Pájaros de verano/Birds of Passage, Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra’s Colombian successor to their Embrace of the Serpent/El abrazo de la serpiente has finally arrived here with a slather of quotes from critics who declaim that they’ve never seen anything like it - which makes you wonder.
I first heard about Tropicalism in the sixties and it sounded like part of the critical babble of the day - cinema-vérité, auteurs, semiotics - when it was applied to films of the Brazilian Cinema Novo - Antonio das mortes, Macunaima and the rest. Well now it’s back again.
This year Pordenone participated with the rediscovery of Alcides Greca’s 1917 Argentinian El último malón/The Last Indian Attack already offering its international audience exotic folklorico material and an account of the destructive effect of South America’s contact with European civilisation.
El ultimo malón anticipates Robert Flaherty and Nanook of the North with scenes of the life of the indigenous Mocovi from the Argentinian province of San Javier, mixed with a dramatised plot about Jésus Salvador’s attempt to take their leadership and wife Rosa Paiquí from his brother, chief Bernardo López. Two professional performer leads are backed by tribals including survivors of the 1904 indigenous rebellion which is dramatised in the film.
They begin with documentary footage of tribal life including scenes of shark hunting and, particularly vivid, trapping caiman alligators seen thrashing about on the baited lines six at a time. Into this, the stiffly acted material has not been particularly well inserted.
After abuse and torture by their new masters, the tribals revolt and are faced with the superior military of the Argentinian government. Their messenger is thrown into a cell. Despite pushing her jailer down a well, Paiqui is lassoed, tied and beaten. The insurgents cut telegraph lines but the news reaches the indignant governor and chalk board messages inform crowds of felt hat men in the capital who take their rifles onto the roof tops for an unequal battle with the Indians’ spears, blowpipes and bows and arrows, while troops oppose riders in the streets.
Like later entries in the cycle, this re-staging of the revolt has taken on the look of the U.S. cowboy movie. Later Glauba Rocha would acknowledge the influence of Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country/Guns in the Afternoon on Antonio das Mortes probably the key work of the tradition.
While advanced for its time, El Ultimo Maldon remains a curiosity. It still lacks lacks real film form or the involving characters found in Nanook. A murky copy with Spanish captions can be seen on Cinemargentino.com.
Meanwhile Armand Gatti’s El otro Cristóbal (The Other Christopher) has re-appeared in a Paris rue Champollion cinema after a half century of oblivion. This one is Tropicalism with its boots on.
In 1963, Fidel Castro demanded a film worthy of Revolutionary Cuba for the Cannes Festival and, at the urging of Joris Ivens and Che Guevera no less, put in charge the French poet and man of the theatre, Armand Gatti who had previously made only one film, the little seen 1961 L’Enclos, an early treatment of the WW2 concentration camps. Gatti was provided the full resources of the Cuban state.
He opted for a deliberately weird style, kicking off with stage hands wheeling round hoardings inscribed with the credits in a giant black wall studio space filled with dinosaur bones and white cage structures.
There’s something that looks as if it will turn into a plot but doesn’t with Dictator Marc Dudicourt, (later a bit player in French movies like the Louis Malle Le Voleur), the subject of an assassination which turns him into a man in a chicken suit in which guise he sets about establishing a police state in heaven. (I did warn you) The matter of his successor is determined by scrutinising the political prisoner dungeons with a diviner’s crystal.
Meanwhile French sailor, an incredibly young Jean Bouise in probably his one leading role, attempts to restore the natural order by dragging a street organ through swamps with his black sidekick, recruiting a Holy Virgin statue come to life. The heavens oppose their efforts as do armed troops and the cohort of businessmen who fear that these events will prevent them from developing their canal projects. Lots of ethnic scoring including a song about expropriation. Did I mention the cock fights?
In case you think it sounds like fun, be warned this one struggles on through two hours of ponderous, inexplicable, contrasty wide screen black and white - Henry Alekan on camera, doubtless injected into the project by the French co-producer who was so dissatisfied by the outcome that he caused the film to be suppressed till the present.
We thought ideologues getting control of film production was a problem in Australia but here once again we are outclassed.
Which brings us to Pájaros de verano, arriving after a fair bit of traffic on the festival circuit and once again hailed as unprecedented. Tropicalism runs amok with the makers of Embrace of the Serpent this time working in colour. It’s Colombian but the framing song has the sound we recognise from the Antonio das Mortes ballad. Soon the Narco thriller (think Blow, American Made) stands in for the cowboy movie.
In the seventies, the Indigenous Wayúu people of northern Colombia's La Guajira region have a hierarchy based on birth, clan structure and ritual.
They are celebrating the coming of age of (TV star) Natalia Reyes, daughter of Matriarch Carmiña Martínez. Women play a leading part in the tribal power structure here. Hunky José Acosta asks for Reyes as his wife but Martínez is wary of any liaison downwards and only concedes at the urgings of Acosta’s powerful uncle. She figures she has put them off by demanding an enormous dowry - goats, cows, trucks and rare stone necklaces.
