A Tilt-Shift Video of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival

“I wanted to look my best for Rio,” wrote the famous Italian aviator Francesco de Pinedo in his travelogues, “There she lay, fragrant and colorful, voluptuously reclining beside the sea.” Le Corbusier echoed similar gendered reflections of the city when he likened Rio de Janiero’s “dancing” landscape of lush islands and sculpted peaks to the bodies of women. What prompted these “poetic” formulations was the bird’s eye spectacle newly afforded by the airplane, which offered privileged encounters with the city inaccessible to all but the brave and daring. Even with the introduction and integration of Google Maps into contemporary culture, these same encounters remain exclusive to experience of flight, in the sense that the airplane is the only medium in which one may truly inhabit the oblique.

Read more. [Video: Jarbas Agnelli]