Aruanda

More a documentary than anything else, this short black and white movie is enchanting due to the way it's done: no talking and there's just a drumming song playing all through the 20 minutes it lasts. The images show how tough life can be in a poor region. However art and beauty may overtake misery for some time, and that's what we see in "Aruanda". This movie was made in Paraíba, one of Brazilian 26 states and also the state I live in, so I think of proud of that.

In the period of the slavery, the runaway slaves formed communities called "Quilombos", a kind of sanctuary and piece of resistance. "Aruanda" exposes the "Quilombo Olho d'Água da Serra do Talhado", em Santana do Sabugi, Paraíba, with people living a primitive life and completely isolated from the Republic of Brazil of the 60's. The tough life of the dwellers is pictured in this documentary through the character of Zé Bento. The place, inhabited by former slaves, is very poor but people do not forget their roots.

Linduarte Noronha made this short documentary in a period where Brazilian "Cinema Novo" was beginning with an inner preoccupation of "Who is the Brazilian Man" and trying to find the "real" roots of the Brazilian men. I personally did not like this documentary, but I absolutely agree with its importance to the moment of the Brazilian cinema. "Aruanda" is a milestone in the history of Brazilian Cinema. In the 60's, the documentaries usually presented the "rites of the power" (acts of the president, governors, majors, politicians, military etc.), quotidian (soccer games, sports, events) of scientific matters. "Aruanda" was the pioneer documentary to reflect the view of the leftists in the 60's, exposing the social reality of a primitive community. In spite of the lack of resources and low budget, this movie is highly recommended for those that studies cinema as art. I saw this movie for the second time on 11 November 2006. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Aruanda"

For Glauber Rocha, Noronha's short, semi-documentary film was foundation, presenting an 'aesthetic of hunger' against the 'aesthetic of digestion' (and consumption) that governed the myth-making of official Portugese cinema, which it countered with "characters who eat dirt, characters who eat roots, characters who steal in order to eat, characters who kill in order to eat, characters who flee in order to eat, characters who are dirty, ugly, skinny, living in filthy, ugly, dingy homes", and for which it was criticised of 'miserablism'. But the family shown here are not simply victims: the film shows their impulse to continue, to survive, to build; humour, intimacy, humanity. They're the survivors of a quilombo, the descendants of those who ran away from the slave regime, and though they have to survive within a semi-arid landscape, their separation from an affluent urban landscape within underdeveloped regions an index, not only of their defiant legacy, but of the continuing racialised, classed and regionalised imbalances of Brazilian society. The film presents those who have refused and have been refused 'integration' into the broader body politic: its title suggests the Afro-Brazilian religious conception of a spirit world, of embodied spirits who take the form of the 'wretched of the earth', a syncretic form with political ramifications. As such, it gestures towards the revitalising myths which Rocha will find in such communities, which serve to present hunger and misery, not in fatalistic fashion, but as a dialectical source for new myths, new ways of political and cinematic thinking.