Word: das
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...Glauber Rocha, director of Antonio das Mortes, describing the style of William Faulkner...
Like Victorian theater and early film, Antonio das Mortes (1969) is staged exclusively in two flat planes: one straight across the frame, the other straight into it. The figure in the left of the frame is opposed to the figure in the right, and the actors in the foreground fight the crowds toward the back. In this closed form of thesis/antithesis, Rocha's open form occurs when he transforms one opposition into another. Rocha's shots are set, closed, until he brings in a new term of antithesis: he pans roughly till the camera picks up a new character...
Rocha 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...
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...
...They were beaten by members of the football team while police quietly watched. This fall, they put out an underground paper called the Mad Hatter. According to a local attorney, the school committee reacted to its four-letter words "as if they had come on the first copy of Das Kapital." The members banned the sheet from the school, calling it "filth" and "insanity...