São Paulo - Sinfonia e Cacofonia

Jean-Claude Bernardet's love/hate letter to the city of São Paulo as seen in countless of Brazilian movies and documentaries from the 1920's up to the early 1990's is a fascinating tour de force through history, culture, society, technological advances and human evolution through language, fashion, behavior and more. Released on the same year as the also obscure "São Paulo Cinemacidade", both short films present an understandable collage of images from many films that has the city of São Paulo as the main location for their stories, and both projects even includes sequences from the very same films - it's impossible to not include Person's "São Paulo, Sociedade Anônima" which is mandatory of viweing in order to understand and live the chaos, torment and confusion of that big city.

The differences from the other project are: a longer running time; it's more of a critique on the city and its population rather than just being a nostalgic love letter; its proposition goes to show theme similarities from the many different decades; and some bits of dialogues are presented. Bernardet exposes the city, its buildings and important locations as captured on several films, and from time to time he works around a theme: loneliness, the spaces, conversations on the telephone, problematic traffic, violence, death, the underground gays, people's views on the city and all.

It's a great use of combining film elements and put them together to form a whole piece and whole spectacle of images, sound and meaning.

Unlike the other short, this isn't suitable for all ages since Bernardet makes use of some heavy imagery for some brief moments - like the corpse being cut at the morgue, it's from some 1970's horror movie (and it sure looks as a real corpse, no dummy used) along with images from a slaughterhouse (not sure if it's the same movie or edited from something else).

Yet it's important to see some shock in it because the author is revealing all sides of this gigantic metropolis where life and death, love and hate permeate everywhere like anywhere else around the world. Obviously that he could have used in another way and either show more positive aspects of the city, some happiness too rather than just focusing on the stressful anxiety of everyday life. Can't live in it but definitely cannot live without it, it's such an incredible place full of social contrasts and contradictions that is beyond belief.

His presentation of films is incredibly well-edited, he knew how to create themes inside one major topic (the city) and present it something unique, valuable and real even though those are images coming from the fiction. But they reveal life in São Paulo as it was and as it is. The list of films is very comprehensive and practically nothing was missed - there's plenty of rare works there, all credited at the end (the ones known can be viewed here at the movie connections part). But I was sad that "Kiss of the Spider Woman" wasn't included since there are many great street scenes there (it appears on "Cinemacidade" though). I loved the project, since I'm a big fan of collage works - but the running time was a bit excessive, it becomes repetitive at parts, slightly distractive but nothing so harmful; and a better soundtrack could've been used in some excerpts. Other than those tiny complaints this is a fascinating, curious tribute to a magnificent city. 10/10.