Dos Santos and Glauber Rocha’s redefining of Brazilian and Latin American cinema
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Cinema Novo's origins were in the early 50s. “a result of debates between young Brazilian critics and writers opposed to the 'empty cosmopolitanism' of Hollywood and the 'false populism' of national studios such as Atlantida and Vera Cruz. “Italian neo-realism […] pointed the way towards a critical realist method based in few technical resources” (Coad 157). “As part of a broad, heterogeneous movement of cultural transformation that involved theatre, popular music, and literature, cinema evolved through a number of phases.” (Johnson 2).
Cinema Novo challenged both the ideology and aesthetics of Hollywood and its distribution chains and the Brazilian commercial cinema. Like Soviet filmmakers in the 20s, Cinema Novo “sought to decolonise film language and liberate its people from oppressive political and economic structures.” In their auteurist political and aesthetic production strategies the Novo filmmakers more radically took inspiration from the French New Wave. (Stam 309).
The first phase from 1960-64 ended with a military coup d'etat. Successive populist governments, following a period of political stability and “national-developmentalism,” in the 50s had created a feeling that the country was on the verge of a radical transformation. Filmmakers initially deployed limited resources in highly individualised searches for an aesthetic appropriate to portraying the real Brazil of poverty, violence and great inequality, similar to the way neo-realism had exposed economic oppression in underdeveloped southern Italy. Films in this 'open' phase of Cinema Novo include Vidas Secas, Roy Guerra's Oz Fuzis/The Guns, Rocha's first feature Barravento (1962) and his Black God, White Devil.
The second Phase of Cinema Novo extended from 1964 to 1968, the year of the Fifth Institutional Act which ended with a coup-within-a-coup inaugurating a period of repressive military rule. Prior to this there was still space for discussion and debate on the failure of the intellectual left in the events of 1964. Paradoxically in the years immediately following the military coup, sectors of the left - including Cinema Novo - strengthened their position. Optimism of the first phase gave way to analyses of failure. In attempting to reach a wider public a distribution co-operative was established and started making films with more popular appeal. The focus of Cinema Novo shifted from rural to urban Brazil, from the lumpen proletariat to the middle class. The commitment to realism in the first phase (with the exception of Glauber Rocha) tended toward self-referentiality and anti-illusionism in the second. Films included Rocha's Terra em Transe (1967) and dos Santos's Hunger for Love (1968). During this phase filmmakers also began to recognise that they were not reaching a wide public and films began to be more commercially oriented.
The third phase ranged from 1968-72, a further period of very harsh military rule with habeus corpus suspended, censorship tightened and torture institutionalised. Concurrent with the third phase there emerged a radically different tendency – udigrudi (underground). Novo filmmakers, unable to express views directly, resorted to allegory and a coded language of revolt in their films, the so-called cannibal-tropicalism, a 60s amalgam of popular Brazilian genres and the avant-garde, as in de Andrade's Macunaima (69) and dos Santos's The Alienist and How Tasty was My Little Frenchman (both 1970). The latter has been described as “a kind of anthropological fiction” suggesting that the (Brazilian) Indians should metaphorically cannibalise their foreign enemies, appropriating their force instead of being dominated by them. Antonio das Mortes was released as the military coup took a more savage turn in 1969, effectively marking the end of Cinema Novo as a movement in support of revolutionary change.
Just when Cinema Novo decided to reach out for a popular audience in the third phase, the underground opted “to slap the audience in the face.” As Cinema Novo moved towards technical polish and production values, the ‘Novo Cinema Novo’ (as the underground was also called) demanded a radicalization of the aesthetics of hunger, rejecting the dominant codes of well-made cinema in favour of a “dirty screen” and “garbage aesthetics.” In doing so they were not only influenced by international currents of the avant-garde but were reviving a long combative tradition in the Brazilian cinema. “The movement [which continued in the following decades] nurtured an Oedipal love-hate relationship with Cinema Novo, at times paying homage to its early purity, while lambasting what it saw as its subsequent populist co-optation.” (Stam & Johnson). Although the films were intentionally marginal they were also marginalised - harassed by the censors and boycotted by exhibitors.
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| Nelson Pereira dos Santos |
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1928-2018) directed two films in the mid-fifties considered precursors to Cinema Novo. In 1963 he had, with others, been advocating the need for an independent national cinema that fully revealed poverty and oppression in Brazil's north-east. Vidas Secas/Barren Lives (1963), a stark adaptation of a novel by Graceiliano Ramos, is considered a high point of first phase of Cinema Novo; Rocha called Pereira dos Santos its “conscience.” Dos Santos's own trajectory as a filmmaker consisted of his initial 'sociological' phase (1955-67), his six features, with the exception of Vidas Secas, following fairly traditional classical narrative form while maintaining a sociological critique of Brazilian society.
