|
CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
As If from an Asian Swell
The New Cinema of Brazil
By NORMAN MADARASZ
Blame only your curiosity if you've failed to
notice it. Over the past ten years the eyes of creative filmmakers
and film theorists alike have been set on Central and East-Asia.
Perspective lines have focused right. East-Asian cinema--in Japan,
China, Hong-Kong and Taiwan foremost--has been challenging Western
conceptions of beauty and narrative form. It has won over audiences
of cinemaphiles the world over--wherever the infrastructure to
project foreign films has not been exterminated. On that issue,
the American-Hollywood conglomerates, who spread their management
doctrines to the film theaters, have banked their money and contract
signatures to decide on what films you get to see. And whenever
they can help it, those films aren't from abroad.
Takashi "Beat" Kitano, Wong
Kar-Wai, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, and John Woo pre-Hollywood flight,
are just some of the director names worth memorizing. Failing
which, you might miss a golden opportunity at capturing artists
chiseling at the cutting-edge marble of the seventh art. Even
more than representing their respective national artistic renaissances,
these filmmakers participate in the universal category of 'auteur
cinema'.
The Asian tigers may have refined art
just as they renewed collective capitalism. Yet nothing compares
with the outstanding production of Iranian cinema. No other country
over the past ten years has contributed so prolifically to retracing
the boundaries of the audiovisual art. No other culture has challenged
the dictates of the post-modern American medley, welding consumerized
business principles to artistic creation, as has the land of
Attar and Hedayat.
A CAMERA IN
THE PASSENGER'S SEAT
Many Westerners are dead-set convinced
of the repressive nature of Iranian society in the aftermath
of the Shi'ite revolution. But how do you equate the following
situation? In the US, the self-declared bastion of free speech
and art, the majority of film viewers are deprived of exposure
to the world's greatest films. They are force-fed a monopolistic
potpourri of that ol' ultraviolence, voyeuristic nudity and fantasy
representation to such a degree that Hollywood long ago became
a synonym of an insult to intelligence. Whereas in Iran you may
find an astonishing depiction of a millenary civilization, whose
past contributions to the arts and sciences were left unexceeded
even by Rome. This is a culture bursting into high-tech modernity,
although one that refuses to merely be co-opted into the Western
system of representation and value.
American cinema no longer has anything
to teach the Iranians. Not only are we the ones who have all
to learn from them, it's learning to learn from them which has
become our work. Our incessant exposure to insipid commercial
products has warped our minds. The beats that pound in our hearts
echo to a war cry. This is why seeking out the films of the contemporary
Iranian masters is a duty not only to art, but to thought.
Islamist Iran never put the great filmmakers
Abbas Kiarostami or Mohsen Makhmalbaf in jail. Yet Makmalbaf
was tortured at the hands of the Shah's US-trained and funded
secret police. As for Kiarostami, he had to await an invitation
from freedom's bastion to be denied the right to speak. Last
summer he was refused entry into the US as he planned to attend
an homage to his life's work, organized by Harvard University
no less.
As for the timeliness of Makhmalbaf's
film "Kandahar" and publication of his film journal,
they have given us more information and wisdom on the plight
of Afghan society than the hundreds of hours of ideological soup
produced by CNN and its cronies. If that wasn't enough, he has
brought up one of the shining lights of young Iranian cinema,
his own daughter, Samira, already the director of two critically
acclaimed features.
For just cause the filmworks of Kiarostami
and Makhmalbaf, among several others', whispers in the same breath
as 1940's Italian Neo-Realism. Their filming strategy allows
the real to supervene as it settles into artistic form, emerging
autonomously from the human agents who set about its creation.
Art matched up fully with the real in the film "Kandahar",
its release coinciding with the American bombing of Afghanistan.
Form spoke transparently to those intent on gazing.
As a real living object, Makhmalbaf's
work took an even more ominous turn. It appeared that Tabid Sahib,
playing the medical doctor in Kandahar, was living out a film
within the film. An American ex-pat at other times known as David
Belfield, he is allegedly involved with the assassination of
an ancien-regime Iranian diplomat in the late seventies. Upon
conversion to Islam, he took the name of Daoud Salah Addine and
escaped to Iran. The nom-de-plume of Hassan Tantai launched his
acting career. Spot the fiction, if you can.
In a statement issued by Avatar films
and published in The Guardian in January 2002, Makhmalbaf claimed
to know nothing of the controversy. "I have made more than
20 feature films. I have always chosen my actors from crowded
streets and barren desserts. I never ask those who act in my
films what they have done before, nor do I follow what they do
after I finish shooting my film. 'Kandahar' is no exception."
