by Fernanda Sales Rocha Santos*
Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon
Organized by Elcio Basilio
Before turning into a medium-length film, Dazed Flesh (Vaga Carne, Grace Passô and Ricardo Alves Jr.) was an important play performed numerous times from 2016 to 2018, written, directed, and acted by Grace Passô. Both the play and its playwright won a series of awards and are fundamental to understanding the Brazilian contemporary theater scene.
Grace Passô is a Brazilian playwright, actress, and director. Passô was a member of the theater group Espanca!, from Minas Gerais, and is one of the most innovative voices in contemporary Brazilian dramaturgy. In Cinema, Grace Passô acted in recent Brazilian films, such as In The Heart of The World (No Coração do Mundo, Gabriel Martins and Maurílio Martins, 2019), Long Way Home (Temporada, André Novais, 2018), and Paris Square (Praça Paris, Lúcia Murat, 2017). Dazed Flesh is her first direction in cinema.
With a poetic and performative appeal, the play is a monologue that revolves around the tension between a voice that occupies bodies and objects and a particular woman’s body. This audible but invisible character explores the interiority of this woman in order to reveal her specificities. In Grace’s performance, there is an ontology of being as she explores in her own body the disjunction between gesture and speech, intention and tone, flesh and voice.
Defined as a transcription of the theatrical piece, the movie broadens the play’s original meanings by using audiovisual resources and creating what I dare call spaces of possibility of the play’s language and discourse. The very corporeal performance faced the challenge of transforming itself into a cinematic experience. To achieve this goal, however, Grace and Alves Jr. did not give up theater space: Grace’s images are mostly on stage and are switched with an audience composed by some spectators whose, as Grace Passô, are black. The voice, the protagonist, is in Grace’s mouth, but here, in the audiovisual work, it is also present through the voice-over multiple uses.
The movie starts in the dark, as the play does. There’s a black screen on which Grace Passô’s voice-over enunciates its presence by saying “voices exist”. The voice-over usage enables a sound spatialization that discloses a new aspect of that ghostly character: the fact that the voice can be next to us and, perhaps, even inside us, the spectators. The sound design brings us the feeling that the voice is going from side to side, surrounding us, and at any moment it will enter our bodies as it entered Grace’s. This contributes to a sensory immersion, a haptic perception added to the film. In Laura Marks terms (2000), I can say that it makes us experience the movie as a physical and multi-sensory embodiment. Lúcia Nagib, in her studies on Intermediality (Lúcia Nagib 2014) emphasizes the inventive and transgressive nature that the intermedial element alone can generate in a film. And this is the case here, when the sensitivity that was achieved by the physical presence of the actress, in the stage play, is now achieved by sound and image editing.
By asserting that voices are things that plan to incorporate the beings and objects, we hear – still glancing at the black screen – that “voracious voices for the bodies exist.” After hearing this introduction dominated by sound, it is impossible not to think in the discursive dimension of the affirmation of this invisible character. It is impossible not to think about the power of the discourses, points of view, opinions, and how they embody everything. The movie does not approach one or more speeches. Instead, it presents the field of the speeches and discourses’ possibilities. And this field of possibility, here, is the black woman’s body.
This woman’s body – black, fat, and relatively young – is something incomprehensible for the voice that says: “Who are you, woman? The duck, the mustard, the stalactites, the plane’s propeller I understood immediately when I got in, but you…”. From my point of view, the voice’s movement and the body’s exploration bring the chance of thinking in black women as a complex space to be found, to be discovered by her own. The black woman’s body can be seen as a space of possibility. At the same time, it shows the fight – a bloody fight – so that this body can try to acquire its own voice. Thus, the film discourse draws us to reflect upon the essential and famous Simone Beauvoir’s quote “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir 1956), and also to Neusa Santos Souza’s sophisticated elaboration of the need to become a black person in Brazil (Souza 1983). We have a come-to-be identity (of gender and race) at the junction between body and voice, which does not seem to have a positive outcome in the film. The voice says that the woman “would like to say that”. Yet, Grace’s mouth moves but no voice comes out. It is a strong and anguished scene. The impossibility of the voice coming out contrasts with another female character that sings the Brazilian Nelson Cavaquinho’s song “Juízo Final ”. The lyrics says that “The sun will shine again”. Unlike the play, in which the song does not exist, the movie brings a glimpse of hope. In its meaning and discourse, the film works to show the black woman’s body occupied by this voice as a place of fear, fight, fun, tension, death, hope, transcendence; a place of possibility.
While exploring the body of this black woman on stage, the voice tests movements, vocalizations, and asks the audience for words to fill in that body. The audience in the movie is represented by people from Minas Gerais such as André Novais, Aline Vila Real, Zora Santos, Dona Jandira (who sings the song), among others. The image of these people, mostly in silence, forms alterity to the verbal body occupied by the voice. This alterity, however, promotes a kind of break in Grace’s flow and instigates a reflection upon the black bodies that occupy that particular space. The choice of inserting these people – who are absent in the theatrical play – opens a place for semantic interpretations regarding the presence of black bodies on screen/ on stage. In that space, the black bodies are in the audience and on the stage. They see and are seen. The black body is the subject of the gaze and, at the same time, its object. The body is a space to be invaded, occupied, and uncovered by voices, and, at the same time, is the body that occupies the spaces (the stage and the audience).
As a work dominated by the poetic regime – as Rancière postulated (Rancière, 2005) – the film also reflects its own media, as it depicts the theater within the film. This intermedial reference to the stage and audience shows us a space of possibility both for the black bodies that occupy it and for the audiovisual language that, such as the voice in Grace’s body, explores that space. Moving between poetry, theatre, and cinema, the film by Passô and Alves Jr. anticipates a kind of language that would become commonplace in 2020 and 2021, pandemic years: experimental films for dramaturgy and plays that could not be premiered in person. Another contemporary feature that can be noted is a series of voices, such as the deputy Mariele Franco, the activist Angela Davis and the former president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff. These voices freely echo over the black screen credits connecting, even more, the audiovisual work with the Brazilian “here and now” emergencies and making us reflect upon the voices that occupy us.
References
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1956. The Second Sex. Great Britain: Lowe and Brydone.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and The Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nagib, Lúcia. 2014. “Politics of impurity”. In: Impure cinema: intermedial and intercultural approaches to film, p. 21-39. London: Bloomsbury.
Passô, Grace. 2018. Vaga carne. Belo Horizonte: Editora Javali.
Rancière, Jacques. 2005. A partilha do sensível. São Paulo: EXO experimental org.; Ed. 34.
Souza, Neusa Santos. 1983. Tornar-se Negro ou as As Vissicitudes da Identidade do Negro Brasileiro em Ascensão Social. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Graal.
*Fernanda Sales Rocha Santos is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate Program in Media and Audiovisual Processes of the School of Communications and Arts (ECA), University of São Paulo (USP). She holds an M.A. from the same program with the funding of Fapesp. Her research topics involve relations between genders, realism, and intermediality. In addition to being a researcher, she is a playwright and audiovisual screenwriter.