Obscuro Barroco (2018) is shot through with the baroque. Textures of fabric and flesh, caught in movement, guide the essay film’s rhythmic exploration of Rio de Janeiro’s queer community. Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Obscuro Barroco centres on Luana Muniz, a Brazilian trans activist and sex worker, who passed away shortly after production. Through a voice-over that combines abstract reflections with passages from Clarice Lispector’s The Stream of Life, Muniz threads together the film’s images of (queer) transformation.
In The Stream of Life, Hélène Cixous writes, Lispector dwells inside “moments of coming into being, in the space of the not yet and the already.” Lispector’s text reflects upon the formation of subjectivity, repeatedly returning to the moments of becoming that accrue to make up a self. Yet, for Lispector, the pleasure of dwelling in such moments cannot be captured through language, as it always runs the risk of appropriation. Obscuro Barroco, too, focuses on ways of capturing this pleasure otherwise, denying the spectator any fixed coordinates. The film opens at the edges of Rio on the cusp of a storm. The relentless movement of the camera is disorientating, continually shifting in scale, from the surfaces of the distant skyline to the lush, vegetal life below. Textures of the material environment fill the frame, directing our attention to the undulating plants — gleaming wet in the rain. As the soundscape thickens, Muniz’s voice speaks from off-screen, reciting from Stream of Life: “My story is of a calm darkness…” But despite this opening, Muniz’s voice-over is neither direct nor confessional. As in her first documentary feature, Exotica, Erotica, Etc. (2015), director Evangelia Kranioti eschews an explanatory mode, focusing instead on the textures, sensations, and affective rhythms of sound and image. While the materiality of the sea frames Exotica, Erotica, Etc.’s study of merchant marining, Obscuro Barroco turns instead to the body.
By framing her body in close-up, the film registers its increasing proximity with Muniz. In a final scene reminiscent of Claire Denis’s sensuous visual style, the camera travels in slow, circular motion across Muniz’s reclining figure, brushing the surface of her bare skin – stretched tight across her sternum. The camera fixes on her nipple, yet this tight framing does not objectify. Instead, it magnifies the rise and fall of her breathing, making visible her bodily rhythm. In her discussion of Denis’s cinema, Saige Walton proposes that the baroque “looks to the skin/surface of the body as well as the surface textures of the world to couple materiality with movement. Baroque figures are often captured in states of bodily transition, suspended mid-flight or mid-gesture.” Like Denis, Kranioti captures bodies in and through dance. Extended dance sequences punctuate the film, alternating between queer spaces and the streets of Rio during Carnival. After Muniz describes Rio as the “city of transformations,” we follow a wandering clown through a parade, a strobing dance floor, and a street performance. In each space, the handheld camera embeds us within a crowd of dancing bodies, tracking textures in close-up – a sequinned bra, the flutter of a patterned fan, colourful glitter on bare skin.
The film’s central sequence, however, focuses more closely on Rio’s queer community, beginning with Muniz’s poetic reflections on self-creation, trans experience, and the potentialities of gender self-determination. As Muniz speaks, Obscuro Barroco presents us with an image of upward movement. In one of the film’s few static shots, we watch the slow-motion ascent of a woman climbing upstairs, her figure partially obscured in the darkness. A close-up of Muniz, speaking directly to the camera, guides the transition to a backstage conversation about surgery. On-location diegetic sound is sparse throughout the film, imbuing this conversation with a sense of place and proximity – as if we are simply overhearing it. We listen as two women, getting ready for the evening, debate the necessity of “sex change surgery,” playfully imagining an ideal body: “I’ll put on that Nicki Minaj booty.” The intimacy of the conversation’s close-framing reflects the film’s attentiveness to the self-expression of Rio’s queer community – whether through dance, song, or speech. This attentiveness informs the rhythmic images that follow. At an underground queer party, the film foregrounds the connection (and reversibility) between performer and crowd. The camera drifts between the performers on-stage and bodies on the dance floor, until a collective rendition of a trans rights protest song dissolves any distinction between them. Rather than framing these moments of self-expression or guiding their interpretation, Kranioti allows them to unfold in duration: the film concludes with a lingering image of Muniz, as she lip-syncs to a cover of La Vie en Rose.
In its episodic structure, Obscuro Barroco retains the traces of its original form as a series of short audiovisual works. Queer transformations of body are set against the background of Rio’s ‘transformation’ for the 2016 Olympic Games and the changing political situation in Brazil, notably the corruption scandal and subsequent impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff. Near the end of the film, Kranioti focuses on the chants and rallying cries of an anti-government protest, which act as a parallel to the crowded streets of Carnival. Yet, the relationship between these transformations – queer, urban, and political – is left open, at times precariously. While the editing suggests a continuity between queer spaces and Carnival, Brazil has some of the highest rates of violence against LGBT people, including the highest number of killings of trans and gender-diverse people. Similarly, Muniz’s voice-over is decidedly not about her activism, which centred on the rights of transgender sex workers; and the safe house she established in Rio’s Lapa district is depicted without explanation. Kranioti decontextualises the film’s images and sounds, placing emphasis on the baroque pleasure of orienting oneself without coordinates.
By staging spectatorial disorientation, the film renders these omissions palpable, inviting us to consider our demands for political legibility. What does it mean to be asked to listen rather than to understand? As opposed to the tradition of social documentary, which aims to convey a message and clear political stance, Obscuro Barroco privileges other ways of knowing: a material engagement with the world that neither fixes nor categorises, but makes space for new becomings.
Lispector, Clarice. The Stream of Life. Translated by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz. Foreword by Hélène Cixous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1973].
Walton, Saige. “Fabricating Film: The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis.” In Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, 76-99. Leiden and Boston: Koninklijke Brill, 2017.
