Cinema and class struggle in Latin America

Tomás Saraceno_Biofesra II_2009
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By GASPAR PEACE*

Foreword to the recently released book by André Queiroz

1.

I met André Queiroz in 2006 in the corridors of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj), corridors that served as an antechamber to the event “Brazilian art and philosophy: open essay Gerd Bornheim”, in which André Queiroz gave a talk about “Raduan Nassar and the will of no more – allegories of another thought”[I], moving through the designs of literature and cinema.

That was the beginning of a friendship made and remade through surprises and chance encounters. I now realize that from the voice that echoed in that amphitheater at UERJ, there actually emerged the magma of another thought, scripted according to the moment, like a true theatrical rehearsal, which challenged the other to say something more.

This search for what is missing, in fact, was spreading throughout his aesthetic-political construction: whether in the poetic nature of his writings, or in the film cuts accompanied by instigating musical images (since André Queiroz thinks his scripts based on rhythm and sound instantiations), or in the other-thought, which transgresses precisely that philosophical trend that (de)formed him and forced him to transgress (Foucault-Blanchot-Artaud, his close associates), or in his stance as a university professor who does not resign himself to the university-market and positions himself in the eagerness to implode the dominant bases to put in their place the vitality of the popular masses.

I dare say that it was this artistic restlessness that caught the attention of philosopher Benedito Nunes when he wrote the preface to his first fictional book, already envisioning the talent that has since been distributed across various perspectives of action. I would like to highlight, in this turn, the research on Latin America on Rodolfo Walsh the definitive word: writing and activism e Fernando Pino Solanas: cinema, politics and national liberation, which resulted in books published by the publisher Insular. In cinematographic production, two films stand out: The missing people e Araguaia present!, and are in the final stages and post-production, with an expected release date soon, John parapet e Solanas explained to children.

I can assure you, after having seen these film essays firsthand, that they carry a very profound poeticity and density of problematization. It is no wonder that this phase of the mature production of the author from Rio de Janeiro now gains the screen crossed by the film and by critical writing with this book. Cinema and class struggle in Latin America.

In the trials of Cinema and class struggle One can perceive two questions that work in ostinato to leverage the reflexive power of these collected writings: the desires and the popular protagonism in the class struggle and the political-pedagogical role of dissent. From this beginning, the text assumes an intonation that gradually gains momentum in the step-by-step questions in anaphora and the adjective extensions between oblivion, fiction, discussions of the political situation and the indecision of memory, which finally takes shape, not as the archival science bored with itself, not as a protection from death, but as Gerd Bornheim provoked: through the inspiration of the other that generates the torrents of life. If in academic amphitheaters everything that is insinuated has the intention of being published and then forgotten, what remains is the “coming to one’s senses” at the time of the siren, the high-pitched whistle that announces the beginning of the theater, the end of the workday.

As the hours begin, perhaps the unlucky hours that André talks about, one brushes the dust off one hand with the other, grabs some clothes and hangs them on the handles of the bag, and sets off for the daily life that matters. Daily life thought and rethought in obligatory stops of startling alcoholic memories. And so, as if by chance, everything takes refuge in a Drummondian “when”, when the skins of the texts touch, experiencing the groping of the deaf gaze searching for the answer in the gesture, in lip reading. André follows Drummond’s mundane cue to the letter, realizing that “then it is time to start all over again, without illusion and without haste, but with the stubbornness of the insect that searches for a path in the earthquake”.[ii]

The unsuspecting reader, upon encountering such stubbornness, may conclude that there is a critical intransigence in the way André Queiroz approaches certain films in this collection. In truth, the opening of the filmic lens proposed by him, in different modulations, aims at a deep dive to come face to face with all the conceivable overflows and dimensions of a film.

We can thus capture the daily struggles he faces, at the same time rearticulating the space-times of memory, the crises, tensions and joys of the present, to overcome the inevitable disappointments of life as it is. And this is how he reinvents a renewed dose of utopia as a mature construction of tangible reality. He wants to know what mobilizes, what intrigues those who come close to the raw images, simple images, sepia images, images that make one think.

2.

Thus, the distribution of the text of Cinema and class struggle is done in layers. The first layer, as it could not be otherwise, is the poetic writing of the text, which is composed through an image-based narrative. This narrative, figuratively philosophical and literary, converses with the images/frames that are, so to speak, the second layer of inflection and readability of the text. Each photo retains within itself an infinity of moments of the film that the author highlights on the screen, on the page. And it is necessary to clearly see the position taken by the images selected by him.

The third layer, in this polyphony established in the scene, arises in the margin of the page, as if it were the stitching together of a parallel text, articulated from information and comments by authors who think about the historical contextualization of Brazil, Argentina and Latin America as a whole. It thus presents the framework and discussion of commentators attentive to the time, showing statements and insights rarely addressed by armchair historians.

These are the comments that provoke the brushing of essayistic skins, not with caresses, but with affections that do not hide discouragement and bring the films to another shore, nourished by the adventure lived and the resistance to the ills of Latin American realities. Among the authors covered in these margins of filmography we find, for example, Francisco Oliveira, Tales Ab'Saber, Celso Rocha de Barros, Eduardo Anguita, Martin Caparrós, Rodolfo Walsh, Paulo Arantes, Florestan Fernandes, Marx and André Queiroz himself, to name a few.

Often, in this exfoliation of textual skins, the author provokes the film narrative by bringing literary intertexts closer to it. Sometimes in the text of the first layer, sometimes in the third, the arid-dry voices of characters from the literature of the Brazilian northeast (Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego…) parade, or the mechanical archaeology of the residue of a Carlos Drummond de Andrade, or even the song by Luiz Gonzaga Jr, which is placed in the right corner of the page as an epigraph to begin the saga of “The boss’s bitter sugar – notes between cinema, memory and politics”: “[…] I hand over to the divine, the idiot who kills me in the bean line, there is no way/ I hand over to the Lord, the doctor who put an end to my money, the whole year/ I just don’t hand it over to the devil, because I suspect that the devil is the boss’s devil”. In these layers of blood-paint on the blotter of Querozian criticism – the incendiary kerosene of the insurgents – we can still see André's own filmmaking permeating, in About of embira, the ties of the aforementioned filmic layers of essayistic criticism. And it is in this fabric that the author will choose the films that will make the dialectic of criticism itself.

There are ten films that portray political scenes from Latin America, to which are added two foreign films (one Korean, one French), which raise acute and reverberating questions in the Latin American panorama. In the process of choosing, of sifting, the author occasionally falls into the voyeurism behind the cameras “in the hands” of a Glauber Rocha or the motivating Argentine filmography; other times, almost by chance, he lets himself be chosen by the film itself, as if he were one of those extras apparently forgotten in a corner of the scene, who suddenly, as if on impulse, decides to ask about the false movements of cinema and politics.

He explains these twists of fate with a commonplace nod to the reader: “On a very hot afternoon in January, I received a list of recommendations for the most recent films on political activism in a WhatsApp group.” He went to check it out! I imagine that this list included at least four of the films analyzed in this book, whose question about the popular struggle is left open. They are: Democracy in vertigo, by Petra Costa; Argentina, 1985, by Santiago Mitre; Bacurau, by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles; and The Night of 12 Years, by Álvaro Brechner, inspired by the book Memories of the dungeon, by Mauricio Rosencof and Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro.

3.

It doesn’t matter so much how all the film choices for this book were woven, but rather the framework of reflections that the films provide. In this sense, André Queiroz positions himself as a kind of “disturber of the status quo”, as Edward Said said referring to the public role of the intellectual, always “breaking down the stereotypes and reductive categories that so limit human thought and communication”[iii].

It is with this inspiration and exploration that the author of Araguaia present problematizes, in the four films mentioned above, and in all the essays that make up the book, some questions about capital violence. He asks, “[…] after all, what is a coup d’état for?”, “How would such a repressive apparatus be financed?”, “[…] why is a documentary film made?”. What the author is saying is that cinema is not simply a well-behaved way of observing things, a piece of the set-up games.

If he wants to film the class struggle, the director and all those involved in the production chain of a film (including the viewers) need to be active actors, much more than spectators who are oblivious to the day-to-day struggles. They will necessarily have to roll up their sleeves and join the fight tooth and nail. It is at this moment, ripped from the hours, that André, if necessary, tears the skin of the films he watches, to re-inscribe them in other films. And he does so by changing the focus, the notes, the chords, the lyrics, bringing to the surface the felt absence, as in a tango by Artur Piazzolla.

It is an invitation to watch as if it were the first time, or at least to review the films with dialectical expansions, complementing their themes and rereading everyday events through them. This can already be seen in the deepening of a journey sui generis that wants to capture everything poetically-literarily-filmically-theatrically, in an eagerness to incessantly re-establish the difficult task of seeing what is behind the events, unveiling them.

These essays, unfolded through the artist's feelings and lenses, have a maturity rarely seen, as they are also aloof from the spotlight of the market for goods and services, displayed on the shelves of capital accumulation. It could be said that what accumulates here are the questions, the calm construction of a work that requires a thorough examination. But let's take a leap – since in cinema everything is cut and edited – to access the way in which André unfolds the focus of the images.

4.

“Valentina offers us drawings from her childhood, drawings from today. Valentina says she discovered how to use brushes in an experiment with texture and shapes. Perhaps they serve to print the score of gestures on the white of the canvas. Valentina’s hand borders landscapes, cuts out characters, processes smells and contrasts under the burst of the photograph. […] Sometimes, the camera shakes, bounces, unframes and makes the image grainy. At other times, the camera captures the void as if it had been forgotten while the things of the world happen with indifference to it. It makes it seem that the painting will always be small, if the affront of reality is the case, touched by the primacy of absence that does not allow itself to be represented. If not only the remains – that flow. If not for what is left – and is not translated. If not for what is missing – and insists on not returning. Valentina opens boxes, unties knots, blind deaf mutes, as if turning over the earth striated by the bad weather that disabled crops and destinations; discovers passwords, letters that never were, half-words […]”

André Queiroz thus begins to unravel the spool of Argüello's house, a film by Valentina Llorens. It is not yet known whether the bodies are in the trunk or not, and the butlers’ scent cannot be smelled yet, but André’s nose senses something. In a fragment of the third layer of the text, he reveals the clue: “I would like to highlight the importance of thinking about the limits of representation, and in this case, this limit is presented in the paradox: the representation of absence, of the disappeared, of erased traces.”

Let’s rewind the tape until we reach fragments of the first documentary, by Petra Costa. “Petra is committed to telling the story of a fracture… Characters driven by the moods of the dungeons of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, reproducing the same slogans, the same war chants based on syllogisms with changed valence… but it’s too late. She knows it. Did no one else sense it? Did none of the political figures, committed to the tasks of administering the bureaucratic machine of the State and at the head of the Executive Branch for over a decade, foresee it? Did none of the agents formulating economic policies for the transformation and dynamization of the domestic investment sector based on the vigorous recovery of local business through the benefits of public capital transfers and tax incentives, suspect it?”

Let's now continue in fast motion, moving forward and backwards through the tape to access a fragment of the essay on Argentina, 1985, where the connections of André Queiroz's argument can be felt even more.

“The film forgets or makes us forget these essential political actors that a government in power would not swallow up and regulate in its institutional liturgy. And this is so true that we can categorically state that in the film Argentine, 1985 what has completely disappeared are the organized popular classes and considerable segments of the middle sectors of the Argentine population, protagonists (who were and are) in the struggles not only against the dictatorship of the military in the service of international and local monopoly interests; but also in the daily and extremely intense episodes of the class struggle against the plundering of the elementary and fundamental rights of the Argentine people during the constitutional governments”.

It is clear that, contrary to the critics who praise the film and the Brazilian viewers who dream of a “justice” similar to the Argentine one and leave the cinema as if they were carrying an urban survival manual that will soon remain quietly on the living room table, André asks about his absence. He studies, studies and studies Argentina, goes into bars, consults geographical maps, reads all the subtext and footnotes of history, listens to music and narratives, goes through archives for 12 uninterrupted hours for days, for months (until these archives proliferate in his dreams), talks to passersby and historical activists and then realizes how much Solanas is missing, how much Solanas makes/made us see.

5.

There are things that don't fit into a film. André knows how difficult it is to create a film script. Not only because of the constant work of separating the wheat from the chaff in order to achieve a good editing, but also because, in film, one is always dealing with the cut. And working with the cut means taking something out of the visible. It turns out that what is taken out of the visible in the case of the films analyzed by André is very symptomatic, since it is what is most dear to the political-social process in Latin America.

The game of scenes can be better understood if we think, for example, about the field of education vis-à-vis history and cultural memory. And when it comes to Brazilian politics, these circumstances remind me of a comment by Marilena Chaui about Fernando Henrique Cardoso's defense of Dependency Theory during his time at Cebrap. Marilena Chaui emphasizes that it is a theory based on foreign capital, the national bourgeoisie and the State. The working class is largely absent, excluded from consideration.

André Queiroz uses a similar line of reasoning when thinking about Latin American cinema. He is indignant and denounces what deliberately disappears, because he knows, like Gramsci in the 1920s, that “Capitalism today means disorganization, ruin, permanent disorder. There is no other way out for the productive force other than the autonomous organization of the working class, whether in the domain of industry or in that of the State” and furthermore “The law of property is stronger than any difficult feeling of philanthropy. The hunger of the poor, of those who produce the wealth of others, is not a crime in a society that recognizes the principle of private property as sacred and inviolable: that bosses close factories, reduce workers’ wages, this is not outside the law that regulates capitalist society”.[iv]

André Queiroz also knows that the movie theater, the setting for Marighella's arrest scene[v] in the 1960s of the Brazilian dictatorship, should not be a place of oblivion. André realizes that a cinema like Kuhle Wampe by Bertold Brecht from 1933, embarking for exile, does not forget what is important. For him, “the agonizing words of Paulo Martins, voice actor and character of Glauber Rocha in this 1967 film (Terra em transe), seem to cross the invisible and refractory walls of time that, from time to time, reappear in the forms of farce or tragedy”.

In the essay on the future of what we are under the wire of the illusion of development, André Queiroz collects the pieces of the factory and asks himself, for how long? And he answers, in the interweaving of literature and cinema, once, twice, three times, tirelessly: “There will be no ways to start over and accept. There will be no deserts to be crossed on nimble legs. There will be no fat and heavy memory to lance the future that will come from the beginning. Better to dismantle the peaceful dream of those who oppress. Pedro seems to know this. After all, it is his final gesture. Not to follow a front of uncertainty and defeat. Not to head for the mountains in a car borrowed on a direct connection. Pedro returns to the factory. He goes to see his companions. He knows that he cannot remain alone. Pedro will organize the fight – which will never end, being his challenge and task”.

The hard and resistant gears, the bitter sugar of daily struggles, the aftermath of life… Anyway…

“Wasn’t that what a Zé Lins do Rego suggests to us in his novels about the Sugar Cane Cycle? That the story of Carlinhos, grandson of Zé Paulino, owner of many sugar mills and of all worlds, would be one thing; and Zé Lins will tell us about the downfall of this world of large-scale monoculture, and will make us follow the scares and assaults of time as the production process turns into cyclical crises; […] In another thread, emerging in the silence of the jackals’ night, Ricardo, a brat from the bagasse mill, will set out, one who no longer plays and only works; he weaves, unweaves, climbs and descends, an oppressed Sisyphus producing with his calloused hands the cashmere of the landlord, or the “surplus of his prosperity” in exchange for an unhealthy piece of meat from Ceará. Zé Lins tells us that Ricardo is heading to Recife, not to land law schools, but to the hot plate of the lathes and the outskirts, and Ricardo, a reader of Paulo Freire's work, will gradually see and realize that his luck is a result of the glory of those who trample on him, and Ricardo will realize that his cold lunchbox of salmonella is the vegan extravagance that obstructs, shrivels and tramples on him. And Ricardo will organize himself. He will look for others in the neighborhood who, like him, suffer from the iron heel of the ordinance. He will not be satisfied with meritocratic indicators alone. He will not want to be highlighted by overtime and participation bonuses with the right to the imposture of having his face on the cheap print of employee of the month. And Ricardo will organize himself. Zé Lins do Rego tells us that soon the men of the platoon will come to take Ricardo and his companions for a very long infamous summer season in Fernando de Noronha. Not to a resort for temperate visits to corals and hammerhead sharks. But to the maximum security prison where the rats and the cold float will not leave in peace to contemplate a type of “such danger”. Zé Lins also tells us this other half of the fabric of the stories. Like someone who moves pieces and destabilizes certainties of readiness”.

6.

Class struggle and dissent are distributed here in a refrain. Let us return to André Queiroz's questions: after all, what is the purpose of a coup d'état? How is such a repressive apparatus financed? Why is a documentary film made? To the first question he makes the following comment:

“Why deploy armed troops from inside the barracks if not to deploy tricks to create a certain state of class struggle?! To reorganize the balance of payments, impose a profit regime on companies at the cost of enormous sacrifices imposed on workers – repressing their right to organize, persecuting popular leaders, prohibiting strikes and assemblies, reorganizing the legislative corpus even within the framework of liberal constitutionality.”

What is the cost, what is the burden? “Where would the money needed for land, air and sea transport, maintenance of a highly specialized strategic and technological command body, troop mobilization, food and ammunition costs, installation of communication equipment in the most diverse vehicles, including the use of its organic ideologists spread across the most diverse means of advertising and propaganda, which, euphemistically, they call themselves media, come from? Who would pay for this undue bill? If we follow the letter of the military document of the Defense Council, it says, in a laconic but very punctual way, that the operational costs are guaranteed in Article 7 of Decree No. 2770/75.”

And why then is cinema made? “Is it to fill the screen with accounts of the recent political historical past – providing us with facts and agents, collective and individual subjects, guidelines and programs of struggle, or the complex web of contradictory contexts through which men travel? Is it to counter a certain hegemonic narrative chained in a massive way by the propaganda oligopolies (the so-called media) in an attempt to promote manufactured consciousnesses?”

André Queiroz's dialectical critique reopens the imposture of disappearances and reveals the flanks of lived life in the film. The writings in hand encourage us to repopulate, to reoccupy the accents of all instances of the film with what has disappeared, exiled. Solano's cinema, Andrea's cinema, expands in the day-to-day struggles in the repulsion of the oligarchic assault and the deaths announced by the genocidaires.

The missing people, the interpretative key to the essays, is a common key to entering doors that are so often broken down with boots. In this obstinacy of dialogue, the notes on the political-pedagogical role of dissent are obvious. It is no coincidence that this theme appears in one of the last essays before the appendices (which are also pearls of film criticism). It is about seeing dissent as opening paths, as taking a position, as building a less evanescent and, in fact, more palpable horizon, even if it does not completely shed (since there is room for desire) the garments of the dreamlike.

Not a dissent to justify irreconcilable compromises, not a dissent to justify the tiresome positions that speciously insist on excluding those who disagree. In fact, the role of dissent here is to expose the threshold of everything. And this whole is reflected in the tenuous working relationships, which do not recognize what is missing. And what is missing is written in black and white by André Queiroz in his native language; what is missing from the unpalatable banquet is that which resists and is persecuted in its actions. Dissent as resistance to the erasure of history, of memory. El Pueblo, cultural present, without mincing words.

With a camera of images in his mind, a load of ideas in his hands, André Queiroz films, refilms, writes, rewrites another thought, with the warm andreoqueiroza image-ideas.

Gaspar Paz is a professor in the Department of Art and Music Theory at the Federal University of Espírito Santo. Author of the book Interpretations of artistic languages ​​in Gerd Bornheim (edufes).

Reference


Andrew Queiroz. Cinema and class struggle in Latin America. Florianópolis, Insular, 2024, 228 pages.


[I] Essay published in the book Brazilian art and philosophy. Open Space Gerd Bornheim. Organized by Rosa Dias, Gaspar Paz and Ana Lucia de Oliveira. Rio de Janeiro: UAPÊ, 2007.

[ii] Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Self-portrait and other chronicles. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2018, p. 87.

[iii] Edward Said. Representations of the intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures. Translation by Milton Hatoum. New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 10.

[iv] Antony Gramsci. The Leaders and the Masses: Writings from 1921 to 1926. Selection and presentation by Gianni Fresu, translated by Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Rita Coutinho. New York: Routledge, 2023, p. 69.

[v] Carlos Marighella. Call to the Brazilian people and other writings. Organized by Vladimir Safatle. São Paulo: Ubu, 2019.


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