Text: Aaron Cutler
The place where I fell in love with cinema was the art space e‑flux, located on the Lower East Side of New York, which was the city where I lived between 2008 and 2010 during my time at graduate school. It was the night of March 31st, 2010, and I had gone to watch a free DVD projection of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger’s film British Sounds (See You at Mao) (1969) within the context of a politicized film-and-discussion series held by the authentically Leftist film programmer Matt Peterson, a characterization that I use with all possible praise. It was my first time seeing a film there, and to be honest, I haven’t been back since. The reason wasn’t because they moved location, nor was it due to the two narrow lines of stiff-backed chairs organized alongside each other, which produced an entertainingly uncomfortable viewing experience for a didactic evening whose audience members included the artist Martha Rosler. Rather, it was because of someone I met when, while perusing a book of images from the late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica pre-screening, I began speaking with a fellow Brazilian multimedia and performance artist and e‑flux intern who had just arrived from São Paulo and would be doing research for her Master’s thesis on the New York School of music over the course of the following month. I don’t remember who began talking with who, but we somehow established that Mariana Shellard and I would be in touch to answer my questions about Brazilian art in the near future. (It apparently helped that I knew nothing about the subject – she told me later that she believed that teaching something to a person who had introduced himself as a film critic might help her make a good impression in her new work environment.) I left before the end of the post-screening discussion to attend a show of Kiarostami’s Close-Up on 35mm about a twenty-minute-long walk away at Film Forum, but Mariana and I stayed in contact, and today we live together in São Paulo with our production company Mutual Films and three-year-old daughter Ava. Before that evening, I believe that I was addicted to cinema, and any addict will tell you that between love and compulsion lies an enormous divide. Speaking loosely (without much thought and therefore open to contradictions), I think that the difference lies in how addiction and compulsion are fundamentally isolating, while love is something that must be fundamentally shared (even with oneself – an unrequited love is nonetheless a love that we nurture inside ourselves). I’m still addicted to cinema at some level, but now I also love it, and that love grows with each day that I encounter not only one, but two beloved people with whom I can share it. So thank you to e‑flux, with whom Mariana and I (and consequently Ava) have in fact just collaborated on a screening project of ours in São Paulo. The wheel of life keeps turning, and on the way, we count our blessings.