Corman's Eyedrops Got Me Too Crazy

For 10 years Ivan Cardoso has set aside traditional cinema to work directly on 35mm film in a handmade film, frame by frame. Scratching, drawing, puncturing, interfering, staining, and even erasing the image with acid. Developing various techniques and ways of doing everything that academic manuals say cannot be done.

Corman’s Eyedrops is one of those rare junctions between a broke exhibition cinema and a broke experimental cinema. Ivan Cardoso perfectly represents this point of connection between these two cinemas: after having made short Super 8 films of horrific inspiration but using some experimental motifs (camp cinema in particular), then after having moved on to the feature-length exploitation film of comic horror (the terrir genre), Ivan Cardoso discovered in the mid-2000s scratching on film, an almost folkloric technique of experimental cinema, without being so familiar with the Lettrist films that used scratching extensively in their films. He then began to scratch out some of the films he had at home: first his own films, then those of others, such as those of José Mojica Marins, who died recently and was a great figure of Brazilian genre cinema. With an exemplary technique, reminiscent of the early films of Claude Duty (the filmmaker behind the final sequence of Irma Vep by Olivier Assayas), he seizes with great energy and joy these bits of film, which he will sometimes divert in a comic way, or accentuate graphically by focusing on certain parts of the image. Then, he carefully keeps these scratched rushes, without turning them into a film that he could have diffused in the “experimental” circuit. Gurcius Gewdner, a young Brazilian filmmaker in a similar vein to that of Ivan Cardoso, suggested that he edit these bits of film, mixing them with a light narrative framework involving Roger Corman and Cardoso himself, but also showing an unbounded love for broke cinema, whether experimental or exploitative. Gewdner then adds a particularly nervous and danceable soundtrack that surprisingly intertwines with the waltz of scratches that take place on the screen, resulting in one of the most over-excited “scratch films” ever!

Translation made by the translator www.DeepL.com/Translator

– T.D.