Let It Burn (Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1968)

Nostalgic commemoration of the glories of the 60s and abject public confession of the decade’s many failures and missed opportunities are two errors that cannot be avoided by some middle path that threads its way in between. . . . Its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.

—Fredric Jameson

The time period—it seems—is the early nineteenth century. The setting is the Caribbean island and Portuguese colony of Queimada, which owes its name—“burnt”—to the circumstances of its conquest: when faced by indigenous resistance, its would-be colonizers set it ablaze, thereby christening it and exterminating its entire native population at once. Thenceforth, Queimada was destined to live up to its name, to be enveloped by flames again and again.

Many years have elapsed since the inaugural colonial fire, during which the island has flourished as a lucrative cluster of sugar plantations owned by masters of Portuguese descent and cultivated by slaves of African descent, whose ancestors were shipped in by the Portuguese to perform that labor to which the native population had preferred death by fire. It is upon such a perfect colonial paradise that there descends one Sir William Walker, agent of the British Crown, to disrupt the delicate equilibrium between masters and slaves: his mission is at once to foment, aid, and abet a slave insurgency against the masters; to incite the masters to declare independence from Portugal; to convince the slaves to help the masters fight Portuguese colonial rule in exchange for freedom; to convince the masters to free the slaves and to hire them back as wage laborers in exchange for an end to the slave insurgency and for help in breaking free from the mother country; to convince the slaves that they shall share rule over the newly independent Queimada with their former masters; and, above all, to pit masters and slaves against each other in as many ways as possible so as to secure monopoly on the island’s sugar production for those different types of masters that are the British corporations—and all of this in the name of progress, civilization, and freedom.

It is while masterminding such havoc that Walker, at a dinner with the notables of the island, turns away from a window overlooking a harem-like courtyard filled with semi-naked black women, turns his gaze inside onto the distinguished all-male company, and addresses the symposium-like banquet with the following words (through the memorable lips of Marlon Brando):

Gentlemen, let me ask you a question. Now, my metaphor might seem a trifle impertinent, but I think it is very much to the point. Which do you prefer, or should I say, which do you find more convenient, a wife or [gesturing toward the window] one of these mulatto girls? No, no, please don’t misunderstand. I’m speaking strictly in terms of economics. What is the cost of the product? What does the product yield? The product in this case being love. Purely physical love, since sentiments obviously play no part in economics. [Laughter] Quite. Now, a wife must be provided with a home, with food, with dresses, with medical attention, etc., etc. You’re obliged to keep her your whole lifetime, even until she’s grown old and perhaps a trifle unproductive. Then, of course, if you have the bad luck to survive her, you have to pay for the funeral. [Laughter] No, no, it’s true! Gentlemen, I know it seems amusing, but actually those are the facts, aren’t they? Now [gesturing to the courtyard below], with a prostitute, on the other hand, it’s quite a different matter, isn’t it? You see, there is no need to lodge her or to feed her, certainly not to dress her and bury her, thank God. She’s yours only when you need her. You pay her only for that service and you pay her by the hour. Which, gentlemen, is more important and more convenient? A slave or a paid worker?

Walker’s “metaphor” twists patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism...