THE 100 GREATEST FILMS FROM AFRICA, LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, PART II

This list, which includes the 100 greatest films I have seen from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean through 2007, proceeds chronologically. However, for a given year the films are given in order of preference. This is the second half of the list. Some films included on this list are more extensively considered in essays categorized as film reviews elsewhere on my blogsite.

1992 (cont’d)
54. QUARTIER MOZART. From Cameroon, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s dazzling Quartier Mozart is set betwixt farce and fable. In Yaounde’s working-class district, various characters, both real and magical, interact. We begin with a schoolgirl called Queen of the ’Hood. “Which would you rather be?” she asks the local witch, “a man or a woman?” The sorceress responds, “A woman in the body of a man.” To help Queen learn Mozart’s gender politics, the witch zaps her into the husky body of Myguy, and, for a little impish humor, zaps herself into the form of a folk figure, Panka, who is able to divest men of their penises with a handshake. All this is fabulous; but underpinning the transformations are the indeterminate relations in a post-colonial society—a context that the name of the neighborhood, in addition to the French language that we listen to, underscores. (DeGaulle’s likeness also pops up on a woman’s tee-shirt.)
     Mad Dog, the bull-headed, pot-bellied police chief, is an arresting figure. Tied to the ways of the tribal past, he wields power in the present, mimicking oppressive colonial rule while enforcing a continuity of male domination. He is laughably, though dangerously, irresponsible. Since taking a second wife, he fears his first wife, whom he wants nowhere near his bed but still around so that he can keep a watchful eye on her. (He has her tossed out, though, when the television set turns up missing.) How she has changed, he laments! It never occurs to Mad Dog that this “change” in her is his doing, a result of the second marriage that the local Catholic priest—like Mad Dog, wishing above all to retain authority—blesses. Meanwhile, Mad Dog has hired Panka to bolster his authority at home, and Queen, as Myguy, dates Saturday, Mad Dog’s independent young daughter.

1993
55. SANKOFA. From Ghana, Burkina Faso, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States, Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima’s bewitching Sankofa begins with African drumbeats and chants as the camera curves around the bronze sculpture of a bare-breasted mother looking down at the child who is cleaving to her: Mother Africa and her offspring, who will be stolen, put in shackles, taken away. An invocation follows: Lingering Spirit of the Dead, rise up and possess your Bird of Passage. With cunning irony, the lamentable past of enslavement shall impress itself in this instance on a chic visitor wrapped up entirely in herself: Mona, an African-American fashion model in Cape Coast, Ghana (because once a major slave post, now sacred ground), on a shoot. Sankofa, in Akan, means “We must go back and reclaim our past, to know how we arrived at where we are, so we can move forward.”
     Gerima’s film, then, resembles A Christmas Carol, where the “offender,” instead of failing to heed the humanity of others (and losing his own in the process), has failed to embrace her heritage and therefore is stuck in an inhuman routine that passes for accomplishment. White Americans are loath to imagine the depth of anguish and deprivation that slavery wrought, reducing it to a mere past fact that black Americans should simply “get over”; but black Americans also have been loath to embrace the knowledge of this horrific experience, and their not doing so extends their victimization. Sankofa will remedy this in Mona’s case by sending her back in time so that she, as Shola, can experience her own slavery on a southern plantation. (When she is captured, she screams: “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Mona! I’m not a black African!”) The majority of this film is with Shola—a letter away from Shoah—in hell.

56. THE MAN BY THE SHORE. Haitian-born Raoul Peck’s L’homme sur les quais draws upon Peck’s memories, as an eight-year-old, of a frightening, brutal place, dictator François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier’s Haiti, where Peck’s father was arrested twice and many others contesting the government were murdered. The better to emphasize childhood vulnerability, Peck has chosen an eight-year-old girl as his protagonist. Through Sarah, we take in an environment of daily political terror. Showing one of Duvalier’s vicious Tontons Macoutes, Janvier, terrorizing Sarah, Oeck declines to sensationalize the scene and thus brutalize the character himself. Peck grasps he cannot credibly show how regimes dehumanize ordinary people if he himself dehumanizes the characters who represent these people.
     We watch Sarah hide a pistol on her person, knowing that her father has taught her how to use it. She and her older sister ride to the shore on their bicycles, luring Janvier to mess with them. When Janvier pulls her sister by the hair in order to rape her, Sarah retaliates, her armed hand in closeup. There is a click; no discharge. A second click; discharge. Janvier falls to the ground dead. The camera moves screen-left to record the stunned girls’ escape; the camera now moves screen-right, revealing that someone else, Gracieux, the girls’ godfather, whom Janvier earlier sexually brutalized with his thick stick, delivered the lethal shot. Gracieux, as gentle as Sarah and nearly as innocent, has been perverted into becoming a killer, as Sarah herself might have been. The passage is structured so that not a drop of glee rises in our hearts over Janvier’s end. Implicitly punctuating the scene are the realizations that we bring to it: this death’s human cost to the innocent; the fact that Duvalier will promptly replace Janvier with another of his soulless army of Tontons Macoutes.

1994
57. EL JARDÍN DEL EDÉN. On the Mexico-U.S. border, Tijuana is the principal setting for The Garden of Eden. Written by sister Beatriz and herself, María Novaro’s masterpiece follows a range of lives there.
     A corrugated steel fence spans the area, attempting to keep Mexicans out of the U.S. Baleen whales, though, migrate into Pacific Baja waters, causing a Mexican child to wonder at such unfettered liberty. Frank, who is obsessed with the graceful gray creatures, relocated there long ago. His sister, Jane, visits; a would-be writer, she hopes to delve into Mexico. Jane’s friend Elizabeth is also there, trying to reconnect with her Mexican roots. Jane romances Felipe, an impoverished farmer making continual attempts to get to the U.S., “the other side.” Felipe has befriended Julián, a teenaged shutterbug, whose mother, Serena, recently widowed, has come with her children to start afresh. Only Frank seems past hope.
     Felipe returns from the other side beaten to a pulp by thugs policing the barrier. The sight of Felipe in bed takes Julián back to the scene of his father’s death at hospital.
     Felipe’s friendly habit of referring to Julián as “brother” misleads Jane, who sneaks both of them across the border in the trunk of her car. (Language and cultural confusions between characters abound in this film.) When the boy turns up missing, Jane and Felipe search for him, wandering into a funeral. There, Jane infuriates Felipe by contributing money to the pot to help get the body back to Mexico for burial. Felipe: “We may be poor, but we don’t need your charity!”
     Novaro surveys the border with documentary attention both sweeping and minute. Her eye achieves great visual poetry, especially in long shots.
     “Garden of Eden” turns out to be less than Paradise. It’s a motel on the other side.

58. THE SILENCES OF THE PALACE. We were taught one rule: Silence.
     The death of an ex-bey who may have been her father brings Alia to the palace where she grew up in the 1950s. Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli creates a masterful blend of Alia’s own flashback and a more generalized and objective reclamation of the recent past touching on Alia’s life. Intermittently returning to the present ten years later, the film’s richly detailed, solemnly paced backward look focuses on young Alia and her mother, Khedija, one of the poor downstairs servants and a favorite, because of her beauty, in upstairs bedrooms. Eventually both Khedija and infant die in childbirth, orphaning Alia, who never learns her father’s identity.
     A Twainian coincidence of births, Alia’s and the palace’s legitimate daughter, who is her playmate, has given Alia a precarious existence in two worlds. Khedija (Amel Hedhili, superb) worries that her teenaged daughter, as she has been, will be impressed into sexual slavery. Tlatli portrays the supportive community of women downstairs, but something else exists above. When Khedija is serving dinner, she is rebuked—an index of female discontent: fallout from the interest that she generates in the princely men. Upstairs women dare not speak against their husbands, so they take everything out on Khedija—an arrangement the men, guilty cowards, tolerate. For women, it appears, silence is the rule both downstairs and up.
     With withering irony all this occurs as nationalists beyond palace walls rattle the French colonial cage for independence. The bey, we are told, gets flak from both sides: from the French, for listening to nationalists; from nationalists, for ceding to the French. Someone observes, “There are no strong men in the palace anymore.”
     Samt el qusur views the oppression of women with profound melancholy. Tlatli is an Arab woman.

1996
59. ARISTOTLE’S PLOT. From Zimbabwe, Cameroon and France, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Le complot d’Aristote, a satirical gangster film indebted to early Godard, turns on a plea for post-colonialist Africa to come more fully into its own.
     Gangsters gathered at the Cinema Africa bug out their eyes and brains on nonstop-action movies. Their leader is called Cinéma. Cinéma’s opponent is Cinéaste, who wants African films to liberate itself from cultural neocolonialism and express African cultures, not Hollywood, not U.S. popular culture. Hilariously, the government investigates the reappearance of characters who have already died in previous movies. Clearly, films can usurp, redirect and reinvent reality—a capability all the more dangerous when the “reality” that films serve is of the Hollywood sort, where the values, implicit or explicit, almost invariably support economic exploitation of the Third World.
     Can Africa emerge from the shadow that made it “the dark continent” in Western eyes?
     The scene of crossing railroad tracks that frames Aristotle’s Plot equally suggests African possibilities and African confusion, with the “civilized” Western view of Africa opposing a homegrown African view or, even, impulse toward such a view, inhibiting the latter from achieving clarity.
     Bekolo’s film resists the narrative tyranny that charts a plot for complacent audiences. (Thus the film opposes complacency.) Things unfold in Aristotle’s Plot in a haphazard way. This tack accomplishes two seemingly contradictory things. One, it reflects the uncertain, ambiguous nature of existence, the absence in our day of clear definitions and categorical boundaries. At the same time, it contests rigidly plotted films in their seduction of viewers into accepting the most outrageous confections as reality. Like Godard’s, Bekolo’s filmmaking, indebted to Brecht, is much about distancing one’s materials in order to spur thought. Nothing ingratiates in his method, nor is there much that is likeable about this brilliant film.

1997
60. WHO THE HELL IS JULIETTE? Argentinian-born Carlos Marcovich made ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? in Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S. He co-wrote (with Carlos Cuarón), produced, directed, (gorgeously) cinematographed, and edited the film, which fuses documentary and scripted material. Yuliet Ortega is an ebullient 16-year-old Havana prostitute. The film runs parallel/intersecting courses, attending also to Fabiola Quíroz, a Mexican model with whom Yuliet appeared in one of Marcovich’s music videos—in a sense, Yuliet’s alternative, better existence, but one hiding considerable misfortune. Marcovich records remarks by both and family members of theirs. Film scholar Brooke Jacobson has perfectly described the film as being all the more heartrending for being so lightly presented.
     The film opens with a visual tweak: Yuliet’s wiping the camera that’s filming her as she addresses us. The gesture passes quickly; it may be meaningless—or does it show that Yuliet wants us to see her clearly? It possibly confirms Yuliet’s reality (for her, for us) by confirming ours. Its poignancy perhaps derives from its emotional location between both possibilities. Rather than interpenetrating, documentary and fiction in this film exist where either may be the other or is on the verge of becoming the other, underscoring the elusiveness of Yuliet’s reality even as she discloses specific facts about herself, such as her family’s abandonment fifteen years earlier by her father, an electrician whom we meet in New Jersey. (Yuliet’s younger brother, without irony, explains that their father is “slow in returning.”) Yuliet’s mother committed suicide. Yuliet’s phone call to her father brandishes anger and hatred that her brother describes as hiding love. The father and others very differently recount his killing the family dog after it attacked one of his sons. He feels that his wife abandoned him by not coming along with him.
     Reality: unresolved, ambiguous, complex.

61. ROSTOV-LUANDA. Raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako returned to his homeland, Mauritania, in 1980. Nearly twenty years later, he proceeds on a quest, which Rostov-Luanda documents. The adventurous road takes him much farther south, to Angola, also on Africa’s western (Atlantic) coast. Accompanied by his elderly former nanny and armed with an old photograph, Sissako is in search of a friend, Afonso Baribanga, a fellow student in Moscow whom he hasn’t seen in seventeen years. Rostov-Luanda is about the people Sissako meets along the way—and about Africa. Since gaining its independence from Portugal in 1975 (fifteen years after Mauritania had gained its independence from France), Angola has been beseiged by civil war. Sissako’s journey is into the heart of uncertainty—the difficult reality that replaced Africa’s post-colonial hopes.
     Outside Biker’s, a brasserie, a man looks at Sissako’s class photograph, shrugs and declares, “One should speak only of what one knows for certain.” If Sissako had been missing, the man says while facing Sissako, then he could be sure, because Sissako has that kind of face. Inside, Sissako interviews cook and customers. One of the latter also was in Soviet Moscow. His conclusion: If he weren’t someone else, he could be the one for whom Sissako is searching. He, too, is “lost.”
     An orphaned boy describes his war-disrupted life. He is determined not to run away from school again, not to be homeless again. A woman explains why she became a teacher. A man decries Soviet influence in Africa.
     An older man looks at the photograph, shakes his head and, referring to Baribanga, muses, “I will probably meet him someday.”
     Could be. Sissako learns that his friend is coming home, from the former East Germany.
     Part of the film’s silent broken melody is the Soviet collapse.
     Abbas Kiarostami’s “road”-influence is everywhere.

1998
62. LIFE ON EARTH. In anticipation of the Millennium, Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako contributed La vie sur terre to the 1999 French-Swiss television series L’An 2000 Vue Par . . . (The Year 2000 Seen by . . .).
     From busy, decorative Paris, on the verge of ebullient millennial celebrations, Sissako, playing himself, returns to his father’s rural Mali village to welcome the epochal event. A long tracking shot of an infinite number of cheeses in a Parisian supermarket dominates the film’s opening; thereafter, in Sokolo, life is simpler, and the year 2000 demarcates nothing new or noteworthy. One isn’t overwhelmed by nonsensical choices. Instead of the ether of consumerism, one experiences there “life on Earth.” “I’ll arrive there,” Sissako writes his father, “fresh and young.”
     A measured zoom on the intricate network of a baobob tree’s bare branches against the sky marks the shift in geography. A cyclist’s upside-down image in the river goes one way; a paddled rowboat, carrying a passenger and her bicycle, goes the other way. The human result is mathematical: stillness.
     Getting back to basics, though, isn’t all a Godsend. The one telephone, at the post office, doesn’t always connect. (“It’s hard to reach people. It’s a matter of luck.”) A local radio station is the only other technology. (A photograph of Princess Diana and Prince Charles adorns the wall.) Cameras are ancient. But the rhythm of life is set to the beating of the human heart, and the place is gorgeous beyond belief. Sissako’s film is gently satirical regarding both sides of human existence: the artificial and bourgeois; the natural and impoverished.
     A boy kicks a soccer ball up a street of sand; heads of cyclists appear above stone walls. Expectancy attaches itself to more pressing matters than the Millennium. “We’ll be harvesting soon.”

1999
63. ADWA. A nation, a people: this identity often coalesces around the memory, the history, of a monumental shared ordeal—if possible, victory. In 1996 Ethiopians celebrated the centennial of their ancestors’ defeat of the foreign army that invaded so that Italy could colonize Ethiopia. Haile Gerima decided to document the commemoration. (Gerima is currently working on a second part to this project.) The decisive Battle of Adwa is the focus of both the celebration and, hence, this film.
     There are no live-action reconstructions; Gerima made this masterpiece on a shoestring—and an Ethiopian-born artist’s soul. Having learned about the Battle of Adwa from his own father, he interviews other Ethiopians, some elderly ones whose fathers fought in it, others who provide historical, cultural and political (both geopolitical and pan-African) perspectives. He surveys the terrain leading to and at Adwa. Children keep the memory alive, making it their memory, in rich song. Above all, Gerima sets his camera on extraordinary artwork—paintings, engravings, early photographs that depict the battle and the soul of a people. Adwa is among the greatest films to absorb art treasures into their being and make these come alive, both to the eye and the soul of the viewer. Gerima has made, in effect, a spiritual documentary.
     Emperor Menelik may have seemed the hero, but it was always the people: vast numbers that gathered from distant communities to face their well-armored, well-weaponed Goliath with a stone and a sling—whatever they had. Those who had nothing took weapons from fallen Italian soldiers. Their victory grew into the sunlight of legend, inspiring movements—Pan-African; nationalist ones; the U.S. civil rights movement. In 1935 Fascism took its revenge by invading Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) on a “civilizing mission,” resulting in guerrilla resistance that made Italy’s life hell.

64. GENESIS. The world is torn asunder . . . Each devours his neighbor’s flesh.
     Although La Genèse will proceed in the Bambara language, it opens wittily with biblical text in French; France’s colonizing of Mali thus implicitly launches Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s stunning film loosely based on chapters 33-37 of the Book of Genesis. Its ancient drama, transposed to the vast Mali desert, reflects on contentious post-colonial Africa. We impute to Sissoko’s dedication, to all victims of fratricide, however, the widest possible reference.
     Everyone’s complaint is rendered suspect. Exhorting himself, Esau shouts, “[D]o not forget to take revenge.” Having returned from exile with an army, he is referring to his brother, Jacob, whom he feels robbed him of his birthright; a later flashback shows that, exaggerating hunger, Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup. Meanwhile, Jacob’s protracted mourning for son Joseph, reportedly torn apart by wild beasts, has reached ridiculous proportions, causing Jacob to ignore his other sons, who are in need of control, as well as daughter Dinah. We later learn that Joseph is in fact alive. Meanwhile, Dinah crosses camps to bed Shechem, Hamor’s son; on no apparent basis, their sex is reported as rape. No one thinks to ask Dinah, since Jacob and sons feel that the relevant issue is family honor. The sons massacre the males of Hamor’s tribe (Hamor survives in this telling), including Shechem, causing Dinah to lose her mind.
     Repeatedly Jacob is shown inside his dark tent indulging his mourning while sunlight dazzles outside; visually, the nighttime massacre thus becomes an extension of his mind-set, holding Jacob responsible. During the dark night of his soul, Jacob later does his celebrated wrestling—in this telling, with God. The final rush of reconciliations is moving beyond belief. It expresses hope for Africa.

65. THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN. Dedicated to persevering street children, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s La petite vendeuse de Soleil opens in the Senegalese city of Dakar, whose streets teem with children hustling newspapers and adults begging, selling. A merchant accuses a woman of having stolen something, and three officers, not bothering to check for the allegedly pilfered item, violently arrest her while she protests her innocence. Jailed, the woman resembles a caged animal. Has she been driven insane by the humiliation and rough treatment? She isn’t a thief but a princess, she shouts.
     The scene shifts to a village, and the juxtaposition suggests a shared destiny between the seemingly indomitable “little girl,” Sili, and Dakar’s mad woman. It’s dawn; why isn’t Sili securely at home asleep? Her mission is to find a way to earn money so her family can survive. Sili is a cripple, each step a hardship. As she reaches the highway, one other sound breaks the silence: that of a man pounding rocks into pieces, to sell for construction work. Globalization has brought construction, including workers, while locals can break up rock. This is where Sili is starting from; the mad woman may be how she ends up. In Dakar, Sili also is wrongly arrested as a thief.
     For all her apparent independence and self-sufficiency, we discover, Sili is reliant on others. She constantly requires rescuing. We speak of people not knowing their own strength. Upbeat, Sili may not yet know her own weakness.
     When she tries selling newspapers, the competition—boys—assault her. Mambéty portrays the whole competitive atmosphere as a cauldron of madness. Debased by their environment, humans become beasts or the prey of beasts. Mambéty conveys a sense of the manipulation of people’s lives by capitalistic forces originating outside the upheaved African community.

66. MUNDO GRÚA. In Argentina, the disparity between rich and poor is deepened by a global economy that impoverishes much of the middle-class and sacrifices the poor to enhance the wealth of transnational corporations. This new eco-colonialism contextualizes Pablo Trapero’s black-and-white Mundo grúa (Crane World).
     Divorced, in his forties, Rulo (Luis Margani, wonderful) does odd jobs in Buenos Aires such as selling tires and fixing trucks. Torres, a friend, gets him a job in construction operating a crane. The day that Rulo is to start work, however, he is let go in favor of a younger man, ostensibly because Rulo smokes and is fifty pounds overweight. But one wonders; in what may be a flashforward, the film opens with Torres, who is slim and fit, being fired from his construction job for not being “dressed right.” Intrusive impersonal forces, rationalized by “rules,” apparently determine employment. After Rulo is fired, shots of dormant equipment project his banishment from the work site.
     Torres secures Rulo another crane job, as an excavator in Patagonia, in the southern desert. This means leaving behind friends, mother, teenaged son Claudio, and girlfriend Adriana, whose once profitable sandwich kiosk struggles against a backdrop of prodigious construction.
     Fellow workers provide the only companionship in Rulo’s new environment. When one day food that the “bosses” are supposed to provide doesn’t arrive, in a spontaneous show of solidarity the workers refuse to work until it does. Later, their pay stops. Is the company that was bankrolling the construction pulling out? Everyone’s job evaporates. This time, static shots of abandoned equipment occupy a wasteland of vast sky and of sand composed of volcanic white shells. Each worker heads back to wherever he came from. Makeshift lives; transience.
     Trapero: “I wanted a film that was like a hidden camera filming snatches of reality.”

67. HEROD’S LAW. Herod’s Law: Fuck people over before they fuck with you.
     Luis Estrada’s brutal, brilliant film satirizes the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)’s stranglehold on Mexico’s politics and Mexican lives since the Revolution. The government succeeded in suppressing the film until adverse publicity compelled its release. The following year, the opposition candidate (National Action Party), former Coca-Cola manager Vicente Fox, was elected president.
     Mild-mannered, naive Juan Vargas, a junkyard custodian, becomes mayor of a tiny rural patch, San Pedro de los Saguaros, whose non-Spanish-speaking indigenes have already lynched a number of his predecessors. Vargas begins idealistically and compassionately, intending to bring social justice and erase poverty, but the Party official appointing him, instead of allocating funds (which are being monopolized by the expense of the upcoming election), arms Juan with a giant book of federal and state laws, to squeeze fees and taxes out of the poor, and a gun, to buttress his authority. When the madam of the local brothel resists his attempt to extort money from her, he shoots her and her bodyguard dead and moves to frame a doctor who has threatened to have him removed from office. It is in this vein that Estrada’s film continues, frequently hilariously. Vargas ends up becoming a wife-beater, killing his mentor and publicly announcing the Party’s determination to stay in power forever: business as usual.
     Some have complained about the film’s broadness and bluntness; farcical satire isn’t the worse for being unsubtle, un-Shavian.
     The accumulation of plot twists and turns suggests the depth of political corruption and social inattention during so many decades of entrenched PRI rule. Estrada overlooks little; for instance, La ley de Herodes is withering on the subject of the contribution made by Mexico’s gringo northern neighbor to the host of woes routinely visited on Mexico’s poor.

2000
68. FAAT KINÉ. Ousmane Sembène has fashioned a brilliant social comedy about three generations. Kiné (Venus Seye, spirited, poised) operates a gas station; tough at business, she is nobody’s fool. Her daughter and son have just graduated high school and, because of her sacrifices, will proceed to college, unlike her. (Kiné had wanted to be a lawyer.) Neither child’s father married Kiné, and neither helped. Indeed, one of them, Kiné’s teacher, impregnated her and then had her expelled just weeks before graduation. Disgraced, Kiné’s father attempted to burn her, but Kiné’s mother interceded, as a result of which Mommy’s scorched back became “stiff as a dead tree.” Kiné supported her family on her own, her independence a reflection of Senegal’s independence.
     There is witty, sometimes hilarious conversation amongst Kiné and two peers. (Kiné, about forty, was born about the time that Senegal became independent from France.) But always there is a serious undertone to the women’s talk. For instance, Kiné advises her friend whose spouse has multiple wives to assert herself in the bedroom by enrobing the man’s organ in a condom—this, on a continent that is ravaged by AIDS. While the film is contemporary, it is riddled with Kiné’s flashbacks. We see the event in which Mommy is burned, and in the present we constantly see Mommy’s unbending back. At a red light, a procession of traditionally garbed women, holding up baskets, walk in front of Kiné’s car after Kiné has dropped off her jean-clad daughter at school and is herself proceeding to the office. Progress: a car radio announces that national school test results are higher than ever.
     Jubilantly optimistic, the film romantically couples Kiné with a man who is not Muslim, but Catholic. They will not marry in a mosque or a church, but at City Hall.

69. THE EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION. Fifteen minutes long, the animated El octavo día de la creación belongs to a genre to which Mexican cinema lays great claim: violent fantasy-horror. (The opening credits list the master, Guillermo del Toro, as a “presenter.”) Directors Juan José Medina and Rita Basulto have imagined darkly both the Creator (who somewhat resembles del Toro!) and his creations. The animation itself, even apart from the particular form that the animation takes, reduces these to the absurd.
     The Creator’s workshop is located in a dark dungeon. The film opens, though, with the Creator seated on a throne, asleep, beseiged by a nightmare of his creation thus far. The image is enrobed in black—the film’s predominant “color.” There’s a faint, sickly olive hue to the Creator’s clay “flesh,” and his hair, red and wiry, is agitated, as if possessed of a life of its own—like the beast that attacks him in his dream. In the dungeon he appears to be facing us; but when the shot is brought into focus, we see him standing in front of a mirror, engrossed by the swollen, grotesque thing—himself—in whose image he will create something new to immortalize himself. Bronze and browns give the dungeon a harsh metallic appearance; it is a loveless place. The Creator’s clay hand scoops out and squeezes an oozing glob of clay. On one level, the Creator represents the filmmakers; the glob, this film of theirs before it took shape.
     Amidst the creepy-crawlies with which the workshop is infested, the Creator’s new creation comes to horrific life, a creature such as Goya might have imagined, and leads the creepy-crawlies in attacking the Creator, chaining him up, his manacled arms outstretched. Grunting/sighing throughout, the Creator no longer emits even a wisp of a sound.

70. ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS. At the outset of Parisian Nabil Ayouch’s Moroccan film about chemkaras in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest port, we hear the voice of fifteen-year-old Ali, one of these children, being interviewed for a television news segment. Why is he living on the street? He overheard his mother say she would sell his eyes. Translation: A prostitute, his mother holds nothing dear and would sell anything. What is his dream? To be a sailor, because he loves the sea.
     Ali leads a foursome—Kwita, Omar and Boubker are younger than he—that has broken away from Casablanca’s main street gang, led by Dib. (Except for Dib, the kids are all played by current or former chemkaras.) The much larger group disputes the smaller group’s independence—some historical irony here—and in a confrontation one of their members hurls a stone at Ali, killing him. Dib punishes the stone-thrower by disfiguring him. (Most of the boys are permanently scarred. Real scars, these.)
     After his death, his followers absorb Ali’s dream. Thus they deny the precariousness of their own lives that Ali’s death manifests. One of the boys approaches Ali’s mother to apprise her of her son’s death, but, with a john, she throws the child out before he can deliver the news. This establishes a pattern in the film—everything interruptus. In scene after scene, some urgent intention fails to come to fruition. This pattern reflects on the capacity of the boys’ dreams to translate into reality.
     On occasion a billboard, other signs and wall graffiti come to squiggly, merry life, courtesy of animator Sylvie Leonard. Another animated passage encapsulates the dream of Ali’s that his comrades have adopted to give it a permanent home. Such childish imaginings are piercing counterpoint to the harshness of these children’s lives.

71. LA PERDICIÓN DE LOS HOMBRES. “You tried to kill him with his own pickax. That’s not right. You can’t kill a man with his belongings.”
     Arturo Ripstein’s tart, absurdist comedy, appropriately filmed in black and white, begins with two men beating a third to death in the dirt. Who’s to blame? Listen to the lyrics of a popular song: “Damn women are the ruination of men.” Only, no woman has anything to do with the crime! The three men are members of the Black Gammoners, an amateur baseball team. The victim, however hard he practices, never succeeds, either in the field or up at bat. When he strikes out with bases loaded, deciding the game in favor of the Corn on the Cobs, his two teammates make good on their threat to dispatch him to that great diamond in the sky. One of them steals their former teammate’s snakeskin boots after snapping the corpse’s ankles. The victim is in no position to protest the call; but one of his “widows” recognizes the boots and whacks the wearer’s ankles with a baseball bat before making the poor guy lick her feet. After exacting this bit of justice from him, she allows the schmuck to hobble away.
     The deceased’s two girlfriends fight over his remains at the police station; a coin toss resolves the conflict. All in all, the gals come off seeming fairer than the guys.
     Ripstein began as an apprentice to Luis Buñuel during the shoot of The Exterminating Angel (see 1962). His target in The Ruination of Men is schoolboy competitiveness in grown men (baseball is a perfect occasion for blurring the age difference), which ends here in murder. Fans of the humor in Ionesco’s plays and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot should apply to this hilarious film at once.

2001
72. A.B.C. AFRICA. See 100 Greatest Asian Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 84.

73. MAIDS. From Renata Melo’s play and filmmaker interviews, Domésticas focuses on five domestics in São Paulo. (There are three million in Brazil.) Following a pseudo-documentary prologue suggesting it’s better not to have been born than to be a domestic, an upbeat montage shows different maids performing various chores. (One is atop a sloped roof adjusting a TV antenna.) One of these is Quitéria, whom Zefa constantly refers to new jobs because Quitéria keeps getting fired. The vase slipped out of her hands, she explains; but a quick insert shows that she smashed the thing. Why? Quitéria owns no such family heirloom; her family history does, however, include slavery, which her employment echoes. Quitéria shrugs as she explains the loss of another job: “The vacuum cleaner got stuck on the dog’s nose.” This seemingly cheerful young woman is seething with revolt. At film’s end, a(n actual?) domestic rages over all she has endured from employers, giving vent to feelings most domestics suppress. Early on, though, Quitéria seems to belong to a lighthearted comedy. Spirited co-directors Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival never show an employer.
     The black-and-white prologue introduces Quitéria. It consists of an overhead shot of her looking up—an ironical posture—and talking directly into the camera. Thereafter, similar black-and-white inserts of housemaids punctuate the film, encapsulating a more reflective mood than her busy life otherwise affords each woman. We also see the women at home. Each one harbors a dream; all hope for a better life. Their lives cross in employer kitchens and on the bus taking them from and to work—motion without progress. Relevant: Quitéria’s mother was also a domestic.
     There is a stunning montage of domestic complaints (“They think we are all thieves”) and another of actual domestics, smiling, each doubtless making the best of things.

74. BOLIVIA. In grainy black and white, its style journalistic-cinéma-vérité, Adrián Caetano’s nonprofessionally cast Bolivia is sharply observant, finely expressive. It follows Freddy, a Bolivian father of four, who has separated from wife and family to work in Buenos Aires. He is a short order cook in a cheap restaurant. His pay is commensurate with the illegal status of his labor, and he must contend with Argentine bigotry at a foreign interloper. With Argentina reeling from its own economic recession, Freddy is seen as belonging to an army of “niggers” who are taking away jobs from locals. He is in fact keeping prices on the menu affordable.
     Freddy had had a job at home, as a field worker, but, in its war on drugs, the U.S. scorched Bolivia’s fields indiscriminately, casting adrift the already impoverished in even worse poverty. Once hungry, Freddy’s family is now starving. Meanwhile, at night, the police stop and harass Freddy on the street, he is treated with contempt by everyone except Rosa, the waitress from Paraguay, and Enrique (Enrique Liporache, superb), the frazzled restaurant owner who is exploiting them, and it’s impossible to see how Freddy’s meager pay and tips allow for anything to be sent home. Poverty isn’t sentimentalized here, nor is it ignored to wax lyrical over the dignity to which the poor rise. Bolivia is about an ordinary human being who is simply doing his best. It recalls a fine West German film also set in a restaurant: Jan Schütte’s Dragon Chow (Drachenfutter, 1987), about an illegal Pakistani immigrant in Hamburg.
     Freddy epitomizes the plight of his poor country, which is under the seige of globalization. Bolivia’s current fate also predicts that of the marginally better-off Argentina. Caetano’s film functions as a companion-piece to an Argentinian one: Pablo Trapero’s Mundo grúa (see 1999).

75. NADA. Carla Pérez is lonely in Havana. A postal worker, Carla contests the doldrums and habitual power outages at home by appropriating scores of letters, and reading and revising them before sending them on their way, to help out, she maintains, the people involved. (What Carla reads, we see imagined in priceless vignettes.) The bane of her existence is her supervisor, who suspects something is going on. This woman cuts the difference between terrorist and by-the-book bureaucrat.
     Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti’s Nada+—the U.S. has adopted the title that Spain has given the Cuban film—is fresh, exhilarating and full of visual invention, in the manner of Buster Keaton’s 1924 Sherlock Jr. (to which Carla’s boyfriend’s flight from trouble on a bicycle in traffic pays homage) and Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1966). Its black-and-white images are sparked by bits of color (an orange pencil, a yellow flower, etc.) until one late, full-color shot stuns with sudden richness and beauty. Bits of animation also (delightfully) figure in, as well as speed-motion and unexpected sounds in lieu of certain voices, but the actors themselves, along with Malberti, supply most of the film’s slapstick comedy. Satirizing bureaucracy, Nothing (or Nothing More) variously makes us laugh hard and thoughtfully chuckle.
     Carla and a younger co-worker become girlfriend and boyfriend some time into the film. Life is looking up! However, Carla’s Castrotted parents, exiles in Miami (where else?), have entered her name into the lottery for an exit visa, and Carla eventually must decide whether to remain in Cuba or leave. She explains to her boyfiend, “I’ve never won anything before.” Malberti toys with our heart a bit (a minor lapse), but when Carla makes the right decision, choosing love, solidarity and some measure of self-determination over the alternatives, whatever your politics you cheer.
     I hope!

76. LIFE AND DEBT. Life and Debt is a tale of two Jamaicas. There is the bright, shiny Jamaica that caters to tourists. The other Jamaica consists of struggling Jamaicans. With narration by Jamaica Kincaid, based on her book A Small Place (actually, about Antigua), Stephanie Black’s documentary takes a look at the tiny nation that gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962, its economic difficulties ever deepened by the ruthless manipulation of its economy by outside corporations and financial institutions.
     A focus is the relationship between Jamaica and the International Monetary Fund as, beginning with the 1970s world economic crisis, Jamaica borrowed heavily, at exhorbitant interest, in order to stay afloat after other banks refused to help. The film reminds us that the IMF, set up by Allied nations anticipating victory in 1944, was intended to rebuild Europe, not help the Third World, which came into existence later as states gained independence from colonial empires. Like the separate World Bank, the IMF additionally imposed economic restrictions, all to local detriment, in exchange for absolutely necessary financial assistance.
     One segment addresses Jamaica’s once growing dairy industry, which is being squeezed out of existence in compliance with U.S. demands through the agency of the Inter-American Development Bank. The ideology of an “integrated global economy” will not permit Jamaican farming, including dairy farming, to feed Jamaicans and sustain local farmers. “Lower trade barriers,” this tiny country is instructed by the Megabeast; “compete with us on a level playing field.” Cheap imported powdered milk, subsidized 130% by the U.S. government (as one farmer puts it, “Nobody can compete with that”), has replaced actual milk in Jamaica. Recurrent images of wholesome milk in streams, discarded by mandate, are heartrending; or is it the fact behind them, that children are drinking powder & water instead?

2002
77. JAPÓN. The protagonist of Carlos Reygadas’s nonprofessionally cast film has forsaken his home in Mexico City to venture into Mexico’s remote rural interior: a mountainously walled canyon. A painter in his fifties and lame, “El Hombre”—the Man—plans on committing suicide.
     Reygadas erases sound to create a dreamlike silence and to emphasize the man’s inwardness, his romance with thoughts of death. At times the film is agonizingly slow. Near the end it achieves a perfect stasis: bereft of onward movement, a scene of huddled humanity—a “dead” spot that ironically signals the man’s rebirth. He has had sex with a very old, humane person, Ascencion, whose naked body, like his, is long past the firmness and suppleness of youth. This sexual intercourse that renews the man’s appetite for life represents the impact made on him by all the villagers. Mired in abstraction (the devil of our time, Reygadas feels), the painter had forgotten to take into account the antidote to his pessimism and despair, humanity, which therefore catches him unawares.
     But at a terrible price. The film’s completion is a stunning traveling shot that records an inevitable yet unexpected catastrophe. Down from the mountains a cart carries a slew of villagers while the reborn stranger remains above. The death he brought with him is now projected onto people who combinately helped rescue him. Reygadas’s 16 mm. camera, achieving an awesome sense of gravity correlative to humankind’s burden of mortal awareness, bears down on pebbled railroad tracks at lightning speed. Again and again it swoops around 360º, picking up on or off the tracks this villager’s corpse or that: the upshot of both the stranger’s suicidal self-involvement and humanity’s interconnectedness, for even rural Mexico is not immune to the currents of discontent the cosmopolitan stranger represents. Hence the title: Japan.

78. WAITING FOR HAPPINESS. From Mauritania, Abderrahmane Sissako’s gorgeous Heremakono is set in the coastal village of Nouadhibou, where the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean meet. Seventeen-year-old Abdallah, visiting en route to Russia, is based on Sissako, who was born in Mauritania, grew up in Mali, lived for ten years in Moscow, where he studied film, and now lives in Paris. The housing in Nouadhibou is makeshift, as in Mali, where it is called heremakono, meaning, waiting for happiness. Theoretically, everyone there is in transit, en route to a happier life.
     Happiness sometimes never comes. The film details a disastrous, tragic emigration. Maata, an older villager, long ago rejected the one opportunity he had to leave Nouadhibou with a friend. His mysterious death in the dunes ends a repressed, bitterly regretful life. Another man has been found dead, perhaps washed up on shore—perhaps someone, like Abdallah, bound for Europe. Meanwhile, Paris-educated Abdallah cannot even speak his homeland’s language, Hassaniya.
     Melancholy: the persistent lapping sound of the ocean surrounding the isolated village. Backwardness: the momentousness of Maata’s purchase of an electric light bulb, which he tries mightily to wire up so that it works. For all this, there is something admirable about the villagers’ simple, largely uncomplaining lives.
     A woman plays the kora, a lute-like West African folk instrument; a young girl listens and mimics. Such traditional education will likely limit the child’s prospects to the village; at the same time, it implicitly protests the invading karaoke music and, beyond that, the intrusion of French influence that, more than forty years after Mauritania’s independence from French West Africa, globalization has revived.
     Abdallah’s experience at travel, hence exile, is shown by the proficiency with which he packs his suitcase before leaving his mother, with exceptionally little fuss from either of them.

79. FROM THE OTHER SIDE. From Belgium and France, Chantal Äkerman’s documentary De l’autre côté opens in Agua Prieta with interviews of Mexicans still mourning the loss of loved ones who managed to get across la frontera only to perish in the States. A coin toss determined which twin brother would cross the Mexico-U.S. border; now the burden of one boy’s life is his brother’s death. He recounts the fate of a group of undocumented aliens, all freezing and starving in the Arizona desert into which the design of impenetrable fences had forced them, each of whom died—part of a scattered, cumulative holocaust.
     Äkerman’s Mexican border towns are parched, hazily sunlit, largely inert. Fixed, level long shots create placid scenes of dusty road and still sky. Sparse activity is correlative to the socioeconomic doldrums, the listless poverty, that provoke illegal immigration across the border despite the risk.
     Repeated shots of the seemingly endless tall, striated metal fence prohibiting Mexican flight along that stretch find deceptive beauty. Behind this appearance, though, lurks an attitude of hostility, racism, and a casual U.S. disregard for human life.
     Arizona ranchers have put up a sign: “Stop the Crime Wave. Our Property and Environment [I]s Being Trashed by Invaders.” With rifles and magnums, these vigilantes hunt down Mexican immigrants and transport them to the Mexican side of the border. “At times,” Äkerman has explained, “the ranchers have held more than four hundred people on their land, treating them like prisoners of war.”
     The ranchers identify the Mexicans with “filth.” This fear of impurity and contagion bears for Äkerman, a Jewish European, a terrible echo.
     The film is difficult. We end up investigating its silences and landscapes to glean shards of truth. Because Äkerman’s film never manipulates us, its constant accompaniment is our beating human heart.

80. NDEYSAAN. According to Senegalese filmmaker Mansour Sora Wade, Ndeysaan reflects his position that “belief [in the supernatural] and pragmatism co-exist naturally.” Contemporary Africa will drown if it drifts too far from its tribal past.
     In a pre-colonial coastal village, waves of fog roll in, keeping fishermen out of the water and thus imperiling the village’s existence. Two best friends love the same woman, beauteous, dignified Maxoye, who loves only Mbanick. Mbanick is the son of the village marabount. In a trance, Mbanick fells the tree under which his father is buried, carving a canoe from the trunk, taking it to sea, disappearing into the heart of the fog. When he emerges, it is with a treasure: the countless fish that he caught. Mbanick now not only has Maxoye but everyone’s respect and gratitude for conquering the fog and saving the village. One night, at sea, Yatma, jealous, kills his friend, whose dying vow promises revenge. Maxoye, pregnant with Mbanick’s son, marries Yatma, knowing he murdered her beloved. The “price of forgiveness” is that theirs will be an unconsummated union and Yatma will have to raise his victim’s son, also named Mbanick. While Maxoye eventually relents and the couple have a child of their own, the sea exacts its own price. In effect, the sea’s forgiveness requires the forfeit of all our lives—and the tale’s survival.
     As the tree falls in slow motion, villagers appear as a procession of phantoms—ghosts of the past, but also the ghosts the villagers will one day be.
     Analytical and gorgeous, rigorous and haunting, Ndeysaan is narrated by an old man, the son of a griot. He prophesies the end of the African oral folk tradition. At the same time, the film itself underscores cinema’s capacity to keep the past, tradition, and hope alive.

81. BUS 174. Sandro do Nascimento never met his father. When he was six, robbers stabbed his hardworking mother to death before his eyes. On his own, Sandro survived the “unsolved” Candelária Massacre, in which probably off-duty police officers opened fire on homeless children in a makeshift outdoor shelter in front of a church. Thus Sandro lost a number of friends—another family. He robbed, to survive and to support a cocaine habit. Imprisoned in a filthy, teemingly overcrowded juvenile detention facility, the adolescent boy was starved and beaten. On June 12, 2000, armed with a gun loaded with a few bullets, Sandro hijacked a city bus and held its passengers hostage. At 18, he was one homeless youth who would be “invisible” no longer. Televised, the standoff between him and the police became a ratings hit, lasting a few hours. In camera view, Sandro’s life was foolproof against police assassination. Eventually, though, he left his safety zone, with one hostage in tow. Out of camera range, intending to shoot Sandro, the police are likely the ones who shot and killed his young hostage instead. The police had done what they were supposed to do: catch Sandro do Nascimento alive. However, in the police wagon en route to the station, they suffocated him. Rio de Janeiro rejoiced when Sandro’s murderers were acquitted at trial.
     José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s Brazilian documentary begins with an aerial shot traversing water, shore, moneyed mansions and, on the other side of a hill, Rocinha, a teemingly overcrowded, vast favela—the juxtaposition of rich and poor, in a single sweeping shot. The bus footage is woven into contextualizing interviews, including the film’s zenith, in photographic negative a passage about other detainees in Sandro’s prison—a “hell-hole,” one guard calls it.
     Ônibus 174 makes the invisible visible.

82. CITY OF GOD. Built in the 1960s, “Cidade de Deus” is a housing project that has evolved into a swarming cesspool of youth violence. What had been society’s dumping-ground for Rio de Janeiro’s black homeless has thus exposed over time Brazil’s lack of concern for its poor: a provision of shelter that politicians can point to, but not the jobs that might sustain families and improve their lot. Gangs have replaced family, with established ones providing a model for ever younger, more violent upcoming ones to emulate.
     Fingertip cinema, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s film is light, quick, urgent as a rush of blood—MTV, with a social slant. It follows two boys: Li’l Ze, who becomes a callous gangster, and Busca-Pé, frail and sensitive, who becomes a photographer. Moving from the 1980s back in time, Busca-Pé narrates; the film comes full circle, ending where it began. One boy gets to photograph the other’s death, perhaps triggering his upward mobility in a society where violence sells (and in which newspaper photos bear no indication of a photographer’s race). Wryly, Busca-Pé notes that he won’t have to worry anymore about Li’l Ze’s killing him but he will still have to worry about the police.
     Stylistic contributors include U.S. films of the previous fifteen years. More decisive to the film’s quality, though, is the influence of Pudovkin. Early on, a series of three quick shots notes the identical triangular roofs of the drably tan attached units in the housing project; later, gang activity unfolds against the backdrop of this building-scape. Thus arises an idea conveyed through visual means and montage: that a major impetus for the children’s gang violence is their overwhelming need to individuate themselves in an environment that daily tries to crush their spirit in a crucible of undifferentiated existence.

2003
83. THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED. 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.

84. THE PASSION OF MARIA ELENA. Benefitting from scripted interventions, sociologist Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez’s La pasión de María Elena portrays a woman, her parents, their community.
     María Elena Durán Morales is a divorced Rarámuri who, after the death of her 3-year-old son, Jorge, moves with son Luis from rural Rejogochi to a city in Chihuahua, Mexico, to find work and because her village is now haunted by memories of her dead child, the victim of a hit-and-run. The driver was Spanish Mexican.
     María Elena has a Rarámuri trial, the purpose of which isn’t punishment but communal harmony: admission of guilt, forgiveness, reconciliation. At trial, the driver, Marisela, tearfully confessed and María Elena forgave her. At her official mestizo trial, though, Marisela denied having anything to do with Jorge’s death; “white justice” acquitted her. A Human Rights Commission attorney naively seeks to correct a doctored police diagram of the accident that helped exonerate Marisela. But the matter is never resolved; Mexico’s justice system isn’t attuned to the rights and grievances of poor, dark-skinned indigents.
     María Elena’s pasión is not simply a grieving mother’s pursuit of justice; it is her spiritual dimension, spiritual resourcefulness. Visitations in which Jorge is flying hold out hope for María Elena that her deceased son will be reborn in another child’s body. After giving birth to a new son, María Elena says it has been easier to bring Jorge back from the dead than to secure justice from white people.
     Subtle time-lapse photography assists in portraying one of María Elena’s visions, in which clouds pass over mountains that begin in sunlight and darken to dusk—intimations of spirit. By contrast, the city’s flat appearance and traffic noise suggest spiritual deprivation.
     Situated betwixt reportage/observation and poetic fiction, Rodríguez’s film shows a mother’s passion for renewing her life-giving, life-affirming role.

2004
85. MOOLAADÉ. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 100.

86. DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE. See 100 Greatest German, etc., Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 98.

87. TROPIC OF CANCER. A stark examination of post-NAFTA Mexico, Tropico de cancer considers how hard some people must work just to survive.
     Charco Cercado is a small village. The parched region may once have yielded silver and gold, but the mines have long since been exhausted. Villagers illegally trap animals, including canaries, and sell them at roadside to tourists, who stuff them deep into trunks of cars to escape customs detection. These affluent passers-through pay little for a hideous amount of work. Meanwhile, the adjacent road is busy with commercial trucks: ironic counterpoint to the struggling black market—legal sales that will eventually fill corporate pockets with inexhaustible silver and gold.
     The process of the capture and bagging of snakes is meticulously observed. At home a trapper’s wife skins a snake and dries the skin. Racks of skins will be part of the makeshift roadside bazaar at film’s end. In Mexico, incidentally, selling protected animals is punishable by up to nine years in prison and a $200,000 fine.
     Earsplittlingly cacophonous birds are released into the desert. Who would buy such noisy creatures?
     Children check countless traps—monotonous, necessary work. Father and son go off together in the afternoon, passing under a barb-wire fence to hunt rodents. The boy’s slingshot fells a rat. Cut to the big outdoor pot in which the mother cooks and seasons that night’s dinner: rat stew.
     The suspenseful closing long shot, at roadside, encapsulates the precariousness of these people’s lives, how survival may depend on a sale. A car slows down; as the seller approaches the driver, the car speeds up and drives off. And the trucks keep rolling by.
     Eugenio Polgovsky wrote, directed, digitally videographed, and edited this powerful documentary. A kid in his twenties born in Mexico City, Polgovsky is the future of cinema.

88. THE NIGHT OF TRUTH. “We are of the same clay. We have endured the same nightmare. . . . Your pain is my pain.”
     Burkina Faso’s first feature by a woman, Fanta Régina Nacro’s La nuit de la vérité is a fable of the attempted reconciliation between opposing sides in a fictitious just-ended ten years’ West African civil war. A nighttime celebration shared by government Nayaks and Bonande rebels instances the classical motif of the “failed feast”; burdened by memories of the conflict, including of war atrocities, “war” erupts anew. Confessing an atrocity he committed against the President’s child, the rebel leader explains, “War opens up our souls, and demons drive their way in.” Tied above an open pit, the man is roasted to a crisp. More demons—more evidence that a peace treaty can punctuate a war but not erase it.
     Nacro employs an artillery of Brechtian distancing techniques that at first gives the film a stilted, stagy appearance. Nacro doesn’t want her film to wash over us; we are snapped to analytic attention. By degrees, however, the film adds emotional force to its brilliant intellectual clarity as Nacro draws her material out of its distanced domain into a startling naturalism. Nacro’s first procedure encourages our thoughtful understanding; her second, our humane engagement.
     Nacro is an ironist. The film’s opening long shot tweaks Monet; but it is a procession of souls—presumably enjoined Bonandes and Nayaks—whose reflection we see in the water below rather than the Impressionist’s luxuriant Nature. But are these reconciled beings or ghosts of the war dead? The President later gets over his wife’s murder disconcertingly easily; is there more blood to pay? There’s a “happy” schoolroom conclusion that relegates the war to the nation’s past; but isn’t this punctured by the film’s ironical procedure?

89. YESTERDAY. HIV/AIDS has spawned more bad, sentimental movies than any other category of sickness—and two wonderful movies: A.B.C. Africa (see 2001) and Yesterday. While the former is a documentary, the latter is fictional—an attempt to humanize the statistics. White South African writer-director Darrell James Roodt focuses on a single couple in a rural Zulu village; John works in the mines in Johannesburg, though, staying away much of the year. Yet this pair provides a window onto the vast African AIDS pandemic. Beauteously cinematographed by Michael Brierley (he and Roodt orchestrate light to suggest hauntingly the passing of life), this spare film encompasses a full draught of the human tragedy involved.
     The protagonist is Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo, marvelous), an illiterate young woman who, feeling ill, takes two dauntingly long foot-journeys, along with her daughter, Beauty, to see a doctor at the nearest clinic; both times she is turned away and told to return in a week’s time because of the number of patients the place serves. Finally, a blood test reveals the problem. Alone, Yesterday makes another long journey, by bus, to inform John, who beats her, unable to face the truth. Soon, though, he succumbs to the illness, wastes away and dies under his wife’s committed care in the “hospital” that she has built outside the village—ignorant about AIDS, their neighbors do not wish them to remain there—because the actual hospital is too crowded to admit him. “Beauty?” John asks as he wanes. “No,” his wife answers at his bedside. “It is Yesterday.”
     According to Roodt, his is “a film about the heart and mind of an ordinary person trying to survive against an extraordinary circumstance.” Yesterday hopes to live long enough to see her daughter, unlike her, start school. After all, tomorrow is Beauty’s day.

