In the late 1950s, young cinephiles in Rio de Janeiro began meeting at movie theaters and coffeehouses. Intrigued by both Hollywood classics and contemporary
European art films, the young men wrote articles calling for a change in filmmaking. Given opportunities in the commercial industry, they launched a movement: Cinema Novo, the Portuguese term for “New Cinema.”
In outline, Cinema Novo’s history conforms to that of many young cinemas, particularly the Parisian Nou-velle Vague. Yet the differences are striking. Although Brazil was in many ways a westernized country, it remained firmly a part of the underdeveloped Third World. The cinephiles, far more politically militant than their counterparts in France, wanted their films to speak for the disenfranchised people of their country—the ethnic minorities, the peasants and landless laborers. Influenced by Italian Neorealism as well as the New Wave, the directors sought to record their nation’s dilemmas and aspirations.
Cinema Novo films combined history and myth, personal obsessions and social problems, documentary realism and surrealism, modernism and folklore. In mixing populist nationalism, political criticism, and stylistic innovation, Cinema Novo recalled the Brazilian Modernist movement of the 1920s. It also chimed well with contemporary literary experiments and Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. The young directors became a link between the western new cinemas of the early 1960s and later Third World movements (see Chapter 23).
20.85 Barravento is filmed with a hand-held, zooming camera that dynamizes the capoeira fight/dance between Firmino and Aruan.
20.87 The hand-held camera is used to follow the family’s endless search for a home in Vidas secas.
20.86 Hired by a landowner and a priest to kill the religious agitator Sebastiao, Antonio das Mortes takes aim at his real target in Black God, White Devil.
The most populous country in South America, Brazil had a topography stretching from drought-parched areas to tropical beaches. Its population included groups of African, Amerindian, European, and Far Eastern descent. Through a policy of “developmental nationalism,” President Joao Goulart sought to unify and modernize the country. His plan for achieving industrial capitalism required that people recognize the country’s backwardness. Although under fire from both right and left, Goulart supported many liberal cultural initiatives.
Cinema Novo was one such effort. Nelson Pereira dos Santos had already made his mark with the neorealistic Rio 40 Degrees (1955) and was to serve as producer, editor, and inspiration to a group of younger men who came from film schools and film criticism. Like many New Wave directors before them, Brazil’s filmmakers first tried their hands at short films. Ruy Guerra, Glauber Rocha, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade made shorts while they were in their teens and early twenties. The anthology film Slum Times Five (1962) included episodes by Carlos Diegues, de Andrade, and others. Within a year, distinctive Cinema Novo features began to appear. Drawing on stylistic resources of other new cinemas— hand-held camera, zoom shots, plans-sequences, underplayed dramatic moments, temps morts, ambiguous leaps between fantasy and reality—these directors turned out politically critical works.
Many films concentrated on life outside the cities. Glauber Rocha’s Barravento (“The Turning Wind,” 1962) is set in Bahia. Firmino returns from the city and tries to persuade the fishermen to free themselves from bondage to the owner of their nets. He also comes into conflict with Aruan, a local holy man (20.85). Eventually Aruan becomes the new force of social consciousness.
Rocha’s next film, Black God, White Devil (1963), is more disjunctive. Set in the sertao, Brazil’s harsh northwestern plain, it shows the oppression of the peasants by messianic religious leaders and vicious bandits. Between the two forces stand the credulous follower Manuel and the gunman Antonio das Mortes (20.86). The story is modeled on folk ballads, and songs comment ironically on the action. When Antonio kills the bandit Corisco, a choir sings “The power of the people is the strongest power,” followed immediately by a lengthy take of Manuel and his wife fleeing across the wastelands. “Sad, ugly films... screaming, desperate films where reason does not always prevail”15— Rocha’s description of Cinema NOvo’s style of this period fits his own work perfectly.
Nelson Pereira dos Santos dealt with peasant life more austerely in Vidas secas (“Barren Lives,” 1963). Adapted from a classic novel, the film traces the attempts of Fabiano to find work during the 1940s drought. The dedramatized, almost wordless opening sequences introduce his family’s trek across the arid sertao (20.87). In the course of the film, the family picks up scraps of work, but Fabiano is unjustly arrested and beaten. The film ends as it began, with quasi-documentary images of the family on the move.
