IF YOU GO THERE, GO IN PEACE (Se For, Vá Na Paz)*

Bacurau (2019)**

Bacurau is the title of the 2019 movie written and directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho. The film’s genre has been described as ‘weird western’, a genre that combines spaghetti western with sci-fi, horror and fantasy. The titular Bacurau, a small matricentric village in a near-future Brazilian sertão (hinterland), is in mourning for the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita (Lia de Itamaracá ). The town finds itself in unusual circumstances when the highway gets closed due to an unknown accident closing regular access to larger settlements in the region. The routine water convoy then arrives in the town riddled with bullet holes. Later, Bacurau’s unexpected disappearance from the map is but precursor to the havoc about to be wreaked from heavily armed human-hunters on safari. The film starts as a slow-burner but leads us to a nervous, constant and violent confrontation in the name of survival. To ground this fictional town in an authentic locale, Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra within the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Barra was a good choice as the location for the movie due to its dry, high climate and its resemblance to the single street towns that are so common in the spaghetti western genre of cinema.

In my analysis of Bacurau, this text may appear to be in the form of film review but I do not wish to follow a linear line while I am looking at the detail of the film within the context of my study, but rather to rethink the film dialectically while I am (re)mapping Bacurau. I have dissected the film into pieces, however, I hope this will help us to see the film from another perspective and within different contexts closer to our current agenda. I will be analysing this film within three different contexts: First, I will be looking at the idea of progress as the means of survival in a time of crisis (the crisis the people of Bacurau face). Second, I will be moving on to the idea of critique as proposition and embodying that line of thought with some current examples as it relates to us now in the time of crisis (global pandemic), asking ‘how do we survive and thrive, collectively’. Thirdly, I will be looking into the separation from ‘nature vs. culture’, as the contemporary is the function of western modernity. Art, its function and the function of art institutions. What can we do with the urgencies (priorities) that we are, or are not, affected by within the sphere of art and culture?

The School and the Map

Tony Junior: “We are going to move forward together”

What comes to mind when we think about progress today? Materiality, the wealth of society, exponential growth? Perhaps it is this sense of constant growth and change we see and experience today that underlies the belief of progress (a very western conceptualization of progress) as a linear movement, from past to present to future, from worst to better, from hut to settlement to a city. As Arturo Escobar puts it “the present is a moment of transition: between a world defined in terms of modernity and its corollaries, development and modernization, and the certainty they instilled”¹ , it is within this that the world has operated, under the European hegemony for over two hundred years. Escobar continues, locating the two sides of this transition in ‘a world’ where either ‘deepening of modernity the world over’ or ‘deeply negotiated reality that encompasses many heterogeneous cultural formations’.

Tony Junior, a regional politician up for re-election, arrives in Bacurau with a truck full of books, some expired food goods and black label medical supplies, an underwhelming offering to the town in a selfish bid to win over voters. Within moments of his arrival, everybody in the village hides away, literally turning their back on his political agenda. Tony Junior’s first words are ‘We are going to move forward together’, his promise if they re-elect him as a mayor for another year. By this time we know that the town struggles from a scarcity of clean water and reliable medical supplies. Early on in the movie we are introduced to the villagers struggle for resources when Teresa (Bárbara Colen) comes to Bacurau to attend the funeral of the town matriarch, Carmelita, Theresa has brought a box of essential medicine which she shares with the whole village and we see that austerity affects all aspects of the villager’s lives. Back to the scene where Tony Junior has entered the main street, there are a couple of important things that I would like to draw attention to; namely, Tony Junior’s selling tactics, what he is selling here is not only the promise of a better future but a very twisted idea of modernity in the hands of neoliberal politics. To understand this, it’s essential to look into Escobar’s characterization of modernity as four different perspectives; historical, sociological, cultural and philosophical.

