Never a card-carrying member of the Tropicálists, writer/musician/filmmaker Jorge Mautner still had a moon-like influence on Caetano Veloso and is mentioned in the same breath as artist Hélio Oiticica, poet Augusto de Campos, director Glauber Rocha and designer Rogerio Duarte as one of the movement’s spiritual forefathers.
It was Mautner’s trilogy of novels, the Mythology of Kaos, as well as his song “Radioatividade,” about the Third World War, which caused Mautner to be labelled a dangerous Trotskyist subversive and his name included in the National Security Law. He went into political exile and in London met up with Veloso and Gil, where he filmed O Demiurgo, a low-budget feature film starring Veloso in the title role and Gil as Pan.
A colorful feature film that mixes exile with the figure of the poet Rimbaud and the feminist revolution. “It’s super-intellectual. A fable-musical-philosophical-chanchada”, Mautner says. He also affirms that the work focuses a lot on the longing for Brazil, on the will that the exiled had to return to their homeland. The idea came from conversations between the musician and his old father, “always talking about the pre-Socratics”, he recalls. Glauber Rocha states that “The Demiurge” is the best film “of” and “about” exile.