I skipped the L.A. Conservancy's screening of Cabaret at the Los Angeles Theatre last week. No, I have nothing against Liza Minnelli. I had just come back from a trip to Arizona to watch my brother get his doctorate, followed by revelry and sleepless nights in the City of Lost Wages. I came back on Tuesday, and when I woke up for work on Wednesday, I knew I wouldn't have the energy to go downtown after work. I love the Last Remaining Seats series, but living as far from downtown as I do means going to these things is a whole to-do. I have to get to work early so I can leave early and get downtown on time. When the show ends, usually around eleven, the subways come every twenty minutes or so. It's pushing midnight by the time I get home. It's exhausting. It's too bad I missed Cabaret last week. First of all, I've never seen it. One reason I like these screenings is because the L.A. Conservancy usually picks a classic I've somehow managed to miss. Secondly, the Los Angeles Theatre is one of my favorites. Seriously, you've got to see it. They're showing A Streetcar Named Desire there next week, so not all is lost.
Tonight I was back to the same theater where I saw Buck Privates two weeks ago: Sid Grauman's Million Dollar. Tonight's film was thousands of miles from Buck Privates, though, both literally and figuratively. It was a Brazilian film from 1969 called Macunaíma. No, I'd never heard of it either. You've gotta give the Conservancy props for throwing in something obscure to American audiences. Cabaret was last week, Streetcar's next week. The Sting was the first film this summer. So they've got the classics covered. Why not challenge audiences a bit?
This was a co-presentation with the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles (lacla.org), a summer-long festival of various Latin American films. Indeed, tonight's screening was actually part of the festival programming. That's kind of cool. That means we Conservancy folk who didn't know anything about LACLA can learn about it, while fans of the LACLA learn about the Conservancy. Both organizations are non-profit, so this kind of cooperation can only be a good thing.
As always, I got downtown early to have drinks and grab a bite. Instead of braving a new place, I decided to duck into the Library Bar. I came here a couple times last year. It's one of my faves. It's small and dark and has a nice long bar with a tap selection almost as long. The 1903 Prohibition Ale is a divine nectar, if a bit strong. Also cool was that the Library Bar now has its own food menu. It ain't Spago just exactly, but previously if you were hungry you'd have to go next door to the Wolfgang Puck Cafe and bring your food over. Or, as I did last year, you could call them on your cell from the Library Bar and they'd bring the food over. Anyway, tonight I tried the Library Burger, which wasn't very wide but made up for that with thickness. And instead of regular fries, I got the peppered steak fries with hickory dipping sauce. By the time I showed up at the Million Dollar, I was feeling buzzed, fat, and happy, and all revved up for artsy Brazilian fare.
As always, the Conservancy opened the doors at 7 p.m., and then the show started at eight. Tonight I showed up about ten minutes or so before showtime. That's too bad because according to the program, they actually had some pre-show entertainment at 7 with a DJ named Mochilla. To quote the program, Mochilla "has spent seven years forging a cultural link between Los Angeles and Brazil. Tonight we hear the sound of that transcontinental bridge!" Darn it all. From now on I should check the Conservancy site before each screening, because of course I don't get the program until I show up the night of the show. The site says DJ Mochilla "sets the mood before the screening with the sounds of samba, bossa nova, folk-psyck [huh?], batucada, and more..." Ah well. Live and learn, right?
Anyway, after Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave her little spiel to thank all the sponsors, City Councilman Jose Huizar, whom I'd seen at one or two screenings last year, came out looking as polished as always in his crisp suit. A native of East L.A. and having grown up going to movies on Broadway, Jose is basically the Conservancy's champion in the local political scene. He's all about preservation, especially the Bringing Back Broadway initiative. As with Linda Dishman, part of his point in speaking was to give thanks, only not to the corporate sponsors of tonight's screening like she did, but to all of us for being Conservancy members. It's only because of us that the Conservancy exists. And it's thanks to the Last Remaining Seats series that Conservancy membership has spiked in recent years. This movie series started in the late eighties, but it's taken time to catch on. Jose said that Bringing Back Broadway is a ten-year project. It started in 2004 and is still on track to be done by 2014, according to him. That would be kind of amazing considering that most of the twelve theaters on Broadway aren't done yet. And he said the Broadway streetcar, which I mentioned in my post on The Sting, would be finished by then too. Well okay. If he says so. That'd be pretty awesome if they could pull it off.
The main pre-show event was a Q&A hosted by an L.A.-based Brazilian radio DJ named Sergio Mielniczenko. He hosts a couple of Brazilian radio shows here in town, Global Village and Brazilian Hour (brazilianhour.org). You can tell Sergio earns a living with his voice. He's a great speaker, a natural host. He had two guests. The first was this young American guy who looked to be in his thirties or so. The program doesn't give his name. Apparently he's a scholar well versed in all things Brazil. The other guest was a seventy-five-year-old black Brazilian actor named Milton Gonçalves. Like you, I'd never heard of Milton, but apparently he's quite the legend in Brazil, kind of like their Robert Duvall or Paul Newman. He's been in the business pretty much forever. His English is terrific. I wasn't surprised to learn that he's dabbled in the occasional American film, such as Kiss of the Spider Woman, Moon Over Parador (that movie's hilarious!), Wild Orchid, and--you talk about a masterpiece--Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. In Macunaíma he plays Jigue, one of Macunaíma's brothers.
Before Sergio walked over to the chairs on the right side of the stage, he stepped up to the podium where Councilman Huizar had spoken and said a whole bunch of stuff to us in Portuguese. I don't speak a lick of that language, but plenty of other people in the audience did, as at one point they laughed at something he said, and applauded when he finished and headed over to the chairs.
As you might imagine, Sergio was far more interested in hearing from Milton than he was from the scholar guy. The latter only answered one question during the entire Q&A, but he was still informative. He talked about the political and social environment in Brazil in 1968, during the year leading up to Macunaíma's production. That is to say, the environment was pretty unstable. The military took over the Brazilian government in December of 1968. When it came to movies, they censored pretty much everything. And they certainly didn't want anything artsy fartsy like Macunaíma being made. They'd view it as subversive or something. It isn't, of course. As I'll get into in a moment, it's not the easiest film to digest, but I suppose if you're a military dictator, a movie you can't understand must be an evil movie. So today in Brazil Macunaíma is praised not only as a good film, but as a real accomplishment of getting around the military censors. The fact that they made it at all is nothing short of a miracle.
Milton's acting career started about ten years before Macunaíma, when he was in his mid twenties. That didn't stop his activism apparently. Milton related an episode in the mid sixties, when he was thirty and partook in some demonstration or other. Police came. Shots broke out. Dude was one of the ones who was shot. These activists were trying to get Brazil to be more socialist. Milton said he used to be an unabashed socialist who hated America. He hated everything about it. But with forty-five years of hindsight, he can see how wrong he was. Not only does he like our country, but he's a huge fan of Barack Obama. The U.S. is "once again showing the world how democracy is done" by electing a black man president. Milton's still working steadily in Brazil, in both movies and TV. His son Maurício has also been bitten by the acting bug. He's been acting steadily for twenty years now and is also a published writer.
Okay. Now. Let me talk about the novel on which Macunaíma is based. Entitled Macunaíma: The Hero without a Character, it was written by Mário de Andrade. The best way to put it is that Mário was the William Faulkner of Brazil. Faulkner's widely considered the best American novelist of the twentieth century. Well, that's pretty much how Mário is viewed down yonder. And he wasn't just a writer by the way. First of all, Mário was trained as a musician and, while he never made a living in an orchestra or anything, he was a noted musicologist. He also loved art history and earned a living as an art critic. And he was a photographer. Oh yeah, and he liked to write. Novels as well as poetry. His home base was São Paulo. He did for that megalopolis (it's even bigger than L.A.!) what Faulkner did for Mississippi.
Macunaíma is a modernist novel. That means it's really hard to read. Again, think Faulkner. Think The Sound and the Fury. Think James Joyce's Ulysses. It was published in 1928 when Mário was in his mid thirties. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1945, he hadn't done anything else as huge. This novel was his masterpiece. He did do lots of other things, though, as I said above. In general Mário is viewed as the godfather of São Paulo's art scene. He was the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture. Did I mention he was sort of a big deal down there?
Macunaíma is a modernist novel. That means it's really hard to read. Again, think Faulkner. Think The Sound and the Fury. Think James Joyce's Ulysses. It was published in 1928 when Mário was in his mid thirties. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1945, he hadn't done anything else as huge. This novel was his masterpiece. He did do lots of other things, though, as I said above. In general Mário is viewed as the godfather of São Paulo's art scene. He was the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture. Did I mention he was sort of a big deal down there?
The movie was directed by this guy named Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (no relation to Mário). As that young scholar said, it was made on the sly, and on the fly, and with little money. Just as Mário wrote the novel in his mid thirties, Joaquim was in his mid thirties when he directed it. He'd directed six or seven movies at this point in his career, and he'd direct another six or so before he died of lung cancer in the late eighties at the age of fifty-six.