From a historical perspective, the temporal and spatial origin of modernity occurred throughout; “seventeenth-century northern Europe (especially France, Germany, England), around the processes of Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.”² Through the end of the eighteenth century, this process had solidified and combined with the Industrial Revolution. Sociologically, modernity can be characterized by certain institutions (western universities, museums, etc.) which bond with the nation-state and an ‘expert’ knowledge to create a society where these institutions have a huge impact on the life of communities and within local contexts. Culturally, modernity is characterized by the construct of reason, individual, expert knowledge with language, idioms and vocabulary and all administrative knowledge is connected to this. Escobar explains that “modernity brings about an order on the basis of the constructs of reason, the individual, expert knowledge, and administrative mechanisms linked to the state. Order and reason are seen as the foundation for equality and freedom and enabled by the language of rights.”³ Lastly, philosophically, the foundation of all knowledge of men is the measurable knowledge which indicates the separation of men from nature. Also, modernity can be “seen as the triumph of metaphysics, understood as a tendency” through Plato, Descartes and the modern thinkers and then criticized by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Escobar continues that one “…finds in logical truth the foundation for a rational theory of the world as made up of knowable (and hence controllable) things and beings (e.g., Vattimo 1991).” Escobar’s quotation on Gianni Vattimo is important here because he talks about the idea of progress and aiming towards betterment “as crucial to the philosophical foundations of the modern order.”⁴

Getting back to the movie, we have Tony Junior standing in the centre of the vacated village, with a megaphone in his hand and he is trying to convince the community to come out of hiding. Tony has also brought with him a near-future device that would allow him to gather the votes of the people of Bacurau by scanning their retina. With their biometric data he would be able to disrupt the autonomy of the villagers while at the same time stabilising his own authority. This very logic of progress and development is rooted in “building an allegedly ordered, rational, and predictable world”⁵ But what happens when irrational and unpredictable events come into play and disorder takes the place of ‘order’? Well, welcome to Bacurau!

Kid: “don’t we pay to be on the map, sir?”

In order to make meaning of, or rationale a logical composition for a tangled situation, we need to connect its temporal and spatial elements. Early on in the movie, the (mobile) brothel is set up in the centre of Bacurau and we learn from the village’s very own MC- DJ Urso (Black Jr.) (a modern-day town crier-cum-DJ) that after an unknown incident in the neighbouring Serra Verde, that the village has been cut-off at the highway from southern Brazil. The audience is presented with a montage of the day to day life of the residents of Bacurau before the scene cuts to Plinio (Wilson Rabelo), the village teacher, intellectual, and the collective moral conscience of the village. Plinio is trying to show the school children where Bacurau is located on a digital map on a tablet. Plinio’s intention is to help them to locate Bacurau and identify it as where they live and where they come from, and to understand Bacurau’s spatial relationship with other places in the region. He zooms in with his fingers on the tablet but it seems that he cannot find Bacurau. Bacurau has mysteriously disappeared from the map. Plinio starts to have doubts, he tries to assure them that Bacurau is on the map and it should be ‘right there’. Shortly after one of the kids asks: ‘don’t we pay to be on the map, sir?’ Plinio nervously smiles and says ‘no, kids…’ and tries to make sense of it all. Bacurau is cut off from space and time, the residents are in the midst of something quite unknown.

However, Plinio’s response to the situation is surprisingly quick and efficient. He calms the kids and rolls down a very different map of Bacurau from the ceiling. This map is hand-drawn and coloured, Plinio introduces the kids to a material document that details the village. I see this map as an archival object, and it serves not only in the present time, in this particular situation, it serves as a map to the future. Within this context, I am thinking of the performance-lecture by Boris Groys at BAK’s Former West programme in 2013 when he talked about the production of art and the concept of the archive. From the transcription of his lecture, he says that one thing that art has and politics does not, is the archive. The archive has a historical context which can tell us about the political past. In these terms, it is an archive of individual subjects’ attempts to escape the historical, here-and-now and project oneself into the future. This is a different kind of archive, an immaterial one. By forming the archive, forming the material, the practical and technical side of our world and our future world. Art can influence our world much more deeply than politics. The effect of art can often be somewhat delayed. For instance, politics has to operate in the here and now (in the case of the disappearance of Bacurau in satellite maps) because there is no other time, but art has the opportunity to last for much greater stretches of time than individual human experience. In fact, art can postpone its effect by creating some material or object with which the next generation has to live with and has to be said to accommodate. As Bacurau becomes ‘temporarily’ cut off from the rest of the region, this particular scene which follows Plinio and the kids discovering Bacurau off the map is not mere coincidence. The hand made map comes out of the archive as an object to inform the next generation in the time of crisis. A recent interview with Bacurau’s directors, Dornelles mentions that the Brazilian government erased environmentally protected areas from the maps and Filho continues that there is no protection for those areas anymore because they are no longer recorded. Both director’s comments on this issue are very recognizable when compared with recent news about high-profile firing and deforestation in Brazil. Referring again back to Groys’ lecture, he suggests that the archive has a very material basis that can give promise to objects that, without political agendas, views or thoughts, can be passed onto the next generation to be reinterpreted anew. It’s controversial but the pledge is really progressive.

