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Queimada - Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!
- as long as there are empires, there will be wars -
[DVD available at
Amazon.com]
Review by Joan Mellen
Courtesy: Cinema Magazine - Issue:32, Winter 1972-73
"..The film portrays, quite
brilliantly, the nature of a guerrilla uprising.
Walker seems all too aware of the danger of a
popular uprising, when he cautions the white rulers
that "the guerrilla has nothing to lose." And that
in killing a hero of the people, the hero "becomes a
martyr, and the martyr becomes a myth." "
Amazon Review
"... The young boy who
guards the captured Dolores stays with him and provides
Pontecorvo with a means of allowing Jose Dolores to give
his ideas expression through dialogue. Jose Dolores does
not assail his captor; he tries to inspire and convert
him. He tells the young man that he does not wish to be
released because this would only indicate that it was
convenient for his enemy. What serves his enemies is
harmful to him. "Freedom is not something a man can
give you," he tells the boy. Dolores is cheered by
the soldier's questions because, ironically, in men like
the soldier who helps to put him to death, but who is
disturbed and perplexed by Dolores, he sees in
germination the future revolutionaries of Quemada. To
enter the path of consciousness is to follow it to
rebellion.....Pontecorvo zooms to Walker as he
listens to Dolores' final message which breaks his
silence: "Ingles, remember what you said. Civilization
belongs to whites. But what civilization? Until when?"
The stabbing of Walker on his way to the ship by an
angry rebel comes simultaneously with a repetition of
the Algerian cry for freedom. It is followed,
accompanied by percussion, by a pan of inscrutable,
angry black faces on the dock. The frame freezes, fixing
their expressions indelibly in our minds.."
Comment
by tamilnation.org
"..But imagine it
happens:
Killinochchi is flattened,
Mr
P is dead,
LTTE
dissolved. Will the Tamil
dream of a Tamil Eelam
die? Of course not. It will be revived, and new
cycles of violence will occur..."
Conflict Resolution in Tamil Eelam - Sri Lanka: the
Norwegian Initiative- Professor Johan Galtung,
February 2007
"Kuttimuni will be sentenced to death today, but
tomorrow there will be thousands of Kuttimunis."
Statement by Tamil Leader, Selvarajah Yogachandran
(Kuttimuni) at his trial in the Colombo High Court,
August 1982
Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! must surely be one of the most
underrated films of recent years. This can be explained in
part by its involved and intricate plot which, on first
viewing, is difficult to follow.
Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) soldier
of fortune, adventurer and an envoy of the British Crown is
sent during the 1840's to an island named Quemada. The
island was originally burned to cinder in the scorched earth
conquest by the Portuguese who claimed it as a colony- hence
the name "Quemada" which means "burnt."
Walker's mission is to foment a revolution
against Portugal among the oppressed peasantry with a view
to replacing Portuguese control with that of Great Britain.
He arms a peasant named Jose Dolores whom he first tests for
daring and bitterness. With a small band of followers,
Dolores, guided by Walker, robs the Bank of Portugal of its
gold and goes on to lead the struggle against the
Portuguese. After victory, Dolores discovers that the new
ruler of the island will be not himself, but a local
bourgeois named Teddy Sanchez.
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Marlon Brando as Sir William
Walker
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Walker, having provoked peasant revolt to
remove Portugal, has organized the settler bourgeoisie,
warning them that the peasants will go beyond independence,
demanding economic and political control to effect social
equality. The settlers are used by Britain to protect
British investment and her access to Quemada's resources.
"Independence" is translated into
replacement of Portugal by a small settler ruling class
militarily supported by Britain. For the peasants, one
master replaces another. Their misery and powerlessness
continue. It is a prefiguring of today's neo-colonial
pattern.
Dolores is outraged by this cynical denial
to him of the fruits of struggle and he assumes the throne
of the former Portuguese Viceroy by force. But he discovers
that although he possesses momentary power, he lacks the
means to feed his people or to sell the sugar. There is no
knowledge of world trade or alternative markets. Teachers
and technicians do not exist. In short, his people are
without the very accoutrements of that civilization which
oppressed them in the first place.
Unable to see a way out and with sugar
rotting and piling up on the docks, Dolores steps down
reluctantly, allowing Sanchez to take control. But the
settler commander General Prada is quicker than Sanchez in
realizing that Quemada can be kept open to foreign
investment and bourgeois rule rendered secure only if the
rebels are suppressed and permanently disarmed.
Ten years pass. Walker, lacking apparent purpose in life, is
now dissolute and living on the margins of English society.
Jose Dolores again leads his starving people in a new
rebellion aimed directly at the landed settler rulers. This
threatens the entire structure of British economic control
with implications reaching further than Quemada. Such a
revolt, if successful, would spread through the Caribbean
and beyond.
