The Inventing With Difference Notebook
The Inventing With Difference Notebook
The Inventing With Difference Notebook
the INVENTING
with DIFFERENCE
NOTEBOOK
cinem a, education, and hu man rights
Cezar Migliorin
Isaac Pipano
Luiz Garcia
India Mara Martins
Alexandre Guerreiro
Clarissa Nanchery
Frederico Benevides
Douglas Resende
translated by
Eduardo Castro
Jonathan Fleck
illustrated by
Fabiana Egrejas
Niterói
2019
We dedicate The Inventing with Difference Notebook to Marielle Franco,
Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman and human rights activist
who was assassinated in her own city.
24 34 40
Far Away, Up Close The Stories of Objects Subjective Camera
52 30 46
Sounds Masks and Monstrosities Film the Snow
44 42
Haiku Film In-Camera Editing
28 22
16
Frames Lumière Minute
The Image: Seeing and Inventing
48 38
8
Empty Spaces Colors and Textures
How to use
6
60 77
Inventing with Difference
Letter-Film References
32 56 26
Other-Portrait Mirrors Trail of the Senses Narrated Photos
64
Pedagogy of the dispositif: clues to create with images
20
50
Lumière Minute - Preparation
54 A Walk Around the Block
Music and Memory
18
Seeing and Inventing: How Do We See? What Do We See? What Do We not See?
inventing with difference
6
As we learned in the project that year, it is not up
to us to define how a pedagogical action should be
implemented. Our role is to collaborate in the creation
of methodologies and processes that can reach
educators who are autonomous enough to define their
own practices and establish their own production
dynamics in the field of education. Working with cinema
in schools, we learned that practices are always
transformative and creative, because the world being
filmed is constantly changing. Anyone who films the
world must create a new point of view for the camera, a new cut, or an overlap of
two sounds that have never been put together before. In filmmaking, as in education,
principles never precede practices: they are created simultaneously.
As they make films and as they cope with their surroundings, with otherness and with
difference, adults and children work and invent together. It is during that process that
we discover the power of creating a point of view of the world or a place to hear what
we have never before taken the time to hear.
other.
7
To teach is not to transfer knowledge
but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
how t o use
8
Dispositifs are exercises, games, film challenges, rules
to help students tackle the basic
aspects of filmmaking while, at the same time, expressing
themselves, creating, discovering
their school and their neighborhood, telling their storie
s. Dispositifs come in two types:
those that require film and sound recording equipment
, and those that do not.
9
1. Emancipation scene
Begin to take action within the community
through an inventive and creative
relationship with everyday life, through
the introduction to new narratives and
artistic references. Go beyond the familiar
meanings of objects, symbols, and signs.
2. Discovering territory
Experience the community with
curiosity and openness, as a place of
experimentation and growth. Reflect upon
stories, traditions, values, inhabitants. Pay
attention to everyday spaces, details, and
subjects, exploring everyday life with new
perspectives and discovering new places.
10
5. Spark of equality
Conceive of the space of learning as a place where
anyone, wherever they are from, can contribute to the
process of production and knowledge. Experience the
process of creation as a site of exchange between
different kinds of knowledge that, as they come into
contact with one another, multiply creative powers and
produce new worlds. Break free from traditional roles to
facilitate this exchange.
11
The s pe c t ado r is the person who witnesses the creation an image’s meaning
and is delighted with all of the other meanings created unintentionally.
world.
The eye sees, the memory re-sees, and the imagination sees through the
We need to see through the world.
Manoel de Barros
A photograph is the product of decisions and choices: these characteristics, inherent in every
Draw upon a bank of images selected by students and teachers (newspapers, magazines,
books, web sites), and seek to analyze the images
according to their formal features:
16
how?
proposal 1
proposal 2
17
Taking a photograph always forces us to think about
how to see any given scene: what we can see within
the frame and what is left out. Our eye, like the lens of
seeing
a camera, performs this function, framing the world
and generating an image that lets us perceive the
and
shapes and colors of people and objects. When we look inventing:
at a photograph, we can ask ourselves, among many
other questions, the following:
18
Images show us that we are always missing an image.
