Black God, White Devil: Feeding on Hunger
![<em>Black God, White Devil: </em>Feeding on Hunger](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/editorial_content_posts/hero/8537-/QUJoYfXfkjZUTJD4SG83AaBHKjGXuh_original.jpg)
In the history of Brazilian cinema, Black God, White Devil (1964) has had such a profound impact that it continues to project a miraculous aura more than half a century after its release. Director Glauber Rocha—who was twenty-four years old when the film was shot—had already completed an experimental short (1959’s Pátio) and a feature (1962’s Barravento) before he began making this ambitious work, but in many ways Black God, White Devil has the power of an electrifying debut, one that announced the arrival not only of a brilliant filmmaker but also of a new phase in Brazilian cinema and art. Along with Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Barren Lives and Paulo César Saraceni’s Porto das Caixas (both 1963), Rocha’s breakthrough manifested the project of Cinema Novo, a new wave that sought to overcome the influence of Brazil’s colonial origins and find images and sounds that could reconceive the nation.
In a place like Brazil, miracles like Black God, White Devil do not come from above. The film opens with a title sequence in which the credits appear and dissolve over a single take depicting white, grainy soil specked with gray, spiky bushes and black pebbles. Matching the martial pace of “Ária (O canto da nossa terra)”—which plays on the soundtrack and is one of nine Bach-inspired suites that Brazilian modernist pioneer Heitor Villa-Lobos composed in the 1930s and ’40s—the camera moves from right to left at a low angle that makes it difficult for the viewer to attain any sense of scale, turning the textured land into a backdrop for austere black lettering designed by the artist Lygia Pape. Then, Rocha cuts to two striking close-ups of a dead cow’s teeth and its eyes being eaten by bugs, and a third one introducing Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey), whose face is partially covered by a crumpled hat as he looks down at the animal carcass. In the scene that follows, the protagonist happens upon a procession led by a Black prophet named Sebastião (Lidio Silva), then rushes home to tell his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães), about the encounter. “He said a miracle is coming to save the world,” Manoel informs her.
The desire for a miracle is a sign that this world needs saving. A period piece set at an unspecified point in the 1930s, Black God, White Devil starts out as an allegory about the historical exploitation of the poor by Brazil’s oligarchical class. Manoel knows that the cow’s fate will be his own. At the time the film was made, farmworkers’ unions were illegal in the country, and rural laborers endured unfavorable conditions similar to the ones that haunt Rocha’s characters. At the beginning of the film, a drought has just taken the lives of the last cows that Manoel was hired to herd. We soon learn that their deaths come at a high cost: Manoel’s employer charges him for the loss of livestock. In despair, Manoel attacks his boss, then flees with Rosa in search of a miracle that never seems to come. As the journey unfolds, Manoel and Rosa are torn between two forms of messianism: the hope of transcendence that Sebastião represents, and the immanent revolution promised by Corisco (Othon Bastos), the leader of a gang of gunmen who terrorize the local oligarchs.
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