BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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In 1964, when Brazil enjoyed a golden era of culture and musical influence (Bossa Nova), 25-year-old writer/director Glauber Rocha left an indelible mark on international cinema with “Black God, White Devil.”

Following on the heels of his equally dynamic feature debut film “Barravento,” “Black God” redoubled Rocha’s Cinema Novo movement, which carried Rocha’s socially rebellious anti-capitalist and anti-religious beliefs.

As a founding member of Brazil’s radical left, Rocha espoused the eradication of money while working as a film critic and journalist in his teens. After making this film, Rocha published his “Aesthetic of Hunger,” a socio-political manifesto calling for a revolutionary cinema, that he fulfilled with his next two films (“Terra em Transe” and “Antonio das Mortes”), which combine to form a trilogy.

The Brazilian maverick from Bahia appreciated the works of Luis Bunuel, Jean Luc Goddard, and Roberto Rossellini, whose influence comes through in Rocha’s helter-skelter films. In turn, “Black God, White Devil” inspired a diverse generation of filmmakers from around the globe. Traces of his influence can be found in auteurs as distinctive as Sergio Leone and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Fiercely political from beginning to end, the linear narrative follows Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey), a peasant ranch hand, and his downcast wife Rosa (Yona Magalhaes). A drought ravages the arid Sertao outback where Manuel and Rosa struggle to survive during the 1940s. When his cattle rancher boss attempts to cheat him, Manuel kills the brute and goes on the run with Rosa into the hinterlands.

The newly minted outlaw falls under the spell of Sebastiao (Lidio Silva), a bloodthirsty religious leader (a self-decreed saint) who condones violence and human sacrifice. Sebastiao preaches about an imaginary “sacred” island destination where the land and the sky will become one after a rain of gold.

An apocalypse is coming, he promises. Sebastiao adds to his followers with an ongoing procession of intimidation and violence. His goons fire rifles into the air when they pass through sleepy villages. The leader personally attacks the women that he effectively kidnaps. He makes Manuel crawl for miles on his knees while balancing a heavy rock on his head before convincing his loyal subject that Rosa’s newborn infant is the devil, and must be sacrificed. Only blood can cleanse the souls of Sebastiao’s flock. When Sebastiao kills her baby, Rosa takes up the dagger against the charlatan. Now she and Manuel are equals.

Rocha’s roving handheld camera creates a subjective viewpoint of the remote landscape and the oppressed peasants who are easily exploited by anyone with a gun. Enter Captain Corisco (Othon Bastos), a cangaceiro (a nomadic bandit) to co-opt Manuel’s and Rosa’s quest for freedom, if not salvation. Dressed in a Napoleonic-styled hat bejeweled with coins, Corisco fits the bill of a bandolero-toting cowboy. A church-hired assassin, on a mission to kill Corisco, lurks in the sagebrush of the desolate region.

“Black God, White Devil” is a cinematic call for the audience to reject all political and religious doctrine in favor of an individual liberty at one with nature, something you could call sustainable.

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ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN

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Co-writer/director José Padilha’s fiery sequel to his right-leaning “Elite Squad” (2007) digs deeper this time into Rio de Janeiro’s culture of crime and corruption through the seen-it-all eyes of returning protagonist Nascimento (Wagner Moura). Too many years on Brazil’s paramilitary BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) squad (think SWAT) have left Lt. Colonel Nascimento unable to control his own men. Moura handles his character’s balance of job fatigue and waning arrogance with a world weariness that shows in his tired eyes.

Nascimento’s top pupil Captain André Matias (powerfully played by André Ramiro) proves too quick to employ BOPE’s ingrained shoot-first rule of engagement during a prison uprising that sees warring factions of inmates brutally attacking one another. One prisoner is “barbecued” between old mattresses.

Padilha understands the claustrophobic nature of enclosed spaces and their ability to infect violent panic among prisoners. The early sequence sets a worst-case scenario tone. A dead gang leader’s blood winds up on the shirt of leftist civil servant Fraga (Irandhir Santos) even as he negotiates a truce. To address public outrage in response to pressure from human rights activists Nascimento is “promoted” to the desk job of sub-secretary of intelligence, where he heads the city’s wiretap program. Nascimento also enjoys a certain hero status pumped up by a right-wing television host who works his Bill O'Reilly-styled brand of hate-mongering. Put through the filter of its association with American media propaganda, the monologue sequences drip with irony and sarcasm.

Quicksilver editing by Daniel Rezende works with Lula Carvalho’s instinctive cinematography to mask the film’s crutch of voiceover-heavy narration, which overstates the film’s subtext. As with Brazil’s past decade of stylized filmic achievements (see “City of God”) “Elite Squad: The Enemy Within” carries a stamp of gritty and glossy neo-realism.

Rio’s criminal drug cartels are now run by corrupt politicians and dirty cops who leech blood money from the impoverished favelas with impunity. Nascimento must also contend with the fact that his ex-wife Rosane (Maria Ribeiro), and mother of his teenage son, has remarried to Nascimento’s fiercest rival, leftist intellectual Fraga (Irandhir Santos). Their intertwined story brings the film to a surprisingly powerful climax that takes full advantage its potential for emotional and thematic import.

“Elite Squad: The Enemy Within” is a vast improvement over the franchise’s first installment because it puts more emphasis on the emotional cost of political, economic, and military corruption. One civilian’s terrorist is another's occupying military policeman.

The “enemy within” is the fraudulent system that treats citizens as disposable property to be exploited for whatever profit can be squeezed out. Impoverished citizens aren’t just economically and physically abused, they are harvested. Some are shot in cold blood on the street; others are shuffled into an ever-growing penal system that threatens to eventually imprison 95% of Brazil’s population. Crime equals big profits, but only for the cops and politicians who simultaneously make and break the rules. As Brazil eats itself from the inside out, so does Europe, China, and the United States, sacrificing decency to line the coffers of its elite enemy within. It couldn’t be spelled out any clearer.

Not Rated. 116 mins.

PIXOTE — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Long before Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made "City of God" in 2002, about Rio de Janeiro's youth-centric atmosphere of organized crime, director Hector Babenco set the bar for such explosive cinema with his brilliant 1981 film "Pixote."

The film's full title, "Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco" translates as "Pixote: The Law of the Weakest," and was based on José Louzeiro's book "A infância dos mortos" ("The Childhood of the Dead Ones") in a screenplay adaptation by Babenco and his script collaborator Jorge Duran, about a young boy named Pixote (pronounced Pee-jo-che).

Fernando Ramos Da Silva was the expressive young non-actor chosen to play his life as a ghetto child for Babenco's evocative subjective camera. The boy is sent to a cruel juvenile reformatory where he sniffs glue and learns the ways of prison survival that inform his life after he and two of his friends escape the jail. Pixote desperately seeks the attention a mother figure even as he falls deeper into an inevitable vortex of crime and violence.

"Pixote" is Hector Babenco's masterwork. The film is a distressed and powerful cry for social change in a Brazilian society that feeds on its on children. It is a deeply affecting and haunting film that penetrates the skin of its viewer through the personal commitment to its subject that comes through in every frame.

That Fernandos Ramos Da Silva was eventually murdered at the age of 19 by police in Sao Paulo only emphasizes the sad fate of so many more Brazilian children just like him. "Pixote" is an amazing cinematic social document made with fury and passion by an uncompromising director.

There has never been another film that approaches its depiction of Brazil's condemned youth, not even "City of God."

Rated R. 128 mins.