IMS, Equipe. Close to Clarice. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2022. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2022/12/08/close-to-clarice/. Acesso em: 28 April 2024.
On December 10th, IMS Rio celebrates Clarice Lispector’s birthday. This year, we will present, in a single screening, the short film Perto de Clarice (Close to Clarice), by João Carlos Horta, from 1982, in a new digital version based on the 35mm original preserved by the Audiovisual Technical Center (CTAv).
The film begins with a Hebrew funeral prayer and images of the wake and burial of Clarice Lispector, filled with friends and family, at the Israelite Cemetery, one day after Shabbat in 1977. And it ends with Clarice saying to the television camera: “Now I’ve died, let’s see if I’ll be reborn again.”
Bearing in mind the significant number of young readers, translations into foreign languages, and studies dedicated to her work, we can say that, in the 45 years that followed her death, Clarice has been reborn – “again” – many times. On the 10th, once more, Clarice’s Hour will be celebrated in various parts of the world, in her memory. The writer would have turned 102 years old.
The twelve minutes of the short film about the presence, in image and sound, of Clarice (in a rare audiovisual recording for TV Cultura months before her death) gather off-screen testimonials from friends such as Hélio Pellegrino, Nélida Piñon, and her son Paulo Gurgel Valente; readings of excerpts from her work by Ana Cristina Cesar; and takes of Leme, the neighborhood where the author lived and died in Rio de Janeiro. These and other frames emotionally are punctuated, here and there, by the music of Chopin and the singing of Caetano Veloso.
After the film screening, there will be a conversation between the writer Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, who was involved in the making of the film and is the director’s widow, and Teresa Montero, author of the most recent biography of the writer, À procura da própria coisa (In Search of the Thing Itself – Rocco, 2021), mediated by the IMS literature consultant, the poet Eucanaã Ferraz.
