Glauber Rocha
Il Dio Nero e il Diavolo Biondo

Glauber Rocha was one of the most important Brazilian directors. Born in '39, he lived his youth during a period of great cultural and ideological fervor, also due to the strong development policy desired by then President Kubitschek. At twenty, he found his artistic expression in cinema and directed his first short film. Glauber had a volcano in his head, his mother recounts that he used two typewriters at the same time. In '64, he completed his second film, his debut work and revolutionary piece "Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol". Twenty days later, with a coup d'état, a military dictatorship was established, which belatedly tried to prohibit the film from being screened at the Cannes festival that same year. The film also aimed to be a symbol of the "Cinema Novo", understood as a cultural movement that wanted to detach from American cinema standards to gaze towards Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague, while trying to create its own aesthetic, defined by Glauber himself in his manifesto launched in Genoa in '65.

"Estetica della fame" (Aesthetic of Hunger) is the title of this manifesto, fundamental to understanding Glauber's work. In it, a vision of third world problems is claimed, trying to highlight how the third world is unable to make its real problems heard, disguising the truth in a false exoticism and how civilized countries are unable to see third world poverty as a tragic symptom, but only as a fact, seen with a pitiable gaze. This situation of art inevitably tends to influence politics. Civilized culture looks to Latin America to satisfy its nostalgia for primitivism. The strong colonialist conditioning leads the culture of developing countries to an aesthetic of poverty that only stimulates the humanitarianism of the colonizers. "Here lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo in relation to world cinema: our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger, being felt, is not understood." This tragic misery thus wants to oppose that false bourgeois aesthetic that hides the true reality of things, called by Glauber, "digestive cinema" which for Europeans becomes "a strange tropical surrealism and for Brazilians, a national shame." This dialectic can only culminate in the noblest manifestation of hunger: the culture of violence. "For Cinema Novo, the right behavior of a hungry person is violence, and the violence of a hungry person is not primitive, but revolutionary."

Unfortunately, many things mentioned above are still very relevant; just turn on Brazilian television and watch the trashy novellas that only portray the high-bourgeois life of that 5% of the population that holds 50% of the national wealth. Or ask someone what comes to mind first when they hear the word Brazil: tanned bodies, beaches with crystal-clear waters, coconuts, football, carnival, "garota de ipanema"...

"Il Dio Nero e il Diavolo Biondo" (The Black God and the Golden Devil) instead is set in the "sertão" of the northeast, a geographically almost desert-like area. The "sertão" was socially divided into three categories: the "fazendeiros" or landowners, those exploited by them (who after the strong urbanization process filled the "favelas"), and the "cangaceiros," those who did not accept this system and robbed and killed (with gusto and brutality) the "fazendeiros." And it is among them that the film's protagonist finds himself after escaping from poverty, from a murder, and from an unpleasant mystical parenthesis with "San Sebastiano" (the Black God of the title), caught between the illusion of the dream of a new life is a tragedy aborted by religious fanaticism. He thus meets "Corisco," the last survivor of the massacre of the "cangaceiros" by public forces, a character emblematic of revolutionary violence. When "Corisco" is also killed by "Antonio das Mortes" (who in a western would be a bounty hunter), our protagonist finds himself alone again with his bride, and flees accompanied by the film's final message: "how wrongly divided the world is, the land belongs neither to God nor to the Devil."

There would be much more to write about this film: that it is a film of poetry, that it is of surprising spontaneity (without scene repetition), that the music and the texts (beautiful) have the function of narrating the film itself (based on "cordel" literature), and then the shots, etc., etc., ... But I prefer to stop here, hoping to have whetted the appetite of cinema gourmets.