*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:*
*Friday, May 4 at 7pm - **Special Event Tickets $12 - Nelson Pereira dos
Santos in Person
**
*
*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.
________________________________
*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.
________________________________
*
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.
________________________________
*
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.
________________________________
*
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.