Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...stage and beautifully suggests the pair's lifelessness and plasticity by treating them as just two more props to be moved into place. Another innovation is the actual acting out of the Tahitian movie, a touch that makes the suburbanites shrink further into irreality, by graphic contrast with the film characters of their imagination...
...this film, which is a true breakthrough for cinema, I probably should begin by saying that it is filled with the savage folk poetry of the Brazilian northland (cousin to the American Wild West), it is colorful and violent, it deals in myths of recent times which are inherently Christian and Marxist. What I saw, however, was the first dialectical cinema in film history...
Like Victorian theater and early film, Antonio das Mortes (1969) is staged exclusively in two flat planes: one straight across the frame, the other straight into it. The figure in the left of the frame is opposed to the figure in the right, and the actors in the foreground fight the crowds toward the back. In this closed form of thesis/antithesis, Rocha's open form occurs when he transforms one opposition into another. Rocha's shots are set, closed, until he brings in a new term of antithesis: he pans roughly till the camera picks up a new character...
ROCHA's dialectic ranges over all levels of film reality. In one sequence the old landowner's whore Laura stands in the center of a mid-shot, leaning on a balustrade with one plant in left frame balanced by one plant in right; close in back of her a flat wall, close in front of her the screen. Behind her Dr. Matos paces from the left frame edge to the right and back. She talks, and we start with the conventional assumption that she is talking to the other person depicted in the frame. Then we notice that...
Through Antonio das Mortes the dialectic keeps balancing and leaving its crux, in center frame, to be the truth of the image and of the film at this instant. Sometimes a symbolic figure occupies the center between the cangaceiro and his opponent; sometimes there is just the space between foreground and background masses. In each case Rocha's dialectical construction tells us the precise nature of their relationship. As elsewhere, dialectic shows itself to be the best way of understanding events, of laying them open to us. The central fact about this film, the root of its success, is that...