A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film: From Nationalism to Protest 9781477325247

Citation preview

A CENTURY OF

BRAZILIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture 

A CENTURY OF

BRAZILIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM FROM NATIONALISM TO PROTEST DARLENE J. SADLIER

University of Texas Press 

 Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sadlier, Darlene J. (Darlene Joy), author. Title: A century of Brazilian documentary film : from nationalism to protest / Darlene J. Sadlier. Other titles: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021047900 ISBN 978-1-4773-2523-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2524-7 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2525-4 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—Brazil—History and criticism. | Documentary films—Social aspects—Brazil. | Documentary films—Political aspects—Brazil. | Documentary films—Technological innovations—Brazil. | Brazil—In motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 S23 2022 | DDC 070.1/8—dc23/ eng/20211027 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047900

doi:10.7560/325230

For Jim, as always

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 CH APTER 1 . The



Jungle and the City: Modernity in Two 1920s Documentaries  7

CH APTER 2 . Government



Educational Shorts, Bandit Footage, and Vera Cruz Documentaries  35

CH APTER 3 . Documentary

and Cinema Novo  61

CH APTER 4 . Documentary,

Dictatorship, and Repression  89

CH APTER 5 . Biographies CH APTER 6 .

Documenting Identity  145

CH APTER 7 . Biographies CH APTER 8 . The



of a Sort, Part I (1974–1989)  115

of a Sort, Part II (1994–2016)  167

City and the Countryside  211

Epilogue: A Country in Crisis  241

Select Filmography  253 Notes  263 Bibliography  287 Index  297

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began to form in 2017 shortly after I received a package from my friend and São Paulo theater critic Jefferson del Rios, who wanted me to see the extraordinary 1922 documentary No país das amazonas (In the country of the Amazons). Production of the special-edition DVD Jefferson sent was supervised by another São Paulo friend, Felipe Lindoso. Jefferson and his wife, Bia, and I would regularly see one another at the São Paulo home of the writer Edla van Steen, who introduced us and, like Jefferson but in a different way, was instrumental in my decision to write this book. In 2018 Jefferson and Bia introduced me to Sérgio Muniz, who is a mine of information about the Farkas Caravan in which he played a central role and whose documentaries I write about in chapter 4. The Universidade de São Paulo film historian Eduardo Morettin has been a touchstone for my questions about Brazilian history and documentary; his extensive writings on documentary along with his activities encouraging publication in the field are inspirational. São Paulo is also the home of the Cinemateca Brasileira, where I conducted research; there I received the generous support of Gabriela Sousa de Queiroz, head of the Center for Documentation, who called my attention to many invaluable resources for the book. In Rio I worked with the archive of Edgard Roquette-Pinto at the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). Cícero Sandroni greatly facilitated my research there, and I cherish my friendship with him and his wife, Laura. Knowing of my documentary interest, Ivelise Ferreira wrote from Rio of a seminar about contemporary Brazilian documentary to take place online; we both enrolled and as student-participants had many lively discussions about the films and interviews we saw in class, all of which kept our friendship close as the pandemic raged around us. I received two grants from Indiana University to support research at the Cinemateca Brasileira. At Indiana, the Moving Image Archive specialist Carmel Curtis provided invaluable help with the preparation of images for the book. ix

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acknowledgments

For several years I have had the good fortune to work with senior editor Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press. Jim has sound editorial judgment, and I am grateful for his advice and excellent sense of humor. My thanks to assistant editor Sarah McGavick and senior manuscript editor Lynne Ferguson for their work on this book. James Naremore has always encouraged me in my writing, and this book is no exception. There are no words to convey my deep appreciation for his enthusiasm about the project, his careful reading of chapters, his invaluable feedback, and most of all his loving support. The book is dedicated to him.

A CENTURY OF

BRAZILIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM

INTRODUCTION

This book covers one hundred years of documentary film in Brazil, with films organized in roughly chronological order, often grouped according to their thematic concerns. Brazilian scholarship classifies documentaries as curtas (shorts up to thirty minutes), médias (mediums from thirty to sixty-nine minutes), and longas (feature-lengths over seventy minutes). Examples of all three appear in this book, although I have used the terms “shorts” and “feature-lengths” as descriptors. I discuss a wide variety of documentaries—anthropological, propagandistic, biographical, autobiographical, instructional, educational, state-sponsored, independent— without worrying too much about employing the term “documentary” to cover them all, but I trust readers will accept my use of it. Any commentary on documentary films, whether from Brazil or elsewhere, is haunted by the question of what counts as a documentary. We can all think of examples of such films, but like every generic category in cinema, “documentary” is a loose concept with members at its margins that make precise definition difficult or perhaps impossible. The range of works that could count as documentary include “observational,” fly-onthe-wall studies of people or institutions; extended talking-head interviews; “essay” films; and reenactments mixed with on-the-spot footage. Not all documentaries must contain original or archival photographic evidence; for example, it would be possible to make a documentary about the history of Brazilian cartoons consisting entirely of clips from animated pictures. The term “nonfiction film” is somewhat easier to manage, but it, too, is difficult to pin down exactly. From at least the time of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) until now, documentary filmmakers have staged events, sometimes without revealing that fact, and their practice often raises questions about ethics or truth-telling. Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973) is a nonfiction film with plenty of documentary footage, but its whole purpose is to trouble the distinction between truth and fakery by openly playing tricks on the audience. I hope to demonstrate both the art and social purpose of documentary, 1

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introduction

and I believe a study of this kind has another value. Taken together, the films provide a way of discussing the larger history of Brazilian society, politics, and culture. In addition to celebrating certain achievements or individuals, they document the nation’s social problems and radical shifts between liberal-democratic and authoritarian governments. The earliest examples I discuss tend to be nationalistic and propagandistic, and as I show, several later examples were made during periods of heavy censorship or repression. But as technology began to give filmmakers greater flexibility, documentary became a powerful means of social protest, an alternative to the official accounts in mainstream media. In all such cases, I have tried to give readers the historical context for these protests, developing an implicit narrative that runs alongside them. The rich history of Brazilian cinema as a whole has been studied in English by numerous scholars, beginning with Randal Johnson and Robert Stam’s seminal volume Brazilian Cinema (1982, revised 1995) and more recently by Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison’s Brazilian National Cinema (2007). These and other works, such as Lúcia Nagib’s edition The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), all include insightful discussions of documentary films within their larger focus on fiction films. David William Foster’s Latin American Documentary Filmmaking: Major Works (2013) and Vinícius Navarro and Juan Carlo Rodríguez’s edited volume New Documentaries in Latin America (2014) offer other Brazilian contributions to this growing cinematic field. Looking back in time, Luciana Martins’s Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil (2014) focuses on the role of image-making in the country’s first four decades of the twentieth century, and Maite Conde’s Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2018) is required reading on silent cinema and film culture of the Belle Époque at the turn of the twentieth century. In his 2019 Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil, Gustavo P. Furtado studies a broad range of films since 1985, when Brazil returned to democracy after twentyone years of dictatorship. Every film scholar owes a debt of gratitude to Julianne Burton Carvajal for her groundbreaking Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (1988) and for The Social Documentary in Latin America (1990), with essays on documentary by two of Brazil’s leading film critics, Jean-Claude Bernardet and Ismail Xavier. My study is indebted to these and many other important works. Public interest in films documenting the Brazilian reality dates to the end of the nineteenth century, before my history begins, with what were initially called “naturals.” Some of the oldest to appear, 1897–1898, feature fishermen, forts, and warships in Rio’s Guanabara Bay; a train’s arrival in

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Petrópolis, the summer home of royals and presidents; and a visit with President Prudente de Morais’s family in the Catete Palace.1 The last two were filmed by Afonso Segreto, son of Italian immigrants; along with his brother Paschoal, Afonso Segreto was a major figure in early Brazilian cinema. Paschoal opened the country’s first movie theater, the Salão de Novidades de Paris in Rio, then the nation’s capital. Afonso is credited with making Brazil’s first documentary, in 1896, composed of scenes of Rio he filmed from a ship entering Guanabara Bay.2 The Lumière cinematograph’s debut at the Teatro Lucinda on July 15, 1897, and at the Salão de Novidades a few days later was widely publicized and a cause for celebration; most titles were imported from Europe, especially Portugal, as local production geared up.3 The Teatro Lucinda program offered, among other things, sights of Portugal’s trains, boats, and seascapes and a segment on firemen from Oporto.4 Cinema operators often changed titles, announcing already exhibited films as new attractions to ensure income but leaving repeat customers often disenchanted with the sly switch. Documentaries from the Belle Époque (1898–1914) centered on topics common to those of other countries.5 Dignitaries’ visits, especially those of presidents and notable foreigners, were popular with audiences, who possibly for the first time saw their nation’s leaders up close and in motion. This was certainly the case of the moviegoing public outside Rio, where presidents resided until the construction of Brasília some fifty years later. President Afonso Pena was filmed visiting São Paulo in 1908; one year later, movie theaters were showing his funeral on screen. The oldest surviving documentary footage was also made in 1909. A film sponsored by the Automobile Club of Brazil, Circuito de São Gonçalo (São Gonçalo circuit),6 captures an enthusiastic crowd cheering drivers at the country’s second major automobile race held in Niterói.7 Footage of expeditions into the little-known interior were also popular. The short Rondônia (1912), filmed on location by the anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto, was an ethnographic study of the remote Nhambiquara tribe. Theodore Roosevelt was often the subject of shorts commemorating his exploits in Brazil; celebrations in Rio over his visit there were the subject of the 1913 Festejos realizados no Rio de Janeiro em honra do ex-Presidente Theodoro Roosevelt (Festivities held in Rio de Janeiro in honor of former President Theodore Roosevelt). Shortly after that, cinemas were featuring Expedição Roosevelt ao Matto Grosso (1915, Roosevelt expedition to Mato Grosso), about his adventures in the interior. Brazil’s large German immigrant population no doubt delighted in seeing compatriots in Almoço no Kaiser oferecido ao Presidente da República e esposa (1914, Lunch on the Kaiser offered to the

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president of the Republic and his wife). Hermes da Fonseca was president during the German visit on the cusp of World War I. Publicity beckoned audiences to see “the salutes exchanged and the Brazilian and German squads in Rio de Janeiro’s bay.”8 Thousands of miles from the nation’s capital, footage was being shot of the jungle and river systems in the Amazon. As festas no Amazonas (1909, Festivities in the Amazon) was among the shorts shown at the cinema Recreio Amazonense in Brazil’s rubber capital, Manaus. Roaming Amazonian waterways with his 35 mm camera, the photographer-turnedcinematographer Silvino Santos spent three years, 1918–1920, filming the feature-length Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (The Amazon, the largest river in the world). The story of that lost project, his follow-up prizewinning feature, and Santos’s long undervalued role as one of Brazil’s most important silent-film directors is where this book begins. Many of the films I discuss, among them the 1929 São Paulo “symphony” film, the government educational shorts begun in the mid-1930s, and the 1950s Vera Cruz Companhia Cinematográfica’s documentaries made during that studio’s short lifetime, fortunately were available at the Cinemateca Brasilieira in São Paulo. Were it not for that institution, with its excellent library, paper and film archives, preservation center, digitized catalogues, online resources, and dedicated specialist staff, this book and many others would not be possible. Of special importance is the rich trove of materials in its Banco de Conteúdos Culturais (Bank of Cultural Contents).9 As I write this introduction, however, the Cinemateca has only recently been opened by the government, which seized the keys in August 2020. On July 27, 2021, a fire in one of its shuttered warehouses destroyed three rooms of films and paper documents. Many online forums, petitions, and articles appeared insisting that the Cinemateca’s holdings, which are invaluable for study of the nation’s audiovisual history, be returned to the public and researchers. In 2020, as the COVID pandemic raged through Brazil and moviegoing shifted almost completely to cable, streaming networks, and other viewing platforms, a four-week online seminar was announced in Brazil on the topic of the contemporary Brazilian documentary. Curated and moderated by the filmmaker Bebeto Abrantes and critic Carlos Alberto Mattos, the twelve two-and-a-half-hour sessions included live interviews with directors and online access to one or more of their films, supported by bibliographic selections. Produced by Márcio Blanco, director of the nonprofit association Imaginário Digital, the subject and timing of the seminar, entitled Na Real_Virtual, was fortuitous for the present book as

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I began to write about twenty-first century documentary. Sold out prior to its July 20 opening with acclaimed director Maria Augusta Ramos’s O processo (2018, The Trial), a documentary about the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, the seminar coincided with that year’s National Documentary Day, celebrated annually in Brazil on August 7. Established by the Association of Brazilian Documentarians, the date is an homage to Olney São Paulo (August 7, 1936-February 15,1978), whose short fiction film Manhã cinzenta (1969, Gray morning), about the arrest and torture of two protesters, resulted in his own arrest and torture in 1969 by the military dictatorship then in power. What the organizers of Na Real_Virtual were recognizing with the opening seminar and its equally successful Part II in November 2020 was the rise in production and scholarly and popular interest in documentaries. Historically relegated to private showings, film clubs, and film festival circuits, documentaries were capturing larger audiences with occasional theatrical releases such as Aurélio Michelis’s O cineasta da selva (1997, Filmmaker of the Jungle) and José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s Ônibus 174 (2002, Bus 174) and more importantly with television. Among the earliest programs devoted to documentary was journalist Nelson Hoineff’s Documento especial: Televisão verdade (Special document: Television truth), which first aired in 1989 on the Manchete network and continued on two other networks until 1998. Pay-TV channels like GNT began featuring documentary series such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s four-part Casa grande & senzala (2001, Masters and the Slaves), which he followed with Raízes do Brasil (2003, Roots of Brazil), a commercially released documentary on the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and his classic study for which the film is named. What is known as the retomada (resurgence) of Brazilian cinema in 1995, with the international success of Carla Camurati’s historical satire Carlota Joaquina: Princesa do Brasil (Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil) saw, in the following year, the first É Tudo Verdade (It’s All True) film festival, featuring twenty-nine works by Brazilian and international documentary filmmakers.10 Festival founder Amir Labaki’s prescient decision to use Orson Welles’s tongue-in-cheek title for the film that Welles was forced to abandon in Brazil served to call attention to the mix of objective and subjective, of truth and “fake” strategies that have characterized documentary from before the time of No país das amazonas in 1922. In the context of the pandemic, É Tudo Verdade held its twenty-sixth festival online in 2021 with a roster of seventy feature-length and short documentaries from twenty-four nations.

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The creation of DOCTV in 2003 in association with TV Cultura in São Paulo brought more regional works into the public television sector, supporting independent filmmaking with prizes and other financial incentives. It also enlisted some of Brazil’s major documentarians, including Eduardo Coutinho and Geraldo Sarno, to evaluate projects and advise on selections to be aired. In 2006 the government of Brazil launched DOCTV Ibero-América in collaboration with fourteen other countries to promote documentary production and distribution. Now called DOCTV América Latina, the documentaries made under its auspices also appear daily on the public network TV Brasil and online. The cable TV and online arts and culture channel Curta! is dedicated exclusively to documentary. In 2018 government edicts launched under the Ministry of Culture boosted financing for documentaries about Black and Indigenous peoples, childhood and youth, and subjects to commemorate Brazil’s bicentennial in 2022. However, the dismantling of that ministry by President Jair Bolsonaro on his first day in office in 2019 and his administration’s attacks on culture and the arts, including the closing of the Cinemateca Brasileira in 2020, do not bode well for government-funded projects unless they are economically beneficial to the Ministry of Tourism, which oversees the Special Secretariat of Culture, where the Audiovisual Department is located. At the same time, digitalization has made filmmaking of all kinds more affordable, while major festivals and online programs offering films below theater costs, along with platforms like Vimeo, Netflix, and revived cinema clubs, have increased viewing and distribution potential and revenue streams. The history of documentary is ongoing in Brazil, and the possibilities, as evidenced by the Na Real_Virtual seminars, are endless. I hope the following pages will indicate how significant its history has been.

CHAPTER 1

The Jungle and the City MODERNITY IN TWO 1920S DOCUMENTARIES

Two of the most important and, until recently, rarely seen works of Brazilian silent cinema are No país das amazonas (1922, In the country of the Amazons), directed by Silvino Santos, and São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (1929, São Paulo: Symphony of the metropolis), directed by Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig. The first is a travelogue-style documentary about the Amazon rainforest economy with occasional ethnographic sequences; the second is a city symphony in modernist montage about a day in the industrial capital. On the surface, the two films could not be more different. At bottom, however, each is designed to celebrate a modern nation of industry, commerce, and distinctive identity. Both laud the “order and progress,” the motto on the national flag, of a Brazil eager to proclaim its modernity. The films are also implicitly about migration within the country and from Europe that helped compensate for the loss of labor after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Both films were in fact made by immigrants.

No país das amazonas Viva Brazil! The pleasure is complete: neither an idiotic love story nor a dull farce, nothing, ultimately, of those imbecilic episodes that constitute the mediocre plot of moving pictures. Estado de São Paulo, July 27, 1923 The quote is from a review in the Estado de São Paulo newspaper in response to the feature-length documentary No país das amazonas, which was about to open in São Paulo after a three-month run in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil. Featured at the government-sponsored Exposição 7

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Internacional do Centenário da Independência (International Exhibition for the Centenary of Independence), a world’s fair held from September 7, 1922, to July 24, 1923, the film attracted large, enthusiastic audiences and received a gold medal. US officials in attendance were so impressed by the film that they organized a special Amazons Day to screen it at the US pavilion.1 The São Paulo theatrical run also proved successful, with showings at the Teatro Avenida, where it opened on August 8, and at sixteen other locations around the city. From there the film traveled to northeastern and southern Brazil and later crossed the ocean to theaters in London and Lisbon and was shown in the United States.2 No país das Amazonas was nearly left out of the Rio exhibition despite agreement by officials that motion pictures were an ideal way to promote Brazil’s natural resources to the fair’s other thirteen nation-participants. To achieve this end, fair officials had selected items from extant films on the country’s history and regional economies; they also created guidelines for newly contracted works, paid for by the metric foot, to hype commodities such as coffee, sugar, and cotton. Not surprisingly, given the financial incentives, filmmakers often expended greater efforts on length than artistry. Unlike the films commissioned by the exhibition, No país das amazonas was a private initiative financed by Joaquim Gonçalves “J. G.” Araújo, a rubber baron and entrepreneur in Manaus who decided to make a documentary about Amazon commodities sold by his company domestically and abroad. Araújo found the exhibition a perfect venue for a film about the region’s economy that could be used as a stage for attracting new markets to his business. He hired Silvino Santos, who worked for his firm and had considerable experience photographing the Amazon, as the ideal director. Negotiations between Araújo and Rio officials began in 1921, as Santos was well into filming, but stumbling blocks soon appeared. Among the organizers’ chief concerns was that other filmmakers had been contracted for films about the Amazon region, and a feature documentary, a “natural” as it was called then, by an unknown director might not appeal to Rio audiences. Subsequent disagreement arose over film rights. Discussions continued off and on after the fair opened. Frustrated by the impasse, Agesilau de Araújo, J. G. Araújo’s son and Santos’s collaborator on the film, contacted Minister of Agriculture Miguel Calmon about the scope and significance of the project. Convinced of its appropriateness for the centennial, Calmon arranged a private showing for Artur Bernardes, the newly elected president of Brazil, and his ministers at the presidential palace.3 Bernardes’s praise was sufficient to end the stalemate, and No país

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Mythical women warriors as publicity for No país das amazonas.

das amazonas debuted at the exhibition on March 22, 1923. The film’s enthusiastic critical and public reception proved that a documentary could succeed as box-office entertainment. Born to a middle-class family in Portugal in 1886, Silvino Santos left home for the Amazon when he was fourteen years old. In his unpublished memoir, he recounts that he was captivated by a story about the Amazon River in an illustrated magazine for high school students.4 With Portuguese relatives already relocated in the Amazon, he booked passage to Belém. His trip was part of a pattern of heavy migration from Portugal to Brazil, especially to the Amazon region, where fortunes were made during the rubber boom. The Portuguese Ferreira de Castro’s bestselling 1930 novel, A selva (The Jungle, 1935), is based on his own experiences as a young migrant who travels to Belém. J. G. Araújo also was among the thousands of Portuguese who migrated to the Amazon during the rubber boom and the much smaller number of them who made their fortunes. Unlike most export companies, Araújo’s business was diversified with commodities from

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Silvino Santos.

different regions, including tobacco, rubber, and nuts. Because his son Agesilau was interested in photography, Araújo invested in a laboratory for developing negatives and in the sale of imported film stock. Santos supervised the company’s film division, which operated until 1934, then moved to another part of the business. To complement the company’s film section, J. G. Araújo opened a separate shop called Manaus Arte that specialized in photographic and film equipment.5 Although unknown in Rio prior to the exhibition, Silvino Santos was a seasoned photographer and filmmaker who began his photographic career in Manaus in the final years of the rubber boom of 1879–1916. The harvesting of rubber transformed Manaus from a remote jungle capital into a modern metropolis and popular destination for international travelers. Among the city’s attractions was the Teatro Amazonas, where noted Italian opera companies regularly performed. One of Santos’s first large albeit controversial photographic commissions was from the Peruvian Consul Carlos Rey de Castro on behalf of the Peruvian Julio César Arana, a latifundista

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and head of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. Complaints had been lodged against the company by Walter Hardenberg, an American engineer in Peru who accused Arana of killing Indians and enslaving thousands more in the Putamayo district to work as rubber tappers. The company’s executive board in London, where Arana arranged financing, was informed of the atrocities and sent a representative to Putamayo who confirmed Hardenberg’s account.6 To discredit the accusations, Arana employed Santos to travel to Putamayo and make still photographs of the Indians’ working and living conditions. Santos’s visual record from the period August to October 1912 survives. Perhaps not surprisingly, his photographs document a tranquil jungle environment, with shots of fraternal gatherings of rubber workers alongside company foremen, local politicians, and Arana. Numerous photographs focus on Indigenous families and their festivals that likely served as evidence that workers were free to practice their cultural traditions. The photographic record also includes portrait studies of individual Indians, who pose in traditional as well as European dress, the latter likely to demonstrate the company’s supposedly civilizing effect.7 Arana was convinced that a motion picture about the Putamayo workers was an even better way of combating adverse reports and publicity. In 1913 he sent Santos to study filmmaking for three months at PathéFrères and Lumière Brothers in Paris. In 1914 Santos returned to Peru to make his first feature documentary about the Putamayo communities and labor conditions. But World War I had begun, and the ship carrying the film negative to England for processing was destroyed at sea and the film lost. Santos’s interest in the Putamayo people nevertheless continued. In 1920 he completed his second feature, Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (The Amazon, the largest river in the world), a three-year project that cut across the Amazon Basin beginning at the mouth of the river in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, and ending in Peru. The Peru segment featured footage of festival performances by the Putamayo Indians, some of whom Santos had photographed years earlier. Although not lost at sea, the negative sent to London for processing was never to return.8 By the time Santos made No país das amazonas in 1922, he had directed sixteen feature-length and short documentaries. His films were mostly about the Amazon River and its tributaries, although several shorts focused specifically on Manaus. Like No país das amazonas, his early films were often sponsored by individual entrepreneurs; Amazônia Cine-Film, a company founded in 1918 by Amazon businessmen, financed Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo and other works. But after joining J. G. Araújo’s firm in 1920,

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Santos gained access to state-of-the-art equipment, including a Bell and Howell camera and a Duplex copier, and was able to develop his own negatives, beginning with the footage of No país das amazonas. By the end of his life, he had filmed most of the Amazon Basin in Brazil and parts of Peru. Of his approximately one hundred films, only forty survive today.9 A straightforward, impressively photographed, sometimes relatively artless film, No país das amazonas has lost none of the fascination and wonder it must have had for its original audience. We, of course, see it differently, aware of certain historical ironies. It gives striking evidence of an early form of Taylorized, assembly-line production that was still dependent on arduous, amazingly skillful manual labor, and it shows the remarkably wide range of goods the Amazon Basin made available to industry. It documents the strange flora and fauna of the jungle and provides images of the Indigenous populations, who are presented to the camera almost as museum exhibits. It demonstrates a burgeoning economy that gave employment to thousands but overlooks the dangers to the Native population and the ecological crisis that would inevitably result from modernity. The film celebrates nature and wildness while at the same time celebrating the forces that commodify and destroy nature. No país das amazonas is organized paratactically as a series of episodes devoted to various commodities: fish, latex, Brazil nuts, tobacco, cattle, and more. Each episode has a kind of plot, showing how a product is harvested, industrially developed, sometimes brought to a factory, and shipped domestically or abroad. The temporally organized sections on the industrial processes are interspersed with what might be called travelogue-style digressions, less time-bound sequences showing the rail and shipping infrastructure in the jungle, the architecture and urban population in the capital of Manaus, the local folklore, and the beauties and dangers of the jungle in its native state. Significantly, and perhaps not always consciously, the film juxtaposes two orders of time that are symptomatic of modernity: on one hand are sequences organized by the efficient clock time of industrial labor and the production of commodities; on the other hand are almost still shots or sequences that seem outside time, impervious to development or change, illustrating the surrounding jungle and its Native inhabitants. The result is a kind of catalogue of wonders, all the more intriguing for viewers today because it depicts what has long passed. The film opens with a series of title cards that describe the size and resources of Amazonas, a remote and little-known region that was still largely associated with myth and legend. In fact, the word “amazonas” in the film’s title refers not to the geographic area but to the Amazons,

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the mythic women warriors of ancient times for whom the river and state were named. So compelling and pervasive were the tales surrounding these women that speculation about their existence carried into the nineteenth century. The Austrian naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Karl Friedrich Phillipp von Martius wrote about Brazil during that century; their descriptions of a New World of fantastic beings were often designed to engage readers, shock Old World sensibilities, and, one might add, boost sales. Santos and Araújo may have had a similar strategy in mind when titling their work and using a woodcut of naked Amazons on horseback to publicize it. The language of the film’s title cards, which were written by Agesilau Araújo, harks back to colonial times and the ufanista (hyperbolic) prose that extolled Brazil’s natural wealth. There are also titles modeled after a seventeenth-century nativista rhetoric that was used to tout Brazil in comparison with other countries, such as that Amazonas is an “enormous territorial expanse greatly superior to that of so many other countries.” New World writers employed ufanista and nativista rhetoric to convince Portuguese kings to invest in the bountiful land with its endless profit potential. King Manuel, who reigned from 1495 to 1521, and his successors did just that, and the returns were immense. Discovered in the late seventeenth century, Brazilian gold, along with silver and diamonds, bankrolled one of the most luxurious periods in the history of the Portuguese Empire and, indirectly, the industrial revolution in Britain. No país das amazonas employs similar rhetorical devices to attract new markets for goods handled by Araújo’s firm. Once it was approved for the exhibition, the film was perfectly placed to accomplish its aims. Following the introductory title cards, an iris-out appears featuring Manaus’s modern port facilities, also described in ufanista terms as a “center of great activity and progress.” Footage of river commerce segues into a title card commentary that despite eight hundred miles that separate Manaus from the mouth of the Amazon River, there are no obstacles to shipping goods; the large transatlantic British freighter Hildebrand is shown smoothly gliding from port into the Rio Negro. Santos also draws attention to the port’s large warehouses, long floating docks, and easy loading and unloading of passengers and products. From the port scenes the film broadens to showcase the Amazonian capital’s large public squares and such architectural landmarks as the Municipal Palace, St. Sebastian’s Cathedral, the Governor’s Palace, and the world-famous Teatro Amazonas opera house with its stained-glass dome. Inserted into this architectural tour is footage of the city’s main

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commercial thoroughfare. The street scene is not especially interesting, yet the camera lingers until a title card appears to inform viewers that the J. G. Araújo Company occupies buildings on the avenue. This is the first of several references to Araújo’s firm. In this way, Santos emphasizes the company’s importance by seamlessly featuring it alongside Manaus’s most influential institutions and landmarks. Transitions between scenes of the modern capital and the surrounding jungle take on a conventional travelogue rhetoric in which viewers are invited to board ship on a river journey into the rainforest. Most of what follows consists of stops along the Amazon River and its tributaries to observe the collection and processing of different products. Like entries in a textbook or encyclopedia, title cards appear at regular intervals to identify each product by name in Portuguese and Latin. A title card for the first stop informs viewers that the “Manatus Americanos” is one of largest inhabitants of the jungle’s lake system. Devoted largely to the manatee, also known as the sea cow, these scenes are both riveting and unsettling. Santos begins the segment with a disturbing shot of four dead manatees arranged in a row on their backs. Manatees are large, strange-looking mammals, like the fantastic sea creatures described in colonial works that were both captivating and frightening. A close-up of one of the manatees with closed eyes and armlike flippers crossed and resting on its body looks uncannily like a human laid to rest. Consumed as an alternative to fish, the meat of the manatee did not appeal to everyone because it resembled human flesh. Following these intriguing yet eerily grotesque images, the documentary turns into a primer of sorts on the skill and labor required to capture, kill, and process the mammals. Manatees are strong and agile; they can be as long as thirteen feet and weigh a ton. The film documents these characteristics by showing a harpooned manatee pulling a fisherman in a rowboat at waterskiing speed until the animal finally tires and gives up. A subsequent scene focuses on the rower’s struggle to haul the giant catch onboard. It is an amazing demonstration of human skill and strength, involving a manatee so large it barely fits in the boat. The film shifts to the shoreline filled with rows of dead manatees and pirarucús, a much-prized fish that can weigh more than two hundred pounds. The pirarucú is also fierce and resilient, as shown in a shot of a fisherman repeatedly clubbing one on its head to haul it onboard. Additional blows are meted out to kill the captured pirarucús as they wriggle on the shore. The documentary then proceeds to examine the different stages in processing the catch. These include gutting and trimming flesh from the

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A dead manatee in No país das amazonas.

bone and a process called moquear, in which large filets are roasted over fire and then preserved in their own fat. During the cleanup, fishermen toss handfuls of discarded entrails into the lake. Here Santos turns his camera on a large group of crocodiles that expectantly huddle close to the shore. The footage includes dramatic close-ups of their powerful jaws and razor-sharp teeth as they furiously snap up and tear apart the treats. The film rarely comments on the workers’ origins, but many darkskinned laborers, as seen in the fishing sequence, were likely northeasterners or blood relations of the thousands who fled the drought-stricken Northeast and, like the Portuguese, migrated to the Amazon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Northeasterners were prominent among the rubber tapper population, and they continued to migrate during the 1920s and long after. When work as tappers grew slack as demand for rubber declined, they turned to other local industries such as those associated with fish, Brazil nuts, tobacco, and cattle. No part of the film is a more compelling portrait of labor and efficiency than the segment on Brazil nuts, which documents the different stages of the product from the jungle to the city. Santos begins with shots of the tall trees where the nuts grow inside large, round, outer shells that hang from the limbs. Like the rhetoric in colonial texts, visual references to size are everywhere in the film. To give an idea of one nut tree’s circumference, Santos films five workers who extend their arms and join hands but can encircle only a portion of the massive trunk. Although danger in the jungle is more commonly associated with wild animals and insects, a title card comments on the perils of collecting nuts, whose large shells must

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be sufficiently mature to have dropped onto the ground. For a worker to approach a tree prior to maturation was to risk serious injury and possibly death from a plummeting, baseball-like shell. With large baskets strapped to their backs, workers use machetes to pierce the round shells, which they quickly toss over their shoulders into the baskets. Their speed and accuracy are dazzling, as is their dexterity in breaking open the shells and removing the clusters of nuts from inside. The film then follows other stages in the nuts’ preparation, including sorting and discarding unusable items and washing and loading the nuts into boats bound for a riverside warehouse. There Santos continues to focus on workers’ skill and swiftness of movement from one level of processing to another. In a primitive assembly line involving factorylike speed and repetition, workers shovel nuts into boxes, separate them by size, and weigh and empty the boxes into large containers. These are loaded onto freighters identified in a title card as North American and British, a nod to the international markets for Brazil nuts in “the most important centers of consumption.” Viewers learn that some export markets prefer Brazil nuts removed from their individual shells, and the film promptly segues to an Araújo factory in Manaus, where that process is carried out. Unlike workers deep in the jungle, those in the factory are women. Seated at tables arranged in long rows, they use a levered device to crack nutshells one by one to retrieve the meat. Santos holds the camera on a few workers who are charmingly conscious of being filmed. Everyone wears a cap and apron, and a few seem dressed up for the camera. Close-ups of the women’s faces, smiling whether genuinely or just for the camera, are designed to convey a congenial and pleasant work atmosphere. As in other segments, skill and efficiency are on display in the women’s rapid hand movements; one hand places a nut on a tiny metal plate, and the other pulls a lever for a rod to crack the shell. The fast pace of the repeated action is mesmerizing, as if humans had become machines. Tiny, precise movement of hands reinforce the common belief of factory organizers that women, unlike men, are naturally endowed with nimble fingers, ideal for detailed piecework. That age-old notion kept women in the most menial and tedious and lowest-paid factory jobs for decades. Speed is a primary objective of the assembly line, and rewards are based on the number of items processed. In the shelling factory, workers carry boxes with the results of their labor to supervisors, who weigh and note what each worker has produced. The film closely follows the women as they approach the scales in silent, orderly fashion, on the order of a solemn

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Factory workers shelling nuts in No país das amazonas.

pilgrimage to make an offering. This long sequence is followed by a brief jungle scene in which a little monkey repeatedly hits a Brazil nut with a rock and eventually cracks the shell. This is one of several instances in which the film’s attempt at a light touch creates an unwanted effect, at least for today’s viewers, who are unlikely to appreciate the comparison between a cute monkey hammering on a nut and scores of women performing hard, repetitive work. The nature scene ends as the monkey eats the nut, which is his reward, while the factory shots of smiling women suggest that the work is itself gratifying and rewarding. The section concludes with crowd shots of women contentedly walking home after a day in the shelling factory. Perhaps because of his experience with Arana and the Putamayos in Peru, Santos often appears to try to convince viewers that working conditions in the jungle and the city are humane. The section dedicated to tobacco cultivation and processing contains a fascinating scene in which women pack leaves into tight bundles as they sit in a circle on the ground. After a close-up of their rapid, nimble-fingered work, the camera pulls back to show them taking a coffee break. Tiny cups and saucers are carefully placed in their hands by other workers. Despite the dainty, tea party–style serving, the women remain seated on the ground, so that no time is lost in returning to their labor. There are also several references to the plentiful fish and game available to workers in the jungle. In one instance, the film moves from scenes of manual labor to shots of a successful boar hunt by workers followed by a recreational moment as they relax around a fire awaiting the roasting meat. In another scene, the menu is duck. Seemingly contented family life and camaraderie are other motifs. The section on the collection and processing

