Cafundó Paula Betti & Clóvis Bueno Brazil 2005
Cafundó, by Paulo Betti and Clóvis Bueno, is a cinebiography of the man who inspired the Afro-Brazilian "preto velho" myth, João de Camargo. Born a slave in 1858, Camargo was variously a soldier, miner, and servant. Even after the abolition of slavery, blacks were the lowest of the low, their occupations servile and their ways repressed. Despite these adversities Camargo eventually finds happiness with a white woman, establishes a farm and sets about attending to their first harvest. His wife is a wanton hotwire and quickly grows tired of farm life and betrays Camargo. Crushed, Camargo hits rock bottom, hits the drink and spirals downwards into destitution. At his lowest ebb, he has a religious illumination and is entrusted with a mission to bring grace to others. He builds a chapel and his reputation as a healer and miracle-worker grows. Faithful followers begin to accrue and soon he runs into problems with the authorities. As his reputation grows, so do his responsibilities and the demands made upon him by the faithful. With his faith he manages to negotiate these travails and dies old and venerated in 1942, the "black pope of Sorocaba". After his death, the legend of the "preto velho" (the old black man) continues to grow, until it becomes a deeply rooted folk belief, a counterpoint and avatar of Nossa Senhora do Bonfim, the black virgin Mary of Bahia.
Cafundó follows the Catholic formula for the life of a saint: temporal life with its hardships, illumination, grace; spiritual life with its own hardships, death and consecration. What makes Camargo special is the way in which he syncretised the European and African elements in Brazilian culture. Camargo’s story is also the story of Brazil and its confluence of Europe, Africa and America. It is a foundational story about the birth of modern Brazil, and the evolution of a vision of what it could become. Camargo’s vision is a Brazilian version of manifest destiny, but instead of an imperialist geographical logic it represents a miscegenation of races, languages and beliefs. His story takes place at a crucial time in Brazilian history: he is born a slave, lives through manumission to the introduction of electricity and the automobile and dies just before the Second World War.
As befits a film that deals with Afro-Brazilian spiritualism, a world view in which the material and the spiritual world intermingle, the film is imbued with many touches of magic realism. Camargo is visited by both good and evil forces, wayside crosses bleed in his presence and people are possessed by spirits and speak in tongues. One of the most arresting magical realist scenes is when Camargo visits a quilombo, an Africanised village founded by escaped slaves. The clay toy elephants of a boy with whom he is speaking animate and tramp across the dusty ground before them, reviving the memories of the native land from which they have been stolen. Cafundó is the name of this settlement, which is portrayed as a harmonious utopia, and the film as a whole can be seen as a valorisation of the African contribution to Brazilian culture. The whole of Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century is lushly recreated, but special attention is reserved for the African side of the story. It has long been a passionately held myth that Brazil, and the Portuguese-speaking world in general, was somehow free of racism. This is a myth demystified in Cafundó. The whites generally exploit, leer and sneer at the blacks. Brazil’s curious power of inclusion, especially at the lower end of the social scale is also shown. Camargo marries a white woman without censure, even if she turns out to be bad, a step that would seem impossible in the South of the USA, a comparable society. Camargo’s later vision is partly nothing more than the spiritual materialisation of this dream of Brazil. After Camargo’s illumination, white and black alike flock to his chapel in Sorocaba. A key moment occurs when Camargo is imprisoned by the petty, white establishment of Sorocaba, fearful of his growing influence and dismayed by his ‘debasing Africanisation of Catholic doctrines’. In gaol, the disaffected black inmates jeer at him for bowing to the white men’s god and renouncing their African ancestors’ pantheistic beliefs. With great dignity Camargo replies that an ocean now separates them from Africa, that this is a new world, and that for it to succeed a new, syncretic culture must be forged. Later Camargo is released from incarceration on the order of a senior member of the government, showing that the dream of a united, pluriracial Brazil was not just the province of its disenfranchised.
Cafundó is a lavish, fascinating film, exploring the African fundaments of modern Brazilian identity, one that is seldom depicted on its own terms as it is here. It is also a very glossy production. Its aesthetics are very much those of the costume drama. It is a National Geographic photo shoot of Nineteenth-century Brazil, a world in which squalor shines and dirt isn’t really dirty. Cafundó remains, nonetheless, a rich and rewarding film.