Ruy Guerra made one of the earliest Cinema Novo films, Os Cafejestes (“The Loafers,” 1962), but his fame arrived with Os Fuzis (“The Guns,” 1963). Soldiers arrive in a famine-ridden town to guard a landlord’s warehouse. As the starving peasants pray for miracles, the soldiers idle away their time drinking, firing their rifles, and chatting with the truck driver Gaucho. At the film’s climax, Gaucho leads an aborted rebellion. Guerra uses striking wide-angle close-ups as well as long shots, which dramatize the alignment of political forces (20.88).
These films’ stylistic differences reveal the influence of the European auteur theory. Guerra’s crisp deep-focus imagery, the bleached dedramatization of Pereira dos
Santos, and the flamboyant zooms and jerky cutting of Rocha mark each film as the product of a distinct sensibility. Most Cinema Novo directors followed Rocha in seeing the auteur theory as a vehicle of political critique. He considered cinematic authorship a reaction to the dominance of Hollywood; making idiosyncratic films was itself a revolutionary act.
The worldwide popularity of samba and bossa nova music and the building of the modernistic capital Brasilia helped promote Cinema Novo as the expression of an energetic, modernizing country. More concretely, the films were oriented toward Goulart’s ideology of consciousness raising. They show peasant Brazilians oppressed by illiteracy, subsistence living, and military and clerical rule. The sertao films exemplify what Rocha called an “aesthetics of hunger,” the revelation of how centuries of suffering could burst into cathartic rebellion. “Cinema Novo shows that the normal behavior of the starving is violence.”16
President Goulart’s reforms aroused fears in conservative circles. In 1964, the military seized power. For more than two decades afterward, Brazil was ruled by generals. Guerra, who left the country soon after the coup, declared that Cinema Novo ended in 1964; however, the movement was not yet interrupted. Despite the authoritarian regime, politically critical art flourished. Cinema Novo directors continued to work, and new filmmakers entered the industry.
Several Cinema Novo directors reflected on the failure of the Goulart government. Their films often focus on the tormented intellectual, cut off from both the bourgeoisie and the people. Gustavo Dahl’s The Brave 'Warrior (1967) ends with an idealistic politician about to shoot himself in the mouth. Rocha gave this despair an extravagant treatment in Terra em transe (“Land in Anguish,” 1967). In the country of Eldorado, a political myth is played out within the delirious consciousness of a revolutionary poet. Terra em transe is a surrealistic interrogation of the artist’s political role, culminating in an Eisensteinian sequence: while police fire at the poet, churchmen and businessmen hold a raucous celebration.
Despite the new regime, Brazilian film culture was advancing. Universities were starting film courses, an annual festival was begun in Rio, and new magazines appeared. The collapse of the Atlantida and Vera Cruz companies (p. 411) had seemed to end all prospects for a national film industry, but both Goulart and his military successors sponsored state initiatives aimed at rebuilding it. Legislation dictated tax exemptions, uniform ticket prices, and bigger screen quotas for the local product. The Grupo Executivo da Industria Cine-
20.88 Os Fuzis: a truckload of onions in the right foreground is off-limits to the peasants, kept passive and frightened by the soldiers.
20.89 Antonio das Mortes: in the town square, Antonio and the bandit reenact the battle that climaxed Black God, White Devil.
Matografica (GEICINE) was created in 1961 to coordinate film policy. In 1966, GEICINE was absorbed into the Instituto Nacional do Cinema (INC), which supported production through loans and prizes. Cinema Novo had a strong influence on the agency. The INC also assisted coproductions, which sharply increased national film output.
This expansion was aided by an abrupt turn of political events. As inflation increased in 1967 and 1968, so did strikes and protests. A second coup took place, installing hard-line generals. They pushed through legislation curtailing civil liberties and dissolving political parties. Leftist forces launched urban guerrilla war, and, between 1969 and 1973, Brazil was a battleground between terrorists and the military regime.
As usual, Rocha was quick to comment on contemporary conditions. 0 Dragiio da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (“The Evil Dragon versus the Holy Saint,” aka Antonio das Mortes, 1969) revisits the subject of Black God, White Devil, but now the mystic and the bandit are seen as affirmative forces. No longer are the peasants benighted victims; revolution arises out of folk rituals, such as theater and festival. Accordingly, Rocha’s technique is more stylized. The people become the audience as the antagonists play out their conflicts in a bare, semitheatrical arena (20.89). In asking spectators to consider his films as part of an evolving personal vision,
Rocha continued to take European auteur cinema as a model. Yet he also pushed toward political militancy. He saw Antonio das Mortes as an instance of “guerrilla filmmaking” in which the cold-blooded killer had obvious analogies with the new regime.