As for whether Makhmalbaf would have
still hired him had he known of the actor's involvement in a
political murderer, the director stood tall. Governments tend
to pardon political crimes when committed against injustice,
why would the filmmaker act the moralist? A neo-realist film
aesthetic and methodology draw out the moral norms. Makhmalbaf
avowed wanting to make "a film with him about the murder
that he had committed, in order to explore why it is that in
the civilized and opulent United States, a black man commits
a political assassination and then escapes to a country like
Iran, which has a tense relationship with the United States.
In fact it has just occurred to me that if I were to see him
I will make that film." As it also dawned on him that, while
Belfield is a marked man internationally, the filmmaker's own
torturers live comfortably in the US, the land of the free.
Faced with the most fascinating moral
issue to burst from the art world since Giuliani banned the "Sensations"exhibit,
the American Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
decided to do the public's philosophical work. After winning
Cannes' Ecumenical Jury prize in 2001, and a sure-set nominee
for the Best Foreign Film category, Makhmalbaf's masterpiece
was dropped from the roster. As it's a foreign film, the issue
of censorship was never raised. That's because when it comes
to foreign films, they're already earmarked for censorship by
commercial and linguistic interests. So where does the globalized
world begin?
CINEMA NUEVO
A brand of exclusion stands equally for
the rising tide of Brazilian cinema masterpieces. Those interested
in Brazil's golden year of 2002 have had to search long and hard
to find information on the country. In every article where the
New York Times South America correspondent links the word 'leftist'
to newly-elected president Lula da Silva and uses innuendo to
twist the sense of 'anti-globalization former metalworker union
leader', a thousand people loose out on the chance to see a Brazilian
film. Sure Brazil's World Cup victory was celebrated in the international
press. And if you live in Europe or NYC you've probably had the
opportunity of getting familiar with some of Brazil's recent
musical creation--crafted either by exiles or natives. But it
only takes a bat to flutter its wings for a glance to be sidelined.
When handsomely paid corresponds are
the henchmen to belittle foreign cultures, how easy is it to
keep an open mind and broaden it evermore toward their creations?
As with Iran, how many are aware of the outstanding years of
cinematic creation the country has lived?
The background to this creation is far
different from the Cinema Nuevo movement of the 1960s, spearheaded
by the late Glauber Rocha. It had given Brazilian art its international
laurels in a century pierced with thorns. The country was then
under a harsh military dictatorship. To quell the mounting social
and political revolution of 1968, the generals increased the
brutality. Glauber Rocha's films express the desperation of an
entire generation seeing themselves severed from the international
youth movement.
Sprouting minds were forced to keep living
under a centralized hold on power that set the country back to
the nineteenth century latifundios in terms of political freedom.
In reaction, these minds grew into radicals and revolutionaries,
unleashing as they did the State's violence. Use of torture became
commonplace. The rest of Latin America turned to authoritarian
rule as its landed aristocracy crushed the will to reform and
distribute wealth either in the fields or the cities. The early
years of Brazil's military rule seem polite in comparison.
Nowadays Brazil is teaching the world
a lesson in deliberative democracy. Its society is still gnawed
severely by rampant inequality and the environmental catastrophe
of desertification in the North-East states. Residents of its
largest cities live in a continual state of preparation for violence
wrought by a generation of youth with nothing to lose but a snort
of glue or coke and padding their pockets with the green bill.
Still, this country has historically ushered into power a government
with a potential to introduce social change on a scale not seen
since Chile's Salvador Allende assumed power by popular vote
in 1970.
It's against this contemporary background
that, ever since Walter Salles's surprise Oscar victory in the
best Foreign Film for "Central Station" (Central do
Brasil), every month has seen a steady flow of high-level cinematic
creation. And every semester has ushered in a masterpiece.
Excuse me for flogging the poverty of
American cinema to a pulp fiction. It's a lesson that so many
Brazilians also have yet to wake up to and learn. With the exception
of David Lynch, American cinema has become a medium organized
only for the ideological dissemination of triumphalist abnegation.
With every additional Gladiator thrown at a crowd starved for
art, US people continue in their simultaneously pathetic and
arrogant self-portrait, forever in denial over the fact that
their country is now nothing less than an Empire.
Caught in the web of the victim-hero
complex, Americans suffer raw of being art-deprived by the commercial
control on what gets to be shown and advertised in their Homeland
secure. They prove to the world that vis-a-vis their State the
population acts so often in complicity. For lack of political
opposition, Americans underwrite the nightmare its current administration
is forging around the world. The scenario there is of intensified
poverty, spread of war and hatred, and a deregulated environment.
Washington intellectuals seem unable to look at these outgrowths
with clear eyes, were their spirits imbued with reading Chicago
School economics and attending Georgetown University foreign
policy lectures.