The British turn again to Walker, hoping to exploit both his
knowledge of the peasant movement and his old relationship
with Dolores. He is asked to return to Quemada and put down
the rebellion. Walker accepts.
He attempts to contact Dolores, thinking to
trade upon their old association, but it is this very past
which has opened the eyes of Dolores to Walker, whom he
spurns.
Now openly the professional mercenary,
Walker pursues Dolores ruthlessly, burning half the island
while uprooting and killing people, animals and vegetation
in his path. He develops a theory that the guerrillas can be
defeated only if the peasants among whom they take shelter
and who supply them are burnt and driven out of all their
villages. The vegetation and trees must be denuded since
they too hide the rebels. The logic of defeating a popular
movement is inexorably genocidal, entailing total
devastation.
Dolores is finally captured and hanged,
refusing Walker's "offer" to escape. Dolores has learned
that freedom must be seized in struggle. And he knows the
offer to free him is designed to demonstrate his
subordination. He also realizes that Walker, having smashed
the rebellion, wants to avoid creating a martyr and a
legend. Dolores, in cool defiance, prefers death as his
fulfilment.
Walker is personally undermined by this
stark contrast between Dolores' satisfaction in moral
conviction and his own emptiness, which he only now fully
registers. The taste of victory is bitter.
His business finished, Walker is stabbed to death on the
dock by a porter a moment before embarking. Quemada's people
are awakened, emboldened, and irreconcilable. The camera
pans to many worn faces, their rebellion unchecked and the
example of Dolores burned into their consciousness.
The political aspirations of Burn! are
ambitious. Unlike
The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo's earlier film, which
takes the easier target of colonialism and the desire for
independence, without examination of social formations or
the political consciousness of the F.L.N., Burn! recognizes
that direct colonial rule is but one form of control.
Without goals that go beyond mere physical
absence of the colonizer's army, economic and social
exploitation will be maintained for alien interests by
intermediaries, independent in name alone. Neo
colonialism is shown a far more invidious and clever enemy.
The powerful evocation of the dynamics of
America's practice in Vietnam, with its graphic depiction of
"Vietnamization," must surely be a major reason for the
critical skittishness towards Burns! in this country.
Pontecorvo has Walker make his next stop
Indochina on first leaving Quemada, a piece of historical
impressionism, since France and not England occupied
Indochina in the 1840's. It is a bitter irony when his
friend Jose Dolores, not yet awakened to betrayal,
innocently offers Walker a toast "to Indochina."
United Artists, as
Pauline Kael put it, "dumped" the film without advance
publicity and screenings. They made Pontecorvo change the
occupier from Spain to Portugal, presumably because the
Spanish market for all United Artists films was in jeopardy.
They made the English title of the film the
absurdly imperative "Burn!" rather than the appropriate
translation, "Burnt," which states the inexorable fact, thus
implying the film's endorsement of the tragedy it depicts.
Involved too is the crass sensationalism of
invoking "burn, baby, burn" of ghetto insurrections. This,
aimed at the black market, inverts the film's meaning, for
Portugal and Britain burned Quemada, not the victimized
populace, who would never call for the "burning" of their
own homes.
Burn! may have been buried because United
Artists doubted the film would do well, but the distributor
willed its unhappy fate. They were disturbed by the
incendiary nature of a subject with which they did not care
to be closely identified.
If Portugal and England were safer
destroyers for United Artists, the film's relentless
association of racism (the condescending attitude of Walker
toward Jose Dolores throughout) with imperialism brought the
theme even closer to home.
The Battle of Algiers, despite its acclaim, had already
suffered a distribution and publicity blackout in the United
States, and Burn! goes deeper and farther.
Here, far more than in Algiers, Pontecorvo
explores Fanon's
theme that through long delayed and liberating violence
the oppressed are returned to self-respect and adulthood.
After attacking their first detachment of Portuguese
soldiers, Dolores and his people burst into an orgy of dance
and song that lasts far into the celebrating night. After
generations of passivity before abuse, they emerge as
autonomous people. It is entirely possible that there are
circumstances in which a company like United Artists might
even be prepared to lose money!
What makes Burn! more interesting than The Battle of Algiers
is that it raises those questions which Algiers, in its more
pristine detachment, evades.
The problem of what happens when a
revolutionary organization takes power in an over-exploited
country is hinted at in Algiers when
Ben M'Hidi advises
Ali La Pointe:
"It's difficult to start a revolution,
more difficult to sustain it, still more difficult to
win it," but it is after the revolution that "the real
difficulties begin."