Jean-Louis Comolli
practical proposal
19
lumière minute - preparation
shot: everything that happens from the moment we turn on the camera
cinema.
20
how?
practical suggestions
21
lumière minute
Almost everything you need to consider cinema can be found in the Lumière brothers’ early films,
not because they were first, but because they are so simple, lasting just 57 seconds. Almost
everything? The bodies, of course, their relationship to the machine that films them, the masking role of
the frame, what is in-bounds and out-of-bounds, in-frame and out-of-frame, the articulation of speeds,
the measuring of time and recording, the inscription and erasure.
Jean-Louis Comolli
22
practical suggestions
4. All of the “Lumière Minutes” produced by students are watched in the classroom.
23
w h a t ? Approach and film a stranger with shots of different
sizes. Hand the camera to the stranger so they can also film close
up, far away, and very close up.
why?
• turn filmmaking into a way to meet and get to know new people;
• be attuned to movements, gestures, and ways of seeing;
• consider the challenges posed by the presence of the camera in
interactions with others.
24
h o w ? • around the area of
school, approach someone with
whom you have never spoken;
• after talking to the person and
confirming their participation in the
dispositif, film three different shots
of them;
• for each shot, think about the
relationship between the person
and their surroundings.
1. far away;
2. closer;
3. very close r.
25
narrated
photos
26
how?
When the night is darkest, we can perceive the faintest glimmer, and even expiration of light
becomes more visible in its trace, however tenuous.
No, the fireflies disappeared in the blinding glare of the ferocious spotlights:
spotlights from watchtowers, from political talk shows, from football stadiums, from
television screens.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies
27
w h a t ? Film through a framing object – a door, a window, a hole.
frames
It involves practicing framing, since our gaze and our ways of seeing
are always partial, localized snippets of the world. Even so, what we
do not see still exists, and is worthy of our attention. Selecting what
28
how?
29
masks and monstrosities
30
Keep your eye on the eye of the jaguar.
Become a jaguar.
Caetano Veloso
how ?
1. find or create filters that can be placed over a camera lens to alter the
image. Colored pieces of paper, wax paper, tracing sheets, bits of fabric,
prescription lenses, sunglass lenses, etc.;
2. using these masks, film situations, scenes, people, and objects;
3. repeat the shots with new filters to create different perspectives and
monstrosities.
31
We have the right to be equal when our difference
makes us inferior;
and we have the right to be different when our equality
may mischaracterize us.
Hence the need for an equality that acknowledges
differences
and a difference that does not produce, promote, or
reproduce inequalities.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
other-portraits mirrors
why?
32
h o w ? Write a text that will take up to
two minutes to read aloud, considering “my
relationship with what is furthest from me”.
It can be a physical, symbolic, cultural, or
socioeconomic distance.
33
the s t o r ie s of ob j ect s
relating to the world, especially traditions and habits that have been
34
It is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory responds.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.
.
how?
35
My hair was the shell of my ideas,
the wrapper of my dreams,
colors
the frame of my most colorful thoughts.
It was my kinky hair that made me realize and
a whole set of attitudes
that revealed society’s need
to make me fit
into standards of beauty,
thought, and life choices.
Cristiane Sobral
textures
38
w h y ? Raise awareness of the variety of skin tones and body
marks of the people in the community, brining students closer to the
diversity around them. Parts of the body and their unique details –
moles, wrinkles, scars – create a mosaic of multiplicity that reflects
our ethnic miscegenation and all the marks left by time.
Over a soundtrack that the students create from everyday objects,
we transform images and the sensitivities they awaken.
how?
39
subjective camera
w h y ? When we create subjective images, we not only look through someone else’s
eyes, but we also enter their world and multiply the ways we see our own world, which
they have never before experienced, fostering respect and an appreciation for the work
40
how?
41
what? Shoot an everyday scene for in-camera editing.
in-camera editing
42
It is a mistake
to think that
the eye judges
and the hand
executes.
Gilles Deleuze
how ?
