'Santo Antonio' Tells a Claustrophobic Story

“Santo António,” an art installation currently exhibited in Radcliffe Yard’s Byerly Hall, consists of four screens that each cover a side of a room. The mesmerizing short film “Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day” is projected simultaneously on all screens with variations between each one, forming an endless fugue enclosed in a 200-square-foot universe.

Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues, known for daring films such as “Two Drifters” and “To Die Like a Man,” created the piece in 2013 as a commissioned work for Mimesis Art Museum in South Korea. It was intended as an installation version of his “Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day,” which had premiered a year earlier at the Cannes Film Festival.

The original 25-minute short focuses on a group of young people as they get out of a subway station near the St. Anthony statue in Lisbon, numb and exhausted after the immoderate festivities of St. Anthony’s Night. “St. Anthony’s Day is a religious day because St. Anthony is the patron of Lisbon,” Rodrigues explains. “But people do a vulgar celebration, which is to go out, drink and get drunk...so there are two sides of the same day which are conflicted.” On one hand, the youth rebel against the constraints of religion and the establishment, which is epitomized by a young man trying to break the statue of St. Anthony. At the same time, however, these people don’t know where their rebellion leads. In the film, they wander around like sleepwalkers and end up lost in hollowness and helplessness. “But who’s looking at those people? St. Antonio himself,” Rodrigues says. “He is a silent observer, looking at these people, and he can’t fully understand them.”

The short film is typical of Rodrigues’s works both thematically and stylistically. Deeply concerned with social issues, Rodrigues utilizes films to voice his concern about marginalized groups and neglected political problems. “There’s nothing that is completely not political,” Rodrigues says. “For example, my first film was about gay characters, and there had never been a film in Portugal about gay characters.”

Another feature of Rodrigues’s films is that they don’t convey his thoughts through words as much as through visuals. Heavily influenced by American silent cinema and French art house film, Rodrigues views films as essentially a visual art about space and time. “It’s super lazy just to tell stories through words,” Rodrigues says. In the silent era, directors did not use words, but they could still tell a complex and engaging story because they discovered and polished a visual language that used the unique qualities of film to the greatest effect. Rodrigues has been exploring this language, and in “Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day,” there is almost no dialogue. To emphasize the sense of apathy and confusion, he lets the young people in the film walk mechanically and rhythmically, like characters in works of Buster Keaton and Pina Bausch.

However, “Santo António” is different from “Morning of St. Anthony’s Day.” As a piece of installation art, it has its own language. “It’s much more architectural,” Rodrigues says. He tries to incorporate the characteristic of the media with the theme of the film. “The idea of the film is about these young men and young women going out of the square. The four screens are the four sides of the square, and the whole room is a recreation of the square.” At the center of this reconstructed square, audiences are actually looking from the viewpoint of the statue of St. Anthony, observing the young people as they walk out at all directions further and further away from the square and from each other. The relation in physical space helps to establish the psychological distance between characters. Rodrigues also tries to convey the sense of alienation through space configuration, as the the display of images inside four walls creates a claustrophobic situation.

“Santo António” will be on exhibition through Dec. 4. Isolated in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery of Byerly Hall, it will be playing Rodrigues’s melancholic video essay about the modern generation over and over until the exhibit’s closing.