90. SALVADOR ALLENDE. We’ve all read accounts arguing that Allende’s administration created such economic chaos as demanded the military coup of September 11, 1973. However, Chilean exile Patricio Guzmán’s documentary is as much about himself as about Allende. Visiting his homeland, Guzmán explores what drew his heart to Allende and stiffened his spine against those who deposed him.
     Salvador Allende begins powerfully—with Guzmán. We watch his hands carefully go through Allende’s effects (wallet, watch, etc.); the camera slowly approaches broken eyeglasses ensconced in a museum case—a record of violence (“suicide,” the Pinochet regime reported). During Pinochet’s rule, “[t]housands of Chileans were assassinated or tortured.” This is the one time that a film’s opening has moved me to tears.
     Guzmán delves into the past—Allende’s childhood in Valparaiso: old photographs; an elderly surviving relation; a former mayor, a communist, who recalls that Allende opposed one-party rule and dictatorship of the proletariat. In medical school, confronted with poverty, Allende became a socialist—one who believed, according to Guzmán, that “real democracy leads inevitably to socialism.” Allende’s daughters speak of the people’s love for the pacifist senator, the presidential candidate. Old news footage from the campaign does nothing to contest this claim. (Constitutionally, Allende was voted president by Chile’s National Congress after the nationwide election secured him a scant plurality of votes—a fact Guzmán omits.) Equally moving as the opening is footage recording the celebratory crowds in the street upon news of Allende’s victory—the encapsulation of working-class hopes. This follows a passage that renews Guzmán’s focus on hands; we follow one hand after another as each carries a vote to a ballot box and deposits it—movement that recalls earlier shots down train tracks: progress.
     Everything fits—and Nixon’s quest to still Allende and the hopes he embodied angers afresh.

91. LOST EMBRACE. Ariel Makaroff’s father, Elías, abandoned his wife, Sonia, and two sons to go fight in the Yom Kippur War, after which he chose to remain in Israel rather than return to Buenos Aires.
     Ariel works in his mother’s lingerie shop in a downscale mall. His, he feels, is a stalled life. Ironically, in El Abrazo partido, the boy is shown always on the go. Hand-held shots abound of Ariel rushing here or there—implicitly, nowhere.
     Globalization has imposed economic hardship on Argentina. The paucity of patrons and closing of shops at the mall imply the squeezing out and lowering of the nation’s middle class and the further financial debasement as well of marginal consumers.
     Daniel Burman is a Jewish Argentine of Polish descent. His wonderful comedy is also about the city’s Jewish community, which seems remarkably secular. The one time we see Ariel in synagogue it is for nothing religious, and the sight of the boy wearing a yarmulke comes as a pleasant shock. Tellingly, Ariel’s ritual circumcision—the film’s one religious event—appears not as a clear filmed flashback but as a murky family videotape recording.
     Long ago, Ariel’s maternal grandmother had sung professionally; but, after the war, she stopped singing, even at home, because her singing reminded her now deceased husband of all that the Nazis had taken from them. It is Grandma (Rosita Londner, heartaching) who assists her grandson in embracing his Jewish identity by her reminiscing about the Nazi ordeal; and the resumption of her professional singing, despite her advanced age, epitomizes the resurgence and indominability of human spirit that lend the film some of its most poignant notes.
     But nothing in the film is quite so shattering as the reconciliation of father and son, Elías and Ariel, after an initially rocky reunion.

92. HOLLOW CITY. About a young life uprooted by war, Maria João Ganga’s Na cidade vazia, from Angola and Portugal, is set in 1991, during the Angolan civil war. N’dala’s family is slaughtered in rural Bié. The 12-year-old is among the children airlifted by the Red Cross to Luanda, Angola’s capital city. However, N’dala eludes the nun in charge and goes off on his own, misled by her religious twaddle into believing that his parents still exist back in Bié “in the sky.” Like E.T., N’dala wants to go home.
     Based on a novel by Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, Ganga’s script is not among the film’s assets. The occasional shifts away from N’dala, to follow the nun’s unlikely search to recover the boy, are irritating, and the several attempts to force a parallel between N’dala and a national hero being played in a school play by Zé, who befriends him, fail to convince. Add to these distractions the academic irony that the script pursues: that Luanda proves as unsafe for the child as was Bié.
     Rather, two things account for the film’s extraordinary achievement, in addition to Roldan Pinto João’s beautiful performance as N’dala: the film’s visual design and procedure, its series of highly defined shots rather than narrative scenes, this, correlative to N’dala’s profound impressions and quick perceptions; the richness of his solitary wanderings—this is a “road picture,” by foot, that is confined to a single location—as these intersect with various characters who befriend N’dala, including Antonio, a poor, protective, elderly fisherman who refreshes the boy’s recollection of home. There is also a hypnotic portrait of the half-world of night prostitution. Indeed, N’dala’s journey introduces him to a wealth of urban experiences that fill him with wonder but only sharpen his fruitless yearning to return home.

2005
93. LA SIERRA. “We’re in the hands of kids with guns.”
     Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez’s documentary about the armed struggle between Colombian Leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries for control of Medellin’s hillside barrio of La Sierra contemplates the contorted relations among youth, poverty, desperation, violence. Shortly after opening pages of script (“In the past decade, over 35,000 people have been killed in Colombia’s bloody civil conflict”), we see a shot-dead youth on the ground, his bloody corpse a magnet for flies. His girlfriend is beside herself. This will be a film in which other teenaged girls are stricken with identical grief over the loss of their children’s young fathers.
     One member of the paramilitary group Bloque Metro notes that he worries not about harm coming to him but to his family. We think: Your being killed—that will harm your family.
     Dalton and Martinez focus on three persons: Edison Flores, the 22-year-old commander of Bloque Metro, who has six offspring with six different girls; Cielo, the 17-year-old girlfriend of an incarcerated Bloque Metro member; 19-year-old Jesús, who is under Edison’s command and who has lost a hand to his own grenade: a natural metaphor that plays out through the film, encapsulating the self-destructive nature of gangland violence. “I’m one of the good guys,” Jesús professes; “I’m only bad to bad people.” Offscreen, Martinez asks him, “Do you think you will die young?” Jesús: “Of course.”
     By joining forces with another paramilitary group, Bloque Metro is finally able to defeat the local guerrillas, at which point war erupts afresh as the other group seeks total control of La Sierra. Government forces shoot dead Edison; we watch a small neighborhood boy ignite a legend about the fallen commander.
     Reality is a rock upon which the human heart breaks of its own accord.

94. JEWS IN SPACE. Twenty-six years old, Santiago, nicknamed Tati (Fernando Rubio, wonderful), is deeply dissatisfied with his job as a cook in a Buenos Aires restaurant, but in many ways he is the most mature member of his extended family, which includes three warring sisters—two aunts and Mirta, his mom—and their suicidal elderly father and grandfather, whose photo album hints at family secrets. At the restaurant, where he does not recognize her after years of separation, and then at hospital, where Mauricio has been brought following his failed suicide, Tati is reunited with kleptomaniacal cousin Luciana, from whom he collected a charming peck in a years-ago prologue designed around a family Passover Seder. Now Tati and Luciana are engaged in cooking up their own Passover Seder—an attempt to hold the family together, at least for a night. This time, they share a voluptuous kiss with lots of tongue, although she “tastes” like gefilte fish and he “tastes” like chocolate cake! Luciana, poised to return, lives in New York City.
     Writer-director Gabriel Lichtmann’s Jews in Space, or Why Is This Night Different from Other Nights? (Judíos en el espacio (o por que es diferente esta noche a las demás noches)), a gorgeously underlit, warm-hearted comedy, is always funny and frequently hilarious. It is simply astonishing, given the number of serious matters it touches upon (including an assault by skinheads on a Kosher store that all but ruins business for its young owner), how richly comical the film remains without the slightest rupture to its essentially naturalistic style. The last Seder culminates in a meshed series of shots of the seated participants, which simulates a single, unbroken moving shot that simultaneously conjoins these family members and friends and consigns each to his or her lonely isolation.

95. U-CARMEN. Winner of the top prize at Berlin, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha transposes from Seville to Cape Town today Georges Bizet’s nineteenth-century opera Carmen. The violent romantic triangle remains intact, with South African history and male gender bias helping to define Carmen’s association with freedom, independence, self-determination.
     The film opens on Carmen’s face as a lover’s voiceover compares her female beauty to the Spanish ideal. Thus Carmen and lover are both inside and outside the film, fictional characters and the actors who are playing them. The film’s thematic coordinates partly lie outside the opera. The film considers the cultural collision between the Third World and the Europe that once colonized it. This movie’s Carmen is both a vibrant South African woman and someone who is selfconsciously Carmen (hence, her most un-South African name) as a result of an intrusive Europe and its imposition of European culture. Hers is a compounded example, then, of modern alienation, of watching oneself being oneself. (Recall: Picasso credited African masks for elements of his cubism.) The voiceover describes Carmen’s “expression [as] at once alluring and fierce” as her face, in closeup, mesmerizes us as a kind of mask. As the camera withdraws we see that Carmen is sitting in a tent being photographed. The camera’s long retreat, inspired by the final shot in Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (1955), reveals the shantytown where Carmen lives, that is to say, the poverty that is the legacy of colonization, Apartheid and, now, globalization. The camera’s quick reverse movement “loses” Carmen almost immediately to suggest the larger social tragedy she is a part of.
     The musical, punctuating the Bizet with indigenous folk tunes, is sung entirely in Xhosa. With great verve, it spills over mundane settings—village, factory, school. Directed by Britain’s Mark Donford-May, Pauline Malefane makes a stunning Carmen.

2006
96. BAMAKO. “They take our money; they take our minds, too.”
     Mali’s Abderrahmane Sissako’s masterpiece begins at dawn; the village of Bamako is waking up. Among intercut actions: daily activities; an impoverished couple quarrel as their ill daughter sleeps; a man scrounges a living videographing weddings and funerals; a trial in a courtyard, where the West’s financial and economic forces bleeding Africa—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, the G8—face charges in absentia.
     A western film-within-the-film encapsulates African frustration, anger—for many, repressed feelings. “The trial’s becoming annoying,” one villager opines.
     It fascinates us, however. “Pay or die,” an attorney for the plaintiff, black Africa, declares. “That’s the West’s lesson.”
     Africa finds itself trapped in a “vicious circle” of debt, owed to the World Bank and the IMF; while 10% of a nation’s annual budget may be directed to social services, education, infrastructure, etc., at least 40% goes to debt repayment—because of interest, an infinite amount. The borrowed money, we learn, wasn’t invested in creating jobs. The world is “open” for whites, not African blacks, who are sent back home when they try emigrating to find work. Barely living under “imposed destitution” (life expectancy is 46), they find multinational corporations seizing whatever a nation needs to be sovereign. Colonialism “took everything away”; this new form of colonialism keeps taking. The World Bank threatened to withdraw financial support if the transport system wasn’t privatized. Victims of “unchained capitalism,” people have had their public institutions and social services sold off. While two-thirds of their children are illiterate, now they must pay for education.
     Hilariously, the judges settle uneasily into their robes. A dog that earlier appeared dead may have sprung back to life, but only to sniff at the corpse of a suicide.

97. DREAMS OF DUST. From France, Canada and Burkino Faso, French writer-director Laurent Salgues’s Rêves de poussière is a vivid depiction of hard labor, sustained by hopes for a better future, and poverty. Mocktar, a Nigerian farmer, has just lost his youngest daughter. Burdened by guilt for inadequately providing for wife and family, he travels to northeast Burkino Faso to work in the gold mines. An official explains, “The gold rush is over.” His response gets Mocktar hired: “I’m just looking for a job.”
     The film opens with an extreme long-shot of sand being blown by wind screen-right across the landscape. A human figure enters the frame and proceeds, by foot, screen-left—in the face of the wind. This is Mocktar symbolically braving life’s misfortunes. Neocolonialist exploitation of African resources and peasants contributes to African poverty. “The gold we risk our lives for,” Mocktar himself notes later on, “is for white people.” At the camp, Mocktar is attracted to Coumba, who has lost family members in a shaft collapse there, and whose young daughter Mocktar helps with his pay, redeeming himself from guilt over his own recent loss. At the last, in an extreme long-shot, he is shown journeying home.
     Much of the film is given over to showing, in documentary fashion, the harsh, dangerous labor involved in different facets of the mining. (Mocktar, his first day, suffers a horrible accident.) We also see Mocktar’s after-work interactions with an older miner who takes Mocktar under his wing; but when this gentleman replaces the bullying, uncaring boss, we see the start of his transformation into a facsimile of that boss—black against black at the behest of white interests: an appropriation of available limited power.
     Cinematographed by Crystel Fournier, images are hauntingly dreamlike. Wind-swept dust is a recurrent motif.

98. MADEINUSA. In fictional Manataycuna, “the town that no one can enter,” young geologist Salvador, from Lima, has a hitched a ride in during “Holy Time,” when the native Peruvian residents celebrate God’s being temporarily blind and mute, releasing them from moral scrutiny. The three-day carnival mixes pagan and Christian rituals and icons, and intruder Salvador’s Spanish ancestry hints an allegory of Peru’s sixteenth-century conquest by Spain. Cayo, the town’s mayor, puts the stranger to work before locking him up, a redress of history and a response to one daughter’s attraction to Salvador, which threatens Cayo’s control of his family. Cayo’s attic is a storeroom of artifacts from Holy Times past.
     This daughter is Madeinusa (pronounced Mad-ay-NOO-sa, but a play on “Made in U.S.A.,” suggesting neo-colonial exploitation). We are introduced to the teenager as she spreads rat poison around the house, along the way picking up a large dead rat and flinging it aside, her hands protected by plastic bags—makeshift gloves that suggest how resourceful some people have to be just to survive. Later, Cayo impresses Madeinusa into incest in the bed that she and sister Chale share. The girls’ mother, the family legend goes, ran off to Lima years earlier. Madeinusa hopes to do the same, and Salvador may be the means; but Salvador is monstrously unfeeling regarding this sustaining dream. He is blasé about taking her; “Why not?” he says.
     But Salvador’s own leavetaking is thwarted—in a spontaneous ritual, he is scapegoated for Madeinusa’s own crime—and Madeinusa takes his place as the hitcher.
     Claudia Llosa raw, vulgar, visually dazzling film includes eye-opening closeups, of hands at work as well as faces. It shows people’s lives under the thumb of history and of social and economic forces not of their making or choosing, and beyond their control.

99. BREAD. Like Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s Tanzanian documentary These Hands (see 1992), Pan attends to the labor involved in crushing rock. The five-minute-long documentary, by Argentinian filmmaker Marcelo Bukin, is a co-production of Spain and Guatemala. It shows three Guatemalans at work: a father and his two small sons.
     The opening: a man’s shadow driving a pick into an expanse of rock: a figure of human strength, but with this suggestiion undercut by both the use of the man’s shadow (rather than corporeal reality) and the massive reality of the rock. The sound of the labor persists throughout, even as each of the three speaks directly into camera, even as the screen goes blank and the end credits roll.
     One of the boys explains, “[M]y father works hard to give us food.” Stone thus translates into bread. The young father says, “I didn’t go to school, because I had to work with my father” [emphasis added]. His other son tells us that he does go to school, that his father’s labor enables him to buy school lunch; he also shares his hope for a better future—in effect, a less back-breaking job. (He wants to be a secretary!) “If my father doesn’t sell the rock,” one of the brothers adds, “we have nothing to eat.” Inserts of the labor interrupt the spoken words.
     When each speaks, in addition to the sound of rock-crushing, something else persists: massive rock, in the background—the past, in whose grip they remain. When each speaks, he faces us—the future: what either boy hopes to be, and what their father hopes for his sons.
     Crushing rock: the sound continues throughout a stunning montage of tools—pick, hammer, shovel—that lie dormant: rest; but no rest. The last image of the father is as a shadow again.

100. IN THE PIT. The occasion for Juan Carlos Rulfo’s En el hoyo is the construction, 2003-05, of the second deck of the Periférico Freeway in Mexico City. Largely comprising interviews of construction workers involved in the project, it is an ironical documentary.
     Rulfo signals an almost mocking intent from the get-go, with the first bit of voiceover announcing a fairy tale or fable (“Once upon a time . . .”), a genre at odds with a chronicle of productive labor. The film leaves the expansion unfinished, ironically withholding from the material the salutary effect of the seemingly obligatory shot of its completion; a long aerial shot begins with the completed part but then passes into the disarray of unfinished construction—with its rapid roller-coaster effect (for us the audience), a shot of devastating wit. Along the way, one of the interviewed workers remarks that one can get used to anything, except work. Rulfo’s film is full of surprises and reversals of expectation.
     Numerous shots facing downwards, with a gaping depth of space below the men at work, reiterate the constant danger. “Aren’t you afraid?” at one point Rulfo asks, and a worker responds, “I am more afraid of not eating on Saturday.” Opening and nearly closing the film are headlong shots into the ground-level construction pit, into which, at the last, a worker has fallen, perhaps one of the project’s “inevitable” fatalities, suggesting a linkage of “sacrifices” over time. The 330-second aerial shot of the finished and unfinished parts of the construction, because of the anonymous workers we see being rapidly passed by, reminds us that the project’s completion will mean an end of some duration to these people’s paid work. This returns us to the nature of that work. Few would choose such dangerous work if there were alternatives.

THE 100 GREATEST FILMS FROM AFRICA, LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, PART I

This list, which includes the 100 greatest films I have seen from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean through 2007, proceeds chronologically. However, for a given year the films are given in order of preference. This is the first half of the list. Some films included on this list are more extensively considered in essays categorized as film reviews elsewhere on my blogsite.

1932
1. ¡QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 13.

