The Striving Promisor: On the Immobile Movement of Promise in «O pagador de Promessas» (Anselmo Duarte, 1962)

Abstract

At the yard in front of St. Barbara’s church in Bahia, Christianity has come to a standstill. The unflagging journey of the believer, kept alive and in motion by his promise’s sacred bond, and carrying the Cross to the glory of the Saint, is obstructed by the Church itself and excluded more theological from the house of God. The steep staircase, horizontally barred at the top by doctrine, the priest, and closed doors, portrays the very cruciform ground where the Cross is itself crucified. In spite of its inner ascensional impulse, the stair’s immobile longing for the Heights withholds the advancement of the pilgrim; conversely, it is that Zé-do-Burro’s donkey-wise stubbornness some call faith, that still breathes some spiritual movement into and through the petrified eternity of the sanctuary. The pattern of the moving cross flourishing and persevering within the deadly stern one, not only re-enacts the mystery of resurrection: it buttresses also cinema’s proneness to revisit the olden stage and its stasis, and to revive from within that canonical medieval setting for the theatrics of Christ and His imitators. Beyond the clash of the secular and the clerical at the feet of the church, and the demolishing alive fresco of the whole of the Brazilian society (with no exceptions whatsoever) stepping up and down through the dynamic oppositions and movements of hierarchical power, it is the moving immobility of the Promise in the name of the Donkey that reminds us all universally of the immobile mobility of Christ’s in perhaps ours. Between camera work, mise-en-scène, script, and Scriptures, Anselmo Duarte’s theatrum of movies makes its own way to incoincide finally with the conspicuous triviality of its own ending, which poses as (literally) demagogic triumph. This last split rules also secretly over the entire film’s impasse: alongside with the visible immobilization of Zé’s efforts, the spiritual quality of his paralysis makes this latter precisely into pure transcendent trespassing. Made of stills rotated into movement, film does alike. The paper will focus on how the filmmaker and his cinematographer endorse this ontotheology aesthetically.