"Movement is, so to speak, living architecture - living in the sense of changing emplacements as well as changing cohesion. The architecture is created by human movements and is made up of pathways tracing shapes in space..." 1
- Rudolf von Laban, Choreutics
Choreographer William Forsythe has himself stated, "Choreography is a language. It's like the alphabet and you don't necessarily have to spell words you know.... The value of a language is determined by the context in which it appears. The most important thing is how you speak with the language, not what you say."2
Ballett Frankfurt returned to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October for what will be the last time. After two decades of choreographing movement for and shaping the intellectual direction of the company Forsythe is retiring, gracefully, and the ensemble dissolving. He and his dancers having accomplished what they set out to do-create an alternative language of movement based upon, but spiritually transcending, that of ballet. A post-contemporary idiom of physical movement. Yes, organizational problems with the city of Frankfurt, artistic clashes with the board, a sense of creative satiation, whatever-they are done, "disbank", willfully metamorphosing into the sunset. Like the Beatles.
Ballett Frankfurt first performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1998 with the stunning full-length contemporary ballet "Eidos: Telos" ("Take an equation, solve it; take the result and fold it back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a million times")3. The piece moves from a set of ideas, an essence (beyond the simulacrum), on to a logical, ultimate purpose, an aim, completion, end (a sort of death? or perfection?). It so deconstructed ballet and contemporary movement and then rebuilt the remains with a clarity immense in scope that many artists in New York, viewing Ballett Frankfurt for the first time, were stunned. In 2001 they returned with a section of the performance video montage, "Woolf Phrase" along with the haunting "Enemy in the Figure" and the conceptually mesmerizing "Quintett".
For this, the last of their appearances at BAM, the approach was sparse, the stage settings for each piece plain. No music, or little of it. As if the company needed not anything to clutter up their relation to the movement. Four dances were performed, each unique is displaying a facet of Forsythe's vernacular:
"The Room As It Was" a tour-de-force of Forsythian movement: disjointed, elegiac, something of a "beginning", an intro into the semantics of the language-course, heavy, rich, cutting, yet smooth. The bodies onstage barely those of humans but conduits through which this language is spoken. The strongest of the four pieces danced, in "The Room As It Was" the dancers glide, jerk, contemplate, slide, twist, react to (and from), ignore, inspire ("physically") the beings around them. Little pockets of action occur on corners of the stage, "dialogues" between dancers developing. No music. The piece is danced entirely without music, the only sound that emanating from the twisting feet of the dancers upon the stage, their bodies sliding along (and crashing onto) the floor, so that a sense of concentrated serenity streams from them. All of the beauty flows solely from this temperance, intensity, this naked, honest movement.
"Duo" is an older piece (1996), a duet between veteran Ballett Frankfurt dancers Jill Johnson and Allison Brown. The two are costumed in sheer black stocking jumpsuits, through which their breasts are visible. More classical in temperament the piece seems an exploration of the nature of "duet"-the dancers together at times within the movement but then separate, riffing on the physicality of Forsythe's movement. How a duo might negotiate space with a particular set of building blocks. The light onstage subtly shifts here and there, following the dancers (here & there), losing them, as they sometimes lose one another, rhythmically falling back into place, back in "step".
Forsythe's "(N. N. N. N.)", a somewhat physically aggressive, all-male piece, begins tame enough with a man curiously contemplating his arm, the various movements the limb might make-bending, swinging, limp, flexing. The arm. He seems almost childlike in his fascination with the limb. But then slowly this fascination extends to other parts of the body and suddenly he is questioning the nature of his whole body (always within the context of Forsythian movement). Now-roll, jerk, snap, twirl, drawing forth centuries of classic movement but then usurping this, re-interpreting, making it your own, contaminating it (often mirroring a seizure?), then release and joy, filtering these movements through some type of post-contemporary "pop-locking" breakin', a freedom, rolling, wistfully aggressive, this (post)modern body. Gentlemen join him onstage and the piece evolves into movement filtered through the interlocking of arms (again the arms) and an exploration of how these arms might connect, disconnect, lock, break apart, bodies rolling on and off of one another, caressing and attacking these other "bodies of essence". Forsythe has informally intimated that the first of his post Ballett Frankfurt creative endeavors might involve work in Brazil, and I found "(N. N. N. N.)" very suggestive of the fight moves/dance performed in traditional capoeira. Swinging, moving, wrestling, arms locked, rolling over and through one another, a "grid" choreographed from an almost brutal cultural contact improvisation.