3. The editing is done in the camera itself: in other words, the shots are
filmed in the exact same order they will be shown;
4. Each shot is filmed in a single take; therefore, students will need to plan
the exact moment to turn on the camera and to turn it off, to make the cuts
effective;
43
living is very hard.
The deepest
is always in the surface.
Paulo Leminski
filme-haikai
a cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.
Matsuo Bashô
w h y ? The haiku is a short poem, originally from Japan, that contains 17 syllables. It
was introduced into film by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). Eisenstein
appropriates this literary form to reflect upon the concision of film and its ability to convey
concepts and ideas through a high “emotional quality”. According to Yone Noguchi, “it is
the readers who turn the imperfection of the haiku into artistic perfection”. The haiku
employs montage-like techniques in an objective and succinct way. In the traditional
haiku, the central themes are nature, animate beings, and inanimate beings. When they
experience haiku in film, students are invited to observe how life happens beyond humans.
This exercise encourages students to learn creatively about art history, as well as to keep
reading.
44
how?
45
film the snow
46
how?
47
The mother noticed that the boy enjoyed the empty more than the full.
He said that the empty is wider and even endless.
Manoel de Barros
empty spaces
48
what? Photograph the insides of homes
with no people in the frame.
how?
1. Choose up to five people who are willing to open their homes for this activity;
2. Each student takes one photograph inside one of the homes;
3. View all the pictures taken. While discussing the photos, encourage students to infer
possible narratives about the home, its story, and the ways of life it holds;
4. Create a fictional narrative for each home.
49
w h a t ? Film a walk around the
school block.
a walk around
50
how?
Look; the most important and nicest thing in the world is this:
the block that people aren’t always the same, they are not all of a piece
and finished but keep on changing.
Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
51
w h a t ? Research the different sounds in the community.
sounds
52
how?
When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it.
The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer..
Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography.
53
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under
his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients
himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
54
how?
2. Ask each person to sing the snippet of a song they often remember, and
record it with a smartphone;
3. Search for the lyrics of the songs and create a map out of the words,
characters, and recurring places featured in the lyrics.
55
w h a t ? Create an installation that engages all five senses.
56
recursos
how?
1. In a dark, scented room, provide a variety of materials for the students to feel as
they touch, smell, taste, hear, or step on them;
3. As they walk along the trail, which can be of different shapes and sizes, students
come into contact with a wide variety of “things” that they experience every day,
but which usually go unnoticed;
4. Ask students to talk about their experience and to describe the sensations they
felt on the trail.
57
When you start thinking in images, without words, you’re well on the way.
William S. Burroughs, Burroughs Live.
letter-film Making a film: the challenge
that moves anyone who ever thought of turning on a camera
and connecting to cinema.
60
Today’s filmmakers prefer not to adventure on these dangerous paths.
It is only masters, fools, or children who dare push these forbidden buttons.
Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography.
1. Choose an addressee for the letter –a person, city, animal, object, place, etc.;
2. With the class, watch the materials (dispositifs) produced in previous meetings.
4. Select, organize, and create with the materials available and/or capture new
images, voices, and sounds that relate to the letter-film;
61
A fil m does not c o nvey an experi en ce,
In 2002, the filmmaker and visual artist Cao Guimarães produced the documentary
Two-Way Street. With clear spatial and temporal cuts, the director created a set of little
rules to let the film take shape.
People who didn’t know each other traded houses at the same time for 24 hours. Each
person brought a camcorder and had total freedom to film whatever they pleased in the
stranger’s home over this period. Each participant tried to elaborate a “mental image” of the
“other” by coexisting with their personal objects and domestic universe. At the end of the
experience, each person gave a personal report on how they imagined this “other”.1
That is how the film was created, with no theme, pre-constructed text, or script. In the
foundational gesture of the film, the filmmaker records nothing, he simply receives
the images produced by the mechanism he has devised – a filmic apparatus, his own
dispositif. Using a split-screen, the film had some of the hallmarks of the so-called
dispositif-film: the random opening, the decentering of the director, the invention of a set
of limits instead of a theme, a strong spatial and temporal focus.
