Macunaima, the eternal outsider - 1969 Brazilian film - Strangers on the Screen

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1989 by Antonio Rodrigues

IN a structured, well-defined society it is easy to pick out the outsider, the person who is different from everyone else. In France, the United Kingdom or the Federal Republic of Germany, the cinema returns repeatedly to the theme of immigration, turning out naturalistic films about second-generation immigrants. The latter are seen as foreigners, outsiders, since a clear, if arbitrary, line of demarcation still separates them from the local population.

The situation is more complicated in emerging countries or in mixed societies. In Brazil, for example, on the outer edge of the Western world, a variety of races, cultures and ways of life which span the archaic and the modern coexist side by side. Brazil is European in its language, its legal code and some of its customs, but African in its beliefs and patterns of everyday life. In this melting-pot almost anyone could see his neighbour as an outsider and no one is truly representative of any particular social category.

The film Mascunaima, made in 1969 by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1932-1988), has become a classic of modern Latin American cinema precisely because it succeeded in conveying the curious state of generalized otherness" that exists in Brazil. One of the merits of the film-a fable in which, provided that you can interpret a few clues, Brazillan society can easily be recognizedis that it can be understood by and is attractive to film-goers who have only a superficial knowledge of Brazil.

The hero, Macunaima, is a black man born into an Indian tribe. One day he decides to set out with his brothers for the big city. On the way, he walks through a magic fountain and miraculously turns white (one of his brothers, who arrives too late, only has the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet turn white). On reaching Rio de janeiro, he has a number of adventures. He marries a woman guerrilla fighter, is widowwed and then tries to steal a talisman from a rich giant. Finally, tired of it all, he returns to the jungle with a whole range of consumer goods air-conditioners, refrigerators, etc.). Caught up once more in a life of idleness, he ends up being devoured by a river siren.

The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Mario de Andrade, published in 1928. However, the director filled out the story with new episodes (those concerning the guerrillas were of topical interest in Brazil in 1969), and left out passages in the book that were primarily of of linguistic interest. Furthermore, he adopted the typical style of a certain class of comic film popular in Brazil, particularly in the sequence dealing with the birth of Macunaima and in regard to the physical appearance of the giant.

Thus the mainspring of Macunaima, in the words of its director "a Brazillan film devoured by Brazil", is otherness.

In turn Indian, Black and White, savage and city-dweller, proletarian and profiteer, Macunaima never belongs to a clear-cut category. He is always an outsider, even though he seems at ease in .ill situations. The notion of otherness implies a clash between cultures, a confrontation, or at least a sense of difference. In Macunaima there is no clash. The hero goes from one extreme to the other, from a poverty-stricken tribe to the financial district of Rio de janeiro, a city which he reaches in a truck full of immigrant workers and in which he mixes with prostitutes, terrorists who die through their own carelessness (they do not know how to handle their bombs), and greedy industrialists. However, Macunaima is not just a passive, disillusioned onlooker observing the world in which he finds himself. Even though his primary objective is the search for easy pickings (he becomes a kept man and, to acquire riches, attempts to steal the giant's talisman), he tables part, in his own fashion, in the life of the very different circles in which he moves.

This social mobility and his succession of apparently disconnected adventures find their own logic within the context of an extravagant, exuberant fable. The film tells a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, with episode following episode in a far from haphazard order. Macunaima is a piece of story-telling rather than the illustration of a thesis.

The only world to which the hero really belongs is his family, which consists of the entire tribe into which he was born. Outside this family he constantly finds himself face to face with a world which he distrusts and in which he sees only adversaries. Macunafma takes each successful adventure as it comes. A brothel or the guerrilla girl's hiding place are for him no more than provisional, interchangeable stopping-places, where, with no concern for others' motives, he looks to his own immediate interests. It is as if the words of the truck driver who took him to Rio are still ringing in his ears: "Now it's every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." He is the eternal outsider, never putting down roots or becoming integrated anywhere. He is the new arrival, always embarking on some new enterprise which will never be carried through to the end. Macunaima never acquires any more than a superficial knowledge of those he meets and himself remains unaffected by these encounters. He looks no further than the immediate, all devouring present, until the day when he himself is devoured. Not knowing what he is seeking he follows his chosen path unquestioningly.