Brazilian Outlaw Cinema, pt. 5 — Gurcius Gewdner
Gurcius Gewdner is an evil genius and a mad scientist, a gentleman and a scholar. You’re just as likely to catch one of his films in a stuffy classroom full of “art” people as you are at a Napalm Death show. He’s been creating art since 1996, when he was 13 years old (At 13, I was listening to Poison and trying to grow a mullet). He’s acted in films by Rodrigo Aragão, Petter Baiestorf, and Fernando Rick; he’s edited nearly 80 films; he’s directed some of the most chaotic films around, including Pazucus: Island of Vomit and Despair and Mamilos Em Chamas (Flaming Nipples); and his band, Os Legais, is a mix of Naked City, Charles Bronson, Andy Kaufman, and total anarchy. Proceed at your own risk!
Nervousmaker - Do you feel that Brazilian horror/genre films are influenced by the social/political climate, and if so, in what way?
Gurcius Gewdner - For sure, how could they not be? Political consciousness and education are matters of survival. Look what's happening here right now and in so many countries around the world. This grotesque rise of the far-right wing, this identification with fascism and figures of pure ignorance and hate taking important places in leadership and governments. It's almost difficult to create something aggressive or with the intention of "images of fear and the bizarre" when the reality looks so scary and doomed. We are stuck again in that moment where educators and artists are being persecuted. At any time and especially at moments like these, as Minor Threat says, you need to "FLEX YOUR HEAD!” If you stop learning, if you stop sharing knowledge, messed up situations like this emerge from the sewers again, and well, this is always happening in small or big proportions. At the moment, the problem is as big as can be, for the worse. Creating critical art is a HUGE necessity, to inspire people to seek knowledge, never stop learning and fighting for freedom: freedom in arts, freedom in sex, freedom in life. Freedom and respect. Since I was a young teenager (made my first movie at 13), my utopia and dream was to live by making movies and music. I had the chance to go to a university and my choice was not to study cinema, but to study HISTORY. Monty Python, punk rock, and Dusan Makavejev movies were my main influences, I wanted to learn what they learned to make movies and art. I wanted to discover who the hell Bakunin and Marx were, how people survived totalitarian governments, how people destroyed them, and with that knowledge try to make movies as funny, crazy, and defiant as Makavejev movies or the Pythons, knowing with the knowledge of punk rock that it is possible to make those movies with what I have in hand, which sometimes is very little… But you can do it, you get up and do it, without thinking on who’s going to see it or like it, just do it, together with the people you love. For me, my love and obsession for horror movies and experimental cinema always walked together with the spirit of DIY of the punk/hardcore/underground music scene. Create your own movie, your own demo tape, your own fanzine, with the people you love and respect, get all your aggression and anger and put it into something that can help put a dose of strangeness and sense of liberty in people's lives. Also challenge our own methods and the technological instruments we use to create our art. To be critical also of our own views on what a "genre movie" should be, how to cross and destroy limits of style, how to go beyond the bubbles of gore, underground, SOV, splatter, and all those labels that try to define independent cinema/punk culture/genre cinema, etc... That being said, I think I can say that I never did a "pure horror movie," all my stuff is impregnated with a pure love for genre movies, but there's always something that I'm not sure what it is, that I'm not sure what I'm doing or where I'm going, and this makes me happy because that means that I'm still learning and discovering things, mixing everything that falls into my hands.
Nervousmaker - Is there a specific "Brazil" style when it comes to horror/genre films? Something uniquely Brazilian about your films and those of your peers?
Gurcius Gewdner - Well, for my movies, I'm not even sure which planet I am on, and I'm not really interested in finding out. If I discover a box with great experimental horror movies made by giant bugs on Jupiter or a huge basket of spaghetti westerns shot by Martian worms with a new type of camera, I will try to absorb them for my own and put something that I learn from them in my work. Even that I have my favorite places to make films, especially Florianopolis in the south of Brazil, I'm a kind of a gypsy with no defined home. Pazucus is shot mainly in Florianopolis, but don't trust very much in my geography lessons, there can be footage from any place that I put my foot in the world mixed in there. This is one of the things I love in Jesus Franco for example, you are never sure enough where he is. I love the confusion of languages too. This is how I like to deal with my "geographical identity." But Brazil is a very multicultural and big country, as you go on discovering filmmakers you can notice how they deal with their homes and identities in the movies and you can learn a lot about their specific regions in their movies. This is very clear in Rodrigo Aragão movies for instance, he is chanting his village, you recognize his area, the state of Espirito Santo and his region (Vila Velha, Guarapari...) even in a zombie movie. The same with the urban movies made in big cities like São Paulo by Dennison Ramalho, Fernando Rick, or Juliana Rojas movies, José Mojica Marins and other directors from the area filming in small cities around São Paulo, Super-8 underground movies of Ivan Cardoso of the seventies which are totally and completely Rio de Janeiro rooted or the masterpieces of underground experimentalist shocker Edgar Navarro in Bahia. Even in Petter Baiestorf, who is also some kind of crazy gypsy from another world, you can recognize his region and their costumes, because most of his films are made in his region of western Brazil and you recognize the food, the way people talk, and the landscapes. All directors use some local and specific cultural heritage in their movies, some of them in a more clear way than others. One thing I can say for sure about "Brazilian Style" is that transgressive, horror, and experimental cinema in Brazil is not known enough, not as it should be, it's not even known around here in its own country. When someone shows some Brazilian contemporary movies or even old ones, even in horror retrospectives, the selection is still very soft and very limited. There is a tradition of those experimental/hysterical/surreal movies in here, since the sixties, we had our Dreamlanders (the John Waters gang) in the sixties and seventies, our Joe D'Amatos and "Transgression Cinema" in the eighties/nineties, and the history continues... Those movies and directors should be praised and recognized around the world like the Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch gang, Russ Meyer, Ozploitation directors, Fassbinder, Maya Deren, Koji Wakamatsu, Buttgereit, Dusan Makavejev, Walerian Borowczyk, Teruo Ishii, the Kuchar brothers, Vera Chytilova, and all those great artists that we love so much. Those Brazilian movies should be studied and discovered the way they deserve, all over the world.