During this period, several other films also made use of dispositifs2, among them
Eduardo Coutinho’s Edifício Master (2002). After watching the film crew entering the
building through a security camera, the audience hears Coutinho’s voice-over as the
images show the corridors of the building: “A building at Copacabana, one block from
the beach, 276 studio apartments, some 500 residents, 12 floors, 23 apartments per
floor. We rented an apartment in the building for a month. With three different crews,
we filmed life in the building for a week”. And so the dispositif came to be. Consuelo Lins
summed up Coutinho’s practice during the time: “Dispositif is a term Coutinho began
to use to refer to his filming methods. At other times he called it a prison” (Lins 2004,
101). According to Coutinho, “What really interests me is the dispositif, which can also
be called method. I have gradually discovered that the most essential dispositif for me is
the spatial prison. It is about the metonymy. I do not want to talk about a specific country,
or religion; I decline general ideas. I have learned that spatial prison is fundamental
to me.” (quoted in Lins 2004, 101). Consuelo Lins adds, “Filming ten years, filming only
people from behind, it may be a bad dispositif, but that is what matters in a documentary
[…]. These are fragile forms that do not ensure the existence of a film or its quality, but it
is the only possible start for the filmmaker.” (ibid., 101-102).
64
Our aim here is not to address the history of the notion of dispositif or the arts that
employed methods of restriction, games, process cuts, or formal tricks. If such a
genealogy were the objective, then we would need to address American structural
cinema and filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, visual artists like
Rosangela Rennó and Sophie Calle, and writers like George Perec or the Oulipo Group.
Dispositif is a notion that cuts across all aspects of a work’s production. In other
words, in certain works we cannot consider editing, photography, script, or actors’
performances to be separate elements from the dispositif used. It is a choice that
establishes restrictions before any image is captured. This choice will model all
alternatives from that point on.
In dialogue with the artists mentioned above and informed by the work of philosopher
Gilles Deleuze, we arrived at a definition of dispositif in a 2005 article. The definition will
prove crucial for later works and for employing the concept in education, especially as
it relates to Alain Bergala’s research. According to that article,
dispositif is the introduction of activating guidelines into a chosen universe. The creator
isolates a space, a time period, a type and/or a number of agents and, to this universe,
adds a layer that will push movements and connections between the agents (characters,
technicians, weather, technical devices, geography, etc.) and their surroundings. The
dispositif presupposes two complementary dimensions: at one end, extreme control, rules,
and limits; at the other end, absolute openness dependent on the agents’ actions and
connections. (Migliorin 2005, 83).
Remarking on Fernand Deligny’s work, which dates back many years, Bertrand
Ogilvie offers a new way of defining the dispositif as a “discursive material agency, the
organization of space based on a system of categories, beliefs, values, sensitivities,
tropisms, which brings to light unperceived, hidden, repressed parameters and factors
and enables behavioral displacements” (Ogilvie 2015, 280).
Our work, which was only recently exposed to Deligny’s thought, owes a decisive debt
to Gilles Deleuze, who allowed us to stop thinking of the dispositif as a cinematic work
method or as a “prison” in which the film unfolds, but rather as an operator in reality
itself. The images would grow out of an action that produces micro-deviations under
the chosen conditions. We took a wager on the instability inherent in the social order
and in ways of life, as if the dispositif merely activated a movement that already existed.
The dispositif is an intensifier, rather than a creator. This act of intensification could
not occur without bringing together several agents of various natures. On Foucauldian
dispositifs, Deleuze writes:
65
The dispositif is a kind of skein of yarn, a multilinear ensemble. It is composed of multiple-
natured lines, and these lines of the dispositif do not encompass or delimit homogeneous
systems on their own (object, subject, language) but follow different directions and shape
always unbalanced processes, and these lines not only come close together but also move
away from each other. Each one is broken and subjected to (forked) direction variations,
subjected to deviations. Visible objects, possible utterances, forces at work and subjects in
a certain position are like vectors or tensors.” (Deleuze 1990, 155-161).
Thus, we would like to think of the dispositif as a knot that mobilizes creation and
stands between artistic creation and subjective creation, as the epicenter of both
processes. It is an indiscernible trigger between art and life, even when art and life do
not blend together.
