PhD in Film Studies (USP, 2008; advisor: Ismail Xavier; Fapesp Fellowship). Post-Doctorate (PUC-SP, 2014; supervisor: Arlindo Machado; Fapesp Fellowship). Post-Doctorate (USP, 2017; supervisor: Cristian Borges; Capes Fellowship). Retrospectives: Festival of Rio (2002); 56th Locarno Festival (2003); 6th Belo Horizonte Short Film Fest (2004); 16th Sesc Videobrasil (2007); Instituto Tomie Ohtake (2019). Films shown at MoMA (New York) and Tate Modern (London). He directed, among others, “Vassourinha: The Voice and The Void” (1998; Best Documentary Short, 36th Chicago Festival), “Santos Dumont Pré-Cineasta?” (2010; Best Director, 10th Recine), “Untitled # 1: Dance of Leitfossil” (2014; Best Film, Golden Reel Underground Festival), and “Untitled # 5: A Rotina terá seu Enquanto” (2019; Best Short, 24th It’s All True). His work is the subject of a chapter in “The Sublimity of Document: cinema as diorama (avant-doc 2)”, by Scott MacDonald (Oxford University Press, 2019).

FILMOGRAPHY - CARLOS ADRIANO 

Suspens - (1989, 13min)
A Luz das Palavras - (1992, 8min)
Remanescências - (1997, 18min)
A Voz e O Vazio: A Vez de Vassourinha - (1998, 16min)
Militância - (2002, 10min)
O Papa da Pulp: R. F. Lucchetti - (2002, 15min)
Um Caffé com o Miécio - (2003, 15min) 
Porviroscópio - (2006, 31min)
Das Ruínas a Rexistência - (2007, 13min) 
Santoscópio = Dumontagem - (2009, 14min)
Santos Dumont Pré-Cineasta? - (2010, 63min) 
Sem título # 1 : Dance of Leitfossil - (2014, 5min)
Sem título # 2 : la mer larme - (2015, 31min)
Festejo Muito Pessoal - (2016, 8min)
Sem título # 3 : e para que Poetas em Tempo de Pobreza? - (2016, 13min) 
Sem título #4: Apesar dos Pesares, na Chuva há de Cantares - (2018, 30min)
MarMúRio - (2019, 6min)
Sem título # 5 : A Rotina terá seu Enquanto - (2019, 10 min)
O que Há em Ti - (2020, 16min)

TRAILER

For me, it is somewhat difficult to try to tell how this film came about. It would be a contradiction to try to explain the process of something (re)created under the sign of the Freudian “disturbing“ (unheimlich), the very condition of ”disturbing strangeness" hinders the task (perhaps more solicitous to psychoanalytic analysis). After all, mystery (not only in the things of art, but especially in the things of life) is mister.

Initially I realized the similarities, in terms of episodic interplay, between two films produced in an interval of almost half a century and in the span of different genres and modes of production. Other references occurred to me, such as Artaud and Walser.

During the editing, a verse from a poem called “Música” by Charles Baudelaire (a verse whose rhyme works in both French and Portuguese) came back to my memory (my Gradiva?) with astonishing pertinence and propriety, formulating a definition of what I felt about the film: “mirror of my despair.”

TESTIMONIALS 
 

“For the past three decades, the Brazilian master Carlos Adriano has been exploring  his national cinema’s roots on film, together with his relationship to the cinematic  medium as a whole. In the process, he has become one of the world’s great  contemporary practitioners of found-footage filmmaking, as he intermingles sounds  and images from popular culture with fragments of his own life story in creative,  surprising, and consistently moving ways. We are fortunate to have this magnificent  artist’s continually growing output with us, and to watch its trajectory unfold.”

Aaron Cutler e Mariana Shellard (2019) (curators, São Paulo / Nova York)

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"One of the most original Brazilian directors, Carlos Adriano won the contest of National shorts of the festival 'É Tudo Verdade' with SEM TÍTULO #5: A Rotina Terá seu Enquanto. As is customary with 'found footage‘ films, which appropriates and re-signifies archive film images, he follows his self-biographical series revisiting Yasujiro Ozu's’ "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962). Its Mondrian-esque refinement, as is surely noted by the jury, is one of the highlights of exactly three decades of exuberant cinema."

Amir Labaki (2019) (É Tudo Verdade festival director and critic)

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 "no / your cine / refuses to / cine-same / cine-poem / signema / yes / (...) / kinesthesia / grains and soundnoises / unreassembled in light-minutes / short films / of long life." 

