To
say that Ruy Guerra was one of the pioneers of the Brazilian
Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s would be to understate
the importance of a world figure who has directed some
30 films in South America, Europe, and Africa. In addition,
he has scripted or co-scripted nearly all his films, has
worked as a film editor and cinematographer, acted in
the films of others on occasion (including Werner Herzog's
Aguirre, Wrath Of God, shot
in the Amazones of Brazil), and usually produces himself
every film he sincerely believes in.
Moreover,
he has worked as a film critic and journalist, publishes
stories and chronicles, is a playwright, directs stage
productions, collaborates with several renowned Brazilian
musicians as a songwriter, and presently teaches at the
School of Cinema at Gama Fiho University in Rio de Janeiro.
Most important of all, particularly for his film-making
career, Ruy Guerra is a political activist. Born
in 1931 in Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), Mozambique,
when it was still a Portuguese colony, Ruy Guerra began
writing film criticism at 17 while taking part in pro-independence
movements and anti-racist activities. Two years later
he left for Paris, where he enrolled in the two-year course
at IDHEC (1952-54) for directing although Guerra
says he learned film-making by working on productions
as assistant cameraman and assistant director.
His
first short films, Song For Crossing The Water (1952)
and When The Sun Sleeps (1954), were made
at IDHEC. At the same time, he took courses in acting at
the Charles Dullin School at TNP and could be seen in this
capacity in Georges Rouquier's SOS Noronha
(1956).
Moving
on to Brazil, Guerra started but didn't finish two short
films, but was on hand for others in the burgeoning Cinema
Novo movement. He edited the Carlos Diegues episode in the
omnibus film, Cinco Vezes Favela (1962), credited
by many as the film that sparked the Cinema Novo movement,
and acted in Flavio Migliaccio's Os Mendigos
(1962). The breakthrough came with his first feature film,
The Unscrupulous (1962), in which he applied
French New Wave aesthetics to portray the bourgeois of Copacabana
with its dismal milieu of indifference and countenance of
sex and rape, blackmail and protection rackets, and other
related crimes.
Guerra
followed with a run of productions that made him a name
as both a leader of Cinema Novo and a director capable of
international productions. His Os Fuzis (The
Guns) (1964), one of Cinema Novo's most important films,
is extraordinary in that a sequel was made a decade later,
A Queda (The Fall) (1976), in which
a soldier who had fired on villagers during the time of
government oppression is now himself a victim of exploitation
as a worker on a Rio construction side. The Fall, co-directed
by Nelson Xavier and a competition entry at the 1977 Berlinale,
was hailed by critics as a modern parallel to the classic
crime-and-punishment theme. His Os Deuses E Os Mortos
(1970) was another Cinema Novo milestone.
When Mozambique declared its independence in the late 1970s,
he returned there to participate in the founding of the
National Institute of Cinema. His Mueda, Memoria E
Massacre (Death, Memory And Massacre) (1979)
was the first Mozambique feature film. Afterwards, he abandoned
radical political statements to make a series of international
co-productions in Latin America acclaimed for their aesthetic
beauty and commercial entertainment quality: The Stolen
Letter (1982), two screen adaptations of stories by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Erendira, 1983, and
The Story Of Bela Palomera, 1987), Malandro's
Opera (1985), and Kuarup (1988),
based on a novel by Atonio Callado.
Guerra's Estorvo (Turbulence), based on a
novel by singer/song-writer Chico Buarque, chronicles the
existential nightmare of an anonymous first-person character
who roams through the streets of a modern city. The setting
is Brazil today, the protagonist ("I") is awakened from
a restless night by the ringing of the doorbell and the
presence of a man in the doorway who provokes fear and uncertainty.
The man sneaks away from his apartment to experience a panoply
of dreams and hallucinations that reach far into the past
mother, sister, friends, thieves, cops, marijuana
growers, dealers...
"Chico Buarque's book is so well known," says Guerra,
"that it seems unnecessary to enunciate the power of the
text, the skilled manipulation of its real and imaginary
time, [to] praise the precise portrait of its characters,
or [to] underline the accuracy of its dramatic trajectory
in which the absurd is defined in our own commonplaceness.
The cinematic image will, I hope, as a film, come close
to the literary sensation."
Ron
Holloway