As Noble laureate Joseph Stiglitz put
it in his last book, Globalization and its Discontents, the presence
of the grand Logos of Channel, Calvin Klein, or even MacDonald's
on the streets of the former socialist block states (Europe's
new power centre, as Rumsfeld would have it) is anything but
a sign of economic progress when ramping corruption aided and
abetted by the IMF's fiscal ideology sends the masses tumbling
into spiraling poverty.
FIVE MASTERPIECES
Brazilian intellectuals long ago understood
that art was incorporation, cannibalism. Failure to ingest leads
a nation's art to wilt from depression, if not explode in fury.
Nor has the country been spared the ravages
of globalized shareholder capitalism. After all, its ruling financial
clique has been among the IMF's star players in market deregulation.
Still, as if on a bas-relief, Brazilian cinema has become political
only in a broader sense. Were one to consider five bona fide
cases, "To the Left of the Father" (Lavoura Arcaica),
Hans Staden, Madam Sata, "Behind the Sun" (Abril Despedacado),
or the greatest Brazilian international success since "Dona
Flor and her Two Husbands", "City of God" (Cidade
de Deus), all of these films are set in the past.
Lavoura Arcaica is Luiz Fernando Carvalho's
mood piece of a young man's passion for his sister. Based on
one of the foremost works in contemporary Brazilian literature,
Raduan Nasser's eponymous novel, it tells the tale of a Lebanese
immigrant family's life in the Pindorama, toward the interior
of Sao Paulo State. The images are crafted by Walter Carvalho,
the leading innovator among DoPs working in Brazil, or anywhere
in the world at the moment. At times distorting images of lust
into anamorphic ecstasy, he reminds one of Alexander Sokurof's
tonal inversions of Christ's passion. Caught amidst the humidity
of hills and forests, in which secrecy and denial carve at the
family patriarch's staunch insistence for the Arabic homeland
values to prevail, Carvalho's camera inches by quoting Andrei
Tarkovsky at the edge of Starker's void. The film's opening draws
the viewer into a rush channeled by a stunning soundtrack mainly
performed by Brazil's premier experimental ensemble, Uakti, with
sound switched into curdled milk bathing your face. Not before
its 171 minutes stretch into the finale is the viewer released
from penetration by the loss of unlivable desire.
Luiz Alberto Pereira's Hans Staden is
based on the autobiographical account of a German explorer and
adventurer of the same name, The True History of his Captivity,
published in the 1557. It recounts the explorer's plight at the
hands of a Tupinamba tribe on the coast of what was to become
Sao Paulo state. The music composed by Marlui Miranda and Lelo
Nazario, is performed by Uakti once again. Its effect is to make
the film's language, spoken in Tupi, into a universal expression.
Staden had in fact learned the language, a trading lingua france,
after three years in Brazil. I can think of no film so intelligently
designed on earlier Amerindian life that has been produced in
either Canada or the US. Hans Staden's nobility is acknowledged
by the Tupis, the privilege of which for a prisoner is to be
eaten. The Tupis grace the "Friesian" explorer with
foremost hospitality. He is given a wife and allowed full participation
in daily and spiritual life, as he awaits his fateful moment.
When illness starts ravaging the tribe, Hans Staden not only
steals his fate by fleeing to Europe. He witnesses the future
devastation that disease would inflict on all American native
nations without exception.
Madam Sata, directed by Karim Ainouz,
is another film shot by Walter Carvalho, this time taking on
Fassbinder's Querelle as deconstruction. Set in the hot Lapa
district of Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, swarming with "malandro"
hustlers, it traces the origins of a transsexual who would become
one of the great celebrities of Rio's carnaval, dancing as a
star with numerous samba schools. A masterpiece of acting, Madam
Sata stars Lazaro Ramos, whose pathologic outbursts are only
offset by his finesse, artistic grace and brooding sexuality.
Living from the gregarious gender-bending cabarets that brought
Brazilian transsexuals their international fame, Sata becomes
a hunted animal. He has slain an intoxicated gay-hater, who taunts
him as if by a prohibitive messenger of God sent to keep the
marginal deep within the Styx. The film is an aural experience.
Music and chatter reverberate through the narrow alleys spreading
under the bleech-white aqueduc that today hosts the roots samba
revival. Through the heat and sweat, sex and murder, the hands
of the narrative leave the cavaquinho and quique to pound drums
built up multiplying fivehundredfold as the film sambas to climax.
Walter Salles was involved in Brazil's
recent tide of cinema from the start--as was his family. In 1996,
brother Murilo Salles shot a stunning tale of regular teenage
banditry, Como nascem os anjos ("How Angels are Born").
