Metropoles News Joins Forces with Glauber Rocha’s Daughter to Restore “Black God, White Devil” in 4K

When “Black God, White Devil” (1964) reached the 21st century, audiences that watched 2002’s digitized copy on DVD or any 2K exhibitions on the big screen, did not experience Glauber Rocha’s foundational rock of Brazil’s Cinema Novo in all of its glory.

With the gradual and irreversible obsolescence of cinema projectors, the film’s previous digital scans had never actually undergone a restoration. “Black God, White Devil” sat idly in five cans of 35mm film at the Brazilian Cinematheque, or, as it’s called in Portuguese, Cinemateca.

Then, in 2019, an ambitious – but challenging – project emerged by filmmakers Paloma Rocha and Lino Meireles: judiciously restoring the Cinema Novo landmark film, in digital format, with a resolution of 4,000 pixels (or 4k). The process is in its final stage and will reach movie screens as soon as possible, considering the current pandemic scenario.

Lino Meireles – Producer

Paloma Rocha – Director

Lino sought out Paloma, Glauber’s daughter and owner of the rights to his work, with the aim of finding and recovering one of the director’s deep cuts.

“I wanted to restore movies that weren’t available to the public. And Paloma mentioned it could be this one. It wasn’t my original idea, but I wasn’t aware it had never been properly restored. ‘Black God, White Devil’ is something you can’t pass up. It’s marks the beginning of a truly original Brazilian cinema”, says Lino.

There was a reason Paloma made “Black God, White Devil” a priority: “A lot of people thought the movie was restored because it was on DVD, but that copy never went through digital post-production. The original print is still available, so thanks to the technology and the experts available today, we can make the best restoration possible.”

To better understand the decision to restore “Black God, White Devil”, it is necessary to understand what kind of prints are available as source material. In this case, a negative print. “Glauber’s other digitized films (“Barravento”, “Antonio das Mortes”) were made from scratched copies, from positive copies. And this one was practically flawless”, adds Paloma.

With this scenario in place, Lino’s wish met Paloma’s need: “He realized that this is an important project, not only because it’s difficult, but also because it represents a great happening for cinephiles around the world”, recognizes the restoration’s director. Lino signed into the project, convinced of the importance of restoring one of his most beloved films.

For him, the film’s renown might also enable a more permanent restoration plan for other Brazilian films. “I’m not in the distribution market; my goal was to fund a restoration, regardless of return. But “Black God, White Devil” is so historic, there just might be some financial return. And that’ll be great, because then we’ll restore another film,” he hopes.

The initial seed

Before starting work on restoring “Black God, White Devil”, Lino Meireles became interested in film preservation while directing his first feature, “Candango: Memories From a Festival”. Centering around the story of Brazil’s longest-running film festival, it also told the story of Brazilian Cinema itself after the country descended into a military dictatorship in 1964.

“When I made Candango, I deepened my understanding of how difficult it is to find and watch classic Brazilian films,” says Lino, as he began searching for various deep cuts in directors’ filmographies. “Most of the films by great Brazilian directors are simply not available for us to watch. I had to watch several on YouTube – because I didn’t want to interview someone without watching the work in question – but in a terrible state of picture quality.”

After preliminary contacts with some filmmakers, it was with Paloma Rocha that the conversation proved to be fruitful.

The Brazilian Cinemateca

Lino and Paloma then decided on the Cinemateca as their starting point. “Our initial idea was to carry out thewhole restoration process with the institution itself. But the last restoration they did was in 2013, with “A Man Marked for Death” (1984), by Eduardo Coutinho”, explained Paloma.

In 2019, therefore, the Cinemateca’s equipment had been idle for more than half a decade. So, after years of neglect and funding cuts by the federal government, it became impossible to carry out a project of this magnitude in the home of Brazilian cinema itself. Paloma, however, has always maintained a good institutional relationship with the Cinemateca, and so the filmmaker found an opening.

