Black God, White Devil

Throughout, Glauber Rocha calls on us to imagine what we’d want a revolution to look like.

For all its heroic energy, hortatory anger, and impulsive youth, it's very much a philosophical work of its time, a majestic fantasy of no way out.

Simple, black-and-white, more arresting as a shocking polemic than as memorable drama.

Rocha's project is fundamentally political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to improve.

Strongly recommended.

The fusion of European and Afro-Brazilian elements -- dialogue, exquisite black-and-white images, and music by Villa-Lobos -- is startlingly original and poetical in conveying the hope and despair of the oppressed.

A strange film, both of its time and blisteringly immediate.

Long, increasingly phantasmagorical, alternately frenetic and soporific, Black God, White Devil remains an uneven viewing experience, but one whose daring—located somewhere between Bunuel and Sweet Sweetback—carries it over the rough spots.

Rocha borrows certain compositional elements from the western to build, with his aesthetic expertise, a fairly sober sociopolitical treatise on inequality, corruption, and peasant resistance in times of authoritarianism. [Full review in Spanish]

For me the mixture of primitive subject and some sophisticated, if barren, filming produces distinct unease, as though Glauber Rocha were goading and prodding his subject into the fatalistic shape of legend.