Júlio Bressane

We see the film, not the cinema; cinema remains hidden within the film. Cinema is the Phantom of the Opera. A movement and a moment of transition, the Phantom fades away with each opera. It disappears and then reemerges in another, and another, and another, and yet another opera.

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For Filmmaker Film Festival (2023), Fulvio Baglivi and Cristina Piccino asked some filmmakers (R. Beckermann, J. Bressane, D’Anolfi/Parenti, T. De Bernardi, L. Di Costanzo, A. Fasulo, F. Ferraro, M. Frammartino, S. George, ghezzi/Gagliardo, C. Hintermann, G. Maderna, A. Momo, A. Rossetto, M. Santini, C. Simon, S. Savona) to give us their own "lost road," that is, a sequence, scene or piece of editing that did not later find its way into the final version of one of their works. Each fragment has its own accomplished presence, often has a different title from the film it was made for, which is not necessary to have seen in order to find meaning; on the contrary, those who set out thinking they know the world they are walking through will find themselves displaced.

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A statue steps down from the pedestal and sets out in search of her Creator, the cold Queen of the Night. In the urban night, she encounters mysterious figures that disappear like shadows. Freely inspired by characters from Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute.

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For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!

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Vladimir Carvalho's Cinema of Inequality marked the documentary filmmaker's trajectory over decades of activity. Considered one of the most important Brazilian documentary filmmakers in activity, his images influenced the emergence of Cinema Novo and the new Brazilian documentary years later. Quando a Coisa Vira Outra covers the most important films made by Vladimir, revealing where ideas come from to show the true reality of a country.

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In 1965, a year after the military coup in Brazil, an oasis of freedom opened in the country's capital. The Brasília Film Festival: a landmark of cultural and political resistance. Its story is that of Brazilian cinema itself.

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Helena Ignez is one of the main female figures of Brazilian cinema. She developed a new style of acting. Nowadays, she directs independent films. The documentary tells some of the History of Brazilian cinema, its political context and Helena's trajectory.

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Bressane (together with his partner Rosa Dias and young filmmaker Rodrigo Lima) guide us through the beautiful Swiss Sils Maria, where Nietzsche spent no less than eight summers. In his letters, Nietzsche indicates which spots brought him to a different understanding of philosophy. He discovered, beyond the philosophical text, a source for ideas in the pure air, in the mountain landscapes, in the water of the lakes, and in the age-old forests.

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A rescue of the history of Ipanema beach in the 1970s, when the construction of a pier changed the landscape and created fertile soil for a generation of artists and sportsmen.

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An abandoned tumbledown theater in the outback of Paraíba state is the initial setting of a film about cinema, which explores the testimonials of the novelist and playwright Ariano Suassuna and other filmmakers such as Ruy Guerra, Julio Bressane, Ken Loach, Andrzej Wajda, Karim Ainouz, José Padilha, Hector Babenco, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr, Gus Van Sant and Jia Zhangke. They all respond to two basic questions: why do they make movies and why do they serve the seventh art. The filmmakers share their thoughts about time, narrative, rhythm, light, movement, the meaning of tragedy, the audience‘s desires and the boundaries with other forms of art.

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When I wake will I be someone else?

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A documentary on the restoration of Rogério Sganzerla's 1970 film "Copacabana, Mon Amour".

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Sentimental Education centers on the unique relationship between Áurea, a lonely 40 year old teacher, and a young man she has just met by chance – one of these encounters which mythology and literature are full of. A delicate soul who finds itself attracted to a beauty that seems to demand, disturb and move her. That shakes her up entirely. During the days following their first conversation, she will expose all her feelings through classes in which he will let himself be carried away. Until an unusual episode from the past is revealed and changes everything.

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An essay around the streets, as an homage to Fernando Pessoa

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Between February an May of 1970, Julio Bresane and Rogerio Sganzerla made 7 films for their company Belair that were forbidden by the Brazilian censorship that reveal today images of an unique freedom.

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Experimental documentary short that debates over Rogério Sganzerla's Brazilian cult classic "The Red Light Bandit".

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In September 2007 Júlio Bressane goes to Ferrara. In the cemetery of the Italian city he ends up making two movies.

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A short documentary on Belair, an independent Brazilian film company that lasted for only five months in 1970.

