MARCIUS GALAN

Like the yellow bands of his sculptures, the hook in The View from The Widow, the film by Marcius Galan in collaboration with Carlos Issa and Newton Leitão, is one of those architectural elements which, in losing the function it has always been assigned, also loses some of its meanings while reinforcing others. In the film, it is a solitary theatrical character with a low voice who is drawn to conversation by its memories and deliriums. It lies alone, surrounded by a future that has been abandoned. The object of its obsession is a mobile by Alexander Calder, which it sustained for years in a servile and loving way, and is no longer there (will it return?). A mirage remains, perhaps, the work of old age or retirement.

Black Widow, a sculpture by Alexander Calder, was fundamental to abstract art in Brazil. It was one of the works that encouraged Brazilian artists to abandon more anecdotal themes and dive into perceptive studies of geometric abstraction. The combination of Calder’s piece with the pioneering design of the São Paulo offices of the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil [Institute of Architects of Brazil – IAB-SP], coordinated by architects Miguel Forte, Rino Levi, and Abelardo de Souza, materialises the constructive effort that would animate visual creation in the following decade.

This onslaught was the cultural side of a modernising project, typical of the postwar period, which aimed to overcome Brazil’s backwardness. The debate about what needed to be done for a new insertion of Brazil into an international trade system was intensely contested. It was a rich debate that enlivened scientific, technological, and industrial production, social thought, and the arts. In 1964, that debate came to a standstill and gave way to a conservative, elitist, and authoritarian kind of modernisation. Celso Furtado, one of Brazil’s brightest thinkers of the time, when theorising underdevelopment, realised that the local elites were born modern, and when trying to modernise, always restored backwardness in a more complex way. Thus, social violence was not a by-product of an atavistic past, but a modern way for society to insert itself internationally.

The Black Widow was one of the silent characters in this debate. It was first shown in Brazil in 1948. Shortly after, in gratitude for the efforts of the Brazilian architects in putting on the exhibition and vitalising the artform, Calder donated it to the IAB. The Widow remained in the building until 2017, when it was removed.

Since then, that sculpture, conceived in the United States, saw significant changes: the optimism of the 1950s waned with the dictatorship, but it witnessed heated debates. It was reborn with the “Diretas Já” movement, which was defeated, but won us the New Republic and new hopes. These took different forms until they were fatally wounded with the violent deposition of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016, almost the same time as Calder’s mobile left the IAB.

Throughout this period, if we take into account the lines the objects say in the film, the Black Widowlived pleasantly, without looking through the window or paying attention to the noise coming from the street. The sculpture is formed of a chain of linear wires with metal paddles attached to their ends. These wire arms swing and rotate in all directions when hung from a hook, to quote the beautiful metaphor recalled in the film. Owner of itself, in control of the action, the Widow danced in different directions, triggering new satisfying and pleasurable discoveries when responding to the touches of the atmosphere, objects, and people. In its sensuality, it made Mário Pedrosa recall music and dance. In the film, however, the hook speaks like somebody who misses sex.

Its spiralling was self-referring, made of lasting, carnal love. The widow who speaks in her delusions remembers sensory pleasures: light, colour, touch, textures, temperature. Deliriously, she asks the hook to imagine if everyone could touch her while she was hanging there, orgiastically.

Therefore, the nostalgia of Jonathan Gall’s deep voice is of a private nature, urgent, but private, which makes it no small thing. Love turns the grapnel dependent on the sculpture’s delicate dance and makes it live prostrated without it. The piece left over cannot think about life from then on. It is melancholically trapped in a past where even the falls, the stumbles are idealised. In fact, the delight we feel before a mobile by Calder has a domestic nature. He is an artist who deals with playful joys, utopias, not conflicts. Perhaps because of this, the melancholy expressed in the film’s dialogues is private. The hook survives the pain of living only by suffering from affective dependence.

The film, in turn, makes us see something bigger. The lack recalls a description by the singer and composer Chico Buarque of this uncontrollable, unpronounceable desire in his song O que será: ‘E que me faz mendigo, me faz suplicar; O que não tem medida, nem nunca terá; O que não tem remédio, nem nunca terá; O que não tem receita’.[1] At the time, the song, in addition to expressing an uncontrollable interpersonal desire, also spoke of the frustration of those who sought to change their lives faced with the narrow limits imposed by the civic-business-military dictatorship. Brazil is experiencing a similar moment, of a shortening of our historical expectations.

The instrumental reason that governs international trade, which increases dividends and imposes austerity on the most vulnerable part of the Brazilian population, is refractory to the most intimate pleasures. Everything must serve a purpose: to meet the expectations of capital. The extreme neoliberal right wants to knock down our doors, tell us how to live, how much we should work, and for whom. Today, even more so than the smallest joys, we understand the right to do nothing as the result of historical struggles. Even the sadness we feel for no longer being able to see the widow dancing.

[1] Chico Buarque de Hollanda in the song O que será (À flor da pele). Originally recorded in 1976, for the soundtrack to the film Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, by Bruno Barreto.