Focusing on the dispositif means moving away from film as an end in itself and putting
its potential and possibilities into contact with the things of the real world and the
very individuals responsible for its creation. There is no such thing as the image on
one side and the world on the other, as if the latter were ready to become the former.
It is about drawing, sketching – in each moment, exercise, film, and experience – a
new empowering of individuals, machines, discursive and material stabilities, and
displacements that are nonetheless subjective.
66
1. group. The pedagogy of the dispositif is carried out essentially in groups. The
creation of ways of life and subjective processes by necessity collective, not centered on
what an individual says or is but on the possibilities of doing and being that go beyond
individuals. The group is not merely a collection of people, but a way of sharing and
exchanging in which the group itself begins to dissolve the centrality of the self. The
group anticipates a relation between the individual and society that is fundamental
to creation, like a Möbius strip in which the inside and the outside depend on ever-
changing agencies. Cinematic creation, subjective creation.
In group film practices, the images and sounds created come from outside the group,
from the relations with the world, and it is these relations that we address, removing
from the group the little personal stories, the repetitions that have already been
organized into individual narratives. If self-centered talk takes place, it is already
mediated by a relationship of otherness to what has been done within and outside the
group. In the process of group de-individualization, that is, as the group learns to create
together, it leads to a displacement from over-codified personal places. On the first day
of the meeting, no one tells a story about themselves, nobody forces upon the group the
already-organized narratives, the already-established places. Here, the group members
do not have rigid frames that precede and ensure unity; these are not identity groups,
for instance. This is the immanent and unstable dynamic of the group. Always pierced
by what comes from outside – images, sounds, words –, the unity of the group is a hole.
A hole that is needed if we wish to disarm the toxicity of automatisms that always bring
us back to the self and to the projects that compel the self to obey the orders of the
world. The group finds its territory in the deterritorialization of creation – individual and
collective, artistic and subjective.
The difficulty of creating as a group lies in its very existence, since there is no center
within the group, no leader, no owner of knowledge, no identity, but rather a procedural
dynamic in which the group itself takes responsibility for its own existence. This
responsibility often grows out of the way in which a group memory is written. In our
practices, after each meeting, a group reports what happened to everyone. A free
recounting of what took place, the ways of creation that appeared, the ways of seeing
and understanding the world-images that circulated in the group. The lack of centrality
makes the group fragile and dynamic, which paradoxically may be its greatest strength.
Thus, group meetings must not be confused with classes;
instead, they are a noisy gathering in which each person
offers what they can to the collective and, above all, shares
their desire to be there.
67
2. film culture. The work with dispositifs is based on the premise that everyone can
make films. With as little as a two-hour learning session, we are ready to embark on an
adventure in the sea of stimuli that the world presents us with, which becomes the fodder
for our art. Film culture can greatly enrich practice, inspire new dispositifs, and enable a
more complex wandering between the images and sounds that we produce. But it can also
be oppressive, creating hierarchical relations that destroy the group. A group is not made
up of someone who owns something and others who do not. When this vertical relation is
established and maintained, the group is done for. Film culture can be a trap that destroys
the experience.
3. everything is right. To start making cinema, all you need is a shot. A shot is
everything that happens from the moment we turn on the camera to the moment we turn
it off. It is not about making a film, but making a shot. It is “to camera” (camérer), to use
the word coined by Fernand Deligny (2017, p. 1742). It is to use the camera as a device
to map and experience, as a way to establish creative relations with space. To reach
such an openness, it is enough to follow two or three very easy rules that even a child of
seven years could understand. From this point on, everything is right, correct – a multiple,
variable, inhabited correctness. We are not in the land of multiple-choice. In the classroom,
in the group, there is no competition. Comparing different outcomes is productive. The
images are edited side by side, not compared hierarchically.
4. shot, shots and redirections. To make a shot is to redirect the time that passes
into the time that remains. With a dispositif we choose what lasts, what remains, what
is shared. In a one-minute shot, we choose just one of the thousands of minutes we
experience every day. Filming is a serious act. It is a break in the passage of time. It is a
timespan framed by gazes, words, thoughts – which are renewed as images are reviewed.
