As muitas mortes de Antônio Parreiras, The Many Deaths of Antônio Parreiras

One day I had a dream: thirteen landscapes were stolen from the Antônio Parreiras Museum. That gave me the idea for a film about stolen forests, as if part of the country itself had been taken. Or better yet: a film about the sadistic relationship between the State and culture in Brazil. For Parreiras, initially a landscape painter, eventually became the artist of a decrepit power. A cruel irony for the artist who, after leaving the academy for the freedom of the forests, ended up living off official commissions…

Famous for his paintings of dense forests, historical canvases and female nudes, Antônio Parreiras (1860–1937) is an ambivalent figure. His work stands at the crossroads of a transition: from Indianism to indigenism, from romantic landscapes to a physiology of sight, from civilised panoramas to primal forest. He is particularly notable as the first artist to have persistently immersed himself in the untamed light of the tropics. No one before him had gone so far this way. His observation of light and its effects on visual perception reveals striking modernity, radically anti-European: far from diffuse lighting and traditional shadow masses, he captures sharp, almost violent zones of light—a practice matched only much later by Cinema Novo photography.

Parreiras also wrote short stories. Mostly in a bombastic, affected style, some feature dialogues between painters. These immediately reminded me of Lucian of Samosata’s necro-dialogues, where eras intertwine. All this offered rich formal possibilities: archive experimentation (with many freeze-frames); deliberate anachronisms; use of harsh light in forests; recourse to the absurdism typical of contemporary Brazilian literature. Above all, it allowed a symbolic subversion of representations of the State.

With the burning of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the rise of Bolsonarismo, the question of barbarism and corruption hidden behind militarism and civilisational rhetoric re-emerged with great intensity. It then became impossible for me to make a ‘serious’ film on Parreiras’s painting, so I chose to follow a path of satire edging into nonsense.

I imagined a film of reflections (Parreiras Narcissus… Parreiras Through the Looking-Glass…), projecting this pre-modernist painter and landscape observer into a symbolist universe, turning the forest into a hypnotic device—a mechanism that, through mirrors, flashes and background noise, might induce an altered state of consciousness. It was also, in this symbolism, my way of constructing an internal space to speak about a certain mental conditioning, hypnotic crimes, the war of images, the sadistic relationship between State and culture in Brazil, and perhaps above all the relation between art and the colonisation of the imagination. I wanted to speak of a certain unconscious of the Brazilian intellectual elite—even if in anachronistic, hallucinatory, non-explicit ways. To discuss Brazil’s relics, atavisms and bureaucracies. For me, in a way, it’s a film about the skeleton of Duque de Caxias, the nineteenth-century military hero known as “the pacifier” (our Colonel Kurtz?). He even appears in one of the Paraguayan War paintings…

The film carries a deadly dimension, up to that necromancy scene where a skull prophesies the national future. Yet, a childlike irony constantly undermines the seriousness. Less a horror film, more an “horrire” [rire = laughter in French, nde] –following Chris Marker’s intuition that we must “make horror a friend”.

Parreiras is a tightrope-walker’s film, balanced between: essay-film and mannerist fiction, studio and archives, nature and city, civilisation and barbarism, interior and exterior, living world and world of the dead, embodied voices and ghostly ones. This tension generates as much exuberance and successive contrasts as effects of alienation, like surrealist shop windows where objects lose their primary function. You see it clearly when elements whirl separately against a black background, each with its inertia, just as actors—almost never in the same shot—move in distinct spheres, creating a gnostic vision where each universe becomes the simulacrum or distorted reflection of the other.

This radical discontinuity instils an obsessive presence of failure in the film. The threat of falling into the void is ever-present, this sense that everything could collapse at any moment, swallowed by the abyss of delay. The moustache might drop, voices desynchronise, the country becomes scenery, the forest only an orientalist décor, institutions don’t exist. Everything is false, especially the continuity of time.

Finally, there’s the influence of Dungeons & Dragons, the animated TV series where a group of children is sent to a fantasy world after visiting an amusement park. Guided by the Dungeon Master, they desperately seek a way back, facing monsters, spells and traitors. They always come close to the external reality without ever reaching it. In a memorable episode, they must climb a pink mountain overcoming an apparently impassable abyss. The Master then reveals an invisible bridge—they must dare to cross it in faith. That metaphor helped me structure the film, to imagine a country trapped in a hallucinatory reality, where farce precedes tragedy, where any continuity is impossible, and where, on the edge of the abyss, only belief in the invisible—the thin thread sustaining the real—can take you to the other side. Beyond that, who knows what awaits us.

I initially wanted to use only Brazilian music, exploring a little-known classical repertoire. The soundtrack therefore navigates between famous composers (Carlos Gomes, Villa-Lobos) and transitional figures (Alexandre Levy, Alberto Nepomuceno) who, like Parreiras, marked the transition from Romanticism to Modernism; between radio melodies by Orlando Silva and modern film scores by César Guerra-Peixe and Francisco Mignone. Then this musical archaeology shifts into the experimental—krautrock, Japanese spectralism, synthesizers—defying copyright constraints. All ambivalences are deepened, and this multiplicity of sonic layers evokes the marginal cinema aesthetic, where trance-like bodies seem guided by waves from different zones of the unconscious. Ultimately, while the music weaves contrasts, the soundscape unfolds into a continuous drone—a hypnotic canvas throughout the film—a blend of cicada trills, roaring rivers and distant urban hum.