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of latex begins with a poignant domestic scene in front of a hut where a rubber tapper says goodbye to his wife and child before going to work in the jungle. This obviously staged moment evokes the stereotypic movie image of the suburban middle-class breadwinner who kisses his wife and baby at the door before heading to the office. In other scenes, workers pause in their labor to smile at one another and share a cigarette. Within and between sections dedicated to labor Santos inserts spellbinding close-ups of flora and fauna to showcase the rainforest’s beauty. Like a naturalist excited by his finds, he presents a close-up of the clusters of large orchids that grow on the same trees that are valued for their nuts; in an iris-out that simulates a cameo portrait, a young woman looks at the camera through a garland filled with guaraná berries. Although harmful to tobacco plants, small worms with bright-colored rings and a snail with trailing shell appear in close-ups of leaves, looking more like ornaments than pests. Other shots focus on an anteater as it weaves its way among rubber trees, otters as they crisscross a small waterfall, and a jaguar on a tree limb awaiting its prey. Captured in mid-journey, a sloth looks at the camera as it climbs a tree near a riverbank. The famous Amazon butterflies appear in close-up and in long-distance shots of a field where thousands of the insects flutter their wings like flower petals in the wind. In still other parts of the film Santos combines his naturalist’s eye with the interests of an ethnographer. One of the most impressive sequences is of the Parintintin, who are introduced in an intertitle as the strongest and most aggressive Indians in the Amazon. Santos sets up an expectation of fierce natives, but the footage documents a taciturn community of men, women, and children. Several men and boys, none of whom appears especially strong, line up to face the camera and then turn for a profile shot. Aside from feathered headdresses, they wear a bit of cloth around their hips, and long narrow tubes cover their genitals. In another shot the men and boys walk in a tight circle as if performing a dance or ritual, then in single file directly toward and past the camera. Although the scenes of labor are also staged in the film, the staged segment with the Parintintin males is particularly discomforting. Like the jungle flora and fauna, they are treated as exotic specimens and posed so that they can be examined from different angles. Scenes with the female community, although also staged, seem slightly less rigid. Photographed in their nakedness while lying in low-hanging hammocks, the women converse, eat, and nurse infants without acknowledging the camera. One woman stands up and turns her back to the camera to attend her hammock. The still photographs of the Putamayo community that Santos made

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An iris shot portrait featuring guaraná berries in No país das amazonas.

ten years earlier are similar to his filming of the Parintintin, although the latter had yet to reckon with the impact of modernity. At the time Santos was making No país das amazonas, the Parintintin population numbered about four thousand. Following a second rubber boom during World War II and construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the 1970s, their numbers fell dramatically, to around one hundred fifty. The importance of Santos’s footage of the Parintintin lies partly in its archival documentation of a remote, little-known Indigenous people nearly extinguished by the very industrial development that Santos and his film promoted. In contrast to the Parintintin, indigenous women described in a title card simply as “civilized” are employed to shell the berrylike guaraná fruit from which the popular caffeinated beverage is made. Seated on the ground and dressed in western-style apparel, they perform the same repetitious, nimble-fingered labor carried out by women in the nut factory. The chief difference is that instead of a modern-style factory warehouse in the city, the guaraná shelling takes place in the jungle. The ostensibly uncivilized life of the Parintintin women seems almost idyllic when compared to the assembly-line efficiency of their urban counterparts. A more powerful scene suggests the degree to which modernity is transforming Indigenous rituals. Santos films young Indian women performing a dance described as one of the “solemn” traditions practiced by the community. The apparent point is to demonstrate that the arrival of modernity does not mean rituals are lost or suppressed. As per tradition, the women are naked except for large, intricate designs painted on their bodies. Santos features these artful patterns in a scene where the women are lined up next to one another facing the camera, similar to the staging

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Members of the Parintintin tribe in No país das amazonas.

of the Parintintin males. Unlike the Parintintin, however, these women are aware of their nakedness and glance at one another shyly and in slightly amused embarrassment. The degree to which supposed civilization has transformed one of the most traditional aspects of their culture is conveyed in the final shots of the solemn dance. Here, the formerly naked young women wear long, white frocks and dance in an energetic, playful ring-around-the-rosy. The frocks with their ruffled necklines evoke the long, white, ruffled shirts that European explorers made female Indians wear to cover their nudity. Given the centuries-old religious practice of converting Indigenous populations, the white frocks might possibly be baptism or communion apparel. Santos inserts footage of other Indigenous inhabitants who have yet to experience the full force of modernity. No indication is given of who they are or where they live, but, like the Parintintin, they are mostly naked; they stand and face the camera and turn to offer their profiles. The relation between wildlife and Indians is suggested by two portrait-like shots in the section devoted to latex. In the first, a smiling boy in traditional feathers and beads is photographed with a large parrot perched on his raised hand. In the second, a little monkey clings to the shoulder of a girl who happily holds an infant in her arms. No explanation is given for the white bandage strips that appear around this child’s eyes, strangely mirroring the monkey’s partially white visage. The monkey’s pat of the child’s head enhances the visual record of jungle kinship. These curiously compelling interludes appear in the midst a sequence on balata, a latex used in submarine and transmission cables. Santos focuses

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on the skill and special climbing footwear needed to scale and score the extremely tall trees, releasing the latex. The scoring from top to bottom of the tree requires crisscross cuts in a highly uniform pattern, and the result is a tree trunk that has an artful resemblance to a pineapple. In a scene demonstrating daring agility, one worker scales swiftly up a tree to take a cigarette break with another, who is poised at the very top. A sequence follows showing how latex is processed into large sheets that are folded, packaged, and shipped to Manaus, where workers busily unload the product at a warehouse bearing the J. G. Araújo name. Although the Amazon waterways were the primary means of transporting goods in the region, not all parts of the river were navigable. No país das amazonas includes historic footage of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway, a cooperative project between Bolivia and Brazil that enabled Bolivian goods, especially rubber, to reach the Atlantic and overseas markets. The railway buoyed expectations for greater economic growth and was another indication of the industrial revolution’s arrival to the interior. Although the plan was conceived in the nineteenth century, construction did not begin until 1907 and took five years to complete. The railroad, 228 miles long, ran parallel to the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers, connecting Porto Velho, now the capital of Rondônia, with the town of Guajará-Mirim, near the Bolivian border. Inaugurated in 1912, it was dubbed “the Devil’s Railroad” because of the thousands who perished from disease and other causes during its construction. The cost of human life became even more tragic as demand for Amazon rubber declined in the late 1910s and the railway lost its primary purpose. Fewer markets meant less money to run and maintain the line, with most of the costs falling to Brazil. Márcio Souza’s historical novel Mad Maria (1980; Mad Maria, 1985) is about the folly of building the railroad; once the Trans-Amazonian Highway was constructed, giving Bolivia direct access to the Amazon River, the near-moribund railway was finally closed. Despite reduction in demand, latex remained a valuable commodity and continued to be transported by rail when Santos made his film. One scene shows the arrival of a locomotive and several cars in Porto Velho, where Araújo had a warehouse. Dramatic camerawork from the viewpoint of the last car of the fast-moving train shows the long line of track left behind. The scene epitomizes an idea of modernity that was associated with trains and velocity, yet it also invites the viewer to ponder the superhuman effort (not to mention lives) expended to open the narrow wilderness vein for the train to pass. Hovering high above the tracks on either side, the jungle

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partly surrounds and funnels the train like an endless tunnel or channel open to the sky. While the film shows the rubber industry’s reliance on trees, it also shows that other industries thrived on what we now call deforestation. A busy Araújo sawmill is the destination for massive logs rolled by workers into the Amazon River and floated downstream. Mill workers at the river site jump from log to log as they prepare them for processing into planks. Santos includes shots of the towering pissaba palm, another Araújo export whose vegetable fiber is used to make ropes, brushes, and mats. No país das amazonas concludes with a lengthy segment on cattle ranching in the area around the Rio Branco, a tributary of the Rio Negro that splits and flows as far north as Guiana and Venezuela. Santos begins with an iris-out of early rising cowboys, followed by a second iris of a cattle drive across the plains to the farm corrals where they are branded. A title card accompanying scenes of cowboys lassoing rebellious steers compares their riding and roping skills to those of North American cowboys in the Far West. A bronco-busting scene is immediately followed by an amusing shot of a young boy riding toward the camera on a large, energetic sow. Anyone who has read Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas (1938; Barren Lives, 1965) or seen Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1963 film adaption will recall how the youngest son tries to emulate his bronco-busting father by riding a goat. Like the film’s other long segments on commodities, close-ups of nature occasionally appear amid the cowboy scenes. Santos pauses to consider the beauty and size of the Victoria water lilies, named for Queen Victoria. Other recurring motifs are the plentiful foodstuffs and recreation available to workers. As elsewhere, there are hyperbolic descriptions of the quantity of fish and deer. Deer are so bountiful that five have just been killed in two hours before the scene was shot. Herons are also plentiful, hunted not as food but for their feathers, which are prized by “men and women imbued with an equally inhumane and ambitious instinct.” Shots of fishing and swimming depict some of the leisure activities enjoyed by the cowhands. It is impossible today to view scenes of logging and cattle ranching without considering their impacts on the environment and ecology. As is well known, agribusiness in the Rio Branco region has greatly expanded grazing lands for cattle by slashing and burning the rainforest. Logging has decimated other parts of the Amazon, and violence has ensued, including assassinations to silence activists who protest the forest’s destruction. Of course none of this is evident in No país das amazonas. Only a few scenes of Indians and the skeletons of trees in a lake suggest the problematic effects

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of industrialization. The film ends with a title card that proclaims “Viva o Brasil!” I suspect that those who view this amazing documentary about modernity in the Amazon might be doubtful about the enthusiasm behind that exclamation.

São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole São Paulo! Commotion of my life . . . Mário de Andrade, Paulicéia desvairada, 1922 No; it is not a natural film: it is a poem. Guilherme de Almeida, Estado de São Paulo, May 23, 1929 While officials were preparing for the International Exhibition for the Centenary of Independence in Rio, where No país das amazonas would be shown, a group of writers, artists, and musicians in São Paulo, with the backing of the state and its governor Washington Luís, organized the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), a centennial celebration that opened on February 11, 1922, at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo. Both events were highly nationalistic in character; the world’s fair touted Brazil’s natural wealth and economic modernity, while the Semana de Arte Moderna proclaimed the advent of Brazilian modernist literature and art. Although avant-garde and modernist works were in evidence prior to the week, 1922 is generally acknowledged as the start of Brazilian modernism.10 The art week program consisted of lectures on art and literature, musical and dance performances, an art exhibition, and poetry readings by a new generation of writers, among them the now canonical figures Mário de Andrade, Ronald de Carvalho, Oswald de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia, and Guilherme de Almeida. Organizers considered the event a resounding success despite or possibly because of the tumultuous readings of combative and satiric verses on February 15 that elicited audience catcalls and boos. Mário de Andrade’s Paulicéia desvairada (1922; Hallucinated City, 1968), parts of which he read on stage at the Teatro Municipal, captured the defiant spirit of early Brazilian modernism with a brash, polemical tone and unsettling references to São Paulo as a “big mouth with a thousand teeth” and “three-cleft tongue oozing pus.” Like Guillerme Apollinaire’s Paris in “Zone,” Andrade’s images of the anthropomorphized city are often delirious; he also denounces self-satisfied city politicians, the “fat-flanked bourgeoisie,” and São Paulo’s cultural void, with “neither poetry nor joys.”

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In Paulicéia, Andrade makes only a brief, nostalgic reference to a past film era, although he was intrigued with the possibilities of cinema, as seen in his novel Amar, verbo intransitivo (1927; To Love, Intransitive Verb, 2018). Unlike the Rio industrial exposition, the Semana de Arte Moderna did not include film in its program. The film historian and critic Ismail Xavier attributes this exclusion to the state of Brazilian filmmaking in 1922; he reports that it lacked “a modernist and Brazilian practice, which was demanded by the movement’s [Semana de Arte Moderna] platform.”11 Hollywood had so saturated the post–World War I film market that only eleven Brazilian feature films were released in 1922. Nine were documentaries, including two on the world’s fair, along with No país das amazonas; the fiction films were melodramas, one of which was an adaptation of the Brazilian writer Bernardo Guimarães’s classic novel A escrava Isaura (1875, The slave Isaura).12 In 1922 São Paulo was one of the country’s three most powerful states, alongside Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and coffee exports accounted for 70 percent of São Paulo state’s income. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, thousands of immigrants came to work the São Paulo coffee fields, whose owners grew richer as the demand for coffee rose worldwide. In tandem with the ever-widening cultivation of coffee and increased migration to the countryside and the city came the rise of manufacturing in commodities for local consumption such as textiles as well as cement, bricks, and other construction materials. The historian Warren Dean has found that by 1920 São Paulo surpassed Rio de Janeiro as Brazil’s most important industrial center.13 Among Europeans to arrive in São Paulo was the Hungarian Rodolfo Rex Lustig (1901-1970), who was hired by Armando Pamplona, head of the newly established Independência Filme, to work on films for the 1922 Rio world’s fair.14 Pamplona owned Independência with José and Menotti Del Picchia, the latter a Semana de Arte Moderna participant with whom Pamplona shared an enthusiasm for the modernist idea of “making it new.” Lustig had considerable prior film experience. In 1918 he was a technician at Pathé in Budapest, where he collaborated on projects with his coworker and friend Adalberto Kemeny (1901–1969). Two years later, in 1920, he and Kemeny moved to Berlin, where they worked at UFA, the state-ofthe-art studio whose directors at the time included Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau.15 Lustig was the technical director at Independência in 1926 when Kemeny joined him in São Paulo. In 1928, when Pamplona decided to retire from filmmaking, they purchased Independência’s equipment and

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started their own firm, Rex Filme. In addition to newsreels and occasional pieces for the Brazilian Department of Agriculture, the pair spent their first year making a feature about a day in the life of the city. On September 6, 1929, their filmic tribute titled São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (São Paulo: Symphony of the metropolis) opened auspiciously on the eve of Brazilian Independence Day at the Teatro Paramount in São Paulo.16 Distributed by Hollywood’s Paramount Studios, it played for close to two months locally as well as other screenings in Curitiba and Manaus. São Paulo audiences saw their neighborhoods, department stores, restaurants, parks, schools— and possibly themselves and their family members or acquaintances—on the movie screen. Two favorable reviews appeared immediately after the film’s release; one was in Cinearte, the popular Rio film weekly, and in his São Paulo newspaper column, “Cinematographos,” the poet Guilherme de Almeida praised its rhythmic poeticism. Kemeny and Lustig’s portrait of São Paulo has little in common with Mário de Andrade’s poetry in Paulicéia desvairada, which remains a literary touchstone. Both works are about modernity, but unlike Andrade, whose poems were skeptical of the city’s transformation and progress, Kemeny and Lustig exulted in São Paulo’s industrial development, as proclaimed in the ufanista-style rhetoric of the film’s many title cards. They made a flamboyantly patriotic work featuring a dramatic reenactment of the country’s independence, several flag-waving scenes, and exhortations that not just paulistas but all Brazilians take pride in the “greatness of this lofty metropolis.” Their documentary also flaunts its technical sophistication with passages of rhythmic montage and optical experiments typical of the European avant garde. One of its fascinations for today’s viewers is that it provides an invaluable and impressive visual record of São Paulo and its citizenry at the end of the 1920s. Alongside Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which also was released in 1929, São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole was the last of several city symphony films to appear in the 1920s. Brazilian film historians regularly point to Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) as the model for São Paulo, although Kemeny stated in a 1960s interview that he had no knowledge of the Berlin film at the time.17 Despite his claim, there seems little question of Berlin’s importance to São Paulo, ranging from the film’s title to its specific scenes and formal elements. Among the most obvious borrowings from Ruttmann are shots of department-store mechanical dolls in motion, a milk-bottling factory, a child running late into school, pedestrians’ legs and feet, and a spinning spiral optical. This last element became a symbol of modernist cinema, first seen in Marcel

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Poster of a modern city for São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole.

Duchamp and Man Ray’s short film Anemic Cinema (1926). Ruttmann’s images of animals in the Berlin zoo are given an interesting twist in São Paulo, which focuses on animals pictured on tickets for the jogo do bicho lottery game. City-symphony films made prior to Berlin also seem to have been influential. Like Paul Strand’s short Manhatta (1921), São Paulo uses title cards to praise the city and the labor that went into its construction, while Berlin eschews title cards. Nearly equivalent scenes from the Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti’s Paris film Rien que les heures (1926, Nothing but Time) also appear in São Paulo, including a public swimming-pool sequence, a montage of newspaper headlines, and a finale with the image of a turning globe. But aside from the modernist day-in-the-city organization of these films, there are significant differences among them. Artistic modernism had

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no single politics. Nothing but Time is a left-wing film about the déclassé and disenfranchised of Paris; Berlin is an almost apolitical symphony of metropolitan and cosmopolitan life; Man with a Movie Camera, which creates an artificial geography by combining scenes from different cities, is a celebration of the Soviet Union’s five-year plan of industrial and technical growth; and São Paulo is an exuberant homage to the cosmopolitan middle-class and the military. Berlin shows horses with feed bags and pushcarts commingling with streetcars and automobiles, but São Paulo focuses exclusively on modern forms of transport. While Manhatta and Berlin are poetic, lyrical films about the beauty of cities built by laborers, São Paulo celebrates order, progress, and the nation. All the city films of the 1920s make time their subject matter, using modern workdays as a chief formal element; the industrial assembly-line time of factories that we find in No país das amazonas is either absent or subordinated to the more irregular rhythms of the day in the city—its slow start and finish, its hubbub and speed as the streets fill, its moments of lassitude at lunchtime. One of the striking features of São Paulo, however, is the way it departs from the single-day rhythm to propagandize for modernity. In an essay on the film, the critic André P. Gatti makes the important point that São Paulo was an expensive endeavor for the fledging Rex Filme. Based on internal evidence, Gatti speculates that it had several financial backers ranging from local industry to the state plus its distributor, Paramount.18 The film may also have garnered support or at least approval from the former governor Washington Luís, who was now the country’s president. Gatti’s surmise about backers is convincing, especially considering the film’s footage on municipal and state initiatives such as a public dental clinic and a progressive prison system, which are among the few segments in the film to feature interior shots. Gatti also correctly points out that São Paulo lacks commentary on the city’s cultural traditions, art, and poetry, an absence that calls to mind Mário de Andrade’s complaint in Paulicéia desvairada of a city devoid of poetry and joys. On the other hand, São Paulo is a film that repeatedly flaunts its artistry at a formal level by using rhythmic montage, optical signifiers of modernist art, and specially designed title cards by João Quadros featuring modernist illustrations. At the start of the film, intertitles announce the city’s wee-hours’ silence and slow awakening. The first of these is written in cursive lettering accompanied by an artistic flourish; the second uses large block letters to emphasize the word “Desperta” (It awakens) in a futuristic design of concentric circles that open out onto the city. This last design anticipates other circular imagery such as wheels and dials, clock

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pieces and spirals that give the film momentum and a thematic motif. There are more than sixty title cards in the hour-long documentary, an unusually large number, and they have an integrally educational function, which may explain the decision to make them especially distinctive. But the illustrations may also have been a way to entertain viewers who were unable to read. São Paulo shows a metropolis whose history, monuments, institutions, and neighborhoods were unfamiliar to many in the large, predominantly Italian immigrant population and to some who had lived there for years. Title cards describe landmarks such as the glass-enclosed Luz train station designed by Charles Henry Driver, and the law school founded in 1827. The cards also announce the hour of the workday, giving the first part of the film an orderly progression. The lunch hour is introduced with the words “Syncope: Brains rest. Nerves asleep,” accompanied by a drawing of a plate of steaming food. In the lunch sequence, a montage of handwritten, illustrated, and playful restaurant signs promote daily specials such as bacalhau (cod) and “tripe cooked Portuguese style.” Here eateries of all kinds are shown, street stalls and storefronts for the working class and more formal dining for businessmen. There is even one whose sign reads, “Restaurant for Ladies.” Unlike other city-symphony films, São Paulo interrupts its narrative and its rhythmic montage on the workday, leaving images of the bustling metropolis behind for segments on medical achievements and statesponsored reforms. The first of these is a two-minute presentation on the Butantã Institute, a world-famous research center where lifesaving vaccines were made from the venom of insects and snakes. The close-ups of researchers handling reptiles and insects and extracting the venom have the same fascination as the scenes in No país das amazonas in which men wrestle with fish and mammals. This is not the first reference to public health in the film São Paulo; between earlier shots of the city’s Banco do Brasil and a kindergarten where all the children are white is a twentysecond inside look at a roomful of patients being attended at a free dental clinic administered by the School of Orthodontics. The Butantã segment is longer, more detailed, and without a hint of the metropolis outside; its wild-kingdom approach to the business of handling snakes is both engaging and educational. A six-minute segment that abandons the city-symphony approach focuses on the state penitentiary called the Regeneration Institute, whose motto over the entryway proclaims, “Here work, discipline, and kindness redeem the misdeed committed and redirect men toward social

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participation.” This remarkable episode, unusual because it suspends for so long the formal logic of a city documentary, shows the prison motto in action as inmates perform tasks normally assigned to professionals, such as fingerprinting newcomers and examining heads and hands for injuries. The prisoners are shown making shoes, brooms, and baskets for sale to help cover operating costs. Inmates are filmed in educational classes, receiving religious instruction, and enjoying family visits important to their rehabilitation. The prison is the only place in the film where more than one Black Brazilian appears.19 Considerable footage is devoted to prison discipline, which involves boot camp–style calisthenics and drilling. Militarism is especially evident in scenes of uniformed prisoners marching with flags to the drumbeat of a prison band. The prison section can be understood as an indirect paean to positivism, a nineteenth-century philosophy attributed to the Frenchman Auguste Comte that emphasized instrumental rationality and scientific or empirical study as opposed to metaphysics or religion. Embraced by the Brazilian military and the leadership that overthrew the monarchy in 1889, positivist “order and progress” became the motto for the new republic’s flag. In São Paulo, the prison is a microcosm of an orderly, self-disciplined society that manufactures goods and earns money. The prison’s motto and ethos reflect the positivist credo of “Love as principle, order as the basis, progress as the goal.” The whole segment promotes the state’s approach to reform, without comment on such issues as violence or recidivism. Although dealing with labor, it is a digression, like the Butantã segment, that seems more propaganda than symphony and is strangely at odds with the city sights photographed outside its walls. In this context, the idea of order and progress has obvious right-wing implications. São Paulo moves more explicitly in a political direction with title cards that proclaim, “And a strong race trains itself for the formation of an even stronger race” and “Today they swear allegiance to the Fatherland.” The intertitles appear after a segment that features Brazilians playing tennis, running races, diving, and racing horses. References to “athleticism” and “stronger race” lead into footage of soldiers standing at attention and giving an extended right-arm salute to vow allegiance to the flag; the right-arm salute was eventually used by Brazil’s schoolchildren. A title card completes the unfinished sentence in the previous intertitle, “tomorrow, in bursts of daring, [the stronger race] will be the heroic sentinels of its defense.” This language is consistent with opinions expressed in A Defesa Nacional, a newspaper founded in 1913 by young military officers who had been trained in Germany. The editors believed that a nation’s progress was

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contingent on the modernization of the military. The newspaper called for the buildup of “better sons” to counter the deleterious effects of slavery and bachelarismo, snobbism associated with educated but faint-hearted elites.20 It is impossible today not to draw connections between this ultranationalistic language and the extended-arm salute with the growth of nascent fascism in São Paulo, a development whose origins date back to Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922. Il Duce became a topic of interest and increased adulation in the pages of Fanfulla, Il Piccolo, and other Italian-language newspapers in São Paulo that promoted cultural and economic ties with the Italian fatherland.21 In 1923 the fascist organization Fascio Filippo Corridoni was founded in the city, offshoots of which appeared throughout the state and beyond. By the end of the decade, nationalistic ideals of a strong and homogeneous Brazil were commonplace, ideals that Lustig and Kemeny support in their film.22 The film even includes shots of both Fanfulla and Il Piccolo in a rapid montage of São Paulo newspapers. A lead article immediately under the Fanfulla banner head is titled “Fascismo.”23 The filmmakers portray the future “heroic sentinels” in a staged cavalry charge in which soldiers with drawn swords gallop on horseback through a field. There is no indication of an antagonist in this dramatic sequence, but the next segment criticizing antiprogressive behavior leaves little doubt. Interestingly, this short sequence features only women, who fail to observe the city’s rules, regulations, and march toward progress. In one scene, an old woman ignores a signal and tries to cross a busy street. In another, a woman jumps the line to pay for a streetcar ride and then discards the ticket on the ground. Thus, order and progress are associated with a masculine military and disorder with feminine behavior. It should be noted that while the Brazilian nineteenth-century educator Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta, who knew Comte in Paris and introduced him to others, was instrumental in positivism’s spread to Brazil, it was a philosophy that tended to regard women and other minorities as socially inferior. Intermittently throughout all this, São Paulo is filled with optical experiments that convey modernity and movement, most prominently the spinning spiral and various kaleidoscopic shots with rotating image fragments such as one of a trolley car. One of the most unusual experiments appears after a sequence on the jogo do bicho lottery game ends with numbers rotating over a spinning spiral to suggest a wheel of fortune. In the next segment, a giant, disembodied hand moves high across the cityscape and descends to deposit a coin in a beggar’s palm. A quasisurrealistic shot superimposes the giant hand on a panorama of cityscape in motion. After the modest

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An optical experiment in São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole.

The “giving” hand in São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole.

charitable act of giving a coin to a beggar, the hand withdraws, moving back across the city. It next appears in a darkened limbo where it magically produces a pile of money on a table. An element of greed is suggested as the hand clenches over the bills and the pile grows. Across the table, two hands reach out and scoop up the cash, as if having won a wager. This sequence is one of only a few to acknowledge poverty, although the focus is on the hand that gives and not the one that receives. The giving hand and the hands that scoop up the money belong to well-dressed men in suits. The meaning of the sequence is unclear, but it appears to be a comment on chance, which serves some better than others. Or the hands might be understood as emblematic of those with means who publicly donate a coin and privately clutch at a fortune that can be lost should luck

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favor another. Whatever the intent, the segment shows the circulation of money and its unequal distribution. At the time, Lustig and Kemeny were undoubtedly aware that the São Paulo economy was in trouble, with the fall of coffee sales in the spring of 1929, only months prior to their film’s release. There is nothing to suggest that the money sequence has anything to do with the looming world financial crisis that affected all sectors of society, from wealthy coffee planters to the proletariat. But the wheel of fortune was no longer spinning in São Paulo’s favor as coffee prices plunged, unemployment grew, and the state edged toward bankruptcy. Shots of street traffic, shops, and labor continue to appear, inserted between the sections about money, the prison system, the Butantã Institute, and the military. A visit to the Museu do Ipiranga segues into an unusual and rather static reenactment of Dom Pedro’s 1822 proclamation of Brazilian independence. A sort of tableau vivant, the scene is based on Pedro Américo’s late nineteenth-century painting titled Independência ou morte (Independence or death). The frequency and length of such scenes tend to sidetrack the film from its images of the workday schedule; only in the final minutes do the filmmakers regain focus on passing time in the city with images of long shadows, rush-hour traffic, crowded streetcars, a tolling bell, and a setting sun announcing the end of the workday. The intertitles’ ufanista rhetoric builds to a crescendo, with references to progress and São Paulo’s brilliant future “in the vanguard of the greatest centers of activity in the world.” Composed of three animated segments, the film’s finale is intriguing for today’s viewers to contemplate. A nighttime image shows aircraft flying over a skyscraper landscape, an image that conveys the forces of progress. Next, a spotlight flashes Hollywood-style into the darkened sky while a movie theater’s illuminated marquee appears in the background. This self-reflexive image seems to suggest that cinema, like other industries, has a role to play in the march toward progress; the airplane and skyscraper animation briefly reappears as if to ensure those connections are made. The last sequence consists of a title card and four dissolves to images that shift emphasis from São Paulo to the nation as a whole, a shift prefigured in the film’s initial intertitles, which were addressed to paulistas and all Brazilians. An intertitle heralds the coming of a “new Brazil, greater and more powerful” with the “most beautiful and most powerful of flags.” The country’s well-advanced march toward worldwide prominence is suggested in an iris shot of an hourglass with sands partially disbursed and that shot dissolving into a spinning globe. In another dissolve, the globe becomes the round, star-studded “order and progress” emblem that in turn dissolves

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into a full-screen image of a briskly waving Brazilian flag. In a somewhat ironic twist on the themes of nationalism, industry, and future greatness, the word “FIM” (End) appears over another round emblem, the Paramount Studio logo encircled with many more stars. Paramount’s control over distribution may explain São Paulo’s limited domestic circulation and failure to be shown or commented upon abroad.24 It was a silent film in a period when sound was on the rise in Brazil, although the first successful sound film, Coisas nossas (Our things), a Hollywood-inspired musical by Columbia Records executive-turnedfilmmaker Wallace Downey, did not appear in Brazil until 1931. Lustig and Kemeny photographed and shot the Downey musical, an experience that undoubtedly led to their remake of São Paulo into the sound short São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas (1934, São Paulo in twenty-four hours), which was also distributed by Paramount.25 But the times were very different; the 1930 revolution replaced Júlio Prestes, the elected presidential candidate from São Paulo, with the gaúcho Getúlio Vargas, from Rio Grande do Sul; two years later, in 1932, the state of São Paulo launched a failed constitutional revolt against the provisional presidency of Vargas. Perhaps not surprisingly, patriotic scenes of flag-waving militancy, cavalry charges, and prison tributes, among others, were left on the cutting-room floor. Over the years, footage from São Paulo was used as stock imagery to show how the city looked in the late 1920s; meanwhile, No país das amazonas had completely disappeared from public view. The year 1997 was important for the revival of both. A restoration of São Paulo that year by the Cinemateca Brasileira gave the film new life at festivals, including Pordenone in 2016, and the film’s appearance on YouTube in 2015 has ensured broader public attention in Brazil and internationally. Also in 1997, the documentary filmmaker Aurélio Michiles included rare scenes from No país das amazonas in his film tribute to Silvino Santos, O cineasta da selva (Filmmaker of the Jungle). Two years later, the novelist Márcio Souza published his own homage in Silvino Santos: O cineasta do ciclo da borracha (Silvino Santos: Filmmaker of the rubber boom), in which every frame of the film was reproduced from a copy housed in the Cinemateca. In 2014 the city of Manaus brought out a special-edition DVD from materials in the Cinemateca, in other archives, and in private hands. Together, No país das amazonas and São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole now constitute extraordinary visual evidence of people and places as they looked one hundred years ago. Though focused on geographically distant and distinctive areas of the country, when placed side by side, the two films show, for better or worse, the growing impact of modernity on the nation as a whole.

CHAPTER 2

Government Educational Shorts, Bandit Footage, and Vera Cruz Documentaries Consequently, cinema will be the book of luminous images from which our coastal and rural populations will learn to love Brazil, adding confidence in the destinies of the Fatherland. Getúlio Vargas, June 25, 1934

The films that fall into these groups are documentaries made during the administrations of Getúlio Vargas, who presided over Brazil for nearly twenty years as provisional president (1930–1934), president (1934–1937), president-turned-dictator (1937–1945), and president (1951–1954). In the early 1930s Vargas invested in the production of hundreds of short educational documentaries and semidocumentaries with the aim of unifying the nation and bolstering pride in Brazil’s accomplishments, especially in the sciences and arts. The educational films, though ideological in general purpose, were free of political controversy, but all films in the period were subject to censorship. Once Vargas’s Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship was installed in 1937, films were more closely scrutinized for political content. One of the most notable cases of censorship involved the complete repression of film footage documenting a famous bandit couple, Lampião and Maria Bonita, who were folk heroes for many in the rural Northeast. What remains of that footage, titled Lampião, gives extraordinary evidence of legendary figures who have become part of the Brazilian imaginary. Vargas’s return to power as a democratically elected president in 1951 coincided with a period of rapid industrialization of São Paulo, leading to an increase in the number and variety of documentary films. As part of 35

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the capital’s growth, the Hollywood-style Vera Cruz studio was built on the outskirts of the city. Vera Cruz produced eighteen features during its five years of operation (1949–1954), but it also made a series of excellent, little-studied documentary short subjects about national treasures and public events, including the building of Vera Cruz itself.

Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (National Institute of Educational Cinema) On April 4, 1932, Getúlio Vargas announced the creation of a national film censorship commission and at the same time voiced his support of educational film, which, in his words, represented “an instrument of unequaled advantage for public instruction and propaganda about the country, within and outside its borders.”1 At the urging of prominent educators who expressed concerns about the adverse impact of lowbrow comedies and morally suspect dramas, the commission was established in the Ministério da Educação e Saúde Pública (Ministry of Education and Public Health).2 In addition to acting as a censorship agency, the commission was charged with identifying films with educational value, in the words of the government decree, “films whose intended objective is disseminating scientific knowledge as well as those whose musical or figurative plot is developed with artistic aims, tending to display the grand aspects of nature or culture to the public.”3 The decree also mandated a tax to support educational films and the showing of one educational short before every commercial feature.4 Perhaps most importantly for educators, the decree moved film censorship out of the hands of municipal police and into the hands of a five-member board in Rio, with one representative each from the Office of the Chief of Police and the Juvenile Court, a professor selected by the Ministry of Education and Public Health, a female educator chosen by the Associação Brasileira de Educação (Brazilian Educational Association), and the director of the Museu Nacional (National Museum). The museum director at the time was Edgard Roquette-Pinto (1884–1954), an anthropologist, radio broadcasting pioneer, and founder of the museum’s pedagogical division, which produced educational shorts about its natural history collections.5 Vargas understood the propaganda potential of educational films and their power to instill a sense of unity and national pride in a geographically divided, culturally distinct, and mostly illiterate population. “Propaganda” was a term commonly used in Brazil to describe the dissemination of information; the less favorable connotation of the term, associated with

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totalitarian regimes and anathema to proponents of Western liberalism, emerged when strict control of information was implemented by the Vargas dictatorship. On July 10, 1934, just days before the promulgation of a new constitution and his election as president following his interim presidency, Vargas moved the national film censorship commission into the Ministério da Justiça e Negócios Interiores (Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs). The move was unpopular with the educational elite and just one example of a tug-of-war that developed between the education and justice ministries over the control of mass culture.6 For Vargas, who was gradually consolidating his powers, turning to the right, and setting the stage for the Estado Novo, educational films meant those luminous images about a modern, progressive Brazil that would build popular confidence in the destinies of the Fatherland under his leadership.7 In March 1936, at the request of Gustavo Capanema, the newly appointed minister of education, Vargas approved the creation of INCE, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo, with Roquette-Pinto as its director.8 Roquette-Pinto immediately contracted Humberto Mauro (1897–1983), a highly respected silent and early sound filmmaker; Mauro worked at INCE from 1936 to 1964 and directed 357 of its 412 titles.9 Roquette-Pinto’s directorship was much shorter, from 1936 to 1947, coinciding with the period of the Estado Novo. It also overlapped with Vargas’s Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP, Department of Press and Propaganda), perhaps inspired as early as 1934 by a similar German agency.10 From 1939 to 1945 the DIP censored all Brazilian media, produced propaganda newsreels, and reported directly to the president. The DIP’s most prominent pro-government newsreels, Cinejornal Brasil­ eiro, were a required part of every movie theater program. The DIP was also charged with encouraging educational filmmaking by offering prizes and other incentives.11 In the mid-1930s Roquette-Pinto commented favorably on Germany’s decision to create separate entities for educational film production and propaganda.12 Recognizing the propaganda value of educational films, Lourival Fontes, head of the DIP (1939–1942), tried to bring INCE under his control. Roquette-Pinto resisted, and the institute remained in the newly renamed Ministry of Education and Health until 1966, when it was transferred to the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (National Institute of Cinema) until it was closed in 1969. The Vargas government’s broad 1932 definition of what constituted an educational film carried over to INCE, which made shorts about a wide range of documentary and semidocumentary subjects including science and technology, public health, history, literature and the arts, public figures,

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Humberto Mauro (left) filming in the Minas Gerais interior.

and commemorative events. INCE was a modest operation in many ways but a vertically integrated enterprise that controlled everything from the development of scripts to nontheatrical film distribution. In addition to a lab and film studio, the institute had book and film libraries and a projection room. Most movies were shot in 16 mm and shown in schools and other nontheatrical locations. Until 1949 most were silent, accompanied by recordings or scripts to be read during exhibition. Not all schools had 16 mm projectors, and often those were lent by INCE; film lengths varied, but works tended to be under fifteen minutes. Several of the 16 mm silent films were remade into longer, better-quality, 35 mm sound films in color that showed theatrically with DIP approval. A good example is Um apólogo—Machado de Assis: 1839–1939 (An apologue), a two-part film about the distinguished author, directed by Mauro for the centennial of Machado’s birth. In the first part Roquette-Pinto, as narrator, discusses Machado’s life in Rio; here scenes of a poor hillside community where Machado grew up contrast with images of the prestigious Academia Brasileira de Letras, which Machado established in 1897 and presided over. Mauro focuses on the statue of Machado outside the academy as well as several of his many possessions on display, including his eyeglasses and handwritten manuscripts. Roquette-Pinto comments briefly on Machado’s most famous novels, and the books’ covers appear alongside illustrations by Santa Rosa, one of Brazil’s foremost artists. The film’s second part is a dramatization of Machado’s famous short story “Um apólogo,” an allegorical tale about human vanity, introduced on screen by the literary critic and Machado scholar Lúcia Miguel-Pereira. The story, narrated in the third person by a man speaking to an unidentified interlocutor, takes the form of conversations between actors playing the

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roles of a needle and a spool of thread in a sewing box where they debate one another’s importance in the preparation of a ball gown by a seamstress; the thread prevails by becoming part of the dress, while the needle is returned to the sewing box. As the tale nears conclusion, Machado adds a new character, a straight pin, who admonishes the needle for having opened the way for the vain thread to become part of the garment. The fable ends as the interlocutor, “a professor of melancholy,” admits to his narrator friend, “I also have served as a needle for much ordinary thread!”13 The seven-minute black-and-white version of this film was among the first INCE productions to appear in 1936; the fifteen-minute 1939 color version is more charming and amusing, with the actors dressed as the needle, thread, and pin inside a set designed as a sewing box. Outside the box is the room where the seamstress works on the gown. Following the thread’s success and the pin’s admonition to the needle, the scene cuts to a shot of the despondent needle, now back in the sewing box. The film ends with the reappearance of Miguel-Pereira, who reads the melancholy professor’s sad admission. Like Um apólogo, commercially distributed INCE films tended to focus on national figures, among them the composers Henrique Oswald and Carlos Gomes, aviator Santos Dumont, medical pioneer Oswaldo Cruz, and writers Vicente de Carvalho and Euclides da Cunha.14 Films about natural wonders such as the giant Amazonian water lily in Vitória régia (1937) and national holidays in Dia da pátria (1937, Day of the fatherland) also played in theaters. But after 1939, INCE films about national icons and newsworthy or patriotic events became the purview of the DIP’s Cinejornal Brasileiro newsreels that were required showings in movie theaters. Among the many subjects filmed by Mauro during Roquette-Pinto’s administration, none were more interesting and significant than those about public health and the treatment of disease. Along with poverty and illiteracy, disease was a constant obstacle to the stronger national body that Vargas sought to build. Roquette-Pinto, who was especially drawn to the sciences, recruited eminent physicians including Carlos Chagas Filho and Evandro Chagas from the Fundação Carlos Chagas and Miguel Osório de Almeida from the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz for films about vaccines for rabies and yellow fever and about diseases such as leprosy and syphilis. Despite the films’ technical expertise and informative content, it is difficult to imagine them being shown to schoolchildren then or today. An example of a vaccine film is a two-part 1938 sound short by Mauro on yellow fever, Febre amarela I and Febre amarela II, made in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation and the laboratory at the Instituto Oswaldo

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Cruz in Rio. Part 1 follows the preparation of the vaccine; first eggs are inoculated with the yellow fever virus and then incubated to allow an embryo to develop. Each egg is stamped with the inoculation date. There is no discussion of the disease or of how it is transmitted. Only the technician’s arms and hands appear in the frame. The step-by-step narration and illustration of the process shows a technician gently cracking the eggs and extracting the live chicken embryos from the shells. The bodies of the tiny creatures are slick from their eggshell home. Embryos that do not survive are discarded. The delicate process of embryo extraction takes an unexpected turn once the embryos are placed in a large, clear, glass receptacle. Without any sign of what is to come, the technician flips a switch and the embryos are suddenly whirled at high speed in the blenderlike vessel until they assume the consistency of a paste. It is a startling and unforgettable scene for the novitiate, largely because it is shown so matter-of-factly and exactly, without apparent concern for the squeamishness of viewers. The film then describes the steps to make the vaccine, which is distributed into glass ampoules for injections meant to protect human lives. It is not easy to forget that the basis for the precious vaccine is those tiny, soft-boned creatures summarily whipped into a purée. Part 2 shows clinical experiments with the virus and vaccine on rodents and monkeys. Unlike the living but immobile embryos, small white rats playfully scurry and tumble over one another in a box. The box lid is then closed, although viewers can still see their antics as they are slowly anesthetized by an infusion of ether. The next shot shows the yellow fever virus being injected into a rodent’s head. More discomforting than watching a needle penetrate the tiny skull is the demonstration of the virus’s impact on the once-hyperactive mouse, now barely able to crawl. Even more difficult to watch is a segment on experiments with rhesus monkeys who, like the rodents, are initially filmed at play, in this case on the Ilha dos Macacos (Monkey Island) off the coast of Rio. Playtime ends in capture for one monkey in a chilling scene showing its arms restrained behind its back as if it were a criminal. After anesthetization, an operation injects the virus into the monkey’s brain. In a later scene, an unidentified technician tapes a screen-covered box with virus-carrying mosquitoes onto the unconscious monkey’s stomach to test if the vaccine is effective. The film is strangely open-ended, giving no indication if the experiment succeeded or the monkey survived. As with other INCE productions, there were silent and sound 16 mm versions of the yellow fever documentaries, and it is likely (one might hope) that their chief audience was medical students and practitioners

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rather than schoolchildren. The vaccine’s first field trials were carried out in Brazil in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation in Rio, and the vaccine topic was an obvious choice for an INCE film. Although a viewer today might cringe at the vaccine preparation and experiments, the discovery of a preventive medicine for yellow fever, which ravaged tropical countries like Brazil, was a worldwide public health achievement. By documenting the active role that the Rockefeller Foundation played in development and testing, the films promoted the image of Brazil under Vargas as a modern, scientifically advanced nation both within and outside its borders. The yellow fever films were among eighteen INCE productions selected to promote Brazilian technological and scientific acumen at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These included films about advances to cure Chagas disease caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite, the use of chest X-rays to detect tuberculosis, and several shorts about sanitation procedures adopted to prevent the spread of mosquito-related diseases in Rio.15 These were not the first INCE films to be exhibited outside Brazil. In 1938 in Venice, Mauro was the first director to represent Brazil at an international film festival. There he screened Vitória régia and a 35 mm version of Céu do Brasil (1937, Brazilian sky), which simulates a planetarium experience and maps the constellations seen year-round from Rio. The propagandistic nature of Mauro’s celestial vision and celebration of Rio was enhanced by a soundtrack playing the Brazilian national anthem. Mauro took advantage of this trip to Europe to visit film studios in Rome and Paris and make travelogues for INCE on Paris, Milan, Rome, and Pompeii. In 1940 Céu do Brasil, Febre amarela I and II, Vitória régia, and other INCE films played in Lisbon; two years later, the vaccine films were part of the Universidad de Chile’s centennial celebration. Few films, however, had the international exposure of Vitória régia, which was shown throughout Europe and South America.16 Originating in the Amazon, the plant is an extraordinary specimen of jungle flora; averaging ten feet in diameter, its underwater root stalk extends more than twenty feet, and the plant produces a spectacular flower. In one segment, Mauro captures the flower’s blossoming in a dazzling fast-motion sequence. The film also calls attention to the Museu Nacional and its botanical gardens, where the plant was cultivated and where Roquette-Pinto had once been director. Knowing the public fascination with the Amazon, Roquette-Pinto also had shorts made from sequences in Silvino Santos’s No país das amazonas, including segments on the Parintintin tribe, Brazil nuts, and balata latex. In 1938, the same year he traveled to Venice, Mauro filmed two blackand-white silent shorts, As aranhas (Spiders) and O joão de barro (Ovenbird).

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Edgard RoquettePinto. Courtesy of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, Rio de Janeiro.

Both were made in Cataguases, his childhood home in the interior of Minas Gerais; there, in the 1920s, he made the now classic silent fiction features Tesouro perdido (1927, Lost treasure), Brasa dormida (1928, Sleeping ember), and Sangue mineiro (1929, Blood of Minas) in collaboration with Phebo Sul America Film. Other successful commercial films followed, including the innovative silent drama Ganga bruta (1933), which he made for the Rio-based Cinédia production company. In 1937 Mauro directed perhaps his most ambitious work, O descobrimento do Brasil (The Discovery of Brazil), an adaptation of Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter of 1500 about the founding of Brazil, with funding from the Instituto do Cacau da Bahia and INCE support.17 INCE provided Mauro with continuous and endless possibilities for educational vehicles, most of which he filmed in Rio. As aranhas and O joão de barro are forerunners of his famous Brasilianas series of seven INCE sound shorts that he made in the interior of Minas Gerais and São Paulo between 1945 and 1964, after the Estado Novo. Most of these are vehicles for popular songs and folk tunes that are accompanied by images of an idealized countryside with picturesque pastures, waterfalls, grazing animals, oxcarts, and occasional glimpses of young love. As aranhas offers a painterly image of rural life. The focus is an abandoned waterwheel-driven mill that has become the home of spiderwebs of various shapes and sizes. Slow pans and close-ups enable viewers to appreciate the unique delicacy and artistry of the individual webs that festoon the old wooden mill. O joão de barro centers on the ovenbird, a species whose nest resembles a small clay oven or kiln. Mauro films the nest’s intricate construction by a bird couple who furiously labor to create their snug home, its outer shell protecting the unusual dual chamber inside for the parents and the eggs. Mauro used the 1938 six-minute short to make his much-admired twenty-minute sound version, also called O joão de barro (1956), an ornithological delight, with birdsong, music, and a broader treatment of the birds and of nature as a sensuous idyll.

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In the 1930s and 1940s, As aranhas and O joão de barro were exceptions to the rule; science and industry, not nature, were the priority subjects for INCE during the Vargas dictatorship. Despite the artistry and luminosity of Mauro’s rural shorts, documentaries about Brazil’s achievements as a modern nation were INCE’s principal focus. Nevertheless, the Brasilianas series and a later INCE cosponsored film about the interior, Aruanda (1960) by Linduarte Noronha, would be foundational to what became known in the 1960s as Cinema Novo.18

Documenting Legendary Bandits Two of the most famous figures in twentieth-century Brazilian history and folk culture are Lampião (1898-1938) and Maria Bonita (1911–1938), the bandit couple who roamed the arid, sparsely populated northeastern backlands with an outlaw band, attacking and robbing farms and small towns, battling local and federal troops, and killing civilians and soldiers. Lampião, whose real name was Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, got his nickname, which means “Lamp,” because of his rapidly fired rifle bullets that were likened to the flickering flame of an oil lamp. In 1930 he was joined by Maria Déia, soon widely known as Maria Bonita, who left her husband for Lampião and was the first female member in his band. Lampião’s notoriety dates to the early 1920s, when he left his impoverished circumstances to join a bandit gang whose leadership he soon assumed. He was wanted by the government until 1926, when he agreed to help officials in the town of Juazeiro do Norte defend the state of Ceará from the Coluna Prestes (Prestes Column), a left-wing revolutionary movement headed by former military lieutenant Luís Carlos Prestes. Defying the federal government, the Prestes Column traveled the backlands to raise peasant awareness of the need for land reform. By joining the government against Prestes, bandits and other criminals received amnesty and were supplied with arms, munitions, and uniforms. Lampião arrived in Juazeiro to officially accept the government’s invitation and was feted as a hero and honorary captain in the local militia. There he met the Catholic priest Cícero Romão, the Northeast’s renowned spiritual leader, whose presence inspired mass pilgrimages to the town. Front-page newspaper coverage of Lampião’s visit to Juazeiro included photographs and an interview in which he mused about a future career in business. Ballads by area poets about the bandit’s exploits appeared in inexpensive chapbooks, literatura de cordel, that spread his fame further. But officials in Rio were slow to pay their

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bandit recruits, and defections from the allied government forces followed. Among the defectors were Lampião and his more than one hundred men; they never engaged with the Prestes Column and quickly resumed their violent ways. In 1936, at the height of his notoriety, Lampião was contacted by Benjamin Abrahão (1901?–1938), a Syrian-Lebanese immigrant living in Pernambuco who traveled to Juazeiro as a youth, met Padre Cícero, and a few years later, after additional schooling and some salesman work, returned to the town and became the priest’s private secretary. Abrahão was an ambitious and somewhat dubious figure who, before and after Cícero’s death in 1934, sold items belonging to the priest as relics, such as strands of his hair. In a famous photograph of Abrahão and Padre Cícero, the publicity-minded secretary poses with his right hand on the back of the seated priest’s chair while his left hand holds a carefully folded and displayed copy of the Rio newspaper O Globo. In 1935 Abrahão approached the banker and businessman Adhemar Bezerra de Albuquerque, head of the Aba Film Company in Fortaleza, about a project to make photographs and a film about Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their band in the backlands. Albuquerque also had a shop that sold state-of-the-art cameras and Zeiss film equipment imported from Germany. The successful negotiation involved the German multinational Bayer Company, which sent traveling salesmen equipped with movie projectors to show movies and attract backland customers.19 Abrahão had met Lampião in Juazeiro during the bandit’s famous 1926 visit, but it was his close association with Padre Cícero and his eagerness to increase the bandit’s celebrity nationally and abroad that convinced Lampião to accept. Aba Film provided cameras, sound equipment, and black-and-white film stock; Bayer local affiliates developed negatives of pictures and film footage; and the Bayer Company optioned to mass-market the photographs in Brazil.20 With an ICA (Internationale Camera AG) and a 35 mm Zeiss, the aspiring director traveled the backlands in search of Lampião, finally receiving his approval to film in spring 1936. The deal with Lampião served both the outlaw’s and the now itinerant filmmaker’s interests. Abrahão sold copies of his photographs and gave interviews to several newspapers over a period of months. He had many postcards made from his photographs and sold them to customers wherever he traveled. Ninety of the photographs have survived and constitute part of the nation’s official history, as Brasiliana. Abrahão had at least two meetings with Lampião in the interior, where he filmed the bandit leader and Maria Bonita as well as another famous couple, Corisco and Dadá,

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Benjamin Abrahão and Lampião shaking hands as Maria Bonita looks on in Lampião.

and others in their makeshift wilderness abodes surrounded by cacti and dense, thorny brush in the rough interior called the caatinga. Newspapers ran front-page reports about the film project, to be called Lampião, and more photographs were published, including images of Abrahão standing alongside his legendary subjects. Lampião participated in the marketing of his image with a handwritten letter reproduced by newspapers in which he authenticates and authorizes the visual evidence. It is not hard to imagine the Vargas government’s displeasure with Abrahão and the increasing media attention to the marauding outlaws wearing their bandit finery of leather headbands and belts decorated with large silver and gold coins and wide-brimmed leather hats studded with stars and other emblems. Like movie stars, they struck poses with swords, daggers, pistols, cartridge belts, and Mauser rifles. Abrahão’s pristine black-and-white photographs offer fascinating details. One portrait shows Lampião dressed in fashionable checkered socks and pointed-toe leather boots and holding a beautifully embroidered provisions bag in his hand. Maria Bonita stands beside Lampião in other photographs, with her short-brimmed tall hat, coin-studded hatband, bandolier-style belts, and ever-present kerchief fitted snugly around her neck with a gold clasp. She is petite and light-skinned and has a disarming and lovely face, all of which makes her image no less magnetic than the darker-skinned, bespectacled Lampião. He enjoyed detective fiction by George Simenon and Edgar Wallace and posed for pictures holding a novel, looking more like a scholar or intellectual than a bandit. The couple’s love story and life on the run enthralled newspaper readers, and for many Brazilians, especially the Northeast peasantry, they became symbols of an oppressed population, admired and supported because of their transgressions and violence. When the Vargas government learned of Abrahão’s private showing of edited footage to a group of Fortaleza officials on April 10, 1937, agents

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from the National Propaganda Department, headed by Lourival Fontes, swept into the movie theater and seized the material. The document authorizing their seizure had appeared three days earlier, in the April 7, 1937, edition of the newspaper Correio do Ceará. Vargas understood the power of cinema and the threat of Lampião, who was idolized far beyond the Northeast. Abrahão’s biographer Frederico Pernambuco de Mello has commented that the reports of Lampião as a symbol of the left-liberal Aliança Nacional Libertadora (National Liberation Alliance) were disturbing to the president and soon-to-be dictator. Images of bandits were also anathema to the idea of the modern and progressive country promoted by Vargas.21 Following his months of celebrity, Abrahão became entangled in difficult business dealings in Pau Ferro, a small town in Pernambuco where he had friends from his time with Lampião. On the evening of May 7, 1938, he left a bar and was returning home when he was attacked and stabbed forty-two times. There were no witnesses to his death. Rumor circulated that he was either murdered by the government or by a jealous husband; his case was never solved. Just over two months later, on July 28, Lampião, Maria Bonita, and nine other bandits were hiding out in Grota do Angico in the backlands of Sergipe. They were tracked down by volantes (mobilized militia) who killed and beheaded them. In 1955 the filmmaker Alexandre Wulfes discovered film cans with Abrahão’s footage in a government office.22 He and the producer Al Ghiu salvaged and edited ten minutes of the footage, which lacked a soundtrack; it was shown in theaters to wide public interest and critical acclaim. In 2007 the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo restored the silent footage, and later that year Ricardo Albuquerque, grandson of Adhemar, edited it and added four minutes of new material. Fourteen minutes are all that remains of the footage shot.23 Of inestimable historical value, the footage gives an idea of Abrahão’s camera skills, aesthetic sensibility, and strategy for dramatic and candid sequences starring the bandits. Abrahão’s journey into the interior overlapped with the rise of the popular northeastern novel portraying peasant farmer struggles in the drought-stricken backlands. Protagonists in novels such as Raquel de Queirós’s O quinze (1930, The year fifteen) and Graciliano Ramos’s 1938 Vidas secas are worn down by oppressive landowners and barren land, while Lampião, Maria Bonita, and others filmed by Abrahão appear content in their backland hideaway, living among the thorny brush and cacti, a wilderness sanctuary from attacks by soldiers and the police. Abrahão’s footage begins with pristine, almost abstract black-and-white shots of the rugged backlands terrain. Close-ups of large cacti resemble

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An armed and smiling Maria Bonita approaching the camera in Lampião.

images photographed by Tina Modotti in 1920s Mexico; other shots call to mind the arid Mexican landscape in Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s footage for his documentary ¡Qué viva México! Lampião and Maria Bonita appear frequently in the footage, sometimes separately, other times together or with different members of their band. Among the surprises are charming scenes of everyday domesticity. In one segment Maria Bonita sits at a sewing machine, her hand rapidly turning its wheel, possibly making one of the simple dresses she wears occasionally in the footage. In another scene she carefully coifs Lampião’s long hair as if readying him for a photo shoot. At other moments she is dancing to a fast-paced musical beat, walking a dog, and putting on several gold necklaces that represent part of her wealth. Contrasting these domestic scenes is one of the most entrancing moments in the footage, when she appears in bandit garb with others and strides across a clearing toward the camera. As she approaches for a close-up, she gives a small smile, draws her pistol, and gradually points it at the camera, somewhat like Bronco Billy Anderson in the famous final shot of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). In all other scenes Maria Bonita hides her hair under a hat or wears it tightly pinned up; in this shot she has loosened her long, dark hair, adorned with a small barrette. It is a dramatic image of a pretty woman who, despite her schoolgirl looks and Mona Lisa smile, traffics in violence and is wanted dead or alive by the government. There are two dramatic albeit slightly out-of-focus close-ups of Lampião speaking directly to the camera. Pernambuco de Mello writes that he spent days looking at the footage to figure out what Lampião said. In the first shot Lampião seems convinced of the impact the film will have and, according to Pernambuco de Mello, says, “This’ll cut everyone deep. Lots of folks. Cut even the Devil!” Lampião is more reflective and subdued in the second close-up: “Hopefully this gives merit to sequences that will last.”24

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Among the sequences that did last is an amusing piece of marketing by Abrahão on behalf of his Bayer aspirin sponsor. Lampião, Maria Bonita, and a dozen other bandits are filmed gathered around a tree where a poster for Bayer aspirin has been attached to the trunk. Most of the bandits look at the camera while Lampião, who is turned more toward the tree, moves his finger along the poster’s ad as he reads the words: “Health and beauty—counters pains and colds, Cafiaspirina, a trusted remedy: if it’s Bayer, it’s good.”25 Smiling and unusually animated, Lampião then passes out small packets of aspirin tablets to several of his comrades. Pernambuco de Mello explains that Bayer had just begun producing the small cellophane envelopes to ensure safety standards for the aspirin. The film was also a self-promotion vehicle for Abrahão, who appears several times in front of the camera alongside Lampião and others, shaking their hands, drinking water from a bandit’s canteen, and accepting a glass of whisky offered by Maria Bonita. To further promote his friendship with Lampião, Abrahão created specially designed calling cards featuring his birth and bandit names along with his honorary title of captain. All the scenes in the documentary footage are to some degree staged for the camera, none more obviously so than the attack sequences that show several bandits charging across a clearing with their rifles and pistols aimed off screen. To give their performance an air of authenticity, one of the bandits stops short during the advance and falls to the ground, presumably killed by an enemy who never appears on screen. In contrast with footage that focuses on violence and weaponry is a remarkable scene in which the bandits kneel with bowed heads and pray in front of a makeshift altar as Lampião, also kneeling, reads from a Bible. Scholars refer to Lampião as a man of faith, although his belief in God apparently never conflicted with his violent deeds. This was also true of other powerful figures including landowners and local officials, some of whom befriended and even bankrolled bandits for services enabling them to retain their political control. There is a dramatic poignancy and irony to the scene of the praying bandits with their heads bared and bowed. After Lampião, Maria Bonita, and nine others were killed in the ambush and decapitated, the militia loaded their severed heads on a truck and drove through the countryside, finally stopping in Sant’Anna do Ipanema in Alagoas, where crowds gathered to see the heads on display in the truck bed. Sometime later they were moved to a chapel and placed alongside one another on a long ledge draped with an altar cloth. There is a widely circulated photograph of this gruesome display and another showing five of the heads stacked on top of the other six.

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Heads of Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their band on display.

But the most famous image was photographed at the magistrate’s office in Piranhas, Alagoas, where the heads were artfully albeit grotesquely displayed on the building’s front steps along with their captured possessions. Lampião’s head appears alone on the bottom step between two bandit hats and two long daggers and above an assemblage of two embroidered bags, a silver-handled rifle, and a hat decorated with stars and coins. Maria Bonita’s head appears directly above Lampião’s. Note cards appear next to the heads to identify the bandits, and their names along with the date of their execution appear on a chalkboard in the far left corner of the photograph. The heads are surrounded as if by a frame made up of the other hats, ammunition belts, and embroidered belts and bags. Topping this bizarre altarlike installation are two sewing machines, which, like their weapons and gold, accompanied the bandits wherever they roamed. Lampião’s and Maria Bonita’s heads were later taken to Salvador, Bahia, where they were put in jars and on museum display for three decades. In 1969 their daughter, Expedita, who was born in 1932 and raised by family members, successfully petitioned for their return, after which the couple’s last remains were finally buried. Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their nine comrades were not the first bandits to be beheaded and treated this way after death. In 1935 and 1936, newspapers carried horrific images of beheaded bandits, three with their eyes still open, displayed along with their guns, belts, and bags. At the time, proof of a bandit’s death, for which militia men were remunerated and often promoted, required cutting off and displaying the criminal’s head for a photograph. One of the most unsettling images, taken a few months before Lampião and Maria Bonita were killed, shows a group of

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more than a dozen armed soldiers, seated and standing, who pose around three severed heads. There is a dark irony to the image because it shows troops wearing wide-brimmed leather hats and other regalia typical of bandits and indistinguishable from the outlaws whose heads they sought. Lampião and Maria Bonita have long been the subject of plays and musical lyrics, and they inspired the colorfully painted figurines sold in museum stores and tourist shops throughout the Northeast. Their story appears in myriad documentaries and was featured in a TV Globo miniseries and numerous dramatic films, among them Lino Ferreira and Paulo Caldas’s sensitive and artful Baile perfumado (1997, Perfumed Ball), which expertly incorporates Abrahão’s surviving bandit footage and pays long-overdue tribute to Abrahão’s own story and directorial talent.

Four Vera Cruz Documentaries Along with continued economic growth, urban expansion, and a steady rise of a migration from within Brazil, especially the Northeast, post–World War II São Paulo experienced a surge in the number of institutions and programs dedicated to the arts. Within just a few years, from 1947 to 1951, the city’s cultural landscape changed dramatically to include the Museu de Arte Moderna with a film center and library, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, Escola de Arte Dramática, the Bienal de São Paulo, and several film companies including the Vera Cruz Companhia Cinematográfica.26 The motivating desire to invest heavily in the arts came from the commercial sector and industrialists who had made or inherited fortunes in agriculture, manufacturing, and communications. Similar to the Portuguese royal court that fled Napoleon’s army and arrived in Rio in 1808, São Paulo’s Francisco Matazzaro Sobrinho, Franco Zampari, and others from the business elite regarded culture and the arts as essential to elevating their state capital’s profile as an industrial and cosmopolitan center. Brazil as a whole was undergoing major changes following World War II, notably with the end of the Estado Novo in 1945, the restoration of a democratically elected government, a flourishing of liberalism, and a new constitution. Yet only five years after Vargas was deposed, voters in the fall 1950 election returned him to the presidential palace for a four-year term. In the 1940s Rio was the undisputed center of moviemaking in Brazil, where the vertically integrated Atlântida Company continued to reign with its inexpensive musical comedies called chanchadas. In São Paulo, film was of little interest compared to manufacturing automobiles and other

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consumer goods; along with banking and wholesale and retail services, manufacturing drove the fast-moving economy. In his unpublished study “História do cinema paulista (1949–1954),” Sílvio de Campos Silva offers various rationales for the unprecedented investment in filmmaking in São Paulo at the end of the 1940s. He cites several external factors, among them the rise of filmmaking in countries formerly without any industry, the success of film industries in Argentina and Mexico, and the increase in film festivals worldwide, which brought greater popular and media attention to national cultures as well as possibilities for monetary prizes and distribution. Campos Silva lists other factors specific to São Paulo, including the proliferation of film clubs; recognition of the arts, as represented by the museums, film center, comedy theater, and drama school; and the growth of industry, which made São Paulo the most logical and viable site for a major movie studio. An additional decisive factor was the return to Brazil of the director Alberto Cavalcanti, who had been invited by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo to present a series of talks on cinema. His 1949 visit came at an especially crucial moment for the Vera Cruz studio.27 At the invitation of Matazarro Sobrinho, Cavalcanti met with him, Franco Zampari, and a few others to discuss their ideas for the new studio, which would make high-quality movies to compete with Hollywood and attract international audiences. Cavalcanti accepted their invitation to head the studio and briefly returned to Europe, where he hired several experienced technicians, including Chick Fowle, the cinematographer for John Grierson’s Night Mail (1936), and Oswald Haffenrichter, the awardwinning editor of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Vera Cruz was a major enterprise built on land owned by Matazarro in São Bernardo do Campo, a satellite city outside São Paulo. Once completed, the studio had four sound stages, office buildings, warehouses for equipment and vehicles, and a number of small but well-equipped accommodations for staff. There is considerable scholarly commentary on the history of Vera Cruz, which made eighteen features and four documentaries between 1949 and 1954, when financial difficulties brought production to a halt.28 In addition to investing in state-of-the-art equipment, the studio regularly overspent on elaborate productions while paying top wages to maintain a staff that ballooned up to six hundred. But the chief problem was Vera Cruz’s reliance on Columbia Pictures in the United States to distribute its films. Vera Cruz executives, neophytes in the film business, failed to comprehend the financial perils for a studio without the means to distribute its own movies. With bankruptcy looming, the studio’s O cangaceiro (1953, The Bandit) won the Cannes Film Festival Prize for Best Adventure Film and

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became a box-office success. Directed by the Brazilian Lima Barreto, it is a dynamic and violent movie whose bandit characters and backland settings are clearly inspired by Benjamin Abrahão’s photographs of Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their band. To pay off debts for distribution, Vera Cruz sold the film’s distribution rights to Columbia, a mistake of epic proportions from which the studio never recovered. Unhappy at Vera Cruz, Cavalcanti left in 1951 for São Paulo’s Maristela Film Company (later Kino Filmes), where he directed a few pictures before returning to Europe in 1954. Among those hired by Cavalcanti who remained at the Vera Cruz studio after his departure was Lima Barreto. In addition to O cangaceiro, which inspired Glauber Rocha’s early films, Barreto directed four documentaries made in the 1950s, three of which played theatrically in Brazil.29 From the beginning, Vera Cruz made plans for a series of documentary shorts to feature works of art and the history, practices, and customs of the people. The first of the series, in which these intentions were announced, was Painel (1950, Panel), the first Brazilian documentary short to be made about the visual arts. Directed by Lima Barreto and shot on location at the Colégio de Cataguases in Minas Gerais, it focuses on a three-panel mural painted by the Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari that was purchased for the newly built school designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Both the school and artwork were commissioned by the São Paulo industrialist and art enthusiast Francisco Inácio Peixoto, for whom the school was later named. Timing was an important factor. Prior to its arrival in Cataguases in 1949, Portinari’s Tiradentes was displayed in Rio and São Paulo to widespread acclaim. The location for the mural in a school designed by Niemeyer was a compelling factor. Portinari chose as the subject for his work the Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Conspiracy), a much-celebrated albeit failed attempt in 1789 to overthrow the Portuguese monarchy and install a republic. The leader of the conspiracy that included a group of distinguished writers from Minas was Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, a soldier and dentist commonly known as Tiradentes. Although other conspirators suffered prison and deportation, Tiradentes was put to death as an example to those who might follow in his revolutionary footsteps. By order of Queen Maria I of Portugal, he was hanged and beheaded, and his quartered body was raised on stakes for public viewing along with his severed head. Painel retells the story of the conspiracy and Tiradentes’s plight through five separate sets of images on the three-panel mural painting. A colorful artwork ten feet high and fifty-six feet long, it is a moving interpretation of history, a condemnation of tyranny, and an unparalleled tribute to a revered national figure.