As part of the military government’s plan to centralize cultural activities, film policy was recast. Censorship became much stiffer. In 1969, an agency was created to control filmmaking. Empresa Brasileira de Filmes (Embrafilme) was charged with organizing film export and financing production, much as France’s CNC did. Through low-interest loans to successful firms, Embrafilme helped boost production to a postwar high of ninety-one films in 1971. The agency would eventually absorb the INC and fuel Brazil’s export success in the 1980s.
Although production was flourishing, political repression drove many artists out of the country. Rocha and Diegues made films elsewhere, while Guerra returned to make a film in 1970 and then departed once more. The Cinema Novo directors who stayed altered their filmmaking in distinctive ways.
One trend, which encompassed music and theater as well, was called “tropicalism.” This was a comic and grotesque celebration of indigenous popular culture. Instead of Cinema NOvo’s didactic insistence on the backwardness of rural life, tropicalism treated folk culture as brimming with vitality and wisdom. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaima (1970), for example, is an exuberant comic epic blending Brazilian myths with contemporary satire. Filmed in brilliant color, full of surreal gags and sudden switches of tone, Macunaima became the first Cinema Novo film to win large audiences.
Throughout Macunaima the lazy, deluded hero is confronted with cannibalism as a way of avenging oneself on enemies. This motif, an echo of 1920s literary movements, became another element of Cinema Novo work of the period. The metaphor of cannibalism showed authentic Brazilian culture ravenously incorporating colonial influences. In How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1972), Pereira dos Santos’s Direct Cinema technique and voice-over narration show a French colonialist captured by a tribe of Tupinamba. He is allowed to live among them before he is executed and eaten. The film dwells satirically on the cultural and economic dynamics of imperialism, as when the greedy colonist and the white trader open a grave in their search for treasure (Color Plate 20.5).
Both tropicalism and cannibalism were in the tradition of Brazil’s “festive left,” which traditionally paid homage to popular culture. Rocha saw in these qualities a way for filmmakers to connect with myth and to guide people toward “anarchic liberation. ”17 These trends could win a wider audience than did the astringent realism or flamboyant experiments of earlier Cinema Novo efforts. The competition of television serials and erotic comedies (the pornochanchada) also pushed filmmakers toward more accessible, spectacle-centered works.
As Cinema Novo became a prestige cinema, winning financial support from INC and Embrafilme, a more extreme avant-garde arose to challenge it. Colleges, cine-clubs, and archives began to screen samples from the udigrudi, or “underground.” Rogerio Sganzala’s Red Light Bandit (1968), Andrea Tonacci’s Bla Bla Bla
(1968), and Julio Bresanne’s Killed the Family and Went to the Movies (1969) were all-out assaults on good taste. Gruesome scenes of murder and vomiting were recorded in deliberately sloppy technique. This self-proclaimed “aesthetics of garbage” savagely mocked the aesthetics of hunger, and many scenes parodied films by Rocha, Guerra, and their peers. Cinema Novo, its edge blunted by exile or cooperation with the state-controlled film industry, was no longer a disruptive force.
Diegues and Guerra continued to make politically critical films in exile. Rocha became even more militant. He denounced Cinema Novo’s formative influences— Neorealism and the Nouvelle Vague—declaring that Third World revolution would overturn both Hollywood and the tradition of European authorship represented by Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Sergei Eisenstein. In this he echoed the manifestos of “imperfect cinema” and “Third Cinema” elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Years before, Rocha and his colleagues had been, as Diegues put it, “making political films when the [French] New Wave was still talking about unrequited love.”!8 The young Rio cinephiles had helped launch a tradition of political modernism that swept through the world during the next decade, as we shall see in Chapter 23.
Cinematic modernism, revived in the decade after World War II, became even more prominent between 1958 and 1967. While established directors consolidated the trend, young auteurs experimented with novel techniques and applied them to new subjects. Now art-cinema films were likely to be fragmentary and nonlinear in their time and space, provocative and puzzling in their storytelling, ambiguous in their thematic implications.
Moreover, many young cinemas were explicitly, and critically, political. In this respect, the Nouvelle Vague, influential in so many ways, lagged behind. Outside France, many filmmakers assaulted myths about national
References
History, cast a severe eye on contemporary social conditions, celebrated rebellions against authority, and dissected the mechanisms of repression. Older directors like Resnais and Jancso and youthful talents like Godard,
Pasolini, Straub, Kluge, Chytilova, Makavejev, and Oshima were laying the groundwork for a “political modernism.” This trend would become central to international cinema in the decade after 1968.
World History
