Two archival materials form the matrix of your film: Denise Crispim’s testimony (Edouard Leite’s partner), which opens the film and the footage shot by Hamilton Lopes dos Santos during the 1979 International Conference for Amnesty in Brazil, held in Rome. Could you tell us about them?
These two archives of the political struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship, both shot in Rome in the 1970s on 16mm film, structure my film. Denise Crispim’s testimony, recorded in 1974 by Alberto Severi for the film Amerika: processo ai governi della tortura (Italy, 1974, 118 min.) during the Russell Tribunal II, serves as the prologue to Anistia 79. This silent testimony functions like a monument to the dead and the disappeared, a gravestone upon which the film’s narrative is built. Between 1974 and 1976, the Russell Tribunal II investigated the war crimes committed by militaries across Latin America. Denise Crispim’s account of the assassination of her partner was presented during its very first session, at the very moment when Brazilian amnesty committees were beginning to organise around the world in an effort to secure the release of many other imprisoned activists who were facing death threats. As for the unseen footage of the International Conference for Amnesty, I discovered in a cellar in Paris in 2016, it had been filmed in Rome by two Brazilians then living in exile in Paris, Velso Ribas and Hamilton dos Santos. Hamilton, who shot the footage, had preserved both his rushes and his sound reels for all those years without ever editing or mixing them. The Conference, the largest gathering of the Brazilian left in exile, took place in the Italian Parliament at the end of June 1979, just weeks before the enactment in Brazil of an amnesty law that was not only highly controversial but profoundly perverse and enabled the forgiveness of crimes committed by the military and the death squads whilst leaving many opponents of the dictatorship behind bars. Denise Crispim appears once again in the images of the Conference, standing beside her daughter, an archive she did not discover until 2024, when I filmed her in Rome, where she still lives today.
You had to find all the surviving protagonists and devise a filming process that consisted of recording them as they watched the archive for the first time. Could you tell us about this stage of the work in relation to the writing of the film? Were there specific questions you wanted them to react to?
This was not an isolated stage of the project but part of a long working process with the archives, beginning when I first located Hamilton’s footage in 2016 and continuing until color grading and sound mixing which, in fact, had to begin before shooting itself, so that the archival images could be shown to the characters. It is a way of approaching the material that assigns the archive the role of protagonist and runs through the entire filmmaking process. I never ask the people I film any questions. What takes place here is an encounter between witnesses of History and previously unseen images from their own past, allowing them to construct a memory that is at once personal and collective. I simply record the effects of these reunions. In fact, all I film is an in situ dialogue between the past and the present. In that sense, Anistia 79 is a kind of observational film, interrupted only by the occasional glance toward the film crew, who always remain off-screen and silent.
Placing the protagonists from the archive face to face with those images in the present is a device you had already explored in Retratos de identificação (FID 2015). Why did you return to this approach? What is the status of speech today in relation to yesterday’s images?
In both films, my aim was to return the archives to the viewer so that they could make something of them. I make sure that the recovered material appears in the finished film in its raw state, as a substance that remains open to appropriation by others. The people I film speak from the archive, not around it. More importantly, they fall silent before the force of this encounter with the remnants of their own past. My protagonists are bearers of images that the present has been waiting for.
Based on the responses of those watching the archive today, what were the main editorial challenges? At what point did you decide to use a split screen?
The shot/reverse-shot structure was already planned during the filming process: we were recording people watching a projection and the editing had to recreate the spatial experience of that viewing, of the face-to-face between past and present. Filming with two cameras facing the characters, positioned on either side of the screen, made it possible to simultaneously edit the archival footage and the people watching…We began experimenting with split screen format from the very first days of shooting. Using this device to organise the space greatly expanded the possibilities, in the editing, for producing relationships between different temporalities.
Making a film from these archives is also, in a way, a means of preserving them. Can we speak about the questions of fidelity to the archive? How did you choose which parts to include?
It is not a question of fidelity but of respect. An archival image is not untouchable. Yet neither should it be treated merely as an illustration of historical facts, it must be regarded as a testimony in its own right, precisely in its incompleteness. Every shot in the Rome Conference footage was important, and every single one was reused during the editing process. There was no real selection, rather, each sequence was carefully edited in an attempt to preserve its essential qualities. Very little archival material was discarded. That is precisely where the challenge of the editing lay because, in addition to roughly 90 minutes of archival footage, we had around 50 hours of footage featuring 11 people filmed separately, whilst the final length of the film had to remain under 2 hours (it ultimately lasts 105 minutes). Within the archive itself, we mainly shortened stretches of recorded speech that had no image. But we also created a soundtrack for one of the speeches whose image didn’t have any sound. I located the written transcript of that speech, which was read aloud by the speaker’s daughter, allowing the editing process to perform a kind of restoration of the archive. Before the filming even began, I had digitised the sound reels back in 2016 in order to synchronise all the recordings from the Conference. From that moment on, I knew that the archival image would occupy the foreground of the film and run through it like a continuous bass.
You have developed a cinematic form that is neither didactic nor informational. The relationship between cinema and history is the heart of your research and you have explored archival material in several previous films. Could you elaborate on your thoughts surrounding this? How can cinema produce historiographical knowledge?
Pedagogy should be left to teachers. There is a pedagogy inherent to the archival image itself, one that exists independently to any explanatory discourse, and it is this that the film must grasp. As for information, it is better left to history books. If historical science needs cinema, it is not to inform us about history, a good book will always do that more effectively than a film. Cinema, however, can offer history something else: the possibility of revealing the buried image of the past, an image that only cinema has the power to make perceptible through editing. That, for me, is where the historiographical potential of cinema truly lies.
Interviewed by Claire Lasolle