1947
2. THE FUGITIVE. This U.S.-Mexico co-production directed by John Ford and Emilio Fernández, and based on Graham Greene’s “The Labyrinthine Ways,” depicts the stumbling odyssey of a padre (Henry Fonda, excellent) torn between duty and a desire to escape being killed now that the revolutionary government has outlawed the profession and practice of religious faith. The last cleric in a mythical totalitarian state, he is eventually betrayed, caught and executed. Early on, when he opens wide the doors of his church, his shadow shows that his arms are outstretched as in a crucifixion. By delivering the man’s shadow, not substance, and by having this shadow hold its pose a beat or two too long, Ford cunningly undercuts the man’s idealized, posturing self-image. At this point in his journey, then, the priest is a fugitive as much from his own humanity as from the authorities. The remainder of the film charts his progress from would-be martyr to true servant of God, which for Ford, an atheist, means true servant of others—the poor villagers who shelter him.
     With symmetrically designed compositions and horses’ hooves bursting through silence, Ford portrays the regime in power not in terms of ideology but in its capacity to impose regimentation, contest freedom, create outcasts. Fear has overtaken people’s lives, transforming the church into a sanctuary and streets into a desperate playground for hunters and the hunted.
     Employing ravishing, high-contrast black and white, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa intensifies the supernal character of Ford’s dignified, stark, somewhat stylized imagery. Spare and essential, images resonate with a heightened naturalism. The film’s rigorous method helped Ford achieve the level of abstraction a universal parable requires. The final image—a Cross of light—transcends religious meaning to convey something more urgent: a persistent light of hope in the dark night of political oppression.

1950
3. LOS OLVIDADOS. Little stressed by the liberal message that the producer tacked onto its front end, Luis Buñuel’s The Forgotten Ones (in the U.S., The Young and the Damned) benefits from Thomas Carlyle’s invention of the concept of environment in the nineteenth century. Buñuel draws a causal connection between ghetto poverty and the violent behavior of street youth in 1950 Mexico City. His film is as incisive as a razor blade slid across an open eye.
     In the scheme of Social Darwinism that Buñuel unearths, “survival of the fittest” takes the form of kids terrorizing whomever they can—for instance, a legless man, whose board (the man’s wheelchair) they confiscate after robbing him, and a blind beggar. (An overhead shot records three of the boys attacking the latter as he wildly strikes out at them with his walking stick.) Powerless, these juveniles grab at any bit of entitlement just to feel alive. Los olvidados presents a brutal vision of endangered and dangerous young male lives. These roles are filled by actual Mexico City street kids, not actors.
     Yet the film, which revived a career that had lain dormant for nearly twenty years, also has its lyrical aspect. Two passages show us dreams. In one, the dreamer, Pedro, promises his overworked mother, a washerwoman, he will get a job, and the bloody corpse of another boy, whose clubbing death in actuality Pedro witnessed, fights him for the piece of raw meat his mother has given him to abate hunger. Pedro is killed by an older boy, Jaibo, an orphan; those who discover Pedro’s bludgeoned body dump it on a garbage heap. Shot by the police, Jaibo dies dreaming of death, his father’s imagined voice guiding him.
     Dies dreaming of death: life—unkind, short, without hope. These boys are “the forgotten ones.”

1952
4. EL. Whereas his Los olvidados (1950) focused on Mexico City’s juvenile delinquent poor, Luis Buñuel’s El—in Spanish, the masculine definite article, but released in the States as This Strange Passion—addresses elite society. Mexican landowner Don Francisco is to be reckoned with.
     El opens in church. A priest washes and kisses a long line of boys’ bare feet. A subjective camera discloses Francisco’s interest: a string of female parishioners’ shoed feet. The camera wittily backtracks to indicate the pair that wins Francisco’s heart. They belong to Gloria.
     Commentators often say Francisco becomes insanely jealous upon marrying Gloria. In truth, he is paranoid earlier in reference to his lawyer’s (mis)perceived disloyalty. The guy has issues. Buñuel tracks Francisco’s romance and machismo.
     When poor Gloria seeks sympathy from her mother, we discover that Mexico itself romances machismo.
     Here is one of cinema’s great black comedies—until Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), its greatest.
     Buñuel’s film keeps going back to church because Buñuel finds the Church’s patriarchic structure informing and buttressing machismo and sexism in Mexico. Francisco attempts to strangle Gloria in a bell tower—a scene that didn’t escape the notice of Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958), who declared Buñuel one of his favorite filmmakers. (Later, Othello-like, Francisco tries strangling Gloria in bed.) Francisco keeps apologizing to Gloria for his abuse because, while the Roman Catholic Church instills machismo, it preaches humility! In a phenomenal passage, at Mass, quick inserts—quasi-jump cuts—describe Francisco’s delusion that fellow parishioners, altar boy, and even Padre Velasco are laughing at him!
     It is time for Don Francisco to calm himself. He enters a monastery. In El’s celebrated final shot, the poor guy, still batty in his holy trappings, walks zigzag down a path, away from the camera. Christian damage may be sublimated but never wholly taken away.

1953
5. ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR. Juan and Tarrajas work for mass transit in Mexico City, where working people’s “words and actions are always directed towards the realization of a dream, a desire, an illusion.” The boys are chided for “too much efficiency” in repairing streetcar #133 in record time; the vehicle, “useless” despite being useable again, must be dismantled, which will put the two out of work. Drunk, they take out 133 for one last ride. They charge passengers nothing; some pay anyway. The sum of riders is a diverse portrait of humanity.
     Distancing techniques urge an analytical approach to the material. Scenes of passengers shift to long shots of the streetcar. Head-on shots show Tarrajas at the wheel and Juan standing alongside him, both framed by the car’s square front window, creating the effect of a screen-within-the-screen. The Professor, a one-man Greek chorus, explains inflation to the depot watchman: More money is in circulation in the economy; prices go up; wages are stagnant; workers get poorer, while traders and businessmen get richer. Amidst the film’s predominant naturalism, accompanied by deep shadows are phantasmagoric images of the bus at night.
     Illusion Travels by Streetcar, the title of Luis Buñuel’s film declares. Two superstructures, religion and capitalism, proffer an illusion of justice while disadvantaging and deceiving the working and nonworking poor. God will redress poverty in paradise; in the meantime, so as not to miss out, people need to harken to what the Church tells them. The “illusion” that travels by streetcar is that things will improve for ordinary people when in fact they will stay the same or get worse.
     Most everything in this marvelous comedy having to do with the streetcar and its passengers is imbued with spirit, and none of this spirit owes anything to the existence of God.

1957
6. THE HOUSE OF THE ANGEL. Adapting her own novel, La casa del ángel, Beatriz Guido gave spouse Leopoldo Torre Nilsson an excellent script; but it is Nilsson’s dark, precise, assured filmmaking that generated so memorably turbulent a result. The film also called End of Innocence sets 14-year-old Ana Castro’s coming-of-age amidst the flux of Argentinean mores and manners in the 1920s. Ana (Elsa Daniel, the epitome of adolescent sensitivity and confusion—at once lyrical and achingly real) comes from an aristocratic family; her father is a scheming politician, her mother a puritanical Roman Catholic fixated on maintaining her youngest daughter’s innocence. They live in a Wellesian/Amberson mansion that is beginning to decay; her aging nanny, who sometimes fails to suit her behavior to Ana’s mother’s strict line, is principally charged with Ana’s care. The back-to-back deaths of mother and nanny suggest a combinate loss for Ana—the loss of childhood.
     Guido’s intricate script meshes Ana’s reminiscing voiceover and the events she recalls. Pablo Aguirre, a young, handsome colleague of her father’s, shatters Ana’s sheltered world. Drawn into a situation where he feels compelled to defend family honor, Pablo will fight a duel to the death, with pistols, on the Castros’ grounds. At a dance in the mansion the night before his morning of reckoning, Pablo takes Ana into his arms—a phenomenal passage; afterwards, alone, Ana gazes into a mirror, attempting to search out signs of the utter transformation she feels. In truth, she has been infatuated with Pablo for quite a while.
     The multiplicity of shots from a fractious variety of camera angles suggests memory’s frustrated attempt to grasp an elusive, complex past.
     An Argentinean of Swedish descent, Torre Nilsson creates haunting poetry as his camera, seeking light, roams the mansion’s darkened rooms and halls.

1958
7. NAZARÍN. Luis Buñuel’s finest Mexican film of the 1950s is Nazarín, from the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. A priest pursues the way of Jesus in Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico
     Father Nazario, who lives amongst the poor, is pure of heart. He charitably gives away whatever is charitably given him. He is matter-of-fact about being repeatedly robbed. “The blessed one,” as his landlady sarcastically calls him, is defrocked once he protects a wanted prostitute. When he works for bread as part of a road labor crew, his fellow workers, needing to be paid, oust him. The prostitute becomes his disciple, touting his ability to perform “miracles” even as he insists only “God and science” can save the life of a dying child.
     Nazarín is a road film by foot. The pride Don Nazario takes in his humility and devotion is matched by the pride in arrogance the collusion of Church and State manifests. No matter how righteously Don Nazario’s “saintly” virtue sets him apart, there is no “him” separate from the institutional influences his faith and lifestyle humbly contest. Social behavior, even the most solitudinous and outstanding, hence seemingly individualistic, is overdetermined. Like Fellini in La strada (1954), Buñuel challenges the fiction of self-determination. Beings must reach out to fellow and sister beings with compassion and equality—neither lowly nor in condescension—in order to be human.
     The film is superbly written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, and shot after shot sets Don Nazario in a harsh landscape that is correlative to both his unconscious courting of martyrdom and the difficult road he needs to hoe in his pilgrim’s progress. For now, he appears human only by contrast to the corrupt Church and Mexico’s resident dictatorship, which conspire to maintain the poverty that generates the miserable souls to whom he ministers.

1961
8. VIRIDIANA. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 22.

1962
9. THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. We all know the feeling; we’re at a party and we want to leave, but can’t. Luis Buñuel employs this premise for his black comedy The Exterminating Angel, in which guests find that they cannot leave their host’s music room. As hours stretch into days, something of a Lord of the Flies degeneration takes hold. Sheep wander in, which the guests eat. After a mind-boggling moment when they realize that they have all inadvertently assumed the exact same positions they occupied some time earlier, the guests are cleared of their paralysis. They attend church. Upon leaving, they are gunned down.
     Many strange, surprising things happen. Early on, for instance, all the posh guests save one have gathered in the music room. The one who has remained in the dining room throws a glass, breaking a window, the sound of which the others hear. Someone tersely explains: “Probably a passing Jew.” Here is the phenomenon of something “outside,” and an outsider, being blamed for what has happened from within. But more: the seemingly crazy explanation, proffered so matter-of-factly, reminds us how irrational sometimes is the basis for social and political statements and actions that the powers that be make appear perfectly rational. In this instance, a shared hatred of Jews makes nonsense seem feasible to the two conversing guests.
     Bristling with irony, like so much Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel is hilarious. It is also a harrowing satire on authority—authority, apparently, that feels threatened by even the most trivial and inadvertent deviation from the norm. Moreover, the film is a cunning allegory on Buñuel’s encounter with Franco over Viridiana (see 1961).
     Dark, dense, The Exterminating Angel is like a dream. “Its images, like the images in a dream,” Buñuel said, “do not reflect reality, but themselves create it.”

10. . . . A VALPARAÍSO. Three brilliant documentarians worked on the French and Chilean . . . A Valparaíso: its maker, Joris Ivens; in his twenties, Patricio Guzmán, Chile’s future premier political documentarian, who assisted Ivens; Chris Marker, who wrote voiceover commentary suited to Ivens’s images.
     Valparaíso, Chile, evidences landmarks from as many countries as have come to port there through conquerors and ordinary seamen. It is a city, we are told, “created, forged, people by sailors.” A montage shows buildings designed and constructed to resemble ships and boats.
     It must have been the Valley of Paradise prior to development; now it is something else. Down below is the commercial city; at various tiers above, built on hills, is a “cluster” of 42 residential villages, one per hill. It is a system of ramps and stairs. It is a kind of Hell, where the poorer that people are the higher up they live, the farther away they are from the sea, which is the city’s “truth,” and the closer they are to the sun, which is the city’s “lie.” There, considerable effort is required to bring water up from down below. Life’s a struggle.
     A one-legged man is shown climbing 121 steps. Marker: “One needs a strong heart and a good memory.” An overhead shot shows another man struggling up different stairs. Nature as well as geography mocks him, for the next thing we see is a chicken springing up the steps.
     It’s easier for children—but also damaging. Their lungs, their breathing, are stressed, and they need to work at their play. Their profusion of kites in the sky—a visual echo of seagulls—may be expressing an unconscious dream for themselves of lightness and flight.
     A posh woman prods a penguin with her parasol.
     Artwork memorializes centuries of Spanish colonial rule.

1963
11. BARREN LIVES. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 25.

1964
12. BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL. Gláuber Rocha’s Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, literally, God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun, opens with an overhead shot of the sunbaked sertão in northeast Brazil. Impoverished Manuel rides home. En route to landlord Moraes, half the cattle die, for which Moraes demands that Manuel pay. When Moraes whips him, Manuel cuts down Moraes with a machete. Manuel tells wife Rosa they must pilgrimage to Monte Santo. Manuel follows Sebastião, a black mystic preaching rebellion. Manuel, “sick with hope” in her eyes, leaves “faithless” Rosa behind, but she follows. As Sebastião walks alongside him, Manuel, on his knees, hauls a boulder up to Sebastião’s church. Rosa murders Sebastião at the altar; Antônio das Mortes, a gun hired by the Church and landowners to kill Sebastião, massacres his followers, sparing Manuel and Rosa, who, led by Julião, a blind singer, end up following Corisco, a white bandit, whom Antônio eventually kills, releasing Manuel yet again from the grip of a deleterious social or religious influence. Manuel and Rosa, in a spectacular long shot, flee across the land; when Rosa falls down, she is again left behind. Manuel reaches the sea—this final passage an hommage to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), much as Sergio Leone’s westerns will pay homage to Rocha’s allegory.
     A seminal work of cinema nôvo, Rocha’s black-and-white film refers to actual events, combining these with shifting chronology, magic realism (a Latin American form of surrealism), neorealismo’s humane concerns, and the nouvelle vague’s formal freedom—elements of cinema nôvo, to which Eisensteinian imagery (¡Qué viva México! is an especial influence) has been added. Rocha shifts from sound to silence and inserts Godardian gunshots into the soundtrack, as well as haunting songs, resulting in a somber yet delirious mix.

1965
13. SIMON OF THE DESERT. Its shooting aborted, apparently, when the producer ran out of money, Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Simón del desierto is set in the past. The film skewers organized religion and laments the gap between one man’s asceticism and the grubby self-interest of those purportedly enthralled by him.
     Simon emulates St. Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century fanatic, by standing on a gigantic, narrow column in the desert—on one foot, even, when he feels obliged to do penance. He has been at it for six years, six months, six days when Satan, in the form of a temptress, pops up to taunt and seduce him. At the end s/he takes him by airplane to 1960s Manhattan, where his column has been multiplied into skyscrapers; in a swinging nightclub, when he half-heartedly announces he is going home, s/he informs him that he has already been replaced on top of the column—the implication being, with nobody, including the priests, any the wiser.
     In one of the vignettes way below Simon in the desert, a former thief asks for the restoration of his hands—they were lopped off as punishment—so that he can farm again and support his family. Simon prays while one of the large gathering quips, “Maybe today we’ll see one of Simon’s miracles.” Indeed, the hands are suddenly back on the man, whose nonplussed response, however, wittily robs the moment of the miraculous. There is also the implication that, if need be, he will steal again.
     Buñuel visually plays with the question mark of whether Simon’s being so far above other humans sets him any closer to God, and the turbulent, windswept black-and-white images of Simon recorded by an upwardly tilted camera, beautifully cinematographed by Gabriel Figueroa, suggest an unsettled soul for all Simon’s air of confident faith.

14. THE LION HUNTERS. Lion hunting, by tradition, is the province of the Gao people. Members of the Fulani, nomadic shepherds in northern Niger and Mali, whose herds are being attacked by lions, approach the Gao for help through the proscribed intermediary of the Songhai, whom the Fulani pay in cattle.
     The distribution of tasks and their performance for mutual benefit suggest a social correction to “survival of the fittest.” But killing lions is serious business. Passages documenting the processes by which the Gao forge arrows and brew poison for these arrows index, ironically, the spiritual weight of the life-taking that will result. In a sense, each group represents the precariousness of African life. The shepherds will be lost if the lions continue to devour their animals; the Songhai and the hunters will be lost if they fail to perform functions that tradition has assigned to them. In the mortal realm of Darwinian survival, a cosmic order is being heeded and worked out. Experience has given the Gao an exhaustive understanding of the terrain over which the hunt will proceed; they are presumably connected to the spirits of the grass, trees and water. France’s Jean Rouch thus brilliantly shows the rationalization involved in killing—by implication, in men killing men as well as animals. Killing must be more than killing; it becomes “sanctified,” elevated by its connection to God or to spirits.
     How perfectly the Gao understand—that is to say, believe they understand—their prey, to the extent that they can decipher which lion has committed which offense and therefore warrants the proper dispatch. Scapelioning. Their reward comes from the sale of proofs of their slaughtering: skin, skull, etc.
     In Rouch’s ethnographic La chasse au lion à l’arc, the primitive casts a light into the heart of darkness of civilization.