Making and viewing a shot means thinking with the resources the world provides us.
The permanence and dissolution of time are two aspects that are not mutually exclusive
in film. When we see them together, the time that remains in the image is no longer the
same.
68
5. untext. It is a commonsense notion that a film starts with a script. However, this
was not always the case, and we can trace back a whole history of film in which images
preceded words. Especially in the field of documentary filmmaking, the creation of
encounters, situations, rhythms, and dispositifs constitutes a thread that runs through
a fundamental part of film history: Viola, Varda, van der Keuken, Vertov, Vigo, Pazienza.
Having this option in our work in education opens up the cinematic experience in
two important ways: a) We do away with the school hierarchy in which students who
write and read well receive high grades and compliments while those that do not are
undervalued. When we start from the image, classroom hierarchies are turned upside
down. B) To start from the image is to relinquish the linguistic organization that aims
to reduce the image to a representation of thought, giving primacy to text over picture.
Text, in fact, tends to hinder the motion of images. Although it is true that not every
script is this domineering, in the school environment the centrality of the script is often
the dominant discourse, given how difficult it is for a script to escape the propensity of
the word to organize what is visible.
6. to document. Turning the camera on and off is already an act of letting in the
world. In the dispositif we added the need for choosing, for creating. Creating in a
relation with reality, with the other, with the context. In the documentary, without the
primacy of the text, there is no blank page, and there is always a giant, inhabited world.
That is the very definition of image: the image takes reality in and alters it. The dispositif
is the mixture of production and representation. We do not abandon reality, but we
change it in the same gesture. The main challenge to the subjective processes inherent
in the dispositifs: to notice and to change what is noticed.
8. politics of collision.4 By doing away with the primacy of the text, we open ourselves
up to chance. Chance is the possibility that a variety of strands may affect the dispositif
and the image. A person’s gesture, a word, an untamed sound, a theme that was not in
any script. As Lygia Clark would say, it is about “merging into the collective”.
Yes, there is two-way interaction – between student and student, student and teacher,
teacher and camera – but an third party is present in every moment. In every moment,
this interaction with the outside collides with other objects, spaces and natures.
Paradoxically, the dispositif gives centrality to the outside, not to binary relationships or
to individuals.
69
on creation
The image is creation and discovery. It is a leaving of oneself and a reflexive return.
Earth and delirium. Two powerful strands, one grounded to the earth and another that
is groundless. The earth thread has a face, a weight, a space, a border, a name. The
groundless thread wanders, rambles, raves, marvels, changes, expands. How can cinema
move between these threads? How can we – in a pedagogical process with students
that may have little to no prior experience with writing or pictorial narrative – create
opportunities to engage them in creative processes that move between what is given
and what is yet unnamed? There is a helplessness and an openness in working with
dispositifs. Before it enters into action, there is no comfortable position, no known world
to be represented. Working with control and with a lack of control means putting myself
in a center of attention and judgement with something that is not mine.
Just like a Möbius strip – a path with no beginning or end where the inside and the
outside are interchangeable – the pedagogy of the dispositif has two strands, running
through a thread grounded to the earth and another that is groundless.
Somewhere, someone will tell you who you are. They are wrong!
A step, a house, a relationship, a child, a political struggle, a group, a love – what makes
all these possible is creation. Everywhere, the “what there is” – that which presents
itself to our perception – asks us for a twist, a disruption, a movement, a redirection, a
montage. It asks us to make something out of what we receive.
To create never is to start from scratch, from nothing, from the ideal, or to aim for the
finished, the ideal, the perfect. Creating is exhaustive, endless, boundless. It demands our
deepest and most intimate selves, our smallest details and our everyday life. If we live
in a world of clear goals, objectives and finishing lines, creation is what fuels explosion.
Creation - the watchword of capital - when it is beholden to capital becomes just another
variation to the same end, which is capital itself: null creation, one that does not belong
to itself.
