Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (49) Brazil - Part 2 - Phases of Cinema Novo: Part 2: de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

Rui Guerra

Ruy (Rui) Guerra directed 14 features,1962-2018, four in Brazil, the balance in Portugal, France, Mozambique and Mexico. He was born in Mozambique, studied at IDHEC in Paris 1952-4, and worked as an assistant director in France for several years. He shot his first feature Os Cafajestes/The Hustlers in Brazil in 1962, helping to initiate the Cinema Novo. He placed himself on the outside of the group with his uncompromising views about not abandoning a critical view of society for commercial success and saw state funding as a form of co-option.

In The Hustlers Guerra mixes fiction and documentary in focusing on the country's moral rather than economic underdevelopment in an implicit criticism of capitalism - lives lived on the margins without meaning beyond basic survival yet integrated into the system. It was initially banned as immoral and repugnant. The characters sole goal of money is constantly frustrated. The deployment of the camera, and image discontinuities between sound and image, often emphasises the distance between the characters and the reality surrounding them. Randal Johnson comments that while other Novo films in urban settings show the direct influence of Italian neo-realism and occasionally Eisenstein, Guerra's critique is “more subtle and indirect, his editing more akin to that of the nouvelle vague in experimenting with the use of time and space in a more formalist manner. “While Joaquim de Andrade, for example, has said that ideology is more important than form, Ruy Guerra's films suggest that only through proper form can ideology be properly transmitted.” (99)

In Os Fuzis/The Guns (1964) Guerra relocated the urban story set in Rio in The Hustlers, to the underdeveloped Brazilian northeast. It was originally to be filmed in Greece about a Greek village threatened by a pack of starving wolves. A detachment of soldiers is sent to defend the villagers and the conflict arises between them and the peasants. Guerra transformed this story into what Johnson calls “one of the most powerful political films ever made” that has been compared to Eisenstein's October and Rosi's Salvatore Guiliano, (99) “two of the very few films,” Michel Ciment identifies, “which apply a truly Marxist attitude to reality ” (100). In The Guns the starving wolves are replaced by peasants starving in a time of drought and the soldiers' mission is not so much to protect the local population but to protect a wealthy landowner's food warehouse. Guerra also took the less obvious option of centring the conflict within the detachment of soldiers sent at the request of the local mayor, a landowner, as the story develops, which comes to serve a repressive mediating function between the peasants and the powerful, two antagonistic competing blocks. To this, Guerra added the element of mysticism.

Johnson points to a cogent article by Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz who noted that the film itself divides into “two incompatible films.” On one hand there is a documentary of drought and poverty showing the fatalism, immobility, and passivity of the peasants waiting for rain and worshipping a holy ox led by one of the bearded prophets who travel the northeast, to be seen but not understood in psychological terms. On the other hand, the soldiers, in their mobility, complexity, and psychological depth, represent a more modern society. The documentary sequences concern and use as actors, the local population and the drought victims; the fictional sequences use actors in assumed roles. A rupture in style thus exists between the two blocks. As Schwarz observes, “the actors are to the non-actors, as the city-dwellers [the soldiers] with their technical civilisation, are to the evacuees [the peasants], as possibility is to predetermined misery, as plot is to inertia.”

Johnson takes up these perceptions to further show the virtual blockade of non-comprehension existing between the two groups since they come from two different worlds. In the eyes of the peasants the soldiers must seem like mythical figures who, with their technology see themselves as superior to the peasants, to them are no more than an amorphous mass. This is exemplified on a personal level in a love-hate relationship which develops between one of the soldiers, Mario, and a local woman, Luisa. Through the relationship Mario does come to understand his contradictory roles as a soldier and individual. Johnson concludes that “the de-centring of the dramatic focus from the peasants and their situation to the various levels of authority seems on the surface to reflect the populist vision of early Cinema Novo films, in which solutions come not from the people, but rather from enlightened sections of the ruling classes. The Guns is a critical, dialectical vision, not a populist one of the reality it depicts, “an anti-militarist film par excellence, [in which] Guerra distinguishes between the army as an institution and the individual soldiers who constitute it.” (100)

Guerra has explained that there are no good guys and bad guys in his films because he believes “that moral values are not to be located narrowly at the individual level, but at the level of class morality […] In The Guns if you belong to a class of shopkeepers, whatever you do you are a bad guy for the peasant; your behaviour cannot be judged outside the class to which you belong.” (quoted ibid 101). This is not to deny that change is possible on the level of individual consciousness (the example of Mario cited above), also played out in the case of Gaucho the lorry driver, a former soldier who is killed attempting to mediate.

