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The
Sign of Chaos (O Signo do Caos) By Ruy
Gardnier [This
piece was originally published in Contracampo #53, October 2003, on the
ocassion of the first showings of Sganzerla’s The
Sign of Chaos in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The review refers
to Sganzerla when he was still alive but ill with cancer. – Ed.] “It comes
and goes, it comes and goes” or To Jairo
Ferreira And to
whoever else wants it a)
The Sign of Chaos
composes, along with Tudo é Brasil
(It’s All Brazil), a strange
diptych of devotion and repulsion towards the country. While the first was
a chant of assimilation and enchantment taken from the point of view of a
foreigner who made films, the second is a melancholic, rabid, and
disenchanted cry of venomous disgust, a testament – in first person, you
could say – of the stagnation of the Brazilian cultural mechanism and
all those involved in it. As It’s
All Brazil develops the situation of a character and his surroundings,
and narrates a sad but flavorful path towards discovery, The
Sign of Chaos impedes any evolution, throws its scenes and its
characters – all of them leads, or all of them supporting performers –
in straight labyrinths where they know they are lost, but have no hope of
running and being found. b)
An antifilm*, but most of all a terrorist film: it throws on the
screen dramaturgically, with clinical cruelty and frenetic fervor, the
apathetic climate that conditions the relationship between Art and the
State in Brazil. A bureaucratic stagnation: rarely has a film (or work of
art in general) taken repetition to such great lengths for destructive (of
the fetishist relationship with the screen) and self-destructive purposes.
The fury of the eye of the hurricane: everything is thrown with centripetal
force into a meaningless black hole. Both the systematic rigidity of
Beckett’s “Comedy”, wherein the story eats its own tail and slowly
becomes a cacophony and redundancy, as well as a Pirandellian feeling of
the characters’ lack of direction. A possible subtitle for The
Sign of Chaos: “X characters in search of a fiction – or strayed
from it, since we’ve already been deprived of it..” c)
Fellini said, in the documentary that preceded the screening of
Sganzerla’s film, that the only criterion that counts for everything and
for all the artistic manifestations is vitality. Let’s be clear and
brief, because the reader may not have noticed: The
Sign of Chaos is vital, it sweats blood and imprints its fluids on the
emulsion. It contaminates everything around it, colors are transformed,
rebels pale. d)
The most extremist film of Brazilian cinema since The
Age of the Earth (A Idade da
Terra) by Glauber Rocha – per se a disregarded tribute to Sganzerla
and Bressane. e)
Trivial to say that this is the nth film by Sganzerla about Orson
Welles. None of his films are about Welles. They come from Sganzerla
himself. Starting with his first, The
Red Light Bandit (O Bandido da
Luz Vermelha), of which The Sign
Of Chaos is the most similar. A strange and hard to explain
similarity. Apologies. We admit our shortcomings. f)
Still, Welles persists in the shots plagiarized from Citizen
Kane – repetitive plongé
of the DIP** villain (Otávio Terceiro, phenomenal) tossing the pages into
the air and watching them fall; in the incredible montage of the black and
white segments that has the energy of Mr.
Arkadin; but above all, in the presence of the omnipotent character
who presumes to hold the truth and feels it’s his right to impose his
law at all costs: Charles Foster Kane, Hank Quinlan, Arkadin, Bannister.
Disassociated of a world they still own, they find in Otavio Terceiro a
genuine successor. Aware that he excercises his powers without the
corresponding knowledge, all he can do is emit the same phrases – like
the already omnipotent and Wellesian character of Jô Soares in A
Mulher de Todos. g)
Lest we forget: The Sign of
Chaos has as many memorable phrases as The
Red Light Bandit. The one that has the most staying power, is from
Welles himself: “We must remove the cinema from the toy room.” h)
The structure of the film’s plot: in the first part the thugs
from the DIP find a trunk of negatives from It’s
All True; unable to accept the savagery and disregard for the protocol
of the “genius” who directed the film, they decide to ban it
eternally. One of them, however, sees in the film’s rushes the purest
expression of the filmic art (or art tout
court) and in vain tries to convince his boss that the film deserves
to be seen (segment in black and white). There’s a short first interlude
filmed with low-resolution and saturated colors: Camila Pitanga behind the
Brazilian flag: sprawled jovially ***, she poses, drinks, converses with a
man and plays with a little transparent ball (we’ll return to it later).
Then, a second interlude in which a girl runs through the countryside. The
only “beautiful” sequence in the film, in voice-off
a girl and her mother talk about color and black and white in cinema, and
about the convoluted mind of the artist. Until 1940, the world was black
and white. Finally a second part where the characters celebrate in a
little party animated by the destruction of the cans of Welles’ film. On
a patio, a certain lady (from Shanghai? An odalisque?) waits for the
film’s defender with open arms, only to later blame him for having lost
all of the money (always the money). i)
An animal film: a parrot is Tirésias, the narrator of the plot;
another character, the most lucid, is a stuffed bird (the only one aware
of its own condition). But perhaps the characters are more animalesque. j)
Most beautiful scene in the film: Camila Pitanga playing ball with
the transparent spherical amulet that is in the hands of Charles Kane when
he is dying, and he pronounces the famous “Rosebud”. Worth the entire
career of some filmmakers. l)
“The image of chaos is chaos itself.” The point of the film is
not to explore chaos, but to let itself be carried away by it.