1967
15. JAGUAR. Cine-fiction: France’s prolific Jean Rouch coined this term for ethnographic documentaries that are launched by a contrivance. Shot in 1954-55 and edited more than a decade later, Rouch’s Jaguar casts three young African non-actors as three African men who journey from rural, impoverished Niger, along the Ivory Coast, to robust cities in Ghana in search of seasonal work. Their migration is the launch, but the film is the product of Rouch’s research into actual activities and social customs in areas at both ends of the journey and along the way. Jaguar contrasts country and city, the primitive and the more advanced. We may say that the camera follows countryfolk to where people take the camera’s presence—modernity—in their stride.
     The slight narrative was improvised by Rouch and the trio, and the soundtrack, consisting of remembered dialogue, ruminations and questions, was improvised post-production. At the time the film was shot, the portable equipment that might have recorded synchronized sound did not exist.
     Jaguar is dazzlingly cut and assembled, with perhaps more shots per length than any other film in existence, to convey the complex experience of the trio on their city adventure. This diamond-faceted, restless, highly analytical visual style—Resnais out-Resnaised, and without the long trackings to add countervailing lyricism—is correlative to the real adventure going on: the social elasticity of the protagonists, their Keatsian negative capability, their ongoing need to process the unfamiliar experiences bombarding them, and the mental and emotional agility that allows them to readjust and reinvent themselves as a result. To turn around a famous remark by Tennyson’s Ulysses, all that they have met becomes a part of them. Back home three months after they left, they are partial strangers to themselves and others. Jaguar is a model of technical form analyzing humanistic content.

16. LAND IN ANGUISH. We live with death inside us. . . . As we advance, we retreat.
     Using the device of a long dying flashback, Gláuber Rocha’s Terra em transe—literally, Earth Entranced—is a major work of Brazil’s cinema nôvo, the movement that rejected Hollywood-type escapism in favor of native forms and political hot topics. The film’s journalistic, feverishly surreal, and operatic qualities suggest also the influences of Francesco Rosi, Luis Buñuel, Luchino Visconti.
     Shot by military police, Paulo Martins is a journalist and poet, and a thread of continuity throughout is his heavy Russian-sounding narration and his speech within the flashback, which is often delivered in the exact same way. Paulo, who finds himself at the vortex of opposing political currents, is based on Rocha, who is thus able to express his ambivalence as to what political course Brazil should take. (The fictional Eldorado, where the film is set, stands in for Brazil.) Through Paolo, Rocha considers the situation of artists and intellectuals following the U.S.-backed military coup that sent Leftist president Joao Goulart fleeing Brazil in 1964.
     The film opens with a bravura helicopter shot that entrances us with Brazil’s “entranced earth.” The film is dotted with bizarre, baroque images: on top a hill, a fascist madman, holding a crucifix in one hand and a flag in the other, proclaiming, “I want a new sun”; Paulo, armed, on his back, struggling his way up a long series of steps. When in a street demonstration he says, “I am the people; I have seven children and no place to live,” a peasant is seized and (along with others) strangled with wire on the spot. Immediately the crowd is assured there’s no hunger or violence in Eldorado.
     Woven into Terra em transe is documentary footage from Rocha’s Maranhão 66.

1968
17. THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 75.

18. MANDABI. “Stop killing us with hope!” one of Ibrahima’s two wives says as the postman delivers a money order from Ibrahima’s nephew in Paris. (Most of the money is meant for the nephew’s mother, but Islamic tradition requires that a male handle business transactions.) In their husband’s absence, armed with the gift, the wives buy food and water on credit—a bit of independence for which their spouse will later castigate them. Meanwhile, Ibrahima hasn’t worked in four years, and his small Dakar abode includes seven children. Senegal became independent in 1960, but the removal of colonialism hasn’t given it much success, and the money order, in a way, makes the Diengs once again reliant on France.
     Ousmane Sembène’s The Money Order is a satirical comedy that follows Ibrahima’s manifold attempts to convert the money order into cash. A convoluted bureaucracy confounds these attempts—a series of intersecting runarounds. Will any of the gift’s value remain as Ibrahima’s wives keep making purchases on credit, as Ibrahima himself borrows and borrows while trying to get the necessary documentation to be able to cash in the money order, and more and more people prevail upon him for handouts or money owed? Hope indeed is the measure of what France has left the Senegalese—and contentiousness and suspicion. Everyone assumes that Ibrahima is “selfish”—and why? because his wives rule his house. Someone remarks: “There is no solidarity anymore.”
     Along the way people either overcharge Ibrahima for helping him or rob him outright. Eventually one of the film’s few “haves” succeeds in turning the money order into cash only to steal the cash, giving Ibrahima instead a bit of rice, which starving neighbors descend upon. The film ends with their testimonies of poverty—and Ibrahima’s conviction that it’s a sin to help others.

19. RAMPARTS OF CLAY. Concentric circles of oppression structure the main action in Remparts d’argile, French filmmaker Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s beauteous, sun-bleached adaptation of Jean Duvignaud’s novel. In a Tunisian village in the early 1960s, a strike by salt mine workers, which is set off when they are paid only half their wages, inspires a young villager to assist in their cause. However, she is deemed by village elders to be somehow possessed for discarding her traditional garb and modest demeanor and for behaving rebelliously, and the women attempt to bring her back to her senses by subjecting her to purifying rituals. But there is no turning back for her; her mind has already touched the border of freedom and self-determination.
     Seamlessly mixing actual villagers and professional actors, Bertucelli translates documentary into fiction and fiction into documentary. It is amazing how thoroughly the film absorbs viewers into its reality—an outcome that the sparseness of dialogue facilitates. When villagers spatter the protagonist with fresh animal blood to drive demons out, one is unlikely to ask, “What were these superstitious people thinking in relation to the actress that they were treating as though she were one of their own?” They are simply maintaining their way of life; and one wonders only after the film has ended what parallels are to be drawn between the intruding filmmakers and, in the film, the intruding mining entrepreneur and the thugs he brings in to intimidate the strikers.
     Banned in Algeria, where it was filmed, and in Tunisia, Remparts d’argile is a powerful feminist fable portraying a brave, solitary soul’s rebellion against both primitive local custom and intrusive neocolonialism. The workers’ strike helps crystallize both her sense of exclusion and her radical dream of real, not nominal, independence. Her desire is to shed two African pasts.

20. LUCÍA. Ten years after the Revolution deposed Batista, Lucía, by Humberto Solás, expressed hopefulness of the future. Depicting progressive changes in Cuba over more than half a century, the film’s formal design—three episodes, each in its own visual style, showing the role of Cuban women at three different times—implies quantum leaps in political consciousness. Lucía adheres to the dictum that a woman’s lot reflects a nation’s value.
     In the case of Cuba, that lot is marked against entrenched patriarchy and socially rampant machismo, one source of which is Spanish culture. The first Lucía is embroiled in a well-heeled romantic melodrama in colonial times, their late nineteenth-century romance at the mercy of her lover’s whims, and the period sets, costumes and florid attitudes—betrayal and madness figure in—correlative to the entrapment of history. In the next, tragic episode, romance strikes out at another Lucía’s insulated world as the political ground underneath the Caribbean island begins to shift. Society-maiden Lucía falls in love with a guerrilla fighter and joins Cuba’s war of independence from Spain. The idea of independence resonates on different levels as the personal and the national cross, resulting in the kind of “intimate epic” that Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming et al., 1939) failed to achieve due to its intellectual vacuity and sentimental compromises. In the final episode, a third Lucía has yet more sociopolitical distance to cover. After the Castro revolution, then what? Progress is being made throughout the island, but Lucía’s spouse, who at times keeps her (literally) locked up, is resistant to any tampering with his male prerogatives. For Solás, “revolution” must be an ongoing thing, and education is the key.
     The lukewarm mush of Solás’s recent Miel para Oshún (2001) begs the question: Is the Cuban Revolution dead in the water?

1969
21. FATA MORGANA. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 77.

22. ANTÔNIO DAS MORTES. A reworking of the myth of St. George and the Dragon, O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro—literally, The Dragon of Evil Against the Warrior Saint—is Glauber Rocha’s sequel to his Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964), a.k.a. Black God, White Devil. Hired assassin Antônio das Mortes reappears, this time allying himself with oppressed, exploited peasants, whose protector and avenger he becomes. The setting again is the sunbaked sertão. Full of ritual, steeped in folklore, rich in song and dance, this brilliant example of cinema nôvo suggests a heady Brazilian mixture of Francesco Rosi, Miklós Jancsó and Jean-Luc Godard.
     Indeed, Rocha presents a landscape of shifting loyalties and betrayals amidst the constants of feudal and colonialist legacies. But the central shift proceeds politically forward: the villain, the Dragon Antônio das Mortes, slays the Dragon Slayer, becoming himself the cangaceiro, the people’s bandit, whose personality suggests the dimensions of guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, whose 1967 death fully released, enhancing, the legend. The film’s formal theatricality, distancing and visually flat, stabilizes the circus-like shifts, creating a tension that is correlative to the hero’s divided nature, which encompasses the degree to which he is haunted by his past. In a way, like Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), he ends up “wandering between the winds,” a solitary figure in a landscape at once both alien and familiar.
     The film’s amazing final movement finds the hero moving in and out of remoteness, timelessness and immediate, time-specific traffic, while the film itself moves in and out of sound, in and out of silence. The closing shot finds the hero walking down a deserted road away from the camera, with a Shell Oil station up ahead—a mark of exploitation: post-colonial colonialism.

1971
23. MEXICO: THE FROZEN REVOLUTION. Raymundo Gleyzer’s pulsating, deeply moving México, la revolución congelada is a brilliant Argentinean documentary about the “stillborn” 1910 Revolution that failed to bring economic and social justice to Mexico, but, rather, maintained the desperate poverty and hunger of the country’s indigenous peasants. Gleyzer, 34, was kidnapped and murdered by Argentina’s ruling military five years after this film. (His films are usually about Argentina.) Gleyzer won for it a special prize at Locarno for Third World production.
     The film combines historical documentation, consisting of voiceover and old photographs and newsreel footage in sepia or black and white, as well as footage from the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City during the 1968 Summer Olympics, which claimed 400 lives, many of them students, and freshly shot material in color. The latter includes material from the 1970 presidential campaign—at least I think at least some of it is fresh—and interviews with rural peasants, for instance, Mayans.
     The materials are dazzlingly assembled; the result, trenchant. Gleyzer explores the reasons for the Revolution’s failure, its departure from socialist principles, its co-option by reactionary forces, including middle-class business, and so forth, and the effect of all this on the lives of actual people. At the outset of the Revolution, 1% of Mexicans owned 97% of Mexico’s land; nominal ownership expanded to about 50%, wherein persisting feudalism kept crops that these “owners” raised, on the land that they worked, nearly entirely out of their hands and their children’s mouths, prompting their further victimization by usurious lenders. All this also entailed the collaboration of Mexico’s exploitational neighbor to the north.
     The nobility of starving Mayans is apparent in their faces, their willingness to work, their love of family—and their great ancestral stone carvings, which this peerless film also encompasses.

1972
24. AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 78.

1973
25. TOUKI-BOUKI. Shimmering in heat waves, a wide-angle shot shows a boy mounted on a zebu leading a herd of the oxen towards camera. Theirs is a single destination that therefore applies, at least metaphorically, to both beasts and boy: the slaughterhouse. What follows is graphic and gory—stuff so discombobulating (for us, in our safety) that we think: No child should be part of this. But no matter how young he is, this village child, Mory, must do what he can to survive. Djibril Diop Mambéty’s The Hyena’s Journey has astonishingly begun.
     The next shot is point-of-view; the stylistic rupture corresponds to the fact that time has passed. Mory is a young man now, and he is riding into Dakar—the city—on his motorbike. How do we know this is Mory, only grown up? The horns of a zebu adorn the handles of his motorbike. This is how Mambéty’s masterpiece proceeds: elliptically, expressively.
     Mory and college student Anta dream of fleeing to Paris, and much of the film records the couple’s attempts to get the money to do so however they can. (Mory, the hyena, still pursues survival—mental, now, as well as material.) French singing, some of it by U.S. expatriate Josephine Baker, dots the soundtrack. The confusion of western and French icons and emblems reminds us that Senegal had been a French colony. But the point is, the Senegalese need no reminding. Mambéty’s film is about the people’s confusion of cultural and national identity—a legacy of Senegal’s colonization. The dream to escape to Paris reveals the need for a resolution to this confusion.
     References to French films—Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949), Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1969) among them—suggest the ironical allure of more confusion as some sort of resolution.

1975
26. HARVEST 3,000 YEARS. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry 82.

27. XALA. Ousmane Sembène looks back to Senegal’s independence from France. People rejoice in the streets—perhaps prematurely. Fifteen years later, Sembène implies, Senegal still hasn’t come into its own.
     The protagonist is El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a food merchant who, like other members of the government-connected businessmen’s group to which he belongs, routinely diverts funds intended for the poor, for whom he has contempt. Enamored of power and influence, and having adopted the French colonialists’ smug sense of superiority, he exploits black Africans. He is, after all, a capitalist.
     Each group member has been given a stash of cash for business use, but El Hadji uses his for a lavish wedding. His young bride looks miserable at the ceremony, though, and Wife #2 counsels patience to Wife #3. What a hard limit, it turns out, #2’s patience really has!
     El Hadji defends his status-seeking third marriage for its “Africanity”—its revival of traditional black African practice. “I am the master here!” he shouts at daughter Rama, a socialist and feminist, after striking her for telling him that all polygamists are liars.
     Plainly El Hadji needs to be taught a lesson. The lesson is not long in coming. El Hadji cannot “perform” on his wedding night. His penis, we are informed, “crumpled like a wet piece of paper”—an allusion, perhaps, to the new nation’s Constitution. Has someone put a hex on him—a xala, a curse of impotence? El Hadji tries everything to undo the “curse.” Finally a traditional “healer” succeeds, exacting a capitalist’s price: El Hadji’s full purse.
     Overextended, El Hadji goes under financially. Not having been paid, the healer reinstates the curse. Beggars El Hadji once had hauled away by the police now occupy his home and dish out just desserts. Sembène knows his Viridiana (see 1961).

1977
28. CEDDO. Banned by his nation, Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo is set in Senegal’s past, when the Ceddo—the people; those who resist—were forced to convert to Islam by occupying Islamic forces. The film, by turns a mythical and grimly realistic epic, reflects on the African need to retain native cultural roots against whatever outside forces oppose this: Christianity, colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as Islam. A Catholic priest and a white trader crop up as figures of oppression and exploitation.
     Ceddo is a film of revolt, a cry to rise up against foreign invaders. (It is worth noting that Sembène, “the father of African cinema,” studied film in Moscow under Mark Donskoi, the director of The Rainbow, 1944, about a Ukrainian village occupied by the Nazis.) Its style is minimalist and, at times, semi-abstract; derived from ideas embodied in its images, the film’s force owes nothing to sentimental manipulation.
     Like nearly all of Sembène’s films, this one is feminist, gleaning a connection, a mirror-imaging, between tribal patriarchy from within and oppression from without. The principal agency of this feminism is the character of Princess Dior Hocine, whose kidnapping is the result of her father’s, King Demba War’s, alliance with the Islamic invaders. Communal debate ensues. Ultimately the princess shoots dead the Imam occupying her father’s throne.
     Throughout, the distancing techniques that Sembène marshals do even more than make us think (Brecht); they are correlative to the cultural self-dissociation that Islamic and other oppressors seek to impose on native Africans and which the latter, Sembène feels, must do their utmost to resist. His film is graced with long shots of the people, and it’s reasonable to assume that he was partly inspired by one of the two greatest shots of the 1970s: the closing one of Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder (1973).

29. DE CIERTA MANERA. Sara Gómez Yera was 30 when asthma took her life in 1974. Both Cuba’s first woman filmmaker and first Afro-Cuban filmmaker, the former documentarian was making her first feature. (France’s Agnès Varda had been a mentor.) The film was completed by Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who would pay homage to its style, a fusion of documentary and fictional elements, in his Up to a Certain Point (see 1983). Gómez’s film, called in the States One Way or Another (In a Certain Way might be more accurate), was partly based on her love affair with a sound technician. In the film, Yolanda is a middle-class schoolteacher; Mario, a factory worker. Moreover, Mario, who is racially mixed, is misogynistic, tied to machismo; by contrast, Yolanda embraces the new sociopolitical order. The divide between lovers may be characterized as past versus future, pre-Castro and post-Batista. Yet Gómez is sharply critical of Cuba’s persistent attachment to elements of classism, racism, sexism; some of this she lays at (what she sees as) Castro’s authoritarian door. These elements are explored in various interruptions of the main story, including newsreel footage, interviews, direct addresses and related elements. Jean-Luc Godard may be a direct influence (or, through Varda, an indirect one).
     On the one hand, the film records improvements in the Cuban human landscape. For instance, a principal setting is a housing project that has replaced one of Batista’s horrific slums. Also, Yolanda’s pupils are from the underclass, which Batista had banned from schooling. However, worrisome cultural behaviors persist, such as the Cuban penchant for indolence. A moral crisis for Mario arises when he considers reporting a fellow worker who has taken off from work to have sex.
     Both leads are nonprofessional. Yolanda is played by a Yolanda; Mario, by a Mario.

