Macunaíma

Follow the Tracks — Sic Transit

In 1969, Macunaíma initiated a new, final, "middle-to-late" period for Joaquim Pedro de Andrade — the films' political subversion stitched loud on their baba-cool sleeves and hems. In the frame posted above, Macunaíma drops from his mother's womb like a... how to put it... 'an adult foal'? Three times throughout the course of the film Macunaíma will be incarnated in different forms, the ink-ling's parallel path through a pathway of political readjustment in the modern flux of Brazilian society. As already mentioned, the picture is an entry into the "politically subversive" movie of the late-'60s —a trend grandfathered in by Godard's 1967 La chinoise and Weekend — replete with a wild beautiful color palette, a dubbed audio track, bright Klieg éclairage, 'tableaux' compositions, and the plausibility of cannibalism metaphorical and literal.

Consonant with that last aspect, Macunaíma further exemplifies the era's political strain countered by surrealism. When springtime hits 'the hero,' Macunaíma turns white and takes more immediate and tangible control of the anarcho-disruptive cell to which he belongs. This 'Brazil of the imagination,' full-flow tropicalia, remains to this day Joaquim Pedro's most popular film; its US Blu-ray release from Kino initially appeared as a standalone disc; shortly thereafter, they released a 3-Blu set that includes Macunaíma along with the rest of his entire body of work. Why buy one film, when for slightly more dollars you can have the complete works? •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

Cinema Novo [1967]

Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova [Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City, 1968]

Macunaíma [1969]

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Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City

All Mod Cons

Ever wonder what the story is with that spot in Brazil with the name? You need look no further than Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City [Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova, 1968]. The year prior, the Italian manufacturer and industrial design firm Olivetti commissioned Andrade to make a documentary portrait of the pre-planned city-in-progress, known from before its 1960 construction as "Brasilia." Note the hopeful, utopian ring to the name — if it sounds at all naïvely paradisiacal, that's because it was intended by the civil bureaucratchiks to signal to the people a place conceived as the modern metropolis, one in immediate congruence with the electro-technical times. Over a short span, however, the new capital Brasilia came more to reflect any other city's struggle in maintaining equilibrium among the classes, serving as an environmental/ambient eradication-zone intended to quash class and economical differences across-the-board. In fact, as experienced by all states which eventually give up on 'big ideas' (washing their hands of a Brasilia's now all-but-obvious infeasibility), the project metamorphosed less into "Ys" than into a gilded Potemkin village. And maybe Olivetti had some stake in its progress, or in the propaganda that might keep it at least a semi-functioning, or exploitable, asset. So their man Joaquim Pedro takes to the ground with camera in hand, and the producers are taken aback by this film whose title promises "contradictions."

Raul Marques on Letterboxd wrote: "Ingeniously starts out as a straight-up propaganda for the modernist utopia of a planned metropolis then proceeds to increasingly deconstruct itself to reveal the cracks in the concrete sand castle. Slips at affirming the almost immaculate qualities of the city's design, yet correctly addresses the inescapability of the country's issues independently of a deliberate urban experiment." •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

Cinema Novo [1967]

Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova [Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City, 1968]

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Chop My Money + In Memoriam January to July 2024

Life, with a Leak

Before his brilliant 2016 Rat Film, Theo Anthony made a few preceding pictures, of which Chop My Money [2015] counts as the first. It's the portrait of a group of Congolese street-kids, lives born into near-continual slow-motion, all haze of weed and cheap hooch. They are 'gangsters.' They go to military-school from 7:30am to 1pm every day to study math and English. Their medicine man has unwittingly lent an aspirational nickname to the toughest in the crew: "the Bill Gates Congo Man." The BGCM opens the film with the voice-over:

"This world is not the world. This life is not the life."

You can view Anthony's film at his website here. •

Writings at Cinemasparagus about the films of Theo Anthony:

Chop My Money [2015]

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This year I've been keeping a list of deaths of note. I'd wished to have fully obituarized each in a few lines, but this will have to do for the current installment:

Jose Luis Vasquez (The Soft Moon)

Mary Weiss

Sandra Milo

Damo Suzuki

Eleanor Coppola

Dickey Betts

Laurent Cantet

Robert Towne

Donald Sutherland

Willie Mays

Anouk Aimée

Martin Mull

Shelley Duvall

Dr. Ruth Westheimer

and (I'd planned to go long on this final passing in a separate entry, but the world seemed to wholly have my back on this one) —

The Smartest Guy in Any Room: Steve Albini •

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Cinema Novo

Shooting at Street Level

At 33 minutes, Andrade's 1967 Cinema Novo depicts and celebrates Brazil's "New Cinema" movement, following a number of heroes of the scene with a handheld camera as they themselves shoot new work on-location and in the streets. A German TV program commissioned the documentary, and Andrade's credit reads variously as the cameraman and the director. Of late I've been diving more into Brazilian cinema, so many of Cinema Novo's revelations are lost on me at this point (with the exception of the footage of Glauber Rocha), but won't always be... •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

Cinema Novo [1967]

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Orange You Glad I Said Banana

News to Me

"It actually looks bigger than it is, which is quite a crafty move. Was that the intention? – But it does look bigger than it is, as well... Two-thirds of the way through, having thought it's bigger than it is, you come to realise it's actually bigger than you thought it was..." —Chris Morris, Blue Jam

