2nd Annual ARTS@DRCLAS / Harvard Film Archive retrospective

Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Cinema Novo and Beyond

The 2nd Annual ARTS@DRCLAS / Harvard Film Archive retrospective is co-sponsored by the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program, with additional support from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

April 20th - May 7th
Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge

The director will be present at three of the screenings -- May 4th, 5th, and 6th at 7:00 p.m.

Details: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/santos.html
Contact: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/contact.html

Schedule of Remaining Events:

Rio, Northern Zone (Rio, Zona Norte)

Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With Grande Otelo, Malu, Jece Valadão
Brazil 1957, 35mm, b/w, 90 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

Setting up the gracefully jarring dichotomies that disrupt dos Santos’ otherwise “traditional” film, the opening credit montage features the discovery of a body on the train tracks while a cookie-cutter Hollywood soundtrack idly plays. The injured man is Espírito da Luz Cardoso (literally “Spirit of the Light”), a struggling composer whose sambas unite and uplift the marginalized Brazilian people in his midst. Based on the life of composer Zé Keti – who actually appears in the film as the popular singer Alaor – Espírito’s story unfolds through flashbacks which overflow luxuriously with song, yet also expose the manifold divisions within Rio’s social strata. A victim of exploitive businessmen who suck the life out of his music, Espírito witnesses each of his dreams dashed one at a time by unrelenting tragedy. Apparently oblivious to his inherent goodness and irrepressible joy, the plot of the film – much like capitalism’s surge through 1950s Rio de Janiero – boldly charges forward leaving true beauty and vitality lying upon its tracks.
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Saturday, May 5 at 7pm - Special Event Tickets $12 - Nelson Pereira dos Santos in Person

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como era gostoso o meu francês)

Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With Ana Maria Magalhães, Arduíno Colasanti, José Kleber
Brazil 1972, 35mm, color, 84 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

In keeping with Cinema Novo’s reappropriation of Brazilian culture from its Western absorption, dos Santos travels to the colonial crime scene of 16th century Brazil. A French Huguenot is captured by the Tupinambá and participates in their culture for several months prior to his planned execution. This insider/outsider perspective – similar to that bestowed upon anthropologists and documentary filmmakers – is one of many methods dos Santos uses to constantly undermine and call into question narrative authority. No particular character, sex or culture emerges more “savage” than the other, no single point of view directs the action, and no heroes or other cinematic tropes lay claim to the audience’s sympathies. Using a naturalistic verité camera and interspersing actual historical texts, dos Santos crafts a thoroughly subversive reevaluation of “official” histories and mythologies. In the face of subjects who utterly defy objectification or total comprehension, the audience is forced into actively engaging with that which they wish to consume.
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Sunday, May 6 at 5pm

Hunger For Love: Have You Ever Sunbathed Completely Nude? (Fome de Amor: Você nunca tomou sol inteiramente nua?)

Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With Leila Diniz, Arduíno Colasanti, Irene Stefânia
Brazil 1968, 35mm, b/w, 76 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo.
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Sunday, May 6 at 7pm - Special Event Tickets $12 - Nelson Pereira dos Santos in Person

Music According to Tom Jobim

Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil 2011, digital video, color & b/w, 88 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

Santos' latest film is a celebratory documentary tribute to Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim that gathers together a wonderfully wide range of the best interpretations of Jobim’s now canonical ballads, sung by the likes of Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald and Caetano Veloso.
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Monday, May 7 at 7pm

The Third Bank of the River (A Terceira Margem do Rio)

Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With Ilya São Paulo, Sonia Saurin, Maria Ribeiro
Brazil/France 1993, 35mm, color, 98 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

After an extended period directing original screenplays, dos Santos returned to the creative engagement with literature that was the wellspring of his early masterpieces, offering a combinatory adaptation of five stories by the renowned Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa. Openly embracing a mode of magical realism, dos Santos' celebrated film tells the story of a farming family defined by the absence of its father who abruptly abandoned his wife and children, sailing away down the river, including his son who continues to communicate with his father, speaking daily to him from the river bank. While offering an evocative vision of rural Brazil as a timeless land of mystery and solemnity, The Third Bank of the River is also bitingly satiric in the remarkable depiction of religious belief when the family moves to the city and its youngest member, a mesmerizing little girl, is revealed to be a kind of saint, capable of miraculous acts. In a gesture back to his earliest work about rural Brazil, dos Santos cast as the lonely mother Maria Ribeiro, star of Barren Lives.