For introduction, please see October 15, 9:45.
With its roots in the legends and folk traditions of Northeastern Brazil, Black God White Devil is a kind of epic exorcism of the violence and hunger-fed cultural derangements that have scarred that barren and backward region for centuries. In near-hallucinatory images of astonishing power, it depicts the bizarre saga of a charismatic Negro priest who leads his hunger-crazed followers to a massacre at the hands of the government troops. One of the survivors joins up with an insane bandit cangaceiro, whose heroic championship of the oppressed is treated as the stuff of great tragedy. Rocha views the historically accurate stories of the messianic priest (based in part on Antonio Conseleiro, who together with thousands of followers held off a Brazilian Army Expeditionary Force for months before being massacred) and the possessed outlaw (based on the legendary bandit Iampiao) from a Marxist perspective that cries out for revolution and the liberation of the oppressed masses of Latin America from the culture of poverty imposed by colonialism. Luis Buñuel wrote, “Black God White Devil is the most beautiful thing I have seen in more than a decade, filled with a savage poetry.”