cinemas of the south

A Dream That Came True
By Carlos Diegues

In July, 1963, Glauber Rocha set foot in Milagres in the drought-ridden part of the State of Bahia and began filming Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol). In the very same month, Nelson Pereira dos Santos was editing his Barren Lives (Vidas Secas, 1963). These two films were to head the list of the classics of the so-called New Cinema, a movement that arose at the end of the 50s via a few short films, very few full-length features and a great deal of effort on the part of its founders.

Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1963)

When Glauber arrived in Milagres and Nelson had begun to organise the first private showings of his film, they were in fact making way for the highest points in the domestic and international prestige of the Brazilian Cinema Novo. The following year, Black God, White Devil and Barren Lives were to represent Brazil at a historic Cannes Film Festival. To boot, Ganga Zumba (Ganga Zumba, o Rei dos Palmares, 1963) was also to be shown during the Critics' Week, a parallel event dedicated to new films. While Glauber's film led to a full-scale 'fracas', Nelson's grabbed three or four awards, under the protest of the critics who demanded that Barren Lives receive the Golden Palm, which that year was given to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) by Jacques Demy. Even so, the festival had been sufficiently prodigious as to transform Black God, White Devil into a banner for worldwide new cinema. Barren Lives, on the other hand, had no lesser role than to display the flagrant yearly unfairness of Cannes. The doors of the European intelligentsia had been flung open to Brazilian films. Included within the same nucleus, Black God, White Devil had drawn all the younger, more radical elements, while Barren Lives appealed to other cultural segments.

For some, this was the starting point of Brazilian cinema. For others, it was the birth of the Cinema Novo. In fact, it was neither. These two films were no more than a milestone that marked the climax of a process that had begun some ten years before.

Barren Lives (Vidas Secas, 1963)

In a book written in 1963, Revisão Crítica do Cinema Brasileiro, Glauber Rocha noted that the bankruptcy of the Vera Cruz Film Production Company in 1954 had not led Brazilian cinema into any kind of crisis, as has so often been claimed. During the three years between 1953 and 1955, something new was taking place in Rio, just as the film industry in São Paulo was crumbling. Just as expensive, pseudo-industrialised, culturally 'colonised' films such as The Bandit (O Cangaceiro, 1953) and Floradas na Serra (1954) were being made, Alex Viany made the low-budget film Needle in a Haystack (Agulha no Palheiro, 1953). And Nelson Pereira dos Santos introduced Brazilian cinema to the co-operative approach with Rio , 40 Degrees (Rio 40 Graus, 1953). The latter would also be responsible for the first encounter of a generation that would later be called the Cinema Novo. Censured and officially rejected, Rio, 40 Degrees aroused controversy throughout the country, which forced the first university students/film-club goers/documentarists and critics out into the open in defence of the film. They got together through articles or demonstrations in support of Nelson Pereira dos Santos , a figure who was to dominate the new film scenario until the end of the 50s.

When a more up-to-date way of making films arose in Brazil, I was making my first full-length feature, Ganga Zumba, a film about the first run-away slave enclave in Palmares and their struggle for freedom. Twenty years later, I made a film on the same theme, Quilombo (1984). They are films that try to extract from this historical event the fulfilment of a Brazilian dream, the great and original utopia that has been brewing for almost five centuries at the hands of our best heroes, poets and prophets.

The Bandit (O Cangaceiro, 1953)

During the second half of the 16th.century, a few slaves who had escaped from the sugar-cane plantations, founded, in the mountains of the north-east, a free republic, known as a 'Quilombo', in Palmares. This republic lasted for more than a century, thanks to favourable historical circumstances and the heroism of its inhabitants. It was finally brought down by colonial violence in 1694. Persecuted indigenous tribes and the poor from the coastal towns were drawn to the Quilombo, since they too were victims of European oppression. In the Quilombo, they founded, under black leadership, the first democratic society known in the Americas.

In Palmares, a new language, culture and religion were founded with completely original customs and social relationships, which included, for example, collective ownership of land and the election of those in power. So well organised was it that Palmares was in fact a true nation before Brazil was. While, in the coastal towns of the north-east, European colonisation set up the exploited, poor and socially unjust country that has come down to us, in the mountains of the same region, a new civilisation was being invented, the first true American utopia, to the sound of rhythms and dances and leading towards a future that mankind was yet to know.

This is why we are the first Afro-Latin people in the history of mankind, Afro-Latin with an Indian unconscious. This is our epic, an anti-Greek, anti-biblical epic, free from the cultural axis of Europe and fostering the exaltation of life as opposed to a perverse fascination with death.

Glauber Rocha

I am very proud to belong to a generation that founded modern cinema in Brazil at the end of the 50s when we were already making political films. Under the ideology of film authorship, we have made films into a personalised expression, a dialectic relationship between, "a pure soul and the bleeding cosmos," as Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe, 1967) was later to say in its epigraph from a verse by Mario Faustino. This was a key film in modern Brazilian culture.

Hailed worldwide as one of the wellsprings of contemporary political films, Earth Entranced, which has in turn inspired and influenced other films, paintings, plays and songs, unites political analysis with personal fantasy as a way of approaching the reality of Brazil. In order to talk of this mysterious, inspired and revolutionary film, one must recall, all at once, James Joyce and Villa-Lobos, Jorge de Lima and Buñuel, disintegration and construction and form and anarchy. And none of these references would really cover it all.

It is within this scope that we build our cinema, both visionary and half-breed, able to use technology as a source of poetry and liberation, to fulfil the utopia of a controversial Brazilian Cinema, which is, at the same time, caring. Just as one day, for instance, Glauber Rocha's Quilombo had dreamt.

Carlos Diegues

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