“I had a meeting with our Secretary of Culture. I have all of Glauber’s work at the Cinemateca, more than three hundred boxes, and I could spend my time being outraged by everything that is happening, but I’ve put in some effort not to be angry with Brazil. I don’t aim for the stars anymore, I’m just trying not to skin my butt while falling”, she quips.

With “Black God, White Devil”‘s cans of film in hand, Paloma added cinematographer and constant set partner Luís Abramo to the restoration crew for coloring and lighting, along with the Cinemateca’s preservation coordinator, Rodrigo Mercês. Image restoration was done by CineColor post-production studios, and sound restoration by specialist José Luiz Sasso, from JLS Studios.

Abramo recognizes the strength of this restoration project, especially with regards to the technical crew involved: “It was an act of courage to bring this team together, around this film, and to carry out such a thorough restoration. Because it’s an expensive process. And there’s Paloma, who knows the work very well, not only for being Glauber’s daughter, but for researching and working with his collection for the last 40 years”.

Rodrigo Mercês, a specialist in the preservation of Brazilian cinema, also believes that the process of restoring “Black God, White Devil” set up a very favorable relationship, between the Cinemateca’s status as a public institution with private funding.

“This partnership is the crux of the project’s approach, in addition to Lino and Paloma’s insistence on ensuring the best result”, praises Mercês, who left the Cinemateca in August 2019 and returned in December of that same year to participate in the restoration project.

One of the restoration’s first steps was a study of the cans of film the Cinemateca had preserved. Mere months before the Brazilian government closed it, the crew projected an original 35mm copy at the Cinemateca itself, with filmmaker Walter Lima Jr., who was Glauber’s assistant director, in attendance.

“It was a very good copy and it was very important to have Walter commenting on it, because he remembers the film’s first copies”, remembers Abramo.

After the screening, the team held its first conversations on how the restoration would be carried out. “It was important for us to set out and debate the ethics and techniques that would guide us in interpreting the original intentions of the picture’s photography and direction, combined with what was present in that print”, details the cinematographer.

The team is proud of the new copy of “Black God, White Devil”. “It will be a milestone in the restoration of Brazilian cinematography”, hopes Abramo. “And it’s a response to everything that has been going on with our country’s cultural politics: that we must not give up and that we must take care of the history of our cinema. Forwards and backwards. It will surely inspire future generations.”

Paloma confirms that this is the best version of the film: “It’s as if you were seeing a copy from a new negative. In fact, I think it will be better than it used to be, because current technology breathes life into it, in a way that laboratories at the time could not.”

The Work and the Canon

There aren’t grandiose enough adjectives to account for the cinematic feat that is “Black God, White Devil”. This is one of those rare cases where the description “masterpiece” can be used without fear of controversy. Its laurels and praises are among the best in Brazil, and it constantly grabs attention on international lists, all of it doing justice to the work and its creative genius, Glauber Rocha.

Unlike many of the resounding classics of world cinema, this film is not buried by the weight of canon, presenting its themes and ideas constantly throughout generations.

“Black God, White Devil” was commercially released in Rio de Janeiro on July 10, 1964. Riding a nascent wave of European interest in Brazilian cinema, along with an actual coup d’état, it debuted in Cannes to astonishment and acclaim, although it would not win the Palme d’Or.

Astonished spectators witnessed an unsteady camera that captured Brazil’s depth. In the microcosm of its northeastern badlands (the sertão), Rocha’s tale voiced a continental malaise that inhabited every corner of this land full of strife and suffering.

The sertanejo epic starts off with a couple of humble farm workers: Manuel (Geraldo del Rey), a dispirited ranch hand, and Rosa, the housewife tasked with piling flour day after day (with a deep resignation present in the eyes of Yoná Magalhães), until their romantic-spiritual encounter with Corisco (Othon Bastos).

Manuel rebels against the system after his boss leaves him penniless. Angry, he murders the man and runs away with Rosa to join a rag-tag group of believers in the self-proclaimed prophet Sebastião (Lídio Silva). Inspired by the real figure of Antônio Conselheiro, Sebastião predicts a re-founding of the biblical city of Canaan, where poverty and suffering will be eradicated.

