulso you’re interpreting Clarice Lispector, with 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) you’re calling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, and with this new film you’re adapting Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain. There is a sense of collaboration in this way. What was it like to think about Yoko’s work for Hanabi and how did your handling of that material change throughout the 10 years you were working on it? You can always revisit a text and glean something new, of course.
It’s wonderful to go back to Clarice Lispector because when me and Yoko first met in 2018, shortly after I finished reading her journals for the first time—published by the French publishing house Les Éditions des mondes à faire, which means “The Publications of Worlds to Come”—I told her that her text reminded me of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964). For me, it’s one of the most astounding novels written in the last century, in which this woman encounters a cockroach, which is not just a cockroach but something that signifies a complete disintegration of herself. And this is not only due to racial and class issues, but metaphysical questions that permeate Lispector’s oeuvre. What took me to cinema was literature, so what you’re saying is really on point.
Yoko looked at me and laughed. She said very dryly, “Oh, that’s the one where Lispector eats the cockroach at the end.” All of her text is about eating, about injection, about the fear of it, so I thought it was so great that she said that straight away. In her journal, she begins by eating the cockroach. We established this very mysterious connection from the beginning. There was a very significant affinity between the way she considers literature and the way I consider cinema. So from that moment, which appears in the form of emails in the film, I thought it’d be wonderful to make a film based on the places that Yoko traversed.
How did you decide to approach that?
I was thinking of Masao Adachi’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1975) and the works of James Benning. I was thinking of works made mostly by men in the 20th century who considered places as containers of narratives and histories. I wanted, in a way, to honor and break away from that tradition. I wanted to make space for something more complex than this idea of the fixed land in a fixed space and the camera suddenly providing an understanding from its fixed perspective. There’s something of a “masculine mastery” there, which my cinema has always moved in reaction against. From the beginning she asks that the text is never published in Japanese. So right away, the film had this necessity for opacity.
One thing I thought we could do was walk together through these spaces she traversed. We walked and I didn’t film anything, and we did this in 2018. She took me to certain locations in Central Tokyo. “This is where I walked when the earthquake began, this is where I walked when I was this young mother and child.” I said, “Great, now I’m going to reflect on this.” I thought that this was one of the paths we could take, but it seemed too structural, as if I was trying to honor the text too much. I wouldn’t have taken into consideration one of the most astounding qualities of her work, which is this very intense questioning of our so-called “natural” way of perceiving the world. All of her work is about a certain madness—a madness that is a lucidity. This goes back to the idea of ferality.
Over the course of the journal, she creates this para-character in the film, which I only realize later is the narrator, Madame Zombie, who is not me but either Yoko or no one in particular. This mutating character makes me think of Lispector’s cockroach, like someone that leads us through these different sequences which the film uses to create its mise-en-scène. I started thinking of each journal entry conceptually. What is her state of perception? What is she actually considering? And rather than being direct, I’m always being dissonant. She’s speaking about molecules, so we see bodies and fire. She speaks about Madame Zombie, so we’re seeing a city. There’s a semiotic game that the film is playing, which means there’s an interval between what she says, what we hear, and what we see. It’s never loyal. There’s always three layers of meaning you’re having to engage with, which I think honors the complexity of her work—it’s more faithful because it’s less faithful.
You mentioned this notion of “masculine mastery” and how you push back against that. It’s clear from your works, like There is Land (2016), Amérika: Bay of Arrows (2016), The Age of Stone (2013), and even Apiyemiyekî? (2020) that you’re more interested in a sort of excavation. There may be landscapes and histories present, but you’re inviting the viewer to participate with you in what is being uncovered.
There’s this idea that cinema’s role is to reveal a hidden truth that the filmmaker had access to and the audience didn’t. It’s of the Biblical tradition, where I bring you the testament, you listen, and then you will understand. I’ve been bothered by this since I was very little. In a sense, I prefer to say that I don’t know anything more than you. We are, together, tatear as escuras—we’re using our hands to feel through this very thick mist, in which there are only faint glimpses of understanding. That doesn’t mean that the films come with a truth, either; you don’t come as an oracle. But there’s always a desire to honor a partial, collective, and collaborative way of sensing.
