Brazil's Cinema Novo, Now
Talking BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL with Rafa Sales Ross
It turns out I wasn’t done writing about Criterion Collection releases this week! In addition to putting out Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, the specialty label also added the Brazilian film Black God, White Devil by director Glauber Rocha. The 1964 film at the vanguard of the country’s Cinema Novo movement was long hard to watch stateside, and a new restoration is now available on both physical media and to stream on the Criterion Channel.
Like much cinema from the global south, I knew little about this film or the movement it came from before Criterion put it on my radar. Black God, White Devil defies description — especially for non-Brazilian audiences, whom an enfant terrible like Glauber Rocha deliberately decentered in the film’s appeal.
But that’s not an excuse to give up on this genre-bursting quasi-Western about the ranch hand Manoel and his wife Rosa as they bounce between a self-proclaimed prophet Sebastião and a roving group of bandits in the Brazilian dry land known as the sertão … all while bounty hunter Antonio das Mortes swirls. It’s a reason to lean into what cinema does best: help us see through the eyes of another.
Luckily, I’ve got something like a pair of contact lenses to crystallize that image in one of my Venice Film Festival roommates! Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, and Sight & Sound among other outlets. Rafa can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire … and now, in conversation with me here.
In our extensive dialogue, Rafa provides an incredible primer on what you need to know about Brazil’s history and politics, its Cinema Novo movement, and the artist Glauber Rocha to approach Black God, White Devil. It’s a beast of a movie, but one worth watching to have a fuller global picture of the exciting filmic activity happening in the 1960s.
I recently saw a semi-autobiographical play called Invasive Species by an Argentinian actress Maia Novi, who opened the show with a reflection on the first time she saw an American film in a theater. By seeing what Argentinian films lacked in production value made her realize that there was a difference between the countries, and seeing everything measured against this world power led her to develop a low-grade internalized inferiority complex. What was your experience like understanding the world from your point of view through Brazilian cinema?
I feel like it's a bit the same with countries that people in America would deem to be underdeveloped, or not to global potencies in terms of cultural export. In Brazil, we grew up watching movies in the cinema. I think about Cuarón's speech when he won Best International Film with Roma a few years ago where he said "I grew up watching foreign films," and then he mentioned Jaws. That's exactly how we felt because, to us, foreign films were American films. Even though this is all we watched, this was our understanding of the world through cinema. Even as a kid, you go and watch Disney movies or Shrek, and then you move on to watch teen comedies, eventually graduating into more mature films. And in between those lines, there's very little offering of Brazilian cinema that isn't the populist cinema.
The Cinema Novo of Glauber was trying to fight [this] many decades ago. This populism in Brazilian cinema has always dominated the box office and the major productions because there was this understanding that Brazilians would only go watch Brazilian cinema if they were light-hearted, slapstick comedies. So when I first had contact with Brazilian films that weren't these very low-production value comedies, it felt like there was this entire part of our culture that I just hadn't tapped into and was available to me to dig my teeth into. But this happened to me fairly late; I was already a teenager when this happened. I just have this desire that Brazilians can see these in cinemas a bit earlier on.
Now there's this law in Brazil, a share that we need to have in exhibition: you need to occupy a percentage of your screens with Brazilian films. Films like [contemporary director] Kleber Mendonça Filho's Aquarius, Bacurau, even Pictures of Ghosts, those aren't films that were available to me growing up in a smaller town with one multiplex. Now, you can see them in cinemas. There is this massive dichotomy between the kind of Brazilian cinema that is available widely and the one that we export to festivals like Cannes and theaters like Lincoln Center.
This makes me think of Rocha’s observation in his manifesto "The Aesthetics of Hunger" that “For the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only in so far as it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism.” Do you still feel that gaze nearly six decades later?
Oh, 100%. You just mentioned his manifesto, and I have chills because it's so beautiful. I think it's such a powerful piece of text. For him to have written this decades ago, and for it still to stand as truth, really shows how slow progress goes when it comes to cultural exports for countries that, once again, are deemed to be third world. Now that I get to be in spaces like Cannes and Venice, there's always this descriptor "exotic" that comes before a little Brazilian film. The conversation is, "This is so great for a Brazilian film," or, "This plays with such great production value," because there are some kinds of people who always see foreign films – not necessarily just Brazilian films, but South American films, African films, Asian films, Indian films – through the lenses of Americanization. Even in terms of cinematic potencies, they are comparing them to American films, French films, or British films to a certain extent. There's always this understanding that this is great for a Brazilian film, and I don't think there has been a proper solidification of the quality of Brazilian cinema as its own export.
