DOS SANTOS GETS L.A. WELCOME AT LAST

Imagine not ever having been able to see any Truffaut films except at a festival or in a retrospective.

It sounds unthinkable, yet thanks to the vagaries of film distribution, that’s what has happened in the United States to the films of Brazil’s Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who in the Latin American cinema of the last 30 years has had a prestige equal to that of Truffaut in the world cinema. Like Truffaut, Dos Santos came to films as a critic and theorist and, with the late Glauber Rocha, launched his country’s Cinema Novo generation in the ‘50s at the same time Truffaut and his contemporaries were riding their New Wave.

The showing of his “Memories of Prison” at the Fox International in Venice marks the first regular run ever for one of his films in Los Angeles. It culminates a weeklong presentation at the Fox of five of Dos Santos’ 15 films, revealing him as a major film maker with a command of a breathtakingly wide range of styles.

Dos Santos has moved easily from his Neo-Realist “Vidas Secas” (“Barren Lives”) (1963), to the highly symbolic and deliberately fragmented “Hunger for Love” (1968), made during Brazil’s repressive military regime, and on to the anti-colonial “How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman” (1971) and then to the folk epics “The Amulet of Ogum” (1975) and “The Tent of Miracles” (1978) and finally to the contemplative “Memories of Prison,” based on the experiences of novelist Graciliano Ramos as a political prisoner in the ‘30s. Ramos also wrote the novel on which “Vidas Secas” is based.

To Dos Santos, a handsome man of 58 with thinning silver hair, his evolution as a film maker is simply a result of his commitment from the beginning to reflect Brazilian life truthfully.

“I think I haven’t changed in my mind,” said Dos Santos over breakfast in a Venice cafe. “I’ve always been very attracted to Brazilian culture and to social issues. It is the heritage of our great writers like Jorge Amado, painters like Di Cavalcanti and musicians like Villa-Lobos. Until Di Cavalcanti and several others, for example, our painting had been very academic, very French. He painted a portrait of a beautiful mulatta from Bahia, and it was a scandal.”

Dos Santos, then heady from the impact of Italian Neo-Realism, likewise created an uproar when he made his directorial debut 30 years ago with “Rio 40 Degrees,” a story about three black boys selling peanuts to survive, a film that brought vividly to the screen the dire poverty in Brazil. “It was a big moral and political success,” he recalled. “For four months it was banned by the police on the grounds that is was subversive and could make a revolution.”

By then, Dos Santos, who had desultorily studied law at the University of Sao Paulo and entered films in 1951 as an assistant director, had already become disenchanted with the mainstream Brazilian industry, which was producing imitations of Hollywood films that had nothing do with the native culture.

“At that time young people in the cine clubs and at the universities like me wanted to make real Brazilian films,” he said. “Neo-Realism was a big lesson for poor production companies like ours. We raised money from family and friends, and got some backing from Brazilian TV.” It was while visiting various film clubs to garner support for his fight against the banning of “Rio 40 Degrees” that Dos Santos met Rocha in Bahia. “We had an idea to publish a film magazine,” he said. “Its title was Cinema Novo, but it was never published because everybody involved started making films. Cinema Novo is a combination of the decolonization of the Brazilian cinema and the auteur theory of the French--’ L’auteur , c’est moi !’ But now I don’t care if I’m known as the auteur of my films or not. I want to speak in a language that will be understood by everybody.”

Indeed, what has concerned him most for the last decade is how to reach Brazil’s mass audience. Except for “How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman”--”not because of its ideas but because of its nudity”--his films had been reaching only students and urban middle-class audiences. Then with “The Amulet of Ogum” he began working in what he has called “magical realism,” defining it as “a translation to reality of the imaginary world of the people.” He began to combine social satire with an invoking of African and Indian mythology in a manner that was at once sophisticated yet highly accessible even to illiterate audiences.

In “Memories of Prison” Dos Santos has come full circle, not just in returning to Ramos but in reconciling the oppressed intellectual with the oppressed poor, two of his primary concerns.

In October, he will start shooting “Bahia of the Saints,” a Franco-Brazilian co-production that he describes as a love story between a black boy and a white girl, set in the ‘30s. Now that he has been attracting increasingly large audiences at home, he can look toward greater recognition abroad.

As he sees it, many Brazilian films have gone unseen in America because of the lack of a large Portuguese-speaking population to support them here and the comparatively recently revitalized Brazilian cinema’s lack of long-established ties with U.S. distributors. But since the return of democratic government in Brazil, which has provided a favorable climate for film makers, and the success of Bruno Barreto’s “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands” (1978), Brazilian pictures have surfaced in American theaters from time to time.

In summing up his own career and its various phases, Dos Santos said: “I don’t like to repeat myself. Each film is a new field of observation. There’s an old Portuguese saying that I believe in: ‘I don’t know where I’m going, and the only thing I know is that I don’t want to go back where I’ve been.’ ”