Exhibitions
A Man Called Love
Danni Zuvela
The phenomenalism of Spiritualism will soon, as other newly discovered principles and forces in nature have done in the past, cease to excite especial wonder. The spirit rap, the temporary domination of natural law by a higher but nonetheless natural law, the trance, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychography, psychometry, the exercise of all the many and varied gifts of the spirit, and last but by no means least, the wonderful manifestation of the psychic form—all these, and more will soon be as familiar to mankind as human life itself.
—James J. Owen1
A small grain of happiness and hope within each one of us is capable of changing and transforming anything, because LIFE is CONSTRUCTED in our DREAMS and is SUMMED UP IN LOVE! Lovingly, Francisco Candido Xavier.2
Documentaries—or whatever their directors care to call them—are just not my favorite kind of movie watching. The fact is I don't trust the little bastards. I don't trust the motives of those who think they are superior to fiction films. I don't trust their claim to have cornered the market on the truth. I don't trust their inordinately high, and entirely undeserved, status of bourgeois respectability.
—Marcel Ophuls3
At first we see a man in heavy spectacles, eyes closed, head bowed, body poised in silent concentration. This is Francisco ('Chico') Candido Xavier, spirit medium, who is receiving dictation from the other side. Brazilian artist Tamar Guimaraes's slide-show installation A Man Called Love centres on this prolific psychographer, who transcribed hundreds of books and thousands of poems, messages, and communiqués from the spirit realm. We see many arresting images of this celebrity medium, whom we learn is one of the most famous and influential figures in Brazilian history. We see him with notaries and ardent followers, and receiving messages, while the voiceover details his extensive contribution to public life.
We hear how spiritism—a French offshoot of the spiritualist movement that swept Europe, the United States, and Australia in the nineteenth century—also took hold in Brazil, becoming its fourth-largest religion. Mediumistic activity was central to its practices, but paying mediums was not. Xavier never sought payment for the words he channelled, for, he claimed, he did not author them—the spirits did.4 We hear that Xavier's publications fostered spiritism during Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1960s and ʼ70s, and that thousands of lives were touched by the words manifested from his inter-dimensional visitations. We develop an image of the man described as having a missionary-like devotion to others; whose sharing of his gift 'gives us a slight glimpse of what the real meaning of the word LOVE really is'.5
Rather than simply a biography, A Man Called Love uses biography as point of departure to explore the interstices between art, documentary, death, belief, and photography. With its carefully sequenced images and expository voiceover, its grounding in the documentary tradition appears clear. Its use of still images set to sound is in conversation with numerous other works in the essay-film genre, notably those by Chris Marker and Raul Rúiz. Such experimental documentaries favour 'an open-ended, ambiguous play with time and space' that seeks less 'to resolve real issues than to challenge the definition and priority of an issue per se'.6
However, A Man Called Love is more than just an experimental documentary. When we widen our gaze, we see that it consists not only of bright rectangles projected onto the wall, but also of dancing cones of light that connect the screens back to the whirring, interlocked slide projectors. By placing the apparatus undisguised in the centre of the room, Guimaraes proclaims it as a sculptural feature, in opposition to cinema, where the projector is hidden. To encounter the work, we must encounter the device and arrange ourselves in relation to it.
The self-evident projectors, the quietly assured narration, and the stream of 'factual' photographs signal the work's relationship to another non-fiction form, the art-historical slide lecture. With its attention to the historical context of Xavier's work, revelations about his private life, and illuminating use of images, the work exemplifies the forensic oratory of the 'art-historical slide lecture performance'. 'In the slide lecture, the image, that shadow or representation on the wall, never remains mere projection, mere being, because it is part of a performative triangle consisting of speaker, audience, and image'.7 With an unseen speaker, this installation re-performs the lecture, but with its contents' truth left open to debate.
Why is Guimaraes interested in exploring nonfiction film? One answer lies in her confrontation with the subject matter. We register prickings of doubt when we hear of the strange 'camouflage' Xavier adopted on his public outings—his conspicuous dark glasses and 'amusing' wigs—which inadvertently quotes the language of disguise, jokes, and fraud. Similar doubts arise on hearing of his published account of a putatively utopian, potentially fascist afterlife (Our Home) during Brazil's brutally repressive dictatorship. While the quiet authority of the narration clearly critiques Brazil's class iniquities, it is destabilised by the ambiguity of the photographic 'evidence'. We cannot help but wonder and question both subject and story, recalling Eitzen's claim that a documentary 'is any motion picture that is susceptible to the question, "Might it be lying?"'.8 A Man Called Love opens up an uncertain, murky space. Is it an exposé? A debunking? Are we seeing a celebratory biopic about an interworld celebrity or a critique of his counterfeit power?
Guimaraes's use of the analogue-slide format is charged with significance. In 1992, Robert Nelson argued that the photographic-slide lecture was 'about to be digitalized into oblivion'.9 Contemporary film-based works inevitably take place in the era of 'the death of film'. With its subject being a dead man whose existence was defined by the deceased, and by continuing to evoke what is doubly 'no longer there', A Man Called Love deliberately calls up photography's status as memento mori, reminding us, as Cadava puts it, that 'photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification'.10 Through the photographic 'medium', Guimaraes grants access to another plane, to regimes of vision built not around rationality but belief; to practices, such as spirit photography, 'whose very fascination came from their impossibility, their apparent severance from the laws of nature'.11 She asks us to evaluate the role of, and our desire for, historical 'truth', questioning both historical agency and the representational regimes bearing on our perceptual subjectivity.
Through its apparently straightforward presentation, A Man Called Love subtly undermines and destabilises conventions of rhetoric and vision. It seems that Guimaraes is interested, in both senses of the word, in a re-presentation of the medium—spiritual and technological—in order to leave us asking, 'Just what is it that I am actually looking at here?'
1. James J. Owen, Psychography: Marvellous Manifestations of Psychic Power Given through the Mediumship of Fred P. Evans, Known as the 'Independent Slate-Writer’ (San Francisco: Hicks-Judd Co., 1893).
2. Message from Francisco Xavier, Spiritist Study Group Chico Xavier of Tampa, http://chicoxavierdetampa.com/ default.aspx
3. Dirk Eitzen, 'When is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception', Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (Autumn 1995), 81.
4. See Francisco Xavier's website: http://www.chicoxavieruberaba.com.br/.
5. Antonio Leite and Renan Lacerda, 'The Most Prolific Spiritist Medium in Brazil, Francisco de Paula Candido Xavier, Returns to the Spiritual Plane' (2001), Grupo de Estudos Avançados Espíritas (Group for the Advanced Study of Spiritism), http://www.geae.inf.br/en/articles/news.html
6. Bill Nichols, 'Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde', Critical Enquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001), 594.
7. Robert Nelson, 'The Slide Lecture, or The Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Critical Enquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000), 415.
8. Eitzen, 'When Is a Documentary?', 81.
9. Nelson, 414.
10. Eduardo Cadava, 'Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History', in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 224.
11. Tom Gunning, 'Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny', in ibid., 68.