Rather than an individual process, creation is the way individuals and groups put into
motion and into contact myriad elements of multiple natures. If creation matters, it is
because it mobilizes ever-widening ways of life that include neighborhood sanitation,
the delirium of a mad person, and music. The limit of what we can do is material and
70
delusional. On the one hand, you need a limit. It is the relation with real forces –
the school wall that allows external sounds in and precludes a film screening; the
private company that prescribes books and software to schools. Creation is not
isolated from this sphere. We hope that the house does not fall, that the fire burns
only what we want it to burn, that drugs are a way out of ourselves, not something
hidden in our food. On the other hand, there is multiplicity, something that erupts
in eagerness, in the game of a child who goes from the hero to the dead, from
the animal to the more-than-real without defining any boundaries. As Félix
Guattari and Suely Rolnik (1986, 155) wrote, “subjectivity does not exist on one
side and social reality on the other”. In other words, what we invent as forms of
relationships and desires cannot be separated from social conditions. The robbery
of political time is also the robbery of time for celebration.
The operators of oppression are out there: fear, debt, class oppression, moral
and linguistic oppression. There are fierce disputes over what restricts ways of
being, restrains delirium, and denies difference and the other. Perhaps creation
may lead us along a crooked path that not only sets us apart from fear, from
willing submission, but also connects us with the unknown where the sounds of
difference, minorities, lunatics, rogues reverberate, all those who were cast out by
borderless capitalism, this worldwide mega-machine of exclusion.
God has died and capitalism has placed the individual center-stage. The
entrepreneur, the enterprising self, the competition of all against all. We owe
nothing to God, but we do owe it to ourselves. The debt has become universal –
monetary, cognitive, subjective. We become our own first judges, which authorizes
us to judge everything. The closer the other is to me, the harsher my judgment
will become. Immigrants hate immigrants, left-wing activists foster fierce
disagreements with one another, couples destroy each other, black policemen
kill black youths, and so on. Creation does not produce objects but ways of being
with the world without surrendering to a “higher value” (Deleuze 1997, 165).
Creation does not report to pre-existing allies – the asset, the market – but takes
place in the constant creation of new allies. Creation is the opposite of debt
and of judgment. Creation experiences the agents of the world as opportunities
to combine, to assemble, to kindle sparks that causes friction, that unite and
double. Creation is a matter of assembly and connection, and it does not abide
judgment. Two, five, ten parts are joined, assembled, pressed together. Creation
is a connecting gesture. That is why plugs, connectors and cables always have
problems connecting. Connecting is much more complex than it seems.
And so, lacking harmony but also lacking a higher form, the creative gesture is
an act of listening and gazing that distinguishes, that is curious and eager for the
world, that invents ways of being-with.
71
Our wager on the pedagogy of the dispositif is inextricable from that
movement that unites in one gesture artistic creation, self-creation, and
world-creation.
2. you will not recognize yourself. How can it be that I created this?
Exactly because you have not. There has been a connection with other
worlds and with what is not us. Something connected.
5. unlike what capitalism calls creation, the one that creates may prefer
not to create. If it is possible to not create, then creation is possible.
72
Notes
2. Sandra Kogut’s Hungarian Passport (2003), Paulo Sacramento’s Prisoner of the Iron Bars (2004), Mike Figgs’s
Time Code (2000), Eduardo Coutinho’s Babylon 2000 (2000), and Kiko Goifman’s 33 (2003) are some of the films
created through dispositifs around the turn of the twenty-first century.
3. In 2013 there was an urgency to our research and outreach. Following an invitation from the Secretariat for
Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic, we began a teacher training project in all Brazilian states,
reaching over 250 schools and approximately 500 teachers. It was a very small project for the country, but a
huge one compared to the scope within which we had been working up to that point, out of the Fluminense
Federal University. Our first action was to return to the dispositifs, to mine from the history of film small acts
that could be reorganized as dispositifs, keeping documentary film and experimental film in the center. With
almost thirty exercises, organized as little devices for playing and experimenting with cinema, we published
a volume in which we proposed a new dispositif every two pages. Teachers would be responsible for deciding
which classes and age groups would be appropriate for each exercise. A record of this experience is available
on the website www.inventarcomadiferenca.com.br.
