Posts Tagged ‘Army of Shadows’
‘69 AND THE CINEMA OF RESISTANCE
A quick movie recommendation: just saw the brilliant Brazillian film Four Days in September, directed by Bruno Barreto and based on the 1979 memoir O Que É Isso Companheiro? from former political prisoner Fernando Gabeira. The movie stars Alan Arkin as Charles Burke Elbrick, the American ambassador to Brazil who was kidnapped by the revolutionary group MR-8 in Rio de Janeiro in early September 1969. Although a political thriller, this isn’t cast in the same mold as any number of Tom Clancy-based cinematic adaptations. The revolutionary terrorists who seek to strike blows against Brazil’s military dictatorship provide the sympathetic core of the movie (Pedro Cardoso and Fernanda Torres are really the film’s main protagonists), although the notions of right and wrong with regard to the group’s methods are questioned. In the current geopolitical situation, this is a movie that tells a compelling story while having much to say on the politics of terrorism and torture.
After you watch Four Days in September, check out some other classic entries from the international cinema of insurgency: Costa Gavras’s Z and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, both released in 1969, and of course the classic Battle of Algiers from Gillo Pontecovo.
-Rob