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Brazil's
Bid at a Continental Cinema
Walter Salles Jr.’s Motorcycle Diaries in context
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Ernesto's art,as a road novelist, was not the book, but the journey itself
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By
awarding Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d’Or, the 2004
Cannes Film Festival jury, presided by Quentin Tarentino, only did what was
natural at this moment in time for art. It used the film to denounce the tyranny
of Bush and the neocons for having intensified the violence and terror they
claim to have been eradicating, and for doing so primarily to seize central
Asian natural resources for personal and family gain. France happened to be the
ideal place to declare such a message for more reasons than one.
Apart
from the country’s opposition to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the
festival was also set against the social strife affecting France’s arts
industry workers—the “intermittents du spectacle.” In the summer of
2003, they had managed to bring the Avignon Theatre Festival to a halt in
protest of the Chirac government’s attempt to rid their status of job security
and unemployment benefits. In the end, neither the intermittents nor the
American occupation of Iraq made the Cannes dream-machine flicker into a fade
out. Nor was there much discussion about the stance that art ought to take on
the world’s current flow.
Back
in 1968
Instead,
the American culture system proved able to deploy irony in the face of
opposition and protest. Back in 1968 the Cannes film festival was no less
insurgent against the American invasion of South Vietnam and authoritarianism of
the French political system. Yet its protests struck out on an international
tone in a bid to broaden people’s power of decision-making in Western
democracies. What has changed 36 years later is that the United States manages
to monopolize the stages of protest as well as those of aggression. Meanwhile,
under the cool shade of the Mediterranean palms, the rest of the world was
blazing new, separate trails.
Less
ironically, only in the United States can the question still be raised seriously
as to whether cinema has a political potential. The seventh art has,
nonetheless, shifted its stride. With Serguei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union and
D. W. Griffith in the United States, cinema provided these countries with
modern-day epics by which nations recognize their historical purpose. Decades
later, out came a line from World War II with Italian neo-realism in the work of
Roberto Rossellini, and the French New Wave of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.
These movements brought documentary techniques to project the real-time struggle
against what the world marshaled by the United States and the
Soviet Union had become. Image strategies were
reorganized to expand public imagination as reality was identified with
spectacle.
Brazil:
Differences Within Similarities
Nowadays,
with a documentary holding the Palme d’Or for the first time in 48 years, it
seems that cinema has been compelled to take up the failure of journalism, at
least as it is manufactured by the corporate -owned and -run mass media. But
journalism and news documentary are not akin to art. It’s even questionable
whether journalism manages to come close to telling audiences the truths whose
expression distinctly occurs within art’s domain.
Cinema
has always offered a glimpse into the imaginary, even in its least escapist
form. As worthy as Michael Moore’s struggles might be, the 2004 Cannes film
festival only reiterated what was in the Establishment’s shrunken mind.
Political cinema can be criticism, but insofar as it becomes a variation on
journalism, it ends up evaporating its dream component. Were this component to
equate with what drives the cinematic art itself and the criterion by which the
Palme is awarded, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’s Diarios de
motocicleta—also in this year’s official selection—would have been its
victor.
Set
in Spanish, but conceived by a Brazilian, Motorcycle Diaries is a
southern Latin American film. Foreign audiences may not grasp the sense and
importance of that implication. General ignorance of South America is draped by
a skewed geography. Too many keep forgetting that Spanish is not the language
spoken in Brazil, the continent’s largest country. As one of the great
veterans of the 1960s’ Cinema Novo movement, Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
recently said, “The political divisions invented for Latin America are
completely artificial. Our peoples are so close, so similar. Walter Salles’s
film shows this dimension.”
Yet
there is difference within the similarities. Not only are its cultural and
political traditions Portuguese and Italian, but Brazilian culture is steeped in
an African and Indian admixture atypical even for the American continent. So
while South America sports a common market zone, the Mercosul (in
Portuguese) or Mercosur (in Spanish), it’s difficult to speak of the
area as sharing a historically linear plight of common struggle.
For
a Brazilian to prime his film as Latin American is also a gesture of ambition,
hope. It’s precisely the stuff cinema is made of. In that regard, there may be
no more perfect a figure from the continent to carry a screenplay on the theme
than the Argentine-born Cuban and Latin American revolutionary, Ernesto Guevara
de la Serna, a.k.a. “Ché.”
It’s
the Venture
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Motorcycle Diaries is guidance for today’s youth worldwide
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Motorcycle
Diaries is Ché’s Bildungsroman, his
coming-of-age tale. As a precursor of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957),
though not translated into English until 1995, Guevara’s memoirs are much
closer to an egalitarian version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. There’s
no Dean Moriarty or Sancho Panza in Ernesto’s partner, Alberto Granado—whose
own memoirs, With Ché Through Latin America, stands as the complementary
basis for José Rivera’s screenplay. Equality between these two “brothers”
sets the basis from which their political egalitarianism will arise.
