Joaquim Pedro de Andrade: The Complete Films

Hard on the heels of Eryk Rocha’s excellent documentary Cinema Novo (VL-9/18) on Brazil’s titular movement during the 1960s and ‘70s comes this collection of the work of one of its most notable directors. The output of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1932-88) comprises eight shorts and six feature films, with the former including portraits of Brazilian artists, essays on socioeconomic disparity in the new capital of Brasília and the power of advertising, documentaries about street children trapping stray cats for use in making tambourines and the cinema novo movement, and a short fiction film about a man’s peculiar sexual practices. The feature films begin chronologically with Garrincha: Joy of the People (1963), an energetic portrait of the titular soccer player, and The Priest and the Girl (1965), the tale of a young rural priest’s obsession over an attractive girl, before peaking with Andrade’s most famous work, Macunaíma (1969), a madcap film steeped in mystery and coarse humor about a naïve forest-dwelling man who travels to the big city. The later features include The Conspirators (1972), about a failed 18th-century coup against colonial rule, obviously designed to criticize Brazil’s military government; the wild sex comedy Conjugal Warfare (1975); and The Brazilwood Man (1981), a highly imaginative biography of Oswald de Andrade, who is portrayed simultaneously by an actor and an actress, representing the twin sides of his personality. All of Andrade’s films are marked by passion, intelligence, and commitment to a philosophy that combined intense patriotism with an abhorrence of repression and societal inequality, as well as a penchant for visual extravagance, oddball humor, and hyperkinetic editing. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)