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Walter Hugo Khouri is an undervalued master. I had seen two of his films before watching a third in the Boca do Lixo series. Both 1964's Eros and 1968's The Amorous Ones are strangely disquieting films about casanovas facing mortality. In both films men use and abuse women to compete with each other, and then, upon realizing that the women are human beings, get slapped with their own desperation. The films' tones shift from light to dark while the characters keep consistent. Men end alone, lost in nature, their charm wound up.
One could say many of the same things about 1980's Invitation to Pleasure, which played at Rotterdam. Its two male leads are a middle-aged dentist and his businessman friend who set up a bachelor's loft to have sex with young women together, each man glancing at the other as they go. In time, one wife finds out; the other's known all along. And just as the men are trapped inside their desires, the women are trapped inside a social condition. "Don't fool yourself into thinking it's better out there," the younger wife hears, and fears she's heard right; the older has long since decided not to give up the big house and nice clothes. These women's minds are dying. Is their place better than that of the screaming girls in the loft? Continue Reading »
Tags: Antonio Polo Galante, Carlos Reichenbach, Cláudio Cunha, Empire of Desire, Eros, Fuk Fuk Brazilian Style, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Invitation to Pleasure, Norma Bengell, Oh! Rebuceteio, Os Cafajestes, Profession: Woman, Ruy Guerra, Sit on Mine and I Will Enter Yours, Snuff Victims of Pleasure, The Amorous Ones, Walter Hugo Khouri
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The Pornographer could also be called The Movie Buff. This 1970 film's hero, Miguel Metralha (Stênio Garcia), is a wannabe gangster whose head dances with images of Cagney and Bogart shootouts. He's also unemployed. One day he walks into a publisher's office and says he'd be great for the magazine. As he unveils horrific tales of nude ladies in strange positions (male coworkers giggling, almost cheering with delight), we see pornography, like Hollywood, as a fantasy.
The film is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo's comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy. Boca characters keep escaping into pop-culture references, and at times the entire movies do. The Pornographer is literally pastiche; its director, João Callegaro (who's spent the rest of his life since making the film in advertising), found scenes from The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, and other classic gangster films in the trash outside the American consulate and edited them in. Callegaro then used slapstick to crash the fantasy into reality, as when the hero opens a wonderful looking gift box and a spring-wound boxing glove smacks him. Like many Boca comedies, the film gets more melancholic, in a creepy way, as it goes. The dreamer earns the wrath of real gangsters, who chase him through a fun house. As he turns and turns, fleeing certain death, he keeps confronting in mirrors what a life's worth of fantasies have helped him create: distorted images of himself. Continue Reading »
Tags: Angels with Dirty Faces, Carlos Reichenbach, International Film Festival Rotterdam, João Callegaro, Lilian M: Confidential Report, Stênio Garcia, The Pornographer, The Public Enemy
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"It's a western about the third world," the news ticker says at the start of 1968's The Red Light Bandit. Its hero, played by Pablo Villaça, is a soulful, slim rapist and murderer from a favela, whose mother tried to abort him so that he wouldn't starve. He's here to complete "the most complete of all criminal districts": the Boca do Lixo.