Burn! takes on this challenging theme. One
of the film's most subtle insights is that colonialism so
succeeds in damaging its victims that should they take
power, they have in advance been deprived of the means of
exercising it.
"Who will run your industries, handle your
commerce, govern your island, cure the sick, teach in your
schools?" Walker asks Jose Dolores, confident of his
superior position. "That man or this one?" he continues,
pointing contemptuously to the bodyguards of Dolores who
stand helplessly before him. "Civilization is not a simple
matter. You can't learn its secrets overnight."
Burn! is an intensely romantic movie, a seeming
contradiction given the relentlessness of its politics. It
opposes "Western Civilization" (an evil because it has been
racist and exploitative) to the purity of its victims, who
can see nothing of value in a civilization which forever
holds them down.
But the sugar cane cutters are the true
creators of the civilization which they reject as "white."
"We," declares Jose Dolores to Walker, "are the ones who cut
the cane." The labor which has led to great wealth is
subsequently denied its producers. That it could not exist
without them slowly dawns upon Dolores as a transforming
discovery. From this flows confidence and single mindedness.
Pontecorvo unfortunately makes a facile identification
between liberation for Quemada's slave descendants and a
rejection of "white civilization."
Because the vast wealth exacted by colonial
countries from the labor of their victims has given rise to
a flourishing culture, it does not follow that the arts,
sciences and technology made possible are themselves
hateful. The fact that white Europeans are associated with
this civilization accounts for the racism of the Europeans,
who must denigrate those from whom they plunder, but it does
not validate a racism in inverted form.
This is what Pontecorvo unwittingly does
when he allows Dolores to prophesy not merely the end of an
order which depends upon exploitation, but also the culture
which it has spawned. Since all culture has similar origins,
the sentiment casts the advocate of emancipation in the role
of destroyer.
But the burden of the film is to present
Dolores and his people as the carriers of a different
society, one which would end exploitation and create a
corresponding culture. It is clear that the accumulation of
capital, which permits technical development and a culture
requiring leisure, draws upon this labor. The social basis
of Western Civilization, certainly in its industrial and
technological phase, is traced in Burn! to its brutal
source.
The last words of Jose Dolores are meant to
taunt Walker with his obsolescence: "Civilization belongs to
whites. But what civilization? Until when?"
The words fall short, although they gain
power as the last statement of a man giving his life to his
deepest convictions. Because the film raises this idea
without exploring it, the source of the projected new
civilization remains obscure - as it must - for it is surely
destined to take the best of bourgeois culture as a point of
departure rather than retreat, if it is to be a culture
transcending the subjugation of one class by another.
Pontecorvo has said that "the third world
must produce its own civilization and one of the weaknesses
of the third world today is that its culture is not a new
product which has rid itself of white culture, but is a
derivation of this culture.'" But an emergent people will
take what is useful to them and build from there. In any
event, no culture is a new product. Such a view is hardly
historical, let alone Marxist.
And, Pontecorvo, after all, in describing the struggle of
Jose Dolores, projects not a "new" ideology but that of
Marx, who was both European and a product of European
capitalism and civilization. "Between one historical period
and another," says Sir William, readying himself for battle
against Dolores and the rebels, "ten years may be enough to
reveal the contradictions of a century."
Pontecorvo applies the words of Marx, as well he might,
since a new ideology is not required. Nor does Pontecorvo
care that Walker uses Marxist terminology and categories
before the Communist Manifesto was written!
Why then does he, speaking through his
characters, offer in the film a blanket condemnation of all
the ideas, values and philosophies to appear in Europe since
the Greeks? "If what we have in our country is
civilization," says one of the rebels, "we don't want it."
Yet in the next breath his ideas are those of Marx and
Engels: "If a man works for another, even if he's called a
worker, he will remain a slave."
These contradictions permeate the film and
engender not only a certain feeling of anachronism, but a
lack of intellectual clarity, especially disturbing in a
film which aims to enlarge our understanding of the nature
of neo-colonialism and its relation to culture. There are
other undeveloped aspects of the film.
In the service of Britain, Sir William
Walker is ready to kill Jose Dolores when he threatens
British privileges and interests. But Walker feels deep
affection for the rebel leader who has played Galatea to his
Pygmalion. Indeed his fondness for Dolores is almost as
obsessive as his later quest to capture him, and, at the
end, Walker is shattered by Dolores' contempt. This is one
of the most potentially illuminating and subtle themes in
the film.
Walker's fascination with the vitality and
innocence of Dolores is in counterpoint to his frenzy when
he is rejected, even as the colonizers want the love and
approval of those they oppress at the same time as they
would destroy them for exposing the perpetrators to
themselves.
This allows psychological verisimilitude to
Walker when he returns to Quemada as a ruthless warlord who
will burn every blade of grass to prevent Dolores'
rebellious ideas from spreading to other colonies and
islands where Royal Sugar maintains interests.
A major weakness, however, is that this
ambiguity of response is evident in Brando's performance,
but inadequately developed in the film. The problem is that
the face of Brando easily conveys irony and nuance. He is at
his best when a situation is ambiguous.
But the film seems to deny ambiguity when we
are expected to believe that Walker, without
self-examination, will renounce all humanity in the service
of an absent master- for pay so meagre it is not enough even
to be called "gain."
Sir William Walker (Marlon
Brando) meets the porter Jose Dolores (Evaristo
Marquez) |
Psychological motivation required more
careful delineation. As it stands, in the middle of the film
Brando, is unable to carry the degeneration of Walker when
he has become a brawling drunkard. The action and melodrama,
no matter how many fires are set, is too weak to conceal the
hiatus between one aspect of the characterization, the
external, and the other, the inner life of Walker.
The bridge of a psychological relationship
between Walker and Dolores, oppressor and oppressed, is not
constructed. Pontecorvo is himself too facile in accounting
for Walker's transformation:
"Walker changed because he discovered that
there was nothing behind the side he helped... Men like
Walker, full of vitality and action, then change the
direction of this vitality. They go to sea, buy a boat,
drink, beat people up. They don't believe in anything.'"
This is meant to explain why Walker returns to work for
Royal Sugar to rid the island of its rebels, i.e. to a man
empty of values one side is not perceptibly different from
another. But this reduces Walker to a cardboard figure, and
Brando is uncomfortable with the conception, imparting to
his Walker that very psychological nuance which the film
itself does not consistently fulfill.
Hence we miss in Burn!, until the very end,
that moment of self-confrontation and discovery in which
Walker registers his emptiness and becomes ready to do
anything.
We have instead his departure to "Indochina"
in one sequence and the sight of a slovenly Brando in the
next. There is almost a suggestion here that Pontecorvo
fears that moments of psychological insight in a film
involve indulgence, a resort to what vulgar Marxists might
call "bourgeois individualism."
More the pity, because the spectacle of
personal damage drawn upon and inflicted by imperialism upon
its own adherents could only have made more rich the
portrait of deterioration in so bold and talented man as
Walker. Given the enormous resource Pontecorvo had in
Brando, he neglected an important opportunity to create a
character at once more powerful and tragic for being able to
see more deeply into himself.
As in Algiers, Pontecorvo used primarily non-professional
actors in Burn! Besides Brando, the only professional was
Rento Salvatori who plays the social democratic leader Teddy
Sanchez, an easy tool who is eliminated when he perceived:
"if there had not been a Royal Sugar, there might not have
been a Jose Dolores."
General Prada was played with wit and aplomb
by a lawyer, the President of Caritas in Colombia. Mr.
Shelton, the representative of Royal Sugar who accompanies
Walker during the last half of the film, was performed by
the administrator for British Petroleum in Colombia. He
played himself-convincingly and with ease. Only in Evaristo
Marquez (Jose Dolores) was Pontecorvo unlucky.
"...the native population scrounges for a living
on the waterfront. It is here that Walker meets
Jose Dolores, a porter who has learned that the
only way to survive in a white man's world is to
ingratiate yourself with foreigners." |
In Algiers, Brahim Haggiag, an illiterate
peasant who knew nothing of movies, was metamorphosed into
Ali La Pointe in every gesture and expression. Marquez was
also an illiterate peasant who had never seen a movie when
Pontecorvo met him. He was chosen without a screen test
because his face so well suited Pontecorvo's conception of
the character. But here the attempt failed. Pontecorvo found
that Marquez could not turn or move on cue. A script girl
had to tap his leg to remind him of his next movement.
His part had to be played over and over in
the evenings by Pontecorvo and Salvatori. Brando, out of the
frame, would mime the facile gesture for Marquez who was on
camera, while Pontecorvo shot over Brando's shoulder.
Although Pontecorvo argues that after ten days Marquez
improved dramatically, the film is marred by the unevenness
of his movements and the unsureness with which he speaks.
At one point during the shooting, when Dolores was being
coached in a completely mechanical way, Brando quipped, "If
you are successful with this scene, I know someone who will
turn over in his grave-Stanislavsky."
Unfortunately for Pontecorvo, Stanislavsky's
rest was not disturbed. It is not even clear from his
performance if Jose Dolores understands what the film
represents as his ideas.
