São Paulo, Incorporated · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man steals a car and drives out of São Paulo. He has spent the whole film inside the automobile business, a big firm first and then a parts factory he ends up managing, and when he finally breaks, the only vehicle available for the break is the product. Jean-Claude Bernardet singled out that sequence in 1967 and he was right to. It is the film's argument delivered as blocking instead of dialogue. Carlos escapes inside the commodity. The windscreen frames him the way the office window framed him an hour earlier.

Almost everything Deleuze can give you about this film is already sitting in that shot.

Deleuze's name for the older cinema is the movement-image, and its motor is the action-image: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the act changes the situation. Cutting exists to serve that chain. Westerns run on it, so do gangster pictures, so does most of what you have ever watched. His claim is that after the war certain films kept the form and lost the motor. Characters who can still see perfectly well and can no longer respond adequately. He called it the crisis of the action-image.

That lens has to earn its keep, so let me argue for it. Without it, Carlos is a well-paid man complaining, and the film is a mood piece about bourgeois unhappiness of the kind being made all around it in 1965. With it, you can see the machine Person actually built. Carlos acts constantly. Promotion, marriage, salary, a factory floor of his own. None of it moves anything, because the thing he would have to move is not in the room with him. The title says so. Sociedade anônima is the ordinary Portuguese term for a joint-stock corporation, and read literally it is "anonymous society." You cannot hit a legal person. Person's specific invention, his debut feature, is to lodge the failure of action in an economic form rather than in a soul. That is why the film has outlived the metaphysical anguish films it opened against.

So the car theft is not an exception to the diagnosis. It is the proof of it. Deleuze catalogued this shape as the voyage or balade: the trip that transforms nothing, movement that has come loose from consequence. Carlos's flight is the last purchase he makes.

Glauco Mirko Laurelli's editing took a state prize in 1965 and deserves the attention it got. Carlos narrates his own collapse in flashbacks that refuse chronological order, so that the film arrives as fragments recalled under pressure rather than a life recounted from the beginning. Deleuze would insist on a distinction here, and it is the most useful thing in his second book. A conventional flashback is a recollection-image: dated, signposted, a former present retrieved and slotted into place, with the story still running as a line. What Laurelli gives you instead are sheets of past, the past as coexisting layers you move around inside, where the order in which a memory arrives is itself the meaning. Bernardet, writing in 1967, found this genuinely unusual for Brazilian cinema. The consequence is that causality is never narrated. It is implied by juxtaposition, what Deleuze calls slackened or weakened links, and the work of connecting falls to you. Carlos cannot sequence his own life. His inability to sequence it and his inability to explain it turn out to be one disability.

Ricardo Aronovich photographs the city as something that acts on bodies. Concrete, plate glass and machine surfaces carry the same tonal weight as faces, and the frame is worked vertically, Carlos small against structures that continue past the top edge. Deleuze calls a composition like that a closed set: a frame treated as a system, an enclosure dense with information. But he insists that every closed set opens onto an out-of-field, and he separates two kinds. The relative out-of-field is the next room, the space you could walk into. The absolute out-of-field is a presence that cannot be located anywhere in space at all.

That is what this film's sound is. Brazilian features in 1965 were post-synchronized as standard practice, so the track was built rather than captured, and Person exploited the fact. Traffic, machinery and the ambient roar of the city persist across cuts and across locations, which means a private scene in an apartment is still audibly inside the industrial process. There is no shot you could cut to that would show you the source. The sociedade anônima has no address. The frame closes and the sound opens: that pairing is the film's basic mechanism, and it is why the apartment feels like the plant.

Against that, Carlos's voice-over supplies a first-person account the images repeatedly fail to ratify. Deleuze tracks this as audiovisual disjunction, sound and image telling two stories and declining to fuse into a single testimony. Walmor Chagas plays straight into the gap with a controlled opacity carried over from São Paulo's TBC stage tradition, articulate about his misery, useless against it, refusing to make that combination attractive. What you are left with is an image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read against what you are being told. Deleuze's word for that is the lectosign, the image as something deciphered rather than simply witnessed.

And the object you read it all through is the automobile. Product, aspiration, workplace, chamber, escape vehicle. Deleuze reserves the term symbol for an object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and it is rare to find one this complete. Nothing has to be said about it. The relation is done by staging.

One more piece. Cinema Novo went looking for Brazil in the sertão and the favela; Person went to the open office, the showroom and the modern apartment and found a class with no collective existence, a society anonymous by legal definition. Deleuze argues that modern political cinema begins where a private grievance stops being separable from a political situation, and where a people has to be invented because it is missing. The version here is bleak and precise. The missing people is the middle class, and what stands in for it is a corporate charter.

The craft debts are specific and worth naming, because films are chapters in an argument. Il Posto had already shot the corporation itself, real Milan office floors and locker corridors, letting procedure and furniture carry the drama, and that is the template Person takes into the plant and the boardroom. From La Notte and L'Eclisse comes Antonioni's discovery that you can hold a composition on concrete and glass after the actor's beat has ended and let the building finish the scene, plus his method for making capital filmable at all, as noise and gesture and objects. Rocco e i suoi fratelli gave Aronovich the register: documentary locations under hard sculpted key light, neither newsreel nor gloss. Hiroshima mon amour supplied the grammar Laurelli inherits, memory cut as present-tense image with a narrating voice the pictures quietly contradict, which is also the film Deleuze uses to explain sheets of past. À bout de souffle licensed the elliptical jump cut inside a continuous scene and the car interior as a chamber for direct address.

Forward, the line runs two ways. Aronovich took what he learned on these streets to Resnais's Providence and Costa-Gavras's Missing. Inside Brazil, this is the film that turned the new cinema away from the backlands and toward the office, made from the wreckage of a boom that had just curdled into recession and, in March and April of 1964, into a coup. A period film about the immediate past, made by people still standing in it. Columbia distributed it. Abraccine's critics placed it seventh among all Brazilian films fifty years later, and a 4K restoration put it back in theaters at sixty.

When you watch it, listen rather than look. The city's roar is the corporation's only body. Then watch the escape, and ask whether the film ever lets that sound go.