“Barravento” is also the name of the first feature film by Glauber Rocha and the definition above is found in the opening text of the film. It was through this text that the director expounded his determination to confront ideological categories of opposition that were imposed to the world in the early 1960s: rationalism and irrationalism, materialism and religiosity, myth and history. Developing his film, Glauber curses and desecrates his coexistence with the possibility of a magical world, installing his work in a territory in which these oppositions are so indefinite as to reveal their unlikely synergy.
“Barravento Novo" is a work that seeks to experience the timeliness of the paradoxes of Glauber's film. The core of the paradox of Barravento lies in the character of Antônio Pitanga: Firmino Bispo dos Santos. Firmino is constituted by two gestures, which combine both and contradict each other. The first of them is liberating. He wants his comrades to break with the subservience condition in which they live and for this he believes that they must break with a mysticism that would be condemning them to misery. In the second, it resorts to the procedure of the tradition itself that tries to fight to reach its goal. Trocando em miúdos: makes a spell to defeat the faith of his comrades!
In “Barravento Novo" Camila Pitanga, daughter of the actor who played Firmino, appears as a character who is the synthesis of the character of the father and Cota, the woman who is convinced by him to try to break the spell of faith that kept the fishermen oppressed. Its performance consists in the execution of two movements. In the first one she appropriates Firmino's speech, summoning the fishermen to break the bondage of subservience. In the second, walked towards the sea, in an attitude similar to that of Cota. The difference is that Camila wears the clothes of the father's character and instead of trying to seduce one of the fishermen, as Cota did, she dives into a deep trance, performing movements that cite gestures of capoeira and candomblé.
The final result is an installation mounted on two video channels, one channel is mapped onto a home movie screen in the proportions of an old 35mm film (4X5) in which original images of the film of Glauber juxtaposed with new images (projected in 4K), produced by the artists. A dialogue is established between two historical moments and digital versus analogue film that in the eyes of the spectator can connect both by similarities and differences.
In 1962, Rocha released “Barravento,” which he wrote and directed to “suggest that only violence will help those who are sorely oppressed." The political message of basic income inequality and faith as developed in “Barravento” has contemporary resonance throughout the world today.