Antonio das Mortes

Director: Glauber Rocha

1969 / 99min / DCP

Hired by a feudal landowner in the arid, drought-wracked sertão to put down a revolt of local peasants by assassinating their leader, mercenary gunman Antonio das Mortes (Maurício do Valle, reprising his Black God, White Devil role) winds up supplanting the deceased rebel, turning against the brutal Baron and his cronies. A flamboyantly stylized—Rocha really puts the opera in horse opera—melding of Western and Brazilian folk art, Antonio das Mortes is the exuberantly colorful hothouse flowering of a style Rocha had been cultivating through his first decade as a filmmaker, its “tropicalist” aesthetics and revolutionary content an affront to the newly installed military dictatorship in his homeland.