The Brothel, The Church and Coffins

Bacurau seems to speak with the present tense or with the feeling one can get that everything is as relevant as what’s happening around us today, this may be a side-effect of the film actually being set in the near future. Even though the film takes us on a violent and disturbing journey, we should not be afraid to think about real world alternatives in the sense that the film actually gives us some glimpses of hope if we look at Bacurau as a microcosm. How can we live in the future, not as a form of escapism but as a way to be accountable for today? What are our values now and why do they matter? How do we acknowledge our universal rights and how can we access them? I am thinking of this question, of course, in light of the global pandemic as these questions are our urgencies right now. In this sense, Bacurau is a special film especially in the sphere of the production and casting, the relationship between actors and locals who take part in the film, as their planning of dialogues and improvisations are most importantly collective act. The movie sets the fictional village of Bacurau as a model for affirmative ethics, despite this the villagers still have to defend themselves on the terms of violence and combat that is brought to them from the outside world. This becomes a metaphor for the destructive power of capitalism, western modernity, globalization and everything that comes with it. Bacurau shows us how these alternative relationships — economical, social, ecological and sexual can be considered, while actively standing up to present conflicts. The audience is left to consider how to assess them and imagine new configurations.

At this point, I would like to look into Hakim Bey’s (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) idea of immediatism. In talking about the production and consumption of arts, imagining and building an alternative world Bey defines it as “… something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives.”⁶ Immediatism depends on the situation, like daily life, which may take the form of any kind of creative play which can be performed by two or more people, by and for themselves, face to face and together. Bacurau builds upon these experiences throughout the film. They not only share their food, medicine and water but also share their pain, grief, tears, fears, strength and joy as the interwoven people of Bacurau village. We see this in the example of a funeral at the opening of the film. The whole village comes together for the funeral of its matriarch, Carmelita. On arriving in Bacurau, we see Theresa offered a pellet to consume, as part of the town’s ritual for grieving, the inhabitants partake a natural drug derived from the landscape and cultivated by one of the inhabitants. The mind-altering drug allows interconnectivity and empathy to be explored through symbolism and the visuals effects of the movie. In Bacurau, to enter a different state of consciousness is an intrinsic action of the community, and with the dissolution of the ego, interconnectedness feels readily more tangible.

Another instance of shared empathy that stands out in the movie occurs after the killing of a child and when an elderly couple who try to run away from the village after having seen the child’s death are brutally gunned down. It is at this moment, as if out of nowhere, the community has to bury many of their loved ones with feelings of anger, grief and fear. The preparation for burial comes after a ceremonial farewell is made to them by a congregation. For this reason, the capoeira scene is also very important here. The dance, as it is shown in the film, is the bridge to a healing power which is collectively practised and it is also a signal that actual conflict is close at hand. As capoeira is a martial art that combines elements of fight, acrobatics, music, dance and rituals in an exceptionally exquisite and magnetic way. Sometimes it’s called ‘Capoeira game’ and it’s performed by two people, not a fight but another way of playing. From its historical context, Capoeira was created by African slaves in Brazil mainly from Angola. When they were taken from their homeland and kept as a slave, they started to invent fighting techniques for self — protection. We see this scene in the film as part of a ceremonial event, preparation for their upcoming combat and also a connection with one and another through dancing and singing. Everybody leaves their differences to unite in the name of survival. This shows what Hakim Bey expresses with the practices of immediatism as it is the release of forgotten power within us through group dynamics. This sort of play “not only transforms our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play but will also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create, the more public & mediated art.”⁷

It is also important to mention that this sort of play did not only transform the characters from the story of the film, but, according to the director, the actors also experienced this unrealised ‘power’ in them thinking of the acting as a form of a play. In one of their interviews, Filho mentions: “You come for three months or four months and you disrupt people’s lives and you realize that you’re not disrupting their lives at all. You’re actually giving them something that they really needed then, and they didn’t know they needed then. So that’s why it was so special.”

Here it is important to look at Tania Bruguera’s concept of ‘art for the not-yet’ and Athena Athanasiou’s ‘as if it were possible’ to characterize the meaning of these propositions. Bruguera creates through the appropriation of resources of the powerful. Bruguera speaks with the language of art, her concept, the ‘Arte de Conducta’, which can be described as art that uses social behaviour as an artistic material. This means that working within the limits of society instead of the limits of the body to look for sustainable change. Her working guidelines shape around political imaginary (Untitled (Havana 2000)), people’s professional experience (Tatlin’s Whisper #5), and political memory (Trust Workshop / Untitled (Moscow, 2007)). Within the creation of her works, the artist stands as a political artist and initiator. As Bruguera simply puts it, art and ethics cannot be thought of as separate entities, in the practice of arte útil (useful art) whose concern is the means of offering practical solutions for social issues, stating that art and ethics are interdependent and that they define each other. From this understanding, Bruguera starts her research through a method which she calls ‘institutional self-critique’ which means instead of only criticising what exists, and what doesn’t work in the governmental or institutional structures, she creates her own institution with the way she hopes to function in reality (Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art Department — 2002–2009), Immigrant Movement International 2010–2015). In this sense, ‘art for the not yet’ appears in response to the needs of art to transform the answers of governments or from the people in power, from violence to creative responses. With this, the exhibitions become the space of training grounds for the public, and art becomes “an instrument for the transformation of ideology through the activation of civic action in its environment.”

I would like to introduce the concept by Hakim Bey of ‘(re)turning to the economy of the “bee”’, which illustrates the collective act as a means of production of art, seen as ‘carried out by a non-hierarchic creative collective to produce a unique and useful and beautiful object’. Wilson puts forth the very essential aspect of Immediatism; “…the radical quality of Immediatism expresses itself rather in its mode of production & consumption. That is, it is produced by a group of friends either for itself alone or for a larger circle of friends; it is not produced for sale, nor is it sold nor (ideally) is it allowed to slip out of the control of its producers in any way.”⁸ This also refers to the non-western societies in which they practice gifting systems that evolve around the three basic principles: to give, to receive and to return. (Mauss, The Gift, 1925) As Mauss is trying to challenge this notion and assumptions about what human nature is in the world of economy, Hakim Bey’s suggestion about returning to the economy of bee points out a proposition to think about the alternative systems which had existed before the establishment of the capitalist system.

As suggested by Bruguera, creating parallel and alternative infrastructures alongside the currently existing infrastructure is also crucially associated with instituting differently ‘as if it were possible’. This encourages a shifting of dynamics and thinking about the triangle of ‘artist, institution and audience’ towards the togetherness of ‘artist & publics, art institution’. I have found that the question raised by Judith Butler and quoted by Athanasiou is essential to make meaning of this: “How else would we understand the general claim that bodies invariably depend on enduring social relations and institutions for their survival and flourishing?”⁹ Within the dilemma of this conflict, as Athanasiou puts it “institutions sustain us and wipe us out at the same time.”¹⁰

