Leopoldo Miguez

Veteran filmmaker Humberto Mauro delivers another comissioned cultural project, this one being a tribute to classic composer Leopoldo Miguez, best remembered for his composition of the Hymn of Republic and the music from an opera composed by Coelho Neto, both which are presented in this feature on different performances.

In all honesty, I couldn't care for the weird-out themes and music which are all unappealing and typical of the early cultural music of Brazil in copying European styles to define itself as a culture rather than creating works from their own - popular Brazilian music at the time wasn't considered as culture, so you had to mantain the European feels and themes. What got me hooked with this short was Mauro's technique of super-imposing images and putting two or three together much like Dziga Vertov and other contemporaries used to make. And this isn't a double standard because I objected to a similar borrowing from the music since when it came to cinema the borrow of European elements makes things interesting and worth watching, rather than the music which didn't translate well and was annoying to hear. The images go from peculiar, to mysteriously haunting - specially the Prometheus being created from the clay where Mauro performs him. And the little facts on Miguez also make the film a valuable source of information from the period. 6/10.