1978
30. BAARA. From Mali, Baara—the title translates as Labor, or Work—is by Soulaymane Cissé. Its three main characters are on a capitalistic collision course. Balla Diarra is an impoverished street porter who lands a job at the local textile factory owned by Makan Sissoko, a man so intent on riding Africa’s westernized wave of the future that he has only one wife at a time. (Sissoko is currently in his fourth marriage.) Between them stands Balla Traoré, who newly manages Sissoko’s factory and institutes a shorter work week and higher wages. He seeks to protect its workers from both their corrupt union and Sissoko’s plans for a massive layoff. Unlike Sissoko and Diarra, Traoré doesn’t quite know his own place yet, nor is his level of confidence sufficient to forge a clear path of action through the morass of his good intentions. Moreover, he is conflicted, as his marriage demonstrates; tied to old ways, he refuses his wife her independence, keeping her at home. By contrast, Sissoko’s wife runs a boutique (another part of her husband’s—forgive—empire); but her freer life encourages her adultery. We have here a symbolical jumble of post-colonial attitudes and uncertainty.
     Tribal results ensue, including Sissoko’s sense of betrayal upon learning that Traoré has met with workers (he thus has Traoré killed), and his burst of lethal violence upon catching his wife and her lover together. The police assault on striking workers is, indirectly, another outcrop of his lethal violence. Sissoko’s center does not hold.
     In detail the film shows, moreover, the workers at work—work, here, that’s excrutiating to perform as well as monotonous.
     Baara is a tad clumsy, arty and melodramatic—but powerful. It shows colonialist imperatives, assimilated by post-colonial capitalism, finding ways of reasserting themselves through greed and lust for power.

1979
31. MALUALA. The final entry of a trilogy begun with The Other Francisco (1975) and Slave Hunter (1976), Maluala is in the mold of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Queimada (Burn!, 1969)—but without the Brandopiness. Fiercely beautiful, Sergio Giral’s film fictionalizes slave revolts in Cuba in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, called Gallo, leading an army of runaways, petitions the Spanish colonial government for freedom and land; he and his followers are met with brutal reprisals. Their settlement tucked away in eastern mountains, Gallo and the others come to presage Castro, “Che” Guevara and their anti-Batista guerrilla forces in the 1950s. The film suggests that the latter revolution has brought to fruition the earlier movement by Cuba’s most oppressed individuals—a connection that Giral, a black Cuban himself, draws with heartfelt conviction. Indeed, the film ends with a freeze frame that perfectly expresses the historical weight that Giral wishes to bring to bear. After engineering a massacre of blacks, the colonial Spanish general—Gallo’s nemesis—is shown surrounded by a taunting crowd of the dispossessed. They represent the future as much as the present, and the freeze frame captures the general’s howl and bulging eyes, slyly anticipating the end to the power upon which the colonial forces then so ruthlessly relied. This man embodies injustices perpetrated against the Cuban people; with hindsight, then, the film looks forward to his getting his comeuppance. The film’s heightened style—its rich colors, music and touches of primitive folklore—helps the connection drawn between the black slave revolt and Castro’s later defeat of the Batista government appear almost mystical. In this, the film owes something to Battleship Potemkin (1925), where a failed Russian revolution looks ahead to the successful one that has already since occurred. Like Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Maluala is a national epic.

1975, 1976, 1979
32. THE BATTLE FOR CHILE. On-the-spot documentaries can capture the most unshakable things. Patricio Guzmán’s tripartite The Battle for Chile includes a passage in which, as soldiers fire into a crowd of Allende supporters after Pinochet’s September 11, 1973, military coup, a cameraman films his own death.
     The subject of the coup occupies the middle part of Guzmán’s total work, although the first part opens with a snapshot of what after all is the central event toward which the three films thematically gravitate. Through an eclectic collage of materials, including his own footage, news footage, and television interviews of politicians and activists, Guzmán covers populist/socialist Salvador Allende’s election, the organized efforts opposing him, the idea of the coup that crystallizes, the coup and its tumultuous aftermath, including street demonstrations and Allende’s political efforts to effect his reinstatement, the aerial strikes on the presidential palace that kill Allende (“suicide” was the official pronouncement), and organized efforts to overturn Pinochet’s oppressive, murderous rule. Few films convey more powerfully the sense of a nation’s history in and out of the hands of its citizenry.
     One of the emerging themes is the disconnect between Allende and his supporters, whose inspiration by their leader may not match Allende’s own political beliefs. In his last days, for example, Allende denied workers the arms that they sought in order to defend him. It is not a stretch to say, regarding the film’s mosaic in which bits and pieces continually spark connections with other bits and pieces, that the deaths of Allende and the cameraman each reflects the other and, in some sense, become one end—that of Chile. Prosaic causality yields to a national vision—a national graveyard.
     Guzmán’s masterpiece, full of hope for Chile’s resurrection, honors all of Pinochet’s victims, Allende among them, but not Allende alone.

1981
33. THEY DON’T WEAR BLACK-TIE. Brazil’s military dictatorship, in place since 1964, had entered a period of liberalization when Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and director Leon Hirszman adapted the former’s 1958 play, Eles Não Usam Black-Tie, in response to industrial strikes occurring in São Paulo, to where they reset the play’s action (from Rio de Janeiro). Both Guarnieri, who also assumed the principal role of union leader Otávio, and Hirszman, whose Polish parents eluded the Holocaust by moving to Brazil, are Marxists committed to workers’ rights and social progress.
     At the center of the film are a father and son. Both work in the same metalworking factory that also employs the boy’s pregnant girlfriend, Maria. But while Otávio helps organize the strike at work, Tião opts for a more immediate, practical future, one that entails providing for Maria, whom he wishes to marry as soon as possible, and their baby. In the service of this priority, he becomes a scab, deepening the divide between himself and his father, which his mother, Romana (Fernanda Montenegro—Oscar-nominated for Walter Salles’s 1998 Central Station, but here giving a much more complex and valuable performance), painfully does her best to moderate. Ironically, Tião’s stance also damages his relationship with Maria, who is more in tune with Otávio’s activism.
     One of the accomplishments of this fine example of cinema nôvo is the distinction it makes between Romana and Otávio’s modest working-class home and the poorer, more cramped quarters that Maria’s family occupies.
     Each one of the characters is admirable in his or her own way, including Tião, who steps up to the plate of quite overwhelming responsibility. The film’s generosity in this regard helps lead to a humane rather than a schematic result. At the same time, there can be no mistaking where the filmmakers’ political heart lies.

1982
34. WÊND KÛUNI. The first film from Burkina Faso is wonderful—a beauteous, visually unaffected pastoral about a 12-year-old boy. It takes place in the early nineteenth century, before the white man’s intrusion, along with his Christianity, before Islam’s intrusion. The film is quiet, tranquil, as rhythmic as a river. The baa-ing of sheep and chirping of birds are recurrent sounds.
     The father apparently abandoned the mother when the boy was an infant. At ten, the latter and another child in the village fell ill, causing his mother to be branded a witch. Mother and son were driven out, their hut, burned. That day, his mother died, and he ran for hours, dropping down from exhaustion and nearly dying himself. The film opens as an itinerant merchant gives him water, bringing him back to life, and takes him to the nearest village on his way, depositing him there. The boy cannot speak. Tinga and Lale adopt him, naming him Wênd Kûuni, “God’s Gift.” This is his second rebirth. A couple’s domestic quarrel leads to the husband’s suicide, which Wênd Kûuni uncovers. This restores his voice—his third rebirth. With this voice he discloses his history to his sister, Pognere, thus becoming a storyteller: another rebirth.
     Gaston Kabore’s film consists mostly of the family’s daily life. The boy’s adoptive mother hardly ever seems to stop working; she is shown performing numerous tasks. (The village men, by contrast, seem on perpetual holiday.) Wênd Kûuni shepherds the family’s flock. In one shot, he is walking towards the camera in the tall, dry grass in the fields. The animals in front of him become visible later than he—a magical moment. In another passage, we watch Wênd Kûuni make a flute.
     Kabore’s Bûud Yam (1997), which I haven’t seen, catches up with Wênd Kûuni’s life.

1983
35. UP TO A CERTAIN POINT. In an interview being filmed, a Cuban explains: “It’s right that men and women should be equal. But only up to a certain point.”
     Machismo dies hard in Castro’s Cuba—and maybe, truth to tell, in Castro himself; but at least it finally dies, however slowly. In another of this film’s pseudo-documentary inserts, a Havanan says that her man gave her a choice: him or work. No fool, she chose her job, asking where she would be if he decided to leave her someday. No film I know of better links gender equality to personal destiny and social necessity than Hasta cierto punto.
     Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s most captivating comedy looks back to De cierta manera (see 1975), which Alea helped complete upon the death of Sara Gómez Yera, and looks ahead to Carlos Saura’s Argentinian Tango (see 1998). Alea’s film draws thematic and stylistic concerns from Gómez’s film, and in fact pays tribute to it, and, like Tango, is a film about the making of a film—but here the protagonist of the film, Oscar, wrote the script for the film-within-a-film, not directs it. However, there is a similar thematic back-and-forth playing out between Alea’s film and Oscar’s. Oscar’s documentary exposes machismo and consequent Cuban difficulty in realizing gender equality; his romance with Lina, the activist dockworker who appears in the film, suggests the need for cameras to be turned on him. But wife Marian’s friend Flora, wife of the film-within-a-film’s director, counsels a kind of cynicism about men that reflects the men’s own machismo. This machismo, along with labor issues of the dockworkers, Lina included, undermine the Oscar-Lina relationship. It seems that the male sense of entitlement to adultery links new Cuba to the old.
     Well, that’s true up to a certain point.

36. ERÉNDIRA. Colombian-born Gabriel García Márquez brilliantly wrote this film, which is based on his 1978 novella, La incréible y triste historia da la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, and which Ruy Guerra directed. It is a heady, strangely evocative film—an allegory of Mexican history, with dark, at times delirious brushstrokes of magic realism.
     The opening shot is of the coffins of teenaged Eréndira’s parents—symbolically, Columbian Mexico. “The wind of misfortune arose,” a disembodied voice softly announces as a melancholy tune is played on an unseen accordian. The girl now is a live-in slave to Grandmother, through whose villa the wind everywhere blows: Irene Papas, in a tremendous performance—and, Greek, a sly reference, perhaps, to the foreign hands into which Mexico has fallen. In a trance induced by Grandmother’s litany of chores for her to do, Eréndira burns down the villa. “Poor girl,” Grandmother tells her amidst the ruins, “you won’t live long enough to pay me back with your only asset.” Eréndira is overwhelmed by obligation, and Grandmother has now become her pimp. As they visit towns throughout the northern Mexican desert, Eréndira becomes legendary, servicing thousands of men, and Grandmother adds new expenses, hence years, to her granddaughter’s debt.
     Eventually Eréndira meets Ulysses, a boy her own age, and the two fall in love, although someone suggests that she is confusing love and death. They plan their escape; but Eréndira’s freedom requires that Ulysses kill Grandmother, whose tenacity proves ferocious. Three pounds of poison in Grandmother’s birthday cake only gives her a good night’s sleep and causes her hair to fall out. She also survives being blown up. (“Pianos don’t explode by themselves,” Grandmother opines.) Finally, Ulysses succeeds in stabbing Grandmother to death. But Eréndira takes off on her own, running against the wind.

1984
37. MEMORIES OF PRISON. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Memórias do Cárcere is based on Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos’s posthumously published account of his yearlong incarceration in the mid-1930s simply for being a suspected communist. No charges were filed against Ramos; there was no trial. Ramos was recently discharged as Director of Public Education of Alagoas.
     The film sketches the family life of Ramos’s about to be disrupted and his southward journey to prison in Rio de Janeiro, during which a military officer asks for his autograph. The rest of the film details the culture and daily life at the prisons where Ramos was confined.
     It is clear at the point of Ramos’s first arrival that political imprisonment is routine in Brazil. In a heartrending shot, the camera moves across an expanse of cheering male anti-fascists behind bars in countless cells and ends in the female part of the prison, where spirit and nostalgia, expressed in song, is equally strong, and where a cut, disrupting the shot, reveals a peeping male eye. The inmates are in solidarity. The incipient deportation of two female inmates to Nazi Germany provokes outrage in both parts of the prison. “There is no justice nowadays,” Ramos tells his wife on one of her visits. Ironically, Ramos’s incarceration seems to clarify his previously uncertain politics.
     Ramos is relocated to the brutal Ilha Grande Correctional Colony. Arruda, the white-outfitted despot at the colony, unmercifully beats a black prisoner for no reason. Arruda asks Ramos, who has been helping fellow inmates with their Portuguese, to write a speech for him; Ramos declines, although permission for his own writing hangs in the balance. Ramos is shipped back to Rio.
     Carlos Vereza gives a tremendous performance as Ramos, whose novel Vidas Secas Pereira dos Santos filmed some two decades earlier (see 1963).

1985
38. FACES OF WOMEN. From Ivory Coast, Désiré Ecaré’s Visages de femmes shows a society in transition. Framed and punctuated by a street festival providing linking all-female choral commentary, two overlapping stories address the status of women as this evolves from patriarchal oppression—the residue of both tribal organization and colonialist imposition—to newer demands for equality. The past, deeply entrenched, opposes either protagonist.
     Brou suspects his wife of committing adultery with Kouassi, his brother; he barks at N’guessan: “You are my slave . . . I own your body.” The adultery eventually materializes, prompting Brou to respond with brute force. By compounding N’guessan’s voice with several likeminded voices (“Men never trust us. . . . [Brou] deserves to be deceived”), the chorus implies the political strength in numbers necessary to uproot the idea of ownership that Brou professes.
     In the second tale, another, older woman has succeeded in the marketplace. Her fish-smoking operation employs 200 women and supports herself, spouse, family. For all this, her husband’s position of authority within the family hasn’t budged. The woman decides to open a restaurant, hoping that making more money will help.
     However, the banking system she must approach for the loan needed to launch her new venture hews to its own patriarchic logic. The woman finds herself facing an obstructive kid—an educated banker young enough to be her son. Therefore, she now frames her loan plea in familial terms, hoping a son would not turn down a mother. Humiliatingly, the strategy fails. Despite his youth, the banker stands in for a husband who discounts his wife’s ambitiousness (she has “too many plans,” he tells her). This husband also exemplifies patriarchal form taking precedence over what should be the tender, egalitarian substance of marriage.
     Ecaré’s marvelous comedy concludes with women dancing by themselves. They can rely only on themselves.

39. THE OFFICIAL STORY. During the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, thousands of citizens were tortured and murdered; they simply vanished, never to return to families who had no idea what had happened to them. Additionally, the children, including babies, of these desaparecidos were turned over to military and other right-wing families. Once the dictatorship fell, mothers of desaparecidos organized, protested and searched for their missing grandchildren. Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial approaches this material from the opposite dramatic perspective: in Buenos Aires, Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez (Norma Aleándro, in the performance of a lifetime), a high school teacher and the wife of a lawyer, begins to suspect that their five-year-old adopted daughter, Gaby, was one of these state-abducted children. Alicia’s relentless search for the truth sets her on a collision course with her spouse and their bourgeois existence.
     For quite a while, Alicia herself wears political blinders. Ironically, she teaches Argentinian history, but it is her students, unruly, self-righteous and inquisitive, who press her to learn more about what has been recently and is now going on in their country. Alicia cannot believe that such things went on as did. A Leftist colleague challenges her: “It’s always easier to believe it’s impossible, right? Because if it is possible, this would require complicity.” Her husband, Roberto, lied to Alicia about the adoption at the time; now Alicia must accept her own complicity in the unfolding national nightmare of which she had been ignorant. Of course, both she and Roberto adore little Gaby.
     Eventually Alicia meets a woman who may indeed be one of Gaby’s birth grandparents.
     By the film’s end Gaby has mastered the song that she has been attempting to learn throughout. This is part of the lyric: “In the land of I-don’t-remember,/ I take three steps and am lost.”

40. HOUR OF THE STAR. “I’m not much of a person,” 19-year-old Macabéa tells boyfriend Olimpico, and her self-evaluation is accurate. She lives with three other renters in a single small, squalid room. Both Macabéa and Olimpico are impoverished, socially and academically uneducated rural migrants in the city; she, the protagonist of Suzana Amaral’s Brazilian A Hora da Estrela, which is based on Clarice Lispector’s novel, is nicer, though. When Olimpico dumps Macabéa for someone who is more (obviously) attractive, he tells her, “You are a hair in my soup.”
     Macabéa, like Olimpico, is an orphan. She works ineptly and painfully slowly as a typist, and is constantly on the verge of being fired. (Olimpico is a factory worker.) Macabéa continually asks Olimpico questions, often about unfamiliar words she has heard used on the radio. When she asks what culture is, he typically hides his ignorance behind a brusque, dismissive response: “Culture is culture.” Macabéa wants to better herself, but she doesn’t know how, and her attempts to do so are routinely blocked.
     Yet Macabéa perseveres. She succeeds somewhat in coming to terms with herself in a largely inhospitable environment. For the most part, no one sees her. In a crowded fast-food restaurant, Macabéa is pleased when she thinks a man is noticing her, but as he leaves she realizes he is blind. Throughout, we see her looking at her image in mirrors and windows, and the reflecting surface usually is vague, smudged or given to distortion. At first, she is trying to see herself as others see her; later, she is trying to see herself more clearly, more kindly than others do. Amaral’s at times almost documentary-like film cries out for us also to see Macabéa and people like her.
     Profoundly engaging, sometimes radiant, Marcelia Cartaxo is superb as Macabéa.

