Displacing the gaze: Imaging Brazil intransnational experimental cinema and video art

The encounter between Latin American subjects and landscapes with filmmakers from the global North has been studied primarily through analyses of documentary and fiction films, whether it is through the presence of auteurs like Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, or Luis Buñuel in key moments of the formation of filmic identity in countries such as Brazil and Mexico; their use as backdrop in Hollywood or European films; or the different iterations of Jean Rouch’s documentary workshops Ateliers Varan in the region. The theoretical corpus surrounding the ethics of asymmetrical representation proves insufficient when dealing with another perennial form of audiovisual transnational encounters in Latin America: experimental cinema and video art. This article looks at a group of works made in the past three decades by female artists from the global North who have turned to Brazil as a physical, cultural, and symbolic space that invites destabilisations of conventional filmmaking strategies: Um Campo de Aviação (An Avi