Quizá podamos pensar que en la diversidad de pensamientos, opciones de vida, maneras diferentes de hacer, sentir, actuar y pensar del mundo contemporáneo el arte se esté constituyendo en las comunidades y sujetos étnicos en una acto decolonial que interpela, increpa y pone en cuestión las narrativas de exclusión y marginalización.
—Adolfo Albán
Image production and circulation permeate the organization of the contemporary world and the forms of its reality entirely. With digital technology’s consolidation and dissemination, this article engages with the debate surrounding the appropriation and uses of the technical objects that shape that universe. Far from distancing technology and its artifacts as predatory machines of capitalism in its current state, we must ask ourselves how to emancipate them for common use and for the actions that not only resist predation but advocate for another world.
Thus, we enquire whether cinema could be one of these technologies, capable of being appropriated and emancipated in favor of decolonial thinking, critical of the residual violence and injustices of coloniality, but also proactive in fostering a structural societal transformation. Despite the common perception that associates cinema with hyperbolic productions, the popularization of artifacts resulting from digital technology has brought changes in habits, consumption, and ways of using cinematic tools. Hence, such manifestations reinforce the need to rethink hegemonic means and circuits of film production and circulation, as well as the ways of viewing and perceiving such productions. What is produced in the peripheries, in indigenous communities, in schools, and how and where films are viewed are questions that lead us to conceive of cinema as an instrument capable of affirming different ways of life, educational spaces, as well as inventing realities and common worlds where alterities meet and perform.
Our proposition herein is to think of cinema as a cosmopoetic tool for the invention of the common, as such, linking it to the critical endeavour led by the decolonial option. Our hypothesis is that the image is the place of conjugation of the sensible and the intelligible, but it can also be invested with imaginary virtualities originating from the reserve of imagination of those who seek to exist and re-exist amidst the onslaughts of capital. This hypothesis also refers to education in its capacity to transform, resisting its instrumentalization by market ideology with a view to turning every human being into capital or a human resource. We believe that cinema allows us to think about bodies as it stages them in a state of presence, of suspended time, unfolding in subjects’ sensitive faculties to recognize themselves and others, enabling a true cultural exchange. Cinema primarily invests in sensitivities, and then in reason—a formula we adopt for didactic purposes.
Since what came to be known as the discovery of the Americas, a “world-system” (Wallerstein, 1980) has been established, based on a Eurocentric reference, operating from a division between rich countries and poor countries (later to be replaced by “developing countries”) and establishing a kind of eternal European supremacy in political, economic, social, racial, technological, ideological terms, etc. Thus, not only modern institutions but also thought itself are built and developed around this “ground zero”, neutral, absolute, Eurocentric, that is, “the ground of absolute epistemological beginning, but also of economic and social control over the world” (Castro-Gómez, 2005, p. 25, all translations are ours). On this ground zero, which is based on its own unquestionability, Stam and Shohat (2006, p. 21) state that Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into “the West and the rest”, organizing language into binary hierarchies that benefit Europe. Homi Bhabha (2007) also criticizes the binary structure and seeks, from a post-colonial perspective, to review nationalist pedagogies that observe the world within a binary opposition and, further, to resist the search for holistic forms for social explanations. For the author, the post-colonial perspective “forces the recognition of more complex cultural and political borders that exist at the apex of these often-opposing political spheres.” (Bhabha, 2007, p. 241-242) Hence,
Post-colonial theorists initiated a fundamental critique of the experience and logic of colonialism and imperialism, in a quest to restore […] the voice, experience, identity, and history of the subaltern, while also claiming the importance of peripheral localities (Cuevas Marín, 2013, p. 95).
However, some authors connected to decolonial thinking—which began in the 1990s—such as Walter Mignolo (1998), question the “translation” of these theses connected to cultural, post-colonial, and subaltern studies to studies and analyses in Latin America. According to Mignolo, these studies fail to radically break away from Eurocentric thinking. Faced with this limitation, the Modernity/Coloniality (M/C) Group emerged at the end of the 1990s, comprising Latin American intellectuals who, according to Luciana Ballestrin, “initiated a fundamental epistemological movement for the critical and utopian renewal of social sciences in Latin America in the twenty-first century: the radicalization of the post-colonial argument on the continent through the notion of a ‘decolonial turn’.” (2013, p. 89)
The “decolonial turn” notion was developed by Nelson Maldonado-Torres to situate a movement of theoretical and practical, political and epistemological resistance to the logic of modernity/coloniality (Ballestrin, 2013, p. 105). This turn, therefore, points to a possibility of updating the critical tradition of thought in Latin America—and for Latin America—and, consequently, the problematization of specific post-colonial issues (as a historical moment) experienced on the continent. Furthermore, the thought that emerges from the notion of decoloniality contributes to important historical reinterpretations and the recovery of the construction of individual or collective identity and memory.
