In my art history courses I usually incorporate certain notions about philosophy, history, geopolitics, literature, music as well as visual arts. Especially cinema is an active subject that serves as a means to understand much more about a country and its culture. Movies, when they are good, become a mirror of society. All societies seen in their depth end up being similar. The poverty of many African countries is like that of Latin America; The violence in Brazil is similar to that of the suburbs of Paris. The tenderness and feelings of an Iranian, like those of a Chiapas, are universal. Tears, laughter and love are common to all human beings. And good cinema, auteur cinema, allows us to enter into life, the emotions and drives that we can recognize in the environment or even in ourselves.
I have nothing against having a good time. Cinema is also a “popcorn” entertainment, fun and insubstantial. Forgetting problems for a while is valid. But art cinema, which began from processes of photographic animation and experimentation with the image, which through a camera has been able to delve into more intimate and honest realities, requires a greater disposition. It involves surrendering ourselves to the story that the director wants to tell us and that he has constructed as if it were painting a painting, writing a novel or composing a symphony.
Like all art, when it really is, it is not usually accommodating or satisfying our particular taste. Quality cinema fulfills a purpose beyond the commercial. He does not disguise the truth, he does not blackmail and he does not manipulate. It is not maudlin and portrays the events ethically and without directing our gaze. Trust in the intelligence and elaboration capacity of those who are in front of the screen to experience something more than recreation.
Art cinema has the function of transforming us, it is a catalyst of emotions and sensations that establishes an “other” time. Its essence is light. Everything that happens appears before us from an eye that knows how to see and tell, and that not only illuminates a scene, but also our thoughts. The screen of a movie theater is offered to us like a blank page. Darkness is the vehicle that takes us to a liquid, liminal space in which unlikely things can happen. The place where we abandon ourselves and stop being those on the “outside” to enter a qualitative state.
movies like Splendor by Ettore Scola have paid tribute to cinema, to the attempts to preserve that continent in which universes, ideas, moments are woven. Laugh, cry, scare us, terrify us. Reflect on the price of a ticket. In The Purple Rose of Cairoa woman with a mediocre and routine life, pays for a ticket at the town’s movie theater. Every afternoon he gets caught up in fiction. Miraculously, something that can only happen in the cinema emerges, literally from the screen, its prince charming. The genius of a director like Woody Allen reminds us that even common places can stop being commonplace and become magic.
As part of the program for my course, I included a trip to Brazil. The films that I have recommended are Fitzcarraldo, by the German Werner Herzog, and Embrace of the Serpent, a co-production from Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina by director Ciro Guerra. Both deserve a separate text. In this column I want to talk about City of God (Brazil 2002), by directors Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, considered one of the most important of the 20th century, and perhaps the most ambitious film of our continent. I saw it at its premiere, and the first surprise is seeing it so many years later and discovering that far from getting older, over time it has made much more sense. We could say that it is a classic. A story that is based on the agreement between the production team and the head of the dangerous gang of a favela, who authorized the filming as long as the actors were the same inhabitants of the community.
It is a story that takes us into the deepest social layers of Brazil. Narrated with dizziness, it is the story of City of God, the favela that through the years tells of the life of a group of children who enter adolescence and premature adulthood without opportunities, with a social and cultural backwardness that condemns them to crime. Lives given to drug cartels; victims who become perpetrators and vice versa, in an endless cycle of violence. In each scene the story creates an atmosphere that, without melodrama, is almost a documentary or something that resembles French cinema verité, Italian neorealism or the superb work Los Olvidados by Buñuel.
Adapted from a true story that was a police report in the local newspapers, it does not tell anything new, it is the process of destruction of the social fabric. What is relevant is the way to do it. Families forced to emigrate to a suburb that apparently offers new perspectives. Houses built by the government (something similar to what happens in our country) without the minimum services, water, electricity, transportation or security. Mostly descendants of the eternal injustice left by the slave trade in Brazil, Africans from many nations who saw their children grow up in an environment that could only generate misfortune. The fictional characters come to life, amalgamating in an amazing way with non-professional actors who move, act and reflect an inner life in front of the camera.
Poverty is full of painful layers. It contains moments of light and many others of darkness. Mostly lacerated beings who find each other between imperceptible folds for those who are alien to their reality. In City of God These layers emerge and become paradigms of hopelessness. Thanks to an impeccable story, our gaze is transformed from observer to accomplice. The mastery of City of God It is that it forces us to put aside our privileges and selfishness to become part of those lives that are embroiled in disaster. But these are not fallen beings; On the contrary, they are beings of light that circumstances lead to violence. Doom is lurking, but that doesn’t stop them from playing with it and trying to defeat it. Subjected to the rites of Candomblé, they seek to be anointed to give their lives to the irreducible hunger to kill to live. “Fight and you will never survive, run and you will never escape.”
But it is precisely in these strata where the true storytellers emerge, the artists and philosophers who are not left indifferent by infamies. Deep and lucid, with ideas that can change the world. In City of God Between mafias, drugs and ambition, in the midst of this darkness, Buscapé emerges, a young man who has the gift of knowing how to see through the lens of a camera. Only he can penetrate the sordid place where the improbable occurs. He is the one who, with a camera in his hands and a creative gaze, allows us to enter a community that could not have been seen any other way. He is our subjective, the redeemer of the human condition. As in Mexico, artists like him abound in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I had the opportunity to meet several artists who would also deserve a complete column.
City of God It is a profound hymn to humanity, to otherness, to friendship and also to the understanding of violence. That’s what makes it a superb film. And something else, it turns the screen into a life experience. @Suscrowley