Some people understand it – people who are experts in Brazilian cinema, or people who have affinities and can understand films and can see them within the cultural context in which they were produced. But I rarely find people in these situations who are not Brazilian, and I think the curiosity there comes from this exoticized view. I think a lot of people expect Brazilian films to be about the City of God-ization of Brazilian cinema about black suffering, slums, and how women are not being treated fairly. The Bolsonaro government, God forbid, has made Brazilian cinema move in a way that is very openly political and has given the opportunity for a new wave of radical queer Brazilian cinema and incredible dystopias. You have Renata Pinheiro's King Car, Iuli Gerbase's The Pink Cloud, and Gabriel Martins' Mars One, all films coming out of this post-Bolsonaro government that are really tapping into new ways of understanding queerness and genre that are quite interesting but also allow Brazilian cinema to communicate with a wider global cinema in ways that are new for us.
What do you find most invigorating about Cinema Novo? It feels so unique in its blend of Italian neorealism and Soviet montage with American spectacle.
It is coming back to that conversation that we were having earlier: once again, the cinema that was produced in Brazil was a populist cinema. You keep people entertained so they don't get political, which obviously isn't unique to Brazilian cinema. This is something that has happened to many other coaches before, you feed people some candy and just expect them not to arise. With Brazil, it was the same. The production was concentrated in the southeast of Brazil, where São Paulo and Rio [de Janeiro] are. These are the two big potencies because Salvador used to be our capital in Bahia [a state in the northeast of Brazil], but eventually, the Portuguese white men with their concentration of capital came to the southeast of Brazil, and so did the films. There were all these recipes that were trying to mimic the Hollywood Golden Age decades after, like musicals and romance. You see bananeira leaves, the beach, and beautiful women. And there were [still] filmmakers, especially in the Northeast. Today, the Northeast is still the most experimental hub within cinema in Brazil, a bit more perhaps than in the central part of the country. The Northeast decided to say, "No, I don't want to make these slapstick movies. This is not what I want to do. This is not what our reality looks like!"
And Glauber Rocha was someone who was a prodigy. He started very young, and he had access to cinephilia that people in other parts of the country didn't have. He was someone who, at the age of 22, got a visit from [French New Wave director François] Truffaut, and he met [Italian neorealist pioneer Roberto] Rossellini within the same five years. I think this made him realize that people were out there doing things that were truthful to what they thought the cultural fabric of the country looked like, even though Rossellini and Truffaut were at completely different stages of their careers. He just decided to say, "Look, I can find a camera, I can get some of my friends together."
And this ethos of Cinema Novo, which is "a camera in the hand, an idea in the head" is incredibly literal because that was it. A lot of Glauber was trying to capture this idea he had in his head, even if he wasn't necessarily structured in a way that classical cinema is. Even from the point of view of having a solid script, he was very responsive to the happiness – but also suffering – of some of his actors and people who collaborated with him. Then, it was a massive turning point.
Black God, White Devil isn't the first film of Cinema Novo, but it really, truly defined what it would come to look like in terms of experimentation, of really creating this laborious view for international audiences to really not have a fully digestible way into our culture. To really kind of grind that painful, laborious way of the sertão has to do with auteur theory and these conversations that were happening in Europe but weren't really pertinent to Brazilian cinema. "What do I want to create with the work that I do, not only in this single offering but also in the work that comes after? What is my vision? What is the conversation that I want to start here?"
It’s such a politically-minded cinema — is there any other movement you find comparable or at least complementary to help ground someone who might not have a deep knowledge of Brazilian history and society?
I think the post-dictatorship cinema in South America, like in Chile with Patricio Guzmán and Raúl Ruiz. Chilean cinema that comes from this period of reflecting the dictatorship and the country that they were left with, to me, is the kind of cinema that has the same rage and desire to say something and make a political statement that isn't veiled. It's very clear about this one thing that happened and completely shifted their understanding of their country.
The cinema of exile, to me, is really interesting because South America obviously had awful dictatorships, not only in Brazil but also Chile and Argentina. These incredible creatives, musicians, painters, and filmmakers were suddenly obliged to make films within the structures of the white colonizer, and a lot of them never returned home. Glauber never returned home. And this is heartbreaking when you think about it. This is a deep ache that is very hard to communicate within the parameters of American cinema or French cinema, where this kind of exile isn't something that recent history has to offer.
Do you find it possible to separate the tragedy of Rocha’s life from the narrative of this film? On one of the Criterion supplemental features, a contemporary says that he lived his life “between hope and desperation, like a crazy pendulum,” which I can’t help but notice does mirror the dualities baked into Black God, White Devil.
I don't think we can separate the art from the artist. With Glauber, it's even more because he was creating out of this pain for a really long time. He wasn't in exile when he made Black God, White Devil, but his was an understanding that his view of cinema, the view that he had for the cinema he wanted Brazil to have but the country didn't allow this, is a pain already. This is a dichotomy: "I love my country, but I cannot make the art that I want to make here." I'm being slightly parasocial here, but I think he was never fully comfortable within the frames that he was allowed to make his art within. I think the early cinema that he made there, especially Entranced Earth, are films that come from the anguished turn to rage that obviously fueled a cinema that is inherently about land and the people who were here before and the people who will come. I really don't think that you can separate what happened to Glauber from the films that came especially later in his life.
Also, we have so little Glauber. It's very hard from a present-day point of view to not imagine what we could have had if things had gone a bit differently for Glauber. He died so young, away from home, and in emotional distress, to a certain extent. Everyone who came after was working from what Glauber built in one way or another. It's really crazy to think of this guy from Brazil going to Cannes and saying, "You all suck! This year, you're all phonies. This is not what the end goal is for me with my films." Small, independent arthouse films from small countries' dream was to go to Cannes, and Glauber was famously blacklisted. It's very hard to separate Glauber from his films, even the early ones.
Speaking of Cannes, do you know the Elizabeth Taylor story?
The Elizabeth Taylor story? Which one?
I did some research at the library...
Oh God.
"At the Cannes Film Festival, he was once invited by Elizabeth Taylor for a dinner where reportedly he made little dumplings out of his food throughout the night, throwing them at the star's cleavage, all the while claiming that in his part of the world people did not use silverware."
[laughs] I had never heard that before! I'm not gonna condone that kind of behavior, but he's a rascal. Even these days, I will get comments about being Brazilian in certain spaces that people think I live amongst the monkeys. This perception that I come from a favela or a slum is still very perpetuated. Today, we have the Internet and full-on globalization, and this is still there. So I really cannot imagine what kind of comments Glauber was getting, especially thinking that Brazilian cinema rarely got into these spaces at that point. People didn't really understand people from Brazil. They thought it was just this one mishmash of indigenous lands in South America.
Black God, White Devil was celebrated upon its release alongside the Cahiers du Cinema crowd like Godard and Truffaut, but Rocha never quite found a connection with his contemporaries — how much of that was by design, like a self-fulfilling prophecy? That the answer to their misery came not from an external savior but from internal solidarity?
I think Italy and France, which were the two big neorealist cultural potencies at the time, were in such a different place from Brazil in terms of understanding their cultural output and understanding their cultural fabric. Even if the cinema had the same original point of telling the truth as it is, the truth is so different. It's impossibly hard to understand, the gap that is between these two realities of the white European – even the white poor European, the shunned, the ones that didn't have the financial and intellectual means to succeed within educated white Europe – and Brazil.
[The country] was still grappling with the very palpable consequences and scars of slavery. These were kids of slaves. Bahia was being exploited for resources. Even mid-to-late 20th century, that region was still very much trying to understand how to become, from the eyes of the colonizers, civilized even though it was a cultural hub. Educated people and intellectuals in Bahia were still in a completely different part of the process of understanding their of their cultural fabric than France and Italy. To think of today's cinema from a place like Angola being at the same level as British cinema in terms of understanding where they come from ... there can be the same framework in terms of what they want to achieve their cinema, but the gulf between where they're coming from and what they're capturing is immense.
