THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED (Kim Bartley, Donnacha O’Briain, 2003)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s president in 1998, his support largely coming from the poor—80% of the population. In 2002, a coup very briefly deposed him. At the time, Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain were in Caracas, shooting a documentary about Chávez for British television. Their film deconstructs the coup and its aftermath—and electrifyingly records history unfolding on-the-spot, outside and inside the presidential palace.
     Chávez aimed to free Venezuela from free-market policies imposed on it by the U.S. He did not, however, nationalize Venezuela’s oil. This industry already was state-owned, but run for private benefit by executives Chávez would replace. The poor had gotten nothing by Venezuela’s being the world’s fourth largest oil supplier.
     Six private TV stations opposed the state-run one, questioning Chávez’s motives, sanity, sexual orientation. Once in power, “re-establishing democracy,” the opposition silenced the state-run station and dissolved the National Electoral Board, Supreme Court, National Assembly. With his presidential return following the coup’s collapse, Chávez addressed opponents: “Oppose me: fine! But you must not oppose the Constitution.”
     Moneyed interests, backed by military elite (at least encouraged by the U.S.), organized a citizens’ march on the presidential palace to effect the coup. Snipers shot at Chávez supporters, but private media edited footage so it appeared that return fire was aimed at the opposition march that in fact had been safely diverted. Police went on a shooting rampage against Chávez supporters, further bloodying the streets.
     Chávez, held captive, refused to resign; but the media/government lied, saying he had resigned. Chávez cabinet members communicated the truth to the international community, which got the message back to Venezuela by cable TV. The people rose up, pressuring the return of the president they had elected, whom only a referendum could constitutionally replace.

THE NANNY (Marco Bellocchio, 1999)

“Solitude will destroy you,” the doctor tells his patient; but, without his knowing it, solitude is destroying the doctor, much as the divide between classes, playing out in clashes between demonstrators and the military in the streets, threatens to undo Italy. Into his posh home, Mori, this psychiatrist, brings Annetta, a peasant, separating her from her own infant with her imprisoned radical lover to nurse his baby, which his wife, Vittoria, has all but rejected soon after giving birth.
     Vittoria abandons her child when she feels inadequate to the task of being a mother; Annetta violates her contract with Mori, sneaking away to nurse her own child so as not to abandon her heart’s ties.
     Rome. It is shortly after the turn of the century; but Marco Bellocchio, inspired by a Luigi Pirandello story, hasn’t concocted a period piece. Rather, La balia unfolds as a dream of the past. When Mori seeks a wet nurse, a flock of young women in the street move into the frame from screen-right, as if appearing from nowhere. Indoors, they are lined up for inspection, naked from the waist up. His colleague warns Mori that Annetta looks pale, but her selection is a foregone conclusion; Mori had earlier noticed her from his carriage—part of a rush of street images suggesting the new art of cinema.
     Bellocchio’s visually very dark film seems to emanate from some collective unconscious as characters grope to understand themselves and others. Mori runs a sanatorium for mentally ill women, making little headway; but patriarchic society liberally imposes the designation “mentally ill” on women the better to manage and control things.
     The doctor comes alive when he starts teaching Annetta how to read. This also leads to his becoming a loving father to his child.

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN (George O. Nichols, 1912)

Robert Browning penned the greatest Victorian poem, The Ring and the Book. Spouse Elizabeth’s The Cry of the Children, for all its social import, is maudlin. The worst part of the same-titled independent U.S. film consists of title cards excerpting it.
     A couple and their three daughters, except for Alice, the youngest, work in a mill, and the scenes of labor in the mill, especially those of child labor, nearly match scenes from Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in pitting small humanity against huge, vast, efficient machines. (Newsreel clips blend in with the fiction.) These gritty scenes of constant drudgery are surpassed by the end of the day, when faces and forms, bereft of all spark of energy, file out. The mill owner, leisured because the work of others keep him rich, has a childless marriage. This couple try coaxing Alice’s parents to sell them Alice; the working-class couple refuses, with Alice herself recoiling. But a strike at the mill, pursuing a living wage, breaks the family and the mother’s health; when she is too sick to return to work after the workers’ defeat, Alice’s mother is replaced at the mill by little Alice herself. Now Alice is willing to be adopted by the barren owner and wife, but they reject her as damaged goods now that labor has crushed her attractive spirit. Besides, the owner’s wife has already filled the empty space in her heart with a pet poodle. Child labor claims another life; Alice dies on the factory floor.
     Before the factory takes her down, Alice happily skips about a bit too much.
     But this is an important film—and yet another disclosure of material that made its way, in however transmuted a form, into Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK (Aki Kaurismäki, 2006)

Concluding a trilogy begun with Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002), but in this case characterized by only ontological humor, Aki Kaurismäki’s quietly lovely, intense Laitakaupungin valot essays a nighttime security guard whose location sums up his existence: the nearby harbor, his loneliness and aspiration; the patch of businesses he guards, including a high-end jeweler’s, his reality: a constant reminder that Helsinki has more or less left him behind. Koistinen’s nemesis is a businessman who hates him for being a “loser” and targets him, in a complicated scheme of hoodwinking that involves a kept blonde femme fatale, to take the fall for the theft of the jewels that he engineers. This malicious individual is a cosmic force executing the unfairness of capitalism.
     Koistinen is the only character to appear in full; the businessman and the blonde lack depth, are various shades of colorlessness. A sign of some universal concern is a black boy who adopts an abused, abandoned dog and sympathetically watches over Koistinen. His eyes tell us he knows the score despite his youth. A woman who operates a coffee stand represents a possible future of assuaged loneliness for our hero. The film ends in a closeup of their joined hands.
     Kaurismäki’s most Bressonian film, with a touch of Dreyer and Cocteau besides, conjoins Koistinen’s immense loneliness with an accounting of silence punctuated by enhanced material sounds. Although he is kept from being a killer by his too-weak arm and knife, Koistinen reminded me of the young man at the center of Bresson’s L’argent (1983).
     A wonderful shot shows wind animating the ground, immediately followed, in prison, of our first glimpse of a sociable Koistinen.
     What courage and nobility are often called upon to keep hope alive!

