Othon Bastos

  • Glauber Rocha – Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol AKA Black God, White Devil (1964)

    Glauber Rocha1961-1970ArthouseBrazilDrama

    Quote:
    After killing his employer when said employer tries to cheat him out of his payment, a man becomes an outlaw and starts following a self-proclaimed saint.

    Reehan Miah wrote:
    Glauber Rocha’s Aesthetics of Hunger – a 1965 essay which attempts to explicate the Cinema Novo – reads like a convoluted mass of allegations, opacities and rhetoric (none of which are necessarily without substance). Somewhere within these imbroglios however, one stumbles upon an assertion that’s especially jarring:Read More »

  • Arthur Omar – Triste Trópico (1974)

    1971-1980ArthouseArthur OmarBrazilDocumentary

    Traffic on the roads of São Paulo, old family photographs, and the voice-over tale of Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a doctor coming back from Paris after finishing his Medicine studies in Europe. Arthur with his family, Arthur in Paris… The voice tells us of the doctor’s adventures with friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. This is how Omar announces the surrealist biography he weaves in Triste Trópico around the figure of an imaginary doctor who ends up as indigenous messiah. Described as a “anthropological mock documentary,” Triste Trópico is a film whose title alludes to Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic memoirs of Brazil and triggers a chain of evocative references to the carnival-cannibal avant-garde of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto.Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol AKA Black God, White Devil [+commentaries] (1964)

    1961-1970ArthouseBrazilDramaGlauber Rocha

    Quote:
    After killing his employer when said employer tries to cheat him out of his payment, a man becomes an outlaw and starts following a self-proclaimed saint.

    Reehan Miah wrote:
    Glauber Rocha’s Aesthetics of Hunger – a 1965 essay which attempts to explicate the Cinema Novo – reads like a convoluted mass of allegations, opacities and rhetoric (none of which are necessarily without substance). Somewhere within these imbroglios however, one stumbles upon an assertion that’s especially jarring:Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro AKA Antonio das Mortes (1969)

    1961-1970ArthouseBrazilGlauber RochaWestern

    Period piece about a Brazil that is no more. This movie is the sequel to “God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun” (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol), and takes place 29 years after Antonio das Mortes killed Corisco (the “Blond Devil”), last of the Cangaceiros. In “the old days”, Antonio’s function in life was exterminate these bandits, on account of his personal grudges against them. His life had been meaningless for the last 29 years, but now, a new challenge awaits him. When a Cangaceiro appears in Jardim Das Piranhas, the local Land Baron (Jofre Soares), an old man, does what seems obvious to him: he calls Antonio das Mortes, killer of Cangaceiros. At first, Antonio is ecstatic. His life has gained new meaning. But soon it becomes obvious that this new Cangaceiro (named Coirana) is no Corisco, but an idealist. An idealist of the sixties in the garb of the forties. A leader to the hopeless and the hungry. Antonio das Mortes begins to reconsider his feelings towards Coirana and his followers…Read More »

  • Leon Hirszman – São Bernardo [+Extras] (1971)

    1971-1980ArthouseBrazilDramaLeon Hirszman

    Synopsis
    In the interior of Alagoas, the son of peasants Paulo Honório, is a peddler who wanders through the midlands negociating all sorts of things, from cow to religious artifacts. He grows an obsession: to take the São Bernardo farm from the hands of its inept owner, the indebted Luiz Padilha, making him his employee.Read More »

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