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Painel is an educational film but with more financial backing, greater artistic aims, and higher production values than the government INCE films that were still being made. The choice of the Colégio de Cataguases and Portinari’s painting as subject matter was especially well suited to Vera Cruz’s tradition of a quality approach to filmmaking and in keeping with the citywide push to display works of art for public consumption. A member of the Communist Party who ran twice for public office, Portinari was a polemical figure whose politics and paintings of the poor, downtrodden, and dispossessed conflicted with the repressive measures of the Estado Novo and subsequent presidency of Eurico Dutra (1945-1951). At the first Bienal, in 1951, São Paulo, a stronghold of worker militancy and union organizing, paid tribute to Portinari with a special exhibition despite or perhaps because of his living in self-exile in Uruguay. The film begins with a view of a bucolic Cataguases landscape, a region little known to most moviegoers. From the pastoral setting glimpsed between fronds of a tree, the camera approaches the building, entering through large French-style entry doors into an airy, high-ceilinged, and magisterial lobby. Moving past the lobby, the camera focuses on the school’s long, minimalist-designed hallways and Niemeyer’s trademark ramp instead of stairs. In the next shot, a close-up of a classroom chalk board announces that the day’s lesson is the 1789 revolt; on a nearby easel is a large illustration of Tiradentes with the long hair and beard he grew while a prisoner. The off-screen voice of a teacher summarizes facts about the conspiracy and briefly comments on an illustration of Portinari’s panels and the use of historical subjects in modern art. A dialogue ensues between the teacher and a pupil, who is also off-screen and who asks for help to understand the artwork. The camera turns to the back of the classroom and pauses on rows of perfectly aligned desks. The teacher and pupil finally appear on screen as they walk into the lobby and seat themselves in the modernist chairs designed by Joaquim Tenreiro that are strategically placed for viewing the panels. When the student asks why he cannot understand Portinari’s work, the teacher reassuringly explains that modern art (not unlike the architecture and furnishings being filmed) differs from conventional styles and requires a different way of seeing. As he speaks, the camera slowly pans over the panels as if contemplating the lesson’s subject. A melodious orchestral score by the composer Francisco Mignone accompanies the pan; except for the credits sequence, there has been no music prior to this moment. Barreto uses a subjective camera to convey the boy’s bewilderment at the artwork. In contrast to the earlier traveling shots, the sequence involves

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A student and teacher talking about the Portinari mural in Painel.

a rapid shifting back and forth between the boy’s intent, inquiring eyes, and dizzying pans of the artwork and close-ups of certain figures turned at odd angles. The music also changes to aggressive playing of stringed instruments à la Bernard Herrmann in Psycho. A self-reflexive segment, it experiments with camera and music to comment on the estranging effect of nontraditional forms of art. The film’s second part or lesson consists of a slow pan across the five sets of images in the mural, accompanied by the teacher’s off-screen statement “Once upon a time in the captaincy of Minas Gerais . . . ,” which shifts the topic to the artwork’s content rather than its form. To guide comprehension, the audience, now in the role of student, is presented with five title cards, one for each segment of the painting, “Conspiracy,” “Trial,” “Execution,” “Dismemberment,” and “Freedom.” Except for lines spoken off screen to identify the group of “Conspiracy” prisoners, one of whom is in chains, the only commentary is Mignone’s orchestral score, which oscillates between the reverential and the melodramatic. Apparently Barreto preferred lighter, popular music for the soundtrack, but Mignone’s composition seems appropriate, especially as accompaniment for the panel’s numerous images of mourners, mostly women and children, who stand solemnly before the cruel displays of Tiradentes’s bloody head and quartered limbs. Portinari’s quasicubist approach to the body parts, which are stacked on top of one another with the severed head at the bottom, augments the horror. Portinari regularly turned to the marginalized classes as subjects for his paintings and murals. Here he privileges women and children as witnesses to history, groups rarely acknowledged in the official record. In fact, the final set of images, “Freedom,” places the chains of tyranny, now broken, in a woman’s hands.

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Painel is especially interesting as an example of how documentary looks at painting. The film’s first image of Portinari’s work is a book illustration, which may be Barreto’s way of commenting on how most people normally view art reproductions on a page. In his essay “The Cinema’s Art Gallery,” Raymond Durgnat writes, “In contrast to reproductions on the page, the cinema puts the painting back on the wall.” Barreto proceeds to do so in the lesson part of the film. Durgnat observes that although cinema’s “controlled temporal continuum makes it difficult for the spectator’s eye to ‘browse’ at leisure over the work of art . . . it has some compensation in its power to direct attention, to move smoothly from the whole to the detail and back, to related details, to analyze, order, reorder.”30 This is exactly what the lesson is indirectly about: the ways camera movements such as pans and close-ups give a commentary on the work of art. Painel was shown in movie theaters as the lead-in to Caiçara (1950), Vera Cruz’s much-anticipated first feature film by the Italian director Adolfo Celi, cofounder of the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia.31 Because of the quality of the Painel documentary, which was well received by critics and the public, the Tiradentes panels became one of Portinari’s best known and admired works. In 1975, thirteen years after the artist’s death and in the midst of the right-wing military dictatorship, the state of São Paulo purchased the panels and moved them to the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, the government seat, where they were prominently displayed.32 In 1989, four years after Brazil’s return to a democracy, they were transferred to the state capital’s Salão Nobre in the newly constructed Memorial da América Latina. There, after nearly fifteen years, they were reunited with the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, who was commissioned to design the building. With Painel, Barreto took an important first step in developing a distinctively engaging and educational approach to art, history, and culture. He immediately followed that first partly dramatized documentary with another, Santuário (1951, Sanctuary), about the Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, an eighteenth-century church built on a hilltop in Congonhas, Minas Gerais. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the church is famous for the twelve statues of Old Testament prophets carved by Brazil’s most revered sculptor, Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730–1840), better known as Aleijadinho. Santuário also presents the artwork as a narrative, in this case, a dramatic reenactment of a journey by an elderly Black man, Zé Cristiano. The film’s introductory and only title card explains that Zé has set off on his burro to fulfill a promise made in the name of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos. The intertitle addresses viewers directly, inviting them to

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accompany Zé’s journey, documented as part of “the homage to our first artist worthy of the last of the arts: the cinema.” The film opens with footage of the Minas Gerais countryside, followed by shots of Zé riding his burro in his Sunday best, a brilliant white suit and hat that starkly contrast with the landscape. Barreto captures the beauty of the colonial town with scenes of the rider and mount traveling the narrow, cobbled streets of Congonhas with their small, whitewashed dwellings. A small street sign, “Rua do Aleijadinho,” signals the church’s proximity; as Zé’s burro climbs a steep grade, the soprano voice of Maria Kareska accompanies their ascent. Zé’s wonder at the statuary is communicated through a subjective camera and stylized close-ups that shift between his worn yet handsome face and the stone-carved visages. In a subsequent scene, the camera moves in for a close-up of one of Ze’s bare feet. It is a compellingly photographed image, focusing on a foot ravaged by hard labor. Zé’s hand enters the frame to unbuckle a spur strapped to his ankle, which he leaves at the church’s entry gate. Barreto’s choice of a Black Brazilian for the film’s narrative is doubly referential. Aleijadinho was an African Brazilian whose mother was an enslaved African owned by his Portuguese father; eighteenth-century Minas Gerais was largely populated by enslaved people brought to the region to work the gold, silver, and diamond mines. Zé’s promise and journey are also in keeping with devout acts practiced by the rural poor. A second journey of sorts begins as Zé enters the sanctuary courtyard and climbs the elaborate staircase, where the twelve prophets appear in ascending position, six on each side. Unlike Painel, where the film leaves the student and teacher behind to focus on the artwork, Santuário continues to study Zé’s reverence and awe at the statues, which are filmed in low-angle close-ups and accompanied by the music of the São Paulo composer Gabriel Migliori. The camerawork here is reminiscent of Eisenstein’s impressive close-ups of Indigenous peasants against the backdrop of Aztec ruins in ¡Qué viva México! A few low-angle shots in Santuário use the brilliant, nearly cloudless sky to emphasize the statues’ monumental presence, shots similar to the signature close-ups of peasantry by Mexico’s famous cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. If, as Durgnat argues, cinema can put painting on the wall, it can also give life to the three-dimensionality of sculpture by analyzing it from different viewpoints. Barreto’s camera draws attention to the elegance of Aleijadinho’s finely carved statues adorned with Middle Eastern turbans and intricately sculpted, flowing robes. Close-ups emphasize the prophets’ gaunt, angular faces, curling tresses, pointed beards, and sandaled feet.

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Zé, who keeps a promise to the saints in Santuário.

Poised dramatically at different angles, with an occasional arm raised or finger pointing aloft, the towering statues have a dynamic, lifelike quality. Occasional shots of Zé and his burro surprisingly and stunningly appear at intervals, while an off-screen narrator reads biblical passages specific to each prophet. The readings complement the Latin phrases carved on individual sculpted scrolls that unfurl toward the base of each statue. The sculptures are especially impressive considering that Aleijadinho, who suffered from a disease that might have been leprosy, had to have his carving tools bound to his hands to work. After leaving his offering of a candle inside the church, Zé slowly descends the staircase and pauses beneath the statue of Isaiah, the prophet of faith and political justice. There, as if acknowledging an old friend, Zé raises his hand and lightly pats the prophet’s foot. Barreto adds a second charming exchange; after mounting his burro, Zé looks up at Isaiah, whose

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finger, pointing outward and down, reminds Zé that he has forgotten his spur at the gate. With a grateful expression, Zé dismounts, picks up and fastens the spur, and remounts, urging the burro back down the hill. From a distance, he turns in the saddle to take one final backward glance. Santuário won the Governor’s Award at the São Paulo film festival in 1951. Two years later, in 1953, it won First Prize in the art-film competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Learning of the prize while with friends at Nick’s Bar in São Paulo, Barreto is quoted as saying to them, “Now you’ll have to put up with me because I’m going to be impossible.”33 That was a very good year for Barreto, whose O cangaceiro won top awards at Cannes and the Edinburgh Film Festival. Soon after that, he directed two more documentaries, which, like bookends, encompass the history of the Vera Cruz company’s film production. Shot over several months by different camera crews, Obras novas: A evolução de uma indústria (1953, New works: The evolution of an industry) is a documentary about the building of the Vera Cruz studio in São Bernardo do Campo, as part of the state capital’s heady industrial expansion into the outskirts. The first few minutes showcase a bustling São Paulo and the site of the studio built on farmland. An upbeat contemporary music score accompanies shots of movie posters of Vera Cruz features and the many trophies awarded them at festivals. An off-screen narrator provides historical information about the studio and its investments in state-ofthe-art technology. At this juncture the voice-over disappears, as does the upbeat modern soundtrack, and a different viewing experience ensues. There is a similarity between Obras novas and its predecessors, despite the difference in subject matter. Here, in the second part, Barreto creates an artfully composed documentary about architecture and the beauty of labor. There are numerous captivating segments depicting men at work. Armed with a hod carrier, a long, thin pole with a piece of wood angled at the bottom, a worker on the ground tosses individual bricks to a bricklayer, who, several stories up on a scaffold, leans over and easily catches them in his hand. Their movement is almost balletic. In another scene, workers nimbly walk like circus artists over narrow planks that crisscross the roof’s scaffolding. At still another juncture, a small, churning cement mixer is photographed from a low angle against the sky, not unlike the statues in Santuário; then the camera, aimed at the sky, imitates the mixer’s churning by spinning a full 360 degrees. Everyday work implements such as wheelbarrows, ladders, machinery, and even a film projector and an empty film reel take on the look of art objects in dramatic close-ups. Except for a brief scene in which a tractor uproots a tree to clear the land, there is no sign

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Building the Vera Cruz Studio in Obras novas: A evolução de uma indústria.

of heavy equipment. Despite the emphasis on São Paulo’s modernity, the movie studio, like a painting, seems done by hand. Barreto’s use of music in Obras novas is especially effective for two reasons. The film is edited to the rhythm of the work, and the classical score, à la Beethoven, gives the scenes drama and zest. More significantly, however, the anachronistic combination of classical music and scenes of labor creates a kind of tone poem celebrating the dignity and joy of work.34 Obras novas was never shown theatrically, probably because Brazil’s largest movie studio was in financial straits and its production days were numbered. But this was not the case with São Paulo em festa (1954, São Paulo in celebration), the last film made by Vera Cruz. Shot by four different camera crews from July 9 to 11, the one-hour documentary features the city’s elaborate celebration of its 400th anniversary, which coincided with the first international film conference in Brazil. Bands from several countries including the United States, thoroughbred horses in their finery, and a line of fire trucks accompany decorated floats and samba dance troupes down the Avenida 9 de Julho, the capital’s main artery. The opening ceremony is shown at the Pátio do Colégio, the birthplace of the city, and a Catholic mass is conducted at the Praça da Sé, the historic downtown church square. It is estimated that more than a million people turned out for the festivities, which continued into the night with fireworks and showers of silver confetti. At the Pacaembu soccer stadium, Olympic athletes perform alongside trapeze artists, and a cadre of circus clowns entertain thousands of children and adults with an amusing variation on soccer. A historically valuable record of a city and its people in midcentury, São Paulo em festa was also a tribute to the 1932 São Paulo revolt known as the

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Constitutional Revolution, an attempt to overthrow the government of interim president Vargas. The anniversary celebration took place during Vargas’s return to the presidency, but he no longer had the power to strong-arm his political adversaries. Various problems plagued Vargas’s administration, including charges of corruption against certain officials, the attempted assassination of an opposition figure by Vargas security guards that resulted in the death of an Air Force major, and the loss of military support. On August 26, 1954, a little over a month after São Paulo em festa was made, his term abruptly ended, not by armed revolution but by a gun pointed at his heart and discharged by his own hand. Vargas’s control over the nation’s luminous images had ended.

CHAPTER 3

Documentary and Cinema Novo Brazil’s Cinema Novo, one of the most important fiction film movements in history, was closely related to documentary and symptomatic of various countercultural developments throughout the world after World War II. Like Italy’s Neorealism and France’s New Wave, Brazil’s Cinema Novo was made possible by the declining power of the Hollywood studios, the rise of international art-film distributors, and the development of flexible, relatively portable equipment that filmmakers could use in the streets or the countryside in documentary fashion. The Cinema Novo group was distinctive because they were politically committed and openly opposed to what they regarded as the cultural imperialism of Hollywood. They eschewed slick studio techniques and embraced a “cinema of poverty” that would have some of the urgency and relevance of political documentaries. Many of the directors associated with Cinema Novo, including Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, and Arnaldo Jabor, were also working in documentary. The documentary style of Pereira dos Santos’s fictional works is especially evident in his 1963 classic, Vidas secas.1 There was a general atmosphere in the early 1960s that enabled aspiring and veteran directors like Pereira dos Santos to collaborate with directors of nonfiction. Histories have paid little attention to this close relationship between documentary and Cinema Novo, especially among directors not normally considered part of the movement. What many film historians do acknowledge, however, is the importance of Arraial do Cabo (1959) and Aruanda (1960), two shorts regarded as precursors of Cinema Novo. These and several other documentaries circulated at festivals and often won prizes, but unlike a few of their Cinema Novo counterparts, they had no theatrical distribution and were limited in availability until the rise of 61

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media sites like Vimeo and YouTube. Engaging political works, they are concerned with many of the same issues as the Cinema Novo features, including rural peasantry in the Northeast, land reform, religion, the urban working class, and more broadly after the 1964 military coup, the impact of dictatorship on Brazilian society.

In the Beginning: Arraial do Cabo, Aruanda, and Um dia na rampa While the Vera Cruz Studio was preparing its last film, São Paulo em festa, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE) was working on a series of documentaries for the Campanha Nacional de Educação Rural (National Campaign for Rural Education, 1952–1963), whose mission was to bring economic development to rural areas by increasing the number of teachers and schools, promoting literacy, and instituting new work and organizational models.2 Poor health habits were another key concern of the rural education campaign; as a result, INCE films appeared on clean drinking water, proper hygiene, safe food preparation and preservation, and secure housing. Directed by Humberto Mauro and photographed by his son, José A. Mauro, all these films were 35 mm in black and white. A prime example is Poços rurais (1959, Rural wells), which uses animation to depict proper construction of a well. To make the film as engaging as possible, Humberto Mauro intercuts animation with live-action construction shots and a classroom scene with blackboard diagrams of a well and a pointer to indicate how wide and deep it should be dug. The film’s focus on safe water supplies and its use of animation call to mind Walt Disney’s US government–funded shorts on health that were distributed in Latin America during World War II. The same year Poços rurais appeared, Paulo César Saraceni and cinematographer Mário Carneiro, two young film enthusiasts, traveled a hundred miles from their home in Rio to Arraial do Cabo, a remote fishing village, to make a documentary about the impact on the seaside community of the chemical plant Companhia Nacional de Álcalis (CNA, National Alkali Company). The result of their collaboration was Arraial do Cabo, a low-budget, 35 mm, black-and-white film shot mostly outdoors, portraying a provincial way of life beset by industrialization and the nationwide push to modernize. The project revealed unacknowledged effects of the industrialization imagined in the government motto at the time, “Fifty years of progress in five.”3 The seventeen-minute documentary is also an

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impressive work of art, with stunning photography, a soundtrack by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and credit-sequence engravings by the renowned Brazilian artist Oswaldo Goeldi. Shown at film festivals locally and abroad, it won numerous prizes (Bahia, Rio, Bilbao, Rome, Santa Margherita, Florence, and Paris), and because of its implicit social criticism the film served as a touchstone, along with Linduarte Noronha’s Aruanda, for young left-wing filmmakers in the 1960s.4 Saraceni and Carneiro made Arraial do Cabo just before President Juscelino Kubitschek’s 1960 visit to inaugurate CNA, although the plant, which produced sodium carbonate (soda ash) for use in dyes, detergents, and glass, had been in partial operation since 1958, when Kubitschek officially opened the first production phase.5 Plans to build the factory date back to a 1943 economic initiative under Vargas as dictatorpresident. But debates about the factory’s location, Arraial do Cabo’s requisite salt repository, and production and shipping costs prevented action on the project until 1953, when Vargas, again president, ordered the CNA smokestacks to be built. Design and construction of the factory required a major influx of skilled and mostly unskilled workers, hundreds of whom arrived from the Northeast. The historian Walter C. Luiz Mattos Pereira describes the fishing village as so remote at the time that no road connected it to Cabo Frio, the municipal seat of some 35,000, nor were there any schools, doctors, telephone service, running water, or electricity.6 The arrival of migrant workers changed all that as working-class settlements appeared, with stores, social clubs, bars, churches, and schools.7 By 1957 most of the estimated workforce of 2,500 was employed in building these new communities.8 Wages at CNA far exceeded the meager income of fishermen, whose numbers gradually dwindled. Water pollution from the plant’s operation drove those who continued to fish to areas beyond the Arraial shore. In his 1993 book Por dentro do Cinema Novo: Minha viagem, Saraceni recalls that the night before he left Rio for Rome, where he had a fellowship to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he met the poet and anthropologist Geraldo Markan, who talked at length about his field research in Arraial. Intrigued by Markan’s account and his urging for a film to be made on the subject, Saraceni postponed his trip to study film in Rome and contacted Carneiro. Family connections helped them to secure modest funds from the Museu Nacional; Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Sérgio Montagna, Saraceni’s friends at Saga Filmes, agreed to lend them equipment and produce the film. Markan was credited as an associate producer. To help with expenses in Arraial, Saraceni and Carneiro were

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lent the use of a house owned by the museum. With high expectations, the museum director and anthropologist Heloísa Alberto Torres insisted the film be shot in 35 mm to compete for prizes at film festivals. Neither Saraceni nor Carneiro had ever been to Arraial, and despite his photographic expertise, Carneiro had never seen, let alone used, a 35 mm movie camera. The pair spent three months in Arraial do Cabo, the first month learning alongside fishermen the tasks and skills required of their trade. At night they accompanied the village fishermen to Juca’s bar, where they met and drank alongside CNA workers.9 Oswaldo Goeldi’s German Expressionist–style dark-wood engravings were an inspired choice to begin the documentary. The rough-hewn designs of fishermen, fish, rapacious birds, and eerily lit abodes set in inky blackness seem to augur the effects on the seaside community of CNA’s clouds of black smoke. An early scene in the film makes the point in a more obvious way. A young villager riding a burro is nearly run over by a huge, exhaust-belching transport on its way to the plant, demonstrating that progress is on the move no matter the human cost. In a subsequent scene of the transport unloading workers at the factory entrance, a voiceover explains CNA’s threat to the fishing economy. This newsreel-style narration occurs only twice in the film.10 Cross-cutting between villagers in the outdoors and workers inside the factory sharply contrasts the two ways of life. Fishermen and their families appear as part of the natural environment, their workdays determined by the sun and tides as opposed to the clock. Carneiro portrays their humble existence in artistically composed images: a metal coffee pot painted with flowers, an ancient iron for pressing clothes that looks like a piece of modern art, a clothesline with fluttering white wash, and a window frame with a flower pot. As children play on the beach, mothers and daughters fill large metal cans with well water that sloshes over and baptizes their faces and arms when they lift the cans onto their heads. On a hilltop stands the sentinel-like Baroque church Igreja da Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, which suggests the importance of worship to the village. Lean, barefoot men file down the beach to prepare for the day’s fishing. A lone fisherman in a straw hat climbs a hill to signal the location of schools of fish. From shots of long, narrow boats on the sandy shore, the camera cuts to mesmerizing close-ups of the hand-hewn wooden boats with their giant, sturdy oars as they are launched into a sparkling sea. Carneiro’s low-angle shots of fishermen are similar to those of villagers in Eisenstein’s Mexican film. Scenes of men rowing and casting nets and of the villagers helping to haul the bounty ashore also recall Orson Welles’s 1942 It’s All True footage of

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The village lookout for schools of fish in Arraial do Cabo.

the fishing community in Fortaleza in the Brazilian Northeast. Most of the scenes in Arraial do Cabo are backed by a mix of ambient sounds and the music of Villa-Lobos. In contrast, the CNA sequences are backed by sounds of industry such as a roaring engine and a hammer striking a pipe. The beat of a snare drum and discordant, avant-garde music accompany shots of workers riding an open platform up a dark shaft and carrying out their different tasks. In an interesting segue from plant to shore, the snare drum continues to beat as fishermen push a boat toward the sea. The military sound of a drum often associated with executions suggests that the fishermen’s time is gradually running out. Other shots feature workmen waiting outside the plant’s narrow entryways through which they pass one by one to punch a time clock. The footage is relatively short in comparison to that of the fishermen; instead, the film emphasizes the environmental blight of polluting transports and smokestacks and endless exposed pipelines in an otherwise pristine seaside setting. Arraial do Cabo also contrasts the graceful physicality of fishing with the seemingly robotic nature of factory labor. Individual workers appear in front of large machines, watching dials and wheels, standing on platforms, or squatting with a blowtorch. The fishing sequences show men launching boats, rowing long distances, straining against oars, hauling in the catch, pulling in nets, and selling their catch on the seashore. Carneiro’s close-ups of twitching tails and opening and closing mouths and gills capture the death throes of the gleaming fish while predatory birds in treetops await the remains. A second brief voice-over explains that unsold and gutted fish become the property of women villagers who work mounds of coarse salt

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deep into fish cavities and over their bodies to preserve them. Carneiro pauses to consider the women’s sun-aged faces and hands as they quickly and expertly handle the fish. A static shot focuses on the results of their labor, a large pile of tightly stacked fish whose heads with lifeless eyes look at the camera. The film’s final segment leaves a certain ambiguity. The principal action unfolds in a small bar where a barkeep tunes a radio to a station broadcasting what sounds like a small-town band. Men in hard hats and fishermen recognizable from earlier sequences raise their glasses and smile at one another. At one point a slightly drunken fisherman and a factory worker comically waltz to the music while others look on in amusement. The film ends with this scene of male camaraderie. Some viewers have contended that this ending minimizes or dismisses the earlier critique of CNA. In his 1961 review, the critic Jean-Claude Bernardet asserts that the scene might even suggest that CNA was a positive addition to the community.11 But that effect may have been the result of censorship; although the film was made during Juscelino Kubitschek’s democratically elected presidency, there was strict government oversight of mass media, as exemplified by censorship problems that plagued Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1956 feature film Rio, 40 graus (Rio, 100 Degrees). In any case, Arraial do Cabo pulls back from its Manichean approach to factory versus village and shows a bonded community. There may in fact have been actual bonding between CNA workers and fishermen, as the music and images suggest. Mattos Pereira notes that a musical association called Banda Sociedade Musical Arraial do Cabo was established by members from both groups, whose socialization led to better relations.12 All this uncertainty is further complicated by a wide shot intercut with the bar sequence, showing a one-legged man speaking emotionally from a balcony across the street. Nearly drowned out by the music, his barely audible plaint concerns his desire to shoot those responsible for the 1954 suicide of Getúlio Vargas, who was popular with the rural poor and working class. Although it is difficult to know exactly what the filmmakers had in mind with this scene, the man is the only diegetic voice and image of protest in the film. Glauber Rocha criticized Arraial do Cabo’s overall structure but avers that the intercut bar sequence was his favorite part of the film: “But we know that he [the protester] concentrates in his anomaly the drama of the city, the pathos of the primitive civilization invaded by the machine.”13 It is perhaps worth noting that not only fishermen but also factory workers had issues with CNA, and complaints about conditions and wages soon turned to discussions about strikes. The protesting man’s

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muted denunciation in the midst of revelry and camaraderie suggests not only a mourning and nostalgia but also a need to denounce and resist. In 1992 CNA was privatized, and in 2006 it went bankrupt. Arraial do Cabo’s largest industry is now tourism. The factory’s remains, on the order of ancient ruins, are gradually being taken over by the natural environment. While Paulo César Saraceni and Mário Carneiro were shooting Arraial do Cabo outside Rio, the Pernambucan journalist and film critic Linduarte Noronha was preparing a script about an even smaller and more remote community in Paraíba called Olho d’Água, a quilombo in the Serra do Talhado, some 225 miles west of the coastal capital of João Pessoa. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Zé Bento, a freedman and woodcutter, the quilombo grew after the abolition of slavery in 1888 as it attracted newly freed people who crossed the mountain to Aruanda, a name derived from the Bantu word “luanda,” meaning “the promised land.” Noronha was familiar with Olho d’Água. It was near the town of Santa Luzia, which was known for its Festa do Rosário em Santa Luzia, a weeklong religious festival whose origins date back to 1871. Following a visit in 1958, he wrote an article titled “As oleiras de Olho d’Água na Serra do Talhado” (The women potters of Olho d’Água in the Serra do Talhado) for A União, the Paraíba newspaper where he worked. The article in turn became Noronha’s inspiration for a short film about the quilombo’s founding and its pottery-making economy. Once he had a script, he assembled a small crew consisting of fellow northeasterners Vladimir Carvalho, João Ramiro Mello, and Rucker Vieira, whose camerawork would influence Cinema Novo productions shot in the Northeast.14 Despite their passion for movies and knowledge of literature about filmmaking, Noronha and his team had little to no practical experience or funds or equipment to make a movie. Noronha and Carvalho traveled to Rio to present the project to INCE director Humberto Mauro, who liked the topic and lent them a camera and tripod. INCE ultimately distributed Aruanda as part of its educational film series. Noronha also approached the Instituto Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, and it approved funds because of the film’s focus on the Northeast. But filming was a shoestring operation with a small crew, borrowed camera, and less than 3,000 feet of 35 mm black-and-white stock, all of which was transported by truck over barely passable roads. For two months the team experienced firsthand the daily hardships of residents in the isolated, far-flung community. They also made friends, several of whom appear in the film. Aruanda could be described as a docudrama composed of three parts:

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a reenactment of the journey of Zé Bento and his family into the wilderness and the founding of Olho d’Água, whose name refers to a spring that enabled their survival; a step-by-step illustration of the making of pottery; and scenes of the Santa Luzia marketplace, where the pottery and other local goods are sold. In addition to occasional off-screen narration, the film has a musical soundtrack that oscillates between the ballad “Ó mana deix’ eu ir” (O sister, let me go), about an enslaved person’s escape into the interior, and “Piauí,” a light, energetic tune played on a fife. Performed by members of the Confraria dos Negros (Black Brotherhood), the folk song is part of the Festa do Rosário repertoire, while a ninety-year-old quilombo resident and fifer called Manuel Pombal was recorded on site. Evoking an African homeland, drumbeats accompany the initial credit sequence and are repeated at the end of the film. As in Arraial do Cabo, geography is central to Aruanda, but instead of a seaside setting, the focus is a vast landscape parched by sun and frequent drought. Rucker Vieira’s cinematography captures the unforgiving nature of the backlands, a region unknown to moviegoing audiences and to most of those living in the Northeast. There is an epic quality to the reenactment of Zé Bento’s journey; after crossing arid plains and hillsides, he appears on a towering precipice. Like Luís Vaz de Camões’s Vasco da Gama, who sees the future Portuguese Empire from a mountaintop, Zé can see his family’s future in the land that lies before him. Once there, he runs the earth through his fingers to test its worth; in another shot, he and his wife cup the nearby water source and examine it. A mix of soil and water becomes the thick mud that Zé applies to a scaffolding of interlaced branches that will be their home. Vieira cuts between shots of the outside and inside of the structure as it is being built; from inside, the camera focuses on the gradually disappearing strips of sunlight between branches as Zé fills the gaps with mud. The final shots suggest a measure of survival and settlement as the two children, clean and clothed, appear at an open window eating cornmeal, and their parents’ painstaking sowing of rocky terrain has miraculously yielded rows of cotton. Critics have pointed out that Aruanda provided a model for Cinema Novo films shot in the Northeast interior; the film’s camerawork especially offered a lesson for filming in the harsh sunlight without the use of special lenses or filters. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s groundbreaking, now canonical fiction film Vidas secas (1963, Barren Lives) used the same approach when depicting the backlands journey of Fabiano, Sinhá Vitória, and their two sons, clearly evoking the journey of Zé Bento and his family. Like Aruanda, Vidas secas focuses on the family’s vulnerability yet strength

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Discovering an egg in Aruanda.

of purpose in the desolate interior. An interesting difference between the two works is how the journeys are filmed. In its long opening sequence, Vidas secas treats in real time the family’s arduous trek, underscored by the disquieting, seemingly endless squeaking of an oxcart wheel. Aruanda tracks that family’s journey in far less time, leaping to different geographic points, to the drawn-out vocals of a folk song. Both films make early use of close-ups to characterize performers who rarely if ever speak. In a close-up in Aruanda, the young son finds a bird’s nest with an egg high in a tree and looks over his shoulder to see his family walking away. The shot gets its power from the boy’s absence of any emotion at his discovery or any panic at being left behind. Completely naked, the boy seems a poignant sprite as he runs after the family with the prized egg in his hand. In somewhat similar fashion, Vidas secas has one of Brazilian cinema’s most famous sequences. It begins with a close-up of Sinhá Vitória seated on the ground impassively watching the family’s pet parrot perched on the lid of a small trunk. Vitória’s impassivity suddenly turns to pained revulsion as she grabs the parrot and, under cover of the truck, wrings the squawking bird’s neck. It is a desperate act to feed her starving family and the dog Baleia, but her thoughts of the parrot linger long after the kill. The second part of Aruanda shifts to the quilombo’s economy, which relies on making and selling pottery. Unlike the women workers in Silvino Santos’s No país das amazonas, quilombo women perform heavy physical labor in addition to their nimble-fingered work. In extraordinary footage, a small group of women’s efficient, almost assembly-line approach to their craft begins in a field where they pound the rocky ground with hoes and

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wooden poles. Once the soil is loosened, they scoop up handfuls to fill large cloth sacks that they then heft onto a donkey to take back home. After unloading and emptying the sacks, the women pound the soil again and run it through a large sieve until it becomes a fine powder. Noronha uses the light, fast-paced fife music throughout the second part of the film, making every stage of the pottery process, even scenes of field labor, seem almost joyful.15 A prime example is a scene of a woman retrieving water to mix with the soil. To the sound of the fife, she works her way carefully down the steep bank of the spring and slowly emerges with a large jar of water balanced on her head. The fifing continues as she maneuvers around stakes placed as handholds. The music’s quick beat is in counterpoint to her slow ascent, captured from behind in a low-angle shot against the background of puffy clouds in the vast sky. The delicate, airy tune continues in the next shot as the woman, now in the distance, slowly crosses a long, deeply furrowed plain with nothing but wilderness in sight. The fife soundtrack is especially effective in the indoors segment, in which fast-working hands mix water and soil into a large clay ball, then sculpt the ball into a crude, wide-mouth vessel and finally into a finely honed jar. Seated on the ground, three women work on various pieces; close-ups focus on their speed and skill with basic tools, their fastmoving fingers transforming, as if by magic, nondescript pieces of clay into decorative jars. Among the film’s most engaging shots are those showing the women illuminated in plays of sunlight in the shadowy interior. In an interview, Vieira mentions removing roof tiles from the structure to ensure enough light for the indoor shots.16 The film scholar Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky makes the important point that Aruanda, with its small crew and limited equipment, was as artisanal as the pottery making.17 Outdoors, the women prepare an open-top kiln, fire large and smaller pots, and remove the still-hot ceramics once they are done. Back indoors, chiaroscuro accentuates the smooth, round bottoms of fired bowls and jars that have been placed upside down on the ground to cool and set. This curious yet strangely beautiful huddle looks less like a pile of pots than a postmodern art installation. In the final segment the women fashion intricate nets from rope to tie together and secure the pots to the saddles of their donkeys. We learn from the off-screen narrator that their destination is the Santa Luzia market, a weekly trip and their only respite from work. As the women slowly lead the animals over hilly terrain, the soundtrack shifts to the ballad tune that accompanied Zé and his family across the wilderness. The film’s third part takes place in Santa Luzia, where a crowded

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Readying pots for transport in Aruanda.

