Teatro Amazonas, 1999
35 mm film, color/sound, 40 minutes

In Sharon Lockhart’s Teatro Amazonas (1999), an audience seated in the ornate neoclassical opera house of the same name in Manaus, Brazil, looks back at us for the twenty-nine minute duration of the film. Yet, almost forty years after the initial impact of the technique of frontal address in the films of the French New Wave, we have never felt so unnerved by an audience gazing back. Equally unnerving is the film’s strident, slightly sci-fi, minimalist choral score, which we hear along with the audience. Conceived as a sonic blanket that gradually dissolves into ambient audience sound, the score is abstract and intended to avoid imagistic associations, it does not present a marked rhythm, composed melody, or harmonic progression. And yet precisely because of its minimalist purity, this soundtrack invokes the icon of another significant confrontation between different cultures, the deafening sound and blinding light of the monolith scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Teatro Amazonas is a film that operates at the margins of the actual spectacle. In this film, the whole auditorium is evenly lit, suggesting the excitement of a show about to begin. Yet, we realize only retrospectively that this image of suspended expectancy is, in fact, the entire show. Nevertheless, the film is dramatic. And that in spite of the fact that there is nothing vaguely menacing, or even alien, in this audience of Brazilians seated in abeyance. Instead, the film’s drama lies in the duration of its extended reaction shot, which is packed with subtle movement. The audience appears as a constantly shifting surface, and although its gestures and later its sounds are marked by a certain level of restraint, it embodies its own cultural distinctiveness. Heat is noticeable, as is the Brazilian women’s love of the long hair that needs constant twirling. But it is the film’s sharp separation between the onlooker and the event that ultimately defines its theatricality, and it is in the rift between the onlooker and the object of the look that Lockhart’s revised ethnography emerges to vision. A succinct manifesto, Teatro Amazonas is a radical film on looking and cultural exchange.

-excerpt from “At the Edge of My Seat: Teatro Amazonas” written by Ivone Margulies for the catalogue, Sharon Lockhart- Teatro Amazonas published by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam & Nai Publishers Rotterdam, 1999