In the course of Burn! Dolores must mature-
from a man without consciousness of his condition,
completely unaware of the nature of his enemy, to a seasoned
leader who knows exactly "where he's going," even if he's
not always sure of "how to get there." He is to emerge as a
mass leader. But with Dolores, and sometimes with Walker,
motives and feelings are too often presented in long shot.
We do not in fact see what we are told is before us.
Despite these weaknesses, Burn! is a beautiful film. It
shares many of the strengths of Algiers, but its historical
scope is far wider than the bare theme of independence from
an oppressor long condemned by history as obsolete. A
remarkable feature of Burn! is its truly cinematic style.
Pontecorvo interweaves his two great preoccupations, music
(and sound in general) with the imagery created by a
constantly moving camera. The result is not a tract against
neo-colonialism, but a ballet in which the dancers perform
in accordance with a scenario predestined by the exigencies
of a historical determinism.
During the course of Burn! the visual style
is altered with the changing fortunes of Jose Dolores.
Walker's arrival in the first sequence is on a "painted ship
upon a painted ocean." Birds chatter peacefully overhead and
the camera pans a lush, green island. His second arrival,
when his mission is to exterminate Jose Dolores and the
revolutionaries, is in fog and mist, "under a cloud."
The terrain of the last scenes of the film
contrasts sharply with the first. All color has been
bleached out. The sky is not blue, but white. The birds fly
up to the sky to escape the smoke. Vultures predominate as
the screen is filled with bodies and there are only
blackened, charred trees. Pontecorvo demands of his camera
that it find visual equivalents for the emotions of his
people.
" 'Between one historical period
and another,' says Sir William, readying himself
for battle against Dolores and the rebels, 'ten
years may be enough to reveal the contradictions
of a century.' " |
But beyond cinematography, Pontecorvo uses
sound, and frequently music, to convey the themes of his
films. He admits to whistling projected musical themes on
the set during shooting to govern his pacing, to determine
how long to stay with a shot or on a face and when to cut
away. Burn! begins with a gunshot heralding the titles which
force their way onto a screen fragmented with stills from
the film, one giving way to the next, in a violence
accentuated by red background and music. The effect is of a
film demanding that its message be seen and heard.
The central musical motif of the film, that associated with
Jose Dolores, begins when the captain of Walker's ship
points out to him an island in the harbor where the bones of
slaves who died en route to Quemada are said to have been
thrown. The music thus is interested not in Jose Dolores as
an individual alone (he has yet to appear), but as a symbol
of his suffering people. In the same way Walker, who shows
Dolores' executioners how to tie the noose, ("See Paco,"
says the man, "this is how they do it.") personifies a
vicious culture, a role that will supersede his impulse of
affection and sympathy for Dolores.
Sound and image parallel each other as the thud of the plank
lowered for the passengers to disembark is followed by a
quick zoom back for a larger view of the wharves of Quemada.
Creoles await the ship in eager anticipation, while the
native population scrounges for a living on the waterfront.
It is here that Walker meets Jose Dolores, a
porter who has learned that the only way to survive in a
white man's world is to ingratiate himself with foreigners:
"Your bags, Senor," are his "smiling" first words. With a
hand- held camera Pontecorvo takes us on a tour of the
market place of Quemada, teeming with life, its bustle to be
broken shortly by the arrival of a gang of black slaves in
chains.
"Walker changed because there was
nothing behind the side he helped... Men like
Walker, full of vitality and action, then change
the direction of this vitality. They go to sea,
buy a boat, drink, beat people up. They don't
believe in anything." |
Pontecorvo uses the zoom even more
frequently here than he did in Algiers, and often for the
same reason, as a means of conveying a rapidly changing
state of consciousness in a character. There is a zoom to
Brando's eyes as he looks through the bars of the windows at
the funeral of the dead revolutionary, Santiago, who, had he
lived, might have helped him in his plan to overthrow
Portugal.
The technique is also used with Jose Dolores
as he lifts a stone against a Portuguese soldier mistreating
a female slave. To emphasize the moment in which Walker sees
Jose Dolores as a successor to the dead Santiago, Pontecorvo
freezes the frame. With Pontecorvo the freeze frame is used
as an equivalent to musical punctuation. Just as a musical
theme can begin and then cease, only to start up again
later, completing the motif, the freeze frame can punctuate
the visuals. At this moment in the film the identity of Jose
Dolores, and his future, have been sealed by his act of
attempted rebellion.
Equally, Pontecorvo attempts to use editing as a means of
thematic expression. He cuts from the bereaved wife of
Santiago to a vulture against the sky, as she carries the
body of her decapitated husband home. The vulture evokes the
rapacity of those who exploit the people of Quemada and who
murdered Santiago. Pontecorvo's editing style permits him a
good deal of foreshortening, especially useful in a film
with so complex a plot.