marketplace with stalls carrying goods such as soda pop makes it seem urbane compared to the desolate Olho d’Água. The disparity is made greater by the soundtrack that in place of music features voices of buyers and sellers engaging in barter. The off-screen narrator interrupts the diegetic soundtrack to dispel any notion of the town’s well-being. Citing its high rate of illiteracy and grinding poverty, he describes the Serra do Talhado, including Santa Luzia, as a world completely detached from the rest of Brazil. In the next-to-last shot the ballad with vocals resumes as the women lead the animals, now laden with supplies, back to Olho d’Água. The film ends with a breathtaking aerial pan of the region’s mountains and valleys and a musical finale that returns to the opening drumbeat score. Arraial do Cabo circulated at film festivals in Europe, while Aruanda was shown to a small group of critics following the Primeira Convenção Nacional da Crítica Cinematográfica (First National Convention of Film Criticism), a three-day conference in São Paulo in mid-November 1960. The film critic Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes organized the conference and wrote a short article, “Fisionomia da primeira convenção,” published in the Estado de São Paulo, in which he briefly refers to Noronha’s “rich and modest” film and discusses Glauber Rocha’s review of Aruanda and Arraial do Cabo in the Sunday literary supplement of the Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil.18 Rocha’s essay “Documentários: Arraial do Cabo e Aruanda” is important for understanding the historical significance of these two short films that despite imperfections represented new ways of making movies for what soon was called Cinema Novo.19 Reading his detailed critique also provides

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hints at his own indebtedness to the short works for his films about the poor and marginalized in the Northeast. Although he praises Arraial’s scenes of the fishermen at sea, Rocha contends that the segment is too long and that its lyricism, albeit attractive and moving, lacks any connection to the first and last parts and detracts from the documentary’s overall force. Still, the importance of this and another segment in Arraial to Rocha’s Barravento (1962, The Turning Wind), his fiction film about a seaside village community outside Salvador, is evident. Often regarded as the first Cinema Novo dramatic feature, Barravento concerns the economic struggles of fishermen who are forced to pay most of their earnings to the absentee owner of their fishing net. Shot on location with nonprofessional actors, the film has several stylistically impressive and intensely lyrical moments reminiscent of Arraial do Cabo, with fishermen paddling small boats on a sparkling, sunlit sea. Rocha’s praise of Arraial’s scene with the protester on the balcony is also in keeping with Barravento’s central and problematic character, Firmino, who returns to the village after being politicized in the city and rails against injustices and capitalist greed. Despite Rocha’s critique of certain technical problems with sound and lighting in Aruanda, he was impressed by the film, comparing Noronha and Vieira to balladeers or “poets better than the majority of national bards.” The characterization resonates with Rocha’s interest in northeastern oral literature, especially ballads about local legends and backland strife like those that became the narrative backbone of his westerns, Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (1964, Black God, White Devil) and Antônio das Mortes (1969). The significance of Arraial and Aruanda in heralding a new cinematic way was not lost on Bernardet, who, one year later, reviewed both films for the Suplemento Literário do Estado de São Paulo. Like Rocha, Bernardet was less enthusiastic about Arraial, arguing that the fishermen were overly romanticized while scenes of the bad factory and good village were too facile and clichéd, not unlike the treatment of country and city or rich and poor in more commercial films; that binary approach became a trademark of early Cinema Novo. Bernardet was right in his observation, made earlier by Rocha, that Arraial failed to develop its critique of industrialization in the sea segment, providing no basis for the final coming together of workers. Bernardet considered Aruanda a model for a new generation of filmmakers who lacked technical and financial resources; in his words, “an intelligent photographer and small means are enough.” He praised the film’s avoidance of sentimentality, its knowledge of the quilombo, and its direct, incisive approach to the subject. Perhaps most importantly, he

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eschewed Noronha’s own critique of Aruanda’s technical problems, seeing in them clear signs of a new, imperfect style of making movies.20 Luiz Paulino dos Santos, who directed the ten-minute Um dia na rampa (1960, A day on the ramp), has a largely overlooked connection to Cinema Novo. He was the initial director of Barravento, which was based on his idea about a struggling fishing community outside Salvador. Disagreements about the film broke out between him and Glauber Rocha, who was executive producer and coauthor of the screenplay with José Telles de Magalhães. Rocha paid for the script’s rights, assumed the directorship, and made radical changes in the decoupage and the original dialogue written by Santos.21 Key to the film’s success was the editing by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, a strong supporter of new filmmakers like Rocha. Luiz Paulino dos Santos’s idea for Barravento is directly related to his making of Um dia na rampa, a historically important documentary that provides visible evidence of Salvador’s original Mercado Modelo, a street market, and the broad cobblestoned ramp that connected it to the upper city.22 The film focuses on dockworkers of African descent who carry goods transported by sailboats between nearby areas and the capital’s port and bustling outdoor marketplace. A 35 mm, black-and-white, ten-minute short, Um dia na rampa is a beautifully shot film about the rigorous labor of those who serve the market’s vendors and buyers. An upbeat soundtrack with vocals alternates with the music of a stringed instrument known as the berimbau. The vocal arrangement is based on the music of the orixás (gods) in the African Brazilian religion known as Candomblé. Those familiar with Jorge Ben’s popular tune “Mas que nada” of 1963 will recognize the roots of his composition in the film’s soundtrack, whose song “Nanã Imborô” is from the 1958 album Tam . . . Tam . . . Tam . . . ! by José Prates and Miécio Askanasy.23 The music transforms the heavy lifting of baskets filled with foodstuffs into images that verge on the epic-heroic. The images, a few in close-up, evoke Cândido Portinari’s famous paintings of northeastern peasants Mestiço (1934) and Café (1938), except that instead of a plantation, with its associations of slavery, the backdrop is a sunny seaside that is attractive and urbane. The film suggests the disparity within Salvador’s primarily Black population as well as between the social classes of market shoppers. A local woman, stylishly dressed, arrives on a streetcar to peruse the market offerings and leaves on foot, carrying her bag of goods. In three separate shots, two white women arrive in a large, fin-tailed Cadillac, shop for fish,

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Dockside workers in Um dia na rampa.

and load their purchases into the car’s massive trunk. Other scenes reflect a poverty that belies the apparent prosperity of the bustling port city. In one shot a young Black woman crouches on the street to fan the flames of a small grill topped with a large kettle. A sign reading “Deus e. as aguas” (God and. the waters), with the letter “s” written backward, appears at her right on an improvised stand. Here the soundtrack shifts from the upbeat vocals accompanying the shopping to the somber sounds of the berimbau that extend into a close-up of bottle caps used by players in a game of checkers. Dos Santos employs the berimbau as both subject and background music in scenes about African Brazilian culture. Perhaps the most significant is a sequence in which two men perform capoeira as musicians accompany their moves with a berimbau and pandeiro (tambourine). Although capoeira is widely known and practiced today, its associations with enslavement and martial arts resulted in government bans as well as more controlled, sanitized versions in the first part of the twentieth century. The scene in Um dia na rampa is especially important because it melds the martial art with the sound of a berimbau played by Mestre Bugalho, regarded as Brazil’s most talented berimbau performer of the time. Despite its brevity, Um dia na rampa has a certain similarity to documentaries associated with the city-symphony genre. The film begins with the boats’ arrival in the early morning and ends as they disappear into the sunset. The sailboats are large, numerous, and up to date, and they are uniformly docked at a modern marina. Different social and economic classes are shown on their way to and from the marketplace with burros and carts as well as the latest models of automobiles. Emphasis is given to

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An empty basket at day’s end in Um dia na rampa.

street life and the buying and selling of commodities. Um dia na rampa also has moments that depart from the bustle of the city. At one point the film pauses with a low-angle shot showing the sky through fronds of foliage. Another sequence focuses on a young couple daintily climbing aboard a boat and passing into the cabin below, presumably for an intimate moment. In the final shot a dockworker in near silhouette sits on the wall of the ramp and looks out to the sea. There is just enough light remaining to make out the loose weave of his large and now empty basket.

Talking Heads: The Early Films of Leon Hirszman President Juscelino Kubitschek’s “fifty years in five” plan (1956–1961) to modernize Brazil focused on the industrial base, transportation, energy, and the building of Brasília. Education and food supply were also part of the plan but received comparatively little funding despite the high rate of illiteracy and poverty.24 Culturally, the nation was riding a wave of international recognition from the music of bossa nova and, albeit to a much lesser extent, from concrete and neoconcrete poetry and art. In 1956 João Guimarães Rosa’s mythical backlands epic Grande sertão: Veredas was published; it is widely regarded as one of Brazil’s most important novels and in 1963 appeared in translation as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. The theater directors Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Augusto Boal changed the course of São Paulo’s famous but declining Teatro de Arena with socially conscious plays by local playwrights, beginning in 1958 with Guarnieri’s own Eles não usam black-tie (They Don’t Wear Black Tie), about a workers

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strike in São Paulo. It was followed a year later by Oduvaldo Vianna Filho’s play Chapetuba Futebol Clube, about a small rural team’s efforts to compete for the national soccer championship. The founding in 1961 of the interarts Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC) in Rio, with offshoots to appear in other cities, was an outgrowth of the broader popularnationalist spirit and an academic left-liberalism greatly energized by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The CPC was connected to the União Nacional dos Estudantes (National Student Union), which had a theater and received funding from the Ministry of Education. An engineering student who was a committed leftist and cinephile, Leon Hirszman was an early CPC proponent along with the playwright and actor Oduvaldo Vianna and the sociologist Carlos Estevam, who became the center’s first president. Their diverse interests reflected the CPC’s interdisciplinary focus on theater, music, film, literature, and the visual arts as well as the topic of illiteracy. The CPC’s external relations arm brought the center together with other cultural organizations such as the Fundação de Brasília, whose administrator at the time, the poet Ferreira Gullar, helped fund a film project that became the anthology titled Cinco vezes favela (1962, Five times favela).25 Hirszman directed the last of the five dramatic shorts, Pedreira de São Diogo (São Diogo quarry), about a poor community’s fight to protect its hilltop homes from an excessively powerful dynamite charge planned at the quarry below. On the production side, CPC first-time directors were paired with experienced ones; Nelson Pereira dos Santos edited Hirszman’s eighteen-minute short, which critics generally agreed was the best in the series. For his second short, the eighteen-minute documentary Maioria absoluta (1964, Absolute majority), Hirszman assembled the impressive team of Nelson Pereira dos Santos (editor); soon-to-be-directors Arnaldo Jabor (executive producer, co-scriptwriter, sound), David Neves and Eduardo Coutinho (production coordinators); Ferreira Gullar (narrator); neoconcrete artist Lygia Pape (assistant editor); and nineteen-year-old Luís Carlos Saldanha (cinematography), who went on to photograph Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio (1967, The path of oil) and Glauber Rocha’s Câncer (1972). Jabor said Maioria absoluto was the first Brazilian documentary to record direct sound using a Nagra, a Swiss-made portable audio recorder that proved an invaluable technology for talking-head interviews on location in Rio, Pernambuco, and Paraíba.26 Funded by the Ministry of Education, Hirszman’s documentary is about the high rate of illiteracy among Brazilians who lived outside metropolitan

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areas and constituted the country’s absolute majority. Projects about illiteracy were supported by the CPC’s mission, but Hirszman delved much deeper into the issue by giving voice to individuals to speak openly about their lack of food and other basic resources, including access to education. These interviews take place in the Northeast, where the Liga dos Camponeses (League of Farmworkers) was pushing for land reform and workers’ rights. At the time Hirszman was filming, the league got a boost from the left-liberal presidency of João Goulart (1961-1964), whose 1963 reformas de base (base reforms) allowed the government to appropriate large, privately owned tracts of unused land for redistribution to local farmers. That legislation was especially unpopular with northeastern plantation owners, powerful oligarchs who supported the 1964 right-wing military coup that overthrew Goulart and replaced his democratically elected administration with a military dictatorship.27 Hirszman biographer Helena Salem notes that final production on Maioria absoluta was carried out clandestinely after the coup, and the film was banned in Brazil until later in the decade. The film did circulate briefly at international festivals and won the Best Documentary prize at Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1965; in 1966 it won the Joris Ivens Prize in Oberhausen, Germany, and Best Documentary Prize at Sestri Levante, Italy.28 There is a dialectical aspect to the documentary; the film begins with a shot of a darkened classroom where children are sounding out words projected on a screen. The narrator states that the film is not about literacy but rather about the root causes of illiteracy that have marginalized forty million Brazilians. Brief questions and answers with individuals from Rio’s white middle class on the beach and at home are intercut with crowd shots of silent, mostly dark-skinned workers and close-ups of rural northeasterners. Asked on screen for their opinions about Brazil’s greatest problems, the middle-class Cariocas interviewed respond in different ways, from generalizations about moral laxity and an indolent poor to the need to import thousands of whites from Europe and the United States to improve Brazil’s situation. One man disapproves of the voting law that allows people to cast a ballot even if they are only literate enough to write their names. The film turns to the Northeast, beginning with a crowded marketplace where a huckster sells a bottled cure-all to the ailing poor who, the narrator explains, turn to phony remedies and drink for lack of medical care. To bring the reality of their health needs to the fore, he adds statistics: of the 350 municipalities in the Northeast, 277 have no medical care; of the 25 million

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people in the region, 60 percent go without meat, 80 percent without eggs, and 50 percent without milk. These alarming figures are given face in the second part of the film when the illiterate absolute majority speak. The two central themes that emerge from the filmed testimonies are lack of medical care and insufficient food. Both are directly related to the latifundio (plantation) system in which laborers, many like their enslaved ancestors, are totally dependent on the will of wealthy and often absentee landowners. Hirszman begins with two interviews that in different ways sum up the crisis of need and sense of helplessness in the region. There are two speakers in the first interview. Seated and visibly trembling, a man looks down while talking on camera, but his words are incomprehensible. His wife, who stands beside him, translates his story of how eleven years earlier he severed a nerve in his hand while cutting sugarcane. The injury caused his shaking, which first affected his limbs, then his ability to speak and eat. She adds, “I gave him a German whiskey purgative and he got calmer.” Used widely by the poor to treat various illnesses, the laxative has no curative value. The strategy for shooting this scene is innovative. It opens with a tight shot of the seated man speaking while an unidentified woman, partially in the frame, stands beside him. His skeletal chest shows beneath an unbuttoned shirt and the peeling, whitewashed wall of his home behind him. The woman ducks out of the frame, and a jump cut shows her now fully in the frame at his other side holding his thin arm and recounting his story. The jump cut interjects an unanticipated second story, this one without words. The space between the man and peeling backdrop is now filled with five young children and an older woman, possibly their grandmother, who resembles the wife. What begins as an interview about an individual’s physical and economic plight suddenly expands into the tragedy of an entire family living in desperate circumstances. In the second interview, an elderly woman sits in her thatch-covered home with pieces of laundry hanging on a wash line behind her. Hers is the story of the hundreds of thousands left behind when adult children and other family members migrate to the cities for work. Unlike many migrants, her son, whom she helped to relocate to São Paulo thirteen years earlier, has never sent any money back, and her survival depends on the charity of others. A roster of citizens supposedly supports her: “the major, the colonel, and the lieutenant.” These are citizens associated with the old political machine called coronelismo, a patriarchal system that gave or sold military titles, often honorific, to landed gentry, their acolytes, and other

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socially prominent figures who commanded their communities’ loyalty and votes. This was a system long abandoned in rural areas except in the Northeast, where an oligarchy and remnants of the antiquated power structure remain. The woman’s references to these titles in the early 1960s is an indication of how firmly coronelismo was rooted in Pernambuco and Paraíba—states where a neocoronelismo emerged from the alliance of latifundistas with the military following the 1964 coup.29 The off-screen narrator’s intermittent commentary on the region’s lack of schools and decent housing and the millions of workers without land, wages, and adequate food serves as a backdrop to cane workers’ testimonies, which range from the plaintive to the denunciatory. The film’s images of destitution and despair begin with shots of dirt-floor hovels followed by interviews with men and women who have gaunt, exhausted faces and often appear in ragged clothes. There is a cruel irony in the juxtaposition of the narrator’s comment that only 3 percent of the land in Brazil is planted and a worker’s statement: “If we had a little land, we’d have a better life.” An even stronger indictment of the landowning system emerges in separate shots of women knee-deep in a sea of cut cane, raking while two small children watch and help with the harvest. Among the many interviews, two testimonies stand out. A small, middle-age man wearing a porkpie hat performs what almost looks like a standup comedy routine. He amuses the workers around him with his body language and joking manner, but what he says is not funny. He suffers from shoes that are too small and hurt his feet when he cuts cane; he received a government handout of beans the day before but has yet to eat today. Among those in his audience is a young woman who, in a separate interview, denounces the landowner for evicting her family from their tenant home because her husband’s papers were not in order. Her anger is palpable, but there is also a sense of vindication in her testimony. She and her husband protested the eviction to a union, which negotiated a threemonth stay of the landowner’s order. What goes unsaid is that unless they find another place to work and live, which could be miles away, her family will be homeless. Hirszman contrasts these many scenes of grinding poverty and hard labor with an aerial shot of Brasília’s campus of modernist government buildings, including the presidential Palácio da Alvorada (Dawn Palace). The sound of voices, possibly politicians in debate, is mixed with narration, which explains that of the country’s forty million who cannot read or write, 25 percent are over eighteen and cannot vote. The narrator adds that this unheard mass

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Farmworkers in Maioria absoluta.

is the population upon whom the rest of Brazil depends for much of its sustenance. He ends with the rhetorical question “And the country, what does it give them?” followed by the interjection “Watch out!” Anyone who has seen Hirszman’s 1972 fiction adaptation of Graciliano Ramos’s novel São Bernardo (1934), about a greedy, violent landowner, will recognize in Maioria absoluta’s final scenes the source of his feature film’s powerful ending. The documentary’s soundtrack is silent when images of workers heading for the fields appear. A solitary voice slowly emerges, singing a work song to the accompaniment of long-distance shots of a countryside around the laborers. In one shot, swaying sugarcane plants shimmer in the sun like waves on a sea. The film ends with the date 1964, a year that marked the end of democratic rule in Brazil and any attempt at land reform for the next twenty years. In a 1983 interview with the film critic Alex Viany, Hirszman said Maioria absoluta, which had been banned by the military regime, had been released a year and a half earlier, in 1981. Before its theatrical release, showings were limited to international festivals outside Brazil, a few local cine clubs, and the Cinemateca Brasileira, but only for certain audiences.30

Arnaldo Jabor on the Circus and the Spectacle of the Middle Class There is little question that Arnaldo Jabor’s interest in making a documentary in the Northeast was inspired by working with Hirszman on Maioria absoluta. But with the installation of the dictatorship on April 1, 1964, and the regime’s shutdown of Eduardo Coutinho’s film about a peasant leader’s

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assassination in the Northeast, Jabor changed course. Instead, he used film stock that he had acquired from the Ministry of Foreign Relations to make a documentary about the decline of circus entertainment in Rio de Janeiro. Carlos Diegues’s successful fictional film Bye Bye Brasil (1980), about a small circus troupe’s search for an audience, was no doubt inspired by Jabor’s O circo (1965, The circus), a twenty-six-minute, 35 mm, color and black-and-white film that Diegues edited. While working with Hirszman, Jabor was also studying film with the Swedish documentarian Arne Sucksdorff, who went to Rio in 1964 at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Jabor was twenty-four when shooting of O circo began in 1964.31 Looking back on his first film more than forty years later, he emphasized the remarkable freedom that the new portable technology offered.32 Just as Hirszman had recorded the words of an oppressed peasant class, Jabor used the lightweight equipment to film conversations with circus performers whose livelihood was increasingly in jeopardy because of movies and an emergent television industry’s popular telenovelas. Realizing the propaganda potential of television, the dictatorship heavily invested in the field; the government even supported credit options for the purchase of television sets. Not long after the 1964 coup, TV Globo, which partnered with the regime, was born. The circus also declined because it was associated with a devastating fire in Niterói, across Guanabara Bay from Rio, on December 17, 1961. More than three hundred people, mostly children, died from a stampeding crowd and suffocation when the Gran Circo Norte-Americano tent burst into flames and collapsed. Hundreds more of the estimated 2,500 people under the big top that day were hospitalized with serious burns. Glauber Rocha’s often-cited reference in the 1960s to the creation of a vibrant revolutionary cinema with “a camera in the hand and an idea in the head” is a good description of Jabor’s and others’ documentary style at the time. The portable technology allowed them to film quickly and record anywhere, transforming commonplace sights and sounds into revelations on the screen. Given the nation’s political drama in 1964, a film about the circus may seem irrelevant; nevertheless, Jabor documents not only a struggling art form unable to compete with modern mass entertainment but also, and more importantly, the loss of community spirit and class solidarity that were associated with it. The film begins by contrasting movie stills and a contemporary movie music score with archival images of the circus accompanied by a harpsichord and a voice-over discussing the history of the circus. Following the intertitle “Rio 1965,” a long take moves the viewer down a busy, narrow

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Children buying tickets for the circus in O circo.

city street to a small group of men and women standing on the sidewalk. Dressed in everyday suits and dresses, they are circus performers who talk about the cinema’s impact on their livelihood.33 Modernity has increasingly displaced the poor and working class to the urban periphery, and in a muddy field outside the city a large circus tent is being raised. A circus manager comments on the lack of funds to fix the tent, which has large tears and holes. Even so, the circus retains its magic. Jabor focuses on smiling and laughing children who follow a small parade of performers and musicians on the street as they hand out tickets to promote the evening’s show. These charming scenes are juxtaposed with one of a man in suit and tie who stands before a large billboard with images of suited government officials. Speaking to the camera, he urges the creation of a retirement plan for artists. The film cuts back to the city where the performers in street clothes address the camera while holding the Nagra audio recorder’s microphone in their hands. A circus dancer playfully refers to her exceptional body; another woman talks about the exodus of circus actors to radio and television while proclaiming her love of her profession. One of the most emotionally moving scenes takes place backstage in the tent, where clowns and other performers put on elaborate makeup to the nondiegetic harpsichord music. The engaging sequence of movement and music shows that despite an economic turndown, circus performance remains a noble and venerated art that requires careful preparation. To emphasize the art’s history, Jabor switches to black-and-white stock to film an interview with a retired clown who reminisces about his years of travel with the circus. The scene suddenly shifts to color as he performs a part of his old act, playing a guitar. The contemporary circus acts in the film are sweetly old-fashioned,

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filled with slapstick routines, tussles, and pratfalls. There are comedy sketches, fire-breathing, and animal acts; children and adults in the bleachers look joyful. Toward the end of the entertainment, Jabor cuts to a black-and-white close-up of young Black men whose laughing faces are captured in a freeze frame. Harpsichord music accompanies shots of the tent being dismantled the following day. The documentary returns once more to downtown Rio to show young freelance performers playing to small crowds. These are the modern-day acts that have replaced the circus in the city. An older performer and a vestige of the circus’s better days, dressed as Chaplin, has found work riding an old bicycle with an agency’s promotion ad pinned to his back. Another, more devastating reminder of the past takes the form of archival photographs of the remains of the Gran Circo Norte-Americano and a row of bodies burned or suffocated in its fire. The psychological effects of the disaster are suggested by a scene of a former clown who survived the fire and who now rants at passersby while holding a bouquet of flowers in his hand. O circo ends on a somber note—not about the circus, which has already vanished from the city streets, but rather about what progress means for the large urban centers. Jazzy music with vocals accompanies street scenes of young Black men standing idle and a shot of newspaper headlines announcing a 100 percent rise in the cost of living and a police shooting of a young man described by one paper as a murder. A black-and-white freeze frame of the solemn young men on the street contrasts starkly with the earlier freeze frame of joyful faces at the circus. Jabor followed up O circo with A opinião pública (1967, Public opinion), a feature produced with Nelson Pereira dos Santos, photographed by Dib Lutfi, Santos’s cameraman on Fome de amor (1967, Hunger for Love), and distributed by Difilm, Herbert Richers, and Embrafilme. Selected for the Venice film festival, it won the prize for Best Film at Pesaro, Italy, and played in eleven theaters in Rio, a rare occurrence for a documentary.34 An eighty-minute, 35 mm, black-and-white film, A opinião pública offered a unique, critical view of Rio’s middle class, whose largely conservative attitudes were often described as constituting “public opinion.”35 Shot outside and indoors, A opinião pública consists of interviews of people from different generations and walks of life, accompanied by an occasional music soundtrack and voice-over. Intercut between the talkingheads material is footage of individuals or groups in domestic, social, and work settings as well as scenes shot on the set of a television musical variety show hosted by the popular Rio singer Jerry Adriani. There is an aleatory

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aspect to the interviews, whose subject matter is diverse and follows no apparent pattern. Like O circo, A opinião pública has a sad, quasi-elegiac quality that underlies conversations and even sequences filmed at parties and pleasure outings on the beach. When the film was shot, the military’s promises in 1964 to return the country to democratic rule had proved hollow, with no sign of their withdrawal. In fact, the regime implemented a new constitution in 1967 that further restricted civil liberties and banned meetings or gatherings not authorized by the dictatorship. Elected by a military junta, the president was given unprecedented power to issue decrees that, with the opposition under control, smoothly passed into law. A reference to two writers in the off-screen narration may help elucidate the film’s point of view and tone. The first is the nineteenth-century writer Machado de Assis, renowned for his subtly ironic stories and novels about the middle class and especially law-school graduates, whose success relied on an acquired talent to ingratiate themselves with those in power. The second is the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, whose words appear at two junctures in the narration. At one point the voice-over refers to a “frightening solitude” to sum up an interview just seen. The film ends with Drummond’s verses “we are merely men / and nature has betrayed us.” The citations are from Drummond’s poems “A bruxa” (The witch) and “O medo” (Fear), which appeared, respectively, in the collections José (1942) and A rosa do povo (1945, Rose of the people). Written during the Vargas dictatorship, the poems express a hope for community strength and solidarity but acknowledge the struggle toward that end when a society is alienated and fearful. The interviews in A opinião pública show a swath of society seemingly unconcerned with dictatorship. Young men on Copacabana Beach laugh and grope for answers to a question: “What do you see as your future?” University students jeer as a professor jokes in halting English about their lack of education. A voice-over reference to a tradition of youthful rebellion is paired with the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann.” One interviewee proclaims his attitude toward the current situation, saying, “I don’t feel responsible.” An academic reiterates a sense of helplessness, remarking, “I feel blocked to do anything alone.” Another interviewee talks about the impossibility of dreaming of a different future when change is difficult. A poster protesting the nuclear bomb, photos of mass demonstrations, beggars, and the war in Vietnam are countered by scenes of young Brazilians dancing, smoking, and drinking. The soundtrack has rock and roll music and a French love song. In other scenes, young girls talk about boys, and

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Stealing the scene with gestures, not words in A opinião pública.

women talk about men, love, and security. The film shifts at one point to a group of young men lined up at an army recruiting station. One youth talks about the need for a military to correct any “lack of order,” while another regards the military as an educational experience and possibly a career. Amid the many interviews of an apparently complacent society, one sequence stands out for comic relief. In a small living room, a grandfather and former military officer is being interviewed as family members, including three young boys, appear occasionally in the background framed by an open doorway. While the grandfather speaks to the interviewer, the youngest boy, probably five or six years old, appears on a sofa next to the interviewer, playing with matchsticks. A jump cut places him slightly behind the grandfather in a doorway, where he smiles at the camera, performs a little dance step, and gleefully pats his belly like an old man. Showing off for the camera, he becomes more animated as the grandfather rambles about the importance of the family name. The boy turns around, points to his wiggling posterior, and looks back at the camera slyly. Turning back around, he sticks out his tongue and raises both hands as if they were pistols, shooting at the camera. Another jump cut shows his mother in front of a mirror putting on makeup. Her hair is stacked high in the beehive fashion of the time, and like the grandfather, she ignores or seems unaware of the child’s antics. The film returns to the grandfather, who continues speaking while the child seems to have disappeared. Suddenly, like a cartoon character, the kid pops up from below the frame and stands directly in front of the camera; smiling and waving his arms, he drops out of sight only to pop back up again, tossing a matchbox in the air and then stretching out his

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arms to block out everything behind him. After a brief shot of the mother talking on the phone, which rings annoyingly during the interview, the boy reemerges at the side of the grandfather, who never acknowledges him. The boy looks at the camera and proceeds to mimic his elder’s mouth movements and gestures. Approaching the camera again, he makes a few faces and then retreats, sticking out his tongue at the camera. The lengthy sequence is magnetic and incredibly funny, so much so that the child’s sassy, mischievous performance makes it impossible to follow the interview. His antics, alongside the actions of the strangely distracted mother, the undaunted interviewee, and various family members who occasionally appear on screen and look at the camera, not to mention the ringing telephone, create a chaotic, circuslike atmosphere in the middleclass household. Later in the film the child is crying on the sofa and making a general fuss. He refuses to eat food brought by his mother and slaps at her arm. An older woman enters the room, takes the food, grabs the boy’s arm, and lifts him off the couch. Holding him by the ear, she leads him screaming off camera. The family chaos continues. Jabor filmed other kinds of distractions. An earlier scene from the television variety show hosted by Adriani features clowns, costumed dancers, and a raucous birthday celebration replete with party hats and a cake. The camera pans to show the live studio audience screaming with delight. Another distraction occurs on the set of a telenovela in a scene from a period drama with a man hitting a woman. Girls and women figure prominently in A opinião pública, but teenage fascination with romance is shown to be short-lived, as older women talk about the monotony of married life. When asked what women’s mission in society should be, one woman replies, “I don’t know.” Society’s expectations for and restrictions on middle-class women long predated the dictatorship. Complacency is evident in business scenes with middle-age, male white-collar workers, although a couple of them comment about low wages and coworkers who make more money, suggesting a level of dissatisfaction. As in Hirszman’s Maioria absoluta, Jabor includes an interview with an upper-level supervisor who insists on the importance of discipline. Later in the film Jabor intercuts scenes from Maioria absoluta to contrast the conformist attitudes of the Carioca middle class with the protestations of a starving peasant population in the Northeast. Scenes of religious rituals associated with Catholicism, Umbanda, and Candomblé appear here to have the effect of alienation as opposed to solidarity. In an essay on A opinião pública, the sociologist Rodrigo Oliveira Lessa makes important points about the images of conformity in the film. Perhaps

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his most significant observation, and one that Jabor himself makes in the film, is that the idea of a middle class was a relatively new phenomenon in Brazil, deserving more public attention. Jabor also cites the sociologist C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book White Collar: The American Middle Classes as groundbreaking in its call for a responsible and politically interested middle-class to ensure progress in the post–World War II era. Like many leftists, Jabor took up Mills’s argument to demonstrate the troubling degree of disinterest expressed by the Brazilian petit bourgeoisie. Lessa also comments on the control effected by the film’s occasional voice-over, which guides viewers’ interpretations and sometimes minimizes elements of nonacquiescence or nonconformity. He explains that university students at the time were protesting and being punished for their activism while people in general, aware of the consequences of speaking out, especially in a film to be scrutinized by censors, were reluctant and fearful. Censors did cut several comments from the film prior to its approval. These included the word “shit” and critiques along the lines of “living [expenses] rise 70 percent and the government gives us 31 percent” and “In this country there are no governments.” Lessa is nevertheless generous in his praise of A opinião pública, and rightly so. Jabor was looking at a segment of the population that had yet to be shown on screen and was tapping them for their opinions. Although questions posed by the interviewer often elicited the kind of responses that supported the film’s thesis, the commentaries are fascinating for what is said and not said and for those occasional moments that just happen, such as the naughty child’s antics, which are unexpected and pure gold.