However, Acosta and his buddy Jhon Narváez have been selling pot to the Peace Corps volunteers in their area and figure that if they industrialise the operation they will meet the costs. The marriage and the drug business go ahead.
By the time the couple's children are growing, tensions develop when Martínez’ randy son Greider Meza goes off the rails - humiliating a negotiator representing The Word, their honored ritual, by throwing a bag of drug money on the ground. He can have it if he eats dog droppings. He's lusting after the daughter of the neighboring clan leader.
Acosta is anxious to avoid a war which will get in the way of business and agrees to the demands of the neighbors including having Meza work in their fields for three weeks. This puts him in place to molest the girl and then it’s on big time. Negotiations based on The Word give way to threats by the partner with contacts to the Medellin cartel and truck loads of heavies with fire power. Most everyone ends up dead.
More memorable than the grim plot line however is the visual content - beautiful people, face painting, the vivid coloured fabrics of the women’s costumes, exotic fauna - the giant scarlet locust of the opening foreshadows a plague that the budget won’t run to and a crane that picks its way through the buildings.
The notion that this one has appeared out of nowhere is naive. What it would be more interesting to establish is whether these films are a widely spaced phenomenon or whether they are part of a continuous tradition we only get to know about with decade long gaps.
It's all a reminder of the thin coverage Hispanic material is given. However, the news is not all bad. The new Brazilian Bacurau is getting attention wherever it’s shown.
This one rapidly evokes Antonio das Mortes with the couple driving a white “Agua Potiva” tanker along the Nordeste dirt road, crushing a load of coffins spilled from a truck. At the wheel is Bárbara Colen, returning grand-daughter of the 93 year old witch woman whose funeral is taking place in the parched sertão, in Bacurau village, complete with singing cortege. The mourners are abused by local medico Sonja Braga, setting up a science vs. religion conflict that the film never delivers and, as the coffin is lowered, water issues from it, hinting magic realism to the point that, when we first see a spy drone, it registers as a flying saucer. One of mercenary Udo Keir’s cutthroats makes that comparison. Think again.
The TV in the town square covers details of the hunt for bleached hair bandit Silvero Pereira. Running for re-election local parliamentary representative Thardelly Lima arrives in a speaker van where we glimpse bottled water on each seat. Greeted by empty streets, he has his tip truck dump a load of books for the library of the school which has achieved much through the efforts of its dedicated teacher. Lima puts out gift bags of consumables in the square, including medicines that Braga warns are dangerous and addictive. The townspeople are not impressed, demanding action on the water shortage. That night the tanker is shot up, spilling its precious water.
However, the film takes an abrupt change of direction when outlying farmers are found dead. The town no longer registers on Satnav (cf. Under the Silver Lake). A cheery Yankee couple in fluro outfits and face covering vizors arrive on Moto-cross bikes and take a beer in the pool hall, where an animal carcass is hung near the bar. The villagers accept them as tourists on their way through but, when they ride out of town, the bikers shoot the locals who have found the farmers’ bodies.
Turns out they are part of Kier’s Thrill-Kill group who have been provided the now isolated community as a target for their man hunting. However, complications arise. “I thought we just go in and start shooting” one complains. The hunters off the Motocross couple after telling them they are not proper white people entitled to participate (Udo is impatient about this) and argue about whether shooting the nine year old boy who went to investigate with a flashlight can be added to their kill score. A woman explains why she has fetishized the Thompson Machine gun, one of the vintage arsenal they confine themselves to.
However, the villagers have signaled the exiled bandit using a heliograph mirror (one form of contact that couldn’t be closed down) and things don’t go as planned. When Kier arrives at Braga’s surgery, the blood of his Thompson machine gun fetishist customer is still staining the Doctor’s white coat. He menaces Braga with his vicious looking Rambo knife but the nasties end as severed heads on the museum steps - the way Lampiao and his bandits, a reference point in the Antonio das Mortes films, had been displayed pre-war.
Udo publicly reproaches Lima for not providing the defenseless town his clients paid for, ensuring the politician’s downfall - sent out of town naked on a donkey with a child’s voodoo mask on the back of his head.
It does go on too long at two and a quarter hours and there are unsatisfying elements like the way the colourful locals - Colen, the doctor, the teacher, the red headed black, - are allowed to fade as the films attention moves to the kill squad. Expectations of Glauba Rocher are met with sixties Roger Corman. The film cites John Carpenter - all right but not a fair swap.
Even so, a fascinating watch, Bacurau is becoming a source of National pride, probing the Imperialist heritage and deep running neurosis in South American societies and the film is up for the Oscar.
We’ve had Pájaros de verano.It will be interesting to see if Bacurau makes it here. These are not what the Audrey Tatou audience expect.
Editor’s Note: Bacurau screened at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival. Birds of Passage is still screening at limited sessions in Sydney.
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