MARIGHELLA: A Timely Film For A Dangerous Time & Black History Month
review written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
“If I kill Blacks I kill Reds,” the racist white Brazilian cop says peeing on posters declaring the Black revolutionary communist Marighella a terrorist.
However, Blacks are not a euphemism for revolutionary. Not in America. And certainly not in the 21st century despite how Madison Avenue wants to sell it.
By everyone declaring themselves an activist alone in our zeitgeist – the ruling class and the Fascists of the world gain power.
White capitalist structures view Black life and death as entertainment, fodder. Intellectual amusement at best. I don’t know why Americans don’t accept this. You don’t argue with your enemy. You either wait for him to die (as they say in science), you destroy him or…you literally go your own way. This stands for actual life as it does for art.
We all know there is no real such thing as independent film as it has become to be known. Most movies, independent or corporate, share the same values and are just as bad as they have ever been. In fact there are so many terrible movies, I recently vowed to never participate or write another narrative one as long as I live after a recent experience which blew the wind from my sails.
If there’s a movie that should have been lauded for Black History Month it is MARIGHELLA. THIS film should be lauded for Black History Month…but the director is a white cis-man and it is not an English language film. What a shame if the totalitarianism of identity politics is highjacking audiences from seeing or considering this movie. Black audiences are losing out on a drama that is quite possibly the best movie about a Black revolutionary since Lumumba by Raoul Peck.
Both films destroy and redefine bourgeois forms like the ‘biopic’.
Marighella is riveting and full of ignition that borders on the best of the agitprop theater and the rousing energy of a rally. Not because of its radical politics, but because of its superb performance by Brazilian soul singer (samba pop) Seu Jorge. Jorge’s passionate and declamatory performance is insistent as the best funk music, ponderous as a painting by Norman Lewis and as expressionistic and revealing as the eyes of Rene Falconetti’s in Passion of Joan of Arc.
His eyes alone do what Chiwetel Ejiofor’s should have done in McQueen’s misstep 12 Years a Slave.
In Marighella, director Wagner Soura (possibly the best directorial debut I have seen in the past 20 years) weaves in and out of the present (set in 1968) to illuminate the 1968 revolt and outreach to the people— via radio!— led by Marighella, Black-Italian Brazilian man, who was not only a radical congressman but a proud Communist.
Art critic & author John Berger was never a member, Pasolini was kicked out…and Marighella was asked to leave due to his extremist views and ideas surrounding rebellion and how to fight the fascist oppressive CIA backed government.
Although factual, Jorge looks nothing like the actual Marighella did. The film achieves a modicum of mainstream appeal due to its tense pacing; it exploits the action thriller tropes even better than Carlos did and while it is seductive it never once winces at proclaiming support for revolution. This is a serious example of a movie that treads lines between first and third cinema but never capitulates to Western degradation of Black radicalism or the trivialization of freedom fighters, reducing them to safe Disney versions (Selma, Rustin).
the real-life Carlos Marighella
Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Aperj), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
American radical filmmakers or those with a serious interest in progressive socially conscious movies if not actually revolutionary ones could learn A LOT by watching and studying the film.
First, the dialogue is grounded in serious belief and feelings for liberation. The actors, all excellent, express as opposed to “portray” characters; they imbue the movie with the essential conflicted arguments and dialectics that Brecht would have approved of and yet the director does NOT try to make them understood as much as he wants them to be listened to. He is not trying to win you over (the way a “socially conscious Liberal movie” might. Think Oliver Stone, Norman Jewison, Spike Lee, etc.)
The acting is rooted and engaged like a theater ensemble; there is a rage, an empathy and a sensitivity on screen that is seldom seen even in the best theater performances. Most theater performers fail as actors because they all imagine themselves in movies that play for people in malls.
Shakespeare fails now because it is now being imbued with perfunctory Black actors who seem to peddle hip-hop stereotypes as opposed to grand emotions and a desire to liberate, destroying language and drama right there along with their white compatriots.
Much of the movie follows the communists as they try to attain guns for attempted overthrows of the 1964 military dictatorship (they hide guns in churches, with the complicity of the friars!). They are committed to destroying their country’s oppressive regime.
Like in Cuba and Vietnam, but more similar to radicals in America who are NOT backed by the people. Perhaps this is also why the film is compelling. Marighella had no help from anyone, and even cultural radicals should be able to relate; whether artists or academics. Revolutionaries in America can relate as the “people” are often colonized or brainwashed to destroy them (look at how more and more Black and brown policemen there are.)
Marighella wears a wig during his revolutionary exploits to avoid being recognized; a Black straight wig — an edgy nod to the Black sixties style of the times but also an ironic wink at not only very real disguises necessary when evading the government but an intelligent acknowledgment to the Black double consciousness that we wear and maneuver through in a myriad of ways; the book “The Wig” is a funny example and could even be considered a bizarre counterpoint (the humor the film employs regarding identity, race, etc is so casually conscious and realistic it could never have developed from a Hollywood writer or a political outsider.)
The self-awareness of the ridiculous wig in the film is well noted and even a running joke. And it works marvelously well.
“I'm old, but won’t get in your way,” he tells student revolutionaries he enlists. The National Liberation army robs banks to finance the revolution against fascism. If you’re young and the movie doesn’t make you want to take action or make a movie with the best radical actors you know, something is wrong with you.
Marighella is a popular movie that is not only influenced by serious radical art but also the simple affirmative collaboration between Black and White Brazilian actors in a way you never see in American movies. It puts the nail in the coffin and separates the American phony political movies from the real ones.
I have been waiting for 22 years for this.
a still from MARIGHELLA (2021)
This film proves what Visual Liberation could be, from a pedagogical standpoint. I theorized it. In 21st century movies, it exceeds Carlos in that way where it is almost a third cinema movie and a mainstream movie at same time and was made with that in tow; and while Assayas’ Carlos has subtle radical conventions of its own, as a movie it is less progressive – Carlos was a narcissistic tragic-hero; a revolutionary who deteriorated into terrorism and farming out his “skills” as an “insurrectionist terrorist.” Marighella, the actual historical figure and the movie – is concerned with the fundamentals of what it means to fight back against an oppressive system and what is always for a revolutionary person.
That being said, the images of the white racists shooting Blacks in the back has become so expected, however, revolutionary movies must find a way to show…what life itself does not – or what social media could never.
And while the movie may not be addressed as a revolutionary movie (never its director’s ambition) it is certainly NOT a bullet wrapped in sugar.
Thank you to ArtMattan Films for bringing MARIGHELLA to audiences-at-large in the States starting back in 2021. Marighella is available to watch on Amazon Prime and via other streamers.