In his second 'ideological' phase of four features (1968-73) dos Santos deals not so much with events, social situations and structures as with the way in which events and society are interpreted. Fome de Amor/Hunger for Love (1968), for example, calls into question traditional leftist politics in the face of a repressive military regime while Azyllo Muito Luco/The Alienist(1970) questions the repressive nature of all ideologies. The films in this phase are consistently allegorical in content and discontinuous in form, breaking away from the realist discourse of his first phase. Santos's third “popular” phase followed the publication of his “Manifesto for a Popular Cinema (1974).”
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| Glauber Rocha |
Glauber Rocha (1938-81) is a key figure as a filmmaker-poet and polemicist in redefining Brazilian and Latin American cinema. Edgardo Cozarinsky suggests that the confusing and contradictory reality of a continent whose historical and cultural development, for European and American intellectuals, did not follow an accessibly understandable pattern of ready-made equations. Right-wing, tradition and mysticism, against left-wing, progress and rationalism “were dismissed in a shock of colourful violence in a body of work which thrilled the European intelligentsia by questioning their most enlightened assumptions.” (Dictionary of Cinema vol.2 ed. R.Roud 878)
Rocha in his mid-twenties, in a book, “Critical Condition of Brazilian Cinema,” published in 1965 after the release of his first film, Barravento (1961), embraced the notion of the auteur propounded in 'Cahiers du Cinema'. Rocha's emphasis on the importance of self-expression in his critique of the national cinema was attacked by activist Brazilian documentary filmmaker Fernando Birri, and later by Argentinians Solanas and Getino in their manifesto for a Third Cinema. But as Nowell-Smith suggests in Rocha's defence, “a cinema of individual expression, such as one finds in Barravento and Rocha's subsequent films, is the only possible counterweight to a commercial cinema in thrall to folkloric clichés about 'the people' and which treated the audience as irredeemably petty bourgeois in mentality.(179).
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| Barravento |
Randal Johnson finds that all Rocha's films are replete with religious imagery and the basic structure of life arising from death. A new world from the old is also their basis, if albeit often deprived of immediate religious significance. “Rocha has taken the form of the myth and used it in endless variations... until finally in his last film A Idade da Terra/The Age of the Earth (1981) the form assumes its original content […] The structuring element is not only Protestant; it is, rather, syncretic, like Brazil itself, and mixes a baroque, Catholic mise-en-scène with Afro-Brazilian rituals and saints”(118-9). Johnson takes up René Gardies perception that Rocha's films “taken as a single text, are informed by the repetition of a single, Catholic myth: Saint George slaying the dragon.” Johnson suggests, however, that this only shows one side of the coin pointing out that “the difficulty of many of Rocha's films is that images, people, and things are rarely what they appear to be, or, better said, rarely only what they appear to be.” Johnson notes that William van Wert in studying Rocha's typage finds his types [such as the bandits or cangaceiros] “are in continual metamorphosis, always at contradiction with their landscape, always at contradiction within themselves.” (120)
Glauber Rocha was in the forefront of the concern to create a “decolonized” cinematic language, a new cinematic language based on Brazilian social reality […] In his films, underlying religious form is often expressed in terms of revolutionary politics: a new political order arising from the destruction of the old from the ruins of mysticism, alienation, and archaic ideologies. His films are a protest (“protest-ant”) against mystification, capitalism and imperialism at the same time as they are a prophecy of revolution. The prophetic and the messianic are profoundly rooted in Rocha's Protestant ethos and are present throughout his work.” (ibid)
Rocha was born in the poverty of the drought stricken rural northeast/Nordeste. The arid Sertão are where two of his three major Novo features were filmed. In 1965 Rocha published his manifesto, “The Aesthetics of Hunger” in which he argued “that the politics of the underdeveloped world was, of necessity, the politics of hunger and that, again of necessity, there had to be an aesthetic of hunger to match it.” (Nowell-Smith ed. 179).
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| Black God, White Devil |
In Dues e o diabo na terre do sol/Black God White Devil (1964), set in Rocha's Bahia homelands, the conflict is not between peasants and landowners or a struggle not between good and evil but between opposing sides that cancel each other out. Moral values are interchangeable - the Black God (a charismatic black prophet' Sebastião, messianic leader of a strange millenial cult) commits crimes and the White Devil (the blonde bandit or cangacieros, Corisco) sometimes acts as a liberating force to create a new awareness. Antonio das mortes- the killer and hired gun paid by the Catholic church and state - is “a real catalyst of history” as Ciment puts it. (Cameron ed.111) The displaced peasant couple is ambiguously placed in relation to the other central players. A fundamental ambiguity in Rocha's filmic system is carried over and the oppositions that are shifting and unstable develop between different groups and characters.
