A painted landscape from the title sequence, with a line of the poem across it.
Animation for television · 2014 to 2015

Há muitas noites na noite

Directed by
Silvio Tendler
Produced by
Caliban
Broadcast
TV Brasil, seven episodes of 26 minutes
My part
More than 20 time-lapse painting animations, and 40 drawings

A seven-part documentary series by Silvio Tendler on Ferreira Gullar’s exile, built around his Poema Sujo. I made the painted animation that runs through it.

Gullar wrote Poema Sujo in Buenos Aires in 1975, in exile, believing he might be killed before he finished it. Tendler’s series follows that journey through testimony, music and readings, and it needed images for the parts of a life that were never filmed.

I painted those parts and filmed myself painting them, so the image arrives the way a memory does: a mark at a time, in front of you, until it becomes a place. More than twenty of these time-lapse sequences were produced, alongside forty drawings.

Teaser

Há muitas noites na noite — teaser.

An episode

One of the episodes. The whole series is on YouTube.

Another episode
Frames

Stills from the teaser and from episode five, Poema Sujo 2. The whole series is on television archives and on YouTube.

A painted landscape from the series, with a line of the poem across it.
A painted landscape from the series, with a line of the poem across it.
“A solidão do poeta, a vida ameaçada, a dor e a doença dos filhos.”
“A solidão do poeta, a vida ameaçada, a dor e a doença dos filhos.”
“O exílio do poeta, década de 1970.”
“O exílio do poeta, década de 1970.”
Ferreira Gullar, filmed for the series.
Ferreira Gullar, filmed for the series.

This was the first time my painting had to serve somebody else’s argument, on a schedule, at broadcast length. It taught me most of what I know about editing.

All the art ⇢