Black God, White Devil: Feeding on Hunger

Black God, White Devil embodies the values of Cinema Novo—an artistic revolution that, as director Carlos Diegues once said, was already making political work while the French New Wave was still musing about unrequited love. The movement gave rise to a host of young filmmakers, including Diegues, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Ruy Guerra, Eduardo Coutinho, and Walter Lima Jr. (who worked as an assistant director on Black God, White Devil). These directors’ early films are united by a common mission of developing a Brazilian identity through moving images; they combine formal experimentation with political radicalism, taking the camera out of the studios (which still dominated Brazilian cinema at the time) and turning it toward the reality of the poor. Cinema Novo’s ideas about art and politics anticipated later developments in the international film scene, including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Dziga Vertov Group, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s conception of Third Cinema, and the many African cinemas that emerged in the wake of decolonization.

The story of Black God, White Devil is largely drawn from a real-life massacre that occurred in 1838. This historical episode—in which a messianic cult, centered on the Portuguese myth of Dom Sebastião, victimized hundreds of people in a community near Pedra Bonita—has come to symbolize the peculiar combination of violence and mysticism that marks the Brazilian imaginary, as well as the nation’s tendency toward destructive purification. In the film, the event is displaced in time, as if to emphasize how its brutality rippled out into the future. This disorienting approach is highlighted by the fact that some of the characters are references from Brazilian history; while Manoel, Rosa, Sebastião, and the bounty hunter Antônio das Mortes (Maurício do Valle) are fictional inventions, Corisco and fellow thief Dadá (Sonia dos Humildes) are based on Cristino Gomes da Silva Cleto and Sérgia Ribeiro da Silva, two members of a 1930s group of cangaceiros led by the revolutionary bandit Lampião. Specific to northeastern Brazil, and popularized by cheap literary pamphlets known as cordel, the cangaceiros have become symbols of organized resistance against the oligarchy, as well as the state’s inefficacy in combating the social problems that have condemned entire communities to starvation.

In key works of Cinema Novo such as Black God, White Devil, an attentiveness to local themes and issues is combined with the aesthetics of global auteur cinema. Throughout the film, Rocha merges national symbols with a style that incorporates a wide range of influences: here, Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectics meet Luchino Visconti’s penchant for the operatic, Luis Buñuel’s rough surrealism meets Pier Paolo Pasolini’s abrasive mysticism, and Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic gaze meets the narrative sociology of John Ford. Through the film’s use of the conventions of the western, the mythical collides with the factual; flesh-and-bone characters become archetypes, and archetypes are turned into myths. Reminiscent of a hero in a Hollywood western, Antônio das Mortes would become the basis of a later Rocha film bearing the character’s name, and similar figures would also emerge in the Italian western tradition (among them Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name).

Rocha’s disparate influences, which he named in his writing, are present throughout Black God, White Devil. But the film’s relationship to cinema history never feels merely citational. The director’s cinephilia is directly tied to the aesthetics of hunger; it is the foundation of the skill set he needed to realize his ideals. With Black God, White Devil, Rocha inscribed his politics in long takes and jump cuts, honoring the uniqueness of the caatinga with the creation of a singular cinematic style. This mutuality between politics and form is perhaps most powerfully captured in the film’s sonic elements: at one point, the string section of Villa-Lobos’s “Ária” synchronizes with the sound of a gang member sharpening his machete. Here, the weapon becomes a kind of instrument, while Villa-Lobos’s music stands in as a tool of revolution, opening paths for an art that could incorporate both the experimentation of international avant-gardes and the experience of living in poverty and desperately trying to overcome it.

A visionary artist with a global sensibility, Rocha was also a great synthesizer of tendencies in Brazilian art, which by the start of the sixties had begun exploring the radicalism of popular expression, as well as a national psyche shaped by decades of systemic underdevelopment. Brazilian film production had been caught in cycles of crisis since its inception, but Rocha was immersed in an extraordinary broader environment that would soon give rise to Tropicália, a movement that would take over the country (and is foreshadowed in the film’s iconic poster, designed by Tropicália pioneer Rogério Duarte). This cultural ferment largely resulted from a process of transformation at the Federal University of Bahia under the leadership of Edgard Santos, who hired faculty members at the forefront of their respective art forms. Among them were theater director Eros Martim Gonçalves, who in 1960 staged a production of The Threepenny Opera in the burnt remnants of Teatro Castro Alves, in Salvador, Bahia; composers Walter Smetak and Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, who were pushing the envelope in avant-garde music; and Lina Bo Bardi, who was starting to develop a form of architecture (known as arquitetura pobre) inspired by the creativity and resourcefulness of the wretched of the earth.

The combination of social precariousness and creative exuberance went on to influence Rocha’s aesthetics of hunger, but it’s also key in Black God, White Devil, notably in aspects that might go unnoticed. “Sertão vai virar mar,” a Sérgio Ricardo song that plays at the end of the film, borrows a prophecy spoken during one of the country’s best-known episodes of state-sponsored violence against popular resistance. In 1896, while the first documented film screenings were happening in Rio de Janeiro—movies of European city life imported from abroad—a military expedition was sent to Canudos, a small community in Bahia, to decimate a group of farmworkers and cangaceiros who had settled in the area. In Black God, White Devil, Rocha made this latter event central to Brazilian cinema by setting the legendary encounter between Antônio das Mortes and a blind busker in the very ruins of Canudos.

Ricardo’s song is named after the prophet Antônio Conselheiro’s pronouncement to the Canudos settlers that “the backlands shall become the sea, and the sea shall become the backlands.” The film employs these words as a form of political agitation, and as a way to question the binaries that, in both politics and art, work to keep things as they are. At every turn, Rocha challenges such separation. Throughout, Manoel and Corisco stare directly into the camera, anchoring the film in their gazes while also making viewers constantly aware that they are watching a constructed representation. Similarly, the naturalistic depictions of violence in the film are undercut by more obviously choreographed deaths, which interrupt our immersion in the action without diminishing the impact of the body count. Waldemar Lima’s striking cinematography submerges the characters in a white sky that nonetheless bears traces of clouds, using the camera’s focus and exposure to suggest different types of interaction between these human figures and their landscape.

Echoing its opening, Black God, White Devil ends with a shot in which the camera hovers over the soil of the caatinga, this time moving from left to right, over the ocean waves that crash on the shore. The low angle erases the horizon line—another hint that the desire for transcendence may not be reconciled with the merciless immanence of the human condition. Rocha’s ability to animate this eternal clash of opposites is the nature of the film’s miracle.