2022 ‘Onde Fica Esta Rua? ou Sem Antes Nem Depois’ Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata
From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963.
Where Is This Street? or With no Before and After, Où est cette rue ?, 이 거리는 어디에 있나요?
Basically a city symphony film, but shot during the pandemic, so there are hardly any people in it. Eventually we start seeing faces in tree trunks and the likes, or the mind was playing tricks on me.
The cinematographers are the stars here, and some of the editing choices really appealed to me. There soundtrack is also strong, but this was ultimately a bit too monotonous for my taste. I kept hoping for the film to build to something a bit more dynamic, but it was not to be. Lovely final sequence though. Catch it on a big screen if you can, I don’t think this would play very well if viewed on a streaming service.
At times an architecture film, a nature film, an ethnographic film, a travelogue, and some combination of those forms, Where Is This Street? or With No Before or After is a study of human spaces once the humans have gone. Human presence is always felt—either heard, like the music we hear playing in nightclubs and the footsteps coming from just outside the frame, or seen, like the shadows that dance around various shots—and the film always bristles with life, implying vibrancy and humanity through omission and never coming off as academic. The film takes The Green Years as a starting point for its exploration of Lisbon but isn't tethered to that film: on the one hand, every shot of Where…
"Reverent and rigid cinephiles, the structural thread for this tossed-off pandemic film is that the duo’s 16mm camera will follow the locations of Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years (1963) scene by scene. It will seem to do this, to the uninitiated, as a strict game, but the progression is in fact rather loose: there is choreography, but it still has to be interpreted. The images from Rocha’s film that have the strongest sense of composition, such as a gutter-view window looking onto a street, or a long-shot summation of an unraveling, muddied relationship, are not recreated. Instead, each scene is traveled through, in a closed-off, though spontaneously lensed and edited, recreation." ✏️Michael Scoular
Full Review at In Review Online, part of Locarno Film Festival 2022 — Dispatch 1
EXPOSURE AND EXPLOITATION OF A MINOR IN PORN MATERIAL:
In July 2016, João Pedro Rodrigues held a public exhibition of his work at Galeria Solar (Porto) where he included the unedited audition recording of 17-year-old actor Ricardo Meneses masturbating and ejaculating on camera. Fact.
A few weeks ago I read here a dramatic testimony from a supposed actor who auditioned for the same film O Fantasma by João Pedro Rodrigues. In the testimony, he claimed to have contacted every newspaper or film-related organization without ever getting a response. His testimony mentions the public exhibition of that pornographic recording of Ricardo Meneses. He also mentions that the film auditions were heavy in terms of physical and emotional exposure, and in his…
Not a film about people watching so much as about the physical environment and how it guides our view and frames our social perspective. A pandemic film, too, in its emphasis on distance and absence and traces of past inhabitance. The violin and cello score is doing so much work here, giving strong and varied narrative cues, but here that sense of narrative is not directly reflected on screen, suggested only in bits and pieces giving the sense of some mystery at work. What’s shown is almost entirely mundane but between the scoring and some other inventive moves—images of severed hands and legs at the beginning of the film, a black and white musical interlude, clips from a Paulo Rocha…
useless si t’as pas vu l’original de Pedro Rocha mais surtout useless tout court. autant voir un reportage qui te montre la ville avant/après
après c’est clair que pour tous les portugais (ou autre) ayant grandi en appréciant ce film, celui-ci apparaît comme une pilule nostalgique agréable et tendre, mais bon pô pour moi
Were it not for the filmmaker's infrequent but disruptive metatextual intrusions (a rather big mistake, I think), I would've loved this film without reservation. Nevertheless, I found it and its central conceit quite moving; even just its textural/atmospheric qualities would have been enough to carry me towards admiration.
But slightly above that baseline, it provides a powerful statement on our gut-response to a moving camera frame, and the way that motion compels us towards finding intention through the eye of the filmmaker. The shot movements are completely divorced from their original intended subject (for the record, I have not seen The Green Years), so while purpose merely haunts like a specter, it ultimately matters not: we still search for meaning in the images. So plaintive, so transfixing.
