João Moreira Salles talks about ‘Santiago’ – part IV

João Moreira Salles is a Brazilian documentarian and president of the Instituto Moreira Salles. In 2006, he founded the magazine piauí. He has also taught courses on documentary at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Princeton University.

In 1992 he began shooting a film about Santiago, the butler in his childhood home who left an indelible mark upon the family. Santiago was an educated man who, in addition to his work, produced some 60,000 pages of stories documenting his surroundings as well as tales of aristocratic lifestyles, including that of the house in which he himself served.

Through his personal voice-over, Salles sheds light on his family and childhood, and on the reasons why the film took 13 years to complete. The result is an elegant mosaic with two parallel narratives, dealing with universal topics such as memories, identity, and documentary filmmaking. *

To view an extract of the film please click here.

This entry is part of a series of edited transcripts of João Moreira Salles’ Masterclass in Doc Montevideo 2011, hosted by Noe Mendelle.

*Unknown author.

Santiago and Memory

The film is very close to that sensation of celebrating nostalgia, which I think of as being the conservative idea that the past is better than the present, and that one needs to recover the past, which is impossible, so all that’s left is sadness and melancholy of the time that went past and the feeling you can’t invest in the present. From that you get the happiness of the past too. Nostalgia is necessarily melancholic and conservative. The past is better than the present and therefore, sometimes, better than the future… And I didn’t want to convey that in the film.

So I think the sound design would have had that connotation. I think beyond that, there’s also the need to say the following; past is irrecoverable and what you’re watching now, these images, are images that are missing an essential component, which is live sound. The shouting of those children, the affectionate word, the affection between my mother and my brother, my father playing with him… all of that is gone. If you put a soundtrack on it, the feeling that there’s something missing is lost. And this idea, that time produces a non-material effect is an idea that became very important at the time of filming. Why was that idea so important? Because it was Santiago’s idea. Santiago said: ‘The past passes. Things go past. Things are lost.’ What to do in face of that? Santiago found a way, through his lists and his imagination, by recovering that past by naming those people in the lists; by speaking about them and by speaking to them; by saying their names out loud it was as if they existed again, through memory.

Santiago and his lists

It’s a Greek idea, because their biggest fear was to be forgotten. The hero went to the battle and it was important there was a poet to sing about his bravery in the battlefield, because he would always be alive in the poet’s song. The curse is to be forgotten. That’s why the river that flows in Greek mythology is the river of oblivion, when you die. Santiago had that idea very much alive in him. To remember, sing, name, and say these names to keep them alive.

But there are things that go missing. And in the case of this film, things went missing. We, Video Filmes, my production company, used to be in a part of Rio de Janeiro when I made the film. Thirteen years later we had moved somewhere else in Rio and, during the moving, some things went missing, among them some of ‘Santiago’s’ audio tracks. At the end of the movie, you can see scenes of Santiago talking with no sound, and no music either. Again, it was an attempt to show that this was the subject; time. Time loses things. And whatever Santiago said in that moment, I will never know, because it’s lost. And that is included in the film.

When we started editing again, myself, Escorel and Lívia made the decision to include all those very concrete accidents in the film. If we have sound but the image is lost, let’s use the sound and not the image. Leave it all black. If there’s image but the sound is lost, let’s use the image without the sound, because the history of the footage is in those mistakes, in what the footage has left behind, because it got lost in time and because time went past. So in that scene you can’t hear the noises of the house; the sonority of that house doesn’t exist. Any attempt to create sound for it, would be, in fact, violent in relation to what I was trying to say with this film.

Click on the links to read part I, part II, part III or part V.

Filed under: Masterclasses, Brazil, Doc Montevideo, João Moreira Salles, Masterclasses, piauí, Santiago

João Moreira Salles talks about ‘Santiago’ – part III

João Moreira Salles is a Brazilian documentarian and president of the Instituto Moreira Salles. In 2006, he founded the magazine piauí. He has also taught courses on documentary at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Princeton University.In 1992 he began shooting a film about Santiago, the butler in his childhood home who left an indelible mark upon the family. Santiago was an educated man who, in addition to his work, produced some 60,000 pages of stories documenting his surroundings as well as tales of aristocratic lifestyles, including that of the house in which he himself served.

Through his personal voice-over, Salles sheds light on his family and childhood, and on the reasons why the film took 13 years to complete. The result is an elegant mosaic with two parallel narratives, dealing with universal topics such as memories, identity, and documentary filmmaking.*

To view an extract of the film please click here.

This entry is part of a series of edited transcripts of João Moreira Salles’ Masterclass in Doc Montevideo 2011, hosted by Noe Mendelle.

*Unknown author.

Santiago’s freedom and the concept behind the film

This excerpt follows Noe Mendelle’s remark on this scene, in which she asks João if he thinks this was the only moment of the film where Santiago exercised his freedom.

Santiago told me once: ‘I find my hands very beautiful and I remember making these gestures as a child, like an exercise, whilst listening to Bach.’ And he asked me to do that in the film. So you’re right when you say that maybe that is one of the only moments in the film in which he’s exercising his freedom. To be able to do what he wanted to and be proud of it to the point he wanted it to be filmed. And he’s absolutely free and happy doing it, because it’s important for him and it’s beautiful.

When it came to editing, I had a discussion with Eduardo Escorel and with another editor, Lívia. There was three generations in the edit suite. Lívia was 22, 23 years old, I was 40 something and Escorel was 60 something. And as I mentioned yesterday, this film was edited without any expectations. Not only expectations about the audience, which didn’t even cross my mind, but any expectations that this was going to be a film.  It was something made for me, so everything was allowed. We didn’t worry about it being too long or too short, if it’s beautiful and we want to look at it, let’s leave it, because no one is going to judge it.  It’s not a rhetoric film and, I know a lot of people say they made a personal project but this was specifically and truly a very personal project. And no one remembered it existed and there was no pretension to transform it into a film.

So everything was allowed. There was no kind of thoughts asking ‘What about the audience?’

So that specific scene was left long, and Escorel said: ‘But that’s too long!’ and I said: ‘That is a little too long.’ And Lívia, who was the most orthodox and the bravest, said: ‘It’s too short! Leave it for longer!’ She ended up being the radical element in our edit. And it stayed that long because it’s the time he takes… it’s all there is in the film, there’s no more than that. And it lasted for as long as he wanted to show us his hands. So what he had to show us is all in the film, in its entirety, just like a present he gave us. There is no other interpretation beyond that, but I think that you’re right, it is a moment of absolute freedom in which Santiago is not being directed, in fact, the camera is only observing what he chose to show us. And all of it was his choice, including the frame. He said: ‘I don’t want my face in it; I only want my hands, like two ballerinas.’ So we closed in and got a black backdrop in front of him, and he would pass his hands in front of it and do it… There isn’t a place for it either. There’s no geographical place, it breaks from the prison of the apartment, it breaks free from the rigidness of the frame. It breaks from…

Noe Mendelle: Even the hands get out of frame.

João Salles: And the hands break free from the frame too. And they come back when he and Bach’s music decide to give the hands back to the frame. So, you’re right, I’d never thought about it like that but it’s a moment in which Santiago exercises his freedom, right in front of the tyranny of filmmaking.

Noe Mendelle: But you decided to shoot it statically. The frame doesn’t go looking for the hands, it stays put.

João Salles: It stays put.

Noe Mendelle: And you have, there is some sort of respect for these hands that move out of frame.

João Salles: Yes, there is respect in a general sense.

Noe Mendelle: Did you get more than one take?

João Salles: No, no. Everything in that scene, everything you see it’s all that was filmed. There’s no before or after. If I had more I have the feeling that Lívia would have convinced us to put it in. Now, the rigidness of the shot is something that is present in the whole film. I mean, it was a very pretentious film. The original idea was very pretentious. And what was the original idea? Santiago represents to me memory. That is, a sort of vertical axis, fixed on the ground, without moving, except in my imagination. The house, that I filmed empty, was a house that, at that time, for me, only symbolized a place. It didn’t symbolize history anymore, because history had abandoned that house. My family had left it and somehow it lost all its purpose, because times were changing. It was impossible to have such a big house so close to the millennium. This was a house built at the start of the 50’s, when Rio de Janeiro was another city. It was too big a house, too pompous for the ‘90’s. The house was built when Rio de Janeiro was still Brazil’s capital. My dad had been the State Minister and he was Joselino’s colleague. So this house was a centre for Rio de Janeiro’s political life.

Now, at the time of filming, Rio de Janeiro wasn’t the capital anymore; it had been taken over by violence. It lost its consciousness, it didn’t know what it was anymore, and it didn’t reinvent itself… so the city lost its centrality. Brasilia was now the capital; São Paulo was the financial capital. Rio de Janeiro was a memory of something that didn’t exist anymore. And that house represented all of that, for me, a drifting place, without history’s courage, as if it had been ditched by history and it was adrift in the sea. Therefore, because it was pure geography without history’s anchor, the scenes in the house are all moving, just like anything that doesn’t have an anchor.

Santiago is pure memory, not geography anymore, because Rio was not important to me then, the city didn’t matter anymore, what mattered was the verticality of memory and time. So, everything that happened in Santiago’s house was filmed statically. And all the movement in it is the movement of imagination. In the house, all empty, everything is moving because the imagination has left, it was over. Its purpose is over, its history was over, and the idea was over too, the idea that ended on the cutting room floor… because it was pretentious. That was the idea; that empty place was to be filled by Santiago’s memories. I didn’t have to go anywhere to travel in time. The house was sliding but it couldn’t find rest in reason, or a place where it could feel at ease, anchored or stopped. So that was the big opposition of the film. It’s static when you’re watching Santiago, in constant movement when you’re inside the house.

Click on the links to read part I, part II, part IV or part V.

Filed under: Masterclasses, Brazil, Doc Montevideo, João Moreira Salles, Masterclasses, piauí, Santiago

João Moreira Salles talks about ‘Santiago’ – part II

João Moreira Salles is a Brazilian documentarian and president of the Instituto Moreira Salles. In 2006, he founded the magazine piauí. He has also taught courses on documentary at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Princeton University.In 1992 he began shooting a film about Santiago, the butler in his childhood home who left an indelible mark upon the family. Santiago was an educated man who, in addition to his work, produced some 60,000 pages of stories documenting his surroundings as well as tales of aristocratic lifestyles, including that of the house in which he himself served.

Through his personal voice-over, Salles sheds light on his family and childhood, and on the reasons why the film took 13 years to complete. The result is an elegant mosaic with two parallel narratives, dealing with universal topics such as memories, identity, and documentary filmmaking.*

To view an extract of the film please click here.

This entry is part of a series of edited transcripts of João Moreira Salles’ Masterclass in Doc Montevideo 2011, hosted by Noe Mendelle.

*Unknown author.

The film became possible when I realised that these off screen moments were essential for the film

13 years later, when I got back to the edit suite I asked for the transcripts, but these only had information about the actual shots. There wasn’t a single sentence about what came before or after, so I had no information on all the off-screen conversations that took place. I started looking at what came before and after the planned shots and realised that what explained the artificiality in the film was outside of these shots. And the film became possible when I realised that these off screen moments were essential for the film. The off screen that I didn’t control or what I thought I didn’t need to control. And those were my conversations with him, that in the end were the things that weren’t the object of my obsession with control, of the obsession with the aesthetics…

Noe Mendelle: But the difference between these shots seems to me to be in relation to you, not in relation to him.

João Salles: Yes, of course!

Noe Mendelle: He is the same either in or out of the shot, you are the one that changes…

João Salles: Yes, I was the one who changed once I was off screen. And that first edit didn’t have that. And then I started to listen, when I started editing again, to all of the audiotapes, before the beginning of the shot and after. And I also listened to the off cuts of the film which changed my perspective.

Click on the links to read part I or part III.

Santiago in his living room

Filed under: Masterclasses, Brazil, Doc Montevideo, João Moreira Salles, Masterclasses, piauí, Santiago