1951 - The year in which
Clouzot,'O Cruzeiro' and
intellectuals traveled to Bahia

ALVARO KASSAB


UA report on the Candomblé initiation ritual, published in May 1951 by the French magazine Paris Match, triggered a controversy that mobilized intellectuals at the height of Roger Bastide, infuriated the Afro-Brazilian community and stirred the enthusiasm of the national press, – read O Cruzeiro magazine, the most influential in the country at the time. All aspects of the controversy were investigated in an impressive work of historical reconstruction carried out by the anthropologist, photographer and professor Fernando de Tacca, head of the Unicamp Arts Institute.

Recipient of a Bolsa Vitae, Tacca obtained the necessary resources to undertake a long-cherished quest: hunting for the protagonists of a story whose beginning coincided with the stay in Brazil of French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot, author of the photos that illustrated the article from Paris Match. The outcome of the clash can be marked with the “change” of the magazine O Cruzeiro, materialized with a report on the same topic four months after the “scoop” imposed by the French side in the middle of Bahia.

Tacca visited terreiros and searched newspaper and library archives to support his research, entitled Entre a Paris Match e O Cruzeiro – Imagens do Sagrado, a work about to be turned into a book.

The professor became interested in the subject in 1983, the year in which he discovered the book “Candomblé”, written by photographer José Medeiros. The work, published in 1957 by the publishing house O Cruzeiro, contained 62 photographs of an initiation ritual. At the time, anthropologist Micênio Carlos dos Santos, a supporter of Afro-Brazilian cults, provided the first clues, telling Tacca that the images were recurrent in the imagination of Bahian Candomblé. The professor, a student of visual anthropology, was impressed by the technical precision of the photographs and the fact that the images were set in a scenario where access was only allowed to beginners.

In 1988, Tacca had the opportunity to interview José Medeiros. The photographer revealed that part of the photos gathered in his book had been used in the report “As brides of the bloodthirsty gods”, published by O Cruzeiro in September 1951. According to Medeiros, the report made in Salvador in partnership with reporter Arlindo Silva about the ritual of initiation into Candomblé (epilation), had a huge repercussion, to the point that the Mãe-de-Santo was murdered and the Daughters-of-Santo ended up not being legitimized and recognized by the followers of the religion. According to the photographer's version, says Tacca, the article was made so that foreigners could get to know the “true Candomblé”. Medeiros, however, made no mention of the Paris Match article, published four months earlier.

Tacca found out, in mid-2003, about the existence of the report published by the French, when he was in Salvador for 40 days as a research fellow. Before arriving in the capital of Bahia, however, the Unicamp professor had assigned an assistant to research newspapers of the time. Through the material collected, the teacher discovered that the O Cruzeiro article had made a much bigger noise than he had imagined.

The researcher found, for example, that the morning Diário de Notícias, from Diários Associados, set fire to the local religious scene by publishing headlines about O Cruzeiro's report, in the five days before the magazine's arrival in Salvador. The title of the call said it all: “The God thirsts for blood”.

In addition to an excerpt from the text of the report written by Arlindo Silva, the newspaper published one of the photos produced by Medeiros for the article. “The published photo showed the sacrifice of an animal on the head of a saint’s daughter (iaô). It was a very strong image for a layman”, ponders Tacca, remembering that two other Bahian newspapers, A Tarde and O Estado da Bahia, adopted the same procedure, with the latter reproducing the call published by Diário de Notícias. The management of O Cruzeiro, anticipating the success of the edition, increased circulation by 10%. The magazine broke the newsstand.

The link – An advertisement published by the newspaper A Tarde in the 22/11/1951 edition, two months after the O Cruzeiro report, found by Tacca in his research in the capital of Bahia, led the researcher to the reasons that made the Brazilian publication invest in the subject . The statement, supported by the Bahian Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults, “invited all terreiros, supporters of the cult, the press and the people in general, to attend the general assembly extraordinary, in order to especially deem appropriate the publications that were made in the magazines Paris Match and O Cruzeiro, regarding the African cult in Bahia”.

With the information in hand, Tacca followed the report published by Paris Match. Didn't need to run much. The researcher discovered, through the publication's website, that the magazine, still in circulation, had a copy in stock dated 15/05/51, the date on which the article “As possessed da Bahia” appeared. The report was written in the third person. The photos were taken by Clouzot.

The French filmmaker's visit to Brazil was the subject of a detailed survey. Clouzot arrived in the country in May 1950. He came with his wife, Vera Amado – daughter of writer Gilberto Amado –, bringing in his luggage 3,5 tons of equipment and 70 million francs to make a film. He intended to run it in a year. Known internationally, Clouzot was received with celebration by the native intelligentsia, who held meetings in his honor.

The film, for reasons that remain unknown, was not made. In fact, the Unicamp professor speculates, perhaps not even Clouzot himself was convinced of what he intended to produce. It was only known that the film would be called “Le Brésil”, it would not have a defined script and would show something close to a travel diary. Specifically, as Tacca found, the filmmaker wandered around some regions of the country, without ceasing to express opinions – most of them unflattering – about what he had witnessed.

On the other hand, there was his wife, Vera, not by chance cast as the film's protagonist.

What is certain is that water entered the project. The equipment and technicians returned on the same ship that had left France for Brazil. Some voices rose in defense of the filmmaker, including journalist Paulo Duarte. In an article published in the magazine Anhembi, which he owns, Duarte, a card-carrying polemicist, did not miss anything – he saw ghosts in Catete and “in our incredible federal, state and municipal chambers”.

For the intellectual from São Paulo, everything conspired against Clouzot, starting from the difficulty in obtaining customs clearance for equipment, through the impossibility of importing virgin film, to “veiled warnings from censorship”.

None of the conclusions made by Duarte were confirmed, but Clouzot did not give up, reveals Tacca. After his project was unsuccessful, he decided to exchange the screens for Paris Match's rotating ones. The protagonists and setting mentioned by Duarte, however, were maintained. Clouzot and his Brazilian wife tuned their ears to the sounds of drums that echoed in the outskirts of Salvador, a city that at the time had “400 inhabitants, 96 churches and 453 fetish temples”, according to the filmmaker's own accounts.

Such an offer of syncretism would soon lead Clouzot and Vera to the attempt. The filmmaker even hired a maid who “went through long states of stultification”. Another, who replaced her, “expressed herself through grunts, gestures, onamatopoeia”. Three months and thousands of francs in bribes later, the filmmaker and his wife manage to arrive at a terreiro, taken by a certain “priest Nestor”, a father-of-saint who has never been identified.

The incursion yielded the article “Les Possédées de Bahia” (The possessed of Bahia), boasted in its subtitle by Paris Match as “an extraordinary ethnographic document”. The opening of the article, sold as an exclusive sample of a book that Clouzot would later release on the subject, “Le Cheval de Dieux” [“The Horse of the Gods”], also said that for the first time a white man had entered “a sanctuary of gods blacks.”

If Clouzot wanted an “impressionist” work about Brazil, as he declared in an interview, he achieved his objective with flying colors. Adjectived without parsimony, the text provides detailed descriptions of the “possessed” being bathed in the blood of animals – goats, chickens and pigeons – poured over the heads (pierced) and bodies of the saint-daughters initiated into Candomblé. In terms of sensationalism, the imagery chapter was not indebted to the writing. The French filmmaker, who says he was forced to drink the blood of a recently sacrificed pigeon, was merciless in his considerations about the ritual. He said it was a pathological case.

The reaction to the article, which was initially limited to certain circles of intellectuals with access to the French publication, took shape after its reproduction in full, by the Bahian newspaper A Tarde, two months after its arrival on newsstands (editions of 10,11, 12 and July 1951, XNUMX). Tacca and his assistant in Bahia, Cláudio David da Cruz, did not need to resort to journalistic archives. Deliberately, the Unicamp professor dedicated a chapter in his work [O contracampo de Pierre Verger] about the French photographer and ethnologist Pierre Verger “as a counterpoint to the sensationalist work carried out by Clouzot and José Medeiros”.

And it was precisely at the Foundation named after Verger, in Salvador, where Tacca found the documents about the controversy. Explained: the French photographer remained distant from the media fray. Distant, but attentive. Verger cut out and cataloged every part of the controversy. Verger's collections, for Tacca “an icon of the relationship between the photographic image and the religious world of Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian culture”, were precious.

It's all there. Starting with the first of the protest demonstrations by French sociologist Roger Bastide, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo. The intellectual, theory aside, knew where he was going. He had been, for example, the author of an article about initiation into Candomblé, coincidentally written in partnership with Pierre Verger, with whom he was a friend. The report was published in the magazine A Cigarra in 1949.

In a report published on July 7, 1951 by the newspaper A Tarde, Bastide, “traveling through Bahia more for sightseeing than studying”, accuses Clouzot of sensationalism, of ignoring elementary scientific foundations, questions the veracity of the images and sees in the The filmmaker's stance traces a colonialist vision. The same article was reproduced in the newspaper O Globo, on July 18, 1951, with the following title and subtitle: “Salvador city slandered in Paris – Clouzot's report shakes Bahian society – Sociologist Roger Bastide contradicts his countryman” .

