FROM THE beginning of its first nomadic human occupation, which some archaeologists date at 30 to 40 thousand years ago, South America has come to be seen as a special place. Obviously, since it offered new natural vistas, edible foodstuffs, mineral and medicinal products. It was such factors, indeed, which had a cultural effect on its first continental human inhabitants. The fascination of South America, indeed of the entire Americas, North and South, for a large quantity of the world’s races inspired the idea of a distinct cultural identity, and this inspiration — rooted in the continent’s natural qualities followed by its introduced human elements, whether imperial, colonial, bonded, and immigrant — gradually added up to South America’s various national identities linked to cultural pleasures.   

Cinematic pleasures
How are such pleasures manifested or suggested in Brazilian cinema today? The second film I saw at Brazil’s cultural centre in Guyana was the ambitious 2004 production of ‘OLGA’, starring Camila Morgado (as Olga), Caco Ciocler, and Fernanda Montenegro. In this film, the concept of Brazil as an ideal potential is both negatively and positively suggested by a subtle duality in the film’s narrative. Again, the idea of building a topic around an individual female identity gives us something to focus on.
The theme of ‘Olga’ revolves around a politically obsessed Germanic Jew who meets and aids the Brazilian political exile, Luis Prestes, played by Caco Ciocler, in Moscow. But Director Jayme Monjardim creates a distinct film in which the narrative of a dramatic epic (the film is 2hours and 21 minutes long, and becomes overbearingly drawn out on unraveling Olga’s tragic life) is subtly undermined by the semiotic visual language of film structure.
What is interesting about ‘Olga’ is that although the film concentrates as objectively as possible on the naïve utopian dreams and plans of the Brazilian political activist, Luis Prestes, his colleagues, and Communist Olga to topple an elitist Brazilian regime in 1935, it inserts three episodes in its meandering length which subtly alerts us to other everyday values whose importance override and veto the one-dimensional political/social obsessions and plans of the activists.                        

‘Olga’ and Brazilian lifestyles
The first value is the gradual development of romantic affection and need between Prestes and Olga during the long voyage by ship from Russia to Brazil. But this sort of romantic development is not like a typical simple Hollywood stereotype, since it evokes a prior sexual inexperience and repression in the couple, which is linked to imbalanced personalities over-loaded on one side by substituted intellectual blueprints for society on the whole.
Prestes and Olga know they are part of a political philosophy which tends to devalue personal romance as a ‘bourgeois’ distraction, or encourages it only as a means to an end — the typical espionage scenario where women’s charms are used as bait to capture converts or mislead opponents, or same-sex bonds are encouraged to foster and strengthen inclusive camaraderie.
The second value begins to emerge as the ship enters the beautiful coastal landscape of Rio, with its blue sugar-loaf mountain peaks, valleys, beaches, and huge lagoons of clear surf-edged water.
Olga, as a foreigner seeing Brazil for the first time, begins to realise there is a contradiction in their political dreams as she encounters the natural and fecund beauty of tropical Brazil; and her fears are confirmed by their failed revolution when the ‘masses’, whose cause they championed against feudal and official oppression, refuse to rise up and join the ‘revolution’.
By the time Olga has witnessed Rio’s carnival and seen the common people of colour revelling in their sensual and eclectic artistic expressions, she realises in one of the film’s most silently poignant moments the incongruous method of violence as a social stimulus with tragic consequences, both for the activists, their families, and the mass of people they control.
What the film subtly suggests is a deeper existential truth than dialectical materialism, where Brazil itself, as a natural productive potential, and the everyday cultural pleasures of its labouring people constitutes a larger, higher plane of practical values intuitively sensed and obeyed, which political activism can only assist in its official mandates.
While Prestes languishes in a Brazilian state prison, Olga is arrested and deported back to Germany, where she gives birth to a son by her radical Brazilian lover, before finally dying in a Nazi concentration camp. The film’s lengthy second half is of such episodes.
The third value of ‘Olga’ is its most creative, because it asserts the identity of cinema as a visual language through the use of colour, which defines the film’s screenplay/narrative as a dead era, an archival topic.
This is done by excluding the use of bright primary colours such as red, blue, yellow, etc. The entire film is photographed in sepia tones of grey, browns, greens, ochre, etc. Its originality is its structural use of tinted color harking back to the archives of film history, and those wonderful old Hollywood adventure B-films in sepia and mauve tones, proving that cinematic history is really a contemporary visual dictionary to put to use.