ALIE/ N
A(C)
TION
alone in the mud, yes
the dark, yes
sure, yes
panting, yes
someone hears me, no
no one hears me, no
murmuring sometimes, yes
when the panting stops, yes
not at other times, no
in the mud, yes
to the mud, yes
my voice, yes
mine, yes
not another's, no
mine alone
yes
sure, yes
when the panting stops, yes
on and off, yes
a few words, yes
a few scraps, yes
that no one hears, no
but less and less
no answer
less and less, yes.
From "ALIE/N A(C)TION" (Ballett Frankfurt 1992)
The night at BAM concluded with "One Flat Thing, reproduced", one of those curious anomalies where a choreographer takes an approach to movement to a logical (or illogical) extreme. If "(N. N. N. N.)" can be thought of as using as a starting point an abstract relation to "the arm" then "One Flat Thing, reproduced" might be thought of as doing the same with the idea of "the table"-twenty tables to be exact. The piece begins with the entire ensemble raucously dragging tables center stage and then proceeding to dance on top of, underneath, around, and between these pieces of interior (stage) decoration. They soar over and under and through them. Individual dancers, off alone, contemplate various manners in which one might interact with a table, while groups assemble and attack the same idea en masse (always within Forsythian contemplation). It is a spirited piece, bodies rushing and soaring about, as if the ensemble were demonstrating they might apply their rhythmic religion of movement anywhere, in any context. And indeed they do, "One Flat Thing, reproduced" is orgiastic, a feverously intense exploration of Forsythe's (and Dana Caspersen's, Laban's) dance theory, collected movement manifestos. It rises to a crescendo until it has seeped into the very fabric of BAM's Howard Gilman opera house itself.
In his "Choreutics" Laban was a proponent of his own form of "free dance", departing from the tradition and constraints of classical ballet.4 The programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music cannot be commended enough for continually bringing this brilliant performance group to New York, to Brooklyn, throughout the years. It has been a wonder to watch them perform, and saddening to contemplate that one might never behold Ballett Frankfurt again-the architectural use of body space, performances held in abandoned tramway depots in Frankfurt, site specific creations across the planet, movement exploration to the boundaries of what it means to "dance", or even "move" itself. Words, movement, "light", music (sound), the theater arena, streets. The most contemporary of the experimental and yet always elegiac, always beautiful, baroque even, to the extent that the beholding soul goes tender, a silent understanding, a warmth. Performance architecture, indeed.
1 as quoted in "Proliferation and Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Architecture of Disappearance" by Patricia Baudoin & Heidi Gilpin
2 B. Kirchner, 'Good theatre of a different kind', Ballettlnternational, August 1984, p. 6 (as quoted in "Engendering and composing movement: William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt" by Steven Spier)
3 Eidos: Telos (Ballett Frankfurt, William Forsythe, Roberto Calasso, Dana Caspersen)
4 Proliferation and Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Architecture of Disappearance" by Patricia Baudoin & Heidi Gilpin
As more than a few of you know (I seem always to wear current reading material "on my sleeve" so to speak) I just recently finished the distinguished W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. I found the book so moving that I read through it a second time, something I haven't done since college.
I'd read a few chapters of Du Bois's book over the years but never in its entirety. What finally got me to sit down and read it was a lecture I attended at the Studio Museum in Harlem with Stanley Crouch and Playthell Benjamin. The two had collaborated on a book commemorating the 100th anniversary of "Souls" called Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk in which they debate the book's themes and effect on African-American culture a hundred years down the road from its publication. The lecture/debate was so engrossing that instead of going out and reading Crouch and Benjamin's book I decided to dive into the Du Bois itself.
What moves me so much about The Souls of Black Folk is not simply its ability to speak to contemporary African-American culture a hundred years after being published but to American culture as a whole. This is what was so illuminating to me, "Souls" seemed to speak about the state of these United States in 2003. I'd read some passages and feel that although Du Bois was writing less that 40 years after slavery had ended he could just as well have been speaking of Watts in the 1960's or election politics in contemporary Florida. One facet that bleeds through the book is Du Bois's unflinching love for America, for these United States. Despite the wretched plight of his people (this is 1903) Du Bois still cannot contain the enthusiasm and love he holds for the nation's ideals, however he might feel those ideals have yet to be lived up to.
I've previously used Dispactké to excerpt passages from works I've been moved by (I think last summer it was Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai) and so here I give you some selections from The Souls of Black Folk. In the introduction to the Bantam Classic edition Henry Louis Gates quotes J. Saunders Redding as saying of "Souls" that it succeeds in "expressing the soul of one people in a time of great stress, and showing its kinship with the timeless soul of all mankind."
