· By Eric Tsuyoshi Yee
Dec 14
PUNK IS POLITICIS MOVIE NITE #25:
BURN! (1969)
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
Burn! (originally titled: Queimada) is a tragedy of historical and personal inevitability. Once again, Pontecorvo makes his loyalties (barely) known, but stands back to let the wheel turn. With an odd calm, he presents one atrocity after another. Some are physical, some moral, some emotional. Each, however horrible, is presented as the inevitable collision of entrenched culture and the new paradigm arriving, either via the barrel of a gun or thanks to someone’s pernicious self-interest (or, you know, both). Yet Pontecorvo remains a teacher, not a preacher. Burn! hews to the Neo-Realist aesthetic: show the world as it is, let the audience sort it out.
The screenplay offers two men as incarnations of irreconcilable historical forces. Marlon Brando plays William Walker, an English intelligence agent sent to a Portuguese-controlled Caribbean island to foment a native revolution. His revolution’s goal is to displace the Portuguese monopoly and turn the island into a British trading zone. Once he convinces the former and current slaves that such a revolution is possible, however, they develop goals of their own.
Pontecorvo nails the hard truths. Burn! is a quietly bleak, unflinching presentation of slavery, post-slavery racial hatreds, the role of race in political power and the colonial manipulation of all of the above. Pontecorvo takes on these themes so clearly and directly—while keeping them secondary to the drama of the narrative—that Burn! becomes a lesson in how few other films ever address them at all.