Don
Quixote de la Mancha recapitulated the entire
tradition of knighthood adventures, turning the sum into a massive delirium in
recursivity. As a road novelist, Ernesto was breaking new ground by making
healing his primary purpose. Gifted with as much culture as any of North
America’s “Beat Generation,” social change for him was not merely cultural
euphoria and lifestyle challenges. His art was not the book, but the journey
itself.
The
film is a venture back to a time prior to the Cuban revolution, the peasant and
popular uprisings, and the wars of decolonization in which Ché fulfilled a
hero’s purpose, which included his role as Cuba’s Minister of Industry from
1961 to 1965. For decades since, the nation that bankrolled his killers, the
United States itself, has tried various ways to demonize him. It seems to have
best succeeded simply by dropping him into banality: a freeze-framed image on a
t-shirt iron-on or a poster. North American suburban middle-class kids can
titillate their clued-out parents by wearing Ché’s icon while his gaze drifts
eternally through pop culture trends, as inane as anything produced by the
United States’ gift to the world.
For
anyone who has witnessed the pictures of Ché after his assassination by a CIA
goon squad in the Bolivian jungle in 1967, another image wrenches us out of
oblivion. Behind the death mask is a physically vulnerable, saintly figure. An
asthmatic from his earliest days, Ernesto was a trained physician, specializing
in leprology. Motorcycle Diaries recounts his apprenticeship. In his
art’s emergence, his devotion to the disenfranchised would soon become the
guiding light to his political radicalism.
The
film shows Ernesto (played by Gale Garcia Bernal), 23 and still in medical
school, heading off with his best friend, Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna),
on the back of a 1939 Norton 500 for a continent-long adventure. It is 1952. The
friends leave from the urban upper-middle to rural upper-class comforts in
Argentina to encounter nature’s gigantic splendors on the world’s most
spectacular continent. From the Argentine pampas to the stark Andean isolation
of the country’s border with Chile, the pair encounters a land almost barren
of humans.
When
their Norton breaks down in the Atacama Desert, the road begins to unfold into a
land. Hand in hand, the film’s temporal setting evaporates into
contemporaneity. The eternity of post-Inca subsistence and struggle turns the
film’s tables into world historical fate. Alberto and Ernesto ascend the
heights of Machu Picchu like Moses—here
joined by Aaron—receiving the Ten Commandments.
Later,
as they wander through the streets of the Inca capital of Cuzco, change has
primed them to reawaken the ancestral split history of South America. One line
stretches from the descendants of the pure or mixed-blood native Indians,
enslaved in one form or another for centuries. Another one condenses the
European heritage of those whose barbarity exceeded all limits to make them the
continent’s rulers. A young Inca boy, one of a slew of non-professional actors
caught throughout the journey for the camera’s pleasure in a match for its
free-style hand-held movement, sums up South America’s history as its twists
between two strides and two memories. Pointing to ancient masonry, incredible
even by our modern standards, the boy utters, “This wall was built by Incas;
that one there was built by the useless Spanish.”
Crying
Through Wisdom
The
film then turns into Ché’s diaries themselves. Cinematographer
Eric Gautier’s striking chiaroscuro tones, set
against the exploding greenery of the film’s first part, morph into a
semblance of El Greco’s grayish hues. From its fissures, black-and-white
stills tear away from the film’s narrative surface, left for the memory of
viewers to inscribe. The color scheme shift beckons an inflexion in the
narrative. In a decisive moment at every great story’s turn, the explorer
faces an existential moment over which he has no control but to choose: either
he accepts his mentor or slides into quixotic wandering. For “Fuster,” as
Ernesto is nicknamed by Alberto, this mentor is one of their own: a physician,
Dr. Bresciani.
The
first step in Che’s mission takes flight from within the medical profession.
Che’s mentor-physician is a struggling author, whose calling is to give him
and Alberto his manuscript to comment on. In an atypical act of humility, the
master submits to the student’s judgment. While Alberto shies from the
responsibility of appraising the work, Ernesto leaps at it as if to underscore
that the gift his mentor hands down is a task and a striving: to care for
patients in a leper colony on the Amazon. Ernesto and Alberto spend the film’s
most stable moments there, perfecting their arts and their sciences.
Motorcycle
Diaries is also, and foremost, a Brazilian film.
Its release comes on the heels of a series of outstanding works that have
renewed the activity of Latin America’s former great film-producing country.
