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CineSource Collective Narrative
Film Movements: Why Bother? With the SF Film Society starting an “international film center” and indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson calling for a film movement (see related articles, Nov09 CS), I got to wondering: Could the Bay Area support a film movement, what would be involved, and is it of any value, even?
There have been many film movements, from Film Noire, which adapted America to the forbidding post-war period, to Italian Westerns, which did the same in reverse, using copious amounts of Spanish sunlight. But they were thematic not geographical, although some were nationally localized like Italian Neo-Realism or Swedish Realism.
The most remarkable movement, for a film writer certainly, was the French New Wave, started by the writers for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. LIke Zues birthing Athena from his head, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and friends fabricated a full blown film movement right out of their pages of scholarly criticism, although Truffaut had a leg up, having married into a film distribution family (French Jews, they hid in the south of France).
The movement most applicable to the Bay Area, however, is Cinema Novo, out of Brazil, or Cine Novisimo, its younger hipper version, from Salvador, Bahia. Indeed, “bahia” also means “bay” and Bahia is Brazil's San Francisco, a laid back place of hippies, music and alternative arts – notably the Tropicalia movement, led by musician poets Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and the jam banders, Novos Baianos and Cor do Som.
While San Paulo and Rio started making movies soon after the Lumiére brothers sent camera teams around the world in 1898, Bahia remained a five-hundred year-old backwater. Although known for poets and painters, as well as musicians, film didn't get made much up there until Glauber Rocha and Cine Novisimo.
I fell in love with Bahia shortly after arriving in 1978, on Day One of Carnival. It was a teeming town, reeking of industrial-strength mold and African-dende cooking oil, its streets lined with decayed houses, and packed full of singing, dancing and drunk citizens. I stood on a corner in semi-shock, still carrying my backpack, exhausted from the 30 hour bus ride from Rio.
The revelers were often in uniform “togas” identifying their “escola da samba,” or samba school. They lumbered after trucks loaded with lights and speakers and topped by “Trio Electricos,” the Bahian version of roots rock. Everywhere were beer shacks, with small colorful tables, doing a land office business.
As it happened, I had an address and decided to look it up, despite it being out of town on the beach. After negotiating the detoured and jammed buses and random house numbers, I announced myself before a modest residence. A small bearded guy ambled out, but when I tried to introduce myself, he gestured: "Wait!"
A Ducati-style roadster was bumping down the dirt road towards us and he disappeared into the house with its well-dressed drivers. A half an hour later, he reappeared, welcoming me and saying I could stay if I could convince his wife. But Eva was a Dane who lived in New York, my home town – hence, no problem.
I had landed in a den of cineastes, as it turned out. My host, Mario Cravo Neto, was a noted photographer/cinematographer, and son of Mario Cravo Junior, Bahia’s most famous sculptor. Other house guests included soundman Jorge Saldanha and his brother, Carlos, a director, both from Rio.
After a fabulous Carnaval, I went on to crew on two films with Mario and make one of my own, “Cancer in the Tropics,” a take-off of the Henry Miller book title, a coincidence that came full circle twenty years later.
Mario didn’t have much time to help with "Cancer" but he did put in a good word for me at the municipal library. They had Arriflex cameras and Nagra tape recorders, donated by a local industrialist, and lent them free to local filmmakers, which I came to be considered after a year residence.
It was Mario who noted, "You are a Bahiano now." After I protested, not from modesty but the sheer technicality of it, he said, "Look at you arguing with me, not only in pretty good Portuguese but a Bahian accent."
At that point my trajectory intersected with Cinema Novo. Not only did I begin borrowing some of the same equipment they had used but I inadvertently picked up their themes, as I discovered when I started seeing selections from their oeuvre at the library and elsewhere.
One of its principle exponents was Rocha, who was notorious for saying, "I am Cinema Novo." Born in the Bahian hinterlands but raised in Salvador, he is best know for, “O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro,” or “The Dragon of Evil Against the Saint Warrior “(1969), which took Best Director at Cannes. "O Dragon," also called "Antonio das Mortes," after its colorful anti-hero, is about a bounty hunter returning to work after a long break to corral a character who was more Moses then outlaw.
