Black God, White Devil

The revolutionary excitement of the European New Wave in the 1960s reached as far as South America, and can be felt with full force in Glauber Rocha’s extraordinary Black God, White Devil, which might best be described as a Brazilian spaghetti western infused with radical politics, folklore and mysticism. It’s also a totemic reference point for The Settlers, also showing at VIFF Centre this week.

Somewhere in the Brazilian hinterlands of the 1940s, ranch hand Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey) becomes an outlaw after killing his swindling boss. He pledges allegiance to Sebastião (Lidio Silva), a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners even as he perpetrates unspeakable acts of violent zealotry against the innocent. While the landowners hire a mercenary (Maurício do Valle) to take out Sebastião, Manoel and his wife Rosa (Yoná Magalhães) join cangaceiros Corisco (Othon Bastos) and Dadá (Sonia Dos Humildes), only to find themselves once more in league with evil, deluded forces.

Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement’s most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism.

This ecstatic panorama of furious visions and revolutionary dreams in the vast, violent landscape of rural Brazil, made by the 24-year-old director, is one of the founding works of modern Brazilian cinema. Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey), a young cowherd, kills a wealthy rancher who cheated him, and flees home, along with his wife, to join a pilgrimage led by a self-proclaimed saint with a utopian, gory gospel. The Catholic Church and the government send a hired gun, Antonio das Mortes, to stop the procession — and the revolutionary bandit Corisco plans to stop Antonio. Rocha’s hectic drama is, in effect, a political Western that rages at Brazil’s governmental corruption and plutocratic oppression… [with] raw, grand, urgent images.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Rocha, who wrote the script and most of the lyrics, consciously uses iconography from Eisenstein (Potemkin), Buñuel (Nazarin), and Godard (Les Carabiniers) to create a mise-en-scene that’s decidedly European avant-garde, while he has the actors pose and speak in a deliriously theatrical manner derived from Brecht and Grotowski. The fusion of European and Afro-Brazilian elements—dialogue, exquisite black-and-white images, and music by Villa-Lobos—is startlingly original and poetical in conveying the hope and despair of the oppressed.

Ted Shen, Chicago Reader

Italian neo-realism infected by the cutting of Eisenstein and the audacity of the French New Wave.

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian