By LUIS FERNANDO NOVOA GARZON*
Bacurau is a version captured by Kleber Mendonça in his transversal and reverse reading of Brazil.
When the film was released in 2019, what became clear in those years of Bolsonarism rising to the core of the Brazilian State was the feeling of releasing a muffled cry, a small victory on the screens anticipating greater victories ahead. Bacurau was an aesthetic revenge, a vengeful narrative, (“venging book”, as Euclides da Cunha defined the singular meaning of the sertões).
Having confirmed and even overcome many of the dystopian scenarios presented in the film, what endures and deserves revisiting is the bravery of understanding the need to resist. Faced with the Faustian pact of our elites handing over water, territories and peoples to the unrestricted enjoyment of whoever can take it and pay the most, there is the nightjar, the gloomy bird, there is Bacurau embodied as a village on standby. With Bacurau, the film, we see and see ourselves as peripheral, skeptical country folk in the face of formal processes of representation and therefore hopeful about the collective knowledge experienced and retained in memory
In the penultimate feature film directed by Kleber Mendonça, there is, therefore, a solution woven into the retina, made from a braid of memories. At this present moment in which the worst predictions are rapidly expiring, the “Bacurau mode” can serve as an antidote to the credulous and passive attitudes that point exclusively to institutional and legal solutions.
Given the policy of forgetting that continues unofficially, there is no room for any type of silencing. Yes, Bacurau It was a cry and it is very timely to repeat it, because on the one hand we are still here, on the other hand, the agents of necropolitics are on our trail and keep a price on our heads.
If it is the fragmentation of what was lived and remembered that you want, here are versions of other realities, as complete as possible. It does not matter if the version presented is each person's favorite, what matters is being able to discuss and experiment with options, perspectives and paths. Bacurau It is a version captured by Kleber Mendonça in his transversal and reverse reading of Brazil.
Likewise, in Sound around (2012), his first feature film, the plot deduces the city from the sugar mill, the landed wealth of the landowners. In the besieged metropolis, the sparse urbanized areas are privatized and gentrified. That street, under speculative and militia attack on Boa Viagem beach, is a simulacrum of the sugar mill and the rivers of blood that moved its mills.
The enduring association between expansionist propositions and “culture war” discourses reveals how much public spaces and projections have been emptied and how much we need to sketch, plot, remember and foresee. Bacurau is an addition to the possible repertoire of rebellion that figuratively incubates a Brazilian popular revolution.
Whether science fiction or allegorical documentary, it all begins with the procession of Dona Carmelita, matriarch of the collective memory resocialized in the ritual. But faced with the exterminating angel who acts in a voracious genocidal game, all forces are gathered to stop the total war. The film thus reveals and makes perceptible the paradoxes of our history, of our (de)formation. There are inseparable archaic-modern layers, a palimpsest of stifled, unresolved revolts, of the many things we could be.
We are not facing the dehydration of a supposed rule of law or a detachment from “democratic values”. The constitutive formula for the resumption of “lost positions” in commercial, geopolitical and cultural terms announced at the headquarters of the Empire (for example the MAGA motto – Make America Great Again) – and which is generalized to its borders – is the use of “open standards” so that particularisms can be “freely” standardized as the general interest.
Therefore, it is necessary to give way to utopian and literally palpable imaginaries, in which affections and sensibilities matter. The fact that order is “in fact” does not mean that it is valid. Who said that what is there will be?
That is why songs and sounds play such a crucial role in Kleber Mendonça’s filmography. According to José Miguel Wisnik (2012), the Brazilian folk songbook of the XNUMXth century was “the place that best encompassed Brazil. […] there […] Brazilian life could be recognized in songs […] that gave us this feeling […] of participating in the same experience”.
Well, if we are capable of singing about ourselves, then we exist; then we can sing about what we can be. In these songs, which are both extinct and resurgent at the same time, “a concentrated listening of what is being said and sung and of the relationship between what is being said and the music itself” is required, as Artur Nestrovski says (2012).
They are evocations, in the interpretation of Fernando Barros e Silva, of “traces of a strange civilization” that “divers will come to explore”, paraphrasing Chico Buarque’s song “Futuros amantes” (1993): “someone will hear the song that sank into the sea” (BARROS E SILVA, 2009, p. 27).
Em Bacurau, the opening song, says what precedes and proceeds from the popular uprising that was filmed: “I’m going to write a love song to record on a flying saucer. A song telling her everything, that I’m still alone, in love. To launch into outer space. My passion will shine at night in the sky of a small town” (Caetano Veloso, 1969).
In an unidentified place, disputing the meanings of what has been lived is disputing the meanings of what can be lived. The past is an endless repertoire of shortcuts to other futures that must be stirred up in the weaving of conversations, relationships, flashes of dreams and nightmares. By reinterpreting the interpretations of Canudos, the mother ship of almost all our utopias, Joana Barros proposes “rewriting this history and this tradition of struggle and life not through a straight avenue, but through small paths in which we lose ourselves and learn to find ourselves collectively” (2019, p. 33).
The paths dotted by Kleber Mendonça in Bacurau therefore they continue to be an invitation to trace and retrace our history.
*Luis Fernando Novoa Garzon is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rondônia.
References
THE END OF THE SONG: Luiz Tatit, Zé Miguel Wisnik and Arthur Nestrovski. Directed by Daniel Augusto. Brazil: 2012. São Paulo: Selo Sesc SP, 2012. [DVD]. (76 min.), color.
BARROS, Joana. Development and narratives of backwardness: the campaign against Canudos and the paths of resistance. In BARROS, JOANA, PRIETO Gustavo, MONTEIRO, Caio (orgs). Sertão, Sertões: rethinking contradictions. Rebuilding paths. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019
BARROS E SILVA, Fernando. The end of the song (around the last Chico). handsaw, Sao Paulo, v. 3, 2009.
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