From the archive: "Black God White Devil"

A raggedy sort of masterpiece, Glauber Rocha's Black God White Devil, the flagbearer for the Brazilian New Wave, centres on a cattle farmer who murders his boss during a civil uprising, and flees with his wife. The pair come to fall in with a religious pilgrimage making its way up to a mountaintop retreat; as the farmer slowly slips into homicidal fanaticism, the authorities - in the form of the Catholic church, who fear being undermined by these new prophets, and a corrupt politician - hire the legendary gunman Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle) to pick the pilgrims off.

I suspect it's one of those works that requires a degree of religious and historical context to make complete sense of, anyway, but the most instantly confounding element is the apparent absence of an easy identification point. Though the farmer starts out as a class warrior of sorts, he does rather lose our goodwill in sacrificing an infant child (the bandits he falls in with recognise as such, in renaming him Satan), and everybody else looks to be busy drifting between the influences of the title, usually ending up with blood on their hands. The film's thesis appears to concern the corrupting influence of power in all its forms (social, spiritual, political): the true hero may, in fact, be the philosopher-assassin Antonio, the star of a sequel five years later, who at least abides by his own code, and thus stands alone.

The film, too, falls into no obvious category: given Rocha's fondness for non-professional faces, you might be inclined to bracket Black God White Devil as neo-realism, were it not that its wilder, more fantastical moments suggest an especially parched spaghetti Western - except that a) its massacres owe less to Leone than they do to Eisenstein in their composition and the dynamism of their editing, b) individual episodes are linked by popular folk songs (!), and c) the symbolism is highfalutin in the extreme: these figures have been stranded in the desert like characters in a Biblical parable.

You're immediately struck by how fresh this melange must have seemed to audiences at the onset of the 1960s, how unfamiliar and exciting, possibly exasperating; yet it still works today as a revealing historical allegory, the performers possessed of just the right amount of portent, while the central conceit - Brazil as a paradise lost, prone to such bouts of lawlessness - has endured rather too well. (I saw the film in late November 2010, on the day drug dealers began rioting about what they saw as the gentrification of the favelas they once lorded over; a line given to the chief bandido in Rocha's film - "A man is a man when he uses a gun to change his fate" - could equally have been spoken in any of the post-City of God bulletins to have emerged from the country in recent years.) By no means an easy film for the uninitiated, its raw cinematic power nevertheless seeps through whatever gaps arise in your comprehension.

(November 2010)

Black God White Devil screens on Film4 tomorrow night at 10.50pm, as part of the Story of Film season.