CITY OF GOD (Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund, 2002)

A colorful and telling canvas about slum life in Rio de Janeiro, City of God (Cidade de Deus) has wasted little time in becoming an authentic classic of Brazilian cinema. The film admits numerous young characters, most of them distributed among different gangs over time, and a convoluted plot admitting elements of drug dealing, vicious criminal acts, and personal revenge. With nearly awesome flexibility and assurance, the directors of the film, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, have shaken their material loose from what has become its obligatory Italian neorealist formulation. Theirs is what might be called “fingertip cinema,” light, quick, as urgent as a rush of blood.

The City of God’s name encapsulates the hope of Rio’s impoverished blacks for social and economic ascension. It is a housing project, built in the 1960s, that by the 1980s has evolved into a swarming cesspool of teenaged (and younger) street violence. What had been a society’s dumping-ground for Rio’s homeless thus exposes, over time, a nation’s genuine lack of concern for its poor: the provision of shelter that politicians can self-flatteringly point to, but not the jobs that might sustain families and move their lots up the socioeconomic ladder. Like West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961), City of God focuses on kids apart from their homes and parents—here, though, not as a sentimental device aimed at flattering young audiences, but as an expressive device exposing the hopelessness of youth. The generational handoff in this film isn’t from parents to offspring but from older gang to younger gang, as the former provides a model for upcoming gangs to emulate. Irony compounds irony, then, as kids cut themselves loose and are left to their own devices.

The film in particular follows two boys: Li’l Ze, who becomes a callous and powerful gangster, and Busca-Pé, too frail and sensitive for such a fate, who becomes a photographer—a variation on the Hollywood cliché wherein one kid becomes a gangster and the other a cop or a priest. It is Busca-Pé who narrates the film, his narrative moving from the 1980s back in time to the 1960s and 1970s. The film comes full circle, ending where it began, suggesting a Shakespearean instance of the cyclical nature of violence. One boy gets to photograph the other’s death—an act that may trigger his upward mobility in a society where violence sells. Busca-Pé notes that he won’t have to worry about Li’l Ze’s killing him anymore, but he will still have to worry about the police. Irony compounds irony compounds irony.

What a grab-bag of stylistic influences this film admits, with all of these coming from U.S. movies of the past fifteen years. The narration suggests Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), and the wrap-around structure, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994); other moments show the influence of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999). Yet the film proceeds at such a rapid and assured pace that none of the borrowings separate out. Moreover, the film’s greatest coup, which goes well beyond considerations of style, owes its conception and force to silent Soviet cinema, in particular, Pudovkin. Early on, a very quick series of three shots notes the identical triangular roofs of the dismally tan attached units in the housing project; a little later, the camera pans to impress on us again this monotonous (let’s call it) building-scape. In subsequent shots, gang activity and warfare are shown in the streets against the backdrop of this building-scape. Thus associatively arises the film’s most potent and valuable, and original, idea, conveyed purely through visual means and montage: that a major impetus for the children’s violence pitting gang against gang is their overwhelming need to individuate themselves in a setting and a society that daily tries to crush them in a crucible of undifferentiated existence. From the outside, that is, our perspective, we see the mimesis, the extent to which their confrontations make the boys mirror images of one another, gang indististinguishable from gang. But City of God enables us to “view” the matter from the inside out, from the perspective of these children’s raw feelings of sameness and nothingness. This deepens our sense of their sense of futility, of lacking past and future and therefore cramming their whole existence into the present. Violence makes them feel different and alive, and this analysis blows the cliché of gang membership proceeding from a desire “to belong” out of the heavens. City of God allows us to see what we thought we had understood in a fresh, new and, for me, utterly convincing way—and one that doesn’t slander loving black parents and families in the way that the “old” explanation does.

The film, which was written by Bráulio Mantovani, is based on a novel by Paulo Lins; its exciting use of handheld camera, sweltering color cinematography by César Charlone, and rat-tat-tat cutting by Daniel Rezende erase all sense of literary origin. City of God is a film on the edge.

It has won a host of international prizes, as best film and for Meirelles (for whatever reason, the one credited director), the cinematographer and the editor.

It is not to be missed—and no one need do so fearing the film’s level of violence. The filmmakers show very little violence, actually, but convey fully, as artists, the violent nature of the lives these kids lead. Indeed, this film pretty well nails shut the coffin in which lie all the lies about how realism requires violence in order to convey violence—the tack only of either incompetents or those who mask their own insidious love of violence behind the empty proposition, “Well, I’m only showing you the way things are.” Artists show us without showing us because they understand that to be violent themselves defeats their implicit pleas against violence. I can’t begin to list the number of recent, especially U.S. films whose vicious, violent nature this film exposes and shames by its more subtle and infinitely more powerful method. Watching City of God is not an experience to dread; it’s a work of art—and that makes it something to celebrate.