The Red Light Bandit is an electric, legendary movie, one Brazilian cinephiles know practically by heart. Its director, Rogério Sganzerla, was 21 years old when he made it, and the anarchic energy of his "Zorro of the poor" could only have been captured by someone so young. Imagine a city kid drunk on comic books and radio plays and getting the neighbors to act them out with him. Then imagine, through the fantasy, a city revealed. "A punk tried to take a wallet from another punk," a cop says. "However, both were penniless." Continue Reading »
Tags: Caetano Veloso, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Villaça, Rogério Sganzerla, The Red Light Bandit
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The films we consider historically vital are usually films we can easily see. For every movement an Intro to Film course might deem major, from Russian Formalism (Battleship Potemkin) to Italian Neorealism (Bicycle Thieves), there's at least one exemplar that can be easily procured. In an alternate universe, The Margin would be deemed every bit as integral to the history of the avant-garde as Meshes of the Afternoon. But how many have seen The Margin? Very few people saw the film in Brazil, let alone abroad, after its release in 1967, but many of its viewers were deeply inspired by it, and built Cinema Marginal off of its example, from essence to name. For those who know this hidden history, the film is totemic. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bicycle Thieves, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Limite, Meshes of the Afternoon, Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias, The Margin
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The story of Boca do Lixo filmmaking began a few years before any of its movies. In 1962, The Given Word, the story of a man who becomes a local hero for demanding entry into a church despite authority's refusal, became the first Brazilian film to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The film insightfully analyzed Brazilian social inequalities of religion, gender, class, and race, but also humanized its characters well enough to give the film mass appeal. In a way similar to how Rashomon's top prize at Venice a decade earlier created a profile for Japanese cinema in the West, The Given Word's prize alerted European cultural elites to Brazilian film. Continue Reading »
Tags: Antonio das Mortes, Black God White Devil, Glauber Rocha, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Joåo Silvério Trevisan, Luis Bu, Orgy or: the Man Who Gave Birth, Oswald de Andrade, Rashomon, Robert Bresson, Rogério Sganzerla, The Given Word, Vidas Secas
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In the 1960s, a branch of Brazilian cinema emerged so daring, thrilling, and varied that in hindsight people disagreed even over what to call it. For critic-filmmaker Jairo Ferreira, who chronicled the movement, its unconventional narratives and formal audacity made it the "cinema of invention"; for filmmaker-critic Glauber Rocha, briefly a member but chiefly part of the rival Cinema Novo movement, its films were "udigrudi," a Brazilian spin on the American underground. The consensus term, finally, was Cinema Marginal, and though many of the movement's titles were censored by Brazil's military dictatorship, it meant marginal and not marginalized. To be marginalized implies a passive victimization; to be marginal can—and often did—suggest a proud self-definition. Continue Reading »
Tags: Boca do Lixo, Carlos Reichenbach, Cinema Novo, Cinemateca Brasileira, Gabe Klinger, Gerwin Tamsma, Glauber Rocha, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jairo Ferreira, Ozualdo Candeias, Rogério Sganzerla, Såo Paulo, The Option, The Red Light Bandit
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by Aaron Cutler on November 14th, 2011 at 2:00 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: Although the Sao Paulo International Film Festival (Mostra) officially concluded November 3, the festival extended its programming until November 10. This is the second of two concluding pieces about this year's Mostra.]
The programming at the Mostra was remarkable, yet by festival's end I preferred five films above all. They take place within the Egyptian slum of Mafrouza, in Alexandria, where the French filmmaker Emmanuelle Demoris stayed between 2002 and 2004. The series forms a documentary record of the neighborhood's residents, relocated after the government demolished Mafrouza in 2007 to expand an industrial port. But the films also work with the density and complexity of great fiction, offering people with nuanced, self-aware, self-contradictory, always-evolving inner lives.
The five Mafrouza films, with their short, poetic subtitles—Oh Night!, Heart, What Is to Be Done?, The Hand of the Butterfly, and The Art of Speaking—unfold chronologically, though can be watched in any order. They're never once boring, nor solemn. In fact, they're often full of spectacle, as a large chunk of their running time consists of exhilarating song and dance. It's what young people of both sexes do here often, after the day ends. They take to the streets together, in a large circle, clapping, beating drums, and calling out in refrain, "Oh, the night!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Egypt, Emmanuelle Demoris, Heart, Mafrouza, Oh Night!, Panasonic, São Paulo International Film Festival, The Art of Speaking, The Hand of the Butterfly, What Is to Be Done?
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by Aaron Cutler on November 10th, 2011 at 3:42 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: Although the São Paulo International Film Festival (Mostra) officially concluded November 3, the festival extended its programming until November 10. This is the first of two concluding pieces about this year's Mostra.]
