09 · 09 · 26

RIO, ZONA NORTE: reasons to smile

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

Usually, in these columns we direct our attention to the formal elements of a film, such as its compositions, its cross-fades, its colors, and its relationship with other films. However, this time, what inspires this column is a smile. Although it is true that cinema consists of technique, it is also true that cinema is made of accidents and the uncontrollable nature of charisma. In this sense, if criticism is the science of art, it also faces—just like truly rigorous disciplines—insoluble mysteries. By definition, the critic’s material is contingent and often immeasurable. So, how should we evaluate or interpret a gesture? Sometimes, there is no choice but to go along with unanimity.

In the last few days, scrolling through social media, I've been running into the same shot from the Brazilian classic film Rio, Zona Norte (1957), directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Immediately after, I recalled the emotional impact it had on me when I first saw it. But if, in a movie theater with a hundred spectators, each makes their own interpretation of the same film, why have different social media accounts shared screenshots of the same shot, even though it is far from the kind of spectacular compositions we find in Mijaíl Kalatózov’s film? It should be noted that these screenshots are different frames, which indicates that it’s not the same image being repeatedly copied and shared. Clearly, many of us were having the same emotional reaction to the same phenomenon. The question I would like to answer here is: Why?

In this image that draws so much attention, the Brazilian actor, singer, and composer Grande Otelo (the pseudonym of Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata) is in the middle of an interpretation of a samba song that he just wrote under the powerful inspiration of mourning and grief. All of a sudden, a guitar player joins him and, with this gesture, we realize how short the protagonist is: Otelo hardly comes up to the guitar’s sound hole, which is normally placed at the center of the chest. The protagonist is offering his song to a renowned artist of the fifties named Ângela Maria, who plays the role of herself. After a moment of listening to the song and with the lyrics in her hand, she catches the melody and starts singing by herself. That’s when Grande Otelo breaks into one of the most moving and emblematic smiles ever seen in a film.

His eyes are on the verge of tears, and his teeth are almost completely showing. The expression on his entire face reveals a boundless happiness, almost unreal. Without any doubt, I perceive no trace of artifice. Grande Otelo does not seem to be acting or pretending to have that emotion; instead, he seems to have found in Pereira dos Santos’s film a mirror for his own tragic life and some kind of healing.

As a child Otelo grew up in a family where his father was murdered and the mother—who struggled with alcoholism—gave him up for adoption at the age of nine. On the other hand, as an adult, one of his wives killed his stepson and then committed suicide. Otelo worked almost his entire life, and racism was a constant shadow over his career. He must have found something of all this in his character’s story, Espírito da Luz Soares, a samba composer—whose son is involved in a gang—and dreams of having a little house with a bar included where he can live and earn his keep. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem to me that this is an example of method acting—a Russian phenomenon that later became almost exclusively US-American—but rather of another distinctly European approach: neorealism. This movement was imported to Brazil by the screenwriter and the filmmaker Pereira dos Santos, and this paved the way for the most important of Latin America’s new waves of cinema: Cinema Novo.

Otelo probably resembled his character because of the relationship that neorealism establishes with the life behind the screen. He acts in Rio, Zona Norte as a non-professional actor in Roberto Rossellini or Luchino Visconti’s film would. These filmmakers sought to merge Italian reality and fiction through stories about the working class that aimed to speak not for it, but from within it—even in a material sense. The moment we see the men fishing in La Terra Trema (1948), we are witnessing a completely authentic moment captured by a work of fiction. Naturally, the horizontality of a postwar Italian production implies the impossibility of a genuinely working-class film. Additionally, Visconti—the director—was an aristocrat, despite his close relationship with the cast; still, he deserves credit for having stripped down some of the most elitist conventions of the cinema of the period. For instance, shooting in real locations represented an attempt to dismantle Hollywood’s artifice.

Pereira dos Santos majored in cinema for a year in France in 1949, then started writing film criticism. After that, he intended to make movies in order to contribute something new to filmmaking techniques. For this very reason, he decided to implement neorealism in Brazil, where the film industry was prolific yet stagnant: chanchadas—musical comedies designed mainly to display radio talent—suffocated the audience due to their abundance and similarity: most of them followed the same formula, and this caused the weariness that, subsequently, led to the rise of the new wave.

Rio, Zona Norte stands as one of the first attempts to escape the status quo, since we are talking about an antichanchada: even though it preserves the musical element and guest appearances by singers, from its opening shots it is evident that the intention is to capture ordinary and real movement.

Even before the credit sequence, Pereira dos Santos focuses on documentary images of Rio de Janeiro, whose geography plays as central role as Grande Otelo himself. However, it is Otelo’s character—conceived as a symbol—that becomes the film’s most subversive element.

Otelo had already acted in chanchadas directed by Watson Macedo, José Carlos Burle and others throughout the fifties. Although his characters had often been comic—and he had occasionally appeared in a few melodramas—the audience was used to his films offering a lighthearted experience. Pereira dos Santos attracted audiences with the promise of receiving a chanchada; however, he surprised them with a heartbreaking melodrama embedded within the usual atmospheres and dramatic conventions of the genre. It was common that, in the chanchada, musicians would appear as themselves, as Ângela Maria in Rio, Zona Norte did. It was probably assumed that Otelo would play Grande Otelo, but he embodied instead the man behind the mask of fame and frivolity: Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata.

Otelo’s character, Espírito, welcomes a woman—who he fell in love with—and his stepson into his half-finished little home at the moment when it’s almost palpable that he is going to be signed by a major record label; yet, when success slips away, the woman leaves him. Later, Espírito’s gang-member son is murdered. These events make him remember his last and traumatic marriage, which ultimately ended in death. A very interesting detail is that Pereira dos Santos constructs an extremely similar visual composition in several moments of the film: Espírito is often viewed from a higher angle by figures of authority; Pereira dos Santos captures this through shots taken from Espírito’s point of view as he lies on the floor or in bed.

Rio, Zona Norte starts by showing us an image of Espírito lying on the train tracks, such as the neorealist screenwriter and theorist Cesare Zavattini proposed: to begin the film with a tragedy reported in the newspapers and move backward in order to tell how it all was provoked and which social forces were involved. Throughout the film, we often encounter minor yet meaningful actions for the plot: a pair of policemen who abandon Espírito right after his accident, or the medical staff’s indifference toward other patients in the hospital. This technique was characteristic of fellow neorealist Vittorio de Sica, who would shift focus to secondary characters surrounding the protagonist so as to explore more deeply the social reality of postwar Italy. Pereira dos Santos portrays, through neorealism, a selfish Brazil that makes Otelo a survivor of his own motherland.

After being disappointed, betrayed, abandoned, and deprived of his son, Espírito writes the samba that leads him to Ângela Maria, and, by hearing it from her beautiful voice, he smiles with a depth that has touched many of our hearts. In that gesture, the personal and cinematic trajectories intertwine. Thanks to the intelligence of a filmmaker who blended the film traditions of two countries, the Latin American film revolution would be born. William Blake once wrote that the whole world was contained in a grain of sand. That idea is reflected in that smile of a defeated dreamer who, for once in his life, breaks through reality to grasp a momentary sense of triumph. Within a single image lies the emotion of an entire life.

Translated by Michelle Olvera