Olney São Paulo and music - Gray Morning (manhã cinzenta, 1969)

Gray Morning is an audacious movie. The first characteristic that comes to mind is its soundtrack. Many film movements of the time were seeking to stablish proximity with younger generations. At the French cinema, filmmakers found this connection through jazz. At Great Britain, rock and roll. Hollywood was still struggling of how to rejuvenate itself. At Brazil, the avant-garde stablished ground at more distant places, marching through the forgotten depths of an urbanizing country that turned away their faces from the hungry and poor people that build their richness’s. The ‘cinema novo’ movement reached for the never shown faces of the true Brazilian people, the ones that doesn’t show up at magazines and doesn’t have a say at radio shows. To show these people is also to show their culture in every aspect, including its music.

The first long length feature realized by Olney São Paulo, Grito da Terra, follows this pattern. The songs sung by Fernando Lona are very characteristically rural, like the theme of the movie. Are heartfelt, and somewhat painful, songs about the life of those struggling to comprehend the intrinsic ways of nature, but more than that the disgraceful free movements of human greed. In his second movie a turn of events: not a rural scene, not a rural culture, not a rural tradition. Yet, the movie opens with a mass; a black mass, with tambours, with acoustic guitars, many voices singing in a non-coir fashion. The minute the opening credits end, a radical cut: a rock and roll; a girl dancing; its youth, its rock and roll, it’s the city, we are not at the Sertão anymore. There are pal trees in the back of the girl, outside the window.

The Brazilian intellectual scene of 1968 wasn’t understanding of rock and roll, the sold out music, the music of the American imperealism, of big capitalism. Rock and roll was a symbol of what was coming from outside to defeat Brazilian culture. At the same time, immerges from the center of Brazil intellectual scene the Tropicalia movement. And Olney was very fond of it, as we can see by the recurring insurgence of Caetano Veloso’s music in his movies, including Gray Morning. A movie that mixes a black mass with American rock and roll, with Tropicalia, that is in its own sense this mixture. A mix that was in the ears of that generation; a generation that had to dance rock and roll to keep standing, and had to pray to keep alive.