Brazilian Film: The End and the Beginning

Rio de Janeiro - One of the films that touched me the most in 2005 was the documentary “O Fim e o Princípio” (The End and the Beginning) by Eduardo Coutinho, shot in the sertão at Rio do Peixe, in the state of Paraíba. It would make an excellent double bill with “A Pessoa é para o que Nasce” (Born to be Blind) by Roberto Berliner, the documentary about the blind women singers from Campina Grande. Or with a film which I saw many years ago, the title of which I no longer remember, which interviewed Holocaust survivors, who showed their scars, deformities, the numbers tattooed on their forearms.

Coutinho took a film crew and headed out to the backcountry in Paraíba with no script, no project, no plan. The film that resulted from this adventure is a demonstration that cinema has the power of lifting to mythic grandeur the meaningless little life of the "average citizen," of people who are "nobodies." It is refreshing to be able to see image and sound do this with people who in principle are not beautiful, not rich, not famous, who did nothing exceptional in their lives. Except survive.

Coutinho ended up making a film about old people whose great victory and great surprise in life was to have stayed alive for 70 or 80 years. They are old folks whose faces are etched by time like woodcuts, with crooked teeth, hoarse voices, coughing up phlegm, bodies devastated by a life of privations, of work, work and more work. They are poor, but not wretched. We see their well-kept living rooms, a few modest pieces of furniture, pictures on the walls, tables with chairs, the omnipresent TV.

The best part about them is their eyes. One has a serene, peaceful look, the look of someone who has paid every cent of many debts with the world, and whose greatest pleasure is watch a novela to relax, and then snooze on the floor. Another has anguished eyes, complains of not being able to sleep, and spends the night seated in the hammock, "smoking and drinking coffee." Another can scarcely look at you directly, but shows the trophy he won in a poetry competition, and recites syllable by syllable the prize-winning sonnet. Another has the hallucinated eyes of a semi-literate intellectual who spent too much time sounding out the bible. Another has skittish, nervous eyes, which laugh, become serious, never stop, trying to whole time to escape the snares that the "professor" who is doing the interview must certainly be laying for him.

They are the survivors of the Northeastern holocaust, where people continue to die “of old age before thirty, of ambush before twenty, and of hunger a little every day." They all give the impression that they have been to hell and back, and have come to tell the story, though they would prefer to forget it. They are not resentful, do not fear death, don't complain about the government, share their meals, offer hospitality. Of the little that they have, half is always available for someone who may need it. Eduardo Coutinho interviews these people with the compassion and empathy of a war correspondent who has witnessed horrors and heroism in the course of a bloody conflict the reason for which no one has been able to explain.

Translated from the original Portuguese by Tom Moore. Tom is a classical musician and translator who lives in Rio de Janeiro. His most recent CD of trio sonatas by Boismortier is available from A Casa Estúdio.

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