Secondly, Black God, White Devil does not imply a struggle between God and the Devil as much as it does a struggle against both God and the Devil, both of which, while in opposition, are together in the land of the sun. Sebastião who represents the ‘Black God’ is a syncretic figure combining historical, messianic figures of the Brazilian Northeast. At the same time he recalls the millenarian Luso-Brazilian myth of Sebastião, the Portuguese king. The film’s Sebastião is the self-proclaimed disciple of Saint George, who promises apocalyptic transformation, in which evil will be swept away and replaced by goodness. Corisco who is the ‘White Devil‘ is in many ways similar to Sebastião. Their voice is the same and both prophesy that “the sertão will become the sea, the sea sertão ” and use the violence as a means of fulfilling the prophecy. But differences also exist between them. Whereas Sebastião is introduced at the end of a vertical pan from the sky down, the camera movement associated with Corisco is a horizontal pan of the sertão. In opposition to Sebastião’s elevated space, Monte Santo, Corisco inhabits the ‘lower world’ of the sertão. In addition, Manuel wanders erroneously between both poles-Sebastião/Corisco, God/Devil-in search of salvation. But in the end, his salvation can come only through his own struggle. “The land belongs to man/ Not to God nor to the Devil.” This is the meaning of the film’s final sequences. As Manuel runs across the sertão, free from the opposing, mystifying forces of Good and Evil, the camera follows him in a long aerial track before cutting abruptly to the sea. However, it is the camera that reaches the sea, that proposes the solution to the metaphysical problem raised by the film’s conflict (Rocha 1984: 128-135).
In comparison with Black God, White Devil, Central Station presents a romanticized sertão, an “idealized return to the roots,” a “territory of conciliation and pacification,’ offering a ‘melancholic and conciliatory ‘happy ending’ that is distant from Rocha’s utopian gesture toward transcendences and freedom” (Johnson 2005: 34). It recounts Dora and Josué’s trip from the city of Rio to the north-eastern sertão in search of lost relationships and remains of solidarity. Many elements show an attempt to approach the Cinema Novo style: the trance of Dora in the procession, with the camera spinning around her; the ‘tourism’ through the same Glauberian sertão; and the fiction recounted in a documentary way. However, we do not find the violent and unbearable sertão of Cinema Novo, but the innocent, rough but pure sertão, where violence is internalized. This occurs when Josué encounters the first family, who remain silent and hostile, but peaceful, until it is revealed that they are not his real family. The film seems to suggest that the sertão’s monotonous, crude poverty and its mute violence is more bearable than the urban inferno of Rio’s central station, with its bandits and gangs (Bentes 2003: 125-126). Furthermore, the urban/rural dichotomy is emphasized by lighting techniques; Rio is characterized by darkness and low-key artificial lightning, as exemplified in the scene when Dora first take Josué to her gloomy apartment, in marked contrast to the use of natural light or candlelight in the setting of the sertão, scenes repeatedly shot at sunrise or sundown (Dennison, Shaw 2007: 110). The depiction of Josué’s family in the film is clearly allegorical: the film offers hope for the Brazilian people and their culture in a society that is post-dictatorship, post-Collor and post-collapse of the film industry. The father symbolizes many things: the old way of life in the North East, the future, and perhaps more poignantly, the nation itself (Dennison, Shaw 2004: 212-213).
Moreover, the journey back home corresponds to the retrieval of Christian beliefs, reiterated in the film’s iconography. The Virgin Mary with Child is a central element in the configuration of home in Central Station. Icons of the Madonna with the baby Jesus abound in the decoration of houses in both Rio and the backlands, and serve as counterpoints to Josué’s expressions of yearning for his mother. Alone in the station after Ana’s death, he kneels before an altar of the Virgin Mary with Child. His prayers are answered when he meets his surrogate mother, Dora, who helps him fulfill his destiny (Nagib 2007: 43-44). The movie also shows the religiosity of the masses and is filled with fascinating examples of the rich North Eastern traditions of popular Catholicism. These include the sequences featuring the Virgin Mary of the Candlelight parade, in which the only light is from millions of candles. Salles describes this celebration as bringing ‘the possibility of a ray of light in the darkness which in a way is emblematic of cinema itself’, marking a clear difference between the depiction of popular Catholicism in his film and the old Cinema Novo way of seeing religion as the opium of the people (Dennison, Shaw 2004: 214).
To conclude, in both movies sertão represents different ways of coming to terms with the realities of Brazil. Black God, White Devil uses the sertão as the most obvious expression of social divisions, conflict and discord, whereas Central station associates this setting with a sense of community, the accommodation of opposites and the elimination of differences (Oricchio 2003: 153). Central Station replaces the bleak mood of Cinema Novo classic, which became synonymous with the ‘aesthetics of hunger’, with optimism and possibility for the inhabitants of the North-East. In Central Station the search for the father, corresponds on a metalinguistic level, to the quest for the North-Eastern fatherland lost in the past of Cinema Novo (Dennison, Shaw 2007: 110-111).
References:
Bentes, Ivana (2003), ‘The sertão and the favela in contemporary Brazilian film’, in the New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd) pp. 120-137.
Dennison, Stephanie; Shaw, Lisa (2004), Popular cinema in Brazil, 1930-2001 (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press).
Dennison, Stephanie; Shaw, Lisa (2007), Brazilian National Cinema (London, New York: Routledge).
Hollyman, Burnes Saint Patrick (1983), Glauber Rocha and The Cinema Novo in Brazil: Study of His Critical Writings and Films (New York, London: Garland Publishing, Inc.).
Johnson, Randal (2005), ‘TV Globo, the MPA, and Contemporary Brazilian Cinema’, in Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity, ed. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc.) pp.11-38.
Nagib, Lúcia (2007), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd).
Oricchio Zanin Luiz (2003), ‘The sertão in the Brazilian imaginary at the end of the millennium’ in the New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd), pp. 139-156.
Rocha, Glauber (1964), Black God, White Devil.
Rocha, Glauber (1984), ‘Apocalypse and Resurrection’ in Cinema Novo x 5, ed. Randal Johnson (Texas: University of Texas Press), pp. 118-161.
Salles, Walter (1998), Central Station.