Off-centered, savage and unpredictable like a small particle of matter,
the film anticipates shots, repeats them to the point of exhaustion (the
thug who does nothing but giggle…), but above all accomplishes the
strategy of compartmentalizing each character and situation in a
claustrophobic and hideous picture. But it’s us, the spectators, who
feel like Janet Leigh in Touch of
Evil, surrounded by corrupt police/(DIP) agents (or DOPS****, or for
that matter by marketing managers transformed into meta-ministers of
culture) wanting to submit us to their authority. m)
Brazil, still the sleeping giant, represented by the tropical
amazon figure Camila Pitanga. An autistic argument, incapable of fiction,
and the impossibility to project its beauty beyond its own sequence,
corresponds to the exhuberance of the young woman’s natural wealth.
“Brazilians should have never been born” (cited from memory, like
everything else here), but worse, it’s alright, because “they’re
already condemned from the moment they’re born”. There’s a lasting
impression that Sganzerla could already have overcome the question of the
nation in favor of the notion of this preoccupation (Miramar
by Julio Bressane), reworked and justified in The Sign of Chaos. n)
If the rythmic allure of samba were the key to decode Welles’
wonderment with the country in Tudo é Brasil, here the “Aquarela do Brasil” by Ary Barroso,
our informal national anthem (and for this maybe our real anthem), is
whistled with shades of scorn. A tambourine is played, but mistreated as
badly as the cans with the negatives from It’s
All True. o)
Difficult to think of films so opposite from one another as Filme
de Amor by Julio Bressane and The
Sign of Chaos. Opposite in the way they expose the relation with the
world (resigned in the Bressane, rebelious in Sganzerla), in the way they
engage in existential and self-reflexive moments, and in the way they
inscribe these pathways into the work. We can say with some certainty that
this wasn’t the film that everyone was expecting from a veteran
Sganzerla. The Sign of Chaos has
the virulence, the aggressiveness of a newcomer, and the experienced craft
of a veteran. p)
Also, because of the degenerate state of the director’s illness,
the film arrives at an inordinate moment when people feel sorry for
Sganzerla. But as an artist he does not need that. He still and always
will be an enragé, and is
willing to spit on our pity. Justifiably. Let’s leave charity and
benevolence to those who need it. For Sganzerla justice is enough. q)
One aspect that hasn’t been fully observed is that of women as
muses, who are always in the background in this film: Djin Sganzerla,
striking, appears many times on the screen but is always ignored by the
colleagues who share the frame with her. So, unable to captivate the
characters inside the movie, she poses for the audience. r)
Montage mon beau souci.
Once again a film that saves itself in the editing (Sganzerla still wants
to toy with the film); putting scenes together to construct the real
meaning. Rhythm, breathing room, continuity and planned discontinuity,
nostalgic homage to dubbing (almost always out-of-sync, like the best
Italian films or the best Brazilian films). A film that exists in the
sidelines more than in the big picture. s)
Guará Rodrigues, Helena Ignez. Impossible not to mention them. t)
More than Ary Barroso, the film goes by the beat of its only other
tune, “The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady” by Charles Mingus.
Dissonant, energetic, metalic reverberations, love and veracity as one. u)
Just because The Sign of Chaos is a choleric film, it doesn’t mean that no
adhesion is possible (a visible remnant of a world to be explored, and a
consequential love of this hypothesis). That’s why, of all the recent
apocalyptic films, this one goes the furthest. The world is destroyed, the
enemy is strong and clearly defined, but art still isn’t finished. Even
as a possibility, it still persists. v)
“The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be
possessed by Genius” (Norman Mailer on William Burroughs). We could say
the same about Sganzerla, the only living Brazilian filmmaker who may
conceivably be possessed by genius. x)
A film that tries to purge in itself an entire country, a whole
life experience, and all the infamous and longtime relation between power
and art. The price is high, the retribution improbable: it will be a film
maldit forever. z)
A suicidal film for suicidal people. Love it or leave it in peace. * In Brazil, The
Sign of Chaos was subtitled “An Anti-film.” ** DIP:
Department of Press and Propaganda (an organ of Vargas’ dictatorship). *** Adapted
from the original, “deitada em berço esplêndido”,
which is taken from the Brazilian national anthem. **** DOPS –
Department of Political and Social Order (Vargas). Additional
note: the letters k, w, and y are only used in Portuguese irregularly,
hence the omission of these letters from the sequence of paragraphs. Translation
by Gabe Klinger Copyright
© Ruy Gardnier/Contracampo 2003 |
 From The Sign of Chaos. |