CHAPTER 4

Documentary, Dictatorship, and Repression As in many other parts of the world, 1968 was a turbulent year in Brazil. A coup within the military government that put the far right in charge also imposed Ato Institucional No. 5 (AI-5) and suspended Congress and civil rights to curtail demonstrations and other opposition to the regime. A new constitution was passed that consolidated power in the executive branch. Political activism in schools and the workplace was effectively stanched with the closure of the União Nacional dos Estudantes (National Student Union) and government control of labor unions. Politically engaged citizens were arrested and tortured, and scores of individuals were murdered or died in prison. Censorship was ratcheted up to block all forms of mass media whose content was deemed subversive or questionable. The regime also intervened in state and local affairs. Officials regarded as undesirable were replaced. Some political dissidents were forcibly exiled, while others, fearful of reprisals, fled the country.1 During the chaotic year of 1968, Brasil verdade (Brazil truth) appeared, an anthology of four documentary shorts with direct sound produced in 1964 and 1965. The theatrically released feature heralded what became known as the Caravana Farkas, a collaborative project headed by the Hungarian photographer and businessman Thomaz Farkas.2 Passionate about his adopted country and the possibilities of documentary, Farkas financed a cadre of young, often first-time directors to make films about Brazil’s people and culture. From 1964 to 1980, the Caravana Farkas made thirty-eight short films, many about the impoverished Northeast, as well as the feature Certas palavras (1980, Certain words) about the Rio composer Chico Buarque de Holanda. Brasil verdade is a compilation of the Caravana Farkas’s earliest black-and-white films, each about thirty minutes long: Manuel Horácio 89

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Giménez’s Nossa escola de samba (1965, Our samba school), Maurice Capovilla’s Subterrâneos do futebol (1965, Dark side of soccer), and Geraldo Sarno’s Viramundo (1964–1965, World traveler), all of which were shot in 16 mm, plus Paul Gil Soares’s Memória do cangaço (1964, Memory of banditry), shot in 35 mm. For Brasil verdade’s theatrical distribution in São Paulo, Rio, Brasília, and Salvador, all 16 mm footage was transferred to 35 mm. It is important to understand the pre-1968 context in which these films were made. Although the 1964 military regime was more moderate than the one that usurped control in 1968, filmmakers at the time were all too cognizant of the power of the government and its censors. Films made for theatrical release were closely scrutinized for any hint of subversive material or images that depicted the country in an unfavorable light. Although documentaries circulated mostly via film festivals and local cinema clubs, which have long been important for exhibition of documentary, they, too, were subject to censorship. An extreme example involved a docudrama being made in Pernambuco in 1964 by Eduardo Coutinho about the 1959 assassination of peasant league leader João Pedro Teixeira, who was killed by two policemen hired by northeastern landowners. Shot with nonprofessional actors, including Teixeira’s widow and local rural workers, the film was in progress when the April 1, 1964, coup took place. Alerted to the subject matter, regime officials confiscated materials at the film’s site and made arrests. Fortunately, the negative had been sent to a Rio lab to be developed and escaped seizure; nevertheless, Coutinho was forced to abandon the project until many years later. Fully aware of Coutinho’s persecution by the regime, the Caravana Farkas moved cautiously, although the young left-liberal directors had free rein in the choice of subject matter. What the four films in Brasil verdade have in common is their focus on the poor and working-class, as was characteristic of the proto-Cinema Novo documentary shorts Arraial do Cabo and Aruanda and other nonfiction films as well as early Cinema Novo features. The four Farkas documentaries are also among the earliest examples of the use of direct sound in Brazil; they followed closely on the heels of Leon Hirszman’s 1964 Maioria absoluta, regarded as the country’s first direct-sound documentary. Despite centering on aspects of popular culture with mass appeal such as samba, soccer, northeastern folklore, and legendary bandits, the Caravana Farkas films offer political critique of conditions affecting the poor in Brazil. Using indirection, they each managed to sidestep censorship problems in 1965 and when they were released as a group in 1968 in Brasil verdade.3

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Viramundo The two best-known works in the compilation piece are Viramundo and Memória do cangaço, both of which received major festival prizes in Brazil and Europe in the mid-1960s.4 Viramundo was Sarno’s second film, following his and Orlando Senna’s Rebelião em Novo Sol (1963, Rebellion in Novo Sol), a documentary short about Bahia’s peasant league that was screened prior to performances of Mutirão em Novo Sol (Labor Solidarity in Novo Sol), a play about a 1959 peasant uprising written in 1961 by Nelson Xavier and Augusto Boal for São Paulo’s Teatro Arena. A Bahian who had studied film in Cuba and was part of the Student Union-Popular Center for Culture in Salvador, Sarno was drawn to subjects dealing with peasant labor and agrarian reform, legislation for which was under way during the left-liberal presidency of João Goulart but curtailed by the 1964 military coup. The film had an impressive crew; Farkas was the cinematographer, Caetano Veloso wrote the music, and José Carlos Capinam’s lyrics were sung by one of Brazil’s greatest vocalists, Gilberto Gil. The direct sound was recorded by the emergent Caravana Farkas filmmakers Vladimir Herzog, Maurice Capovilla, and Sérgio Muniz, who was also the film’s executive producer.5 Its title, Viramundo, has a double meaning; the word refers to a traveler-messenger known as Exu in Indigenous and African Brazilian religions and more widely known as Gira-mundo (World-turner), who also appears as a pajé (healer) in the folkloric bumba-meu-boi performance.6 Viramundo also signifies the fetters or chains used on enslaved people. The double meaning is apt, for Sarno’s film portrays northeasterners who, out of economic necessity, are locked into endless cycles of migration to São Paulo. The film also includes scenes that depict the practice of Umbanda, a synthesis of African Brazilian, Indigenous, and Catholic religious beliefs surrounding the presence of Exu. The film’s opening shot of Cândido Portinari’s painting Retirantes (Northeastern migrants) is a powerful, auspicious image of a starving migrant family on the road, surrounded by vultures. Although Retirantes, one of Portinari’s most famous works, was painted in 1944, its portrait of northeastern hunger and despair was as true in Brazil in 1964, when Sarno was filming, as it was twenty years earlier. Viramundo does not denounce directly the latifundistas, the powerful northeastern oligarchs who underpaid workers, opposed land reform, and supported the 1964 coup. Rather, Sarno used the new film technology to record the voices and experiences of northeastern migrants in São Paulo who talk about work from inside their homes and on the street. He

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Viramundo’s introductory homage to Cândido Portinari’s Retirantes.

also includes an interview with a factory manager who proffers opinions about the migrant workforce. On occasion one can hear the voice of the interviewer asking questions. At the beginning of the film, an off-screen narrator, in the style of an educational film voice-over, provides statistical information about the more than one million migrants who arrived in São Paulo over the previous decade and the thousands who continue to come each year. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the northeasterners interviewed are men, although initial shots of migrants arriving at the São Paulo train station with their few possessions show many women and children among the newcomers. The scene of the train approaching the city resembles the initial scenes in the 1929 city-symphony film São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole, but the passengers who descend the carriage steps in Viramundo are anything but modern. They wear country attire, some have bundles perched on their heads, and their machetes, which were tools used on Northeast plantations, are seized by city police who search their belongings. The first part of Viramundo alternates interviews with two former migrants, one now a skilled factory worker and the other an unskilled laborer. It is implicitly a film about race. Interviewed alongside his wife and children at their dining room table, the light-skinned skilled laborer speaks positively about the “good life” in the city and says he no longer considers himself a northeasterner. A proud paterfamilias, he describes his rise in the workforce as well as ownership of land and two small homes. In one segment he responds to an off-screen question about unions, a highly sensitive topic given the dictatorship’s purge of left-wing union leaders, who were replaced by military personnel. As Robert J. Alexander has

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noted, new laws outlawed strikes, while wage increases were determined by the regime, eliminating the rationale for organized labor.7 The worker’s reply is consistent with the political situation. He supports unions as long as they are “Brazilian” and have nothing to do with the Soviet Union or Cuba. Possibly his most surprising statement is his description of his fellow northeasterners: “The majority only thinks about killing,” while Brazilians from the whiter, more industrial South are work-oriented and worshipful people who spend Sundays with their families while relaxing with a beer. Intercut with his commentary is the interview with a Black worker; currently unemployed, he has moved from job to job and lives in a tiny space with a woman he calls his “patroa” (boss). He represents the 80 percent of migrants who are uneducated and unskilled and often spend years trying to make it in the city. Sarno adds scenes of other Black migrants who stand idly in the street; in one shot, he shows a destitute figure who begs. The unemployed fellow is at ease in front of the camera, while the successful worker is pleasant but stiff and speaks as if reading a script. The Black worker is eating with his wife at a tiny kitchen table in a modest room and checking on a bird in a cage that hangs over the doorway. The family of the employed man sits silently and barely moves at their cloth-covered dining table. There is little to distinguish them from two posed photographic portraits, one of the husband and wife and the other of two of the children, that hang on the wall behind them. Viramundo documented a migrant community whose voices and private lives were being filmed for the first time. Between the alternating voices of the two workers, Sarno gradually inserted sequences filmed in the large, plush office of a white factory manager who talks about migrant labor. Wearing a shirt and tie, he speaks with authority, but his performance is rigid, like that of the skilled worker, and he is somewhat pretentious. He stereotypes migrants as naturally suspicious, anguished, and uninformed about their new environment. Unskilled laborers, he concludes, are more disposable than skilled ones, all of whom he refers to as “elements.” The second part of the film has brief segments showing charitable organizations including the Salvation Army and food kitchens, sources of help for the poor in capitalist ideology. A placard in one shot of a Salvation Army band reads, “Charity is God’s gift.” God also figures in a long final sequence that alternates between speeches and activities at an outdoor Pentecostal revival and Umbanda ceremonies held indoors and on a beach. Whether in the form of Christian charity, Pentecostalism, or Umbanda, Sarno allows religions to speak for themselves. In one scene a Catholic bishop in all his finery joins the Pentecostal revival to speak to

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An employed skilled worker with his family in Viramundo.

A less-skilled unemployed laborer in Viramundo.

the assembled crowd from the podium. Other scenes show faith healing by the young, fiery Pentecostal leader whose hands appear to miraculously cure people apparently suffering from mental disease, blindness, and paralysis. The sea of believers is largely white or light-skinned, while the mostly Black faithful in the Umbanda scenes, led by their religious leader who also practices healing, twirl to the percussion instruments and enter spiritual trances. Sarno creates an unusual acoustic effect by bleeding the soundtrack of waves at an Umbanda ceremony on a beach into the final shots of the Pentecostal revival.8 Viramundo ends with interviews of migrants on the street who talk about their struggles in the city. One man says he is returning to the small farm he left in the Northeast; another man comments that at forty-seven

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he is too old to be employed. The cycle of migration closes in the film’s final shot of a train station where migrants step into train cars with their few possessions. Unlike the train at the beginning of the film, this one is traveling in the opposite direction, back to the Northeast.

Memória do cangaço The Bahian filmmaker Paulo Gil Soares took an approach similar to Sarno’s in his celebrated short Memória do cangaço about northeastern banditry, juxtaposing 1930s documentary footage of the legendary bandits Lampião and Maria Bonita and their followers with interviews of a former militia colonel who, along with other adherents of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo, tracked down, killed, and beheaded numerous cangaceiros.9 Soares’s focus is on rebels whose popularity and occasional Robin Hood deeds in the Northeast threatened the Vargas regime. They might also be regarded as synonymous with groups opposing the military dictatorship in the mid1960s, especially armed urban guerrillas who were among the reasons for the 1968 crackdown. Of the bandit footage made in the mid-1930s and seized by the Vargas regime, Soares gained access to what remained of that film after it was discovered in 1955; he used it along with interviews of former local militia members and other citizens in the region who were once bandits. To offset any impression of celebration or worship of Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their band, who remained iconic figures of resistance in Brazil, Soares cuts to a contemporary interview with a militia colonel who walks out of the wilderness and sits on a porch alongside other militia members. Dressed in everyday attire, the colonel is relaxed as he speaks about killing bandits, many of whose names he recites from memory. His memories are intercut with interviews with former bandits, one of whom talks about joining a bandit gang after fourteen years of toiling as a farmworker. The colonel mentions being approached three times to become an outlaw and says he declined on each occasion. One unusual and powerful scene involves a former female bandit who rushes at the camera and places her hand over the lens to protect her identity; another features Gregório, an elderly peasant farmer, on horseback as he talks to an interviewer and crew member recording his words with a Nagra. Gregório is an uneducated widower who treats his illnesses with home remedies. The only response to being an underpaid farmhand, he says, is rebellion. Enhancing the film’s strategy is the incorporation of northeastern

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Former militia members reminiscing about killing bandits in Memória do cangaço.

folkloric materials including woodcut illustrations and a ballad performed by local singers alongside music played by a military band. Questions are asked of the former militia men such as why they beheaded the bandits. Former militiamen and others respond that severed heads provided visible evidence of a bandit’s demise, and they were often displayed and photographed. What goes unsaid is that promotions in the militia were often based on the number of heads collected. Soares includes gruesome shots of the jars containing the heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita, which were exhibited for many years in the Museu de Antropología in Salvador. Estácio de Lima, a professor of medicine and a phrenologist, is interviewed in his office and treated as an authority on the causes of banditry. He refers to his phrenological study of the bandits’ preserved heads in the museum that supposedly explains their violent disposition. The continued display of the heads was also a brutal reminder of how a dictatorship dealt with lawlessness.

Subterrâneos do futebol A year before filming Subterrâneos do futebol in 1964, Maurice Capovilla was studying documentary filmmaking in Santa Fe, Argentina, under the tutelage of Fernando Birri, whose documentaries and writings were a major influence on the Caravana Farkas and young filmmakers throughout Latin America. From São Paulo, Capovilla focused on the formidable soccer team from the port city of Santos known worldwide for its famous striker,

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Pelé, who came from the working class and was contracted by the Santos club at the age of fifteen. By 1964 Pelé had been the top scorer for seven straight years in the state championships and the star of the 1958 and 1962 World Cups won by Brazil. With the rise of Pelé and other young, talented players, soccer became a nationwide obsession that thousands watched in stadiums on Sunday while millions followed the action on televised broadcasts or on the radio. In 1964 players and fans were gearing up for the 1966 World Cup competition. In the meantime, Pelé continued to astound fans with his fast runs and scissor kicks that made him the top scorer in the 1963 International Cup and Brazilian Championship Series. Nationalist fervor over soccer helped distract the population from the realities of dictatorial rule; this was especially the case in 1968 and subsequent years as the dictatorship further tightened its grip and instituted a reign of terror. The title Subterrâneos do futebol references a soccer player’s memoir but also Jorge Amado’s Os subterrâneos da liberdade (The dark side of freedom), his 1954 trilogy critiquing the Vargas dictatorship.10 The film is also a response to the Argentine filmmaker Carlos Hugo Christensen’s popular 1962 biographical docudrama titled O rei Pelé (King Pelé), which featured documentary footage of Pelé’s spellbinding footwork and fictionalized segments with nonprofessional actors playing Pelé at ages six, ten, and fifteen; the oldest of these roles was performed by Luís Carlos Freitas, who became a soccer player. But Capovilla’s approach is far different from Christensen’s celebration of Pelé; in Subterrâneos do futebol he provides a behind-the-scenes look at the unseen world of Brazilian soccer, the near-fanatical enthusiasm of its fans, and most importantly, the elusiveness of fame and fortune sought by poor and working-class youngsters who envision themselves as the next Pelé. Capovilla mixed soccer footage with interviews of players and trainers and voice-over commentary to create an unvarnished portrait unique for its time.11 Capovilla alternates action scenes of goals and cheering crowds with more subdued footage of boys playing soccer. Trainers talk about the problems of youths who aspire to become professional. One says, “A player isn’t an ordinary being. He’s a public object.” He adds that the game takes fifteen years from a person’s life, and he questions what a player would become after that and how he would survive. Others discuss injuries and their psychological effects on players, some of whom never play again. Asked if he ever thought about being a professional player, another young man replies, “I don’t. [A player] is the club’s slave.” In one interview Pelé’s brother is asked about his own soccer abilities. He describes himself as a

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The little-seen problems of soccer from Subterrâneos do futebol.

mediocre player in comparison to his famous sibling, and he adds, “I’d starve to death.” The film depicts how Luís Carlos Freitas’s soccer career suffered from his movie role because fans expected him to become the next Pelé. At the margins of the playing field, Capovilla’s camera takes in the flag waving and pushing and shoving of crowds. There is a montage of sometimes ecstatic, sometimes angry faces. At one point a military march is heard on the soundtrack, and the mass hysteria resembles a fanatical right-wing political rally. The narration refers to big-money press hype that drives celebrity interest, the business of marketing, and mythmaking along the lines of a shrine featuring the shoeshine box that Pelé used to earn money as a youth. Along with injury and defeat, rain is among the players’ worst enemies. In footage of Pelé running on a field that looks more like a lake, the narrator calls attention to his many injuries. Capovilla’s film ends with a close-up of a fan who seems deranged as he screams his allegiance to the Santos team. His yelling is followed by shots of the stadium, now darkened and mostly empty; a few stragglers maneuver around small piles of trash that have been set on fire in the cement stands. It is a strange scene and stranger still because there is no sound or fury from the crowd. Trash is all they leave behind.

Nossa escola de samba Although favela tourism is part of the Brazilian economy today, the mostly Black communities living on the hillsides of Rio were relatively unknown to audiences in the early 1960s. Outsiders would have known about favelas

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Everyday life in a favela in Nossa escola de samba.

through Marcel Camus’s Orfeu negro (1959, Black Orpheus), a colorful fiction film and international hit about favelados and carnival, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s earlier and more realistic portrayal of poor African Brazilians in Rio, 40 graus (1956). In 1965 Manuel Horacio Giménez made Nossa escola de samba, his only film with the Caravana Farkas about Rio’s Unidos de Vila Isabel samba school, whose membership was largely from a favela. An Argentine who studied under Birri and was assistant director on his celebrated documentary Tire dié (1958, Throw Me a Dime), Giménez had left the Santa Fe school two years earlier, after Birri was forced for political reasons to step down as its head. Like his Caravana Farkas colleagues, Giménez used alternating sequences to juxtapose sharply contrasting experiences, Vila Isabel dancers rehearsing and performing for the carnival of 1965 and carrying out daily routines at home in the impoverished Pau da Bandeira morro (hillside) community. Members of the school walk up and down the steep hillside, going back and forth between their homes and samba practice in a building in the city below. The voice-over narration in these and other scenes is from a text by Antônio Fernandes “China” da Silveira, who founded Unidos de Vila Isabel in 1946 and appears in the film. Like soccer, carnival provides community engagement but also distraction and escape, especially for the poor and working class. Giménez provides an up-close look at the work of dancers, artists, designers, and musicians who dedicate the six months leading up to carnival to its preparation. In addition to spectacular dancing rehearsals performed by men, women, and children, the film shows backstage business such as committee meetings, visits by costume designers to the Teatro Nacional in search

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A samba school performance in Nossa escola de samba.

of historical accuracy. It explores the costs of preparation for carnival and sponsors of the event as well as certain key performers such as the porta-estandarte (standard-bearer). As fascinating as the rehearsals and later carnival procession are, even more interesting are the rarely seen segments of everyday life in the favela. During a visit to Silveira’s home his family is preparing for school and work; Silveira comments that elementary school is not free and notes that the cost puts added strain on small household incomes. Women are filmed walking down the hillside to get water and climbing back up with heavy cans balanced atop their heads. One young woman sits as another uses an iron to straighten her hair. Children dance and play against a background of wooden shacks made of planks nailed together in a helter-skelter fashion. Samba music is played largely by local musicians who tap out rhythms on drums and other instruments for dance rehearsals. At one point, however, the popular tune “Strangers in Paradise” from the stage musical Kismet is played as dancers perform. This curious moment conveys the sense of otherworldliness that the samba school sometimes elicits. Near the end of the film, as the camera pulls back to pan slowly over the favela, a woman sings the somewhat ambiguous line “From the hillside here I’ll not leave, ever.” Completely avoiding the sentimental romanticism of the Camus film, Giménez adds a subtly ironic touch, a long-distance shot of a factory whose fumes rise slowly toward the hillside community. The military crackdown that began in 1968 took issue with later Farkas films that were more explicit about the dire situation in the Northeast.12 The censors rejected a disturbing scene in Paulo Gil Soares’s A morte do boi (1969–1970, Death of the ox) showing the slaughter of an aged ox, which

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may also have alluded to the dismal end of an overworked peasantry. Sérgio Muniz’s De raízes e rezas, entre outros (1972, About roots and prayers, among others), about healers in the devastated Northeast, lost a scene in which local musicians played the national anthem during a child’s burial.13 In 1972 Farkas launched a second compilation film, Herança do Nordeste (Northeastern heritage), consisting of five black-and-white and color shorts about the region’s traditions, economy, and culture: Casa da farinha (directed by Geraldo Sarno, 1969–1970, Manioc flour house); Rastejador, s.m. (Sérgio Muniz, 1972, Tracker, m.n.); Erva bruxa (Paulo Gil Soares, 1969–1970, Witch herb), about tobacco production; Jaramataia (Paulo Gil Soares, 1970), about a ranch by that name; and Padre Cícero (Geraldo Sarno, 1971). Given the politics of the time, the Caravana Farkas 1970 series A condição brasileira (The Brazilian condition), focuses mostly on uncontroversial subjects pertaining to northeastern traditions and culture. Among these were instances of inspired experimentation that had ironic and possibly political implications. Sérgio Muniz’s Beste (1970, a variation on besta, “crossbow”) shows a northeastern artisan’s step-by-step crafting of the medieval weapon, which he loads and shoots at the moon while the soundtrack of the NASA recording of the 1969 Apollo II moon launch plays in the background. Filming until 1980, the Caravana Farkas gave many young artists important documentary training, among them Jorge Bodanzky, Eduardo Escorel, Gustavo Dahl, and André Klotzel.

Radical Documentary in Troubled Times: Lavra dor I address myself . . . to the millions of our brothers and sisters who give Brazil more than they receive and who pay in suffering, pay in misery, pay in privations for the right to be Brazilians. João Goulart, March 13, 1964 Among those experimenting with the artistic and political potential of documentary in the mid- to late 1960s were Paulo Rufino and Ana Carolina Teixeira Soares, known professionally as Ana Carolina, who collaborated on a script for the documentary Lavra dor (1968). Rufino, who worked with Sérgio Muniz on a few Farkas films, directed the 35 mm, black-and-white short, and his musician-partner Ana Carolina scored the film.14 The title Lavra dor is a play on words in which the Portuguese noun for “laborer,” lavrador, is divided into two Portuguese words. Lavra is both a noun and

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verb signifying “labor” or “work” and often is used to refer to the planting and harvesting of cotton. The word dor is a noun that means “pain.” Lavra dor is a politically radical, self-reflexive documentary about the economic and social injustices perpetuated by Brazil’s feudal landowning system, which Goulart intended to change during his 1960s administration. On March 13, 1964, at a mass rally organized with the help of labor unions, the left-liberal president laid out his ambitious plans to revise the constitution and institute land and other reforms to improve the lives of the working poor.15 Just weeks after his speech at the rally, the military, with the support of civilian groups, ousted him from office. Fearful of reprisals, Goulart left Brazil for Uruguay. Exercising its newly assumed executive powers, the regime proceeded to arrest political supporters of the former president, including trade unionists.16 By 1968, when Rufino and Ana Carolina made their film, the lives of rural and working-class communities had deteriorated significantly. The dictatorship attacked and dismantled peasant leagues created in the 1950s in the Northeast, and trade unions were under strict government control. The twin forces of past hope and incipient despair are the focus of Lavra dor’s introduction, where short excerpts of Goulart’s fiery and forceful March 13 speech are rousingly delivered by a contemporary local politician on the soundtrack to the accompaniment of applause. As he speaks, the voice of an actor playing the part of a peasant farmer is interspersed.17 Structured along the lines of a call and response, the peasant voices his support for the land reforms Goulart promises. Rufino frequently overlaps the two men’s voices, using volume control to emphasize one, then the other. The sequence lasts over a minute while the screen remains black. At other junctures in the film, the black screen serves as a chalkboard or tablet where politically charged words and phrases appear in white lettering. Shortly after the speech segment, a quotation appears about outside forces colonizing the local communities. A second title emerges in bold lettering on the same screen: “The worker is called a settler on the farms.” There are obvious differences between a landless farmworker and a settler. A landowner can get rid of a settler, possibly through violence, while a farmworker has certain legal rights, such as a place to live and a wage, no matter how miserable. By calling the farmhand a settler, a landowner could avoid providing housing and pay. On a black screen, the words “hunger foments” appear in large letters that fill the entire frame. There is no reference to what hunger foments except for what the film’s images and language suggest, popular protest and potentially revolution. Rufino and Ana Carolina also address the issue of what documentary

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Laborers wandering without work in Lavra dor.

is by projecting in bold lettering the word “documentary?” on a black screen. Later in the film the single word appears again as a question, then as a statement followed by a period. Lavra dor’s blocks of images clearly challenge the cause-and-effect logic associated with documentary. The blocks include negatives of photographic stills of a worker’s face in close-up, panoramas of farmland, and shots of a worker’s legs and feet as he walks across an arid landscape. As he walks, the peasant-actor’s voice is heard reading verses about rural struggle. In a longer staged sequence, farmworkers aimlessly enter, exit, and circle a rural hut as voices on the soundtrack describe the arrest and torture of union members and workers’ meager benefits. Among the possible inspirations for Lavra dor is the theater of Bertolt Brecht and the radical film experiments of Jean-Luc Godard. A more explicit influence for Rufino and Ana Carolina’s radical experiment is Mário Chamie’s Lavra lavra: Poema praxis 1958 a 1961 (1962, Labor labor: Praxis poem 1958 to 1961), verses from which appear on the screen and are read aloud by the actor as peasant. Chamie had been a member of the 1950s concrete poetry movement but left it to begin a new poetic movement called “poesia praxis.” Unlike concrete verse, praxis poetry was interested in experimenting with language and sociopolitical themes. Lavra lavra’s emphasis is on a landless rural class’s struggle to cultivate an unforgiving land; experiments in the work include reiterations of certain keywords, playful alliterations (“To measure is the measure / of measuring / the land”), and divided words, as seen in Chamie’s poetic dialogue between the figures Lavra and Dor.18 The film is aurally and visually designed along the lines of Chamie’s work.

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Ana Carolina used classical compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos as backdrop to the film’s unusual graphics and political pronouncements, such as the flashing, twice, of the handshaking emblem of the US-Brazil Alliance. The film ends with images of a mass movement of peasants marching into a town to the sound of a Villa-Lobos composition, which gradually segues into an Indigenous war chant. The chant merges into the sound of celluloid flapping on a reel after a film has ended. The question “documentary?” reappears, this time in black type on a white screen; then “documentary.” appears as a statement, the word followed by a period. As the credits roll, the flapping of celluloid is replaced by the sound of a machine gun. Lavra dor’s visual and audio experiments are in some ways akin to those in Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s epic La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), which was also released in 1968. That year the two films took home the top prizes at the Latin American Film Festival, in Mérida, Venezuela. The following year Lavra dor was shown at the 1969 Latin American Film Festival at Viña del Mar in Chile, an especially important gathering place for left-wing directors. The Chilean government banned the festival the following year, and it remained banned there for the next thirty years. Rufino’s film garnered another Best Film honor at a 1968 festival in Belo Horizonte as well as a prize at the 1970 Latin American Documentary Festival in Córdoba, Argentina. However, like other politically controversial films, Lavra dor ran into serious problems with the Brazilian military regime’s censors and was banned until a political amnesty was declared in 1979. It is a prime example of a late-1960s film experiment with unusual graphics and a soundtrack that incorporates speeches, poetry, music, and sounds associated with insurgency and war. In its concise way, it portrays the desperation and dilemma of those who work the land as well as the limitless artistic potential of documentary filmmaking.

Women Make Movies, Too: Indústria and A entrevista Looking back on the 1960s in a 2015 interview for the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, the director Ana Carolina spoke about the lack of directorial opportunities for women.19 She described Cinema Novo as an exclusively male group whose members João Baptista de Andrade and Nelson Pereira dos Santos were nevertheless supportive of her work. In 1969, following Lavra dor, she directed her first short documentary, Indústria (Industry), an experimental, 35 mm, color documentary about developmentalism, an economic theory embraced by Brazil and other developing nations at

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the time that places industrial development and growth at the center of the political agenda. Inspired in part by her work with Rufino on Lavra dor and Mário Chamie’s poems from Indústria-textor praxis 1961 a 1964 (1967, Industry-producer of texts praxis 1961 to 1964), her film critiques the period beginning with Juscelino Kubitschek’s “fifty years in five” plan to the military regime’s heavy investments in industry to achieve an “economic miracle.”20 With its indirect references to the buildup of an industrialized southern Brazil and continued impoverishment in the north, Indústria struck an early albeit little-heard cautionary note about the consequences of rampant developmentalism. Employing graphic experiments and blocks of seemingly unrelated images such as clowns and chickens, Ana Carolina continued, as in her work on Lavra dor, to test the boundaries of documentary.21 Three years earlier, in 1966, the filmmaker Helena Solberg made her first movie, A entrevista (The interview), a nineteen-minute, 16 mm, black-and-white documentary, a groundbreaking work about the condition of middle-class women in Rio de Janeiro. Solberg had a strong working relationship with the Cinema Novo group, especially Carlos Diegues, David Neves, and Arnaldo Jabor, who were her classmates at Rio’s Pontifícia Universidade Católica in the late 1950s. Marriage and motherhood in 1961 radically changed her life of filmgoing and discussions at the Museum of Modern Art’s cinematheque and writing for O Metropolitano, a Sunday newspaper supplement in Rio financed by the National Student Union. Dissatisfied with the limitations of domestic life, in 1964 she recorded interviews with dozens of young Carioca women, asking them to comment on their lives, their expectations, and their opinions about topics such as marriage and sex. Word of her plans for a film based on the interviews drew the attention of Glauber Rocha, whose endorsement led to financial backing from the Carteira de Auxílio à Indústria Cinematográfica (Department of Support for the Film Industry).22 In A entrevista, Solberg uses excerpts of interviews for the soundtrack of a lengthy staged segment showing an attractive young woman in different settings, a bedroom, clothing store, beach, spa, bridal shop, and a wedding, where she wears a bridal gown. These scenes are representative of a trajectory common to young, middle-class women at the time whose comfortable lives moved almost seamlessly from the parental home into marriage. At the end of this sixteen-minute segment Solberg appears on screen, sitting on a sofa with the actress in a daytime dress, holding a microphone and talking about her status as a woman. In interviews Solberg identifies the actor as her sister-in-law, Glória Mariani, who, unlike the

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many other women she interviewed, was willing to be filmed. The film’s final scenes use photographs from 1964 marches to protest Goulart’s liberal-left policies outlined in his speech of March 13, 1964. Organized by several sectors of the middle class, among them the clergy, Christian women’s groups, and others who feared Goulart’s “red threat,” they were designated Family Marches with God for Liberty. They supported military intervention and celebrated Goulart’s overthrow on April 1, 1964. A entrevista was unusual for its exclusive focus on twenty-something urban women, a subject far removed from Cinema Novo interests in northeastern migrants. Like Barravento, Vidas secas, and other Cinema Novo films, A entrevista is about oppression, albeit in a more nuanced form involving gender and social class, with which women were often complicit. Catholicism played a central role in shaping Brazilian women’s lives; instilled with lessons about purity, self-sacrifice, and obedience, women were taught that marriage and procreation were essential for their success in society. But Solberg’s film shows much more. Women’s success also depended on their physical appearance. As the film’s protagonist prepares for the beach, the camera pauses on different parts of her bedroom; the bed is strewn with clothing, and in a large mirror above a bureau the woman studies her appearance as she unpins her hair. The camera zooms in on the top of the bureau and its opened drawers, which overflow with hairbrushes, combs, tubes of lipstick, jars of face cream, and bottles of lotion, all essential to her grooming. Sitting atop the bureau amid the sea of beauty products is a statue of the Virgin Mary and Christ child. Donning a bikini, the woman turns to a large closet lined from top to bottom with shelves filled with shoes. From the bountiful display she carefully selects a pair of sandals; she adds a fashionable top to cover her swimsuit, and a scarf, which she places in a handsome carry-all. As she readies herself for the beach, her image is reflected in the mirror alongside the statue of mother and child, whose eyes seem to watch her. As scenes of the young woman end with the bridal procession, off-screen voices of women talk about their fears, desires, and gender relations. Not surprisingly, they emphasize the sacramental nature of marriage, remarking on how “the physical part is linked to the spiritual part” and how “giving of one’s body means giving one’s soul.” One woman expresses fear of being dominated by a man; another asserts that a woman is fully realized only when she marries; still another states that it is worse for a man to be betrayed than it is for a woman. Other voices express insecurities about any form of activism: “It’s against my nature to be assertive about myself,”

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Helena Solberg (left) and Glória Mariani in A entrevista.

and “I’m unable to act as I know I should act.” This last statement is made by Solberg’s sister-in-law as she sits on the sofa with a microphone. There is a subtly optimistic note in both this and her comment on her “lucidity” about her condition. Her recognition of how society pressures her to act and how she believes she should act constitute a leap forward in her political consciousness and self-awareness.