Twenty Years Later is a film about a film. Sort of. It begins with the story of João Pedro Teixeira, a political activist in a small tropical town murdered by police in 1962. Two years later, we learn, he had become a folk hero, rechristened João Pessoa (Portuguese for "person") and held up as a symbol of resistance against Brazil's military dictatorship. A film crew came to his town and began dramatizing his life, casting his wife Elizabeth and their children as themselves. But the police stopped the shooting, and the film wasn't finished.
The clean, clear, black-and-white images of the aborted former film mingle with the bright greens and browns of the present one, in which the same film crew returns to the town to see how the locals are. One night they screen their old footage publicly. You realize that the film is being finished as you're watching it, and that together the older and newer footage form a record of peoples' lives. Elizabeth, an activist herself, left the town to avoid her husband's fate, and the narrations of former political struggles give way to present-day scenes of an older Elizabeth reconnecting with the children she left behind. The more she tells about her life to the director, Eduardo Coutinho, the more they come to understand each other, and the more she becomes not a film character, but a person in her own right. The film ends with them shaking hands, the crew leaving, and her waving goodbye to the filmmakers, surrounded by her own family. The movie is over. Life will go on. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anthology Film Archives, Björk, Eduardo Coutinho, Harmony Korine, João Pedro Teixeira, Jogo de Cena, Jonas Mekas, Phong Bui, São Paulo International Film Festival, Sleepless Night Stories, The Songs, Twenty Years Later
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São Paulo is enormous. Its 11 million-plus citizens make it the world's seventh-most populated city, and the people have spread out across around 2,000 square kilometers (more than 750 square miles). Innumerable roads connect the city's different parts to each other, and make it extremely hard to get around without using a bus or a car. This in turn leads to terrible traffic.
The traffic means that a Mostra filmgoer must be clever and careful, scheduling his or her film screenings so as to be able to make them all. Fortunately, the Mostra has placed 10 of its 22 screens this year within a half-hour walk of each other, all located around Avenida Paulista, a long, major street also full of businesses, banks, museums, and malls. If one simply stays in this area, one can fill one's schedule nicely, as nearly every film on the program plays at least once within it. But any filmgoer would tell you that convenience only makes up part of the decision as to where to see a movie. The space's comfort and the screen's appropriateness to the film are also very key. Continue Reading »
Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster, Cinemateca Brasileira, Claudia Cardinale, Evaldo Mocarzel, Histórias Que Só Existem Quando Lembradas, Júlia Murat, Lisa Fávero, Luchino Visconti, Luis Serra, Michel Ocelot, Museum of Art, Reserva Cultural, Rina Morelli, São Paulo International Film Festival, Sonia Guedes, Tales of the Night, The Leopard
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How many readers have heard of Atlântida Cinematográfica? The studio opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, and grew popular over the next two decades for its stream of chanchada films. These were light, exciting black-and-white musical comedies, often Hollywood parodies. At its height, Atlântida would put out five a year using the same small group of directors and actors. Don't think of them as cheap rush jobs, though. On the contrary, these well-made movies are joys.
This becomes clear from one of the first shots of Atlântida founder/producer/director José Carlos Burle's 1953 film Carnaval Atlântida, one of three chanchadas I watched Thursday in good Cinemateca Brasileira prints. (A fourth, Sputnik Man, also screened.) The camera moves toward a door with the name "Cecílio B. De Milho" on it, and we see the growling, pacing, cigar-chomping studio boss (Renato Restier) inside. He's making an epic about the Trojan War. He needs box office, baby, and he needs a star to get it, but against his better judgment goes with two unknowns. The first, a moon-eyed, mustachioed, bow-tied fop (José Lewgoy), is enlisted to play Paris. The second, meek Professor Xenofontes (Oscarito), teaches classical history at a girls' school, and is thus the best possible person to play Helen of Troy. Yet when it comes time to shoot, our leads refuse to kiss each other, wrestling each other to the ground instead, and destroying fake palm trees as they do. Continue Reading »
Tags: An American in Paris, Artists and Models, Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards, Carlos Manga, Carnaval Atlântida, Charles Chaplin, Frank Tashlin, Gary Cooper, Grande Otelo, High Noon, Howard Hawks, Inalda de Carvalho, Jerry Lewis, José Carlos Burle, José Lewgoy, Kill or Run, Neither Samson Nor Delilah, Oscarito, Renato Restier, Rio Bravo, São Paulo International Film Festival, Sputnik Man
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I saw Bruno Dumont's 1997 film The Life of Jesus and liked it, but shortly afterward grew tired of Western European filmmakers showing me how awful the world was, and how awful I was for living in it. (I also grew tired of them citing Bresson.) Years later, Dumont's Outside Satan didn't change things. In one scene, a woman tells a man he can have her, then strips naked in full view and lies down, vagina facing the camera. It's sex, folks, and he goes for it, which means we do too. Then he strangles her. What does that say about us?
Yet what's so irritating about Dumont's film is the way that it wastes not just time, but also space. Over and over we see people walking through vast, empty fields, their bodies either filling the frames like giants or lost as tiny pale specks among a sweep of bright green. But the grass, trees, rocks, and lakes are ultimately parts of the background here, impassive, indifferent observers to the monstrous human drama. The film isn't alive to nature's movement, and by shooting in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, Dumont has given himself a lot of space to do nothing with. Life may suck, but it's never empty. The best widescreen films and filmmakers know how to fill their frames with detail. Continue Reading »
Tags: Breathing, Bruno Dumont, IKEA, James Joyce, Karl Markovics, Outside Satan, São Paulo International Film Festival, The Life of Jesus, Thomas Schubert, Wes Anderson
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Like many countries, Chile has transitioned from dictatorship to democracy within the past 30 years, and as is often the case during transitional periods, not all of the population has supported the move. Although a 1988 referendum emphatically voted Augusto Pinochet out of office, he remained a nostalgic symbol for many until his death in 2006. Current Chilean President Sebastián Piñera voted against Pinochet in 1988, but publicly protested his arrest in London a decade later, saying that no one should be able to judge Chile's former leader except Chileans themselves.
And the Chilean film The Death of Pinochet passes judgment. It's an explicitly post-dictatorship film. This becomes clear in one of its first shots, a perfectly composed profile of a woman's face inside a ring of varicolored flowers. Our eyes move from pink, to red, to white, to green, to purple, before shifting to the center and to her thin smile. It's mid-December, 2006. Her world is so bright because the General has died. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alberto Korda, Augusto Pinochet, Benicio del Toro, Bettina Perut, Carolina Scaglione, Che, Che a New Man, Che Guevara, Fernando Solanas, Ivan Osnovikiff, Marxism, Michael Moore, Pablo Neruda, Patrice Lumumba, São Paulo International Film Festival, Sebastián Piñera, Sicko, Steven Soderbergh, The Death of Pinochet, The Hour of the Furnaces, Tristán Bauer, William Shakespeare
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by Aaron Cutler on October 26th, 2011 at 3:26 pm in Film
Jeanne opens with a story, told over black, of a young Palestinian woman's murder by an angry mob. We then see a flat digital image of a young, black-haired, wide-eyed white woman gazing at the camera. For the next 80-odd minutes, she stares at us, and we stare back; sometimes the camera revolves around her, and sometimes the film cuts to move up or down an empty chair. The soundtrack, meanwhile, plays snippets of al-Jazeera reports, sounds of riots, and a young woman's narration of Joan of Arc's diaries during her trial, along with the same unsourced voice's descriptions of being tortured.