The Museum

How can we think about, and conceive art institutions differently than how we have come to understand them in the current regime of colonial modernity? The museum in Bacurau might hold a clue. We see in the later scenes of the film that much violence occurs within the museum showing that history can be figuratively and sometimes literally written with blood. The museum is also framed as an opportunity for growth, self knowledge and as a means of understanding history through the re-interpretation of artefacts across generations. The museum thus becomes a battleground literally and symbolically. I would like to look into the assembly of two different social bodies here in the story of Bacurau. Thinking about the text by David Beech called Modes of Assembly: Art, the People and the State has inspired me to think about how each mode of the social body is formed, what mechanisms are used in their formation, what technologies bind them, how they are institutionalized, and to which apparatuses they belong:

The hunters (big-game hunters whose prey are the villagers of Bacurau) have a base where they stay, watch, plan and prepare themselves to attack the people who live in Bacurau. They have a leader and they are bound to his command. They use cutting-edge technologies to connect, communicate, watch and attack. Drones, wireless communication devices, signal blockers, satellite maps, automatic guns and pistols. They have their own ‘rules of the game’. They are in league financially to the apparatus of local political powers and their group arrives in Bacurau due to the invitation of civil servants. They are together in the name of killing and of causing damage. However, each of them is motivated by their own bloodlust. This means they cannot perform as a hierarchical team effectively, each striking out in violent bursts. As we see later in the movie this leads each of the hunters to go their separate ways during the attack on the village and each of them eventually gets shot and murdered in the defence of Bacarau by the inhabitants.

The People of Bacurau live in this town together, it is their home. They have a matriarchal system and are an egalitarian congregation of mothers and children, teachers and fighters, doctors and whores who live and work communally in a free-minded and sexually liberated atmosphere. They have access to contemporary technology like cell and smartphones, tablet computers, satellite television and radio but it is not prevalently displayed throughout the movie. There is no other apparent sophisticated technology that binds them; instead, they have songs, dance and a psychotropic drug (grown at the home of the town botanist) that they use to connect with each other and also with nature. Under the threat of resource deprivation, corrupt political agents and eventually the hunters that look to exterminate them, these people come together in the name of survival and they act together as one. They assemble to stay alive and protect themselves and their noble but violent history from being eradicated. The self-constituted people of Bacurau represent the collective subject of power.

At the bloody climax of the movie these two social bodies meet in the museum, obviously not as ‘a meeting of the minds’ but as the audience are to discover, a symbolic repetition of local history. When a group of hunters decide to search the village they separate into groups. One of the hunters creeps toward the museum. As he enters the building, through his gaze, the audience are shown what is being exhibited across the museum walls. Until this moment, we, as the viewers, did not know specifically what was inside the museum. This is in contrast to the many times throughout the movie where the first thing the residents asked any visitors to the town was ‘Have you come to visit our museum’, the answer is always ‘no’ often with a look of condescension for these small town ‘bumpkins’, yet it is in the museum where the true heritage of Bacurau is on display despite it remaining unvisited for much of the movie. Here the audience is teased into thinking the village has delusions of grandeur relating to their own history. It is in fact the ignorance of the outside world (the hunters) of the village’s history that will prove to be to their detriment.

Only at the very end of the movie is the irony of the museum’s displays revealed to be Chekov’s guns -literally-. Inside the museum, we see framed portrait photographers of people, domestic items, tools, clothing, scrolls, small sculptures (of which the hunter takes one as a ‘souvenir’), a shrine and lastly framed news clippings that show the historical uprisings of the town. Until this moment, the viewers possibly fall into the trap and think that the whole village will be massacred by this sophisticatedly armed group. As the hunter moves into the next room we see that the walls were lined with displays labelling a wide variety of, now missing, rifles and guns of all shapes and sizes. The audience becomes immediately aware that these artefacts are now in the very hands of the villagers and will predictably still work quite well.

It is a clever conceit of the narrative to introduce the museum as a place that is not visited by the residents and overlooked by visitors not native to the village. To know the contents of the museum and its history, is to have a key to understanding the inhabitants and their reaction to assault. The museum appears empty day-to-day because, for the residents, history is in their blood. Their collective retaliation is instinctual with everybody understanding what they can sacrifice for the group. As we see and understand here, this was not the first time Bacurau had to use guns and defend themselves in the attack of oppressive forces. This very knowledge saves the town from the external force of oppression and subdual and violence.

The people of Bacurau win in the conflict with the hunters, and what follows is the process of ‘cleaning’, reparation and re-establishing their daily order. This image shows the aftermath of the conflict between the two warring bodies. In this image, we see Isa (Luciana Souza) who is the curator of the town’s museum, who after surveying the wreckage of the conflict, says ‘leave the walls as they are, I want it to stay like that, unfortunately’. The bloodstain of a villain’s hand is kept on the wall as an addition to the exhibits. The blood stain on the wall creates not only a portal from the past through to the present but is also a continuing message to be preserved for the future. The value of its preservation is not in the product itself but in art’s social value of creating an exchange. Here the museum invites us to question its role not only as a means of preserving the past but also to question its contribution and function within the future of public places. I see the powerful imagery in this scenario as a potential proposition about public ownership, in the end what remains in the museum is decided by the very people of Bacurau, for themselves and by themselves.

Taking this proposition a step further, the idea of ‘as if it were possible’ by Athanasiou, also emphasizes the importance between the social institutions and social imagination “… it is about defending, imagining, and performing not only what already exists but also what is yet to come; what is to be reclaimed from existing civic practices and institutions, and what is to be instituted anew.”¹¹

On the topic of political and democratic processes of self-instituting or self-institutionalization, Athanasiou refers to social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis’s theory of social institutions and the social imaginary, exploring the “union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and of history in the making.” (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society). Between these soft and hard pressures, reflecting on our past from the present, society is perpetuated, becoming preserved through a spirit of imagination. The political performativity of coming-together and instituting ‘differently’ holds an important affinity with the possibilities of what is ‘yet-to-come’. As in the light of Athanasiou’s words ‘institutions sustain us and wipe us out at the same time’, indicating that this is the urgency of our time, the reclamation and redefinition of what commons and public institutions are meant to be.

In the last scenes of the film, we see the leader of the hunters, Michael (Udo Kier), captured by the people of Bacurau. As he sits in restraints, he gazes into the distance and says ‘so much violence’. Isa looks at Michael and holds his head between her hands. She starts to closely inspect his face and says ‘I think he could have been a good person once. Don’t you think Domingas?’ Domingas (Sônia Braga) looks at him with a straight face after seeing all the pain and death that has been caused by him and his team, she continues ‘he had a mother.’ During the preparation to defend the village in the final act, the villagers excavated a detention cell hidden under the earth of the town square. It is here that Kier’s character Micheal realizes what his fate is to be, buried alive. As he looks around at the faces of Bacurau’s mob justice, he defiantly delivers his final threat ‘this is only the beginning!’.

I cannot stop but to think of this dialogue in relation to western modernity and what has been done to public institutions. I want to hold modernity between my hands, tired and fragile, and contemplate its roaring, seemingly insatiable greed . ‘I think it could have been a good thing once.’ Then I contemplate the echo of Michaels last words…

Notes

*This piece first appeared in the Temporary Spaces publication, Muhatap: A Domestic Revolution.

**All images are from the film Bacurau. Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. Brazil and France. Film

1. Arturo Escobar, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program
2. Escobar, p.181
3. Escobar, p.182
4. Escobar, p.182
5. Escobar, p.183
6. Hakim Bey, Immediatism, p.10
7. Hakim Bey, p.12
8. Hakim Bey, page.26
9. Thanos Athanasiou, Performing the Institution “As If It Were Possible, p. 680
10. Athanasiou, p. 683
11. Athanasiou, p.684

References

Arturo Escobar, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program, Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2 3 March/May 2007, (UK, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2007), pp. 179–210

Hakim Bey, Immediatism, (San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 2001)

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Gunnison, (London, Cohen and West Ltd., 1966)

Athena Athanasiou, Performing the Institution “As If It Were Possible” in Former West: Art and The Contemporary After 1989, Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds., (London, England: The MIT Press, 2016), p. 679

David Beech, Modes of Assembly: Art, the People and the State in Former West: Art and The Contemporary After 1989, Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds., (London, England: The MIT Press, 2016), p.559