I have seen the light

Giant of Latin American cinema Walter Salles on why it took him so long to wake up to homegrown talent

* Walter Salles
* The Guardian,
* Friday April 2 2004
* Article history

Cienaga

La Ciénaga, evidence of the continuing vitality of Latin American cinema

I remember it as if it were yesterday. The film begins. A dizzying sound of drumbeats invades the movie theatre. Pulsating bodies take the screen. Dozens, hundreds of people, mostly blacks and mestizos, are dancing. Everything is movement and ecstasy. All of a sudden, gunshots ring out. A man lies on the ground - a lifeless body. Surrounding him, the deafening music and the rhythm continue. The beat is frenzied. The camera travels from face to face in the crowd until it stops at a young black woman. The frame freezes on her trance-lit face.

Thus begins Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) by Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and watching it was like a shock to me. The film navigated between different states - fiction and documentary, past and present, Africa and Europe. The dialectic narrative took the form of a collage, crafted with an uncommon conceptual and cinematographic rigour. Scenes from newsreels, historical fragments and magazine headlines mixed and collided. In Memories of Underdevelopment, Alea proved that filmic precision and radical experimentation could go hand in hand. Nothing was random. Each image echoing in the following image, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Until then, having spent part of my childhood in Europe, I had a better knowledge of Italian neorealism and the French new wave than I did of the cinematic currents in Latin America. I admired Rossellini and Visconti and the early films of Godard and Truffaut - and with good reason. On taking the camera to the streets and showing the faces and lives of ordinary people, the neorealists and the directors of the nouvelle vague had fomented a true ethical and aesthetic revolution in films.

But Memories of Underdevelopment carried with it something more. A point of view that was vigorous, original and, more importantly, pertained directly to us, Latin Americans. It was like a reverse angle - one that seemed more resonant to me than that which was prevalent in other latitudes.

On returning to Brazil, while still an adolescent, I had the privilege of watching Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol) by Glauber Rocha, together with a Brazilian psychoanalyst named Hélio Pelegrino. When the film was over, we sat there, ecstatic, overwhelmed by an emotion that is difficult to describe. Hélio turned to me and said: "This film hits the heart of Brazilianity."

And so it did. It was a dazzling experience. And the same thing happened when I discovered Barren Lives (Vidas Secas) by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and São Paulo SA by Luis Sergio Person - an extraordinary and sometimes overlooked film of the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Then came the revelation of Limite, the first and only film by 21-year-old director Mário Peixoto. This was a film of transcendent poetry and boundless imagination.

Once again, I found myself in a state of shock, not only because of the film itself, which was made in 1931 and forgotten for many years, but also for the evidence it bore, that of our creative diversity.

I could speak of other Latin American films that caused a similar impact over the years, the same sensation of unveiling, but the list would probably be too long.

The most important thing is that this feeling remains alive. I was stunned to discover Amores Perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Later came Crane World (Mundo Grúa) by Pablo Trapero, another revelation, as well as Bolivia by Adrian Caetano, and La Ciénaga (The Swamp) by Lucrecia Martel. In Brazil, the same could be said of the work of first-time directors Karim Ainouz and Laís Bodansky.

These films have renewed my faith in the narrative possibilities of the cinema made here in our continent. Yet, at the same time, they are in dialogue with a film past that was our own, with the roots of Latin American cinema. They are as harsh and essential in their form and content as the films made by the generations of the 1960s and 1970s. They are also different, since they portray another political and social moment.

Parenthetically, and paradoxically, I have never been able to view some of these films in Brazil. Crane World and Bolivia have never been shown on the commercial cir cuit in my country. Today, young Latin American film-makers meet each other mainly at festivals. The bottleneck of distribution is a reality.

So what is Latin American cinema today? I believe that there is not just one Latin American cinema, just as there is no single Brazilian cinema. There are cinemas - made of sometimes contradictory currents that often collide yet come together in a desire to portray our realities in an urgent and visceral manner.

We make films that are, like the melting pot that characterises our cultures, impure, imperfect and plural. It is this diversity that pulsates throughout the continent, as it does through the bodies in the opening of Memories of Underdevelopment.

Cinema is, first and foremost, the projection of a cultural identity which comes to life on the screen. It mirrors, or should mirror, this identity. But that is not all. It should also "dream" it. Or make it flesh and blood, with all its contradictions. Unlike Europe, we are societies in which the question of identity has not yet crystallised. It is perhaps for this reason that we have such a need for cinema, so that we can see ourselves in the many conflicting mirrors that reflect us.

· Extracted from The Cinema of Latin America (Wallflower Press, £15.99).

· Memories of Underdevelopment will be screened on Wednesday at the Cinematheque, Brighton, as part of the Brighton Festival of Cuban Cinema. For information, call 01273 471 838.