One of the fascinating concepts put forth within the book is Du Bois's theory of an African-American "veil", a double consciousness that finds blacks living in two worlds, two Americas, in which they show two different faces---one vastly personal and culturally-centric, and the other a face needed to psychologically succeed, to maintain sanity within, the world at large (the "white" world)---a captivating concept.
Du Bois writes:
"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, ---a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
". . . this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves. (From the chapter, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings".)
Of work and wealth Du Bois writes:
(Note: In Greek mythology Hippomenes tricks the beautiful Atalanta into matrimony by tempting her with golden apples.)
"Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.
". . .must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,--wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.
"Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars." (From the chapter, "Of the Wings of Atalanta".)
Of African-Americans and "golden apples":
"In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of know- ing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mam- monism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half- wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers' blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,--into lawless lust with Hippomenes?" (From "Of the Wings of Atalanta".)
Of the infamous "forty acres and a mule" promised to all freed slaves, an offer subsequently reneged upon, Du Bois writes:
". . .the vision of 'forty acres and a mule'--the righteous and rea- sonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen--was des- tined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake-- somewhere." (From "Of the Dawn of Freedom".)
On the function of the university:
"The function of the university is not simply to teach bread- winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowl- edge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civiliza- tion.
". . .but the true college will ever have one goal,--not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
"teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philoso- phers, and fops of fools. [ ] And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,--not sordid money-getting, not ap- ples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame." (From "Of the Wings of Atalanta".)
On colonialism and nation-building:
"The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen. . .
"It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty." (From "Of the Sons of Master and Man".)
"The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate." (From "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece".)
On the mind of the former slave:
"Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to prove the necessity of [such] group training after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, care- lessness, and stealing. (From "Of the Sons of Master and Man".)
"Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave's ethical growth.
"Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appre- ciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,--of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,--exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi wor- ship with its barbarious rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened."
"By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repres- sion and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beau- tiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,--this became his comforting dream. (From "Of the Faith of the Fathers".)
On the soul of black folk:
"The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black [artist]; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people." (From "Of Our Spiritual Strivings".)
In closing from Du Bois I leave you:
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all gra- ciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?" (From "Of the Training of Black Men".)
Avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage passed away earlier this year and his moving on was felt strongly throughout the film and art worlds. Brakhage was one of the most influential filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. I attended a tribute to the man and his work earlier this month at Galapagos in Brooklyn, organized by Ocularis and The Brooklyn Rail (read this publication-it is the hottest thing on paper in New York City right now, it's on the web). It was an inspiring affair: filmmaker and Anthology Film Archives founder Jonas Mekas was recorded on video the night before (he was to be in Paris the day of the tribute, something to do with a "Legion of Honor") in which he offered a heartfelt one-take stream-of-consciousness reflection on Brakhage and his work that was deeply moving.
Back in Chicago a number of years ago I had a roommate who was completing a MFA in film and new media studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was very cool; I had access through she and her friends to loads of equipment and media, and inclusion into a community I never would have otherwise. There were always greats books about art and cinema lying around, and intense conversations about the arts. It was here that I first heard names like Deren, Jacobs, Mekas, Smith, Anger, and often, often, "Brakhage". He was held in such high esteem that his work took on a mythic aura to me before I'd ever seen any of the films. It was in this environment that I had my first experiences crafting my own "films": personal, whatever tools were at hand (thanks Litha, Steve, wherever you are).
