Word: cangaceiros
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...THIRD sequence of Antonio sets a crowd of ragged, vivid revolutionaries dancing into town and into the camera, which tracks back before their leaders yet holds the frame full of the singing masses. The procession comes to a halt; their leader, the cangaceiro ("popular champion," "bandit," "dragon-killer"), comes out before them and says to the camera: "Vengeance has two faces, love and hate...
...cuts to a shot of a government-sponsored parade that is the mirror-image of the revolutionaries': uniformed children ordered in rank and file march stiffly away from the camera, part of a declining historical movement. In the background we see Antonio das Mortes, an old hired killer of cangaceiros, standing detached and pushed back from the ruling class's social order-the mirror of his counterpart the cangaceiro, he is pushed away from the camera instead of into it. A rich landowner's emissary, Dr. Matos, comes up to Antonio and with great difficulty (personal dialectical relationship) induces...
...flat two-shot, separated and complementary (Antonio in dark grey sitting higher, the doctor in white below and slightly to the front); but this personal relation is transformed by a slow zoom into Antonio, who is speaking to the audience about Lampeiro, the greatest of all cangaceiros, whom Antonio killed in 1938. "Lampeiro was my mirror," declares Antonio: "in him I saw myself." This speech exactly balances the cangaceiro's from the preceding sequence, just as the parades mirror each other; even the two men's speeches say the same thing...
Through Antonio das Mortes the dialectic keeps balancing and leaving its crux, in center frame, to be the truth of the image and of the film at this instant. Sometimes a symbolic figure occupies the center between the cangaceiro and his opponent; sometimes there is just the space between foreground and background masses. In each case Rocha's dialectical construction tells us the precise nature of their relationship. As elsewhere, dialectic shows itself to be the best way of understanding events, of laying them open to us. The central fact about this film, the root of its success, is that...
...virtuous" parts of Cangaceiro, however, are slightly awful--hero and heroine participate in a series of love scenes which are pretty much the limit in cowboy-jungle romance. They are also not very brief. The Tarzan type, Teodoro, comes out with some dialogue which, even in Portuguese, cannot fail to win this year's U.T. Award for Unlikelihood. The man protests that "his blood is mingled with the earth" and that earth and woman are the same thing ergo he cannot possibly marry the heroine. The argument is somewhat unconvincing, but one can't blame him--a woman was never...