Humberto Mauro's Ganga Bruta
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 7:30pm

361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Ganga Bruta, Humberto Mauro, 1933, digital projection, 78 mins

Rarely screened in New York, Humberto Mauro’s Ganga Bruta was celebrated by Cinema Novo directors as one of their movement’s most important precursors and, more generally, their country’s greatest films. This violent, dreamlike melodrama follows a construction engineer who, after being acquitted of the murder of his newlywed wife, becomes infatuated with his colleague’s fiance. The film is an ambitious and disjunctive blend of silent and sound cinema, fiction and documentary, Soviet-style montage and Expressionist lensing. Though a flop upon its initial release, some decades later George Sadoul helped advance its reputation, praising it as a “landmark in the history of Brazilian cinema” and noting that “the editing is very forceful, using industrial elements as erotic symbols—a penchant that earned Mauro the name of ‘The Freud of Cascadura.’”

Ganga Bruta’s greatest advocate, however, would be Glauber Rocha, who devoted an essay to Mauro in 1962, arguing that the film brought together “the best impressionism of Renoir, the daring of Griffith, the force of Eisenstein, the humor of Chaplin, the composition in shadow and light of Murnau—but, above all, absolute simplicity, a sharp sense of man and landscape… Led by intuition, Mauro is dissonant and the root of his editing is lived experience.” For Rocha, Ganga Bruta was nothing less than a blueprint for a revolutionary cinema, in particular for its cunning economy. “All Brazilian films after Mauro,” he declares, “have been made with increased resources and they are infinitely inferior.”

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.