IMS, Equipe. Clarice's Days in Washington. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2024. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2024/09/10/clarices-days-in-washington/. Acesso em: 06 December 2025.
Since 2015, the Literature team at the Moreira Salles Institute has been producing audiovisual material about the life and work of Clarice Lispector. The film Dias de Clarice em Washington [Clarice’s Days in Washington] (28:38) is part of this research and dissemination effort. In this latest work, you will find entirely unpublished images in film and photography.
Until then, we had only two filmed records of the author: the famous interview for TV Cultura (1977) and rare images of the writer at her apartment, in the Leme neighborhood, also during an interview, for the TVE program Os mágicos [The Magicians] (1976), the latter incorporated into Clarice Lispector – A descoberta do mundo [Clarice Lispector – The Discovery of the World] (2022), a film by the director Taciana Oliveira. Both recordings were aired on television and produced in similar periods (the author of The Hour of the Star died in December 1977).
Dias de Clarice em Washington captures a very different and decisive moment in the life and work of the writer, when she lived in the American capital with her family, between 1952 and 1959. In addition to a significant number of unpublished photographs – which record her domestic environment and interactions with friends – there are precious images filmed during a public event, in which the writer, her husband Maury Gurgel Valente, their son Paulo, in addition to friends of the couple appear. It concerns a brief color video (06:59) that was recorded on film (by an unknown author) and discovered in 2023 at the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary Brazilian History (CPDOC), which is part of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Rio de Janeiro.
Dias de Clarice em Washington was directed by Eucanaã Ferraz, the Literature Consultant at the IMS. The editing was done by Laura Liuzzi and the research was conducted by Bruno Cosentino, who is part of the IMS Literature team.
See also
by Eliane Robert Moraes
Darkness is a hollow word and one never really knows what fits inside Its dimensions are so undetermined that perhaps it could even be said that everything fits and nothing fits in it, since, being an immense storehouse of paradoxes, the ambiguous quality of immeasurable is immediately added to the primordial void that characterizes it. These attributes, thus agreed, gain particular density when prepared by the wrought of the author of The Apple in the Dark.
by Mell Brites
More or less fantastic in their plots, these children’s stories reveal narrators who, stripped almost completely of their fictional character, are very similar to the author: they are mothers, writers, they go by the initials “C.L.,” or even say their name is Clarice. Thus, if there is a horizontal posture in these narrators in which respect for the particularities of childhood is presupposed, this same movement also shows the desire to become a little more like a child.
by Eucanaã Ferraz
The chronicles of Clarice Lispector were collected in a book for the first time in 1984, in The Discovery of the World, a volume edited by Paulo Gurgel Valente, the author’s son, who arranged in chronological order 468 texts published in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973.
by Elizama Almeida
Paulo Gurgel Valente, Clarice's son, spoke with Eucanaã Ferraz and Elizama Almeida and recalls, for example, the personalities who frequented his home.
by Equipe IMS
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). 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.
by Equipe IMS
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