1987
41. YEELEN. I am not familiar with Mali myth.
     Soulaymane Cissé’s medieval Brightness helps us out with this mythological orientation: “The two worlds, earth and sky, exist through light.” This film is about light—but the light of understanding as well as of material illumination. Instances of both abound.
     When does a boy become a man? Let me ruminate. As I was growing up, being neither Jewish nor Christian (or, possibly, by dint of my parents, both), I wondered that Jewish males were ritually declared adults at 13 while the Christian demarcation of male maturity was the christological age of 33—a twenty-year difference. How does one reconcile this discrepancy? I decided this: Judaism in this regard is projective, setting maturity as the consequence of a boy’s admittance into the adult community; Christianity, however, focuses on the individual boy’s relation to Jesus. In short, while some religions are primarily social, others are solitudinous.
     To confront the person who abandoned them both, the boy here abandons his loving mother. Additionally, the country’s survival is at stake. Soma, the father-king, feels obligated to vanquish son Nianankoro lest his own existence be the forfeit. Nianankoro beds his father’s new, young wife; but the whole to-do is less Oedipal, that is, psychological, than individual/emotional. Nianankoro’s motive and the outcome are less relevant than the journey that takes him to the confrontation with his father and better determines his adult status.
     Cissé’s beauteous film speaks its own truth. However, Nianankoro becomes “adult” by dint of experience, not mythological fiat. It is a cumulative process, which we watch unfold. Moreover, we question everything we see, including “the terror” that Nianankoro’s mother indicated that Soma was and would be, but who also plays his part in helping his son realize the full benefits of identity: hopefully, Africa’s future.

1988
42. MORTU NEGA. Drought has dried the village’s wells. Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence from Portugal has been won and those guerrillas to whom death has been denied have returned home. Fractious, selfish interests war against the unity for which ethnic groups strive. A woman who secured her free allotment of oil before the commodity ran out is selling it in portions. Her rationalization for exploiting others, “I am doing it for my children,” is punctured by the sight of children—the new nation’s future—celebrating en masse, first, war’s end and, finally, the end of the drought.
     Underwritten by the Guinea-Bissau government, Flora Gomes’s Death Denied is an epic, that is, an expression of the aspirations of a people. The first part, which follows a contingent of guerrillas who have just been resupplied with artillery, is a great, gripping mini-film about war. Instantly the guerrillas are humanized as Diminga participates in the struggle in hopes of reuniting with her husband, Sako, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Almost as soon as they do (most tenderly, most movingly) reunite, an aerial attack wounds Sako, who orders Diminga back to their village, out of greater harm’s way. When Sako himself returns after war’s end, his health is most vulnerable, it turns out, from an earlier war injury, in his foot, that has reopened and become painfully infected. It refers to many things: historical pride, hence, vulnerability; the loss of his children that war exacted (delicately, brilliantly, Gomes mentions this loss only in reference to Diminga); his disillusionment on the heels of victory.
     Collapsing time, Gomes includes a song in which Diminga has passed into legend even as she tends to Sako’s needs. The future will commemorate her past; in the meantime, Diminga lives in the present.
     And the struggle continues.

43. HERDSMEN OF THE SUN. See 100 Greatest German, etc., Films list, elsewhere on this site, entry 79.

1989
44. ANGANO . . . ANGANO . . . . In Brazilian-born César Paes’s Tales from Madagascar, a highly original ethnographic documentary, we hear storytellers recount founding myths of Malagasy culture; rather than these folk historians, who appear only in occasional inserts, or dramatic enactments of the tales they tell, we see instead people in the here and now, principally, at work, myths flowing through them, informing who they are and what they do in their everyday lives. Their myths continue to explain their environment.
     We begin at the beginning: the Malagasian creation myth—voiceover set to images of sky, sea and earth. Thunder and lightning—war—was the result of conflict between the Gods of Sky and Sea, both of which coveted Earth. The sight and sound of the matching meteorological display obliterates the difference in time. Past is present; all, eternal. Earth raised mountains to attack Sky, but both Gods struck an accord, inventing peace, and decided on a joint project: the creation of the human—shaped from mud, invested with spirit. Set to this voiceover is a long shot of a boy running towards the camera. Once created, humanity became a bone of contention, reviving conflict between the Gods and within their human creation.
     Bored and lonely, humanity made fire, hence, smoke, so God of Sky sent down his daughter to keep Man company. But she missed the taste of rice, so she and her mate visited her father, stole some of his rice and returned to earth, planting the rice. Set to this voiceover are images of rice harvesting. We see, for instance, women chattering away at work, up to their waist in muddy rice paddies—like the original boy, creatures of the mud themselves now, but also part of a sociable community.
     Myth and reality flow as one river throughout Paes’s radiant film.

45. YAABA. Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba—Mooré, for Grandmother—comes from Burkina Faso. It is about taking responsibility. Although its focus is a village, Ouédraogo’s concerns are clearly national, regional, continental.
     Someone has ignited the grainary. Eyewitness testimony is discounted because it comes from “a drunk”—the role to which villagers have relegated the man. Discounting his testimony, then, confirms their accuracy in assigning him the role, thus blocking any need to take responsibility for their error. But a voice of reason among them remarks that the drunk drinks largely because the community so ridicules and routinely dismisses him.
     The village blames the arson on Sana (Fatimata Sanga, wonderful), an elderly woman who also has been categorically defined—in her case, as “a witch.” The communal superstitiousness isn’t purely a matter of ignorance and backwardness; another component is the (false) sense of security that its familiarity imparts. However misguided, however much the practice converts neighbors into outsiders and pariahs, it reassures villagers to maintain faith in the roles that they have assigned others. It enables them to evade responsibility for what happens in their midst. The earlier arson burns with especial irony in our minds when the villagers, scapegoating Sana just as ridiculously for something else (a child’s illness), burn down her hut.
     The main characters are young cousins Nopoko and Bila. The boy, Bila, befriends Sana; both children are shown as being skeptical of the idea that Sana is a witch. When Nopoko falls ill, her cousin, at Sana’s instruction, makes a journey in order to bring a healer to Nopoko. In this way the boy is taking responsibility for the outcome of Nopoko’s illness—an act that stands in contradistinction to how the village generally functions.
     Indeed, the children represent a more hopeful future, one of responsibility rather than blame.

1990
46. TILAÏ. Filmed in Burkino Faso but set in the pre-colonial past, Idrissa Ouédraogo’s The Law attributes a harsh injunction to an authoritarian/patriarchal bias and the need for social order.
     Saga is returning home after a long voyage away, planning on marrying Nogma. Before he can enter the village, Kougri informs him that Nogma has married their father in his absence. It was a “forced” marriage. Nomenaba desires Saga’s acceptance of Nogma as stepmother. Defiantly, Saga remains at the village outskirts, where the pair consummate their adultery and incest. It falls to Kougri to kill his brother. “I’m sorry,” he says to Nogma before informing her that her disgraced father has hanged himself. “You bitch! You made me a widow,” her mother shouts at her daughter at her husband’s burial. “I never want to see you again!” Meanwhile, his life spared by Kougri, Saga is again a wanderer—as is Nogma, in search of him and pregnant, after she learns the truth. A troubled conscience afflicts Kougri, who selfishly followed his heart rather than honoring tradition. News of his mother’s illness splits the reunited couple. Upon Saga’s reappearance, Nomenaba exiles Kougri, who, before leaving, finally kills his brother.
     If Ouédraogo’s film is Wagnerian in its observation of the role of sex in familial and communal discord, its intimacy and minimalist style are otherwise. The opening identifies Saga as a solitudinous figure, a solitary moving slowly by mule across a barren landscape, in order to suggest Nogma’s contrary need for social existence that helps explain her acquiescence to a loveless marriage—in effect, a symbolic one to Saga at a generational remove. For Nomenaba, the marriage symbolically made him his own son, whose youthful existence he envies.
     “The law”—both men’s laws and “the way things are”—exiles all men from civilization.

1991
47. CABEZA DE VACA. An outgrowth of his earlier ethnological documentaries, Nicolás Echevarría’s most celebrated film is based on explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 report to Charles V about a 600-man expedition to the New World—the mission was to claim Florida for Spain—that only four others survived. In particular, the film explores the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca and, once separated from his shipwrecked group, native tribes he encounters. But the film departs from what Cabeza de Vaca wrote to the King; Echevarría pursues instead a what if? approach to the historical material. Indeed, Cabeza de Vaca weighs aloud the prudence of telling the King lies, so unbelievable has been the course of his adventures, against a desire to tell the truth.
     When indigenes take Cabeza de Vaca away, his comrades assume that he is headed for the roasting pot. Rather, as the fairest of the group, he would perhaps make the best slave. However, the tribe’s shaman takes the white man under his wing, and the Spaniard proves his worth by restoring the sight of a blinded chieftain. When Cabeza de Vaca, thus allowed his freedom, departs, the eyes of Malacosa, the armless dwarf who had once derided him, well up in tears.
     Cabeza de Vaca searches throughout America for his comrades. Eventually they reunite. The cannibalism that had seemed to be his destiny proved instead to be theirs, on the other end of the ladle. One of the group attributes his man-eating to “a Christian’s hunger”—an indication of how easily the “civilized” rationalize their own barbaric behavior.
     Echevarría’s wild, hypnotic, at times deliriously magical film ends with one of cinema’s most searing wide-angle shots: a gigantic Cross being carried across the landscape—colonial presumption, and the enslavement of indigenes and destruction of their cultures.

48. DANZÓN. Julia Solórzano (María Rojo, radiant, heartachingly good), a single mother who works as a telephone operator in Mexico City, relaxes by dancing the highly formal danzón with Carmelo, an older gentleman whom she meets only on the dance floor. (The wide-rimmed white hat Carmelo always wears denotes his cheished privacy.) One night Carmelo doesn’t show up, and Julia uncharacteristically takes time off to go to Veracruz in search of him. While not finding him there, Julia experiences what working-class persons, especially women, rarely, if ever, get to experience: liberty. This includes friendship with a cross-dresser, whom she teaches to dance, and a love affair with a hardworking boy.
     Written by sisters Beatriz and María Novaro and directed by the latter, a former documentarian, Danzón opens with a closeup on Julia’s and Carmelo’s feet on the dance floor and ends quietly, jubilantly, with the pair dancing again. In between, the film follows Julia only, sparking their reunion with both wistfulness and a sense of new possibilities. How important Carmelo is to Julia doubtless reflects how important she also is to him. Novaro suggests how important all kinds of people are to us, both inside and outside of romance.
     The film pairs Julia in heartfelt conversation with other women and girls, including co-workers and Julia’s teenaged daughter, whom Julia helps adjust to her new job as operator while retaining a mother’s worry. (In San Juan, a phone operator was raped at her worksite.) Novaro’s delicious comedy owes something to Antonioni in its open sense of adventure and pays (in the tarot-reading scene) homage to Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). It expresses our need for both structure and liberty, showing how structure can liberate, and how liberty, so hard for so many to come by, can enrich our lives.

1992
49. THE MEMORY OF WATER. See 100 Greatest Films from Italy, etc., list, elsewhere on this site, entry 85.

50. GUELWAAR. Barthelémy, now a French citizen, has returned to Senegal for his father’s funeral. Pierre Henri Thioune, “Guelwaar” (meaning, Noble One), was a district leader whose especial cause was foreign aid, which he inveighed against for costing people dignity. Senegal won its independence from France in 1960, but assistance since then has kept Senegal dependent on the outside world. Yet Ousmane Sembène tweaks the political underpinnings of this psychological concern by showing how reliant on others Guelwaar remains even in death. Someone’s inability to read French(!) has resulted in Guelwaar’s burial in a Muslim cemetery. Guelwaar was Catholic, as are those now mourning his suspicious death. It falls to Guelwaar’s sons to get officials to unbury his father’s corpse so it can be buried where it belongs.
     But things happen slowly in Senegal. Part of the painful comedy of this glorious satire hinges on the pace at which things move. This pace suits the film’s exquisite formality and rigor, as well as the delicate issues involved. The majority Muslim community must be convinced by officials and politicians, all variously motivated, of what’s what. Even the iman initially believes that pesky Catholics are looking for an excuse to violate the Islamic cemetery’s sacred ground. The Muslims insist that the right person, one of their own, is buried in the grave where they are being told Guelwaar is buried. They are poised to shed blood as a result.
     “When a vulture attacks your enemy, that could have been you,” the iman concludes, “so do something to get the vulture off him.”
     A truckload of charitable commodities is discarded. Catholics pass back their cross as they proceed to the truck; the cross thus recedes, releasing irony’s undercutting. The mass activity we see is a tribute to Guelwaar, not a decision.

51. THESE HANDS. Dedicated to women everywhere struggling to survive in poverty, Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s documentary These Hands shows women from Mozambique in a sunbaked Tanzanian quarry relentlessly cracking rock into bits with stone hammers. With conversation among the laborers, but without voiceover or other commentary, that is to say, contextualization, the film thus proceeds until its last breath, at which point script appears to inform us that these refugees work for themselves. This is heartening insofar as they aren’t being directly exploited, yet worrisome as well, for, given the harshness and monotony of their toil, it seems evident that they would be doing other things instead if a choice were available to them. These immigrants and pioneers are starting at the bottom—a familiar kind of place for those in an unfamiliar land.
     The opening is extraordinary. A barefooted woman is sitting in a space of rock, hammering, both raw material and results in piling abundance between her separated legs: a complex image resonating with equal suggestions of barrenness and fecundity, stasis and productivity. Meanwhile, we hear a cacophony of the hammering, the sound of which continues as the camera follows another woman carrying a basket of stone chips on her head. A wide-angle shot shows an army of the refugees at work as the sound that their labor generates continues and continues. M’mbugu-Schelling’s film condenses a single day’s work, but it also conveys the impression that the activity is endless, that, for the moment at least, it defines these women’s whole existence.
     It does not. At one point, asserting her personality and her autonomy, one of the women stops working and breaks into dance, triggering a hand-clapping community of joy in the quarry. Spontaneity; humanity—and then, back to work. Not a regulated factory break, but their own break.

52. THE BLUE EYES OF YONTA. Portuguese Guinea won independence, becoming Guinea-Bissau, in 1974. Vicente fought for it. In Bissau, the West African nation’s capital, he struggles to keep solvent his fish-exporting business, both for himself and the local fishermen who supply him with their catch. Vultures circle in the sky. One day he looks up and sees himself as one of the vultures.
     For Vicente’s generation, disillusionment isn’t hard to come by. The struggle for independence has passed into nostalgia; the dream of progress for everyone has failed to become reality. Electricity is a sometime thing in Bissau, threatening to rot Vicente’s stored fish; people and their possessions are being evicted from longtime homes. Meanwhile, a wedding celebration shows the pluck of the younger generation, who may be, however, whistling in the dark.
     A high school dropout who helps support her family, Yonta is oblivious to how she has had to adjust her own dreams in order to accommodate reality. Like Vicente, she keeps busy in order to nurture blindness; but the pathos of her vacancy as she sits alone by the sea, waiting for someone who will not show, sums up the wistfulness she suppresses. (She is too young yet to be able to name it.) Yonta’s parents are old comrades of Vicente’s, and Yonta is in love with her romantic notion of Vicente. In turn, Yonta has an unknown admirer who sends her love letters that wax poetically on the subject of her blue eyes. Yonta’s eyes are brown. The boy’s feelings are as idealized as once were Vicente’s hopes for his country.
     Flora Gomes’s Udjua azul di Yonta is concentrated and easy, jubilant and heartbreaking. Gomes is of Vicente’s generation. He finds that looking ahead casts an eye backward.
     Blue is the color of sky, sea, dreams.

53. HYENAS. In German, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s tragicomic The Visit of the Old Woman (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956) is a modern masterpiece. Its action, necessarily modified, has been transposed to a Senegalese village in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyènes. Colobane, dried up after a run of prosperity, represents Africa beseiged by poverty, drought, exploitation, communal and regional strife, lack of enterprise. When Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate, brilliant), a former resident who is now filthy rich, visits, the townfolk are enticed to help her in her plan of revenge against shopkeeper Dramaan Drameh in exchange for the wealth and goodies, including refrigerators and television sets, that she dangles under their noses. When she was a girl, Dramaan jilted her.
     Mambéty’s darkly comical fable brandishes the mirror-imaging of a parched landscape and Linguère’s parched soul. Colobanians are only too eager to allow their human folly to tumble out. Environment clarifies their conduct. In addition, the film’s satirical edge administers appropriate cuts to western materialism. The embittered, withered hag that Linguère has become should discourage anyone from following her; but it doesn’t.
     The opening shot sets the humorous tone: a closeup of an elephant’s front feet moving at a lumbering pace. This image of African indolence yields to a wide-angle shot of the herd, with its suggestion of herd mentality. (School children being led in group recitation reinforces this impression.) A red monkey swaying to the beat of a village band’s music—what an image!—rounds out a portrait of defeatism: everyone and everything fiddling, as it were, while Colobane burns.
     It is fitting that enterprising, steadily contributing Dramaan should become the one that his neighbors rally against—neighbors, already quarrelsome, who need a target to give themselves some sense of purpose, unity and communal identity, however false that sense may be.