Coloniality is identified through a triple dimension: power, knowledge, and being (Ballestrin, 2013, p. 100). The coloniality of power is the most evident, permeating all domains of society, configuring itself as a complex structure of controls, as Mignolo points out (Cf. Ballestrin, 2013, p. 100): control of the economy, authority, nature and natural resources, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge. The coloniality of knowledge problematizes the relationship that modern epistemology established between geohistorical locations and knowledge production. Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) asserts that the coloniality of being is “a concept that attempts to capture how the colonial act presents itself in the order of language and in the lived experience of subjects” (2007, p. 154), that is, it acts in discursive subjectivity.
In the wake of decolonial thought that articulates the critique of coloniality, Catherine Walsh explores the multiple meanings that the term interculturality has gained since the 1990s, especially concerning education, in order to distinguish between functional interculturality (in relation to the dominant system) and critical interculturality, conceived as a political project of decolonization, transformation, and creation (Walsh, 2009, p. 2). For this, Walsh relies on the thought of Peruvian philosopher Fidel Tubino, who argues that it is necessary to think of an interculturality that questions the rules of the game and is not compatible with the logic of the neoliberal model (Tubino, 2005). Walsh distinguishes, therefore, three perspectives for the use of the term interculturality in contemporary times: relational interculturality, functional interculturality, and critical interculturality.
Relational interculturality concerns the contact and exchange between cultures, people, practices, knowledge, values, and traditions, which can occur under conditions of equality or inequality. This perspective deals only with the contact and relationship between different cultures and does not question the system of domination, contradictions, and conflicts. Functional interculturality, as the name suggests, is functional to the system, assuming its discourse. That is, functional interculturality not only does not act on asymmetries and inequalities but also serves as support for their maintenance. Regarding how functional interculturality is produced, Walsh points out that “the wave of constitutional educational reforms in the 1990s—which recognize the multiethnic and multilingual character of countries and introduce specific policies for indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples—is part of this multiculturalist and functional logic” (Walsh, 2009, p. 3).
In Brazil, this multicultural policy is addressed through the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional), enacted in 1996 and enhanced by Law 10.639 in 2003. Both aim to promote the appreciation of knowledge about African and Afro-diasporic history, making it mandatory, for instance, to teach African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in the school curriculum. Although its implementation has brought considerable transformations, its desired effects have been neutralized by a certain stagnation in the Brazilian educational system. Even changes in the curriculum content end up being diminished by this multiculturalist logic, which is ultimately functional yet sterile when it comes to ensuring a true social transformation through cultural exchange.
Finally, by questioning the maintenance of structures of inequality, critical interculturality is understood as a processual tool, a project that is built for and with people and never imposed. It is therefore of interest to think of critical interculturality as a process, especially within the pedagogical and educational field, since “its project is not simply to recognize, tolerate, or incorporate the different within established frameworks and structures,” but to “re-conceptualize and re-found social, epistemic, and existential structures, bringing into play and into equitable relations diverse cultural logics, practices, and ways of thinking, acting, and living” (Walsh, 2009, p. 4). It should be part of a social, political, and epistemological project, questioning not only the dominant discourse but also assuming its own discourse capable of breaking with structures of domination.
Cosmotechnologies and technomagics
In Brazil, the experience developed by the ongoing project Vídeo nas Aldeias (Felipe, 2020) consolidated filmmaking practices in indigenous communities, which has been taken up and appropriated in different ways. When a people appropriates a tool and removes it from its naturalized dynamics, the technological apparatus acquires new meanings, but it also becomes a processual part of that group’s life dynamics. We can also mention the project Inventing with Difference—cinema and human rights, conceived by the Film Department at Universidade Federal Fluminense in partnership with the Human Rights Secretariat. Their website offers a regional map with partner projects and interventions across the country during 2017. These initiatives are mostly located in urban areas, as is the case of Cinema na Escola, Construindo Espaços de Cidadania, in public schools in Greater Florianópolis, and Cartas ao Mundão (Letters to the Big World), which brought workshops to six socio-educational units in Recife, among many others. The project synopses address the theme of human rights,the constitution and recognition of identities, and the preservation of memory, as in the case of Juventude do Campo: Cinema, Identidade e Representações in the settlements of Corumbá, Cidrolândia, and Ponta Porã (in Minas Gerais State), which aimed to give social visibility to rural youth; the Afroeducom project in Curitiba, which sought to promote reflection on expressions of racism in the daily lives of Black youth; and Guardiães da Memória, which worked in Indigenous schools with the Guarani-Mbya people in the state of Rio de Janeiro, among others. Outside urban areas, projects undertaken in border areas and indigenous territories addressed the communication and translation of alterities. This is the case of Inventar Cinema de Fronteira in Boa Vista (Roraima State), in the Indigenous Community of Canauaim, and Igualdades na Diferença: Singularidades entre Estudantes do Assentamento Rural de Rio Pardo e a Etnia Waimiri-Atroari in Presidente Figueiredo (Amazonas State).
When we look closely, such experiences point to a desire for social recognition that has on their horizon the inclusion in the experience of building a common world and exercising a more inclusive democracy. All partner projects of Inventing with Difference align with the premises of the discussion that Jacques Rancière (2009, 2012) brings in his reflections on politics as a distribution of the common and the constitution of a community of equals through the celebration of diverse differences. In this light, cinema provides public objects that (re)shape the sensible ways people act, perceive, and express themselves through art, inviting audiences to engage with a shared public realm that fosters new spaces for the circulation of discourse. We would like to emphasize the premises of this debate by articulating the concept of cosmopoetics, which refers to the production of the world as a common world, and verifying the possibility of articulating this thought with the decolonial option.
We borrow the concept of cosmopoetics from Marcelo Ribeiro (2016, p. 4), who defines it as the set of “forms of invention (poiesis) of the world as a common world (cosmos)”—meaning the constitution of a world objectified not only in the order of its laws and juridical-political constitution but mainly as common, invested by certain regimes of intelligibility, visibility, and sensitivity. For this reason, according to Ribeiro, cosmopoetics cannot exist without a cosmopolitics, which constitutes the “sets of discourses and practices associated with the configuration and delineation of the world (cosmos) as a political community (polis)” (2016, p.4). We believe that cinema is an important tool and a fundamental means in the production of common realities, especially when we consider it as a space or reserve for experimentation and imagination of the world, as opposed to the world given as finished, concluded, and closed, which television and newscasts present as fact, as well as to the liquefied world, thanks to the dizzying circulation of images of immediate shock, generally decontextualized, unplaceable, or emptied of meaning, in digital media.
Therefore, we argue that cinema constitutes a “cosmotechnology”—understood radically, following the definitions that a certain line of thought in anthropology attributes to shamanism under the rubrics of “techniques of ecstasy”, “technologies of enchantment”, and “technomagics” (Eliade, 1998; Sullivan, 1988; Belisário, 2014)—which can be summarized herein as the set of techniques, instruments, and practices that constitute the technology and modus operandi of forms of knowledge and experimentation of the common world—a world invested by the virtualities of memory, the imagination as well as mythopoetic narratives.
If cosmopoetics is the invention of a common, cinema as a cosmotechnological tool comes as an intervention in the world, a redistributive investment of words and things, techniques and tools, knowledge, and ways of being that define a common. When appropriated by non-hegemonic peoples, minority groups, or peripheral subjects, cinema becomes a means of establishing dissensual communities. As César Guimarães (2015) suggests when speaking of the community as a specific situation of relations between individuals and peoples that has not yet been realized but is always yet to come, always awaiting the invention of a common, which, in the case of cinema, occurs through expressive means and forms of exchange that constitute it, conditioning its appearance to the rupture of naturalized regimes of the sensible. In addition to trying to understand how these tools are assimilated by non-Western peoples, we would need to ask to what extent their films cross and break the mesh of circulation of productions in urban spaces and festivals, for example.
Thus, Guimarães calls a cinema community that which arises from filmmaking practices when invested with desires for transformation. Cinema, then, establishes dissent within the meshes of the visible, opening a breach for the constitution of a community yet to come. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy, Guimarães discusses the institution of a political community as a “social bond to be given” when he examines contemporary Brazilian documentaries, interested in recent years in filming “not only the face, but also the gestures, bodies, and discourses of all those who, included by exclusion in the political scene”, as he writes, referring to Jacques Rancière’s expression, “achieve a position that allows them to make visible what was not seen and sustain a discourse in opposition to a condition that reduced them to noisy animals.” (2015, p.46)
In a different manner, Mircea Eliade (1998) calls “techniques of ecstasy” the set of operations performed by shamans to enter into controlled contact with mythical time; within this set are the myths and rituals, which the author calls “technologies of enchantment”, that is, the technical operations that can be appropriated by “non-shamans” capable of emulating mythical time for themselves. According to Sullivan, the “ability to know through imitation or symbolic representation constitutes the essence of technology and serves, in the forms of art, music, tool use, and ritual action, as the foundation of creativity and human culture” (1988, p.237), which is what we refer to as mythic technologies. Sullivan deepens the notion of “shamanic technology” (1988, p. 401) by defining technology as “intimate and systematic knowledge” (1988, p. 404), making an association between knowledge and its technologies to the mythical dimension; it is no coincidence that cinema, a dream factory, has also been associated with the myths and fears that shaped Western societies, and beyond, as seen in the appropriation of its tools by non-European peoples, constituting peripheral, counter-hegemonic, and decolonial cosmopoetics. Cinema is just a motif, a mytheme, in the theme of the relationships between myth and technology—a theme that alone forms a separate chapter in anthropologies.
Sullivan also affirms that the “shaman’s body is part of his technology” (1988, p. 419), while Eduardo Viveiros de Castro asserts that the body is “the place of differentiating perspective” (1996, p. 131). Now, a body with a camera is the analogical constitution of this dual definition, since the camera is what conjugates the movement of the world with its intensive virtualities. In developing this notion of the body as the place of differentiating perspective, Viveiros de Castro observes that the body is capable of metamorphosis through the connections it establishes with objects, clothing, prostheses, as well as instruments. He argues that, often among Amerindian peoples, socialization rituals serve precisely to produce the humanity of a still non-human body, in the same way that the shamanic body needs to be produced by distancing from the traits that characterize it as such. It is in this sense that we draw attention to the appropriation of the cinema tool by indigenous peoples.
Thus, our view of cinema as a cosmopoetics of decolonial thought as it stands on a position of experience and the common, configuring itself as a place of re-existence. In Prácticas creativas de re-existencia, Adolfo Albán understands re-existence as the devices created and developed for us to invent ourselves in community, daily, reinventing the ways of managing life and powers (Albán, 2013, p.455). This aims at confronting the imperialist impositions within this reality established by a hegemonic and homogenizing project. This is a reality Jonathan Crary warns us about in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, “the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free from any dependence on others, when in reality we live a more complete subjection to the ‘free’ functioning of markets” (Crary, 2016, p. 95). Re-existence, thus, involves a paradigm shift capable of alienating us from a certain condition to which the forces of the market and the State have placed us—a subaltern condition of subjects excluded from the deliberative processes by which the common is decided and shared; hence, to re-exist would mean to reclaim our ability to manage life and our becomings, fulfilling a sense of resistance against the forces that alienate them, a becoming, to be part of decisions in the world and for the world, promoting a view of the common, the shared.
We ask, therefore, whether cinema does not bring the possibility of inventing the common from a pedagogical and decolonial perspective since it operates in the sensitive realm of ways of being and doing, of forms of visibility that designate and are designated by social actors. If decolonial thought demands a qualitative change in ways of life through a radical intervention in regimes of knowledge, seeing, and feeling, it seems to us that its politics aligns with Rancière’s definition: the political is “when those who have no time take the time necessary to position themselves as inhabitants of a common space and to demonstrate that […] their mouths emit a word that articulates something of the common and not just a voice that signals pain” (2010, p.21). In summary—paraphrasing—the political is the taking of time, the enunciation of a voice, and the appearance in visibility of excluded subjects who can thus affirm their existence as a sensible part of the common—redistributing places, destabilizing identities, giving form to noise through the word and visibility to those who were previously rendered invisible.
Technomagic and Mythic Technology: The Supernatural Evocation in Photography and the Cinematograph
Let us attempt to reformulate the relationship between cinema and myth, avoiding the distinction of the cinematographic tool as a technology originating from Western rationality and the magical dimension as belonging to the “uncivilized”. Several examples could be cited: anthropologist Joanna Overing, for instance, demonstrates how a “mythic technology” constitutes the techniques and practices of “world-making” in Piaroa shamanism (1990, p. 607); likewise, anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones (1988) recounted the case of a shaman from the Barasana people who considered the technology of the whites to be the “materialization of the mythic technology of the primordial shaman Wãribi, the inventor of all kinds of technical objects” (Ferreira, 2014, p. 184). In Pedro Peixoto Ferreira’s article, where this story is revisited, the author states that
It is always about the process of transforming tendencies and potentials that were chaotic (the multipotentiality of the unknown, of mythical beings, of the machines of the ‘Whites’) into controlled, technical processes, now cosmicized. In other words, the process of individuation of a certain relationship, of updating—always historical and contingent, as it depends on encounters like that between the shaman and the anthropologist’s submarine—of pre-individual virtualities. (Ferreira, 2014, p. 184)
This interpretation is not far from what Aby Warburg (2015) did when interpreting the mythical snake of the Pueblo Indians’ cosmopoetics, in the villages of Oraibi and Walpi in North America. Associated with the representation of thunder, the entity of the snake, in modernity, becomes the electric wiring on electricity poles responsible for distributing energy in urban cities—the “lightning captured in the wiring, captive electricity”, by the occidental civilizations, whose industrial inventions kind of secularizes the mythical and the sacred form of Nature into a controlled resource for its own modern purposes (Warburg, 2015, p. 253). Another exemplary episode of the investment of a mythical thought in modern technologies is narrated by Jonathan D. Hill, as he recounts his experience with the Wakuénai. The ethnographer narrates that in this people’s healing rituals, the camera and the ethnographer’s recorder were assimilated in such a way, not with the aim of preserving cultural memory, but because they were tools that imitated the shaman’s power: “just as the recorder and notebooks capture the sounds and sensations of the ritual, so too do the shaman’s chants and tobacco smoke pull the patient’s body spirit” (Hill, 1998, p. 5). In other words, Hill understood that if the goal of the healing ritual was to “search for and recover the sick person’s body spirit”, exorcising the “disease-causing spirits” that had kidnapped the “body spirit”, the ethnographer’s equipment seemed to play an active role in the ritual, analogically imitating the shamanic powers.
The association of technical images—whether filmic or photographic—with technomagic is not gratuitous. It seems instructive to recall the episode discussed by anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, based on a photograph of the Tamu shamans of Nepal, taken during a secret ritual, the Moshi Tiba. Vitebsky describes that after showing the shamans the photograph, one of them responded, surprised, “[it is] precisely like that that the god, the sorcerers, and the ancestors look”, unlike what is thought and seen in drawing representations, what the shamans see are the same colours and traits shown in the photograph, and he adds: “But how can a camera see what only I can see? This is secret knowledge; ordinary people cannot see these things. It must be a very good camera.” (Vitebsky, 2001, p. 20) The question that arises is whether the luminous spots to which the shaman attributes the magical quality of his vision are not merely effects or flaws caused by prolonged diaphragm exposure or even reflections of the shining metal plates held by the instrumentalists during the ritual. What is at stake here is the power dynamics implicated in truth production discourses—in which the shaman’s metaphysical hallucination would oppose the rational explanation of the photography specialist or the ethnographer. Even if the “secret knowledge” that the shaman claims to master is not precisely explained or translated, the question is to what extent the so-called verisimilar explanation of the spots legitimizes or delegitimizes his testimony (Ferreira, 2014, p.188). Thus, it would be:
[…] necessary to investigate from where these visions draw their strength and efficacy, and how a photograph can reproduce them so faithfully. In other words, by saying that the camera “must be very good” because it was able to capture a “secret knowledge” that only he can see and know, the shaman reveals that he is facing a contingent and historical materialization of a mythical technology dominated by him but hitherto restricted to the initiated. Occasions like this can serve to deepen our understanding of both shamanic techniques of ecstasy and the mythic dimensions of “modern” technology (its virtualities). (Ferreira, 2014, p. 188)
It is noteworthy that European Enlightenment modernity, at the height of its will to know, also constituted elements of the “supernatural” and “enchantment” that it might have relegated to foreign lands. This is the case with investigations into phantasmagoria and apparitions that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, began to emerge from photographic experiments. Georges Didi-Huberman observes, for example, how this theme is present in European history by showing the quest of physician and photographer Hippolyte Baraduc for the “aura”, for the “phantasmatic apparition” of the spirit in the technical images of photography.1
Encompassing in a naturally particular way a mythical and phantasmagorical dimension, cinema not only captures the apparitions of the supernatural but also participates in the mythological (re)foundation of the world itself by conceiving, so to speak, a singular ritualistic, that is, a device for the conjugation of social subjects that makes them commune in a collective space and then defines the forms of signification and display through which a culture, an imaginary, and knowledge are updated and circulated, as discourse and as the production of subjectivity.
Thus, it is pertinent to briefly reassess the reasons Rancière (2009) distinguishes the various regimes of visibility, distancing the ethical-religious regime from the aesthetic one. In a context where indigenous peoples begin to appropriate cinema technology not only to re-enact their myths but also to recreate their worlds in an operation of returning belief, putting the new tools in permanent contact with mythical forces and invisible beings, it is worth considering how Amerindian technologies of knowledge and enchantment can inform the ethical-aesthetic dimension present in the arts.2 For example, we highlight Vincent Carelli’s first film for the Vídeo nas Aldeias project, A festa da moça (1987), whose purpose—to film the Nambiquara community and return their own images to them—resulted in the reinstitution of an ancient tradition, at the time abandoned for years, which consisted of piercing the lips of young Nambiquaras; here, cinema restored through its performative force the memory of a people, their identity, but no less their reinvention. In this sense, how necessary does the cinematographic tool become when reappropriated and relaunched by other peoples to once again confuse the ethical and aesthetic spheres in the practice of cinema?
Another special case is the Tikmũ’ũn cinema, discussed at length by André Brasil (2017). Comparing Notes Toward an African Orestes by Pier Paolo Pasolini to the films produced by Tikmũ’ũn filmmakers, Brasil (2017) questions this crossroads between technology and myth that cinema carries within: “If in Notes Toward an African Orestes Pasolini encounters the myth to reflect on the ways of its historical update, here, cinema brings the spirit-peoples to the village, thus enabling the ritual. The images, in this case, establish and come to inhabit the mythical scene as one of its agencies.” (2017, p. 17) Pasolini’s film is an essayistic documentary in which the filmmaker speculates on the formation of new African nation-states after their decolonization, referring to the inaugural myth of the legal system represented by the tragedy of Orestes.
Brasil then shows how the Tikmũ’ũn film consists of images that stage and transfigure the myth into a poetic and stylistic form unique to the cinema—a form that owes its plasticity and mode of existence to the use of free indirect discourse. Thus, cinema—by being “drawn into the ritual scene” and “slightly slowing down to comment on it” (Brasil, 2017, p.25)—establishes circuits of virtualities in which history rearranges myth and myth rearranges history. Cinema would thus serve the constitution and justification of worlds, of common realities, through its ability in “poetic and political transfiguration”, as Brasil writes (2017, p.25).
Cinema, Experience, and Imagination
Questioning the relationship between technology and myth, cinema and magic, can also be framed in other terms (perhaps in a bold and risky way): as a philosophical discussion about the relationship between being and non-being (in turn, analogous to the question of the visible and the invisible, of evidence and appearance). Alain Badiou understands cinema as philosophical experimentation, considering that a philosophical situation is “a meeting of terms that are strange to each other”, “the elucidation of a choice”, “a paradoxical relationship” (2015, p. 31-36). For the author,
The paradox of cinema can be defined in two ways: the first, more philosophical, is to say that it constitutes a completely singular relationship between total artifice and total reality. In fact, cinema is the possibility of a reproduction of reality and, at the same time, the entirely artificial side of this reproduction. In other words, cinema is a paradox that revolves around ‘being’ and ‘seeming’. (Badiou, 2015, p. 36)
In this sense, cinema configures itself as a space of another possible reality, an opening for other reinterpretations and interpretations of the world. In cinema, what occurs is a qualitative displacement between the world and the image of the world, operated through a spectator’s mediation. The tension between “being” and “seeming” induces an ethical stance of the gaze, detached, however, from the moralism of a kind of rationality that privileges being to the detriment of “non-being”. It is in this minimal interval between being and seeming that the space of imagination, no less real than the reality we project onto the world itself, is installed. Cinema exposes the original tension, the constitutive paradox of the formation of societal orders—the artificiality of its institutions, its rites and beliefs, its hierarchies and class privileges—as well as stages the arbitrariness of the postures and gestures that designate the regime of visibility that invests these same orders. Films stage the crucible of social and human relations and, in doing so, establish a space iridescent with experience—complicated in the interweaving of a triple dimension: the intelligible, the sensible, and, no less importantly, the imaginative. Thus, experience, always complex, presents itself in multiple tones in the sensible and in perception—being more or less intense for some than for others but activating different frequencies in germinating sensitivities.
Cezar Migliorin and Isaac Pipano remind us that “cinema, like education, works by returning something of the subject to the world, inventing a receiver for that return. A return not of the thing itself, but of the thing crossed by an aesthetic-political mediation” (Migliorin and Pipano, 2019, p.97). By inventing this spectator, cinema invents the conditions of mediation through which the world is reinvented in an image—an image as an intelligible and sensible form, but equally as a reservoir of imagination, an image in action. Thus, one can say that cinema experiences the world through an aesthetic-political appropriation and return of the world, transfiguring it and sometimes disturbing the naturalizations of the gaze, on the one hand, and, on the other, transforming the normative regimes of ways of seeing, perceiving, and feeling.
As another way of knowing, cinema is characterized by its extreme visibility, but also by the luminous vibration that gives it the iridescent chromaticity of the emotions and feelings conveyed by the images. It is therefore necessary to rehabilitate, in educational processes, on one side, the sense of experience and, on the other, the sense of imagination. Thus, by associating the two, we follow Agamben:
Nothing can give an idea of the dimension of the change that has occurred in the meaning of experience as the upheaval it produces in the status of imagination. Given that imagination, today, eliminated from knowledge as being “unreal,” was for antiquity the medium par excellence of knowledge. […] Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis, and is, moreover, the condition of their communication, that is, of knowledge. (2005, p. 33)
It is this sense, imagination’s mediating capacity as a condition of communication and knowledge is, as Adriana Fresquet affirms, essential to the experience of education through cinema (2017, p. 29). Cinema offers the possibility of experiencing the world from its own elements—the real as raw material of a language—but no less through the investments of imagination. It is no coincidence that Pasolini (1982, p. 138) stated that cinema was the writing of the real because the real, even if it confined its appearance to a cryptographic condition like hieroglyphs, constituted its expressive matter par excellence and it was by its capacity to conjugate a “oneiric quality” to the appearance of objects that cinema could not exhaust the efforts of making “poetic cinema”. By manifesting itself as “object concretion” and not as meaning, this writing of the real would always await decoding, a game of translation. But if there is a possible decoding, it is only through a specular, sensitive relationship with the expressive means of cinema itself. It is in this vein that Cezar Migliorin affirms that if “on the one hand, [cinema] is the world, on the other, it is alteration” (2010, p. 106).
Experience as a foundation of knowledge is thought of by Jorge Larrosa (2002) as an interruption in the flow of reality. If, on the one hand, imagination enlivens experience, on the other, experience takes place in the flesh of the real. Larrosa proposes knowledge through experience as an alternative to pedagogy understood either as applied science or as critical praxis. What interests us is his definition of experience as that “which happens to us”, which is founded on the duration of time and the availability exercised by subjects to see, hear, perceive, feel, and know things (2002, p.21-24). Larrosa also revisits the diasporic sense present in the etymology of the word: ex-pereor supposes the adventure of travel, the displacement beyond borders, as well as the crossing and exile (2002, p. 25). Here, it is of interest to perceive cinema as a producer of experience that displaces the consciousness of being and existing, the idea of the subject, towards alterity and the unknown. On the other hand, knowledge founded on experience is also knowledge of the senses, beyond or outside the cognition of the world.
If it is true that cinema gives visibility to the world in such a way that it is capable of “altering it”, it would be possible to understand it, then, from a pedagogical perspective, as a cosmopoetic tool aimed at transformation, a reinvention of the world as a common world; for, as it transforms our perception of the world, cinema is capable of revealing the power structures within the social and cultural productions of civilization. If decolonial thought is a matter of attitude, of posture towards the world, cinema can be the medium through which this posture, this attitude, can be staged—and transfigured. But cinema is also the place of the common, the name given to the space of sharing and distribution of social positions and bonds, at the same time of communication and rapprochement—between subjects, between differences, between humans and non-humans—and of distance and separation—which do not cease to preserve it as a place of the other and of heterogeneity, of dissidence and dissent. Common, as summarized by Rodrigo Silva, “whether as a space of inclusion or of openness to the ‘unknown common,’ an invitation to conjunction without identification, to existence given in the exteriority of the relationship and not in the interiority of an identification or a ‘communion’.” (2011, p.24) Common as coexistence of differences and co-extension of distances that connect and separate. The possible game of democracy, therefore, is inseparable from the invention of a common.
Final Considerations
The decolonial option presupposes a way of brushing the history of Western culture against the grain, a gesture of recovery within the folds of the history of ideas, knowledge, and ways of life silenced by the colonial process. Cinema, for a long time, was associated with the set of technical-pedagogical instruments for integrating indigenous peoples and alienating marginalized populations. The democratization of its tools allowed for a reorientation of meaning. For us, then, cinema repositions the question posed by Marie-José Mondzain (2002): “Can images kill?” whose formulation we borrow from Amaranta César (2013): “Can images save?” This means that the image is placed at the center of the aesthetic and political debate, which determines the cultural and social life of peoples and minority groups, within the scope of their struggles and demands. By reorienting the debate on images from a decolonial perspective, we ask ourselves if cinema—and what kind of cinema—is capable of fulfilling the political-existential demands that peoples and groups present to the world.
If the image indeed carries the virtualities of desire and imagination, if it can be said that it operates on reality by reinvesting it with layers of meaning, affection, and imagination, staging threatened conceptions and ways of life, it can also be said that, as a producer of images, cinema is, by right, a technology of enchantment. Cinema, as an enchanting cosmotechnology, makes the real world its raw material, the architecture of desires and imaginations, from which it extracts its own powers. Images, then, are the counterpart of the real, its cursed, unspoken part—or rather, unseen or poorly seen—but so they are because they themselves are the space of transfiguration of the real, of transfiguration of lost or yet unrealized struggles, of desires to transform the world, of the plastic re-existence modalities of marginalized lives.
We ask ourselves what kind of cinema materializes or would be able to stage the underlying conceptions of re-existence practices; how the advent of cinema in the daily practices of such groups can contribute to thinking about educational, political-existential, and sociocultural horizons. Finally, we believe that it is through its cosmopoetic power that a possible cinema is established and restored for decolonial thought and the urgent issues it involves in our society.
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Catarina Andrade holds a PhD in Communication/Cinema (PPGCOM/UFPE). She is professor at the Department of Literature at UFPE. She teaches and develops research at the Postgraduate Program in Communication (PPGCOM-UFPE) and is a collaborator of the Postgraduate Program in Education (PPGEdu/UFPE). She is the vice-leader of the LEVE Research Group – Laboratory of Visual Experience and Education. She is a member of the Board of Directors of SOCINE.
Álvaro Brito holds a PhD in Communication from the Federal University of Pernambuco and is a member of the LEVE group (Laboratory of Experience, Visuality and Education – CE/UFPE). He researches essay films, Indigenous cinema, and decolonialities.
To cite this article: Andrade, Catarina and Brito, Álvaro (2025) Re-existence Through Cosmopoetics: A Decolonial Approach to Contemporary Cinema, La Furia Umana, 46. https://www.lafuriaumana.com/catarina-andrade-alvaro-brito-re-existence-through-cosmopoetics-a-decolonial-approach-to-contemporary-cinema/
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- In perceiving a “different light” in the photographs of his son, almost supernatural, a kind of “veil and wind of the state of mind,” Baraduc linked his experiments to a long tradition of European belief in the existence of the aura, a fundamental concept in the thought of Walter Benjamin (Didi-Huberman, 2015, p. 135). As Didi-Huberman writes, through his photographs, Baraduc “experimentally differentiated it from ‘electric winds’ and other magnetisms capable of impressing the [photographic] plate. […] He called it a ‘curved force.’ He recognized in it the explanation for all inexplicable phenomena, hidden influences, mystical visions, halos, ‘unconscious impressions,’ and so on. He identified it with Hippocrates’ ‘Enormon,’ the Church’s Glorious Body, and Newtonian ether. He invoked in its defense Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Mesmer, Maxwell, Éliphas Levy, all mixed together” (Didi-Huberman, 2015, p. 135). Finally, Didi-Huberman reports, Baraduc “subsumed the aura as a category of the ‘movements’ and ‘lights of the soul’; an animic movement because it was the soul that allowed movement without a path, therefore, distance without separation, therefore, contact at a distance; a light of the soul because it was intrinsic, shadowed, and invisible—but photographable” (author’s emphasis, Didi-Huberman, 2015, p. 135). The aura, therefore, would thus be proven by a singular characteristic of the “specificity of the technical mode of existence of photography,” considered by Didi-Huberman as a kind of inversion or “involution of the paradigm of the vera icona,” a “surpassing of the limit figuratively invented with the veil of Veronica,” this religious myth from Christian tradition (Didi-Huberman, 2015, p. 135). ↩︎
- Regarding a return to belief, we credit to the art of cinema what Deleuze claimed for it: “Cinema must film, not the world, but the belief in this world, our only bond,” “whether Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world,” “to replace the model of knowledge with belief” (2007, p. 207). To Christians and atheists, we add other cultures of belief and knowledge that have made cinema a tool for ecstasy and enchantment. We think of films where the participation of the camera was fundamental in triggering ritualistic processes or in the recovery of a tradition: Les Maîtres Fous (1952) by Jean Rouch, Festa da Moça (1987) by Vincent Carelli, or As Hiper Mulheres (2011) by Takumã Kuikuro, Carlos Fausto, and Leonardo Sette. ↩︎