Page 114 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

104 James Phillips

rather than a phylogenetic resource in the struggle against colonialism.
Black God, White Devil, with its beatos (holy men), jagunços (hired killers),
and cangaceiros (brigands), ransacks the imaginary of northeast Brazil, but
as these figures, familiar from the chronicle of Euclides da Cunha, the ce-
ramics of Mestre Vitalino of Caruaru, and innumerable müsicas sertanejas
(regional folksongs), are far from inhabiting anything remotely suggest-
ing a prelapsarian Brazil, they are of little use to chauvinistic ideology:
they do not denote a self-sufficient national identity that could serve as a
pretext for denouncing foreign influence. Here myth is not a relic of the
primordial but a symptom of underdevelopment and exploitation—noth-
ing ever seems to change. With progress having been withheld, events and
personages enter into a single time. Although he acknowledges a fascina-
tion for the literatura de cordel (the illustrated pamphlets of the backlands
in which news of events, such as the murder of the brigand Lampiäo in
1938 or the suicide of President Getülio Vargas in 1954, in the dilatoriness
of their dissemination pass out of the historical continuum to be reworked
in the mythic contemporaneity of the popular imagination), Rocha does
not indulge the nostalgia for primitivism by transcribing their tales and
drawings cinematically. The violence in Black God, White Devil conspires
against the mythic dimension of the film, in which acts are denied their
consequences and characters are reduced to types. Ismail Xavier, among
others, has argued that the violence in Rocha differs from the violence
that the Hollywood western extracts from a Manichean conflict between
the good of the solitary hero and the evil of his decadent surroundings. 22
Whereas the western signs a pact with myth, repeating late antiquity's
disavowal of the openness of the political in favor of the adventure of
absolute subjectivity, Black God, White Devil depicts the revolutionary ex-
termination of myth at the hands of the amoral Antonio das Mortes. The
film ends with a traveling shot that accompanies Manuel and Rosa in their
nonetheless still desperate, headlong rush from the grips of the mythical.
Apathetic and frantic by turns, the denizens of Rochas northeast
Brazil belong to a cinema of the colonized. The nationalistic elements in
the Brazilian bourgeoisie and military government, which were receptive
to calls from filmmakers to foster a local industry through investment and
legislation, were to be denied a cinema that would leap from the nonexis-
tence of a local industry in a colonized market to an industry that would
fabricate an image of Brazil washed clean of the stain of colonization. Nei-
ther the foreign audience with a taste for the exotic nor the local audience