On a formal level Guerra uses various cinematic modes in a dialectical narrative rejecting a conventional dramatic structure in which everything contributes to moving the plot forward. Ciment concurs: “Guerra stands aside, letting a network of meanings gradually rise to the surface […] a progressive unveiling of the sense without anything being said, as it's up to the audience to construe the dialectic from the story. Duration is charged with all its real weight and the direction sometimes uses plans sequences [sequence shots] lasting four or five minutes. […] The muffled build-up of the violence, the quick bursts of action, are authenticated by what psychologists have to say about the effects of starvation. Phases of elation follow periods of apathy and depression.” (100-1)

Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1932-88), described by Randal Johnson as “a poet in the guise of filmmaker,” made 5 features and 6 documentaries, 1959-82. Johnson notes that whether dealing with the impossible love of a priest in a small country town (O Padre e a Moca/The Priest and the Girl, '65), national myths (Macunaima ’ 69), Brazilian history (Os Inconfidentes/The Conspirators 71), or with sexual mores (Guerra Conjugal/Conjugal Warfare 75, Vereda Tropical/Tropical Paths 77), in which he maintains “a consistently coherent critical perspective through several different cinematic styles.”

Macunaima was the culmination of the first three phases of Cinema Novo. Its release in 1969 coincided with the ramping up of repression by the military-controlled government and it was, Johnson suggests, “perhaps the first Cinema Novo film to be formally innovative, politically radical, and immensely popular with the Brazilian public.” It is colourful, zany and fast moving, elevates bad taste to an aesthetic level, seems to ignore the limits of the frame and creates what de Andrade called a film without style with a popular black comedian Paulo José playing the hero, in contradiction, as both a passive and exuberant free spirit. (Johnson 25)

The film is adapted from Mario de Andrade's (not related to the director) modernist novel of the same name written in 1926 and published in 1928 “as a rhapsody (in the musical sense), that is, free fantasy ‘of an epic, heroic or national character’, the author [orchestrating] a combination of heterogeneous elements to create what has been called a compendium of Brazilian folklore […] through which the author attempts to synthesise Brazil. Although the base narrative structure of the novel is retained ”the film adaptation is not merely an attempt to express the ideas of the 1928 work in a different medium but is a critical reinterpretation and an ideological radicalisation of Mario de Andrade's rhapsody, recast in terms of the social, economic, and political realities of the late 1960s.” (ibid 27) Molotnik notes that “Terra em Transe and Macunaima couch their political messages in indirect forms: Rocha in violent allegory, Andrade in stylised, sometimes wacky satire.” The latter amounts to a bizarrely original, if unmistakable, critical stance, at least to Brazilian audiences, against repressive military rule and Brazil's state of unbalanced development.

Macunaima

The director’s basic strategy in the adaptation is to simplify and condense the book’s narrative and to make concrete its magical and fantastic elements. The film develops a critical relationship with the novel. It renders explicit what is implicit in the original and radicalises many latent political aspects of the novel making the film relate more directly to modern Brazilian social, political and economic reality. Whereas the original satirises foreign influence and cultural dependence, de Andrade denounces cultural and economic imperialism transmitted through a sub-code or sub-text of cannibalism (ibid 30).

In the form of an allegorical fable, Macunaima is a melange of Brazilian myths- 'all that is left unsaid' in Brazilian history, 'politically incorrect' in terms of race and race relations (white, black and indigenous) in the story of a man born as a black, adult-sized baby in the Amazonian wilderness to an old masculine-looking white woman of the indigenous people. Macunaima's birth is one of many scenes that plays upon race, sex, and age. He becomes a trickster and embarks on an picaresque odyssey to the city en route being permanently turned white by water from a 'magic spring'. He has a series of bizarre encounters in the city with a giant, cannibals and Cí, a female guerilla-killer with whom he fathers a black child although both are white. The central character, Macunaima, is sexually, politically, lazily, passive, Ci is always the aggressor, both sexually, and in making war on others, like housewives go shopping, in a reversal of conventional male-female roles. He only reacts strongly when Cí blows herself and their black baby up with an ill-timed bomb.

The narrative space of Macunaima is “one of incongruity, discontinuity, and non sequitur.“ (Johnson 29). Sexuality, urban violence, financial empire-building and capitalist development are all satirised. “incorporated by consumer society and co-opted by American cultural domination.” Macunaima pursues the magic stone, all that survives of Cí. An Olympic size swimming pool full of piranhas consumes the villainous giant Pietro Pietra after Macunaima shoots an arrow in his back. Molotnik suggests that a Brazilian audience, even without knowledge of the literary source, would have picked-up Pietro as a spoof of the immigrant Italian industrialists who “modernised” southern Brazil. Nor would they have missed the implications of the urban guerilla sequence which allows viewers to participate imaginatively in the shooting up of the forces of repression, at least until Cí meets her untimely end. The film ends with our unlikely “passive” hero of both good and evil, himself being consumed by piranhas.

In order to try and secure the film's wide release de Andrade had to play by the rules insofar as he coded the messages in highly farcical forms while capitalising on the respectability of the literary source to try and proof it against censorship generated by protest from an activist section of the middle classes. Molotnik points out that the extent of the success of Macunaimablew up the idea that social criticism, to be widely understood, must be confined to a realist aesthetic.

