Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Barren Lives
1963 · Nelson Pereira dos Santos · Barren Lives on Sightlines
Five figures cross a white field. The ground is cracked into plates, the sky has burned clean out of the frame, and with no horizon left to speak of the family seems to be walking on light. Behind them something is screaming. It is the ungreased axle of an ox cart, and that noise comes back through the whole film, dry and mechanical, a thing that needs grease in a country with no fat to spare.
That is roughly the first minute of Vidas Secas. It is also roughly the last. Nelson Pereira dos Santos walks the family in at the beginning and walks them out at the end, and everything between is one turn of a wheel that will keep turning.
Begin with the white, because the white is the invention. Luiz Carlos Barreto came to the film from photojournalism, and instead of correcting for the equatorial sun of the sertão he printed into it, at and past the threshold of overexposure. Classical lighting models a face and carves out a room. This light does the opposite. It flattens, and at the edges it erases, so a body standing in the caatinga looks like it is being slowly consumed by the ground it stands on.
Deleuze has a name for a space that behaves this way: espace quelconque, any-space-whatever, in its version made of emptiness and white. The idea is plain once you see it working. In most films a landscape is information. It tells you where you are, what is over the ridge, what you would have to cross to get out. Take the horizon away and the information goes with it. What is left is not a setting for action. It is a condition, something the people are inside of rather than standing on. Deleuze found white fields like this in Dreyer and Bresson and read them as a spiritual opening, a blankness where a choice becomes possible. Barreto's white is not that. It is the sun. It offers nothing.
This matters because of what it does to the machinery of storytelling. For its first fifty years cinema mostly ran on one circuit, which Deleuze called the movement-image: a character takes in a situation, acts on it, and the act changes it. The circuit needs a world that answers back. Drought does not answer. You cannot punch a sky, and Fabiano cannot out-argue the state. So the film keeps producing what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations, moments where looking and listening are all that is available and no action follows. Fabiano's night in the jail is the clearest case. A soldier in uniform humiliates him and locks him up. He comes out, and goes back to work. In an action film that scene is a debt the last reel repays. Here the episode simply closes and another begins. Fabiano is not a hero who has been delayed. He is what Deleuze called a seer, someone who registers and endures.
The cutting backs this up. Rafael Justo Valverde's editing keeps the chaptered shape of Graciliano Ramos's 1938 novel instead of smoothing it into continuity: arrival, the good months when the rain comes, the law, the market, the drought again, departure. Between the blocks, ellipses. Inside them, long takes and a rhythm that is often nearly static. Deleuze's word for those stretches is dead time, meaning not empty screen but time that is not being spent advancing anything, so you feel it as itself. Bazin had argued that the achievement of De Sica and Visconti was moral before it was formal: they refused to cut the world into the shape of a story. Vidas Secas takes that refusal from La terra trema, whose long wide takes put real laborers under a landscape, and from the accumulated quotidian humiliations of Bicycle Thieves, and pushes it past where the Italians left it, into a circle.
When action drops out, what remains is posture. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called this the gest: an attitude of the body that makes a social relationship visible without anyone stating it. The famous image of the family strung out in a line across the bleached ground is a gest, not a mood. The spacing between them, the load each one carries, the turned-away faces lost in glare. That is a relation to land and labor held as a picture. Átila Iório and Maria Ribeiro play almost nothing in the psychological sense. They carry, walk, wait.
Then there is Baleia. The dog gets the boldest passage in the film: as she dies, the montage moves inside her failing perception. Bergson, whom Deleuze follows throughout, describes any living creature as a centre of indetermination, a gap between what it takes in and what it can do about it. That gap is where action is born. Watching Baleia go, you watch the gap close. Perception continues after the power to act is gone, and what is on screen stops being a means to anything and becomes something to be looked at. The entire theory of the time-image, compressed into a few minutes and handed to an animal. Two ancestors are audible in it: Umberto D., which had already spent its dead time on a marginal old man and his dog and refused to sweeten it, and Los Olvidados, where Buñuel let subjective, dreamlike inserts tear the neorealist surface. Dos Santos's own move is the ethical one. In a film about people the state does not count as fully human, the most complete point of view belongs to a dog.
Which brings up the thing this film is usually praised for and rarely explained. Its politics are structural, not rhetorical. Nobody makes a speech. Fabiano can barely command language at all, and the film treats that as part of his oppression rather than as a quirk. Deleuze, writing about exactly this generation of filmmakers, said modern political cinema begins from the premise that the people are missing: there is no ready-made collective for an artist to speak in the name of, so the work is to help invent one. Dos Santos does not give Fabiano words he does not have. He gives him a structure, the distributed consciousness Ramos invented, passed among the wife, the boys, the dog, and a camera that sees with the family without pretending to be them. Deleuze called that free indirect discourse, the author's vision and the character's fused in a single image. And he gives him the axle. The wheel says what Fabiano cannot.
That is what the film did to filmmaking. Dos Santos had already worked the method out in Rio, 40 Graus: real locations, small crew, non-professional texture, a social geography mapped by moving through it. Carrying it into the drought, he proved that poverty of means could be a language rather than an apology. Glauber Rocha soon named the principle an aesthetics of hunger, where the roughness of the form is the evidence. Black God, White Devil and Os Fuzis arrived the following year in the same backlands O Cangaceiro had first made photogenic, and Cinema Novo had its founding slogan: a camera in the hand, an idea in the head.
Watch it again for where the bodies sit in the frame relative to each other, what the sun is doing to their edges, and when the wheel comes back. Then sit with what the ending withholds. The family leaves the way it arrived, and the cycle is plainly going to repeat. The film has made you want the next turn to be different and has refused to promise it. That wanting, with nowhere to discharge, is the political feeling the whole movement was after.
Concepts in play
- any-space-whatever (emptiness / white) — Barreto prints at and past the threshold of overexposure so the horizon dissolves into bleached sky and figures are pinned against cracked earth; light flattens and erases instead of modelling space.
- pure optical and sound situations — Drought and the yellow soldier present situations no act can change; the family can only look and endure, while the ungreased oxcart wheel supplies a sound situation in place of any score.
- the seer (voyant) — Fabiano is jailed and humiliated by the law, then released back into work; the episode closes without recourse or revenge, and he registers rather than acts.
- dead time (temps mort) — Long takes, wide framings and a patient, often static rhythm in which duration itself registers hardship, with elisions between the chaptered blocks rather than continuity.
- the voyage/balade that transforms nothing — The film opens with the family entering the frame as migrants and closes with them departing again, the intervening episodes forming one revolution of a wheel that keeps turning.
- the gest — The emblematic shots of the family strung out in a line across the white ground, blocked in isolation with faces turned away or lost to glare, performance pared to gesture, posture and endurance.
- perception-image (the interval collapsing) — The death of Baleia, where montage shifts into the dog's own failing subjectivity, granting a non-human consciousness the point of view the social order denies the humans.
- the people are missing — Fabiano's inability to fully command language is itself a theme; conflict is with an impersonal machinery of drought, landowners and the state, and the aesthetics of hunger makes deprivation the form rather than the subject of a speech.
- free indirect discourse (political) — Dos Santos honours Ramos's distribution of chapters across the consciousnesses of Fabiano, Vitória, the boys and the dog while holding a documentary-inflected observational distance: the camera sees with the family without speaking in their place.