In addition to Bastide, four Salvadorans expressed, in local newspapers, their indignation with Clouzot's article – the doctor Estácio de Lima, the historian Gustavo Barroso and the professors José Valladares and Edison Carneiro. The latter, a specialist in Afro-Brazilian cults, even recommended Clouzot to friends and representatives of famous terreiros in Bahia. Furthermore: in his book “Le Cheval de Dieux”, Clouzot admits that he did not know about the existence of Candomblé until he met Carneiro. The scholar did not let it go. He accused the Frenchman of reproducing, without citing the source, entire excerpts from his book Candomblés na Bahia. He was no less merciless about the report created by the filmmaker: “Sensationalism, nothing more. Clouzot made cinema with letters.”

Tacca would locate, in Unicamp, three other emblematic articles about the controversy. On the recommendation of Flávia Carneiro Leão, coordinator of the Alexandre Eulálio Documentation Center (Cedae), of the Institute of Language Studies (IEL), she found in the same Anhembi in which Paulo Duarte comes out in defense of Clouzot, two articles by Bastide and another by Alberto Cavalcanti, filmmaker who had assumed the position of general producer at Companhia Vera Cruz after working in the European avant-garde.

Anhembi reproduces a letter distributed by Cavalcanti in newsrooms. The document would have been, according to Tacca, the first public demonstration contrary to the Paris Match report. The document had been published by Folha da Noite (SP) and Diário de Notícias (BA), among other newspapers, in July 51. In September, Anhembi reproduced it. “It was a kind of redemption, since the magazine had highlighted Clouzot's presence in Brazil”, recalls the Unicamp professor.

Bastide was the only one to criticize Brazilian reporting

Entitled “Let us try to forget Mr. Clouzot”, Cavalcanti's article contextualizes the Frenchman's work as a whole and then attacks his report. “Showing our domestic blacks smeared with blood... as the only thing he saw in Brazil worthy of being shown is a somewhat strange attitude. That's why I come to 'Match' to get things done,” writes the Brazilian filmmaker. In the same magazine, in the August edition, Roger Bastide debunks his fellow countryman without mincing words in the article entitled “Ethnology and ignorant sensationalism”. He lists a series of mistakes made by the filmmaker, pointing out “a sensationalist desire that is doubly insulting to my friends of color and to my white friends in Bahia, to the detriment of the truth. And what cannot be tolerated.”

Tacca assesses Bastide's posture. “From the height of his academic legitimacy, the French sociologist dissects the Paris Match report like no other intellectual had done, placing Clouzot at the level of his total ignorance and colonizing arrogance.” In the following edition of Anhembi, Bastide would tone down his criticisms to praise Clouzot's book, “Le cheval de dieux”, in the words of the French sociologist “infinitely superior to the sensationalist report that was taken from it for publicity”.

Bastide, moreover, was the only voice to speak out against the report made by O Cruzeiro. His criticisms were highlighted in the article “An Unfortunate Report”, published in the November edition of Anhembi. In the text, the French intellectual mentions the sepulchral silence that followed the Brazilians' article. “I waited for the protest of those who had turned against Clouzot, namely the Cavalcanti, the Edison Carneiro and others. However, the days go by and this prolonged silence scares me.” One suspects, Tacca assesses, that the shadow of Assis Chateuabriand, the all-powerful owner of Diários Associados, the publishing group of O Cruzeiro, has hovered above good and evil.

The text of the magazine O Cruzeiro did not resonate among the intelligentsia, but fell like a bomb among religious circles in Bahia, whose representatives abhorred the idea of ​​the secrets of Candomblé being revealed. The rope broke on the weakest side. In this case, it was left to the citizen Risolina Eleonita da Silva, saint-mother better known as Mãe Riso da Plataforma, protagonist of the report. Recovering her story and that of the three saint-daughters reported in the article consumed a large part of Tacca's research, who began his survey in the Plataforma neighborhood, in Salvador.

Although hostile to her peers, Risolina was not murdered nor did she have to run from Salvador, as legend had it. She settled in the Rio de Janeiro city of Nilópolis, at the end of the 1950s, where she intensely carried out her activities as a mother-of-saint until she died in 1995. “I discovered that her yard in Salvador was demolished to build an avenue. She was even compensated. Even leaving Salvador, I found that Mãe Riso maintained an intense exchange with Bahian Candomblé”, reveals Tacca.

Another discovery was the fate given to the images by Candomblé followers. Janíldece Barroso da Silva, Jane, daughter of Waldemira Oliveira Barroso, Perrucha, one of the iaôs portrayed in the article, showed the teacher an album made by her mother with photos of the epilation published in the magazine. “The most incredible thing is that these images were given new meaning at the domestic level”, says the researcher. Mãe Riso, in turn, kept with her a copy of the book “Candomblé”, by José Medeiros. Mãe-de-Santo always had a license. And memory.

Top