4. Expression used by Bruna Pinna at the UFF Department of Psychology meeting on March 7, 2019.
References
Bernardet, Jean-Claude. 2004. Caminhos de Kiarostami. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Crítica e Clínica. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1997. Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Deligny, Fernand. 2015. O aracniano e outros textos. São Paulo: Editora N-1.
. “Camérer” in: Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (Org.), Œuvres. Paris: l’Arachnéen, 2017
Ferreira, Jairo. 2016. Cinema de Invenção. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Azougue.
Fresquet, Adriana. 2013. Cinema e educação: reflexões e experiências com professores e estudantes de
educação básica, dentro e “fora” da escola. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica.
Guattari, Felix, and Suely Rolnik. 1986. Micropolítica: cartografias do desejo. Vozes.
Lins, Consuelo. 2004. O documentário de Eduardo Coutinho: televisão, cinema e vídeo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
Migliorin, Cezar et al. 2014. Inventar com a diferença: cinema e direitos humanos. Niterói: Editora da UFF.
. 2006. “O dispositivo como estratégia narrativa.” In Narrativas Midiáticas Contemporâneas, edited by
André Lemos, Marialva Barbosa, and Christa Berger, 82-93. Porto Alegre: Meridional.
. 2015. Inevitavelmente cinema: educação, política e mafuá. Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue.
Ogilvie, Bertrand. 2015. “Posfácio.” In O aracniano e outros textos, by Fernand Deligny. São Paulo: Editora N-1.
Rolnik, Suely. 1989. Cartografia sentimental: transformações contemporâneas do desejo. São Paulo: Estação
Liberdade.
Freire de Araújo Lima, Elizabeth Maria and Peter Pál Pelbart. 2007. “Arte, clínica e loucura: um território em
mutação.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 14 (3): 709-735.
73
m an is only f ul ly human when he p l ays! Fred er ich Schiller, On t he Aesthetic Ed uc ation of Man
REFERENCES
Ávila, Letícia Brambilla. 2016. “O Projeto Inventar com a Diferença à Luz da Política
Pública do Plano Nacional de Educação em Direitos Humanos (PNEDH).” Master’s thesis,
Universidade Federal do Paraná, 102 pages.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. 2008. Ver e poder: a inocência perdida – cinema, televisão, ficção,
documentário. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.
Duarte, Rosália. 2002. Cinema e educação: refletindo sobre cinema e educação. Belo
Horizonte: Autêntica.
Migliorin, Cezar. 2015. Inevitavelmente cinema: educação, política e mafuá. Rio de Janeiro,
RJ: Azougue.
Migliorin, Cezar; Pipano, Isaac. 2019. Cinema de Brincar. Belo Horizonte, MG: Relicário.
Pipano, Isaac. 2013. “12 etapas e uma lição para se fazer um filme-carta (em tempos de
whatsaap).” In: Mostra Filmes-carta, por uma estética do encontro (catalogue), edited by
Rúbia M. Oliveira Medeiros, 28-29. Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Cultural.
Rancière, Jacques. 2005. O mestre ignorante: cinco lições sobre a emancipação intelectual.
Belo Horizonte, MG: Autêntica.
77
Project Inventing with Difference - cinema, education e human rights
pedagogical coordinators
Eduardo Andrade Barbosa de Castro
Cezar Migliorin Jonathan Fleck
Isaac Pipano
illustrator
printing
evaluation consultant
Sara Rizzo Print Mill Gráfica
project secretariat
Eduardo Brandão
Luciana Arraes
Teresa Assis Brasil
Luíza Catalani
press officer
Laís Ferreira
in partnership with
directors
Salete Sirlei Valesan Camba
Patricia Barcelos
Inventing with
difference
cinema, education and human rights
Rua Prof. Lara Vilela, 126, São Domingos – 24210-590 –, Niterói, RJ, Brasil.
Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)
Agência Brasileira do ISBN - Bibliotecária Priscila Pena Machado CRB-7/6971
Inclui bibliografia.
ISBN 978-85-92655-01-3
CDD 323.07