What was the cause of film making’s interruption? Singer-songwriter Caetano
Veloso unequivocally charged the dictatorial period of 1964–1988 with having
destroyed the bossa nova, Tropicalismo and Mineira art
movements. After 1968 and Institutional Act 5 (AI-5), civil liberties were
suspended and parliament was forced into permanent recess. As successor to
President General Arthur da Costa e Silva, President General Emílio
Garrastazu Médici soon implemented an anticommunist national security terror
state in Brazil. For ten years, expression became a life-threatening contest.
Scores
of artists, intellectuals, and political organizers were forced into
exile—when they were famous. Those not as lucky were imprisoned, often
tortured, and sometimes killed. Lyndon Johnson supported the 1964 coup, offering
American military assistance if anything were to go wrong in the meantime.
Throughout Latin America’s darkest period, the United States helped organize
intelligence networks, such as the Plano Condor (a.k.a. Operation
Condor), to annihilate popular uprisings.
Though
hardly comparable in scale to Joseph Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union,
Brazil’s military dictatorship wrought similar effects on culture: the
creative edge of the nation’s arts drifted into hibernation.
Written
for classical guitar, Gustavo Santaolalla’s soundtrack evokes the struggles of
the continent. It reminds viewers that South America, and Brazil in particular,
is the preeminent space for guitar composition and virtuosity today. Inspiring
the soundtrack is the ambitious project of composer and virtuoso
multi-instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti. His work on native Amazonian song and
rhythm, as well as the cover photo of Zig Zag depicting the majestic Iguaçu
Falls—which straddle the border between the three nations of Argentina, Brazil
and Paraguay—is an ode to the transnational continuity of the land.
Perhaps
through ambivalence or embarrassment about the Cuban revolution, some critics
have pleaded for viewing the film in suspension from Ché’s later life. Others
have denigrated it for not linking the two sufficiently. As much as we might
rationally succeed in rejecting historical determinism as the drive through
which to consider history—that is, as inevitable if not prewritten in some
form—our imagination ends up interfering. Imagination compels us to use
historical inevitability as only one among other possibilities that twist
various lines together to form our conception of history. How else can we be
thrilled by moments of suspense in historical dramas whose outcomes are known
well beforehand? As Ché decides to overcome his frail health and the dangers of
tropical waters by swimming across the Amazon at night to share his birthday
party with the leper colony he has helped care for, we are gripped and yearn for
his success.
The
Cuban revolution to which Ché did so much to lend its festive features has
lasted against sizeable odds. In that regard, Frei Betto, the liberation
theologian and current special adviser to Brazilian president Lula da Silva,
does well to remind us. He hopes “the panel at Jose Marti Airport in Havana
welcoming visitors to the country will remain long into the future. [It
declares:] ‘Tonight, millions of children will sleep in the streets of the
world. None of them is Cuban.’” Yet Cuba’s successes, as extraordinary as
they are when considering the American colossus against which it rose up and has
had to defend itself, were drawn toward the bottom from the outset. As a result,
political egalitarianism has been identified with poverty.
If
American conservatives and Cuban émigrés living in Florida lament that Cuba is
not a beach and casino resort arrayed with the finest mulattas of the Caribbean
to be subjected to prostitution for the rich, progressives cannot be easily
satisfied either with the impoverished state of the project. Motorcycle
Diaries ends with words to remind us of Cuba, where Alberto Granado and Ché’s
family still reside. But through its images, the film captures something equally
difficult to understand: how some persons become world historical figures.
Figures like Ché, Franz Fanon, or Gamal Abdel-Nasser concentrated the courage
of people living under colonial subjection and worked to bring them toward
self-determination and betterment. Courage is the color of this type of cinema.
As
anyone can testify while watching Walter Salles’s film, Ché was someone whom
most of us would have adored to have as a best friend. Even with its violence,
his revolution was based on love. It’s what made him all the more dangerous to
the imperial masters and their CIA and mafia henchmen.
In
an emotional portrayal so typical to Latin America, Salles has confronted
viewers with the task of feeling in deep emotional hues while they think through
rationalized anger. The American Michael Moore can make viewers rage or laugh.
The Brazilian Salles has taught us to cry through hope and wisdom while ditching
the woes and despondency. In the same stroke, he reminds us about what a film of
hope otherwise means.
Motorcycle
Diaries is guidance for today’s youth
worldwide. Ideas emerge from venturing, journeying. Pick up your bags, learn
another language, and explore other cultures. Learn about yourself is its
message.
Norman Madarasz is a Canadian philosopher residing in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. With a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, he teaches and writes on
international relations, political economy and philosophy. He is also a regular
contributor to Counterpunch and has published think pieces and philosophical
research extensively. You can reach him at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
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