Cliff Welch, Ph.D.

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 Grass War! Jofre Netto, the Castro of Brazil

A Review by John T. Caldwell,

Associate Professor, Film/TV/Digital Media, UCLA

University Film and Video Association 2002 Annual Conference

 Grass War! is a documentary that digs up an important but almost forgotten part of the agrarian revolutionary movement of Latin American in the 1950s and 1960s. I am particularly interested in the ways this film appropriates and modifies the investigative, journalistic mode as the basis for political critique and engagement. Filmmakers Toni Perrine and Cliff Welch focus on the radical work of Brazilian Jofre Correa Netto—a contemporary of Fidel Castro—who organized tenant workers to resist eviction by landowners.  Jofre’s agitation created ambivalence on the left and controversy on right, even as it helped incite an uprising by landless laborers. Wealthy landowners in the Brazilian interior recruited peasants from the cities to travel to the interior to help clear the land and provide revenues from the sale of the timber that resulted. In return for this work, the peasants were promised five years of access and control of plots of land on the property from which they could (ostensibly) raise food crops for their families and for income. Once the land and timber was cleared, however, the plantation owners moved to force the tenants to leave by covertly planting grasses within the garden plots the workers had created. Rather than give up in the face of this backstabbing, the workers—urged on by colorful organizer and outsider Jofre—made concerted efforts to “dig-up” the weeds and stay on the land; counter-measures intended to resist the owners’ preemptive grass attacks. This peasant resistance made headlines back in the cities, where journalists described Jofre as “the Fidel Castro of Brazil.” Hundreds of workers massed in protest, Jofre was assassinated but lived, and the government intervened in a supposed “mediation” attempt that was praised as fair compromise but that actually resulted in wide-scale eviction and the abrogation of the original agreements.

Perrine and Welch’s documentary is worth thinking about in two important areas among others: first, in the ways that the film complicates the codes of documentary and serves as an object lesson for investigative and radical filmmaking; and second, in the ways that the film invokes issues very much at the heart of the current post-cold war celebration of globalization and capital. In some ways, Grass War! appears to follow the tenets of “investigative journalism.” The filmmakers provide historical context, then travel to locations in Brazil in an apparent attempt to get at the “truth” of what happened with Jofre, the movement he spawned, and the landed whom eventually suppressed the revolt. The documentary is organized in a linear fashion, with graphic inter-titles marking a sequence of “chapters” (such as “The Uprising,” “The Shooting,” The Resolution”) that trace the dramatic and historical arc of the conflict. The production style aims to weave together clips from a range of interviews from participants and observers on “both (or many) sides” of the struggle, and to cut them together in a contentious back-and-forth “dialogue” marked by extreme contrasts in points-of-view. At one point Jofre is a visionary leader; at another, he is an insignificant outsider. For one interviewee Jofre is comparable to Castro in historical significance; to another he is a loose canon, unsettling to the left, and a wrongful beneficiary of selective historical circumstance.

But Grass War! is clearly also a work of partisanship rather than blank or naïve journalistic truth-seeking. At one point the filmmakers disclose that Jofre himself “worked to shape” the documentary; at another point they conclude that “Jofre saw this video as a way to inspire continued agrarian reform.” I think this kind of disclosure of partisanship and point-of-view is very important (even though viewers might reach the same conclusion, given the effective arguments made by the film). What makes this stance more striking is that the filmmakers have gotten a number of interview subjects on what one might imagine as “the other side” of the issue to come forward in frank accounts of their position and rationales as well.  This “other side” includes one landowner who essentially boasts he is an attempted murderer; and the supposed government “negotiator” who brags of his (now-proven) ability to bribe, mislead, coerce, and finally dispense with the peasants and their cause.

In many ways, the film is knowing exercise in the performance of complicity and disclosure. The clear willingness of the many interview subjects to come forward at this point and perform their points-of-view with conviction provides lessons for those of us committed to documentary. Interestingly, many of the subject disclosures serve as damning admissions.  But these statements also attest to the “retrospective potential” that the appearance of an outsider-documentarian can provide for local players and contestants in any struggle. In effect, the filmmakers provide not the inevitable, pending or pre-determined indictment typical of 60 Minutes, but an “oral history feeding frenzy”; a stage for a range of participants to justify and defend their legitimacy.  Essentially, the appearance of the filmmakers serves not as a threat to the locals, but as a high-stakes opportunity to open an old wound, and to re-suture it in historical terms more acceptable to each of the oral history “performers.” Such is the extreme flexibility of history: even non-professional subjects know that control of retrospection can provide a blueprint and a showcased (even if symbolic) finality for history.

The film shows that filmmakers with a point to make or a cause to address can exploit this lay knowledge (of history as a performance opportunity) to move beyond a model of radical film production based on hit-and-run or covert filmmaking, on the one hand, or some kind of “counter-cinema” experimental form on the other. Even those without the capital of the major television brands (BBC, PBS, etc.) can leverage the potential or promise for media access that their presence provides to engage human subjects from all sides of any issue.  Radical filmmakers and independent documentary makers tend to wring their hands at the suffocating control of the new global media conglomerates. But this same extensiveness has provided human subjects with a working knowledge of how history is written, and the promise that they too can alter it; they too can be seen or heard.  Grass War! takes advantage this kind of consciousness to weave a fabric of disclosure that is typically difficult to attain. The reason this works as effectively as it does is that Perrine and Welch exploit the “complicity potential” of their presence (which results from a perception of their institutional advantage), by making available their “willingness to be used” to those involved in the grass war conflict.

            I think that Grass War! also takes advantage of recent, television-driven changes in the normative codes of documentary that have been instigated by the rise of cable television as the chief author and developer of documentary form today.  Those trained in the documentary canon of “don’t tell, but show” (with its emphasis on “observation” as opposed to “argumentation”) seldom exploit the (ostensibly ‘lower’) possibilities of expository narration, extensive use of file footage, chapter inter-titles, etc. that have become commonplace on the History Channel, A&E, The Learning Channel, and many PBS series. This documentary does take advantage of cable’s televisual doc mode.  It is a strategy which gives the film a potentially larger audience than many docs legitimized, first, by postmodern theory, or second, by the increasingly dominant “observational-voyeuristic” style now funded and popularized by the HBO/Showtime conglomerate. While the apparent authority and trustworthiness of the concluding narration (a summary indictment of US foreign policy and military intervention in a subsequent, Brazilian right-wing dictatorship) bears little of the patient, logical development embodied by the lay oral historians—the directness of these assertions is part and parcel of many documentary series across cable television and the mediascape today. We would all do well to consider and exploit the formal “genre” (or generic) possibilities of contemporary, televisual, documentary form—and not simply the ontological possibilities presupposed by the more orthodox tradition of observational imagery. This film does so, and to good effect. In some ways, politics and context is impossible to talk about without this kind of authorial intervention.