Walker teaches Jose Dolores and his men how
to use a weapon, concluding the lesson with the words, "the
rifle is ready." The rapid cut, accompanied by percussion,
is to a pan of the dead bodies of the Portuguese soldiers
who have been killed as a result. Pontecorvo very frequently
uses percussion, as in Algiers, as a means of heightening
tension and emphasizing the crucial nature of an action.
For his close-ups Pontecorvo generally relies upon the eyes
of his people. He chooses actors frequently on the basis of
the intensity and expressiveness of this feature. The
close-up of the eyes of Jose Dolores as he is about to
attack Walker, who has just tested his metal by calling his
mother a whore, immediately conveys his fury. Close-ups
emphasize the tearful eyes of the children of Santiago
helping their mother to remove the body. They become the
tears of all those who have been made to suffer
meaninglessly.
" 'Who will run your industries,
handle your commerce, govern your island, cure
the sick, teach in the schools?' Walker asks
Jose Dolores, confident of his superior
position.. -'Civilization is not a simple
matter. You can't learn its secrets overnight.'
" |
Such moments are contrasted with those in
which Pontecorvo, using percussion, emphasizes the vitality
and life force in the oppressed which emerges when they
actively take part in wresting their freedom. After the
killing of the Portuguese soldiers, Jose Dolores and the men
and women who have helped him break into a dance. In his
throat Jose Dolores echoes the shrill cry of the Algerian
women when they urged their men to avenge the bombing of the
Casbah.
Reminding us of the earlier film, this
scream from Dolores unites his struggle with that in
Algeria. It also provides Pontecorvo with another
opportunity to show that for people in underdeveloped
countries faced with colonialism and later, neo-colonialism,
the task is the same. The process of self-liberation follows
a similar pattern. Jose Dolores dances with a baby in his
arms, a frequent symbol with Pontecorvo, expressing his
sense that the pain to be endured by Jose Dolores will be
unmediated by success; it will be for future generations,
who must continue his struggle, to achieve the final
victory.
The defeat of the Portuguese in the film occurs all too
quickly. It is rather inexplicable that a military (and
naval) power like Portugal could be banished from Quemada
with so little struggle or attempt at reinforcement. On the
night of a carnival, the camera zooms in on the Portuguese
governor about to be assassinated, ostensibly by Teddy
Sanchez, but actually by Walker, whose role is epitomized as
he holds the unsteady arm of his co-conspirator.
Pushed out onto the balcony to face the
people, Teddy Sanchez utters a whispered "freedom,"
displaying the timidity of his class faced with mass
insurrection. A waving flag of Portugal appears
mysteriously, providing the shot with rhythm and color- and
Sanchez with the opportunity to tear it down. This action
gives him his voice as well. As he now yells for "freedom!"
the drums begin, expressing the restoration to life that
liberation grants the people of Quemada.
The sympathy of the director for Jose Dolores is revealed
most clearly in the music, resounding like a Gregorian Chant
and sung by a black chorus, which accompanies Dolores and
his army along the beach into the city. Because the music is
so flamboyant, Pontecorvo begins with an extreme long shot
of Dolores and his people, some walking, some on tired old
horses, most in tatters, and all in absolute silence.
Only when they are more nearly within our
visual range do we hear the first notes of the organ which
introduces the composition. The effect of this music is
extremely powerful, if romantic. It succeeds, however, in
rendering Jose Dolores a beatific figure, possessed in his
devotion of more than human virtue.
To reinforce this transcendent quality of
his hero, Pontecorvo has a crowd of women and children from
the town run along the beach greeting Dolores. The scene is
done in silence with music alone, recorded, interestingly,
by Pontecorvo in Morocco. It sets off the more grandiose
music of the earlier moment. Smiling women with tears
streaming down their cheeks reach out for Dolores, as if
they were touching a god. Shots of arms, hands, parts of
bodies, children, reinforce the motif of an enormous
collective force converging like a wave in the struggle
against exploitation.
Pontecorvo also relies upon reaction shots
to indicate the political point of view of the film. Jose
Dolores' face changes effectively (and here Marquez seems
quite adequate) when he learns that Sanchez has been made
President of the Provisional Government.
But the best reaction shot in the film
occurs later, when a troop of British soldiers, complete
with Red Coats, disembarks from the ship that has brought
them to destroy the guerrillas. A baby-faced young soldier,
marching proudly along, perhaps on his first assignment,
smiles when he sees all the beautiful, richly dressed women
who have come to offer welcome. His smile is slowly
dissolved to an expression of extreme fear as he sees the
cold fury in the eyes of the men of Quemada - also watching
the scene on the wharf.