Cannibalism in Brazilian cultural terms was inspired by the modernist movement in the 20s as a nationalist strategy of anti-imperialism in which culture from the first world should be devoured, digested and recycled according to local needs. Cannibalism was described by Joaquin de Andrade as “an exemplary mode of consumption for underdeveloped peoples.” Another Cannibalist film is Peireiria de Santos's How Tasty was My Little Frenchman (1971)

Following the popular tropicalist films, Cinema Novo entered into “a politically engendered crisis of creativity” in 1971-2. As censorship and repression worsened, Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra and Carlos Diegues left Brazil for Europe. As funding became more problematic, several directors entered into co-production arrangements with other countries or financed their projects completely abroad. Brazilian cinema as a whole prospered through the “economic miracle” years 1967-73 which ultimately weakened the military dictatorship while resulting in “a brutal transference of wealth from the bottom to the top.”

Carlos Diegues

Carlos Diegues (1940-2025) directed 17 features and a number of documentaries, 1963-2018. Of all the Cinema Novo directors, Johnson regards Diegues “as perhaps the most intensely personal in his approach to filmmaking.” Johnson also nominates Diegues as one of the major theoreticians of Cinema Novo (52-3). One of the first to define the movement, he was also one of the first to protest its mythification and also the first “to declare it moribund.” He emphasised that new Brazilian cinema was a socially committed cinema but with the individuality of each film and filmmaker being defended. He emphasised that Cinema Novo “was not a school, it has no established style” (ibid).

Freedom for Diegues extended beyond freedom of expression for the auteur, to become one of the major thematic threads running through his films. Freedom from slavery in Ganga Zumba (1963), confirmed the existence of a new Brazilian cinema, and in his sixth feature,Xica da Silva (1976), the story tends to a utopian mode of love of freedom in the form of “an ode to the creativity to the Brazilian people […} a colourful, noisy, playful celebration of a little known historical figure.” The spirit, the director suggests, transcends any specific political situation […] evoking political struggle by opposing the [racist] stodginess of alien European culture and the vitality of Brazilian popular culture (ibid 75, 80).

A Grande Cicade/The Big City (1966) described by Johnson, like Ganga Zumba, as “an urban fable,” working toward an almost mythological freedom from economic marginalisation in an anti-realistic mosaic structure continuing and deepening that of the earlier film. Freedom from foreign domination and neocolonialism in Joana Francesco (1974) and Bye Bye Brasil (1979), transmutes to freedom to love regardless of age in Chuvas de Verão/Summer Showers (1978).

Diegues' special concern with the relationship between film and viewer, how a film is perceived and understood - he criticised the didactic posture of early Cinema Novo. This led him to experiment with different styles and modes of discourse ranging from the slow, deliberate realism in the fable form of Ganga Zumba (1963) to the anti-realism of The Big City ; the carnivalesque exuberance of Xica da Silva to non-linear Brechtian-influenced dramatic structure in Os Herdeiros/The Heirs (1968), intended as a mural of Brazilian political and cultural history from 1930-64, seen through the trajectory of a single, bourgeois family; and a major step forward to musical comedy in Quando o Carnival Chegar/When Carnival Comes (1972), from the political didacticism of Quando de samba, Alegria de Viva/Samba School, Joy of Living (1962).

Bye Bye Brasil

Johnson suggests that another central theme of Diegues' films - “a director in search of a style” - might be considered that of Brazilian cinema itself.” The “Hollywoodian” Bye Bye Brasil (1980), the first Brazilian feature to be commercially released in the United States, is dedicatedto Brazilians’ past, present and “perhaps the future,” as seen through the travels of a small-time circus troupe, a form of spectacle becoming less and less viable. Diegues’ cinema had evolved “from the relative “poverty” of Ganga Zumba to the relative “luxury” of Bye Bye Brasil, from the “esthetic of hunger” to a more commercially oriented and communicative esthetic of artistic pluralism.” Johnson adds that “(figuratively) run out of town by critics, Carlos Dieges [knew] that the only choice was to go forward in search of the artist’s utopia” (90).

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Robert Stam, “Third World and Postcolonial Cinema” The Cinema Book Cook & Bernink eds. pp. 120-9

Robert Stam, “Land in Anguish: Revolutionary Lessons” Jump Cut 10/11 1976

Robert Stam, Randal Johnson, Brazilian Cinema 1982 ; “Beyond Cinema Novo” Jump Cut Nov. 1979

Malcolm Coad, “Last Tangoes” Latin American Cinema in the 50s & 60s. ibid. pp.155-7

Michael Chanan, “New Cinemas in Latin America” Oxford History World Cinema ed. Nowell-Smith 1996

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Latin America” Making Waves:New Cinema of the 1960s 2008

Michel Ciment, “Glauber Rocha” “Ruy Guerra” Second Wave ed. Ian Cameron 1970

J.R.Molotnik, “Macunáimá” Jump Cut 12/13 197

Gordon Hitchens, “ A Conversation with Glauber Rocha” Film Quarterly Fall 1970

Randal Johnson Cinema Novo x 5 1984 essays on de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra, Rocha, dos Santos

Julianne Burton Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers 1986