[...] During the ’70s I went to the atelier-home of an artist, Hèlio Oiticica, who lived in New York. [...] Part of Lágrima pantera was shot there. [...] Hèlio Oiticica at the time was experimenting in his ‘infinitistic’ cosmos. In another corner of his work, he was trying it out on herself with a Super8 camera. [...] These small clips (1 or 2 minutes) attracted my attention; I saw in them a way to start over again, to unlearn, to detach myself form myself, from my clichés. Inside these uncertain frames, that he had made step by step, I found an ideal, unexpected passage. To the unprepared eye, the aspect of the world of May-June 1971 – that was marked by great fear – might seem today like the still life of a living painting. Certain pioneering mental states, narcotic delights, men bursting in laughing and stumbling, archaic gestures reborn, these are still the fleeting ghosts of a curious and invisible space… Antonio Vieira said that even the stones talk. They talk and respond, he said. These images talk and respond to something dark; they are unconscious memories of time. (J. Bressane)
Director Of Photography: Miguel Rio Branco
Art Direction: Hélio Oiticica
Actors: Rosa Dias
Cildo Meireles
Hélio Oiticica
Júlio Bressane
Patricia Simpson
Honey
Bob Grass