Revolucao

̃ do Cinema Novo

[Clementi] Yes, but it’s relatively inexpensive to buy a Super-8 camera

and make your film, as if you were buying a typewriter, a pen, to write a
letter, a poem, an essay, a novel. This is the great freedom that cinema can
give you nowadays. There will always be Hollywood and its moronic
system . . . Hollywood offered me a contract. I would earn one million
dollars per year, but I would have to interpret idiotic roles, I would have to
say lines that offended my sense of morality, I would have to assume an
attitude that goes against my sentiments, I would be merely an instrument
of the communication of pornography that Straub spoke of.
A female star can appear naked in a film and I’ll find it beautiful, but I
ask myself: if a star is paid to appear naked, to attract the public with her
naked body, isn’t she selling her sexual attraction to the producer, who
later resells it to the public, at a much higher price? If she appears naked in
a non-commercial film, then it’s clear – her nudity is an existential gesture.
I am against such prostitution of actors. I was in the United States, I bought
a Super-8 camera and I made a film of my journey. Now I only make films
that interest me and I’m becoming increasingly interested in collective
theatre, in tribal theatre, in total artistic freedom. I want to be an art
activist, I want my gestures and acts to be physical and mental, I want my
life to be a theatre, a dangerous, prohibited one. The commercial system
will die on the day that all actors do like me, and rebel together.
[Bertolucci] I don’t think that the industry will die. On the contrary,
I think that it will become stronger and stronger because now co-
productions have begun between Italy and the Soviet Union, I mean
between Italian producers who invest the money of Americans in co-
productions with the Soviets. And when Mosfilm joins forces with
Hollywood it will mean that a pact has been signed to exterminate Art once
and for all. I’m not for or against the system, I can work within or outside
the system, because I have a pessimistic vision and I think that Art is a
solitary activity. That is why I agree with Straub, with Godard, and I can
also agree with Hitchcock.
[Glauber] Bertolucci, did you know that in Brazil there is a theory that
cinema novo is rubbish and Brazil should follow the example of Italian
cinema. . .
[Bertolucci] Three of the best films of the 1960s were The Guns, Barren
Lives and Black God, White Devil. I find it strange that a country which
produces three masterpieces in ten years has a bad cinema. And anyway,

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 On Cinema

cinema in Italy today is rubbish, apart from Pasolini, who is a poet, and
Rossellini, who is a teacher and now only makes didactic films for
television. What Brazilian critics don’t know, perhaps, is that we are also
underdeveloped, that Italy is an underdeveloped country, and that Italian
cinema no longer exists, either culturally or economically speaking, that
our entire economy is in the hands of Americans and that the only Italian
producer who doesn’t have American money is called Barcelloni. In fact,
there is no Italian or French cinema, it’s all American made in Europe!
[Straub] And European cinema made in Hollywood . . . Hollywood
imports the techniques of Godard and Antonioni and produces ‘luxury art’
like Midnight Cowboy or The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967). Americans,
intellectually speaking, are provincial.
[Bertolucci] As I was saying, before Straub interrupted me, these days
Italian cinema is the worst example of cinema that one can cite.
[Clementi] The worst thing nowadays is that most filmmakers who
speak of politics, who are challenging, make pornographic films for the
system.
[Bertolucci] Filmmakers should be free like Rossellini and Buñuel.
[Glauber] No producer, from inside the system or beyond, has
ever dared to meddle in any film by ‘Don Luis’ and nevertheless he
made commercial films in Mexico. When you see these films today –
what great films they are! They are the greatest anthropological essays on
the Latin American man. You could write two hundred-odd essays on
Nazarin (Nazarín, 1959) and The Young and the Damned (Los olvidados,
1950).
[Straub] Buñuel made the best political film I have ever seen: Fever
Rises in El Pao aka Republic of Sin (La Fièvre monte à El Pao, aka Los
ambiciosos, 1959).
[Clementi] Buñuel is a free man, a man that no one can criticize
because he is as pure as if he were filming with a Super-8 camera.
(José Celso Martinez arrives and arranges with Pierre Clementi an
excursion of the Living Theater to Brazil, which should take place this
April.)
A week later, in Barcelona, I meet Pere Portabella, the most important
independent filmmaker in Spain. And he lucidly concludes this
conversation about the future of cinema: ‘I am filming with ten thousand
dollars, with five thousand dollars. Now we have TV cameras and soon we

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