Edgar Pêra

EDGAR PÊRA The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s prolific work starts in 1985, shooting Portuguese rock scene in a neuro-punk style. Edgar Pêra, A.K.A. Mr. Ego (scripts and paintings), Man-Kamera (moving image), and Artur Cyanetto (sound and music) “belongs to a generation of artists who, in the wake of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, recognized the urgency of reinventing a new modernity in Portugal.” (António Preto, curator of the Serralves Museum retrospective in 2016). Reproduta Interdita, Edgar Pêra’s first “official” picture, was shot in 1988 in the ruins of Chiado -a neighbourhood in Lisbon’s historic centre that suffered a major fire that year-a post-apocalyptic set where he would later shoot other films. In 1991, Pêra wins the Grand Prix of the Festival Films D'Architecture Bordeaux with The City of Cassiano, a film about the Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco. After this “consensual” film, Pêra chooses to make more radical works, like SWK4 - about the futurist artist Almada Negreiros- and Manual of Evasion LX94, starring counterculture thinkers Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker. In 1996 Pêra founded, with the elementalist writer Manuel Rodrigues, the Akademya Luzoh-Galaktika(1996-2000), a trans-media working and learning space. During that time Pêra directs several short films, like Zombietown 23 and 25th April - An Adventure in Democracy, Lisboa-Boa 345 A.E., The Misadventures of Man-Kamera and the feature A Janela (Maryalva Mix) The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. In 2004, Edgar Pêra has his first international retrospective at the World Wide Video Festival, in Amsterdam. The programmer and festival director Tom Van Vliet wrote: "Pêra's work has both political and philosophical dimensions. A number of his films relate to Portugal's recent history and the democratization process. A blurring of the border between fiction and reality, between dreaming and being awake, is often present in Pêra’s work. His imagery evokes old silent films and Russian and German pre-war cinema. Pêra’s films are personal, critical, imbued with irony and satire, but are primarily poetical and expressive.” For his next retrospective (Indie Lisboa Film Festival, 2006) programmer Olaf Möller wrote that '"Pêra is too different from everything which we regard as ‘correct’, ‘valid’ within the culture of film, ‘realistic’ in a cinematic, socio-political way. More precisely: Edgar Pêra is different from everything that we know about Portugal”. At Indie Lisboa Perpetual Movements, a cine-tribute to legendary Portuguese guitar composer and player Carlos Paredes wins awards in almost every category, and months later, in Paris, Pêra wins the Pasolini Award for his career, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal. In 2007 Pêra directs another controversial film, Heavy Architecture, starting an intense working relationship with producer Rodrigo Areias that lasts until now. O Barão/The Baron is his first feature film to premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), an adaptation of Branquinho da Fonseca’s homonymous masterpiece. In 2011 Pêra started to work intensively in the 3D format for his doctoral thesis. Two of these are adaptations of the work of the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa: Lisbon Revisited and The Portuguese Sea. But Pêra’s most controversial 3D film to date is Cinesapiens, one of the three parts of 3X3D -the other two parts directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway- that closed La Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2014 Pêra directed the pop comedy feature Inside Out, his first commercial success in Portugal (120.000 spectators). In 2016 and 2017, another two 3D features premiered at the IFFR: The Amazed Spectator, “A Kino-investigation about Spectatorship”, the synthesis of his doctoral dissertation, and Delirium in Las Vedras, a neuro-punk fiction documentary. In 2018 Edgar Pêra premiered, at the Indie Lisboa Festival The Spicy-Man. Dialogues with Mr. Pepper, a poetical documentary about the poet, essayist and performer Alberto Pimenta, while his feature film Magnetick Pathways, his third Branquinho da Fonseca adaptation, starring Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen, Alien Ressucrrection and other films by Jeunet) and Ney Matogrosso, premiered at the São Paulo Film Festival. The critic and programmer, Augusto M. Seabra wrote: “If there has been in Portugal a filmmaker who has never stopped filming (apart from the well-known case of Manoel de Oliveira), he is Edgar Pêra, in part as a consequence of his insistence on doing so regardless of the perennial problems of juries and public subsidies. But it is also a consequence of adopting light technologies; he and his camera, constituting symbiotically an ‘Ego’ that is perpetually making his own film-diaries". Over the past years Pêra has been assembling his personal archives and making documentaries about bands and other artists. He is now preparing a TV series, Cinekomix!!!, from 30 years of interviews with comic book artists like Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman and Jerry Robinson. Kinorama - Beyond The Walls of The Real (Self Propaganda Mix), a sequel to The Amazed Spectator, is in editing and was shown in 2019 as a Work-in-Progress, during Pêra’s most complete retrospective of Pêra, at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, with 26 sessions and a cine-concert Lovecraftland, with texts by HP Lovecraft, music by Randolph Carter (aka Legendary Tiger Man), VJing by Claudio Vasques, mixed with live images shot by Pêra and performances by Iris Cayatte and Dominique Pinon. The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre site wrote that “Edgar Pêra has a penchant for odd, eccentric, obscure and sometimes twisted humour. His unique touch exhibits an arthouse, avant-garde approach, which somehow combines retro and avant-garde modernity. In short, an interesting, highly experimental film-maker with an unapologetic sense of humour.” However, Pêra rejects both the label of Experimental, or even Psychedelic Cinema preferring words like unconventional or “experiential” (“to experience an artwork as something he or she can inhabit”), Recently he finished his most ambitious feature, Não Sou Nada-The Nothingness Club, a psycho-thriller about the poet Fernando Pessoa and his multiple literary personas. Selected: Telepathic Letters, 2024 Não Sou Nada – The Nothingness Club, 2023 Kinorama, 2022 Caminhos Magnétykos 2018 Delírio em Las Vedras 3D, 2017 O Espectador Espantado 3D 2016 Lisbon Revisited, 3D, 66, 2014. Virados do Avesso. 2014. 3x3D (segmento Cinesapiens)em conjunto com Jean-Luc Godard e Peter Greenaway). 3D. 2013. Visões de Madredeus, 2012 O Barão 90’ Punk Is Not Daddy, 2010 Rio Turvo, 2007 Movimentos Perpétuos – Cine-tributo a Carlos Paredes, 2006 Os Homens-Toupeira, 2003 O homem-Teatro, 2001 Oito Oito, 2001 A Janela (Maryalva Mix), 2001 Manual de Evasão LX94 w/ Terence Mckenna, Rudy Rucker e Robert Anton Wilson, 1994. Vida & Obra de Cassiano Branco, 1991.