There are a number of defining moments in my spiritual and creative development here in New York City, but there are some that stick out as being definitive, crucial to my understanding of beautiful, resonant and true, art: Ballet Frankfurt performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in '98, a piece called "Eidos: Telos" I think, which completely altered the way I considered movement, narrative, and the use of "stage space". I still haven't recovered from the experience. A production of Caryl Churchill's "Blue Heart", also at BAM, in which my understanding of drama and the theater, of "narrative arc" was crushed, broken into tiny pieces, only to be reassembled in a manner only hinted at previously. I imagine I could add to the list a performance or two by the Wooster Group, a benefit performance I remember viewing a few years back by Bill T. Jones's company, perhaps also going to "Body and Soul" some Sunday afternoons at the old Club Vinyl down in Tribeca. In concordance with these experiences would be the first time I saw Brakhage's Dog Star Man, no doubt at Anthology Film Archives. I'd seen perhaps 12 or so of his films at this point (many of them short, so perhaps on three or four sittings). The thing about Dog Star Man, and this becomes more readily apparent on further viewings, is that it is a culmination of all of Brakhage's work, representative of his whole oeuvre, the various styles: diary-like family log, cinematic narcissism, meditations on space, a usurpation of both time and visual expectation, and the physical manipulation of film stock. My curiosity with Brakhage's work lies in his progression from "realistic" film images (i.e. people, architecture, nature, etc.) to abstraction built through superimposition and rapid film cutting (even more so than that in Godard's MTV anticipating "Ŕ bout de soufflé") on to abstraction through the process of physically transforming the film stock. Eventually Brakhage just painted onto and "scratched" the surface of raw film. (Did he initially "stumble" upon or somehow let "happen naturally" this technique?) Progressively he perfected the process (and esthetic approach) until he'd gotten to a point in later films like the "ellipses" series where he'd decided that this form of abstraction was the way he solely wanted to create, a logical progression (though some of his films did indeed continue to use "representational" imagery). Some of Brakhage's health problems were a result of this technique of applying paint to film stock, or scratching the emulsion off of film-he suffered a little for his art. A friend of his who spoke at the tribute, poet Steve Dalachinsky, recalled being out socially with Brakhage and spying the man scratching onto film stock whenever he got a moment away from those present. Sometimes he'd be talking to you and scratching away Dalachinsky recalled.
The program at Galapagos included an early film, In Between (1955) with music by John Cage, that I do not think is characteristic of his work at all-staged, an almost "Technicolor" feel to it, sound, not to mention musical accompaniment (albeit by Cage). I would have preferred some of his earlier "diary"-like films, perhaps Window Water Baby Moving (1959) or Loving (1957) with deconstructed/reconstructed images of he and his family. Shown also at Galapagos was Wonder Ring (1955), a silent piece he did in collaboration with Joseph Cornell in which Brakhage took a 16mm camera onto the elevated train line that used to run along Third avenue here in New York, months before it was to be torn down. The film is a beautiful, flowing assemblage of subway car images, the rail line itself, buildings viewed out of the windows of trains, and abstracted twilight images of people moving in and out of the subway stations, circa the 50's, it all looks beautiful. A piece of urban architecture, of urban experience, abstracted into elegiac, visual beauty. By Mothlight (1963) Brakhage was comfortable working in muted yet sumptuous color and had ceased using recognizable images but was simply creating abstraction by manipulating film stock (here with moth wings and parts applied directly to the film stock heated with light). Mothlight is a watershed-it is so organically beautiful, makes such perfect sense and emotionally touches that it feels a pinnacle, a precipice come upon, but of course it was just the beginning. It is only 4 minutes long. Dog Star Man (1961-1964) is more of a chore, but rewards immensely. This film put into use all of his techniques up to that point (and arguably his career) and then took off into the stratosphere: Stark images of the cosmos and exploding stars, of pumping organs within the body, his wife breastfeeding their child, nature and wildlife, nudity, sexual acts, the artist himself, Brakhage, endlessly climbing a mountain in the snow, struggling, his companion of a dog with him. Multiple superimposition, fades, black screens, juxtaposed with some of his most eloquent film treatment techniques. The whole of the Dog Star Man cycle, a prelude and four film "chapters", runs about an hour, and is indeed something of a chore. The 25-minute "Prelude: Dog Star Man" is undoubtedly one of the most mind-blowing cinematic events one will experience.
Stan Brakhage taught me that cinema, film, could be music. Not musical, like Welles or Chaplin, but actual music. That film could be a piece of "art" itself. (Many of his altering film stock pieces have more in common with Jackson Pollock than they do with cinema, like "motion" drip paintings.) Mekas recalled that Brakhage once related a story to him in which a "spiritualist" had told Brakhage that he could beat the cancer eating away at him by "channeling into his body" and confronting the cancerous cells one a time. Brakhage said that eventually he was able to get inside of himself and confront the cells eating away at his body but that when he did so found them so beautiful that he could not destroy them, they were too beautiful. He let them alone. I suspect that somehow even these made it into his work, perhaps they are the stars of his last films.
A fabulous transvestite cabaret performer, addict, lover, and ultimately, something of a social activist, João Francisco dos Santos fought his way from Rio de Janeiro's slums in the 1930's to notoriety and respectability. Karim Aïnouz's Madame Satã chronicles his early years as fable, a dreamscape in which a young man longs to be a woman, longs to be a man, fighting bitter poverty and a doomed fate. A dilettante, criminal, passionate lover and vicious fighter, João (a stunning Lázaro Ramos) rages through the streets of Lapa, Rio's bohemian neighborhood filled with pimps, queers, artists, cut-throats, samba musicians, and "deviants" of various stripes, determined to snatch dignity at all costs. With a motley crew of hangers on always longing for love he searches endlessly for salvation within his dark surroundings-slum tenements, brothels, dive bars, cabarets, and often, prison.
When first glimpsed we view a wild, beaten up João, arrested. A policeman's off-screen voice lists his various offenses and "degenerate" traits: thief, homosexual, hustler, alcoholic, pederast, gambler, possessor of an abject hate for a society that rejects him. And then there is music. Told in an extended flashback we view João off-stage at a cabaret lost in the music of a singer spinning a beautiful tale of "Sultans" and far away lands of adventure and love. João wraps himself in a curtain at the wing of the stage, lost singing the song to himself, enchanted, dreaming of performing. Madame Satã whisks through years in which João Francisco-son of former slaves, poor, black, and homosexual-hopelessly attempts to find a place in Brazilian society.
In many ways Madame Sata calls to mind recent films exploring the plight of artists battling for a place in societies hostile to them. Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls chronicled the story of poet Reinaldo Arenas who, gay, escaped "undesirable" status in Castro's Cuba and came to the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift in the early eighties. After success as a poet he succumbed to AIDS in 1990. Pinero by filmmaker Leon Ichaso recounts the saga of actor, playwright (and founding member of New York's Nuyorican Poets Café) Miguel Pinero. Puerto Rican Pinero blazed from his Lower East Side boricua to help craft the spoken word community of the early 1970's. Winning a Tony Award for his autobiographical dramatic play Short Eyes in 1974 he later succumbed to darker impulses and overdosed at the age of 44. These films share Latino protagonists living on the fringes of society fighting to be heard, for dignity, while also wrestling darker, self-destructive demons. Whereas Arenas and Pinero seem to lose their battles for self-actualization and enlightenment, João Francisco dos Santos reaches a level of personal peace and respect he might once (the years covering Madame Satã) have never imagined.
Early on João manages to fashion something of a family unit out of his effeminate best friend and fellow hustler Taboo (Flavio Bauraqui) and Laurita (Marcelia Cartaxo), a middle aged prostitute with infant child who João once rescued off Rio's streets. These four souls live in cramped quarters in a dilapidated flat in Lapa and amidst rampant poverty find a way to be something of a family. Self-described "son of Iansã and Ogum" (feminine and masculine African gods of the Candomblé religion) João is a river of flowing contradictions: vulnerable, angry, loving, monstrous, father figure, childish, wise, dishonest-yet always filled with passion. An ill-fated attempt to crash a party at Rio's "High Life" club where the wealthy gather ends in a drunken brawl in which he and his friends are tossed out on the streets. Full of unattainable social aspirations and unworkable passions, João is a walking time bomb of societal frustration, the inherent inequality of he and his cohorts' lives readily apparent. When wrongly accused by police of a crime he did not commit (there were others they could have accurately accused him of) João breaks into a fit of rage refusing to allow himself to be arrested, viciously breaking free of his captors (dos Santos practiced Capoeira, a form of flowing Brazilian kickboxing). Only the entreaties of a lover, Renatinho (Felipe Marques), convinces him it is for the best that he turn himself in-the cops will continue to terrorize the entire barrio until he is found. It is inevitable that in this atmosphere João's passions lead to no good end, and indeed he eventually winds up committing a crime that lands him with a long prison sentence.
First-time director Aïnouz tells this story in a series of lush close-ups: faces, hands, dancing feet, flowing curtains, shot glasses, flora. The cinematography, by Walter Carvalho, is rich, textured, and luscious. Colors pour from the screen. Texturally Madame Satã brings to mind Wong Kar Wai's slow meditations on longing and love, In the Mood For Love and Happy Together, Gus Van Sant's early Male Noche and even the banal plodding through lives in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, but without any rushing concern for linear narrative. A disjointed ether flows from the passions, dreams, and haze of João and his fellow denizens of Lapa. But at the center is always João Francisco's world-his desires, fears, vices, trials and tribulations. After various stints in prison Francisco eventually reached a level of notoriety by winning Rio De Janeiro's Carnival costume contest in 1942 with a stunning performance in which he first took on his "Madame Satã" persona in homage to Cecil B. De Mille's 1930 film Madame Satan. By the end of his life he had become a symbol of courage and perseverance, reportedly adopting seven children. Possessor of many personas: "Jamacy, Queen of the Forest"; "Negress of the Bulacoché"; and "Wild Pussycat", Francisco lived until 1976, having spent 27 of his 76 years behind bars.