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| Antonio das Mortes |
The quasi-abstract and enigmatic figure of Antonio the bandit-killer for hire is the mythic centre in themes and location of a companion 'novo western', Antonio das Mortes (1969) set in 1940. Although Antonio is apparently based loosely on an historical figure, he is clearly symbolic. The characters resembling “ideas on the move” are placed stylistically on the screen by a mix of montage and sequence shots. In contrast to the “frenetic camerawork and shorthand montage” of Black God White Devil, Rocha abandons realism in Antonio das Mortes for an theatrical spectacle to engage the viewer, delivering a twist at the end. The ritual of dancing, sacrifice and procession, which Ciment suggests is reminiscent of Artaud's theories on the theatre of cruelty, is in all three films, including Terra em Transe (116 ibid).
The cangaceiros having been killed as negative forces in the Black God are resurrected in Antonio as positive forces. Rocha explained this reversal as recognition of the strength of mysticism (hence the reincarnations) as a popular force in the Northeast. In sociological terms he acknowledged it is recognised as a very negative phenomenon whereas from a subjective and unconscious point of view it is very positive “because it signifies a permanent rebellion of the people against the oppression of that region.” (ibid 143).
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| Antonio das Mortes |
As in Rocha's previous films, the characters of Antonio das Mortes are not psychological beings but symbols in a mystical, operatic structure - the local feudalistic landowner who is blind and rapacious, Mattos his manager intelligent and sensitive but weak (representing the bourgeoisie), and the drunken teacher “the Professor” (the intelligentsia) - “are formed by ambiguous, shifting signifiers and signifieds, as the role of St George passes from personage to personage.” (145) Coriana in Antonio das Mortes has much in common with the Black God Corsico, spiritual symbol of the oppressed in the earlier film but lacking a history as a leader that Coriana is given as a reincarnation of the last cangaciero Lampiao, supposedly killed by Antonio in 1938. As a force of history with a record of killing more than 100 cangaceiros in the northeastern back country coming out of retirement, Antonio kills Coriana in a ritualistic duel. The presence of Coriana's followers “the holy one” (a girl in white) and a black dressed in red, seem to be the catalyst for Antonio doubting his historical role in a revolutionary transformation. He asks for food to be distributed to the poor and he and “the Professor” take on the gang of hired killers, brought in to finish Antonio's work, in a climactic Peckinpah-esque gun battle, and Antão, the black in red, kills the landowner with a lance.”
For Rocha “the true revolutionaries in South America are individuals, suffering personalities, who are not involved in theoretical problems. Latin American peasants have not read Marx […] the upheaval can only come from individual people who have suffered themselves and who have realized that a need for change is present – not for theoretical reasons but because of personal agony.”
In explaining his intention in his two 'Novo Westerns', Rocha referred to the mysticism that marks all of Latin America. Above all, in Brazil, it is based on “an emotional Dionysiac behaviour” which comes from what he describes as “a very strange mixture of Catholic Christianity and African religions involving an energy that is “more emotional than critical...the alienation of the people from everyday reality.” But this energy found in the people “draws its sources from this mysticism, which results from this fusion of all religions in Latin America.” It is hardly surprising that Rocha fell out with Godard during the making of Wind from the East.
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| Land in a Trance |
Between Black God,White Devil and Antonio das Mortes, Rocha made Terra em Transe/Land in a Trance/Land in Anguish (1965), his most personal work - he also claimed it his most important. It embodies “a convulsive, apocalyptic vision of Latin American politics, a cinematic poem-meditation on the death of populist politics which, according to Rocha, has nothing to offer.” The “land in a trance” is immersed in a carnival of eternal crises and political madness. Resurrection, in Rocha's view, “remains only implicit, however, in the dialectical notion that the only positive thing in Latin America is that which is normally considered to be negative and from which a new society can arise.” (Johnson 135).
Pervaded by the influence of Eisenstein, “Rocha wanted a cinematographic confrontation that would put an end to myth where the degeneration of a civilization could be explained and where 'the state of trance could be presented as a ‘state of transition'...The film at the same time is cradled in the blackest romanticism and lightened by the critical gaze the director levels at his character.” (Ciment 115)
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| Land in a Trance |
The poet Paulo Martin's agonised recollections of the political and personal events that have led to his failure and impending death constitute the film's complexity shaped by the free movement between the subjective and the objective, forming what has been called “a sulphurous poem.” The events take place in the imaginary country of Eldorado where the populist provincial governor, Veira, is reluctant to resist a coup led by the right-wing leader, Diaz. Martin who has been trying to persuade Veira to resist, is mortally wounded when he breaks through a police barricade.
In writing about music in his films Graham Bruce leads with a quote from Rocha: “Brazil is a musical country and I think of cinema as musical montage with pauses and musical spaces.” It plays a distinctive Brechtian role in his films “as a vital element, not simply something reproducing and reinforcing the image but as a means of both structuring sequences and commenting on individual images.
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