Introducing “Chacal: Forbidden to Write Poetry” (Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, 2015) | Latin American Studies

Introducing “Chacal: Forbidden to Write Poetry” (Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, 2015)

Our colleague, Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, has made a film!

After decades of feeling overlooked by the literary establishment, in April 2014, the Brazilian poet Chacal is invited by Harvard to spend a week in the US, where he presents his art as a poet and performer. He engages in a revision of memory, linked to the Mimeograph Generation, Marginal Poetry, the Tropicália and rock. Chacal offers a singular interpretation of Brazilian (counter) culture, from the 1960s through today. Publishing his first book in 1971, Chacal debuts in the most violent period of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which, under AI-5 (the attack on political rights) ravaged the country with political persecution, torture, exile. During his visit, Chacal performed, gave poetry readings, recorded interviews, (har)vagabonded around the campus and surrounding areas, living the poetry on the sidelines, irreducible to formulas and codes of conduct, laws and aesthetic standards. This film, shot partially in Super 8, results from the Contact Improvisation that the filmmakers had with the poet, offering a vision of its passage through the traditional American institution: a contaminating passage of a post-hippie poetic and proto-punk poetics.

Chacal

View the teaser trailer:

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