Street Cinema and the Dramaturgy of Intervention In 1967 João Batista de Andrade completed his first film, Liberdade de imprensa (Press freedom), a twenty-five-minute, 16 mm, black-and-white documentary funded by the student newspaper Amanhã (Tomorrow) and the Grêmio da Faculdade de Filosofia (Department of Philosophy Guild) at the Universidade de São Paulo.23 A student activist and director of the União Estadual de Estudantes (State Student Union) in 1963, Andrade was already interested in filmmaking while studying at the university’s engineering school, which he left not long after the military takeover. Although never completed, his first film project, a 1963 short about scavengers at a local garbage dump, was a subject to which he returned in 1975 for a documentary titled Restos (Remains).24 He also worked with the Caravana Farkas on Maurice Capovilla’s Subterrâneos do futebol, all the while continuing his involvement in the student protest movement and the Grêmio da Faculdade de Filosofia. Liberdade de imprensa is about the dictatorship’s implementation of the Lei de Imprensa, a 1967 law that

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formalized existing and additional restrictions on newspapers, radio, and television. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film was banned in 1968 after only two showings, one in Rio and the other in São Paulo, at the beginning of a planned nationwide tour financed by the União Estadual de Estudantes.25 In many ways, Liberdade de imprensa served as a template for Andrade’s groundbreaking television documentaries in the 1970s. Focusing on a topic of current interest and debate, it employs interventionist strategies to elicit on-the-spot reflection and opinion from various interview subjects encountered on the street. Andrade also appears on screen with his microphone, an unusual technique in the 1960s, breaking the fourth wall of the observational documentary.26 There is an aleatory and improvised aspect to his technique; individuals are drawn toward him out of curiosity about his microphone and camera, and he poses questions to bystanders about the newspapers they read and their opinions about the new law. His questions are succinct, allowing his subjects to speak at length, and he often uses responses to his questions as voice-over for images, thus minimizing the authoritative “voice of God” narration associated with documentary. Spaced throughout the documentary are filmed interviews with several well-known journalists and politicians in their homes and offices, providing contrast with and sometimes catalyst for the interviews with people on the street, most of whom are Black. One of the journalists interviewed is Carlos Lacerda, who as governor of Rio was complicit in the 1964 military overthrow. In the interview he expresses disapproval of the press legislation imposed by the “semidictatorship.” During his street interviews, Andrade asks a bystander about Lacerda’s attitude toward the law restricting media. The bystander argues that Lacerda’s motivation is self-interest and that, given his initial support of the military coup, he is one of the last people who should oppose the law. In another segment Andrade uses his interview with João Calmon, author of a “black book” on US influence in the press, to elicit public opinion on the topic. He provides copies of the right-wing magazine Ação Democrática (Democratic Action) to a group of young office-worker types on the street; one of the men comments on the magazine’s obvious anticommunist content. His statement serves as off-screen counterpoint to newsreel footage of the 1964 Family Marches with God for Liberty in São Paulo that supported the military’s overthrow of Goulart. Only one person interviewed on the street is identified. A recurring figure in the film, Celso Monteiro da Silva is a Black man of modest means who lives in a favela and works at a newspaper stand. Perhaps because of his job, he is proud of Brazil’s newspapers and has no problem with the

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new law. In one scene Andrade asks him to comment on Calmon’s critique of a deal between media giants Globo and Time/Life. Celso affirms his support of US investment and influence, saying they prevent Brazil from becoming a communist country like Cuba. He also likes the right-wing publications financed by foreign sources that his newsstand stocks such as Ação Democrática, which he regularly reads. Throughout, Celso subscribes to the position of the white conservative middle class who supported military intervention. A few left-liberal reviewers criticized Andrade for putting Celso’s comments in the film, but by breaking with the idea that a documentary should be seamless in its political point of view and implicitly recognizing that viewers had the intelligence to see his own political position, he brought a greater realism and social depth to the film.27 Liberdade de imprensa also has scenes of policemen attempting to disperse a crowd gathered around the film crew. Unauthorized public assembly was deemed potentially subversive by the regime. Andrade inserts newsreel footage of a large antiregime protest by students in 1966, showing police arresting protesters and loading them into buses. The film ends with a man who amuses the crowd with his frank lack of concern about newspapers and the new law; he has no money, he says, and just reads the headlines posted at newspaper stands. Despite his jocular tone, his subsequent comments about the risks of public gatherings and speaking out are sobering and prescient. In 1968 military police invaded the National Student Union’s clandestine meeting in Ibuína, a town in São Paulo state selected for its remoteness, where Andrade’s film was to begin its national tour. Hundreds were arrested and jailed by the police for unlawful assembly, and the union-sponsored Liberdade de imprensa was seized and banned. From 1968 to 1972, Andrade made several documentaries, including a three-part feature on the history of São Paulo cinema, Panorama do cinema paulista, and a short for the Instituto Nacional de Cinema titled Cândido Portinari: Um pintor de Brodósqui, about the importance of the interior of São Paulo state to the painter’s work.28 He also directed his first dramatic feature, Gamal: O delírio do sexo (1971, Gamal: The delirium of sex), an experimental movie about crazed sexual desire that was part of a São Paulo underground movement called Boca do Lixo (Garbage Mouth).29 Then in 1972 he accepted an invitation from high-profile journalists Fernando Pacheco Jordão and Vladimir Herzog to make minidocumentaries for their new program Hora da Notícia (News hour) to be broadcast on TV Cultura, the public television channel.30 This was an unusual and somewhat daring move because filming for television was generally regarded, especially by his fellow Cinema Novo directors, as a step down in both political and

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aesthetic terms from making films for the big screen.31 Andrade proved the contrary with his highly creative and powerful shorts about ordinary people and everyday events that were broadcast nationwide. He has described this period as the most exciting and fulfilling in his career: My job was directing everyday small documentaries in which I tried to channel my anxiety: to question, to show images that the dictatorship concealed, to dare, to make television viewers aware of the real country in which they lived. In this way I attempted to break from the dictatorship’s visual deceit and the prejudiced view of the Brazilian middle class forged during the years of the “Brazilian miracle.” An example of this work is Migrantes, which I reclaimed after it aired on our program.32 Made between 1972 and 1974, Andrade’s documentaries for Hora da Notícia were edited at the end of the shooting day, shown on air that night, and then discarded. Only three have survived; one of them is Migrantes, filmed and aired on November 20, 1972. Andrade based the seven-minute film on a front-page newspaper story about complaints lodged by residents in São Paulo’s Parque Dom Pedro II against northeastern migrants they considered “marginals” who were living under nearby viaducts. Migrantes elicits commentary from citizens on the street about a public controversy. Here, too, the principal person interviewed is an African Brazilian, representative of a racial population everywhere visible but rarely seen in films or on television. The film begins with the provocative title card “Watch today an unedited and exclusive dialogue: the big city against a migrant recently arrived in São Paulo.” A second title card summarizes the situation, followed by a location shot of traffic around the viaducts. A third intertitle’s irony is impossible to ignore: “The news crew goes to the site and finds a family under one of the viaducts.—At last, the marginals!” Migrantes is a modest production compared to Liberdade de imprensa, but it has similar stylistic attributes. Andrade appears with a microphone, asking questions of Sebastião, who has come from Bahia to São Paulo to work and who lives with his family under the viaduct because he cannot find a place to rent. Rather than the off-screen commentary in Liberdade de imprensa, title cards provide information. Sebastião is one of thousands who have fled miserable conditions in the countryside and is part of a massive northeastern migrant population largely responsible for building the state’s capital city. Andrade’s presence here, as in Liberdade de imprensa,

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João Batista de Andrade recording Sebastião speaking to José, off screen in Migrantes.

José responding to Sebastião in Migrantes.

is kept at the margins of the image, peripheral to the interview subjects, who include two women with small children. Asked if they like São Paulo, they reply in the affirmative despite their obviously grim circumstances. As in Liberdade de imprensa, the sight of a man with a microphone and film crew draws bystanders. One is a white businessman named José carrying a briefcase, to whom Andrade turns. It is an inspired move, showing the film’s audience representatives of the social and racial groups in the conflict. When Andrade asks José about the migrant situation, José looks at Sebastião and says that the migrant and his family would be better off in the countryside. Good jobs in São Paulo are scarce, he adds, and housing is expensive. From this point in the film Andrade avoids any commentary and simply improvises by moving the microphone back and forth between

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the two men. Looking at José, Sebastião courteously but forcefully explains the dire economic conditions in the rural areas, where food is scarce and decent pay and medical attention are nonexistent. He also asserts his right to seek a better job in the city, a search for which he has the necessary documentation. The dialogue between the two men exposes José’s prejudices and ignorance of hardships in the interior; more importantly, it reveals a migrant with little education or means who appears far more knowledgeable and articulate than an executive type.33 Work, or the lack thereof, was a constant theme in the Hora da Notícia programs. In Pedreira (1973, Quarry), Andrade pairs statistics from a government report on workplace accidents with footage shot in a quarry and brief interviews with a few workmen who are asked if they have experienced accidents there. In other scenes the laborers are preparing fuses to dynamite a large section of rock. The camera zooms in on three men as they bound across the rocky terrain, carrying lit flares and repeatedly stooping to light the fuses. The dramatic, suspenseful sequence is accompanied by the sound of a warning siren. Looking more like a Hollywood action clip than a workplace documentary, it demonstrates the men’s agility and skill but also the highly dangerous nature of their work. It also suggests the frightening consequences were anyone to fall or a fuse burn too quickly. A wildly jerky, handheld camera tracks the men as they rush toward a bunker for protection, and a wide shot from a second camera located farther back reveals that Andrade is the man running alongside and filming the workers. The documentary ends with shots of the blast, as a graph is superimposed on its image with the same annual statistics that introduce the film: “1,200,000 accidents” and “23,000 disabled.” Circumventing government censorship was not easy when filming potentially controversial topics for television. In his memoir about that period, O povo fala: Um cineasta na área de jornalismo da TV brasileira (2001, The people speak: A filmmaker in the area of Brazilian TV journalism), Andrade recounts strategies he used to elude censors. One time involved standing on the street with a camera, saying nothing, and simply extending the microphone to passersby, who began to discuss their problems and register complaints. The strategy of offering citizens the chance to speak on television elicited excellent commentary and became the basis for a news series, Recriminações e queixas (Recriminations and complaints). Oftentimes just showing a situation such as the quarry workers running for their lives was enough to raise public awareness. And Hora da Notícia was successful, so much so that TV Cultura viewership grew substantially. Increasingly, however, the military cracked down on the program. Topics prohibited

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by the regime were posted on a wall at the television station called the “mural of prohibitions”; the number of banned subjects grew daily, often without the knowledge of news teams, who returned to the station with material they had to discard.34 As government pressure increased, Andrade was removed from directing films and assigned to advise reporters. Before being dismissed in 1974, he retrieved a number of documents and the few films that had not been discarded; all other materials from Hora da Notícia were destroyed by the government as left-wing propaganda.35

CHAPTER 5

Biographies of a Sort, Part I (1974–1989) This is the first of two chapters dealing with films that have in common a documentary impulse and a biographical subject structure. There is nothing in the periods in question that determines a special interest in biography, but these excellent films show a varied way of using the form of biographical narrative, hence I describe them with the qualifier biographies “of a sort.”

Iracema: Uma transa amazônica Some fifty years after Silvino Santos filmed No país das amazonas, his 1922 landmark celebration of the natural beauty, economy, and tribes of the Amazon, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna made Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Iracema) in 1974, but it was censored until 1980. It is a blend of fiction and documentary whose title refers to José de Alencar’s 1865 classic novel about a “honey-lipped” Indigenous maiden whose name is an anagram for “America.” As she is the daughter of a Tabajara shaman, her virginity is essential to the well-being of her people, but Iracema falls in love with Martim, a Portuguese colonizer in sixteenth-century Brazil. Having relinquished her tribal sanctity for love, she leaves the community to roam the northeastern wilderness with Martim. Left alone while Martim wanders with his Indian friend Poti, she dies after giving birth to a son, Moacir, who symbolizes the legendary union of the two races. Both No país das amazonas and Alencar’s Iracema are paeans to a fertile nation, although the encounters they portray between the European-born and Native inhabitants do not bode well for the future of the Indian. 115

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Bodanzky and Senna’s film returns to the land that Santos photographed, creating a modern-day treatment of Alencar’s tale, part fiction but filled with documentary footage. In their film a fifteen-year-old from the Marajó tribe is called Iracema, after the iconic literary figure. She meets a white truck driver nicknamed Tião Brasil Grande (Tião Big Brazil) from Rio Grande do Sul. The film’s subtitle, Uma transa amazônica, is a pun that fuses the images of sex (transa) and the Trans-Amazonian Highway to emphasize the ineluctable relation between devastation and modernity. The arrival of modernity in the remote, impoverished Brazilian interior became a frequent topic of films in the 1970s and 1980s that portray the impact of developmentalism and foreign capital. In the Amazon, government projects such as the 1965 Operação Amazônica provided tax incentives for private investments and population growth; the 1970 Plano de Integração Nacional (National Integration Plan) was launched to ensure Brazil’s sovereignty over undeveloped and unoccupied lands in the north and west. Industrialization required the opening of roads to move people and products; the most important project was the TransAmazonian Highway, begun in 1972 to traverse the Amazon Basin and connect it with the Atlantic coast. The government subsidized cattle raising in the basin to feed coastal populations and for export.1 Severe drought in the Northeast in 1970 also was a major factor in the government push to open the Amazon for migrant peasant settlement. The roads, cattle farms, agribusinesses, and settlements for landless northeastern peasants led to widespread burning and razing of the rainforest, all of which left damaging impacts on Indigenous and other local inhabitants. Shot in 16 mm color and blown up to 35 mm, Bodanzky and Senna’s feature portrays the devastation of the virgin-turned-prostitute Iracema (Edna de Cássia) at the hands of Brasil Grande (Paulo César Pereio), an enthusiastic proponent of progress who transports timber along the highway. He has sex with Iracema, whom he meets in Belém and takes on the road. Fraught with his frequent taunting and harsh words, their less-than-romantic encounter is short-lived. One night, without warning, Tião leaves her at a seedy roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. Grim scenes of sexual transactions depict her rapid decline into the seamy, often violent world of roadside prostitution, where she meets other Indigenous women. Her swift descent contrasts sharply with Tião’s move upward in the more lucrative transporting of cattle. He barely recognizes Iracema in a chance roadside encounter where several prostitutes await business from passing customers. Dirty and disheveled, missing a tooth, and wearing a single rubber boot, she asks him to stay and then for money. Tião declines and

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Iracema without a future and Tião Brasil Grande on his way up in Iracema: Uma transa amazônica.

departs in his truck, leaving her once again on the roadside, a symbol of the displacement and degradation of a vulnerable population. Filmed on location in Belém and along paved and unpaved stretches of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Iracema mixes fiction and documentary in the telling of Iracema’s story and a larger narrative about people illequipped to deal with modernity and the ravaging of the rainforest. Some of the documentary sequences are astounding. A long traveling shot filmed from inside Tião’s truck captures the immensity of the land’s destruction in an endless stretch of smoldering rainforest that is here and there still on fire. This dramatic footage is accompanied by other shots of the truck as it travels through clouds of thick smoke hovering over the roadway and billowing in the air. Another sequence documents the condition of the land from a small plane that carries Iracema and a coworker to a job at a distant cattle farm. The aerial shot follows the dense and verdant rainforest landscape that suddenly becomes a wasteland with a few skeletal trees. The topographies are startling in their proximity and contrast, as if a bomb had surgically lopped off some of the forest from the rest. In other scenes the beneficiaries of such extensive devastation are seen in the form of fields for agribusiness and pastureland for farms and cattle ranching. More sequences show close-ups of the felling of gigantic trees to cut open the forest for additional highway. The magnitude of the scarring and destruction is spellbinding in an eerie, Dantesque way, demonstrating the impossibility of the seemingly invincible forest-fortress to repel the steamroller of extractive industry. The hardline government of Emílio Médici, a military leader who was president from 1969 to 1974, was responsible for widespread dissemination

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of developmentalist hype about economic opportunity, growth, and prosperity in the Amazon. Patriotic images and slogans touting “Brazil on the move” were directed toward a public far removed from the center of operations in the Amazon and uniformly unaware of the seismic catastrophe happening there. Bodanzky and Senna make Tião the mouthpiece and billboard for the government’s celebration of progress at any cost. He wears a T-shirt emblazoned “TransAmazônica” and plasters his truck’s windshield with patriotic stickers of the national and state flags plus slogans such as “Brazil Love It or Leave It.” He eagerly reaps the spoils of topographic destruction and human displacement while incessantly parroting to nearly everyone he meets the official line about the nation’s future greatness. It is not by chance that his nickname is “Brasil Grande.” The filming of Iracema’s story involved considerable improvisational work between Pereio and first-time actor Cássia, who was from the area. Improvisation is also an aspect of fly-on-the-wall sequences in which Pereio, as the boisterous Tião, strikes up impromptu conversations with locals in town and on the road. One of these conversations prompts a man to talk about the difficulties of acquiring official documents and keeping his small plot of land out of the hands of big business. The owner of a roadside drink stand acknowledges that his modest business is about to be displaced by road construction. Tião’s attempt to draw out locals sometimes receives little reaction, as in a scene in which two workers load lumber onto a truck as he lazes nearby, spouting lines like “Where there’s wood, there’s money.” Later, he is lying in a short-strung hammock attached to his truck’s bumper and calling out to a man nearby who is digging a few postholes in the ground. What these scenes powerfully convey is that modernization has not made life easier for locals or improved the lot of migrants who were drawn to the Amazon with promises of land and a better future. The film documents wooden shacks, dusty roads, dingy roadside bars, and locals hard at work eking out a living or, like Iracema, living dangerously on the edge. In the talking-heads documentary Era uma vez Iracema (2005, Once upon a time there was Iracema) about the making of the film, Bodanzky recalls his nervousness during filming in the Amazon, a governmentdeclared National Security Zone patrolled by military police.2 He also worried about possible difficulties of getting the material out of the area to be developed. The objective, he says, was to enter the zone and shoot scenes with minimal equipment, avoiding clappers and other paraphernalia. Several scenes feature the local owner of the truck used in the film. In one roadside bar scene he facilitates Tião’s approach to locals by greeting him like a friend when he arrives.

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Setting posts on a devastated land in Iracema: Uma transa amazônica.

There was no attempt by the filmmakers to disguise the fact that they were shooting a movie, nor, as the critic Carlos Alberto Mattos states in an interview in the documentary, was there any concern about mixing fiction and documentary footage. Another critic, Ismail Xavier, elaborates on this point in an essay on the film, saying that “by the early seventies, the articulation of documentary strategies and sheer fantasy was already part of an established code in ‘post-Godardian’ cinema.”3 What makes Iracema original is the combination of mixed modes, improvisational performances, and lightning-rod subject matter that would soon gain international attention. In his interview, Orlando Senna talks about his early conversations with Bodanzky, who already had funding from ZDF, German public television, for a film about the Amazon and how the basic storyline evolved as they traveled with the German producer Wolf Gauer to Belém and along the Trans-Amazonian Highway for their research. Senna drafted a script that involved shoots of a few days and relied on Pereio’s improvisations with Cássia and people in the area. Fortunately, the film’s negative made it out of the Amazon to Germany, where it was edited with Bodanzky and broadcast on ZDF to considerable acclaim. In another interview from Era uma vez Iracema, Gauer describes how the broadcast dovetailed with environmental debates in Germany and the shock generated by the scene with the burning and smoldering forest, with images that went global. The film’s resonance was so great, he says, that ZDF made one hundred copies of the film to accommodate public demand. The directors were also invited to Cannes, where the film won the Jeune Cinéma Prize. It also received France’s prestigious Prix George Sadoul in 1975.

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For Bodanzky, the most important step was getting the film back to show in Brazil. A 16 mm copy finally arrived, hand-carried by Gauer, who got it into the country after a failed first try by traveling through Buenos Aires. Like many documentaries at the time, Iracema was initially screened for friends and small groups; additional copies were made to circulate at film clubs, whose memberships were considerable at the time, including one in the Amazon. Despite several tries, Bodanzky was unable to secure government permission for a theatrical release. Iracema’s dramatic footage and obvious critique were at odds with the dictatorship’s crafted image of the Amazon, and the film was banned until 1980, when the political opening was slowly under way. Featured at the Brasília film festival that year, Iracema garnered several top prizes, and its success secured funding from Embrafilme, the state agency created in 1969 to support film production and distribution. In preparation for the film’s widespread release, the directors added an introductory title card that refers to its delay in arriving at theaters and the danger involved in showing what was happening in the Amazon at the time. It adds that watching Iracema is perhaps more harrowing in 1980 than when it was made. With the rise of the environmental movement and conservationist efforts by Chico Mendes and others to protect the rainforest in the 1980s, that was undoubtedly true. With President Jair Bolsonaro’s rollback of rainforest protections in 2019, it is even more harrowing today.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Getúlio Vargas, Os anos JK, and Jango In 1974, as Bodanzky and Senna were filming Iracema, Ana Carolina was completing her first feature documentary, Getúlio Vargas. The 35 mm, black-and-white film is narrated by Carlos César Pereio, whose career would forever be defined by his role as the gregarious and disreputable Tião Brasil Grande in Iracema. Produced by Ney Sroulevich, the documentary was made to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of Vargas’s death; the project also happened to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the 1964 military takeover. Politically, 1974 was a transitional year, with the departure of presidential hardliner Emílio Médici and the installation of the more moderate Ernesto Geisel. A general and former director of Petrobrás, the national oil company, Geisel wanted to liberalize the authoritarian regime, but the process of redemocratization was far from simple, especially on the heels

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of Médici’s highly repressive regime. Geisel also had to contend with continuation of the hardline Serviço Nacional de Informações (National Intelligence Service), military and police torturers, and right-wing paramilitary terrorist groups. His was a slow balancing act, negotiating with civilian opposition while retaining AI-5 and making concessions to the most reactionary segments of the military, which had their own ideas about what constituted national security.4 In the meantime, acts of torture continued; one of the victims was the highly respected São Paulo journalist Vladimir Herzog, who died in custody in 1975 after his arrest by the Second Army on suspicion of being a communist conspirator. The public outcry was widespread and further drove the opposition’s call for a return to democratic governance.5 It is important to consider Getúlio Vargas within this tense political climate. The film’s producer, Sroulevich, a left-wing militant, was head of the National Student Union in 1964 when the military takeover occurred; he fled to France, where he remained in exile for ten years, running the Paris office of the popular weekly Brazilian magazine Manchete. In 1973, with designer Pierre Cardin, he produced Cinema Novo director Carlos Diegues’s Joanna Francesa, a romantic drama about a doomed sugarplantation family in Alagoas; the film starred Jeanne Moreau as a former São Paulo brothel owner turned plantation family matriarch. That film opens with the 1930 revolution that put Vargas into office. Getúlio Vargas was unlike Ana Carolina’s early experiments Lavra dor and Indústria about peasant struggle and savage capitalism and more in keeping with her biographical shorts on the writer Monteiro Lobato (Monteiro Lobato, 1971), artist Flávio Motta (Três desenhos, 1970, Three designs), and female artisans in the Minas Gerais interior (A fiandeira, 1970, The spinner). In 1971 she began researching archives for newsreels about Vargas at the Cinemateca Brasileira, where she was employed, and she was an obvious choice for directing the film. In a 2015 interview she discusses the challenges of projecting the nitrate footage and constantly dousing the projector and reels with water to keep the stock from burning. She dedicated Getúlio Vargas to José Augusto Rodrigues, president of Lider Cine Laboratórios, who stepped in to help with the projection transfer of the combustible material to acetate.6 The documentary’s chief feature is its remarkable assemblage of footage selected from more than 250 newsreels made by the Vargas dictatorship’s Department of Press and Propaganda and the National Agency, which covered Vargas’s return to power in 1951. Archival photographs appear intermittently to supplement or bridge newsreel clips. The soundtrack is

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a complex mix of newsreel commentary intercut with Vargas’s speeches to massive crowds and music from the period, especially military marches. Other period music includes samba tunes performed by Carmen Miranda and the actor Grande Otelo, who appears in a clip from Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio, Zona Norte (1957, Rio, Northern Zone).7 The tropicalist singer and composer Jards Macalé, who worked on late-1960s and early 1970s Cinema Novo films, arranged the music, which includes compositions by Luiz Gonzaga, chapbook lyrics, and the popular melody “Baby Face.” Pereio’s off-screen narration provides dates, names, and historical context to identify people and events in clips and photos from 1930 to 1954. The film begins with the actor reading Vargas’s suicide letter, in which he denounced foes and consoled urban workers, who constituted his major support. It is a powerful letter whose reading is accompanied by images of his body in a glass-topped casket, later carried through the streets by a nation in mourning. Getúlio Vargas documents the reconstruction of Vargas as a national icon by a media under strict government control who in turn is mediated and reconstructed for the documentary. What is seen on screen is the rise of a skillful populist leader, much beloved by the proletariat who worshipfully pack public arenas to hear him speak. An example of his working-class popularity appears in footage of a May Day celebration at the new Maracanã stadium, whose capacity at the time was nearly 200,000. Vargas’s defeat of opposition forces in São Paulo in 1932, 1935, and 1938, resulting in his ban of the Communist Party and the right-wing Integralist Party, are recorded but quickly segue into scenes of Vargas as dictator, his portrait visible in department stores, schools, and businesses and on large banners at official events. One newsreel superimposes his image over a map of Brazil, in keeping with his nationalistic agenda to consolidate the country, including the remote and little-populated westernmost frontier. The documentary follows this grandiose image of supreme command with footage of Benito Mussolini hailing audiences from a balcony in Italy. In one of the most stunning sequences, Vargas presides over a Flag Day ceremony in 1937, the year the Estado Novo was installed, where, one by one, all twenty-two state flags are set on fire and dropped into a Grecian-style urn. A shot of a waving national flag suggests that consolidation of the states under one nation has been achieved. Other footage touts Vargas’s World War II negotiations with the United States for the construction of an iron-ore complex at Volta Redonda, whose location in Rio de Janeiro state is pinpointed by a moving arrow on a map. The technique reflects the “magic geography” developed in Germany in 1927 that later was used in both Axis and Allied propaganda newsreels.

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A larger-than-life presidential presence in Getúlio Vargas.

Fascism is explicit in the documentary’s myriad scenes of military parades with horses and armaments and marching youth groups in uniform such as the Boy Scouts, who sing patriotic songs and wave little flags. Logos of the National Agency and Department of Press and Propaganda flash twice on screen, reminders that the audience is viewing government propaganda. Ana Carolina includes off-screen commentary on how, shortly after Brazil declared war on the Axis powers, Vargas publicly stated that the war was going against the Allies, a comment that probably pleased the Fifth Column but sent US and other Allied diplomats scurrying to the presidential palace in Rio. Bolstered by the war’s end and public calls for democratic governance, the military ousted Vargas. In one of the most personal moments in the film, Vargas’s son talks about his father’s decision not to rally the proletariat against the generals and to quietly return to his home in Rio Grande do Sul. Although conditions were vastly different in 1945, history repeated itself in 1964, with the military overthrow of President João Goulart. Unlike Vargas, who appears back on his ranch and courted by visiting politicians, Goulart was forced to flee Brazil. As the film makes clear, in many ways Vargas remained in power. General Eurico Dutra, his minister of war during the Estado Novo, was elected as the new president with Vargas’s support, and Vargas himself was nominated twice by workers for a Senate seat. The documentary shows clips from his 1950 comeback as the workers’ presidential candidate, with party slogans announcing his “democratic campaign”; the sight likely stirred 1970s moviegoers who were eager for redemocratization under

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Geisel. Footage of a blond, prematurely aging Carmen Miranda struggling down airplane steps in her final return to Brazil in the 1950s might be seen as analogous to the return of Vargas, who, despite popular support, struggled against opposition groups and the media, especially newspapers no longer controlled by the government. Vargas proclaims on the soundtrack, “Without the freedom to criticize there is no democracy,” a phrase that undoubtedly resounded with audiences at Copacabana’s Caruso Cinema, where the documentary opened, and during a ten-month run, from May 1975 to February 1976, at São Paulo’s Museu Lasar Segall. As a film about the past, Getúlio Vargas had no difficulty being approved by regime censors and receiving distribution funds from Embrafilme. But Ana Carolina’s film is more complex than conventional documentaries about famous men; its strategic use of propaganda imagery is a commentary on the power of government-controlled media to shape public opinion. In effect, Ana Carolina selectively draws from the official record to create her own narrative about a political leader who, notwithstanding the Estado Novo and its cruelties that have yet to be adequately explored, became the most celebrated figure in twentieth-century Brazil. Cited in the film’s prologue, his last carta-testamento (letter-testament) addressed to the nation was perhaps his greatest media triumph, transforming opposition and failure into martyrdom and vindication while correctly prophesying the impact of his suicide: “I gave you my life. Now I offer you my death. I fear nothing. I serenely take the first step on the road to eternity and leave life to enter history.” Following in Ana Carolina’s footsteps, in 1976 Sílvio Tendler began archival research for a documentary about former president Juscelino Kubitschek, commonly known as JK. Four years later, his Os anos JK: Uma trajetória política (1980, The JFK Years: A Political Trajectory), a 35 mm black-and-white and color feature, was released at the Pathé and Jacques Cinemas in Belo Horizonte and the Cine Belas Artes in São Paulo.8 The film critic Amir Labaki notes that Tendler was testing the regime’s liberalization process, or abertura (opening), by making a film about the highly popular, democratically elected president (1956-1961) whose “fifty years in five” economic plan envisioned the building of Brasília.9 In 1964, following the coup, Kubitschek was a senator representing the state of Goiás (1961–1964) and was contemplating a second presidential campaign for the anticipated election in 1965. His associations with Vargas, whom he admired, and with Goulart, his former vice president, who was ousted by the military, did not endear him to the regime. Ultimately, the

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dictatorship foreclosed any possibility of democratic elections and brought JK’s political career to a halt, repealing his senatorial mandate, suspending his political rights for ten years, and forcing him into exile for long periods. In 1976 JK died in a car accident while traveling between Rio and São Paulo, a death that was regarded for years as an assassination arranged by the regime. Even more than Vargas, he was a volatile subject for a film at the time, despite the repeal of AI-5, the return of habeas corpus, and a 1979 amnesty law guaranteeing protection for political prisoners and exiles as well as torturers. The possibility of a crackdown existed under newly minted executive powers to declare “‘emergency measures,’ a ‘state of siege’ or ‘state of emergency.’”10 Os anos JK was Tendler’s first feature, but he had considerable film experience as president of Rio’s Federation of Cinema Clubs and an assistant at Mapa Filmes, whose earliest productions included Walter Lima Jr.’s Menino de engenho (1965, Plantation Boy) and Glauber Rocha’s Terra em transe (1968, Land in Anguish). On leaving Brazil in 1970, Tendler resided for two years in Chile, where he worked on various popular culture projects. After moving to Paris, he studied under Jean Rouch and the film historian Marc Ferro and was an assistant director on Chris Marker’s La spirale (1975, The Spiral), about the election and overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende.11 In a 2012 interview Tendler reminisces about meeting in Paris with the Cuban documentarian Santiago Álvarez, whom he greatly admired, and working in Auditel, the same editing studio used by Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard, and Orson Welles.12 Back in Rio in 1976, Tendler wrote a master’s thesis on Joris Ivens and began teaching film at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio while beginning research for Os anos JK.13 Kubitschek was a highly popular president in his own right, but the documentary is constructed in part on parallels drawn between his career and that of the post-1951 democratically elected Vargas, who was a touchstone for JK. Kubitschek was then governor of Minas Gerais and a member of the Partido Social Democrático, the centrist party founded by Vargas that brought him back to power in 1951 along with the Partido Trabalhador Brasileiro (PTB, Brazilian Workers Party). JK also had the support of the PTB when he selected João Goulart, Vargas’s former minister of labor, as his running mate. The documentary’s newsreel footage of massive political rallies in support of their presidential candidacies in 1950 and 1955 was likely a poignant reminder for moviegoers in 1980 of the nearly twenty years of democracy from 1945 to 1964 and the election of civilian presidents. JK’s sudden death, like Vargas’s suicide, plunged the nation into

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Juscelino Kubitschek in Brasília in Os anos JK.

mourning, and footage of his funeral shows his casket being carried by a bereaved public through the streets of Rio. In many ways, Os anos JK is a more conventional film than Getúlio Vargas. It has extensive off-screen narration by the actor Othon Bastos, who played the professor in Antônio das Mortes, and Tendler’s interviews of former military officers, politicians, and supporters who elaborate on historical events recorded by newsreels. The film highlights the many successes and occasional failures of a charismatic leader who had impressive negotiating skills and foresight and who engaged parties on the right and the left. One of the most powerful interviews is with Marcos Heuzi, former leader of the National Student Union, who met with JK shortly after his installation as president to discuss a pending strike to protest a hike in streetcar fares. Heuzi contends that JK presented the students with the task of deciding the nation’s future by either relenting or striking and bringing down his government, which was in its initial fragile period.14 The strike did not take place. JK’s evenhandedness is displayed in footage of amnestied far-right

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Air Force rebels who attempted a coup from the interior and the legal return of Luís Carlos Prestes, head of the banned Communist Party, who had been stripped of his political rights in 1948. Not surprisingly, there is considerable footage of the planning and construction of Brasília and the developmentalist policies associated with the “fifty years in five” plan that included an estimated ten thousand miles of new highways and the rise of the automotive industry backed by foreign investors such as Ford Motors and Volkswagen. There are occasional indirect critiques of policy; highways benefited landowners in the transport of agricultural goods, yet little was done to address land reform for northeastern peasants. And while highways and the automobile industry meant more jobs and better wages, investment in that economy meant a lost opportunity for a national rail system. In his essay on Os anos JK, the critic Jean-Claude Bernardet makes the important point that newsreels, often tedious and of little interest when shown in theaters, take on new life and meaning when featured in documentaries, where they are “redeemed.”15 Much of their fascination as artifacts has to do with what Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution calls the “selective cultural tradition,” which allows them to be used as visible evidence of the past and possibly for critique. The larger point that Bernardet makes has to do with Brazilian newsreels, “chronicles of the winners,” and what they show and do not show regardless of their production by state agencies or for-profit enterprises. The near totality of films made in Brazil with historical footage have to do with heads of state. . . . Other themes, such as the workers’ movement, repression, and fear during the Estado Novo or the Médici government, daily life, etc., could not be treated via this system: films with archival material. The recuperation, revaluation, resignification linked to the history of Brazil ends up operating predominantly, if not totally, in the sphere of power. When one so insistently praises such recuperation of historical Brazilian images, what one is in fact praising is the recuperation of images of power, even when they are treated ironically.16 Bernardet is absolutely right. There is very little in Os anos JK about daily life or the working or middle classes except for their presence at political rallies or occasional headline-making strikes or as spectators at official events. Yet Tendler’s film also uses newsreels and other documentary footage from independent films and television to remind audiences what a

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popular and elected leader and democratic freedoms looked like at a time in Brazil when the road to liberalization was still under construction. It also suggests the sea changes after the military takeover, especially in relation to the Church, whose once pro-military stance as shown in newsreel footage of the 1964 Family Marches with God for Liberty was in stark contrast to its position in the 1970s as one of the regime’s most serious and outspoken adversaries. Interestingly, one of the prizes Os anos JK received in 1980 was from the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil. Os anos JK surpassed all box-office expectations for a documentary, drawing some 800,000 viewers and proving Tendler was right when he predicted that the public was “thirsting” for a film about politics.17 He repeated his success in 1984 with the documentary Jango, whose title refers to João Goulart, the only Brazilian president to die in exile. His death in Argentina in 1976 strangely coincided with that of JK, his former boss, who was ostracized politically but able to return to Brazil from self-exile. Beginning in 1947 with a state assembly seat win in Rio Grande do Sul, João Goulart had a long career as a major statesman that was largely expunged from the official record by the military that overthrew him. Tendler received partial financial backing from Goulart’s widow, Maria Teresa Goulart, to recuperate the memory of her husband, who, in her words, had been “unjustly treated by the press.”18 The March 27, 1984, premiere at São Paulo’s Cine Belas Artes was almost twenty years to the day after Goulart had been forced from office. Two thousand people attended the showing along with the former president’s daughter and widow. More than a half million would see the film, which ranks third in box-office sales after Os anos JK and Estanislau Szankovski’s África eterna (1970, Eternal Africa) for feature documentaries from 1976 to 2007, with up to one million viewers.19 In an interview for Filme Cultura in 1984, Tendler reflects on Os anos JK’s critical reception, especially feedback from Joris Ivens, who felt the film was too cold and lacked emotion.20 Jango is a more dynamic piece, with a brilliant musical soundtrack by the team of Milton Nascimento and Wagner Tiso. Tendler brings emotion to the screen, such as when Nascimento’s famous ballad-protest “Menino” (Boy) plays over footage of the public funeral of Edson Luís, a teenage student killed by the military police in 1968 whose death generated massive protest and the far-right crackdown. Tendler also brings Goulart’s engaging personality immediately to the fore in the film’s introductory newsreel footage showing the warm reception Goulart received by groups of Chinese children who present

