Ressaca is a sound and visual experiment made from images of the Passeio Público area in downtown Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. The country's first public garden, the Passeio Público underwent several transformations and also served various economic interests. Ressaca draws on archival material from the earliest cinematographers (Alberto Botelho, Silvino Santos, among others) and photographers (Marc Ferrez, Augusto Malta), as well as press publications of the time about what was then the capital of the First Republic, to reveal the dream-like images embedded in the projects of the Passeio Público and the city.
We see lyrical, celebratory images of the capital advancing toward the progress and modernity of European metropolises. There are wide avenues, men reading newspapers, gazing at the horizon, or strolling through the gardens of the Passeio. Ressaca is a brief flash of insight into this region overrun by landscape and architectural transformations. From a public garden project featuring a lookout point to admire the horizon and the sea, the Passeio gradually distanced itself from the waterfront and lost its charm. Among the various construction works that came between the gardens and the waterfront are: Beira Mar Avenue, the Cassino Beira Mar, and the Teatro Cassino (the latter two disappeared soon after being built, leaving no trace).
The moving images that Ressaca revisits are the remains of films that no longer exist in full. They are fragments. In this sense, the questions present during the editing and production process were: what can we do with this material? What do these faded images tell us about Rio de Janeiro (and what do they want to hide)? How do we handle the muteness of these silent images? To look attentively at this material is to discover, among other things, existences lost in time that sometimes cast a gaze at us from the past and sometimes turn their backs on us, indifferent to cinema.
Read Ana Maria Mauad's essay on "Ressaca" here
