La Ricotta - The two version of Pasolini's corto

[Tony]

Giano: do you mean you have seen the beginning of O Signo do Caos with Italain subtitles and it is perfect?

Here's an excerpt from a piece by Jorge Didaco from 'Sense of Cinema':

"Sganzerla would draw himself into an odyssey of investigation and research...a tetralogy on Orson Welles, focusing especially on Welles' decisive passage through Brazil in 1942 for the filming of the unfinished It's All True (a project for which Welles was committed to RKO and which aimed to foster Pan-American relations). The films, a mix of archival images, re-enactments of actual events, interviews, fiction, faux documentary, pastiche and film essay, are: Nem Tudo é Verdade (1986), the short A Linguagem de Orson Welles (1991), Tudo é Brasil (1998) and his final film, not yet released commercially, O Signo do Caos (2003).

In particular, Sganzerla's obsession with Welles' kaleidoscopic, contradictory, affectionate and anti-tourist visions of Brazil would provide him with material to dip into the anthropophagic notions of assimilation and fusion. Welles, with Four Men and a Boat (Jangadeiros – one of the constituent parts of It's All True, seen in Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel and Bill Krohn's documentary of the same name), forestalled certain cinema verité characteristics of Cinema Novo and the poetic realism of films like Rocha's The Turning Wind (Barravento, 1961). Also Welles' musings on the origins of samba and its meshing with jazz, and his encounters with musical legends Dalva de Oliveira, Carmen Miranda, Ary Barroso, Herivelto Martins and most notably Grande Otelo, instilled a sense of pride and nationality in Brazilian culture that would eventually enable artists like Sganzerla to investigate our past and heritage in an attempt to understand contemporary anxieties."


Here are a couple of other descriptions:

"It’s Not All True"

Sganzerla reconstructs Orson Welles’ visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1942. Mandated by the Roosevelt Administration, Welles convokes some sailors who accomplished the incredible feat of travelling by jangada from Fortaleza to Rio without any technical device. But when the national hero is invited to tell his story, he drowns in front of the cameras. The production of It’s All True turns into a nightmare…

It’s all true, asserted Orson Welles; it’s not all true, retorts Rogério Sganzerla who, between fact and fiction, signs his first work-tribute to the North American director. The tetralogy on the theme of Orson Welles – and especially his decisive passage through Brazil in 1942 – is made up of a mix of archive images, the re-staging of current events, interviews, fiction, pseudo-documentaries, and art films. «The film may be defined as a powerful experimentation oriented towards the undetermined. The subject is the Great Cinema with its underlying factors, until then obscure and unexplored; the mishap of one of the monstres sacrés of our time – his relation to Grande Otelo and the raising of the curtain of the past, in an invocation of the greatest rhythm in the world: the samba.» Rogério Sganzerla


Nem Tudo E Verdade
a k a Not Everything Is True
1986-Brazil
Running Time: 95 Minutes
Starring: Arrigo Barnabe, Grande Otelo, Helena Ignez
Directed by: Rogerio Sganzerla

PLOT DESCRIPTION
This densely-packed and odd docudrama refers back to Orson Welles' 1942 visit to Brazil to make a movie called "It's All True." Using newsreel footage from that period, re-enactments of his visit, and excerpts from his movies and radio shows, director Rogerio Sganzerla seems to imply that politics intervened in Welles' project, cutting it short. At the same time, Welles is not always painted in a complementary light, whether intentionally or not. Before the final curtain comes down, it is revealed that Paramount Studios found several hundred reels belonging to Welles' Brazilian stay. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

[Giano]

No Tony, I talked about It's not all true. I have not seen a O signo do caos. Perfect is the sense of what Welles done in Brazil, as he he has been able to describe all the aspect of welles' life there.