Frau

"We have tried making institutional videos for companies. We have tried making documentaries on the fine arts. We have tried institutionalizing ourselves. We failed. On the contrary, we made the video Frau, in 1983. A trip to the Gramado Film Festival, with Zé Celso and Julio Bressane. Nothing you can call a documentary. Nor video art. Nor a news report. It contained reality, fiction, chance events, mistakes turned into language... Frau showed us the way. Anarchic, iconoclastic, glauber-oswald-chacrinian. We are what we are, unclassifiable (Arnaldo Antunes, in the song Inclassificáveis). Frau would become the first in a TVDO trilogy [alongside Non Plus Ultra, 1985, and Heróis da Decadên(s)ia, 1987]. Frau was kinescoped (converted into 35 mm) and we submitted it to a film festival!

Everything. Whatever happened was; and what did not happen was also TV. To us, there were no limits. We thought we could do anything. We were born into the academic medium, baptized by mass culture, especially television. Those were still the days of ‘auteur film,’ memories of tropicália, and video was merely the name of a tape. Our smorgasbord of references contained J. R. Aguilar, Glauber Rocha, Godard, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Augusto de Campos, Maiakovski, Zé Celso Martinez Corrêa, Oswald de Andrade, Caetano Veloso, the Rolling Stones and, in a place of honor, Chacrinha.”

Testimony of Tadeu Jungle, published in the book Made in Brasil: três décadas do vídeo brasileiro, de Arlindo Machado (Ed. Iluminuras, 2007)

 

"Frau didn’t have a script. It was made in one day and one night – a 'panaroma' of 1983 Brazilian cinema. The (damned) Gramado Festival featured Neville de Almeida, Júlio Bressane, Noilton Nunes and Zé Celso, among others. Tadeu Jungle and I were invited by UZYNA UZONA and – armed with a camera, tapes and VT – off we went, ready to do whatever came up, perhaps even a video. There, we met Isa Castro, who was a part of the team and later edited the video with us. The backbone was Zé Celso’s address on the evening of the award ceremony. 

Frau is a strong representation of TVDO’s creative triad: collective production mode, manipulation of discourse through editing/sound, and the camera on the eye (sic).

In this video, somehow there coexist the anthropophagy of Oswald and Tarsila, the mockery of the Tropicália, the video art of Nam June Paik, Glauber Rocha’s videos, relativity theory, quantum physics, and the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Brazil was undergoing its political opening process, a redemocratization where social movements and students protested the lack of political freedom. Frau is a "minifest" of freedom of expression: anything goes. Do as you please!

Frau triggered then-innovative narrative procedures, and as such it is a landmark experiment in video."

Walter Silveira in a statement to PLATFORM : VB (December 2013)