Taking No Prisoners: The Films of Sergio Bianchi March 1 - 7, 2002 photo: romance

about the series | film descriptions and times Note: Students with a valid ID may attend this event at film society of lincoln center member's rate. What does it mean to call a film or filmmaker "political"? As we were so often reminded years ago, it can be said that all films are political: all films can be shown to reflect or respond to the societies or cultures that produced them. Yet what then should we call those filmmakers for whom the issue of the political engagement of their films is a kind of guiding principle that courses through their work? Born in 1945, Brazilian director Sergio Bianchi both recalls and advances the notable tradition of political filmmaking in Brazil and throughout Latin America. Bianchi is surely the clearest contemporary descendent of that Brazilian film movement known as Cinema Novo, or "new cinema." Cinema Novo sought to introduce a kind of modernist film esthetic influenced by neo-realism and the French New Wave into Brazilian cinema, but more importantly it hoped to make the cinema a part of a national dialogue about that country's development and future. Like the filmmakers of Cinema Novo, Bianchi focuses on those social groups deemed "marginal" because of race, class or region, although Bianchi includes sexual "marginals" in that category as well. His narratives also constantly mix documentary and fiction, reportage and storytelling, with frequent asides and interruptions to the main action. Yet more than his Cinema Novo predecessors, Bianchi also questions the very conditions for the possibility of a "national dialogue." For Bianchi, the upper-middle-class, overwhelmingly white participants in that dialogue will always show greater loyalty to their privileged positions than to any sense of national purpose, whereas those left out of the dialogue will find other ways of making their voices heard. His characters are often grotesque, their situations exaggerated, yet he challenges his viewers to gauge exactly how dissimilar the world he creates on screen is from the one they inhabit. Instead of sending a message - the aim, in many cases, of an earlier generation of political filmmakers - Sergio Bianchi seeks to engage his audience in a dialogue. His most recent film, CHRONICALLY UNFEASIBLE - shown at the 2000 New York Film Festival - remained in cinemas for months, and drew heated responses pro and con from every shade of the political spectrum. With their potent mix of aggression, exasperation, humor and irony, the films of Sergio Bianchi provide a powerful and important model for a fresh approach to political filmmaking. This series was organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Special thanks to the Consulate General of Brazil in New York, the Museum of the American Indian, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture of the State of São Paulo and to Sergio Bianchi.

THE SECRET CAUSE / A CAUSA SECRETA Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 1994; 93m Freely adapted from a short story by Machado de Assis - in which a doctor whose research involves animal dissection watches his wife slowly move towards death - THE SECRET CAUSE begins as a long inactive theater director, José Mauricio, returns to the stage buoyed by a new government cultural grant. Announcing that he's going to mount a play that will expose how it is that people really live, he asks his actors to go throughout the city and learn from people who are waiting on welfare lines; in AIDS hospices; in homeless shelters, etc. Yet what they learn seems to reveal little about Brazil, but far more about themselves and their relationship to each other and especially to their director. What can truly be made from the suffering of others? Once again, Bianchi returns to the subject of the "bad faith" of the Brazilian élites, and their refusal to come to grips with the contradictions that have come to define their lives. Moving on to work with a much larger cast than in ROMANCE, Bianchi creates an intricate web of relationships, full of subterfuge and power plays, that eventually blur the lines between the action on and offstage. Fri March 1: 5; Sun March 3: 2; Wed March 6: 1, 5 & 9 CHRONICALLY UNFEASIBLE / CRONICAMENTE INVIÁVEL Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 2000; 101m A red-hot poker thrust into the Brazilian body politic, this passionate cry from Sergio Bianchi sets into motion a number of characters whose meanderings, misadventures and interactions expose sad traditions of corruption and hypocrisy. Proudly agit-prop, the film challenges viewers with its confrontational, Brechtian-flavored exploration of the social, economic and sexual relations that define the management, staff and customers of an upscale São Paulo restaurant. Meanwhile, an academic researching the harsh living conditions in the countryside wonders if he can get in on the thriving traffic in human organs. As always in Bianchi's work, there's a refusal to compartmentalize the discussion; each sequence, each encounter, is seen through the prisms of class, race, region, gender, and sexuality. Not since the heady days of Cinema Novo has a Brazilian film caused so much intense reaction and heated debate at home; just about every critic, political columnist, or person with access to a soapbox weighed in to praise the film or, almost as often, to denounce it. Although the film is clearly responding to conditions in Brazil, non-Brazilian viewers should find some uncomfortable parallels in this scathing portrait of a society in which all values are market values. Fri March 1: 3 & 7; Sat March 2: 3:30 8; Tue March 5: 3 & 7; Wed March 6: 3 & 7; Thurs March 7: 1 ROMANCE Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 1987; 103m Three people are looking for clues following the death of Antonio César, a left-wing intellectual and journalist who had been working on an exposé of international business corruption: Fernanda, Antonio's long time girlfriend; André, his roommate, who fears that rumors that Antonio died of AIDS means that he too will contract the disease; and Regina, a journalist whose investigation of Antonio César's work brings up more questions than answers. Although already noted for his short works, especially the scandalous SHOULD I KILL THEM?, Bianchi clearly threw down a political and aesthetic gauntlet with this provocative, kaleidoscopic journey through contemporary Brazil that measures the distance between the radical slogans of the Sixties and the grim realities of the Eighties. In the film, Antonio César exists mainly as a televisual image, a ghostly presence that continues to haunt these characters and yet seems safely distant and contained - an apt metaphor for the legacy of the Sixties in politics, art and cinema for a generation of Brazilians just then awakening to a new democracy. Fri March 1: 1; Sat March 2: 5:45; Tue March 5: 1, 5 & 9 SHOULD I KILL THEM? / MATO ELES? Sergio Bianchi, Brazil; 1982 preceded by DIVINE SOCIAL SERVICE / DIVINA PREVIDENCIA Sergio Bianchi, Brazil; 1983 and THE SECOND BEAST Total program: 60m During the 1970s Brazil's vast Amazon region became the site of both intense economic development and national fantasy; seen as a potential source of limitless wealth, it came to represent Brazil's bright future. Yet at least one major problem remained: what to do about the native Brazilian population - the Amazonian Indians - who used to populate the region. Bianchi's SHOULD I KILL THEM? is a scathing look at the terrible consequences of uncontrolled development and misguided government policies. Using both staged and actual interviews with officials, experts and the local inhabitants, Bianchi constructs the film around a series of questions that appear as title cards for the viewers - for example, "How is it that a tribe thriving in the late 1950s has been reduced by the 1980s to a single member? (Choose One)." Still controversial, SHOULD I KILL THEM? exposes the paternalism and hypocrisy that has characterized so many governments' relations with their native populations throughout the Americas. Preceded by DIVINE SOCIAL SERVICE, a journey through the labyrinth of urban social service agencies. THE SECOND BEAST is an adaptation by Bianchi of the short story written by Julio Cortázar: "Carta a una Senõrita en Paris (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris)". Cast: Alberto Gordon, Elaine Erig; Photography: Pedro Farkas. Fri March 1: 9:15; Sat March 2: 2; Sun March 3: 4 (Special admission for this program is $5) about the series | film descriptions and times