Also, I really don't think that someone like Truffaut or Godard at that time would think that Brazilian cinema was the exact same thing that they were doing! Perhaps this is a very biased point of view as someone who has seen that kind of belittling in terms of critical thinking. It's easier for us today, 60 years after it all, to say, "Yes, they were doing the same thing! This comes from the same pot." But at the time, I really cannot imagine the kind of gulf – and even delay in the conversations. Black God, White Devil, people were seeing this up to 6 years after release. Today, we have such speedy access to everything that is being produced, and we have a much quicker understanding of the cultural shifts.
You've written about how the film feels eerily prescient given that it was made before the dictatorship came into power in 1964, but it was released in that context. How did Glauber Rocha picking up on those tremors color the interpretation of Black God, White Devil?
I think cinema never predicts the future, but cinema as a cultural expression is a moment of reflection. It is seeing what's around you and trying to understand what is going to result. Obviously, at the time in Brazil, the tensions were high. It wasn't a dictatorship, but people were understanding that democracy was in peril. And now, having gone through Bolsonaro – or even as someone in America seeing Trump rising – you see it! You can feel it. You get the warning signs, and the art that is coming from there reflects this political shift. In the same way that you cannot detach Glauber Rocha the person from his cinematic output, you can also not detach the cinema of Brazil from the '60s and '70s from the dictatorship. As with the Chilean and Argentinian cinemas, they're still grappling with this awful part of their history. We still have Brazilian films that are talking about a dictatorship. The next film Kleber Mendonça Filho is shooting with Wagner Moura as we speak is a film about a dictatorship, spies, conspiracies, and the tremors of the time.
Obviously, I think with Black God, White Devil, there's a coming back to a part of the history of Bahia that really determined what that part of the country would look like in the years to come with the cangaceiros [bandits], the wars, the territorialism that would come to be perceived in a national way when a dictatorship came. People are taking up space and starting to preach to find people who are on your side. They're finding allies who are going to believe in what you're seeing so fiercely that, eventually, they're going to get the right people on your side to do a coup. And this is exactly what someone like Antonio das Mortes was doing. He was trying to slowly but steadily find enough political influence to get what he wanted in the many years to come.
One of Rocha’s Cinema Novo collaborators observed “Brazil loves to hurt its best children” when trying to explain why the international success of Black God, White Devil did not necessarily translate at home. Do you think that speaks to something specific in the Brazilian character, or is it a force that’s present in any country with a less developed film industry? I think about how Kurosawa was scorned by the Japanese because they found him too Western as a parallel.
I definitely think that's not just a Brazilian thing. I think people love to dunk! It's very easy. I think the only countries that really don't have that problem are the US ... not even France, they love to dunk their own cinema! There is a sort of weird pleasure in diminishing our own national cultural output in favor of the foreign, but with Glauber Rocha and Black God, White Devil, the general Brazilian audience really didn't have that much access to the film. The general audiences who have seen it had never seen anything like it. Like people running from the screen when the train arrived at the station [in an early short film that caused panic upon its exhibition] over 100 years ago.
In the southeast, for example, you see a film like this, and you're like, "This is not what Brazil is like! This isn't the sertão. We're not sufferers. This is in the past. This isn't pertinent to me; I want to see something about the Brazil of now." To this day, I think there are a lot of people who believe the Brazilian cinema needs to be less about suffering from the past, less about race or class divides, and move towards a cinema that can play with "whiter" genres like horror or fantasy and move away from cinema verité. It was shunned, but today, there's a reevaluation that comes with time. It has happened with Kurosawa, and now it has happened with Glauber. People are able to have enough distance to understand where the cinema is coming from, thankfully.
We still see a lot of this today, even someone like Mike Leigh in the UK making films about the lower classes. At first, people were like, "No, we don't have this problem anymore in the UK!" And the conversations that were happening were obviously still very pertinent. The response broke Glauber's heart. He didn't want his films to win prizes at Cannes. He wanted his films to be seen and understood by people in Brazil. And, for a really long time, they weren't. It's a shame.
I think it's really gratifying to see filmmakers like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Gabriel Mascaro be praised now and supported by young people. To be making films that are playful but still incredibly truthful to the reality of the Northeast. It's really great to see where we are 50 years later, even though there's plenty more to go still.