Nicky Otis Smith, good guy, editor of the Baltimore-based film zine The Servant. No, he's no Andrew Morton under the Chris Morris hot-lamp, he's not crafted a work that appears "bigger than it is," but that quote popped into mind when I was going over my own reactions at the beginning of the film compared to the end; I wouldn't call it a sneaky foray. smuggled in on a South Park joke détourné. Orange You Glad I Said Banana [2020] might first appear as the arbitrary hogwash of the throw-it-all-at-the-wall modern 'essay film' trend, but that reception couldn't be farther from the reality. It's an expression of and signal-jam for these particularly turbulent times. I'd recommend watching it once straight through in a single go, then returning to it afterward and treating it as a "pauser." Fast and furious and brilliantly edited, someone on Twitter X recently remarked that it's at least the equal of an Adam Curtis film. Watch Orange You Glad I Said Banana at Nicky's YouTube channel here, and decide for yourself. •

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The Priest and the Girl

Who's That Lay-Person?

Sexy tempting priests abound in the Catholic nation-states. O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965] approaches its curate from an angle different than that in, say, Melville's Léon Morin, Priest [1961]— An angle different in the jawbone, compared to Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The presumably late-teenage girl draws men toward her, and/or is naturally attracted to these men: a senior priest; a senior parental-guardian; a young villager who resembles a fully-coiffed Dave Attell; a younger priest with dashing looks. The landscapes and frock-silhouettes might remind one of Pasolini’s contemporaneous films: Franco Citti in a frock. The two-shots and intimate close-ups at times emit all the power of Bergman. •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

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"Mens sana in corpore sano"

Storytelling

Dornelles is maybe best known outside of Brazil as the co-director with his associate Kleber Mendonça Filho of the tremendous Bacurau, which I'll be writing about in the near future. The title of this 22-minute Recife-set film,"Mens sana in corpore sano" [2011], is presented onscreen with quotes, like a maxim, on either side of the Latin expression: "Sound mind in a sound body". 

I like this film. A subsequent look might suggest "sound mind in a sound body", a cause and effect spurred by mind and thus body, or the other way around? These are questions at the core of a metaphysics that has captured David Cronenberg's fascination for decades as well. For all the theory being produced around the notion of 'a new branch of film studies' in "Body Horror" (no fundamental ontological breakthrough), Cronenberg's charms lie in force of revelations suffused with the filmmaker's distinct personality and his mischievous charm. He relates yarns. Maybe not the same manner Sam Fuller did, but there's a premise, then an event, and, before any certainty of consequences bubbles up in the spectators' minds' eye, there comes a sense of inevitability directed towards an outcome that itself, though still unknown, seems all but inevitable. 

Does body revolt against mind? Mind against body? Does Body deal with contempt for the cogito...? And either way around, what is the entity or force that induces 'impetus'? Whatever the case, or cause, a self-awareness by force or entity presides over the absolute non-awareness of "Mens sana..."'s vanity-intense protagonist and of his taste for a ludicrous extreme of 'fitness to the nth,' i.e., for his work toward utter self-annihilation.

Dornelles shoots the hard-body in pieces large and small. The gym regimen as a phenomenon sets the course for the achievement of total blankness, why that might be desirable or not, who can say. We can project any 'world-spirit' of the current epoch onto these proceedings; in the category of plastic surgery and masochistic self-improvement, a private dancer goes crotch-to-crotch with our main lead the client, the camera/gaze focusing in on the stripper's breast augmentation her bi- and triceps that really let her work the push-ups she's being 'spotted' for. A finality: a man who goes so hard that in the end his severed head 'looks' upon the body mechanically pumping the stationary bike towards no-more-tomorrow. That's an ending that can only be the result of a tale. After all, the magic of cinema resides within Mickey's sparkle; at essence the wonder of the movies reflects the precepts of a story well told. •

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Other writing on Cinemasparagus on the films of Juliano Dornelles:

"Mens sana in corpore sano" ["Sound mind in a sound body"] [2011]

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Boom

Cursed AF Alright — Writer Declares Bring It

BOOM! like a critically amplified mic-drop. (Side-note first: The true title via the onscreen credit of this 1968 Tennessee Williams adaptation is Boom, no exclamation point... It would be too much, the daitô-katana slash that severed equilibrium.) The first of two 1968 films by Joseph Losey (Elizabeth Taylor months later will play the protagonist among the glazed green tiles of Secret Ceremony) is the film maudit of Joseph Losey, and thus must occupy a high position in any survey of the genre — the 'cursed' film, the movie that doesn't 'fit in,' the 'misfit movie.' Strangest film of his I've seen since La truite [The Trout, 1982], his final work in cinema.

A Sixties prism of ancient Tragedy, Boom in its spaces and setting (a palatial rock island respite only a hop skip and a jump to and from Capri) takes as its specific ur-text Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris [Contempt] of five years earflier.

A single-published-volume poet of middle age, played by Richard Burton, wanders on-site one day under obscure pretenses to pay visit to the troubled, wealthy widower given life by Liz Taylor, empress of a handful and vice-versa. Shortly afterward, he dons vintage samurai garb.

Boom's something of part of a continuum, if not wholly without precedent or without representing something new under the Mediterranean blues. I've been catching up with a lot of 1960s post-studio films and certain international coproductions I've been neglecting for years... and Losey's Boom has become a personal favorite of mine. Ignore the Hateship. •

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