Found footage film. Poetry essay inspired by the article Very personal celebration by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916-1977), one of the founders of the Cinemateca Brasileira and a major champion for film preservation in Brazil.

In his last text, published posthumously, the author makes a critical assessment of his relations with brazilian cinema, drawing attention to the urgency of film preservation, in the face of countless films lost along time and on the margins of history.

The film Festejo Muito Pessoal recycles fragments of brazilian films (1924-1931) from the silent era quoted in Paulo Emílio’s article and of Jean Vigo’s films (Vigo was introduced into film history by the brazilian critic). The soundtrack brings songs recollected by the Mission of Folklore Research organized by poet Mário de Andrade in 1938.

This is a commissioned film for the celebration of Paulo Emílio’s centenary.

A short but dense journey into the creative universe of Jonas Mekas, a mini-manifesto on Mekas the man and on his way of making underground cinema, which is – to use his own words spoken in the film – “in no way important, totally playful, and realisable with just a few dollars’-worth of film”. It is a language all of his own, to which he has always remained faithful, chosen because writing poems in Lithuanian was no longer enough; he needed a means of addressing a larger and more diverse audience. A surprising montage film, constantly in dialogue with the off-screen space and with a rhapsodic soundtrack (Velvet Underground and others). A film also about New York in 1968, with space for material shot by Mekas himself as well as Bachmann’s images of him ‘dancing’ with his Bolex camera in Central Park in pursuit of squirrels, or exiting the famous Chelsea Hotel, while talking to Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, or with Shirley Clark, while participating in and filming anti-Vietnam demonstrations…

With this film, Bachmann and Mekas, who first met in 1952 during Hans Richther’s cinema lectures, seem to seal ‘in his honour’ a friendship pursued between the magazine “Film Culture” and the New York Film Study Group. A friendship based the love of form, light, generative montage, the infinite possibilities of cinema, which is “remember, a child, a ballet and (perhaps) truth”.

Riccardo Costantini