It may only be seen these days by subscribers of Brazil's fine
cable channel, "Canal Brasil", but this film anticipated
the theme of kid-adults turned into psychopathic killers as if
fed on a diet of rampant poverty. Their late-father, founder
and former head of Unibanco, one of Brazil's major investment
banks, was a patron of the arts for many decades. His lavish
house, an architectural wonder in the heights over Gavea, is
now open as an art and photo gallery, seating one of Rio's best
small-scale cinemas. A music center has also recently been added
to a research wing that had previously funded projects such as
Claude Levi-Strauss' Odysseyan "Saudade for Brazil".
Whereas the name of most art patrons
are lost within the stone and paint and glass of which their
funds release the creation, Salles passed his patronym onto cinema
in the work of his sons. In "Behind the Sun", Walter
sets a story written by Albanian author Ismael Kandare in the
legendary Sertao backlands. It's a historical journey into the
gang-related violence today tearing apart Brazil's urban fabric.
The setting juts straight out from the initial chapters of Euclide
de Cunhas "Rebellion in the Backlands", but focuses
on the plight of two clans condemned by the Law of Talion to
seek retribution generation after murdered generation for the
killing of past loved ones. Walter Carvalho is again behind the
lenses, this time venturing alone into the infernal representational
maelstrum as if following a catinga plant's off-shooting stems.
Carvalho's astonishing work as director
of photography should incite the reader to see his own documentary
on blindness, featuring Hermeto Pascoal and Wim Wenders. Indeed,
Brazil's documentary production has been second to none. This
year has seen two outstanding features, Edificio Master and Omnibus
174, both set in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. The outstanding
films discussed above may innovate on fiction, representation
and narrative through historical pallettes. But the documentary
form--whether classically demarcated, or integrated into fictional
narratives--borrows present-time as its instrument for staining
tears with blood.
As a blood banquet, "City of God"
reaches parasidical heights of filmic expression. Dovetailing
so many features composing this rising tide of cinema, its historical
backtracking encapsulates what Brazil's current renaissance is
all about. The samba and the funk, the poverty and rebellion,
intensify the grind of living in two of the hemisphere's largest
cities, need I say megalopolises. Much is still being written
on the film and its social import, and more will surely be said.
When I think of its hip action, and its sanguine humanism, I
grow into a victim, subdued by the syncopation of legendary samba
composer and cantor, Cartola.
His Psalm of Psalms beckons to art "Chora,
disfarca e chora"--Weep, disguise and weep. And I do so
neither because of what lies within the film's form, nor owing
to what attacks from without the cinema's doors. No, I cry and
clap and scream because art exceeds life here in neo-realist
form, reaching into the pantheons of creation and eternity as
if set afloat on Yemanja's barque gliding beyond the underworld.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian philosopher based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He
welcomes comments at normanmadarasz2@hotmail.com.
Today's Features
Linda Heard
Powell
at the UN: Spiel, Stunts and Special Effects
Anthony Gancarski
Peggy
Noonan, Space Case
The Columbia and the Manufacture of Tragedy
Robert Fisk
You Wanted
to Believe Him: Powell Does Beckett
Robert Jensen
Powell
at the UN:
Smoking Guns and Big Guns
William Hughes
Colin
Powell's Big Flop
Ali Abunimah
Dissecting Powell's Speech:
Hearsay and Old Allegations
Phyllis Bennis
Powell vs. Blix
The Case for War Remains Unmade
Rahul Mahajan
Responding
to Colin Powell
Is This All You've Got?
Paul de Rooij
Where Are the Incubators, Gen. Powell?
Website of the Day
Iraq:
the War Game
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February
1 / 2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Railroading
Rosenthal; PeeWee and the Sex and the Sex Police
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Star Whores: Astronomers &
Apaches on Mt. Graham
Dian
Hardison
Former NASA Engineer: "I Fucking Warned Them"
Jerry Kroth
Jung & the Shuttle: Symbol &
the Sychronicity with the Columbia Disaster
Dave
Lindorff
Bush
& HItler: The Strategy of Fear
Behzad Yaghmaian
Report from Istanbul: the Peace
Movement in Turkey
Alan
Maass
Emptying Death Row
Forrest Hilton
The Weight of Forgetting: the Bolivian
Blockades in Context
Kurt
Nimmo
Inventing Crimes: FBI/CIA Entrapment
Matt Taibbi
Iraqt-Up: At Peace Rallies, Hundreds
of Thousands Go Missing
Jeremy
Scahill
Live
from Baghdad: FoxNews: Paying Saddam
Don Atapattu
Songs of Protest
Brian
J. Foley
An Immodest Proposal
Lawrence McGuire
Poker at Camp David
Adam
Engel
Just
Do It: Outrunning the President
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|