Re: "Four Days in September"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Westrich:

>
>Barreto sums up his movie and his approach quite well and I think this is
>the strength of the movie.  I was quite moved by the attempt to portray the
>"humanness" of all the parties involved (revolutionaries, secret police,
>ambassador).  It certainly could be argued that this attempt was a bit
>stiff at times but to see the American ambassador as a human being (as well
>as a representative of the imperialist bourgeois pigs) was a strength of
>the movie.  His little speeches of his "limousine liberalism" were quite
>well done. It did not threaten my politics in any way or my condemnation of
>the dictatorship and secret police to see a torturer concerned that his
>love might not approve of what he does.
>

Actually the film was deeply flawed by its refusal to allow the terrorists
to make the case against US support for the coup in Brazil. It is
astonishing that the American Ambassador was never once challenged on the
role of the CIA in Brazilian politics. When Alan Arkin says that "his
government opposes dictatorship since they produce more problems in the
long run than they solve in the short run," his captors stand there
speechless like a bunch of dummies. Any terrorist worth his or her salt
would have replied, "This is a deeply amoral approach to the question of
democracy, isn't it?" And would have followed up with some remarks on the
history of US intervention in Brazilian politics. But this would have bored
and alienated Barreto's intended middle-class audience, so he left it out.


> The politics were about the
>people. The struggle was not just about capitalism and militarism v.
>revolutionary heros but about who cooks dinner (or what one orders
>takeout), about who tells who what to do and why, how people treat one
>another, and whether one is creating revolution out of a community of
>interests or an a priori conception of "what's right" for "our struggle."
>

Well, of course the film was "political" in this sense. The terrorists were
a bunch of creeps who held an innocent person captive--just as the cops
did. The leader of the terrorists considered the use of torture to get
Arkin to reveal the identity of CIA agents--just as the cops do when they
try to find out who is in the underground. Etc., etc. Standing between
these two warring camps is the gentle, liberal and sympathetic American
Ambassador. It doesn't take too much brains to figure out what this implies
politically.


>I think that Jonas could have tip his hand more but the strength of the
>movie was its subtlety.  The fact that Louis could conjure up such rich
>detail about a character who gets 3-4 minutes of screen focus proves its
>strength.
>

This is nonsense. I conjured up this detail because I was deeply involved
with Latin American politics in that period. I was in the Trotskyist
movement and had frequent visits from Argentinian comrades who were in a
factional struggle with leftists who carried out bank-robberies and
kidnappings. They were known as the PRT-Compatiente and were supported by
the European Trotskyist movement, including Ernest Mandel. Those events and
the events sketched at in the movie are very close to me. The average
film-goer would not be able to supply the context.

>
>This is far from true.  This movie (even with it faults) portrays
>revolutionaries as heros with courage, intelligence, compassion and doubts.
> I cannot speak to its historical accuracy but I could not help but feel
>that it "seemed" very accurate.  Also, the movie captured all I needed to
>fell about "repression" I did not need to see any violence.
>

The movie's biggest lie was the way it handled the torture of one of the
captured members of the underground group. Henrique, the cop who is
Serran's favorite character, plunges the captive's head into a tub of water
for about 15 seconds. It is an evasion of the truth. Real torture is
nothing like this mild baptism. It is horrifying. Unless the film was about
to deal with this reality, it should have not put forward a sanitized
version of what takes place. It is only through such an evasion that it
becomes possible for the film to suggest the plausibility of a torture
victim falling in love with her torturer and marrying him. This is an
obscene lie and an insult to the tens of thousands of people who have been
tortured in Latin American prisons.

Louis Proyect