There’s a connection between Glauber Rocha and Ousmane Sembène, who I talked about with our friend Leila Latif in a recent newsletter, as a key cinematic figure in a developing nation — cinema was used as a tool for education and enlightenment, rather than a diversion or a distraction, because the population was highly illiterate and needed a storytelling vehicle that wasn’t strictly text-based. Do you see Black God, White Devil as utilitarian, even if it still was a bit inscrutable?
It is funny because I am just featuring a bunch of kids watching Black God, White Devil at school, and they would want to kill themselves. I'm not ignorant of the labor that it takes to go through some of Rocha's work, and that is the point. But if you're talking about education a bit later in life, being a young Brazilian trying to understand parts of the country, definitely. This is a film I saw at university, and the conversation that we were having as 18- and 19-year-olds was obviously incredibly formative in terms of expanding my understanding of Brazilian culture and art. In that sense, it was very utilitarian.
We were seeing several Cinema Novo films. Even a documentarian like Silvio Tendler, who is very niche, was being shown in university for us to be able to understand. I didn't [study] film; I was doing this in terms of anthropology, sociology, and really grappling with the colonial past of the country in terms of the population fabric, miscegenation, and what we look like today. In that sense, it's incredibly valuable. Even films like City of God: 10 Years Later are being used in schools for a deeper understanding of not only the country itself but also how the foreigners and the Americans were seeing us at a certain point.
I can’t really describe the contradiction of Black God, White Devil, which is somehow compulsively watchable and totally inscrutable — especially to outsiders. How do you recommend approaching the work?
You were saying earlier that you did go in blind. That's an interesting way because you're just trying to understand what the film is. But, at the same time, it can be quite complicated if you're not necessarily engaged constantly with the work. It's not a riveting work in terms of action and what's happening on screen. You either go in with full research and ready to dissect this, or you go in blindly. I don't think there's a middle way. I don't think that you can read a little bit about it and then go in. I think you have to go with one of the two extremes here.
I would say that if you go in blindly and then revisit after watching it is an interesting way of doing it, although asking someone to watch it twice is a bit of an ask. But to this day, every once in a while, if I think of revisiting the film, I need to be in a certain head space to absorb it, not be distracted and appreciate the little details that make up the film. But also, I need to be fully aware that Glauber wants you to be bored. He wants you to be within your thoughts. It's like Chantal Akerman's quote about slow cinema; she says, "With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. I took two hours of someone's life." How badass is that? I think this is a truth that is incredibly pertinent to Glauber.
Black God, White Devil is playing in the Western genre sandbox to some extent, but it also includes more looks at domestic life and processes in addition to these mythic sweeps. How do you make sense of these two extremes?
Yeah, definitely. And I think what you're saying now is making me a bit more tempted to tell people to not read anything about it. It's interesting, especially if you're not Brazilian, to see what you take from it in a certain way. In Brazil, we call that kind of genre "the northeastern" instead of the Western because the Western there comes from the sertão, which comes from the northeast. So definitely there is an influence there, but the dry land experience in Brazil is very different from the one that you have in the U.S., where the westerns are from the point of view of the colonizer. Those are like, "Let's get indigenous people out of these settlements!" While in Brazil, they're like, "This is our land. We don't want the white men to take it. This is our cattle. This is where we produce. We should be occupying these lands."
It's very interesting to understand the dichotomy because, when you think about it, both of those are Westerns in structure but coming from incredibly different points of view. American Westerns are having more revisionist work with The Harder They Fall and are engaging in different conversations regarding race and ethnicity. At that time, it was very much [asking] what would a Western would look like from this other point of view. The gun-slinging is not necessarily the main appeal here, but I'm very mesmerized by the slow corruption in terms of the way that a person is becoming someone else through the words of the other. This preaching power, this influence at a man who felt like he was God's bastion on earth at that time had. Once again, with Westerns, the conversations around religion are very different than in American Westerns. This idea of negating a higher power, of no longer being a good guy, of being a bad guy who relented and neglected God. While in Brazil, the bad guys a lot of times were weaponizing God and understanding how, to the poor and hungry, you have to believe in a higher power to continue. There's no other way, otherwise you'll go into full nihilism.
You hit on the different enactment of religion, but I wanted to ask about race given how it is constructed very differently in Brazil than it is in America. Can you help unpack what layers that complication adds to the film? Are there any other major cultural nuances worth understanding, especially around religion?
Oh my god, how much time do you have?
You have 15 minutes before you need to meet your friend for coffee.
So Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil, was our main slave port. This is where black people, taken from their homes very violently and sold into plantations, were being brought to Brazil. Obviously, there's this very present wound that connects the northeast to slavery. To this day, the Northeast of Brazil has the highest concentration of black people among mixed-race Brazilians. It is the part of Brazil that voted heavily for Lula, for a populist country, for a country that is trying to help people from lower classes, for a government that is trying to eradicate poverty and racism ... everything that Bolsonaro is going against. It is still very much the part of Brazil that is more in touch with the black heritage and construction of Brazil.
At the time of Black God, White Devil, you would be thinking of the understanding of the white man that came to the northeast to take advantage of the people who got the bitterest end of the slave trade, who had parents and grandparents who were freed into poverty, and then had to understand how to make a living in Brazil and as people away from slavery ... but still slaves in a certain way. This conversation about abolition in Brazil is still something that we have today when it comes to access to universities or governmental support for the poverty line. It's still incredibly present in Brazilian society. Because America was a population colony and Brazil was an exploration colony, it was built within the exploitation of the black body. Not that America wasn't, but from the beginning, people in brought to Brazil to be exploited. To remove as much value as they could and then leave this barren land to the indigenous people. The conversation around this is incredibly sensitive in terms of representation.
The foreign title of Black God, White Devil is very interesting in the way it describes God as black and the devil as white in terms of the demonization of black bodies. The title in Portuguese is Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, which is God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun, which is incredibly different. When you sell it to international markets, there's this idea that, "In Brazil, we have a black god. Look, it is so progressive!" Which just isn't the truth.
Songs make up such a central part of the way Glauber Rocha tells the story of Black God, White Devil. Is this at all related to any Brazilian instrumental or mythological traditions of oral history?
100,000%. There's this thing in Brazil called Literatura de Cordel. They were printed black and white stories that were told like poetry about the sertão. It's a very Northeastern kind of literature with a very specific rhythm and imagery to it, and then these were translated into songs. These are Brazilian chants that are literally ways of storytelling that were passed on between generations living alongside each other. With the exact same rhythm telling these stories once again. [begins chanting] When you're transcribing, this is gonna be awful. But there is a rhythm to it. There's an importance of storytelling like what blues would be in the U.S. This is a way of making sure the next generations know that Antonio das Mortes or other figures in Brazil. These are their stories, this is where they came from, this is what they did. A beginning, a middle, and an end in terms of structure.
That is very restrictive in terms of structure, and that obviously is present here. When you look at the images of Black God, White Devil, this looks like a cordel. It has the exact same structuring: one figure here, a lot of empty space, and you're following them throughout the sertão in the exact same way that you read a cordel book. Glauber Rocha was very attuned to the way that people from that part of Brazil told stories before films were made about them, and he translated that within Black God, White Devil. It is exactly a translation of the storytelling that came before film.
“The most noble cultural manifestation of hunger is violence,” Rocha wrote in “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” He continued: “Only when the coloniser is confronted with violence can the coloniser understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he exploits.” How do you see his stance of violence playing out in Black God, White Devil? Is he saying it’s justifiable so long as the root cause of it is liberation or love?
"Justifiable" is an interesting word because it's very hard for cinema to give a model path to violence in that sense. I definitely feel like he's trying to show people where it comes from, in a certain way. To go to the root of it and say, "Look, this is how violence develops." Starting from the [dead] cattle is such a brilliant way of doing it because you get angry! You get into that position as a viewer, even if you're not Brazilian. Even if you have no idea what's going on, you see the cattle owner going like, "No, it wasn't mine that died. I didn't lose. You lost." And then you understand this feeling of robbery, of violation, of unfairness, in a very clear, simple way. It's very easy to understand why one would resort to violence when you understand that the only way that they had to get out of that situation, the only sliver of hope, has been completely annihilated. Where do you go from there?