Glauber uses regional iconography, to navigate universal concepts: good and evil juxtaposed in the symbolism of the white devil (Corisco) and the black god (Sebastião); in naive masculinity (Manuel) and perceptive femininity (Rosa); in the hypocrisy of a priest (João Gama) and the heroic morality of the mercenary Antônio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle); abundance and scarcity; the desert and the sea.

In the Manichean dilemma between Divine and Satanic imagery, Glauber reframes the debate to direct it between nihilism and enlightenment. He layers a more complex perspective than the dualism suggested by the title. His odyssey is for deep understanding: that our land and our existence belong neither to God or to the Devil, but rather to ourselves.

The Aesthetics of Hunger

In Glauber’s filmography–though this is technically his second work–“Black God, White Devil” (1964) emerged as the manifestation of a new aesthetics that would change the course of Brazilian cinema and its perspective on the world. “Black God, White Devil” is the very aesthetics of hunger – or Eztetyka da Fome, as the manifesto signed by Glauber in the year following the film’s release was named.

This was the scheduled to be the man from Bahia’s first film, even before his slogan “cinema is a camera in your hand and an idea in your head” was coined. The film was born in 1959 – that is, before “Barravento” (1962), his first feature, began production. But it spent that time maturing, ripening amid re-writes. After “O Pagador de Promessas”, by Anselmo Duarte, won the Palme d’Or at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, the world’s gaze was cast on Brazilian cinema. Glauber sought an abandonment of foreign aesthetics in the name of creating a truly Brazilian method of expression.

“Black God, White Devil” summarized Glauber’s proposal. A film that emerged soaked in references and allusions to the literature of Graciliano Ramos and Euclides da Cunha, in the history of its own setting (rural Bahia), but also aware of other movements (such as Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague) that pioneeried new possibilities.

The aesthetics of hunger presented a type of cinema that reflected on scarcity. Not only by vividly showing social issues and economic inequality, but also the modern ghost of colonization. Glauber pointed to the lack of technical and technological resources as a strategy to construct a filmic aesthetic that would break with entertainment industries such as Hollywood.

The hand-held camera, natural light, operatic performances, improvised dialogue and blocking, the use of non-actors… Nothing happened by accident during the production of “Black God, White Devil”. An already postmodern and anthropophagic perspective of Brazilian culture generated a new aesthetic experience that would establish Cinema Novo.

Glauber’s work marches into the 21st century as a powerhouse of invention, and, equally, as a very precise illustration of the social abyss and collective delirium in which we still live today.

A complex, inexhaustible film, fed by a perfect storm national crises that remain embedded in our society: the usury and insatiability of a landlord elite; the political authoritarianism that persecutes those who bother it; the religious power that weaves the web of corruption beneath frocks and ties; the demagoguery that makes society hostage under a cloak of ignorance; and the people made up of figures like Manoel and Rosa who have no choice but to persevere in their survival.

Preservation and Access

After the analog media formats (film and VHS), the first digital version of “Black God, White Devil” was released in 2002, when a scanning process of the original negative was carried out in a standard format.

“At the time, we barely had the technology available for that,” says Paloma Rocha. “It generated a lot of controversy. I was attacked by many people who said that a DVD would never replace film. But I wanted people to be able to watch the film, and there was federal funding for that via Petrobras (the national oil company). This film started digital restoration in Brazil”, she boasts.

The project was directed by Paloma and her producer, in partnership with the Tempo Glauber institution, which preserves, researches and stores her father’s collection. “That was the first time film was scanned digitally here in the country. Some films were eventually scanned in 2K,” recalls Paloma.

When talking about the restoration of a film, some concepts remain little understood by most audiences, even cinephiles. The first and most important one is film preservation. “Black God, White Devil” is one of the more than 250 thousand rolls of prints maintained by the Cinemateca Brasileira.

Though it is trying to keep the lights on in this critical time, the institution charged with caring for the memory of Brazilian is a reference around the world in its tutelage of the film production. That practice encompasses more than the mere cataloguing and storage within the building, originally erected as a meat-packing plant in Vila Clementino, in São Paulo.

Rodrigo Mercês, Preservation Coordinator at the Cinemateca Brasileira, teaches that preservation is not limited to guarding, but also in providing access to the preserved materials. “Preserving a work of art can’t be just about keeping it safe, but also adapting it to constantly changing technology in viewing habits”, he says.

In other words, a lot was said about “Black God, White Devil” being preserved, an allusion to the 35mm print kept in the institution; it is inaccessible, however, by current digital technology. “The work was only accessible in photochemical technology, until now, there was no preservation in digital formats”, he ponders.

For Mercês, there is a consensus that the digital medium is not the most suitable for storing materials in the long term. Therefore, the 35mm copy deposited at the Cinemateca Brasileira is still the best way to keep the work’s integrity unaltered.

“We will continue to keep it stored and preserved, with any and all best practices. We have taken it out of storage in order to generate a digital matrix that can be duplicated and shown to viewers. In the future, technology will change again, and if a new matrix is needed, they’ll use the original print once again. It lasts for decades”, he says.

That durability depends on the sustainability of storage conditions. “The migration process must be constant and continuous. In our current doomsday scenario, everything preserved in our warehouse can still be migrated to digital formats. But time keeps on ticking, and it is even more complicated if we are to use storage tapes like LTO magnetic technology.”

To restore “Black God, White Devil”, the team coordinated by Paloma Rocha sought to be faithful to technical standards. “The process followed current best practices, using the best possible storage materials (files with specifications aimed at greater durability) and better access formats (current technological supports, such as digital projectors, international streaming standards and blurays)”, guarantees Rodrigo Mercês.

Luís Abramo adds that the restoration process essentially seeks to preserve the film’s memory. “And memory is not only what is in the negative, but in the methods of production employed to make the film”, he says.

The biggest challenge, according to him, will be taking the film to different formats, theaters, and projectors. “It’s like a brand new film. Very potent and sure to provoke a lot of debate going forward. We are committing to the future. It’s not just about preservation, but also showing the film and inspiring generations.”

Glauber Rocha (holding rifle) and Mauricio do Valle

The Light and the Image

No matter how complex the attributes of a film, it is the image that usually predominates. “Black God, White Devil” carries nuances of light, contrasting and framing, which underscore a whole new concept for the imagery of Brazilian cinema, strengthening Cinema Novo’s aesthetic ideal.

There lies the restoration crew’s challenge: to bring all of the majesty within the 1964 film into the digital realm, without compromising Glauber’s original intentions and gaze.

Paloma Rocha and Luís Abramo had already worked together with post-production studio Cinecolor, one of the most respected in Latin America, when restoring “Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças” (1971) back in 2011. Ten years later, with “Black God, White Devil”, Cinecolor is a full-fledged partner in the restoration process.

Abramo was responsible for marking and balancing light, based on its original roll. Now he could use digital tools to approximate the 4K scan into that same film. “We tried to create an analogical similarity. We are always pushing only so far as that original reference. And then we can interpret together what the cinematography, and Glauber’s direction were aiming at”, he details.

Renato Merlino, digital restoration coordinator at Cinecolor, was responsible for laying out and establishing what was possible in the process: cleaning (removal of dirt, whites and blacks), analysis and restoration of marks and scratches, depth of field assessment, and, subsequently, execution of a processing tool known as ‘diamond’.

“At Paloma’s request, we didn’t filter the images through any digital ‘camera corrections’. So we don’t interfere with the original shots and framing. If the image was shaky for a given scene, that was a handheld shot, one of Glauber’s decisions. If he shot it by hand, I’m not going to put it on a tripod”, sums up Merlino.

Access to the film’s “first generation”, as he calls the original negative roll, also allowed him to know the level of grain with which the film was photographed. “To give you an idea, current prints that we would see with a film projector, the versions people have seen throughout the years, are ‘fourth generation’ copies”, he explains.

As a result, the new print will be unique. “The digital ‘Black God, White Devil’ that we are going to see has never been seen. People will know how it looked on Glauber’s editing station”, he celebrates.

