OF CLOUDS AND BODIES: FILM AND THE DISLOCATION OF VISION IN BRAZILIAN AND JAPANESE INTERWAR AVANT-GARDES

Abstract

Of Clouds and Bodies: Film and the Dislocation of Vision in Brazilian and Japanese Interwar Avant-gardes examines the political impact of film in conceptualizations of the body, vision, and movement in the 1920s and 1930s avant-gardes of Brazil and Japan. Through photographs, films, and different textual genres—travel diary, screenplay, theoretical essay, movie criticism, novel—I investigate the similar political role played by film in these "non-Western" avant-gardes in their relation to the idea of modernity, usually equivalent to that of the "West." I explore racial, political, and historical entanglements that emerge when debates on aesthetic form encounters the filmic medium, theorized and experienced by the so-called "non-Western" spectator. Through avant-garde films such as Mário Peixoto’s Limite (1930), and Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness (1926); the theorizations of Octávio de Faria and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō; and the photographs and writings by Mário de Andrade and Murayama Tomoyoshi, this dissertation follows the clash between the desire for a universal and disembodied vision, and the encounter with filmic perception. I argue that the filmic apparatus, as a technology and a commodity, emphasizes an embodied and localized experience of vision and time that revealed the discourse on cultural-historical difference—the distinction between West and Rest, or modern and non-modern—as a suppressive modulator of material power dynamics embedded in racial, class, and gender hierarchies enjoyed by the cosmopolitan elite in the "peripheral" spaces. The temporality of filmic perception becomes a problem for the avant-garde program of "moving forward." The dissertation is punctuated with images that traveled across national territories, building a political theory of the technical image that takes into consideration the experience of a displaced spectatorship: transnational, in racially marked bodies, and within discourses of historical belatedness. Comparing two disparate spaces through a mobile medium that represents movement, I explore the possibilities and limits of nation-bound comparison and area studies, while contributing to debates in film and media theory.