Nervousmaker - What are the most important and influential horror/genre films/filmmakers of Brazil?
Gurcius Gewdner - Doesn't matter how different from each other our styles are, everyone loves Jose Mojica Marins, since the sixties, probably if you are dreaming of making radical art, at some point you will fall in love with his movies and liberty. Me and Baiestorf were talking the other day about the fact that Glauber Rocha probably did the first hysterical uncontrolled gore movie made in Brazil, with Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol in 1964, and then later, from 1967 to the future, lots of filmmakers began to make those movies with that spirit too, this "Christoph Shilingensief running/screaming spirit" before Shilingensief even existed. Something that John Waters began to make at the end of the sixties also, influenced by filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and the Kuchar brothers. Here in Brazil I believe that the biggest outside influence was Godard and some things of Japanese cinema. My favorite moment of Mojica is when he decides to make something radical as O Despertar da Besta in 1970, in that moment his style and freedom already has influenced lots of filmmakers with his two Coffin Joe adventures in ‘64 and ‘67, but in 1970 you can see his strength with all his power and totally attached with the underground cinema of the time, using other filmmakers of the period as actors and partners (such as Ozualdo Candeias and Carlos Reichenbach, who are actors in O Despertar da Besta). This movie for me is a perfect mixture of horror and experimental cinema, an LSD nightmare. Mojica always worked with everyone in cinema, in the seventies, working with Maurice Capovilla as an actor in one of the most unique masterpieces of Brazilian arthouse cinema, O Profeta da Fome. Or collaborating directly with artists like Rogério Sganzerla, Zé Celso Martinez, Reichenbach, Ozualdo Candeias, or even in the last years with Dennison and Aragao. In the years since 1964 we have filmmakers following the path of angry experimentalism that would make any John Waters fans in the world very happy, avid and totally filled with energy. This is a huge and incredible list of films and directors, and usually you can track some of them under the label of cinema de invenção or cinema marginal, but this classification doesn't include some other incredible directors like Jean Garret and his fantasmagorical erotic horror movies. Ana Carolina with her first two features (Das Tripas Coração & Mar de Rosas) who reminds so much the spirit of early John Waters. Edgar Navarro, one of our kings of Super-8, master of scatological Super-8 movies, director of Superoutro. A jewel called O Pasteleiro by David Cardoso, which is an incredible necrophilia movie, our Aftermath before Aftermath existed. Fauzi Mansur with really grotesque and fun gore filmed in English, or Sady Baby who did probably the most aggressive porn gore movies ever made in the world (shocking pieces that would offend even Joe D’Amato in his most radical phase) and a huge amount of genre movies that were born in "Boca do Lixo," not only horror but also Westerns, action movies, some sci-fi influenced flicks here and there, most of them full packed with tons of eroticism and exploitation. In the nineties, Brazilian "mainstream" cinema was dead (a long history involving a playboy jerk right-wing president called Fernando Collor and the end of Embrafilme) and later on we have a new generation of SOV filmmakers appearing slowly. Among them is Petter Baiestorf and he is for sure one of the most influential filmmakers of the period, giving energy and full support to a next generation of filmmakers to be born, including me. From 2003 to only a few years ago, we saw a huge amount of filmmakers and new movies appearing; the political situation for investments in education and culture was in a good and very optimistic situation which reflected very strongly in our cinema. A creepy cloud that never dissolved from the military dictatorship was around waiting for its turn, and that cloud began to grow very fast again in the last years, leaving us where we are now, with a living-dead fecaloma militia gangster family occupying the rooms of government and total chaos in every sector of society. Maybe in the movies, we are coming back to 1995 now, I don't know. This is a very disorganized list of some of my favorites, and even saying so many names, the list is even bigger and the movies are wonderful.