The shot of the arrival of the British Army,
marching through a crowd of waving handkerchiefs and cheers,
parallels very closely the appearance of Mathieu and his
paratroopers in Algiers. Both scenes establish that
imperialism will use all the force and technology at its
disposal to crush a rebellion aimed at removing its economic
domination of impoverished lands.
Because it reminds us so much of Algiers,
the scene in Burn! serves again to reiterate Pontecorvo's
view that the struggle of all these peoples is fundamentally
the same. Their enemy always behaves in comparable ways
because the objective of domination compels essentially
similar stratagems and values.
Jose Dolores survives in power but a short time. The
insuperable quality of the obstacles facing him is shown by
the tracking camera moving through the chaotic palace rooms
filled with debris, men sleeping on the floor, a howling
dog, and general disorder.
Dolores returns to the encampment of his
people while the musical motif which has been associated
with him is played, this time with pathos. The scene is a
tableau vivant; the people reach out to him as they did on
the beach. He smiles, but in his heart he knows that their
freedom, for now, will be short-lived. The motif is again
played with sadness when later, in a flashback, the rebel
army is shown throwing down its guns.
Pontecorvo attempts to use music alone to convey the reason
for Walker's return to Quemada. During a dissolute ten
years, Walker had left the British Navy to inhabit slums. He
no longer lives in keeping with the values and style of his
class. The scenes which take place in England look as if
they were filmed at the Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome.
They are unrealistic to an extreme, puffed with atmosphere
and fog, like Dickens seen through the eyes of Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm.
The credibility of the entire sequence is
saved only by the mobility of Brando's face when he is told
by the emissaries of the Royal Sugar Company, now de facto
ruler in Quemada, that he is needed. Walker scorns the offer
until he is informed that it has something to do with "sugar
cane." His face immediately changes as he remembers his days
with Dolores. Accompanying his wistful and pained expression
is the musical motif that we have associated with Jose
Dolores and which represents all that is cherished in the
film.
It is with this that Walker identifies and which possesses
him. And it is here, in failing to develop the personal
workings of his attachment, that the film appears arbitrary.
Suddenly, in the next sequences Walker becomes a hardened
mercenary who does whatever is necessary to preserve the
holdings of a ruthless and self-serving sugar company, not
caring what he must do as long as he "does it well."
We are presented a second time through the music with
Walker's ambiguity. And again music alone cannot carry an
entire psychology of character. On his return Walker sends a
message asking Dolores to meet him for a discussion.
Dolores' outraged emissary conveys the request (It will
later be answered with the murder of three soldiers). But
before this occurs, Walker, satisfied with himself and
relishing the opportunity to meet his old friend once more,
steps outside of his tent. He asks his sentry why he "isn't
in the Sierra Madre with the others." (The name immediately
suggests the "
Sierra Maestra" of Cuba and encourages us to see in Jose
Dolores a forerunner of
Fidel Castro).
The musical motif of Dolores once more
envelops Walker as he walks out to look at the sunset. It is
one of his moments of greatest happiness in the film. The
music poignantly expresses the yearning in Walker, but it
undercuts our belief in the mission Walker carries out so
relentlessly, despite his feeling for Dolores. The element
of self-awareness is missing and with it a means of
integrating Walker's ambivalence within a coherent depiction
of his psyche.
Pontecorvo uses no dialogue to condemn the soldiers, who
must burn all of Quemada to capture Jose Dolores and his
band of guerrillas. It is the music which judges them as
they evacuate the villages. Sometimes sound and image
overlap to increase the sense of irony.
At one point, as people are being herded
from their homes, we hear the words of the next scene:
Teddy Sanchez tells a crowd of starving refugees, "You
will know that it is not we who are responsible for this
tragedy, but Jose Dolores."
A moment later a riot develops over the
distribution of a cart-load of bread and, upon orders from
General Prada, the people are fired on by the soldiers. A
man of good intentions, the social democrat Teddy Sanchez,
who believed all could live peacefully together under the
rule of Royal Sugar as long as "adequate wages" were paid,
is superseded by the more realistic General Prada who has
known all along that Royal Sugar and a contented population
were irreconcilables to be mediated only through the barrel
of a gun.
At one point during the evacuations,
Pontecorvo tilts to a little boy with his hands up. The
"nota ten uta" or sustained note, accompanying the image was
written by Pontecorvo. He included it in the film, as he
says, "superstitiously," since Burn! was the first of his
films in which he did not collaborate on the music because
only two months were available for the editing.
Pontecorvo zooms in on the young soldier who
captures Jose Dolores to explain the willingness of young
men in Quemada to fight for Walker. One of Walker's soldiers
declares he hopes Dolores remains uncaptured because as long
as Jose Dolores lives, he has work and good pay. "Isn't it
the same for you?" he asks Walker.