This state of hopelessness is definitely a very universal experience. You take everything away from someone in terms of where they can dream, of what they can hope, and they will resort to violence. And I think this is what Glauber is saying. He starts from a very interesting point of view because everything that comes after that, you're always reminded of where he started. When it ends, when you're thinking of Rosa saying, "Why must you be sick with hope?" she's trying to say you shouldn't have had hope. Hope is something that we don't deserve. It's true, we are not entitled to hope. Hope is for someone who comes from a different place. Hope is a luxury. I don't think it's necessarily a way of justifying the violence that comes from there, but it is definitely a way of intellectualizing it and understanding where it comes from. At the end, you really know at least I don't have moral judgment. I don't place moral judgment upon anyone who's on screen. I'm not someone who's saying, "Oh, maybe you shouldn't have done that. Maybe you shouldn't have acted in that violent way." Because you're seeing the pain of loss, of not being able to have children, of not being able to feed your own, of not being able to have a house, of not being able to have a space, of not being able to have a life ... you strip away someone's dignity when you take away their hope. Then, you understand where the violence comes from.
If someone likes Black God, White Devil, where would you send them next? I would think Bacurau makes a lot of sense given their shared sertão setting. Do you find them in conversation?
100,000%. Kleber Mendonça Filho is a massive Glauber Rocha and Cinema Novo fan. He comes from the same part of the country, not necessarily the same state, and he's very in touch with that kind of cinema. At the same time, he's a John Carpenter fan. He's a massive cinema nerd. So Bacurau became a potpourri of influences. But also, if you want to come for something newer, Gabriel Mascaro's Divine Love is about religion and the influence of religion in Brazil and speaking about sexuality and family structure.
Also, Walter Salles' Central Station, if you want to go into what was a success in Brazilian cinema that understands the nomadic nature of poverty. Walter Salles' Behind the Sun is one of my favorite Brazilian films of all time, perhaps even more than Central Station, because they're speaking about some of the same traditions in the northeast about loss and grief. Foreign Land, when we're talking about Glauber, it's in conversation, but I think is a slightly more laborious film. It's with Fernanda Torres, a beautiful film from 1996. Walter Salles had these eight years of being an incredible auteur with one thing after the other, and then he became a bit rich after Central Station and started producing for others. He went into American cinema with The Motorcycle Diaries.
And his misbegotten adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road.
It's tough. We don't talk about this here.
If you want to see something more from the time of Black God, White Devil, then Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth is a companion piece. But then if you want to do Barren Lives, which was definitely there at the time, or the work of Eduardo Coutinho, one of our finest auteurs, these are all interesting entry points.
A lot of Cinema Novo titles are not easily streamable because they're in poor condition. Do you feel like there is a little bit more of a global cinematic push to get these films restored and back in front of audiences?
Someone like Martin Scorsese doing this push for the restoration of foreign cinema is the reason why so many other non-Scorsese-dependent restorations are happening because they realize there is a desire for this film to be seen. When the film got restored and I saw it in Cannes a couple of years ago, I was just weeping because I had only seen Black God, White Devil in grainy quality. And then suddenly you're watching this like, "Oh my god, we could have had this!" Definitely, there is a desire to see films and better conditions. And this is a very hopeful thing: young cinephiles want to watch films the way that they were meant to be seen. They don't want to just be torrenting films from the internet and trying to see details in 240p. They understand that they have access today to repertory screenings that are showing films in great quality. It doesn't need to be Black God, White Devil; it can be something like a John Waters film from 1986 being restored, and people will go and watch it. This makes me very hopeful.
Film at Lincoln Center is doing a really interesting series of restorations for pulpy Mexican films from the mid-century. To me, that's exciting because it shows a culture that their work is worth being preserved and shown, even if it is not something that is just going to be exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. Their popular entertainment matters. To know that your history is worth preserving is a way of reaffirming that your life, your history, your culture, all has value.
Don't make me cry because I'm in Brazil right now! I think allowing curators who come from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, people who want to tell stories from their countries, a wider platform is really important.
Thanks again to my friend Rafa for all her thoughtful responses and time! If you want to keep up with her and the brilliant memes she makes in real-time before they get aggregated by Instagram accounts for clout, give her a follow at @rafiews on X (f.k.a. Twitter).
Back with The Downstream next week!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall