While at the Met Breuer, I screened many films and viewed many pieces by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape. The film that caught my attention the most was one titled Divisor (Divider). The piece featured a large group of people wearing one large white sheet with holes in it for their heads while they walked down a large street. The film itself was a recreation of Pape’s performance art piece of the same title that was a statement against the dictatorship in Brazil at the time. What interested me about the film was how the sheet created a large mass out of the individuals that wore it. It forced them to walk and march in a very uniform manner, which was highlighted by the blaring white of the “divider” itself.

The film also featured many close-ups of the people wearing the sheet. The camera would often pick one person out of the group and then follow them as they walked down the street. This allowed the viewer to closely gauge and watch the reactions of those participating in the film. At times, the participants would even pull out a camera to take a picture or film the spectacle around them. This made think of our culture today and our desire to capture video and pictures constantly. The film focused on some of these individuals as they looked through their cameras, walking along with everybody around them.

At various points in the film, the participants would duck out of the head hole of the sheet and disappear underneath. It was impossible to see them under the huge white fabric. Because the “divider” made the people walk and look like a uniform military or police, I wondered if the Pape was trying to suggest death at these points in the film. The other participants continued to march in the same order and fashion that they did before, but as the film continued more and more places where there were once people was now just a white blank space.

Even though I could not pinpoint exactly what Pape might have been trying to suggest in this piece, watching the massive shape of people and movement was quite mesmerizing  and beautiful. I noticed that much of her  work, including some of her other films, dealt much with geometric shapes moving in a space. The final image of the piece was the “divider” now void of people and just moving as it were a flag in the wind.