Augusto de Campos (2002) (poet, São Paulo) 

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"The work reveals a filmmaker more deeply involved with the language he has chosen than any other in activity today of which I have knowledge. A filmmaker for filmmakers. But also a filmmaker for poets and artists. And therefore for all true lovers of cinema. His films are made for the viewer-artist, that is: they make the viewer - the one who actually watches these films - an artist. And they already make a difference in the critical perspective of our entire cinema."

Caetano Veloso (2002) (composer and singer, Salvador / Rio de Janeiro)

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"Carlos Adriano's films are not made only with the heart and mind, they above all cut into the very flesh of cinema to find its light, they live from body to body with the very matter of which cinema is made, resuming, from the most primitive tradition, its most sophisticated destiny. These films are not a possible interpretation of cinema; on the contrary, they want to be cinema itself, in a concrete way, its education by the stone of the image. It is the pure creation of an audiovisual universe alternative to the one we live in.”

Carlos Diegues (2002) (filmmaker, Rio de Janeiro)

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“Carlos Adriano : he’s reel!”

Décio Pignatari (1999) (poet, São Paulo) 

READ MORE TESTIMONIALS ABOUT THE ARTIST

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COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY – Sem Título # 6 O Inquietanto 

CRITIC - Eduardo de Jesus, Catálogo do forumdoc 2020

Cineastas do Real: A Carlos Adriano Interview - by Amir Labaki
 

Master class with Carlos Adriano: Reapropriação de Arquivos – Método e Poética | 17ª Conferência - É TUDO VERDADE (2020)

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POEMS 

I - poem poem mentioned in  Sem Título # 6: O Inquietanto
 

Time

Robert Walser (1900)
 

I stay here, I have time,

 I meditate here, I have time.

the day is dark, it has time,

more time than I want, time

for me to measure, a long time.

measure grows with time.

only one thing exceeds time,

it is longing: no time

is the same time as its time.

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II - an epigraph of  Sem Título # 6: O Inquietanto

It is more decent to put our

ignorance in the mystery,

than wishing to mask it in explanations.

Lima Barreto
O Cemitério dos Vivos (1953)

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III - poems apropos of Sem Título # 6: O Inquietanto
 

La Musique (1857/1867)
Charles Baudelaire

La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
Vers ma pâle étoile,
Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther,
Je mets à la voile;

La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés
Comme de la toile
J'escalade le dos des flots amoncelés
Que la nuit me voile;

Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D'un vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions

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Reappropriation Poems - Sem Título # 6 O Inquietanto

Ano Passado em Marinmaraisbad (2020, 4min) by André Vallias

JUSTIFICATION: "Last Year at Marienbad" is one of the audiovisual works that most impacted me in 2020 and remains a central reference for the reappropriation of archives. The geniality of "found footage" in regards to the structural procedure and the relevance of the appropriation as to the matter of memory make the video a dazzling poem of found footage. I want to indicate another extraordinary work by the poet, translator and designer André Vallias: the poem "Augusto de Campos traduz", published in February 2021 on the 90th birthday of the poet, translator and essayist: a hypertext of feat and invention, of aesthetic and technical expertise – https://erratica.com.br/ac_traduz/. Augustos' ouevre was fundamental in my formative years and still is in my creation. The names of his books of poems – “Poetamenos”; “Expoemas”; “Despoesia”; “Não”) - are manifest from a position that, to some extent, guided my “cine-poems of refusal” (as Augusto wrote to me in dedicatories in his books). 

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You don’t know me (2014, 1min) by Katia Maciel 

https://katiamaciel.net/you-dont-know-me 

JUSTIFICATION: I could cite here several works of Katia Maciel: videos and video installations such as “Timeless” (2011-2015) and “Timelapse” (2015), “Ondas: um dia de nuvens listradas vindas do mar” (2006-2014) and “Quebra-Mar” (2017); poems from “Zun” (2012), “Repetir” (2015), “Trailer” (2017), “Plantio” (2019). But I chose the reference of a video of reappropriation (found footage) that combines a sequel to the film “Vertigo” (1958), by Alfred Hitchcock, with the song “You don't know Me” By Caetano Veloso (“Transa”, 1972). The music sways and embalms the twirls of a couple's vertigo. 

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Circuladô (2006, 5min) by André Parente

JUSTIFICATION: This work has three different versions: video, video-installation and interactive installation. They are all made of found footage, with images of the characters in limit situations, such as: Thelonius Monk (“Straight no Chase”, Charlotte Zwerin, 1988) is about itself as if in a psychotic frenzy; Édipo (“Edipo Re”, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967) in the crossroad it turns and follows its path outside of the Oracle; Corisco (“Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol”, Glauber Rocha, 1964), before it falls dead to the ground, it spins with its arms opened; Dervixes (“Decasia”, Bill Morrison, 2002)