The young boy who guards the captured
Dolores stays with him and provides Pontecorvo with a means
of allowing Jose Dolores to give his ideas expression
through dialogue. He does not assail his captor; he tries to
inspire and convert him. He tells the young man that he does
not wish to be released because this would only indicate
that it was convenient for his enemy. What serves his
enemies is harmful to him. "Freedom is not something a man
can give you," he tells the boy. Dolores is cheered by the
soldier's questions because, ironically, in men like the
soldier who helps to put him to death, but who is disturbed
and perplexed by Dolores, he sees in germination the future
revolutionaries of Quemada. To enter the path of
consciousness is to follow it to rebellion.
General Prada is persuaded by Walker that Dolores induced to
supplicate for freedom would serve their purposes better
than the creation of a martyr, his spirit dangerously
wandering the Antilles. Walker, his ambivalence surfacing,
does not want the blood of Dolores on his hands. The scene
in which Prada makes his offer to Dolores is especially well
done. It occurs three-quarters off stage.
We wait with Walker for the news, but all we
hear are the muffled words "Africa" and "money," accompanied
by a loud laugh from Dolores which chills us, as it must
Walker. The episode is not shown because the film, in its
admiration for Dolores, has rendered the plan absurd from
the start. Nor is the defeated Walker shown at the end of
the scene, although we hear his words, "I'm going to bed."
"Walker is personally undermined
by this stark contrast between Dolores'
satisfaction in moral conviction and his own
emptiness, which he only now fully registers.
The taste of victory is bitter." |
The last interview between Walker and
Dolores is powerful. Walker desperately wishes to set
Dolores free. Dolores refuses to speak to him. The camera
focuses on the face of Brando who, having been superseded in
his superiority and moral strength by Dolores as a mature
revolutionary, cannot understand why a man would give up his
life if he has a chance to escape. Dolores has purpose and
meaning in his life. Walker by this time has none and only
now is confronted, looking at the transformed Dolores, by
what Pontecorvo has called "his own emptiness."
Pontecorvo has described the shooting of
this scene with great poignancy:
" Walker is desperate when Dolores
refuses. He sees his own emptiness before his eyes. And
we stopped one day for this scene because Brando was
afraid. It may appear very strange, but Brando, because
of his sensibility, after years and years of sets, after
years and years of success, is very often afraid of
difficult scenes, extremely afraid. And he is tense and
nervous when he is in such a situation. In this
situation he was not able to function. The dialogue was
originally longer... we cut out all the dialogue and I
told someone to buy Cantata 156 of Bach because I knew
that it gives the exact movement of this scene. And I
cut all the dialogue. Without saying anything to Brando,
I said, we will shoot now, we have waited too long, we
will try to shoot. I put the music on at the moment when
I wanted him to open his arms and express his sense of
emptiness. I put on the music without telling him. I
said only, "Don't say the last part of the dialogue." He
agreed. He was happy to do this; he said it was stupid
to use too much dialogue. From this moment he was so
moved by the music that he did the scene in a marvellous
way. When he finished the scene, the whole crew
applauded. It was more effective there than on the
screen later. The sudden tension we obtained was
surprising. And Brando said this was the first time he
had seen two pages of dialogue replaced by music."
Pontecorvo zooms to Walker as he listens to
Dolores' final message which breaks his silence: "Ingles,
remember what you said. Civilization belongs to whites. But
what civilization? Until when?" The stabbing
of Walker on his way to the ship by an angry rebel comes
simultaneously with a repetition of the Algerian cry for
freedom. It is followed, accompanied by percussion, by a pan
of inscrutable, angry black faces on the dock. The frame
freezes, fixing their expressions indelibly in our minds.
The music of the end is a religious choral
piece. Played over the final moments of life remaining to
Walker who lies in the dust, it becomes at once an
apotheosis, very moving and romantic, as it heralds in
victory the fall of the tormentor. The feeling left with the
audience is simultaneously one of horror and vindication,
although the actual murder of Walker occurs long after his
moral demise.
Far more than Algiers, with its virtual equation of the vast
violence committed by the French with that of the Algerians,
Burn! was a courageous film for Pontecorvo to make.
There are few films as passionate or as
uncompromising about the real workings and nature of
imperialism as a world order, nor a film which identifies so
feelingly with the victims of neo-colonial rule.
Not since Eisenstein has a film so
explicitly and with such artistry sounded a paen to the
glory and moral necessity of revolution. Even had United
Artists not attempted to sabotage Burn!, it would be a
film deserving wider viewing and critical attention.
Review- Copyright Cinema Magazine |