The seated young woman seems meant to recall Maria Falconetti's persistent gaze in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Yet Shahram Varza's film becomes much more than a Palestinian Joan of Arc story, overlapping several discourses at once. First, there's the distant, canonical past of the Joan of Arc readings, as well as the number of different films that have been made of that story by very different directors (Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Luc Besson). Second, there's the more recent story of the murdered Palestinian woman. Third, there are the al-Jazeera and other archival sounds, conjuring up images of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as Muslim fundamentalist oppression against women (the film's multiplicity of seen-and-heard women keeps the latter in mind). Fourth, there's the still more recent past of the filming of the actress and the recording of voices for the film's soundtrack. Fifth and finally, there's the viewer's present-tense experience of watching the film and combining them all. Continue Reading »
Tags: Hanezu, Jeanne, Luc Besson, Maria Falconetti, Naomi Kawase, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, São Paulo International Film Festival, Shahram Varza, The Passion of Joan of Arc
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Many wonderful photographers that work with a moving camera use it to make movement seem light and graceful, as though the characters are dancing (Agnès Godard comes immediately to mind); the great Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, by contrast, makes movement seem bulky and blocky. In films like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and My Joy, his herks and jerks call attention to the weight of the camera as his subjects stumble, doubly emphasizing the difficulty of moving forward. He's a good satirist of post-Communist societies, in other words; he's also very gifted at working with 35mm, whose texture often makes the objects register with more detail than digital video does. This is especially true for Mutu's preferred color palette, a mix of nighttime blacks and muddy browns that wrestle each other for light.
Photographed by Mutu, Aleksandr Mindadze's Innocent Saturday, set in 1986, shows a young man running, then playing music and drinking, in order to avoid looking at the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. Many shots show him racing across the city; others show him fighting other men, the camera focusing on flailing hands and arms. Yet it ultimately adds up to a lot of nasty hysteria; it sprinkles the Chernobyl disaster in around the young man's encounters with his friends and girlfriend as if to try to thrill the viewer with the spectacle of real-life disaster. Continue Reading »
Tags: Agnès Godard, Alberto Morais, Aleksandr Mindadze, Certified Copy, Claudia Priscilla, Come and Go, Innocent Saturday, Jafar Panahi, João César Monteiro, Kiko Goifman, Look at Me Again, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, My Joy, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Oleg Mutu, Russian Ark, São Paulo International Film Festival, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Waves, This Is Not a Film
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A prominent Brazilian film critic said that he was most excited for the nine Elia Kazan films screening at this year's Mostra. I said that the prints should be good, thinking about the complete Elia Kazan retrospective at New York's Film Forum in 2009, which included beautiful new prints of On the Waterfront and Wild River, and about the fact that Kazan's widow Frances was attending this year's festival in person. "Yes," he said, "I'm sure they're all on film."
The remark was surprising, until I considered it. I lived in New York for three years before moving to São Paulo last December, during which time I discovered a number of amazing films I would never have had exposure to otherwise, oftentimes on beautiful 35mm prints. Yet the city also instilled a kind of provincial thinking, leading me to assume that every other large city had the same resources. São Paulo is a wonderful place for filmgoing, with large series or retrospectives happening less than every two months, yet when you go to see an American or European film in repertory it's often an imported print with French or English subtitles, with additional Portuguese subtitles projected electronically beneath. This was certainly the case with complete retrospectives this year devoted to major filmmakers as various as Claire Denis, Alfred Hitchcock, Luc Moullet, and Béla Tarr; one of the programmers of last year's massive John Ford series told me he couldn't find a single Ford print in Brazil. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aleksei German, Atahualpa Lichy, Carlos Manga, Carnival Atlântida, Cinemateca Brasileira, Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, Eduardo Coutinho, Elia Kazan, Film Foundation, Fradique Mendes, Grigori Aronov, José Barahona, Luchino Visconti, Neither Samson Nor Delilah, São Paulo International Film Festival, Sergei Paradjanov, The Gods and the Dead, The Leopard, The Lost Manuscript, The Mystery of the Lagoons Andino Fragments, The Seventh Satellite, Twenty Years Later, Wanadi Lichy
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