Rogério Moraes, colorist and restoration technician at Cinecolor, was the person who ensured that the new copy, now digital, preserved the same look seen at the time of release. “We started with an original negative that, technically, was very good. On the technical side, our challenge was to bring forth what was really in the negative during the development process”, he summarizes.

There were many conversations with Walter Lima Jr., who was an actual onset presence, Luís Abramo, and Paloma Rocha. While debating what Glauber had in mind, and Waldemar Lima (the film’s cinematographer) saw, a couple of decisions had to be made, even while preserving the framing and the editing. “We had to think together with Waldemar”, says Moraes, who had been a pupil of the late photographer.

Luís Abramo remembers that “Black God, White Devil” was filmed during mostly cloudy days. Current copies, however, had limited contrast when showing the sky. “We try to keep this historical memory between the negative and our copy. To try and figure out how much color and light balance they wanted when developing their original copies. We need to maintain ethical and technical standards, and try to reflect upon the intentions of their moment, to be faithful to the history of the work itself, in order to make these decisions”, says Abramo.

The Dignity within a Scratch

“A restoration means bringing back the colors that the negative loses over time.” This is how the colorist Rogério Moraes summarizes the objective of the restoration process of “Black God, White Devil”. The possibilities are endless, but there is a fine line between what is remastered, what is modified and what is restored.

Past memory is key to staying within an ethical framework for restoration. “There are digital tools that can put a little extra light on the character’s face. But then we remember that this kind of alteration wasn’t available back then. We need to keep the work like it was conceived for its first exhibition”, says Moraes.

According to him, cinema is an art that depends on its exhibition medium, unlike a book. “We are not updating it or making it modern. It’s not a retelling. The film has its own imperfections, things that happened while filming with that time’s cameras. We’re keeping those”, he guarantees.

It was another expert, Fábio Feccaroli, one of the technicians involved in the restoration of other works by Glauber (“Entranced Earth”, “Barravento”), who suggested the theory of “the dignity of a scratch”. In other words, during process of restoring a film, lens scratches make up the organic material of the captured image and cannot be simply erased.

“Sasso [José Luiz Sasso, sound technician] follows this theory of the dignity within hisses and scratches”, says Paloma Rocha, adding that, unlike Glauber’s other films, “Black God, White Devil” didn’t have a lot of scratches. “Our print won’t have much scratching. But that’s not because we’re changing anything, but rather because of the quality of the negative print”, she guarantees.

Rogério Moraes adds: “My intention as a colorist is to leave the image as it was. I can fix photometry errors, for example, but not other things. We are not adding any effects. People have the impression that the sky in Cinema Novo films always had their whites blown out. But we noticed clouds and plenty of volume in the original print. There’s still a very bright sky, but with a lot more detail”, he explains.

Sound and Noise

If, in order to restore the image of “Black God, White Devil”, the crew had to search for visual references in the original copy and seek to interpret Glauber Rocha’s intentions, for the sound it would be no different.

Rodrigo Mercês, restoration coordinator at the Cinemateca Brasileira, believed that the best image and sound matrix for the film would be extracted from the same rolls preserved at the institution. There were, however, limitations of a technical nature, especially with regards to sound.

“The Cinemateca has always focused a lot on image. There hadn’t been sound restoration done in house. That’s when we started working with Sasso in our restoration projects,” says Mercês.

José Luiz Sasso, from JLS Studios, is Brazilian cinema’s great specialist in sound restoration. “There aren’t more than two people in Brazil who can still talk about sound negatives. I’m under extinction”, he jokes.

The first technician in the entire country to be certified in Dolby Stereo sound systems since the 1980s, he was invited by Paloma Rocha to take on a very challenging part of the process: interpreting, correcting and, finally, digitizing the film’s audio.

Although film sound was never a highlight of early Brazilian cinema, either during production or in regards to preservation, the copy of “Black God, White Devil” was of surprisingly good quality, in Sasso’s assessment.

“There was never much of a concern in preserving films’ sound materials. The best you can hope for with Cinema Novo is a well-preserved sound negative. “Black God, White Devil” was less problematic than others by Glauber that I restored, because the copy was very well kept at the Cinemateca”, he considers.