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A 10-part documentary about 10 Brazilian filmmakers: Linduarte Noronha, Jorge Furtado, Ruy Guerra, Murilo Salles, Paulo Caldas, Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, David Neves, Julio Bressane, Ana Carolina and Carlos Reichenbach.

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"They are combinations of fragments. There are no stories, it is possible to mount these fragments in many ways. »Cine-eye or cine-voice-eye. The text of the Galaxies goes straight to the image. »A text rewritten for the eye» (H. de Campos). A short film that is more than experimental and that is based on a dark aesthetic that takes from the work of poet Haroldo de Campos its "dark matter" to combine it with the filmmaker's rarefied images and the puppet-like markings of actresses Bete Coelho and Mariana de Moraes.

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A liberal interpretation of the book Galáxias, one of the most important works by the great contemporary Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, written between 1963 and 1976 and published in 1986. Bressane considers this work of poetry the Portuguese Finnegan's Wake. The video is a disorganized system of images: an exploration of colors, quotes and sudden inspirations created by the words. A sequence of epiphanies, rigorous in their images. The films cited act as cinematographic scenery, conferring a sense of drama to the movements of the actresses and the readings of the poems.

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A documentary chronicling the life and works of Brazilian poet, songwriter, journalist and avant-garde filmmaker Torquato Neto, from his beginnings to his suicide at the age of 28.

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A fragmented style, patchwork of interviews with Caetano Veloso's friends, mixed with conversations, thoughts, scenes of dance and literature excerpts.

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Irreverent adaptation of great writer Machado de Assis's masterpiece "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" ("Brás Cubas's Posthumous Memories"). A dead man tells about his love life and adventures, specially his affair with Virgília, a dubious married woman.

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The fictional encounter in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in the 30s) between popular songwriter Lamartine Babo and inconoclast poet and playwright Oswald de Andrade.

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An essay film on the editing of erotic movies.

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An unusual look at 1978 Brasilia Film Festival and the politics that make certain films fashionable or not.

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Cropped hair, a rosemary branch behind the ear, yellow shirt of shiny satin, he's behind the wheel of his car when passing by a woman who walks by the roadside. Strongly painted lips, printed dress with round skirt and red shoes matching the color of the lipstick, she catches his attention. He gives her a ride, the two of them stare in silence for a few moments. They introduce themselves to one another and between the two establishes an absurd dialogue and full of metaphors. And they are driving around in corners of Rio de Janeiro, to the sound of Noel Rosa and Lamartine Babo. Eva and Antena, she a seer, he, an assassin on the run, initiate an unusual case of love, a marginal love, where boredom often gives way to tragedy, creating the agony of a holiday spent in an abyss.

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The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.

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A silent film shot in New York in 1972, including scenes in Hélio Oiticica’s apartment. Last film made in exile by Bressane, it mimics the experimental concept of "quasi-cinema" by Hélio Oiticica. It consists of a fragmentary experience of freedom, in super-8 and 16mm, in a code out of time, out of the square, while recreating (with different cameras) the wild and sensitive look that Oiticica dedicated to cinema. Its definitive 71-minute restored version was completed in the early 2000s.

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A dysfunctional family, composed of a prostitute and two gay men, one strong and the other fragile and stupid, lives a routine life in Rio de Janeiro. When the slut threatens the other two to stop supporting them, they decide to find an odalisque as an alternative to keep their easy life.

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We see the film, not the cinema; cinema remains hidden within the film. Cinema is the Phantom of the Opera. A movement and a moment of transition, the Phantom fades away with each opera. It disappears and then reemerges in another, and another, and another, and yet another opera.

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A montage of 48 Brazilian films made between 1898 and 2022. The moments, the frames, where we feel a glimmer, an innovation, some experimentation and emotion coming to us at different times. A fine thread that runs through cinema since its birth, and even before.

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Two women, long-time friends, embark on a love story. They are writers who do not write to publish but for themselves. Their mutual conversation, their desires, the risks and phantoms of existence, the privilege of the wounded and of condemnation, traverse their speech, are a confession.

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“If you had to choose between me and your mother, who would it be?” Capitu asks provocatively of her problematic lover. Elsewhere, they dance to inaudible music with their friends, each couple keeping to a rhythm of their own. At times, this depiction of the memories we see one Dom Casmurro commit to paper with a flamboyant pen seems to be an interplay of conflicting emotions – particularly when jealousy raises its head. Adapted from the Brazilian classic novel 'Dom Casmurro' (1899) by Machado de Assis as an ironic/philosophical essay on poetry and jealousy, and featuring fragments of Bressane’s previous works.

