Queimada

"There are no miracles in history, only precise timing and cadence." The Emperor Jones is the bedrock, Marlon Brando's presence points up Viva Zapata! The Antilles isle is named after the fires set by colonialists to quell indigenous revolts, dust from the bones of African slaves welcomes the British mercenary tasked with toppling Portuguese rule for the benefit of the Royal Sugar Company. He finds his instrument in a local porter (Evaristo Márquez), molded to lead the uprising that will install a mulatto stooge (Renato Salvatori). Caribbean Galatea turns guerrilla foe, the isle burns again. "Have I become so dangerous?" Gillo Pontecorvo's dialectical swashbuckler, impassioned, didactic, clumsy, cruel, intoxicating. The opening titles announce the kinship to the politicized Italian Western, a profusion of sanguinary reds to go with Ennio Morricone's stuttering synthesizers and ecstatic chorales. Carnival coup, cyclical oppression, the agent provocateur ponders all philosophically until the martyr's noble silence cuts through his irony. (Equipped with blond locks and whiskey canteen, Brando serves up a choice lampoon of the European conquistador as an effete Machiavelli.) Slave versus worker like wife versus whore, a lesson in economics fit for the empire that fucks one and all: "Now, my metaphor might seem a trifle impertinent..." The image is lush one moment and charred the next, a screen that sprawls to accommodate Black riders out of a Delacroix battlefield or a DeMille exodus. "The contradictions of a whole century" and beyond, 1844 to 1854 standing in for 1969, complete with allusions to "a place called Indochina." The gallows for resistance and a knife for exploitation, as with the French in Algiers a matter of winning the battle and losing the war. "Don't you think that's a small masterpiece?" Mandingo, Cobra Verde, Django Unchained... Cinematography by Marcello Gatti and Giuseppe Ruzzolini. With Dana Ghia, Valeria Ferran Wanani, Giampiero Albertini, Carlo Palmucci, and Joseph Persaud.