The process of refining a film’s sound starts with a copy of the negative print, in order to try to find the best possible sound for a positive print. As such, the analog part of the film roll is as close as possible to what was originally idealized. “We should transfer the sound from a positive print, and not a negative print. Many people today scan the sound from negative print. That distorts it”, he says.

Before the pandemic, Sasso joined Rodrigo Mercês at the Cinemateca Brasileira to go through all of the film’s available material. “The sound negative of this film could not be used. And there aren’t any labs that carries out the photochemical processes necessary to create a positive print for it – neither in Brazil nor in all of South America”.

Technically, the solution was to transfer the soundtrack with the Cinemateca’s optical sound equipment. “The quality of the print we used was quite good compared to others. I don’t remember if I reviewed five or six copies. But we arrived at a very well-preserved sound matrix”, he details.

As with all restorations, the sound work is equally thorough. Excerpt by excerpt, sequence by sequence, even scene by scene, the sound was cleared of mechanical noise to eliminate any crackling. All of it done by hand.

“A plugin can’t do that. The digital world works until page 4 of a user’s manual. Because, at some point, we start to create digital noise, digital artifacts in the original track. That’s like curing a patient by killing him”, ponders Sasso.

The Dignity Within a Hiss

There is, for José Luiz Sasso, a limit to wiping clean the sound within an older film print. His logic is the same as explained with the context of the films’ image, about which the restorer Fábio Fraccaroli explained “the dignity of a scratch”. “I will call it ‘the dignity of the hiss’, for our purposes. A lot of people want to get rid of all that sonic impurity that was caused by the equipment at the time. But the hissing was part of the film”, he acknowledges.

For Sasso, one must understand that the equipment on which “Black God, White Devil” was filmed had a narrow recording range. “The quality and frequency of response were very small. If we try to restore the sound to a pattern that didn’t exist, we’ll create other problems”, he analyzes. “You need to know the technology of the time in order to bring it to modernity, without tampering with any technical characteristics”, he teaches.

The restoration process, therefore, cannot make the mistake of seeking a perfection that never existed. Sasso recalls that Cinema Novo, like all Brazilian production until the 1980s, suffered from poor sound quality. “And the problem even extended to a film’s exhibition, since theatres had precarious sound”, he warns.

The private sector only began a process of importing projection equipment, which would consequently improve the quality of the films that were seen, in the early 1990s. “It was a time when we had to do everything possible to emphasize dialog, and actually keep it intelligible.”

Technically, this is a film with an original mix of five tracks at most, while a blockbuster at the time used eight. There was a limitation on the amount of simultaneous sounds a mixer could insert into the soundtrack. Not every detail of the mise-en-scène went into the final sound mix.

“You will find that ambient sound is practically non-existent in “Black God, White Devil”. The ambience was absolutely neutral. By our standards today, something seems to be missing. During the restoration, you start noticing things that, in current film-making, are strange”, says Sasso.

For him, restoration cannot be concerned with filling gaps and supplanting the technical limitations imposed by the technology with which the film was made. “Black God, White Devil”, for example, was dubbed, because there was no direct sound recording. “What mattered was the actor’s interpretation. Directors would have to prioritize between synching an actor’s lips to his lines sometimes, and his on-camera performance. This is something we need to take into account when restoring Brazilian cinema”, he advises.

Decisions, therefore, involve ethical and aesthetic issues. “How far should one interfere without changing the work in question?”, he asks. The goal is not to overly correct anything. “I always try to preserve as much of the original as possible, for aesthetic reasons.”

This aesthetic question was what guided the restoration team’s work from beginning to end, recognizing how central the look and feel of it was in Glauber’s filmography. In the name of this aesthetic, it was, in fact, possible to rescue the clinical, inventive and subversive gaze of the creator of “Black God, White Devil”. 21st century viewers will be able to watch a work that remains embedded in the national culture return to life in light, shadow, depth, sound and all that built a vision that would change the course of Brazilian cinema.