A lot of the things we interface with as a child—parent-child relationships, teacher-student relationships—revolve around an authoritarian figure imparting some knowledge that we do not know and presumably cannot access on our own. Do you recall any early experiences where you appreciated knowledge being transmitted in a different way? Maybe this was through group settings or from simply moving through different spaces.
My education system was marked by reforms made during the civil and military dictatorship, which then transitioned into a democracy during the late 1980s, when I was born. I think my allergy to authority comes from this idea that a student’s point of view didn’t matter—you were there as an empty receptacle. Two things come to mind with this anti-authoritarian feeling. I think I was in 6th or 7th grade when this happened. There’s always going to be a teacher who’s bothered by the fact that her students aren’t inebriated by her wisdom. I organized what I called a “silent protest” against my teacher. It involved convincing all 35 students in the class to turn their desks around so that they’d be facing the wall and we’d have our backs to her. She arrived and knew right away, saying, “Ana, out of the class!” (laughter).
Another thing is that my mother always believed that pedagogy was something you built together. So not only was I not grounded for this, but we had an interesting conversation about authority that day. I had broken a pact with the school—why did that happen? Can we talk about it? Cláudia was always incredible in that sense. Every time I had a question she said, “What do you think?” “I don’t know.” But then she’d say, “There’s something there. What do you think?” And this is something I always say to Noa now, which is, “Trust your intuition. What you thought at first will lead you to what you’re looking for.” The education system is meant to have you doubt that gut instinct, that elemental knowledge we have within us.
You’re a teacher, and teaching is a big part of what I do, but I almost don’t want to call it teaching (laughter). When thinking of people like Paulo Freire or Augusto Boal or Ivan Illich, I think that the only way that we can imagine societal transformation is through questioning it and the authoritarianism around knowledge. I think by shifting, ever so slightly, our modes of transmission, you can create other forms of knowledge, and that’s what I try to do in cinema.
Earlier you mentioned how you came to cinema through literature, and I’m wondering if that’s related to this too.
With literature, something that comes to mind is the idea of reading aloud. One of the most wonderful and important books I read when I was young, because it was part of the curriculum, was João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956). It’s a book about a jagunço, who were these people hired by colonels to work in the colonial backlands. He travels through the Midwest of Brazil, through Minas Gerais, and through listening to how people speak, he annotates their speech in literary form. It’s one of the most astounding novels about orality, on the dictums and modes and forms and sing-songs that people speak in, and it creates this multifaceted portrait of the Brazilian Midwest and all its histories.
At first, I grabbed his book and thought, I can’t read this—I don’t know how to read this. I could only access it when I started reading it aloud. When I did that, I started hearing the dictums, the modes, and the forms I’d heard from a distant relative, or from a stranger at a bus station. When I first showed Hanabi to Yoko Hayasuke—this was in 2022, when it was just a first draft—she said something that I can never forget. “I understand you have a great challenge on your hands. I would ask that you don’t let me speak alone in this film, that you create a dialogue between the literary and oral traditions.” By bridging these two traditions, I’m trying to turn documentary on its head. Documentaries are often based on this fetish of the testimony, like, “Oh, look at these people and what they’re going through.” There is a false empathy that documentary cinema has been engaged with for so long. I want to go against this by saying, “Well, they’re saying this, and someone else is saying that.” You have to complexify what’s being said, and because there’s no sync sound, the idea of truth and veracity is further removed. Yoko’s voice is rendered in this way where you start doubting the narrator’s humanity.
Do you mind talking about working with Nuno Da Luz on the sound? I’m really excited that his work on this film is going to be released by purge.xxx. I’ve been in love with that label for a long time and interviewed the guy behind it, Stanley Schtinter, for The Wire [Issue 450]. How did you two embody everything that you were talking about in your collaboration with Yoko?
To speak about my long-standing collaboration with Nuno is to speak about life: he is my partner and the father of our child. We came together many years ago, working with a collective called COYOTE. It was formed in a dissonant way, with and in friction to a group of studies led by the French philosopher Bruno Latour and his theories about the “Parliament of Things.” It still haunts the works that me and Nuno Da Luz create.
When I began thinking of Hanabi many years ago, I told Nuno that the film was going to involve this challenge of listening. We had to think acoustically about the non-visible, which we doubt because we can’t see its materiality. Straight away he responded with a series of microphones—hydrophones, geophones—that amplified different sounds, be they seismic waves or VLFs (very low frequencies). We’d be together for encounters or interviews or conversations, and then he’d say, “Okay, I need to record sound.” What’s always united Nuno and I is this huge preoccupation with affect and its micropolitical dimensions. And this is not affect in terms of tenderness, but to be affected by something. The macropolitical is there, but if we don’t take the micropolitical dimensions seriously, there’s no way that change can be invited.
The film transformed into something more complicated when we started editing. There was a call and response between all four of us—Chaghig, myself, Nuno, and Olivier Guillaume, who’s the mixer who also worked on It is Night in America. This film also existed as an installation in Palais de Tokyo. We had 10 different speakers and you’d go from the buzzing of bees to the ticking of Geiger counters; you could walk through this space, this environment. It echoed Nuno’s practice, which is about the politics of noise and ecology. And after all these years of dreaming up a common work, Hanabi is a mutated film made of different shorts and installations, and at the core of it is this collaboration with Nuno. Even the album we used for Hanabi, KETU (2022), was because he’d already worked with Pedro Sousa, a wonderful Portuguese saxophonist.
I don’t have any more questions but is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?
Your questions were so great. It was so great to move through these different time periods and films. Since we spoke about purge and Stanley, I think it’s good to note that what will be released on the LP—and this was Nuno’s proposition—is a rendering of the film with all the recordings but without the soundtrack (laughter).
I love that.
This was Nuno’s way of saying, well, this film was made by colliding two forms of music—there’s the improvisational music that accompanies us through the film, and then the recordings. The LP will just be these recordings, with all of their diversities and Nuno’s tape manipulations. It’s interesting to think of the invisible film that’s in this record.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I really doubt the idea of the self. Increasingly, I’m less sure that the self is an entity that holds together as one thing. I believe, rather, that the self is an enmesh of hauntings—an enmesh of different forms of movement. In that sense, a lot of what I do is based on going against the idea of the self. And by doing this, you can have a great deal of love for all of it.
Because there’s a distancing?
Because it’s no longer one thing. If you go into any kind of somatic experience, of trance or hypnosis or meditation, it very quickly feels like the contours of the self dissolve. And when that happens, there’s a radical form of loving that happens—a love for the dispersed self.
What does that look like? And why is it radical?
Radical in terms of its etymology: “root.” I’m not interested in rooting as something pure, as something that has essence; I’m interested in the way it connects in arborescent ways, how it allows for different connections between the space above and the space below, between the earth and the air and the other elements that traverse it. It’s radical because the self is this arborescence—arborescência. And I think it goes back to the first question you posed about ancestry and lineage. What I love about the self is everything that exceeds it. The self is a kind of medium, a passage, a blow of the wind into other arborescences. This idea of the contained self is the malaise of modernity. It’s this idea of a self-contained, self-sufficient heroic figure, which has been insisted upon since Greek antiquity, and it continues to be an empty model for an imaginary West that has never been. To go against this heroic narrative tradition is to think of a more feral, entangled, complex, and humbling way of inhabiting these bodies we call our own.
Ana Vaz’s new feature film, Hanabi, premieres at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.
Thank you for reading the 69th issue of Film Show. Embrace ferality.
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