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For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!

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Bressane (together with his partner Rosa Dias and young filmmaker Rodrigo Lima) guide us through the beautiful Swiss Sils Maria, where Nietzsche spent no less than eight summers. In his letters, Nietzsche indicates which spots brought him to a different understanding of philosophy. He discovered, beyond the philosophical text, a source for ideas in the pure air, in the mountain landscapes, in the water of the lakes, and in the age-old forests.

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A delicate and tenacious writer, widowed three years ago, engages in frequent conversations with a parrot. However, she’s always observed by a large portion of raw meat.

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A curious couple, whose existence takes place where art arises along a singular metaphysical desire. They search for it through repeated and varied representations, in a setting of light where hope and desperation blend together.

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Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, Garoto follows a young couple who find themselves in an enchanted place where they experience an amorous and spiritual adventure.

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Sentimental Education centers on the unique relationship between Áurea, a lonely 40 year old teacher, and a young man she has just met by chance – one of these encounters which mythology and literature are full of. A delicate soul who finds itself attracted to a beauty that seems to demand, disturb and move her. That shakes her up entirely. During the days following their first conversation, she will expose all her feelings through classes in which he will let himself be carried away. Until an unusual episode from the past is revealed and changes everything.

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An essay around the streets, as an homage to Fernando Pessoa

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In his film Rua Aperana 52 Júlio Bressane describes the invention of a landscape, the topology of a corner of Rio de Janeiro. The film consists of a series of photographs taken between 1909 and 1955 by, among others, Bressane's parents at and around the address used as a title. These are interlarded with scenes from films made between 1957 and 2005, bringing the total fictional time the film covers to almost a century; one hundred years in which the winding road featured in almost every shot structures the new landscape behind the Aperana, which means 'wrong road'. Rua Aperana 52 is autobiographical, as it is a landscape from Bressane's youth, but it is also not so; it is more a multi-subjective mythology of a place seen through all those films and photographs. Bressane refers to his editing as an intuitive form of thinking aimed at evoking moods which make the viewer the new witness of the fictional landscape. A fiction about a fiction,

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The names of the characters are pronouns. She is a teacher, with his father dead just three days ago. Faced with this situation, He intends to take care of her while He is alive. This is the beginning of an odd relationship.

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The great battles are the backdrop for the unfolding of the Egyptian Queen's personal life. The strategy of Cleopatra is to seduce the Roman General Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to protect their civilization.

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Three friends, Hilda, Matilda and Gaspar, meet in a rundown downtown apartment during a weekend to chat, drink and experience pleasure.

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A cinematographic essay, without dialogues, about the months Nietszche spent in Turin, Italy, with narration quoted by his original writings.

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Brazilian director Julio Bressane directs this religious biography on the life and work of Saint Jerome, the monk who first translated the Bible into Latin. Set both in the desert and in the posh confines of the Vatican, Jerome (Everaldo Pontes) agonizes over which Latin word would best fit its Hebrew counterpart. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

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Story with some autobiographical touches taken from director's life.

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The history of Brazilian popular music in the 20th Century, focusing specially on the life and works of intriguing singer Mário Reis, a loner who, with his special way of singing - whispering and softly saying the words - in a time when singers with potent voices ruled, was in a way a forerunner of Bossa Nova style.

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A liberal interpretation of the book Galáxias, one of the most important works by the great contemporary Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, written between 1963 and 1976 and published in 1986. Bressane considers this work of poetry the Portuguese Finnegan's Wake. The video is a disorganized system of images: an exploration of colors, quotes and sudden inspirations created by the words. A sequence of epiphanies, rigorous in their images. The films cited act as cinematographic scenery, conferring a sense of drama to the movements of the actresses and the readings of the poems.

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Based upon the life story of Father Antonio Vieira, born in Lisbon in 1608 and deceased in Salvador, Bahia, in 1697. He's considered the first Brazilian writer and one of the most important aesthete of linguistic and of the Portuguese language of all times, a master in the art of metaphor, of verbal relations and analogy. He was persecuted and condemned by the Portuguese Court of Inquisition due to his position against native slavery, against the intolerance to the Jewish people and to the colonial politics of exploration.