Bahia also has a folk hero Lampion, their Jesse James, and lauded endlessly in local songs. In Rocha's film, the outlaw saint is leading a hunger march of impoverished Bahianos, black and white, as they do magic and search for food.
I also viewed various lower-rent Cinema Novo films. They were characterized by their political, mystical and folkloric perspectives, as well as style and, of course, sex. I recall one, its name and director now lost in the mists of time but its opening scene still vivid: a sail boat drifts out of the fog, sleeping on deck is a blond woman covered in white feathers, a black man rows up…
Another Bahian film, penned by the famous Bahian novelist, Jorge Amado, was a veritable anthropological survey of African magic, or Condomble, wrapped in a story of flashy black “milandro,” or hustler. While the latter erred on the side over-the-top side, what characterized Cine Novo, as it was called for short, was its modern international sensibilities and its tackling of local, even esoteric, issues with panache and aplomb.
Could this be a formula for a film movement? Certainly, Oakland with its high murder rate, multiculturalism, hip-hop and Burning Man artists living side-by-side, has similarly striking and contradictory stories that might interest viewers in Paris, London and Sydney. Indeed, Oakland could be considered the poster child for a structurally ambiguous California, which had to remain delicately balanced between collapse and chaos, fine wine and food and massive incarceration, film, computer and biotech centers and massive unemployment, simply to avoid attracting even more then its regular half a million immigrants.
Perhaps we need local libraries like San Francisco's worldclass exemplar to stock cameras so our kids can tell their stories. This is already happening to a degree with Youth Radio, which now has a video program, and, at a higher level, at the SF Film Society’s FilmHouse, which sponsors suitable applicants for higher film education and equipment access. But could it coalesce into a film movement?
Rob Nilsson, noted above, is already leading a movement of semi-improvised, lower-budget features based on his patented style of forming improv-acting troupes and often addressing the angst of those left behind by California: the outcast or recently fallen like cab drivers, homeless, unemployed, questing hippies. These are themes he developed at his decade-long Tenderloin Y Group improv-acting-cinema class.
There aren’t a lot of films incorporating what Oakland has in spades and building off of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing?” and John Singleton’s "Boyz ’n the Hood." But to be uniquely Oakland, they would have address its realities of multicultural ghettos with gangbangers and tribal punks, city lakes and beautiful parks. It's pas de deux of opposites, or what Oakland filmmaker Mateen Kemet called, “Genius and disgusting at the same time. On one hand, Oakland is incredibly poor, uneducated and brutal, on the other, you have pockets of beauty and refinement. All that should be reflected in stories that take place in Oakland. If you told Oakland's story, you'd be talking about a schizophrenic character."
If someone captured this ephemeral mix and got some play, it would spur others to attempt it and compete with each other, as in the development of musical styles, until, out of default, there would be a movement. This same thing could also happen among the large Burning Man population, which has already made a number of films, like Laurent Le Gal’s “Journey to Utopia,” or "Dust and Illusions," by Olivier Bonin. In addition, there's ample material for bedroom farces in Marin or dystopian sci-fi in the cyber-campuses of Palo Alto.
Whether any of these coalesce into a movement it is hard to say but if they do we will be certain to stay abreast of it at CineSource.
And what about Salvador Bahia: Oakland should send in its sister city application papers as soon as possible. In the last two decades it has swerved from third world poverty to a booming middleclass with a Ford plant and new freeway, was well as plethora of dance studios, nightclubs and a new museum, while retaining its artistic soul. When I was recently, the landlady of my B&B told me to sleep in her bed (because she was booked up for the first night of my reservation) and on the nightstand I noticed a book: Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn." Moreover, Bahia is ready for a next round of Cinema Novo – how 'bout a doc on the Carnaval, "Tropical Woodstock," or the Ford factory, the lowest paid in world and excoriated by Noam Chomsky but beloved by Bahians. Nov 4, 2009 by D. Blair