“Four Men on a Raft,” the only part of It’s All True that could be finished, is still a political film — or at least it will be when it opens in Brazil tomorrow, where the descendants of the jangadeiros Welles filmed are worse off than their ancestors fifty years ago. Then, they were poor; today, pushed off the beach into favelas by real estate developers and faced with industrial fishing and worse — new forms called predatory fishing that are exhausting their traditional fishing grounds — they see their very way of life threatened with extinction. Yet, when four men very much like the ones you see in the film sailed on a jangada from a village near Fortaleza to Rio in April–May–June of 1993, while we were working on the editing of the film, the President of Brazil wouldn’t even meet with them to hear their grievances. When I spoke to him, Welles was very concerned about how films date; he would be happy to know that “Four Men on a Raft” is one of the few militant films that escapes Daney’s Law: that good militant films only arrive when they are no longer needed. This one seems to have arrived just in the nick of time… What we have said to the Brazilian journalists we’ve met here is that the jangadeiros of Fortaleza were anachronisms when Welles met them in 1942, and that was certainly the reason he filmed them. He had just filmed Ambersons, the story of a world that disappeared before he was born, and he was in the midst of filming the people’s Carnival in Praça Onze, a public square that had been demolished by the government to make way for Getulio Vargas Boulevard, which he was therefore obliged to reconstruct in a studio for the filming of “The Story of the Samba.” Welles was not a radical, even though there were radical writers around him in Brazil; he was a man of many nostalgias, whose greatest film, made a quarter of a century later, is a film of nostalgia and regret at the passing of the “merry old England” of Falstaff. Don Quixote, he told me, had taken so long to finish that it could not be finished as a film about the Eternal Spain, but only as a meditation on its disappearance. Maybe that’s what he was really waiting for. IAL-extrasToday, we were told by our friends in Fortaleza that the Castelo Encantado favela where many of the jangadeiros live is slated for demolition to make way for the Avenue of the Jangadeiros, a name which will have a certain allure for tourists coming to this city where every imaginable adjunct of their leisure activities, from the beach towels at our hotel to the annual beer festival, is decorated by the triangular sail of the jangada. Welles would certainly have appreciated the irony of real heroes still living, invisible and in danger of annihilation because of their invisibility, in a town where their rafts have become the totem of tourism, like his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza riding past a shop window displaying Don Quixote knick-knacks and even beer bottles bearing their likenesses. What his film makes visible is the jangadeiros themselves, and their way of life. What his film says, and what we have said every time we’ve spoken to the Brazilian press, is that that way of life has value precisely because it is an anachronism, founded on a harmonious relationship with the natural world that we have lost. Today, the jangadeiros and their allies, like the late Chico Mendes and his allies, use ecological arguments: whereas the predatory fishermen who dive for lobsters (drugged on marijuana because their employers don’t give them wetsuits to protect them against the cold) take everything including the young, the jangadeiros have always known what to take and what to leave so that the species can continue to propagate. Harmonious relations of man with Nature, and, I might add, of man with man. The marginal or artisanal fishermen of every stripe along the Atlantic Coast have in their heads a complex webwork dividing up the sea into territories where each fisherman has the right to fish. The industrial fishing boats and the predators ignore this web, which is invisible because it is woven of oral traditions, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. — from a letter from Bill Krohn to Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 7, 1994 youtube/watch?v=7Hy-4cI3EVc
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 15:27:40 +0000
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