Adriano Garrett

Comments

In the email that I received inviting me to participate in this poll, it was a deliberate choice not to define the word 'film'. That is an important gesture not to guide the perception of the voter, although it is undeniable that, historically, 'film' has become almost synonymous with 'live-action narrative fictional feature film', with works that deviate from this standard being categorised differently ('short film', 'documentary', 'animation', 'experimental', etc). In Sight and Sound's 2012 poll, for example, there were only two short films in the top 100. Being aware of this, I looked for a different perspective, especially with regard to short films. In addition, I tried to think of the films not only as individual works, but in dialogue with their historical times and also with the cinematography of each moment. So, I arrived at my list, which can also be read as a proposal for bringing together five film duos:

Meio-dia (Helena Solberg, 1970) + Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970): portraits of post-1968 youth walking through a world that must collapse.

La Noire de… ('Black Girl', Ousmane Sembène, 1966) + Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975): two approaches to time and silence through the daily routine of women in completely different positions within the (post-?) colonial world.

Alma no Olho (Zózimo Bulbul, 1973) + Child of Resistance (Haile Gerima, 1973): two radical experimental films which struggle formally for freedom.

Ulysse (Agnès Varda, 1983) + Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990): Two masterpieces that have changed my way of looking, listening and feeling cinema.

Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) + Serras da desordem (Andrea Tonacci, 2006): Two brilliant cinematographic ways of approaching the theme of genocide.