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The zealous shit-stirrer returning to his Bahia home might be Glauber Rocha himself, machete in one hand and Godard's review of Orfeu Negro in the other. Eisenstein by way of Fernandez is a key influence, "the passivity of those who expect a godly kingdom" the main target. Tropical approximations of La Terra Trema, the white-suited activist (Antonio Pitanga) arrives from the big city so bursting with radical ideas that a new expression is invented by the authorities, "elemento subversivo." Full of blasting sunlight and glistening chiaroscuro, the beachfront village is no idyll but rather a self-devouring circle of ignorance and exploitation, its cracks papered over with continuous Candomblé pirouettes. (The Sea Goddess and the Boss-Man are roughly on the same pedestal.) Progress and awareness become a matter of sabotage, the temptress (Luiza Maranhão) seduces the callow stud (Aldo Teixeira) whose purity is said to protect the community. The turning wind strikes, the agitator arrives at the central revelation: "The master is a slave!" The first of Rocha's shuddering lands in anguish, half-celebrating, half-purging its African-Brazilian panoramas, a matter of nets slashed and nets mended. Dances that turn into scuffles without missing a single ritualistic beat, the Welles lesson not forgotten (It's All True). Choreographed neo-realism and cock-eyed montage (lovemaking by the shore, sacrificial rooster blood), a free-floating welter of chants, drumbeats and scratches, utter contempt for pictorialism that hasn't been grained and defaced—political idleness as bogus paradise, cinema as necessary hurricane. Subsequently disowned by the filmmaker (too much straight narrative?), nonetheless an essential bedrock for his Aesthetics of Hunger and demolishing camera-eye. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |