Rio, Northern Zone · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man falls from a suburban train on the way into Rio. You see it before you know his name, before you have heard a note of his music: a body on the embankment, the rails running on toward the center of the city without him. Everything that follows is the film walking backwards to work out how he got there. His name is Espírito. He writes sambas. Grande Otelo plays him.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos took that architecture from Carné's Le Jour se lève, where a doomed working man's life is told in reverse from a terminal present. Deleuze has a name for the piece of film doing that work: the recollection-image. A memory summoned into the present, dated and addressed, sent in to explain something. He distrusted it. Most flashbacks are housekeeping; they fill a gap and keep the past obedient to the plot. The exception he allowed was exactly the Carné case, where the ending is fixed before the remembering starts, so that memory stops being retrieval and becomes fate.

What that does to the watching is the whole film. You have seen the fall, so you cannot hear a song as a promise. Espírito keeps acting. He composes, he hopes, he rides the train into the center, he hands his work to men with microphones. None of it can reach an ending you are already holding. Deleuze called this loosening the crisis of the action-image: the point at which a situation stops being the kind of thing a person's acts can change. Usually the crisis sits inside the character, who sees more than he can do and goes still. Here it has been moved into you. Espírito never stops acting; the film has stopped letting his actions count. He acts, you watch. The one who can only watch is what Deleuze calls a seer, normally the signature of a much later and much harder cinema. Pereira dos Santos arrives there in 1957 by way of a single structural decision.

It is worth saying why this vocabulary earns its place. Without it, the flashback is a device and the film is a social-problem melodrama with good songs in it. With it, you can see that the film's argument about theft is not carried by anything anyone says. It is carried by the tense of the images. Every scene has already happened, and already belongs to someone else, before it begins.

Now the train. Hélio Silva's photography builds a Rio out of rails, embankments, platforms, hillside houses. The line is not scenery. It is the daily conveyance between the zona norte, where Espírito lives and composes, and the center, where the radio stations and recording studios are. It is a class relation drawn as a commute. It is also the thing he falls from. Deleuze's word for an object that condenses a film's organizing relation is the symbol: not a poetic stand-in for something absent, but the one thing that holds all the others in place. The songs travel that line into the city and come back with other men's names on them.

The spaces the line connects stay separate. Home and street. Station and carriage. The radio booth and the studio, where the light itself changes — contained, artificial, professional. The club. Deleuze calls a trajectory linking otherwise disconnected places a vector, a line of the universe, and here the movement between spaces is the drama, because no single milieu contains them all. That is the shape of the injustice. The composer and the industry never occupy one world.

And almost no close-ups. Silva keeps to the medium and the long shot, holding the figure inside its environment, declining the access to a face that would let you feel the situation instead of seeing it. That refusal is Bazin's argument for neorealism, learned by way of Rossellini's streets and De Sica's man walking Rome after a bicycle, both of which stand directly behind this film. Deleuze's term for the resulting bond is the imprint: situation and character marking each other, so that the man cannot be read apart from the tracks he stands beside. Worth noting what this production did not have. Deleuze's neorealism is not a realism of subject matter; it is an event in the image, and it needed equipment that had not reached Brazil — no lightweight synchronous-sound rig, no Nagra, the music assembled in post. The realism here is one of location, casting and subject. Which makes the achievement stranger rather than smaller. He got to the modern effect by structure, because the apparatus was six years away.

Then there is Grande Otelo. He was the most recognizable Black performer in Brazilian popular cinema, made famous in the chanchada, the carnival comedy Atlântida turned out on schedule. Atlântida had itself tested him once in serious material, Também Somos Irmãos (1949), a film about Black exclusion. Pereira dos Santos takes that proof and builds a tragedy on it. Deleuze has a precise concept for a body that carries a social relation in the way it holds itself: the gest. It is not the performance of a feeling. It is a posture in which an arrangement becomes visible. Otelo's body arrives already carrying the record of what Brazilian cinema had permitted Black performers to do. Put it in a story where the songs are taken and stop asking it to be funny, and the arrangement becomes legible without a word of argument.

The songs run whole. The film does not cut them into montage; it holds still and lets them play. That is partly evidence, since the case depends on your granting that this man is genuinely good. It is also something else. Deleuze uses the word fabulation for the moment a subject is caught in the act of telling himself into existence. The song is where Espírito authors his own life, and the decision to give it uninterrupted duration is a property claim the film knows will not be honored. Everything you hear whole will be signed by another man.

There is a reason a film like this had to be made this way. Vera Cruz, the São Paulo studio founded in 1949 on the European prestige model, had collapsed in 1954 with a Cannes prize on the shelf. What paid was the chanchada. Pereira dos Santos financed cooperatively, deferred payments, kept the crew small, shot on location, and did it as a position rather than as a compromise. The audience such a film addresses did not yet exist: the screens were full of American imports and there was no domestic distribution apparatus to carry a Brazilian feature to Brazilians. Deleuze's phrase for this condition in modern political cinema is that the people are missing. The filmmaker cannot speak for a constituted people, so the work has to help invent one. He drew that chapter partly from Glauber Rocha. Rocha, in turn, named Pereira dos Santos the father of the thing he founded.

The debts run backwards as clearly. Favela dos Meus Amores (1935) had already shot on a morro with the people who lived there and built sequences around samba performed on the spot; this film inherits that location-plus-music grammar and strips the romance out of it. La terra trema supplies the dramaturgy: a producer of value separated from his value by middlemen, played by locals, in their own idiom, in long sustained takes. Swap Visconti's fisherman for a samba composer and the structure holds exactly. Bicycle Thieves gives the single-object plot, a whole life staked on one recoverable thing, and here the thing is a song that cannot be recovered because it was never stolen in a way the law recognizes.

What it did to the art: it took the flashback that French poetic realism used to make doom feel like weather and turned it into an accounting instrument, proof that a life's earnings had been redirected before the life was lived. And it demonstrated that a national cinema could be built at the scale of one small crew and a borrowed camera. Six years later the same director had direct sound and made Vidas Secas.

Watch it again for the few seconds just after each song ends. Look at who is standing in the room, and who writes the title down.