Regarding voices, all characters—except Laurence Martignet, Parreiras’s live-model wife—are dubbed by the director himself. This approach produces a psychic automaticity, as if the characters are mere puppets. It also fuses fiction with the essay-film dimension, where a character’s voice can at any moment become the narrator’s voice. Finally, it creates a certain narcissism around Parreiras’s figure—as with Dorian Gray, where all voices seem to bear the same imprint.

The monotonous tone, combined with the drone, has a magnetic, almost invocatory character. Yet I even considered another approach: not only dubbing all roles (vultures included), but also integrating melodies to turn the work into a musical comedy. With greater resources, I might have risked that. Regardless, even with the somnambulistic tone of the voices, the film retains something of a musical operetta.

I distinguish three cinematic forms fundamentally tied to post-modern paradigms: essay-film, mannerist fiction and found footage. These “genres” share the same impulse: to cross the mirror of appearances to plunge into the noosphere—the mental territory where spirit-images circulate and temporalities intertwine, like a visual necropolis of suspended times.

Mannerist cinema is characterised by deliberate artificiality in the composition of mental spaces. It also cultivates: aesthetics borrowed from old cinematic trick effects; the use of phantasmagoria and cut-out lighting; play with areas of colour; an embrace of the constructed falseness of the device, while betting on the viewer’s capacity to immerse. This approach has roots in the symbolist literature of Alfred Jarry, the rhetorical exercises of the Second Sophistic, and neo-Platonic concepts of parallel worlds. This cinema fell into disuse when “auteur” cinema purism began seeing such artifices as a betrayal of art and a profanation of the medium. Filmmakers then favoured a return to phenomenological realism, sacralising the filmic moment in a quest for the “miracle” in front of the camera—ideally without soundtrack, colouristic effects, or other artifices.

But I believe that, like a wave movement, we today re-examine mannerist aesthetics without fearing to be profane or impure compared to sacrosanct realism. Perhaps, in this sense, Parreiras was a way to draw on feuilleton literature, revue theatre, marginal cinema, drug use and dreams, to lay the covert foundations of a Brazilian mannerism.

Exactly like the first Brazilian filmmakers, Parreiras started by painting beach and forest landscapes before accepting commissions from São Paulo cafés. Then came historical commissions for Parreiras, propaganda films for Humberto Mauro under the Estado Novo. Both masters of the dense forest. Parreiras played with aggressive light, unafraid to make the background a foreground when light struck a trunk, leaving the subject in shadow. He also captured retinal persistence, with purple spots in deep green. Mauro used overexposures and smoke veils to sculpt sunlight filtered by trees. Years later, Cinema Novo would glorify these areas of fractured light cutting across the image.

Filming in the forest remains a challenge, as shown by Fuller’s and Antonioni’s failures in the Amazon. Two options: violent contrasts (blinding highlights) or complex diffusion on chaotic terrain. Lauro Escorel, cinematographer on At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Héctor Babenco, 1991), opted for immense diffusers in the canopy. Other films followed suit, such that contemporary Brazilian cinema often offers a Europeanised forest, favouring large light-and-shadow masses over raw light incision—even though new cameras would allow greater exploitation of darkness depths.

In studying Parreiras and his obsession with tropical light, Dani Correia and I were fascinated by our challenge: to harness shifting shafts through foliage, creating countless camera obscura chambers on the ground, rivers and trunks. Rather than controlling this mosaic of miniature suns, we accentuated glare with filters. Moreover, light flickers resonate with the rustling of trees and the rumble of rivers until vision becomes background noise and the soundscape transforms into image—a synesthetic effect.

The cast combines actors and non-actors. Pepe Bertarelli, who brings Parreiras to life, is an Argentinian painter and architect I’ve known since childhood. Otávio Terceiro was initially considered, but Pepe’s features and manner—his Italian-ness so akin to Parreiras—won the day. When we miraculously found a 1930s linen suit and a prosthetic moustache, the character emerged before us: Parreiras in person. Throughout the film, Pepe never blinks.

Ana Abbott is a seasoned actress who has worked with prominent figures in Brazilian theatre and cinema like José Celso and Luiz Rosemberg Filho—to whom the film is dedicated. Her ability to get everything right on the first take is striking. On screen, she plays Laurence Martignet, Parreiras’s live-model wife—a presence with the bearing of a judging spirit.

Then there’s Leo Pyrata, a great friend, alchemist, gritty-sound musician and former known actor in Minas Gerais cinema. An extraordinary character, he embodies perfectly that art merchant turned secretary of the Vargas dictatorship’s Department of Press and Propaganda. Nothing is made explicit, but the idea is clear: a kind of Mabuse capable of hypnotic crimes, part evangelical pastor, mass mesmeriser and demonic capitalist—a puppeteer who becomes a puppet himself.

Alex Nanin, from the Confraria do Impossível, is a major theatre actor. I discovered him in a Carioca bakery, repairing mobile phones for donations. In Brazil, an actor often wears many hats: Alex even fixed computers in submarines—well, what was left of them. On screen, he becomes Georg Grimm, founder of Niterói’s plein-air painting school and Parreiras’s mentor. A paradoxical painter, he claimed realism but painted sublime romanticism.