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The first installment in a loose trilogy that includes 1967’s Entranced Earth and 1969’s Antonio das Mortes, Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil nonetheless stands alone as a benchmark for the difference between polemic and propaganda. If Rocha’s Italian contemporaries Sergio Corbucci and Damiano Damiani devised the Zapata western to turn the traditional western inside out—critiquing rather than valorizing imperialism—then Black God, White Devil might be called a Lampião western, after the folk hero of Brazilian social banditry who casts a long shadow over the film. More than allegorizing third-world revolutionary and decolonial struggles, Rocha stages a mythmaking intervention into Brazilian history.

As its English title suggests, Black God, White Devil is a film of two halves, each of which slots into a separate western subgenre, and could probably satisfy as a film in its own right. Taken as a whole, though, the film incites a...

The first installment in a loose trilogy that includes 1967’s Entranced Earth and 1969’s Antonio das Mortes, Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil nonetheless stands alone as a benchmark for the difference between polemic and propaganda. If Rocha’s Italian contemporaries Sergio Corbucci and Damiano Damiani devised the Zapata western to turn the traditional western inside out—critiquing rather than valorizing imperialism—then Black God, White Devil might be called a Lampião western, after the folk hero of Brazilian social banditry who casts a long shadow over the film. More than allegorizing third-world revolutionary and decolonial struggles, Rocha stages a mythmaking intervention into Brazilian history.

As its English title suggests, Black God, White Devil is a film of two halves, each of which slots into a separate western subgenre, and could probably satisfy as a film in its own right. Taken as a whole, though, the film incites a...

"I'm condemned, but I have courage." Janus Films has revealed a new official trailer for the 4K restoration and re-release of this Brazilian "Cinema Novo" classic titled Black God, White Devil, made by Glauber Rocha. This originally opened in 1964, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival before playing in Brazil in the 60s. The film is an account of the adventures of hired gunman Antonio das Mortes (played by Maurício do Valle), set against the real life last days of rural banditism. He witnesses the descent of the rural worker Manuel (starring Geraldo Del Rey) drifting to a life of crime, joining the gang of Antonio's sworn enemy, Corisco the Blond Devil (Othon Bastos), leading to the Pedra Bonita Massacre. "Steeped in history, myth, religion, politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement's most uncompromising statements on...

The tough thing about being an intrepid cinephile: you trawl and dig for lesser-known masterpieces of world cinema, watch them on subpar (sometimes sub-subpar) rips, and only five-or-so years later see them get a loving restoration. As is the case with their recent L’amour fou release and Ousmane Sembène retro, Janus are putting out Glauber Rocha’s Cinema Novo masterpiece Black God, White Devil in a 4K restoration that looks so good I can only envy anybody who sees it for the first time like so.

Ahead of its November 17 debut at Film Forum, a new trailer has arrived and, in terms often applicable to Glauber Rocha, “goes super-hard.” His brutal vision of Brazil, seen with the added clarity of Metropoles Productions’ restoration, suggests the ideal for these releases: elucidate a lost classic and herald a new entry in the canon. And if I can make suggestions: The Age of the Earth next,...

“Black God, White Devil” is so not what you’d expect from a director who’d write a manifesto titled “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” That treatise, published shortly after this film was released in 1964, was the 25-year-old Brazilian Glauber Rocha’s plea for a new type of filmmaking that the “Third World” should adopt to expose the exploitation of their countries by the global north. It’s a staple of film studies classes to this day.

“Black God, White Devil,” however, is far from homework. The Brazilian film is a pulsing, anarchic vision that makes it feel like a progenitor to the then-just-nascent Spaghetti Western movement in Italy. This is a different kind of manifesto, one that feels written in bullets, a shoot-’em-up that marries a propulsive plot and extremely memorable characters to its revolutionary politics.

Janus Films has given a 4K restoration to this masterwork, that’ll premiere...