Let me describe the movie as best I can. I don't want to give away too much, though. For one thing, that would be hard to do. Some things about this movie you really need to see to understand. For another, if I give away too much, it'll ruin the novelty of it. Novelty's not the right word. That makes it sound cheap. Let me put it this way: I don't want to ruin the feeling of what it's like to see a film that simultaneously defies every single narrative convention known to man while still holding your attention.
The title character is born a full-grown black man somewhere in the Brazilian jungle. His mom's this white woman who's obviously being played by a guy. The black guy playing Macunaíma is Grande Otelo, a very famous Brazilian comedian at the time. He was fifty-four when this film was made. And yes, he's hilarious. I mean he's this obviously middle-aged black guy all wrapped up and being spoon-fed like a baby. And he whines and so forth. Dude was obviously a comic genius.
So anyway, Macunaíma eventually turns white and heads into the modern city with his brothers, one of whom is Milton Gonçalves's character, Jigue. The guy who plays the white Macunaíma, by the way, is the same guy who played his mom at the beginning, Paulo José. In the city he meets this hot militant chick (every guy's fantasy) named Ci. They have a kid, a black kid, but both Ci and the baby blow up and die because Ci messes up with a home-made bomb. With her death comes the disappearance of her good-luck talisman, something called the muiraquitã. And therein lies our man's ultimate objective, finding that talisman.
The biggest challenge of Macunaíma is that it forces you to let go of narrative convention. To let go of space and time. Mário sure did when he wrote the novel. The protagonist starts out sometime long ago. And the next thing you know, he's in the modern city. I had mixed feelings about the movie. Yeah, I understand they were trying to adapt an artsy modernist novel, but why? Maybe it sounds blasphemous to say, but this wasn't a great movie. I'm just one critic, but still. I paid good money and went out of my way to see this on a school night, so sorry if I was expecting Citizen Kane. Maybe I'm being unfair. Like Citizen Kane, Macunaíma needs to be judged in the context in which it was produced. Now that I think about it, the fact that they whipped up this piece in a country that was being hammered into submission at the time by a theocracy that censored all movies is to be commended. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie. I liked it. What's more, this is one of those movies that you'll like the more you see it. I suppose I'm saying they shouldn't've adapted the novel at all. Or at the very least they should've waited until Brazil was a safer place to make movies, instead of make it at a time when you had a military in charge who thought movies were evil.
The title character is born a full-grown black man somewhere in the Brazilian jungle. His mom's this white woman who's obviously being played by a guy. The black guy playing Macunaíma is Grande Otelo, a very famous Brazilian comedian at the time. He was fifty-four when this film was made. And yes, he's hilarious. I mean he's this obviously middle-aged black guy all wrapped up and being spoon-fed like a baby. And he whines and so forth. Dude was obviously a comic genius.
So anyway, Macunaíma eventually turns white and heads into the modern city with his brothers, one of whom is Milton Gonçalves's character, Jigue. The guy who plays the white Macunaíma, by the way, is the same guy who played his mom at the beginning, Paulo José. In the city he meets this hot militant chick (every guy's fantasy) named Ci. They have a kid, a black kid, but both Ci and the baby blow up and die because Ci messes up with a home-made bomb. With her death comes the disappearance of her good-luck talisman, something called the muiraquitã. And therein lies our man's ultimate objective, finding that talisman.
The biggest challenge of Macunaíma is that it forces you to let go of narrative convention. To let go of space and time. Mário sure did when he wrote the novel. The protagonist starts out sometime long ago. And the next thing you know, he's in the modern city. I had mixed feelings about the movie. Yeah, I understand they were trying to adapt an artsy modernist novel, but why? Maybe it sounds blasphemous to say, but this wasn't a great movie. I'm just one critic, but still. I paid good money and went out of my way to see this on a school night, so sorry if I was expecting Citizen Kane. Maybe I'm being unfair. Like Citizen Kane, Macunaíma needs to be judged in the context in which it was produced. Now that I think about it, the fact that they whipped up this piece in a country that was being hammered into submission at the time by a theocracy that censored all movies is to be commended. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie. I liked it. What's more, this is one of those movies that you'll like the more you see it. I suppose I'm saying they shouldn't've adapted the novel at all. Or at the very least they should've waited until Brazil was a safer place to make movies, instead of make it at a time when you had a military in charge who thought movies were evil.
I'm glad I'm not a critic. Macunaíma was beloved in Brazil. It won awards at various film festivals and so on, although it doesn't seem to have made an impression in the U.S. It wasn't nominated for Best Foreign Film. The winner of that award in '69 was Z, the French-language political thriller from Algeria, directed by Costa-Gavras.
Whatever you think of the film, you've got to give the Los Angeles Conservancy credit for teaming up with LACLA to put on something like this. That'll teach all those people who expect the Conservancy to stick with the safe classics.
