Brazil, 1984
Direction and Screenplay: Eduardo Coutinho
Original Title: Goat Marked for Death
Cast: Eduardo Coutinho, Ferreira Gullar, Tite de Lemos
Photography: Fernando Duarte and Edgar Moura
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 119 minutes
By Adriana Schmorak
“Cabra Marcado para Morrer” is a semi-documentary narrative of the life of João Pedro Teixeira, a peasant leader from Paraíba, assassinated in 1962. After 40% of the technical script had been filmed, the 1964 military coup forced the filming to interrupt filming. Part of the team was imprisoned on charges of “communism”, and the rest dispersed to different cities in Pernambuco. The title "Goat Marked for Death" is inspired by the poem "João Boa-Morte, goat marked for death" by the poet Ferreira Gullar, who also participates as a narrator.
At first it was intended as a fictional film with characters played by non-professional actors. The script was structured around characters with clearly defined profiles, constant, without internal conflicts, repetitive in their thoughts and attitudes. That is to say, typified characters and intellectualized and ideological dialogues, distanced from peasant culture. The first filmed material was saved from censorship thanks to the fact that it had been sent, before the 1964 coup, to a developing laboratory in Rio de Janeiro, which, in turn, sent a copy to the film crew.
In the available film material it can be seen that the points of view assumed by the camera change throughout the shots, the point of view on the roof follows the gaze of power; the point of view at ground level accompanies the perspective of the oppressed; the lateral point of view, when the narrative instance stops assuming the perspective of the characters on stage, becomes an extra-diegetic narrator.
The framings are very diversified: general shot, close-up, medium shot, American shot, etc. Real time coincides with diegetic time, and there is a similarity in the treatment received by time and space, which suggests that the technical script had been designed following the canons of post-war Italian neorealism, with the same didactic profile. -awareness.
The feature film was resumed 17 years later, in 1981, after the amnesty decreed during the government of General Figueiredo. Then Eduardo Coutinho returned to the place of the first scenes and continued the interviews there with the peasants who had already appeared in the 1964 shots, placing special emphasis on the statements of João Pedro's widow, Elizabeth Altino Teixiera, who since December 1964 she had lived in hiding, separated from her children. Coutinho thus managed to reconstruct the history of João Pedro and the Galiléia and Sapé Camponese Leagues.
The rigid and preconceived script of the first "Goat" and the guidelines of Italian neorealism disappeared to give way to more modern forms of documentary, which Coutinho acknowledges having learned working for television. “Identify the interviewer, situate the person filming, his ideology, his social class. My function is to stay inside the scene, looking into the eyes of the interviewees, not towards the camera (...) I could never have made the film without extensive experience in documentary, in reporting, experience that I acquired on television" . (Statements made by Eduardo Coutinho in his text “Filme Marcado para Reviver”, published by the Moreira Sales Institute, Rio de Janeiro, 1985)
In the 1960s, the filmmaker was said to be the spokesperson for the people. In the '80s, the director, on the other hand, proposed to accommodate different voices, even though they were contradictory, without typifying the characters and without the intention of instructing the public about the need or not for a Cuban-style revolution. His idea was to produce a report open to different thoughts, ideas, memories, and even to frame the silencing of the intellectuals belonging to the revolutionary left, the workers, and the peasants in the same theoretical framework.
All opponents of the military regime came to have a common reference, the break imposed by the military coup of 1964. The loss of constitutional guarantees and freedoms came to unite all of them. This is how the film rescues a traumatic part of Brazilian history in the light of new social, political and cultural conditions. With a special concern to recover the memories of simple and oppressed people, whose life stories show the hidden side of a unique story told by the winners.
“Every film is constructed, it is a narrative. Thinking about the film does not mean giving a position on that matter as a specialist: it is giving a position on the film, on the cinema, on life.” (Eduardo Coutinho)
The general tone of the film is aimed at showing that the problems present in the 1960s continued to be present in Brazil in the 80s. The old problems were still the same, but the moment of democratization in the 80s demanded new answers. When it was released in 1984, “Cabra marked to die”, it was presented as a kind of platform for the construction of a democratic left in Brazil.
In November 2015, the film was listed by the Brazilian Association of Film Critics as one of the 100 best Brazilian films of all time. With a well-calculated editing to tell all the details of an intricate drama that took place in a forgotten part of Brazil, the film is to this day a master class in documentary and semi-documentary filmmaking. It was screened at international film festivals in Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Berlin, Paris, New York, Québec, San Francisco, São Paulo, etc., in most of which it won numerous awards.
“Cabra Marcado para Morrer” is a living film, still in progress. Through the case of a leader of the movements of landless peasants, a long history of tragic events related to land conflicts in Brazil is summarized, such as the execution of trade unionist and environmentalist Chico Mendes, who was killed in Acre in 1988; the massacre of the 19 landless in 1996 in Eldorado dos Carajás, State of Pará; the murder of the North American nun Dorothy Stang in 2005 and the murder of the promoter of Justice Thiago Faria Soares, which occurred in Itaíba, Pernambuco, in October 2013. In this list we cannot fail to mention Marielle Franco, veredora from Rio de Janeiro, feminist and fighter for the rights of black women, shot dead in March 2018.
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ibliography:
Coutinho, Eduardo. “Film Marked for Reviver”, Moreira Sales Institute, Rio de Janeiro, 1985
Fantinel, Danilo. Goat marked for death. Rio Grande do Sul, 2013. URL: www.papodecinema.com.br
Freire Ramos, Alcides. “A historicidade de Cabra marked for Morrer. New World New Worlds. Journals Open Edition, 2006-2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/1520
Goat Marked for Death on Wikipedia: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabra_Marcado_para_Morrer