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Irreverent adaptation of great writer Machado de Assis's masterpiece "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" ("Brás Cubas's Posthumous Memories"). A dead man tells about his love life and adventures, specially his affair with Virgília, a dubious married woman.

Open details →

The fictional encounter in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in the 30s) between popular songwriter Lamartine Babo and inconoclast poet and playwright Oswald de Andrade.

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A caboclo's soul wanders through purgatory (or hell), visiting many places until he boards a ship whose destination is unknown.

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An essay film on the editing of erotic movies.

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Cropped hair, a rosemary branch behind the ear, yellow shirt of shiny satin, he's behind the wheel of his car when passing by a woman who walks by the roadside. Strongly painted lips, printed dress with round skirt and red shoes matching the color of the lipstick, she catches his attention. He gives her a ride, the two of them stare in silence for a few moments. They introduce themselves to one another and between the two establishes an absurd dialogue and full of metaphors. And they are driving around in corners of Rio de Janeiro, to the sound of Noel Rosa and Lamartine Babo. Eva and Antena, she a seer, he, an assassin on the run, initiate an unusual case of love, a marginal love, where boredom often gives way to tragedy, creating the agony of a holiday spent in an abyss.

Open details →

The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.

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It is a film about the deep Brazil, not Brazil as a society, state or experience; it is a film about a geological, prehistoric and pre-logical Brazil. The adventures of the Caribbean monster, its wanderings along a virgin beach evoke, before Brazil, the artistic wanderings of a filmmaker in constant friction and, why not say, struggle against the mommy-daddy cinema, produced without taste, without joy and without adventure.

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A silent film shot in New York in 1972, including scenes in Hélio Oiticica’s apartment. Last film made in exile by Bressane, it mimics the experimental concept of "quasi-cinema" by Hélio Oiticica. It consists of a fragmentary experience of freedom, in super-8 and 16mm, in a code out of time, out of the square, while recreating (with different cameras) the wild and sensitive look that Oiticica dedicated to cinema. Its definitive 71-minute restored version was completed in the early 2000s.

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Bressane's second London film, shot in six days in his apartment. "I had seen the French avant-garde films of the 1920's and naturally the title cites Breton. But underneath it can also be read in many ways. It is a cinema that is invented on the spur of the moment, like you invent an instrument to play music and then abandon it. This film came out like an improvisation, a total risk. It is a deconstruction of meaning but not in the analytical, intellectual sense. I have always tried to lose myself with my films. There is no trace of American or French underground cinema. If anything, it is the idea of home movies, there were many ideas for digital films long before digital film existed. This film made itself, it was like a jazz improvisation. Amor Louco is a lost object, it doesn't speak any language, it has no signs, no letters, no captions. And in the scene where the cataract is cut with the razor blade, it was the adventure of the film itself that was put to the test".

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First film by Julio Bressane shot in exile, "Memoirs" is a film about a man who repeatedly kills the same type of woman in same places, the same way. Filmed on the streets of London.

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Bressane’s first color film, shot in the home of the artist Elyseu Visconti. Part of it is missing sound and final editing because the director was forced to leave Brazil. Horror and humor to deal with the subject of insanity: “In the end everyone leaves the house as though they were laboratory mice escaping, they invade the city and contaminate the world”. “If we talk about horror, this film deals with national horror, with Mojica Marins as an emblem. There might be a few touches of Corman and English horror, but it is another level of horror. What transformed the film was the location where we were shooting, the house of a 19th century painter, a receptacle of light. When I arrived and saw that house, that light, I said: ‘This is the film. This is the horror’. The meaning of the film, its appeal, derives from this laboratory of light” (J. Bressane). — Torino Film Festival

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A dysfunctional family, composed of a prostitute and two gay men, one strong and the other fragile and stupid, lives a routine life in Rio de Janeiro. When the slut threatens the other two to stop supporting them, they decide to find an odalisque as an alternative to keep their easy life.

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Rogério Sganzerla’s lost film. The only existing copy was lost in 1992 and the negatives are lost. It tells about the history of Betty Bomba, an exhibitionist woman.

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Sônia and her homosexual brother are both believed by their mother to be possessed by the devil. She works as a prostitute in the streets of Copacabana and he’s a servant who falls madly in love with his employer.

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