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him with bouquets of flowers in honor of his visit to China in 1961 as vice president under President Jânio Quadros (January–August 1961). Traditional Chinese music plays as an Asian speaker narrates the Chinese newsreel in Portuguese. The credits appear over a bio-photo montage of Goulart, beginning with images of the young politician and family man, followed by his buoyant appearances at rallies and with party officials as vice president and president. Tendler alternates these and photo opps with heads of state including JFK and Leonid Brezhnev with moments at his São Borja ranch, where he is photographed fishing and hunting. The montage ends on a solemn note with an older, grayer Goulart in exile, sadly smiling at the camera. Tendler dedicated Jango to several people: Chris Marker, Joris Ivens, Tendler’s wife, the actor Ana Rosa, and the journalist Raul Ryff, who was Goulart’s press secretary. Ryff is among the dozen figures including military personnel and politicians interviewed for the film. Some of the early parts of Jango repeat scenes from Os anos JK, and similarly, Tendler draws attention to Vargas as touchstone for Goulart, a fellow gaúcho whom Vargas mentored and appointed minister of labor in 1953. In 1954 Vargas entrusted Goulart with a copy of the letter that was found after his suicide in the presidential palace. Goulart thought the document had instructions for his trip that morning back to Rio Grande do Sul and did not read the letter until he was on his way.21 Among images of their relationship is one of a grieving Goulart standing next to Vargas’s casket. Just as Os anos JK emphasizes Kubitschek’s push to modernize Brazil, Jango celebrates the left-liberalism of Goulart’s administration, which fostered the continued growth of peasant leagues and unions and plans for agrarian reform. Tendler juxtaposes footage of PTB rallies supporting Goulart with shots of US delegations sent to Brazil to drum up anticommunist fear and dissent, especially in the Church. There is also propaganda footage from the US and the multinational support agency Instituto pela Pesquisa e Estudos Sociais (IPES, Institute for Social Research and Studies); founded in 1962, it encouraged the military’s intervention.22 In one of Jango’s most dramatic sequences, Tendler intercuts shots of a pro-Goulart sailors’ revolt in Rio and the military pushback, with scenes from the Odessa Steps and final act in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) showing the military offensive on land while sailors on Czarist ships refuse to fire on and proclaim solidarity with their rebel comrades. Although Goulart’s March 13, 1964, speech mobilized his huge support network, especially among the working class, he chose not to lead a counterrevolt once the takeover occurred. Tendler uses freeze frames of his March speech to suggest his faltering last attempt to assert power

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The deposed president João Goulart in Jango.

over the opposition from both the right and the far left.23 Images of Che Guevara’s open-eyed corpse, student protests, arrests, and beatings, the enactment of AI-5, and Allende’s assassination in Chile signal the end of an era. By 1976 the military junta allowed the return of Goulart’s body, and his casket, like those of Vargas and Kubitschek, was carried through the streets of Rio. A year before the release of Jango, popular demonstrations had begun to force the return of direct elections. The spiraling economic downturn and more than 200 percent inflation diminished the regime’s standing and helped move liberalization forward. In many ways Jango provided a lesson about democracy, with its push-pull images of a nation economically struggling and divided surrendering itself to military intervention and totalitarian rule. But perhaps more than a lesson, it gave a much-needed and

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welcome lift in public expectations and hope, as suggested by the box office as well as prize recognition from, among others, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil. There is no question that Jango caught the crest of an unstoppable wave that brought a civilian president to power just one year later and direct elections in 1989. The historian Marco Napolitano perhaps best describes the film’s larger importance as “one of the most provocative examples not merely of how history can serve as material for cinema, but especially how cinema can intervene in history.”24

Documenting Death: Di Cavalcanti and Glauber, o filme One of the best-known documentaries to be suppressed during the military regime was Glauber Rocha’s Di Cavalcanti (1977), a seventeen-minute short about the death of his friend and compatriot Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, regarded alongside Cândido Portinari among Brazil’s most important twentieth-century artists. Despite its anarchic character, the short was not banned by the military but by a civil lawsuit brought by Di Cavalcanti’s daughter, Elizabeth, who was offended by Rocha’s grotesque cinematic eulogy. Following a long period of self-exile, Rocha had been in Rio only a few months when he learned on October 27, 1976, that his friend had died the previous day. Borrowing a 16 mm camera from Nelson Pereira dos Santos plus three thousand feet of color stock, he contacted the cinematographer Mário Carneiro and drove to the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio, where a wake was taking place until the artist’s burial later that day at the Saint John Baptist Cemetery. It is difficult not to cringe at the filmed manic antics of Glauber at the wake. Against the family’s wishes, he removed a handkerchief from Di Cavalcanti’s face for a close-up of his emaciated, ghoulish visage, with its protruding teeth and cotton-packed nostrils, an astounding and chilling image of death. At other times the camera moves erratically around the casket in the museum’s large lobby, showing the relatively small community of mourners in attendance. Incensed by the public’s slight of the artist, Rocha adopted lines from a famous poem by the symbolist poet Augusto dos Anjos and added them in capital letters to the film’s title: “NO ONE ATTENDED THE FORMIDABLE FUNERAL OF ITS LAST CHIMERA, ONLY INGRATITUDE, THAT PANTHER, WAS HIS INSEPARABLE COMPANION: DI (DAS) MORTES.”25 In most ways, the film, which follows the coffin and small procession of family and friends to the cemetery, was more about Rocha than Di

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Glauber Rocha’s controversial close-up of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti in death in Di Cavalcanti.

Cavalcanti, and references to the film simply as Di Glauber grew. Living mostly in Europe, Rocha had not made a critically successful film for several years. Di Cavalcanti’s premiere at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize for Best Short, marked his triumphant return. It was an especially sweet moment, as Rocha’s idol Roberto Rossellini, whom he had met through Di Cavalcanti years earlier, presided over the festival. Funded by Embrafilme and TV Educação, Di appeared in Rio cinemas and twice on television before it was seized by court order on June 12, 1979, at the RioSul cinema, where Rocha and his guests were to appear. In August 1981 the short was rebroadcast on TV in an homage to Rocha, who died that month at the age of forty-two. But the documentary remained largely out of public sight for the next twenty years.26 The film historian and critic Randal Johnson has described Di as a film about “death as spectacle,” a phrase that captures the theatricality Rocha always invested in films, as in Antônio das Mortes (1969), where the deceased becomes a catalyst for faithful followers’ rebellious and celebratory acts.27 There is no conventional logic or cause and effect in Di as it ricochets from images of the austere wake to a museum display of Cavalcanti’s colorful paintings, mostly featuring colorfully dressed dark-skinned women. At different junctures the paintings become background for brief shots of the actor Antônio Pintagua, bare-chested and smiling as he dances and waves at the camera. Interludes between the wake and final burial sequence show a ribald gathering of Rocha and friends, who pass around newspaper coverage of the shoot, and graphics comparing Di Cavalcanti’s importance to that of JK and Goulart, both of whom were publicly memorialized in 1976. At the cemetery Rocha brazenly uses the camera to intrude on the tearful graveside mourning of Marina Montini, one of Di Cavalcanti’s favorite models.

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The camera also shows Glauber leaping around headstone monuments for angles to film the procession head-on as it approaches the gravesite. Edited and recorded in a studio, Rocha’s off-screen narration for Di is as unsettling as the images; his loud, bombastic celebration of Di Cavalcanti’s life and art involves considerable self-promotion. Other unusual, often disturbing sights and sounds include a carnival march that plays as the camera pans over the casket and an energetic Jorge Ben tune that accompanies the lowering of Cavalcanti’s flower-strewn coffin into the grave. The frenetic short became a sort of template for Rocha’s subsequent work for the weekly television broadcast Abertura, which appeared on São Paulo’s TV Tupi from February 1979 to May 1980, as the station went off the air.28 As its name suggests, Abertura went on the air at the same time talks were under way about returning to democratic governance. With interview spots hosted by Rocha and other celebrity figures, the two-hour mixed entertainment program dealt openly with the political transition, amnesty, and censorship. Here, as in Di, Rocha often looks a bit disheveled, with his trademark partly unbuttoned shirt and shadow of a beard. While the narration for Di was recorded under controlled conditions, Rocha on TV often rambles and seems at times grasping for words, perhaps lacking a script or forethought for what he might say or do. However, his unpredictability, irreverence, and self-promoting skills remain intact, and his television performances drew audiences. In an interview, the documentarian Eduardo Coutinho comments on the uniqueness of Rocha’s television work: “The Glauber of Abertura . . . no one managed to do what he did because he did that as an actor, he was an actor, he was a rascal, he did things for publicity that at the same time were serious business.”29 When Glauber Rocha died in 1981, Sílvio Tendler took a camera to his friend’s funeral in Rio’s Jardim Botânico, where he filmed the wake with the permission of Rocha’s mother, Lúcia Rocha. Following Glauber Rocha’s lead, Tendler shot footage of him in the casket, although the images are far less provocative, invasive, and horrifying than those of Di Cavalcanti. Graveside footage of Rocha’s flower-strewn casket being lowered into the ground eerily duplicates Di’s burial scene. The funeral sequences appear in Tendler’s projected feature on the life and death of the iconoclastic director. Unlike Di, and in the style of other Tendler biographical documentaries, Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil (2002, Glauber, the film—Labyrinth of Brazil) is a sensitive portrait of the actor, director, and critic that features archival material and interview commentaries with Rocha’s many friends

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Homage to Glauber Rocha in Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil.

such as Mário Carneiro, who talks about filming Di’s infamous casket scene. The documentary begins in a Rio hospital room where the ailing director is visited by his Bahian compatriot Jorge Amado, who was the subject of Rocha’s last documentary, Jorjamado (1977). One of the final scenes in Glauber returns to the hospital where Amado, joined by his fellow Bahian writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, says goodbye to Rocha. Two days later, Rocha was dead. Tendler concludes his homage with footage of a musical tribute held at a packed Canecão arena in Rio and a scene from one of Rocha’s Abertura episodes in which Rocha waves around a copy of Glauber Rocha (1977), a volume of essays about him, as he denounces the colonization of Brazilian cinema by the US film industry, the demise of the incomplete Cinema Novo movement, and rise of pornochanchada. In a startling twist, Lúcia Rocha took legal action and prevented Tendler from using the funeral footage, just as Elizabeth Cavalcanti had done with

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Di. The scenes were kept from public view for the next twenty years, until Glauber, o filme was finally released in 2002. In the intervening years, the audio tapes with family and friends speaking at the wake had been lost.

Remembrances of Things Past: Cabra marcado para morrer Behind a riverbank three hired guns with sure aim killed Pedro Teixeira, a dedicated man who had fought his entire life against that exploitation. Pedro Teixeira had fought at the side of Julião talking to peasants to give them better understanding and a league had been organized to fight the landowner-boss, to do away with slavery that exists in the region, that leads into desperation an entire population where only the landowner has money and opinion. Ferreira Gullar, João Boa-Morte In April 1962, Eduardo Coutinho arrived in the northeastern state of Paraíba, where two weeks earlier, on April 2, João Pedro Teixeira, leader of the Sapé Peasant League, had been ambushed and killed by police hired by a landowner. Coutinho was participating in the countrywide tour of members of the National Student Union’s Centro Popular de Cultura who were promoting the formation of more cultural centers. During the visit, a rally of Sapé and other leagues’ thousands of members took place over four days to protest Teixeira’s assassination; his activist-widow, Elizabeth Teixeira, and six of their eleven children took part in the events. Coutinho filmed the rally and the bereaved family, whom he had met prior to the protest. In a 1985 interview conducted by Alex Viany, Coutinho said the protest inspired the idea of a dramatic reenactment of João Pedro’s activism and

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Recently widowed Elizabeth Teixeira with her children in 1962 in Cabra marcado para morrer.

murder in which Elizabeth and league members would play themselves. In January 1964 Coutinho returned to Paraíba to begin filming at a sugar mill, but the arrival of state military police after violence at the mill forced him to relocate. Galiléia, a sugar mill near Recife in Pernambuco, was chosen as the new site. The mill and its lands had been expropriated by the government and now belonged to subsistence farmers, among whom were leaders of the local league, Brazil’s oldest chapter, established in 1955. From their constituency Coutinho selected actors for the film; João Mariano da Silva would play the part of João Pedro alongside Elizabeth, who had relocated to Galiléia for the shoot. On April 1, 1964, the crew had filmed for thirty-five days and had roughly 40 percent of the film completed. That was the day the military overthrew the Goulart administration. Police immediately invaded Galiléia and arrested and jailed league and film-crew members, who were deemed part of the supposedly communist project. All film equipment and materials at the site were confiscated. The negative of most of the footage shot had been sent earlier to a Rio lab for developing and escaped government hands. During the government invasion, Coutinho, Elizabeth, and other cast and crew members were able to escape into the woods, where they hid until the police left. Separating into small groups, most fled to Recife or Rio. Elizabeth traveled from Recife to João Pessoa, where she was arrested and held for several weeks. Coutinho was also arrested later and held for several days. Surprisingly, a copy of the script and eight stills survived. Coutinho’s filmmaker friend David Neves hid the 1964 footage in a country house outside Rio, and in 1981, Coutinho returned to the Northeast for two months to locate and interview Elizabeth and other cast members for a feature documentary about the filming. Because of her league leadership and activism, Elizabeth had been in hiding in São Rafael in Rio Grande

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do Norte for seventeen years, even after the 1979 amnesty law was passed. With her eldest son’s assistance, Coutinho located her and filmed her interviews. Her memories of the rally, the 1964 filming, and her life with João Pedro are interwoven with memories of other cast members, who were located and interviewed along with several of Elizabeth’s children, most of whom had not seen or had any contact with her since she fled.30 With two exceptions, all the children were raised by family members in Paraíba.31 Widely regarded as Brazil’s most important documentary, Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (1984, Twenty Years Later) is a 16 mm blackand-white and color feature, later blown up to 35 mm, that debuted twenty years after the filming and invasion at Galiléia. Shot over a two-month period, the film borrows its title from Ferreira Gullar’s 1962 João BoaMorte: Cabra marcado para morrer, a verse tribute to João Pedro Teixeira and peasant solidarity.32 A left-wing militant born in the Northeast, Gullar lived in exile for years during the regime. He is also one of the film’s narrators, along with Coutinho and the poet and playwright Tite de Lemos, who provide background information on the 1960s footage and later interviews with Elizabeth and others. In its first year on the festival circuit, Cabra marcado para morrer won two prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, the Grand Prize at Paris’s Cinéma du Réel, and another at the Georges Pompidou Festival, along with major awards in Cuba, Italy, Portugal, and Brazil. Writing for the New York Times, Vincent Canby praised the film, which appeared at the New York Film Festival, as “the one-of-a-kind document that is both an essay on the last 20 years of Brazilian politics and an essay on cinema verité.”33 The riveting backstories of a political murder for hire and a league activist, widow, and mother targeted by the regime have often overshadowed other important aspects of the film. If Cabra marcado para morrer is about twenty years of Brazilian politics, it is also a snapshot in time of a centuries-long peasant struggle under the feudal landownership system called latifundismo. The rise of northeastern peasant leagues in the mid-1950s and early 1960s was no match for the powerful and entrenched plantation oligarchy. Contract killings and complicity between landowners, local government, and the Church had become commonplace since colonial times, and the nefarious dealings went uncontested if even noted.34 The difference in 1962 was that Goulart was in office, promising radical reform of the age-old system. Solidarity within and between leagues with thousands of members gave rural workers a greater sense of purpose and security. The rally to protest Teixeira’s murder was a well-organized, lengthy event and possibly unique in league history. But advances to reform landownership

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were short-lived. With the oligarchy’s support and blessing, the military ousted Goulart, leagues were attacked, their members arrested, tortured, and disappeared, and latifundismo remained firmly in place.35 Little has been written about Cabra marcado para morrer’s style and treatment of time. Although there is a general linearity to the unfolding of events, the documentary’s temporal structure is complex, constantly weaving back and forth between the present, filmed in color, and different moments in the past such as the 1962 rally and the 1964 fictional footage that were shot in black and white. Other temporal aspects derive from interviews that involve recollections of past experiences while talking about the present. Utilizing what became his trademark approach, Coutinho appears on screen in interview segments in which he shows stills from Galiléia to help elicit Elizabeth’s and others’ recollections. In one moving scene, he shows a picture of Elizabeth to one of her youngest children, who moved to Rio. The daughter says she has no memory of her mother. Another, older daughter, also interviewed in Rio, cries when she sees her mother’s picture. Her interview is flooded with other memories of the daughter’s own once comfortable but failed marriage and struggle to provide for her three children. One son living in Paraíba has no memory of his father, but he speaks with pride about rebuilding the desecrated roadside memorial that marks the spot where his father was gunned down. Coutinho incorporates newspaper photographs of Teixeira’s open-eyed and bare-chested corpse riddled with bullets. Five year later, images of Che Guevara’s open-eyed, partially clothed, and bullet-ridden body would circulate the globe. Although there is no direct reference to Che’s death in the film, the resemblance between the images of the two men’s corpses is undeniable. It is hard to imagine that Coutinho was not in some way using Teixeira’s photograph to evoke the famous Argentine and to honor a little-known peasant leader who died for a revolutionary cause. The film begins in the present of 1981 with preparation for an outdoor screening of the 1964 footage to which the film’s actors have been invited along with family and friends. Coutinho films their faces as they smile at their younger selves on screen and identify other actors, no longer living. João Mariano da Silva recounts his arrest in Galiléia as he is arrested playing Teixeira on screen. The incomplete footage, unedited and without a soundtrack, is projected in the sequence it was originally shot, in nonlinear fashion. Another former actor laments the soundtrack’s absence, the dialogue and their youthful voices now lost. Clips from the footage reappear in interview segments with Elizabeth, an interesting use

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of fictional material as archival document that gives added historical weight to her reminiscences. One-on-one interviews with João Mariano da Silva and João Virgílio Silva, a league leader who also acted in the film, reveal the persistence of their trauma. Seated at an outdoor café across from Coutinho, who holds a Nagra, João Mariano da Silva begins freely reminiscing. Coutinho suddenly calls out to stop filming because of wind that is interfering with the recording. When the interview restarts, João Mariano looks less comfortable, even apprehensive, perhaps realizing that speaking on camera, as he did in the past, can have dire consequences. João Virgílio’s appearance is compelling in a different way. Arrested and jailed for six years for league activism, he rails at length about being tortured by prison officials in Recife. Coutinho adds a devastating and ironic epilogue to the scene consisting of a shot of the panopticon-designed prison there and a reference to its transformation into a cultural center and major tourist attraction. Significantly, the regime was still in power in 1981, and speaking out remained dangerous. In a 1985 interview Coutinho recalls his own anxiety when he submitted the film for government approval. Fearful the documentary might run into trouble with the censors, he made a copy for safekeeping to ensure its survival.36 Time’s passing is also apparent in the on-screen faces of Elizabeth, João Mariano, and others first seen in footage and photographs from the 1960s. This is also true of Coutinho, who appears in a short clip from the 1962 rally and nearly twenty years later with his camera crew in interview sequences. In a review published not long after the film’s release, Bernardet considers the work as a reassembling of fragments of time, similar to a family split apart by events whose members Coutinho strives to find and reconnect.37 Coutinho also reconnects with Elizabeth and others within the frame. From his job with the television news program Globo Repórter, Coutinho understood the degree to which his presence on screen was essential to the interviewing process: If you position yourself three meters away from your interlocutor so as not to appear in the image, you are not speaking to this person. No one talks to another that far away. You have to be together. If not, it’s as if there were a barrier, the person is talking as if talking to the police or to “cinema,” in other words, giving a deposition. Even if you try to break that barrier, every deposition looks like a police deposition.38

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Elizabeth Teixeira speaking to Eduardo Coutinho in 1981 in Cabra marcado para morrer.

Cabra marcado para morrer is also an unusual making-of documentary describing the production of different projects: the short footage shot at the 1962 rally, the incomplete fiction film in Galiléia, and Cabra itself. Although Canby does not elaborate on what he means by the film as an essay on cinema verité, Cabra marcado para morrer’s self-reflexivity, along with its detailed commentary about earlier projects, clearly results in a fascinating documentary about a documentary.

A Day in the Life of a Tomato: Ilha das Flores In the long, rich history of Brazilian short subjects, Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores (1989, Isle of Flowers) is widely regarded as the most important. This was the case in 2019 when the film received the prize for Best Short from the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Cinema, which considered both fiction and documentary films since 1913, the year of the oldest preserved fiction short. Among the association’s top-100 list are several documentaries discussed in this book, including Glauber Rocha’s Di Cavalcanti, which critics ranked second.39 The colorful 35 mm Ilha das Flores, Furtado’s fourth short, is a parody of educational film with a deadly serious subject, the unequal distribution of wealth resulting in mass poverty and hunger. The film’s title refers to an island garbage dump near the southern state capital Porto Alegre, whose discarded foodstuff feeds women and children forced to scavenge. The film’s parodic elements play with conventions associated with 16 mm educational films such as the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo’s works that address topics in history, geography, culture, and disease control and prevention. As in other forms of filmmaking, they have a clear beginning, middle, and end, a cause-effect logic, and resolution or closure. The move to color from black and white enhanced the classroom experience;

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off-screen narration, recorded mostly by males with radio-style voices, conveys information at a slow to moderate pace, allowing viewers to absorb information. Their soundtracks use various combinations of narration and diegetic and nondiegetic sounds to instruct, engage, and entertain. Stock features aped in Ilha das Flores include a male narrator, chronological exposition, story cause and effect, nondiegetic music and sound effects, and obvious closure. But there is nothing conventional about this lightning-fast tour de force that in its title also has a paradoxical beauty. Harking back to silent cinema, the film begins in black and white with three intertitles. The first declares, “This film is not fiction.” The second informs viewers that “a place called Ilha das Flores exists.” Both titles implicitly play with facts and truths, fundamental concerns of educational films but never proclaimed in quite this way. Then the third title card knocks out the props: “God does not exist,” an unexpected and powerful statement in a Catholic country like Brazil. The intertitle’s shock value also derives from its unexpected relation to the first two statements at the end of the film when a grotesque reality is revealed. References to other truths and facts appear in the film’s end credits. Ilha das Flores is the partly animated story of a food chain, and its central protagonist is a tomato grown and harvested in Porto Alegre by the Japanese Brazilian farmer-actor Mr. Suzuki, who appears briefly. Deadpan off-screen narration by the gaúcho actor Paulo José is exaggerated and comic. Among the information he relays are the city’s degrees of longitude and latitude, certain physical characteristics associated with the Japanese, and a description of Mr. Suzuki as a human being endowed with a telencephalon (part of the brain) and opposable thumb. The name “Suzuki” flashes on screen against a pink version of the Japanese flag’s red circle-sun while a gong sounds off-screen. In a subsequent scene, a model of a brain appears to illustrate the narrator’s description of the telencephalon. A hand suddenly enters the frame and sticks a pin with a flag into the brain, eliciting a sharp cry of pain off screen. A short discussion of the function of the opposable thumb ensues, illustrated with an animated forefinger and thumb extended in pincer movement. This segues into a fast-paced series of images documenting various tasks made possible by the opposable thumb, such as holding a mascara wand to brush and separate eyelashes. Most definitions of the food chain describe the journey of a plant to the animal it feeds. Ilha das Flores uses the food chain to show how, historically, humans acquired food, first through barter and the exchange of commodities and then with money. The pace of the narration increases with the speed of images. A rapid lesson on the history of money accompanies a

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The bad-smelling tomato in Ilha das Flores.

lightning-fast, Monty Python–montage of currencies that existed before Christ. An image of Jesus crucified suddenly appears and is paused for a moment. Then viewers are told he was a Jew. The next set of images are World War II clips of Holocaust survivors and skeletal corpses piled in a mass grave. The narrator observes that they are Jews, have opposable thumbs, and are human beings. The unexpected shift from rapid-paced comedic montage to reflections on human horrors is even more destabilizing because of the narrator’s matter-of-fact tone. The film’s commentary on money turns to issues of buying, selling, and profit. Mr. Suzuki’s tomatoes are purchased in a supermarket by a woman who earns money selling perfume door-to-door to other women. At home she discards one of the tomatoes, which, in contrast to the perfume, smells bad and which she rejects as sauce for a pork dish. The film then gives considerable information about the way flowers are processed to become perfume and mentions that pork is made from pigs, animals that have no opposable thumbs. The last part of the film accompanies the bad-smelling, discarded tomato to the Isle of Flowers surrounded by murky water and locals who live in wooden shacks. Descriptions of what can be found in the garbage include a piece of paper with a schoolgirl’s essay. Viewers are informed

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that a dump site in the city of Goiânia contains toxic cesium that kills unsuspecting scavengers. The owner of pigs on the Isle of Flowers pays to give his animals first access to the garbage. Without money, the isle’s inhabitants queue outside a fence, where they wait to enter the dump. Access is limited to small groups, each of which has five minutes to collect edible remains left by the pigs. Ilha das Flores is challenging to describe in detail because of its wealth of images, visuals, parodic off-screen narration, and nondiegetic sounds such as music ranging from Carlos Gomes’s nineteenth-century opera O guarani to the discordant strumming of a heavy-metal guitar. But its point is clear. Money determines one’s place on the food chain, whether a human being with a telencephalon and opposable thumb or a pig.

CHAPTER 6

Documenting Identity Indigenous Peoples on Screen In the area between the telegraph line opened by the Rondon Commission, from 1907 to 1913, and the Guaporé River, more than 18 tribes disappeared in a few years. All of them were isolated until the 20th century and such high lethality cannot be explained by the virulence of epidemics. Darcy Ribeiro, “Cultura e línguas indígenas do Brasil” The anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro’s affirmation that disease alone did not kill off entire tribes in Brazil’s northwestern frontier reverberates in Sérgio Bianchi’s Mato eles? (1983, Should I Kill Them?), about the struggles and gradual extermination of Indigenous inhabitants in the Terra Indígena Mangueirinha reserve in southwestern Paraná state. Even more important for Bianchi’s purposes were the 1950s writings and 1957 documentary by José Loureiro Fernandes and Vladimir Kozák about Paraná’s Xetá tribe, who had no outsider contact prior to the 1940s and was now being devastated by disease, acts of violence, and displacement of the tribe from its rightful homeland. One of the most painfully ironic moments in Bianchi’s 16 mm black-and-white short bears the date 1982 and shows a male Xetá facing the camera, then turning in profile and turning back again, as seen in the ethnographic filming of Indians in Silvino Santos’s No país das amazonas. The difference is that the man in Bianchi’s film is dressed in modern clothes and works at the local lumber mill where the scene is being shot. A close-up of his chin shows the small hole where tribal ornamentation had once been displayed. A film-crew member appears at his side and extends his arms lengthwise next to the man, as if providing scale to the faux-ethnographic portrait. The scene is part of a longer segment titled “O último Xetá” (The last 145

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Xetá) and appears immediately after clips from Fernandes and Kozák’s footage of everyday practices of the Xetá, who wear little or no clothing and live in the forest called Serra dos Dourados. Bianchi uses music from Carlos Gomes’s nineteenth-century opera O guarani for the soundtrack. Based on the Brazilian classic by novelist José de Alencar, the opera celebrates the romantic “noble savage,” who became a symbol of Brazil following independence in 1822. Alencar’s and Gomes’s Indian protagonist is the heroic Peri, but there is nothing heroic about the Xetá filmed in the 1950s or those who appear in Bianchi’s short except for their ability to survive. The ironies at play in the sequence conclude with a multiple-choice quiz asking viewers to select the correct answer to the question “What happened to the few surviving members of the Xetá tribe?” Five responses appear one by one on the screen: “a) they mixed with whites and went to the big city; b) they died from disease and from acts relating to their land’s litigation; c) they are on holiday outside Brazil; d) they never existed and the Fernandes and Kozák documentary is false; or e) all the responses are correct.” The quiz makes an important point about how little is known about what happened to make an entire tribe disappear. A test of sorts follows in an interview segment between Bianchi and an official of FUNAI, the Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indian Foundation), who works at the reserve where the lumber mill is located. Founded in 1967, FUNAI has the stated central mission of protecting Indigenous tribal communities and the lands they occupy from outsider invasion. But the lumber mill and a highway built on the reserve are invasions. Bianchi asks the FUNAI agent on screen about both constructions and where the money from the sale of wood goes. The agent says the highway was built by the state because the land is state-owned, but he sidesteps the money issue by declaring that Indians earn their living from agriculture and not from the mill. He quickly adds that the wood harvested and processed is used to build tribal homes, schools, and other buildings on the reserve. As the agent speaks, the figure of US$8 million, income from the mill, flashes on the screen. The agent also reads from documents that cite the number of acres under cultivation and the types and amounts of agricultural products grown by the Indians. As he speaks, more US dollar figures flash on the screen, indicating that products grown on the reserve yield no more than a few hundred dollars each for the Xetá. There is an especially ironic relation between the official’s statement about using wood for housing and a short segment on the Guarani, who also live on the reserve. The scene begins with a shot of an impoverished

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Smiles after the tribal elder questions the interviewer in Mato eles?

Guarani woman on a roadside, selling painted and decorated gourds. A tracking shot shows three young children standing idly nearby. As the camera pulls back, a wooden shack comes into view behind them. It is difficult to reconcile the agent’s explanations about wood from the lumber mill, processed in amounts far beyond local residential or civic use, and the dilapidated structure where the woman and children apparently live. As occurs from the widely publicized agents of destruction in the Amazon, agribusiness and the lumber industry in Paraná mean devastated lands and displaced populations, including the Xetá, who were forced from the Serra dos Dourados to the Mangueirinha reserve, which is overseen by FUNAI. Mangueirinha has one of the last forests of araucaria, the pine trees whose nutritious nuts form part of the community’s diet. Bianchi films his exchange with a small group of Indians who protest the cutting of trees. The group’s elder talks about the forest’s destruction that will turn their community into beggars. He also argues that instead of removing old and dead trees, as was initially proposed, the mill is cutting down healthy trees, indicated by their large clusters of pine cones. The interview becomes especially interesting when the elder begins to question Bianchi’s motives for shooting the film, asking him if he is making money to buy coffee and how much he earns. The man smiles as he asks his questions, as do his wife and younger tribal members, some of whom laugh at the turnaround in the interview, which includes shots of the director and crew’s amused reactions. Despite the moment of levity, the issue at stake is not a laughing matter. The cacique Ângelo Cretã was struck down while walking on the highway. Was his death an accident or

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a murder? It would not be the first time an Indigenous leader was purposely removed. Bianchi’s title asks if this is the fate awaiting others from a purportedly honored and protected community on the Paraná reserve.1 Santa Catarina poet and filmmaker Sylvio Back had made more than a dozen shorts and four features when he made República guarani (1981, Guarani republic), a 35 mm feature documentary about the colonization of Guarani tribes by Jesuits in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina. The film consists of shots of Jesuit mission ruins, scenes from Fernandes and Kozák’s 1957 ethnographic short on the Xetá, colonial iconography of Indigenous peoples and Jesuits, and a clip from Humberto Mauro’s INCE short Os bandeirantes (1940) about colonial frontiersmen in Brazil, with proselytization scenes by an actor playing Padre Anchieta, a late sixteenth-century Jesuit who wrote the first Tupi-Guarani grammar. Most of República guarani consists of talking heads of historians and anthropologists who speak Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Their commentaries follow a chronology of the 150-year history of the reducciones (Spanish) or reduções (Portuguese), communities where Guarani lived under Jesuit rule, and focus on subjects including proselytization and homogenization of Guarani tribes, the use of church bells to structure and control their lives, and a penal code with prescribed punishments for recalcitrant Indians such as imposed prayer, starvation, lashings, and imprisonment up to ten years. Back uses Indigenous song as well as classical and liturgical music on the soundtrack. His earlier provocative and polemical fiction feature Aleluia, Gretchen! (1976, Hallelujah, Gretchen!) is about German immigrants and Nazism in southern Brazil, and the documentary Rádio auriverde (1991, Green and yellow radio) is about Brazilian soldiers fighting in Italy in World War II, but there is nothing especially provocative or polemical about República guarani. More than a decade after this film, Back returned to the subject of Native inhabitants in Yndio do Brasil (1995, Our Indians), one of his best-known and possibly most controversial works.2 Released to considerable critical attention in Brazil and at festivals abroad, Yndio do Brasil is a 35 mm compilation of clips from dramatic films, documentaries, and newsreels that portray Indigenous peoples of Brazil. It is an impressive assemblage of black-and-white and color images derived from Back’s extensive research in cinematheques and museum collections. With a few exceptions from the United States and one from Germany, the clips are from Brazilian productions. The unusual soundtrack consists of anachronistic marches and sambas, Indigenous-inspired pieces,

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Publicity from Yndio do Brasil.

and readings by narrator José Mayer of Back’s own verses about atrocities committed against Indians, including genocide, that he wrote for the documentary. The film historian Robert Stam points out that viewers unfamiliar with the clips “may be in doubt about the status of what they are seeing and hearing, although the anti-racist drift is always clear.”3 The seventy-minute movie ends with a list of titles and dates of the fictional films and a few other works in the order they appear. Depending on the viewer’s knowledge, the list may prove helpful or not. Yndio do Brasil is not organized chronologically. Covering some seventy years, the clips move back and forth in time, and the temporal jumbling and colliding of different filmic modes gives a dynamic quality to the film. Among the dozens of clips are newsreel segments showing a presidential expedition to the Amazon during which Indians perform dances and

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receive gifts, a scene with missionaries and proselytized Natives dressed in uniforms and using combs, a “pacification” mission to “neutralize” the Carajá tribe in the state of Tocantins, and shots of Teddy Roosevelt on his near-fatal 1913 River of Doubt journey. Examples from ethnographic-style filmmaking include the Canadian-American explorer Aloha Baker dancing with members of the Bororo tribe in 1931 and scenes from Fernandes and Kozák’s 1957 work on the Xetá. Footage of skeletal Indians barely able to walk are from the archive of the Brazilian physician Noel Nutels, who became an Indian rights activist. Among the more curious clips is a 1950 RKO color documentary called Jungle Headhunters, featuring the explorer Lewis Cotlow from the United States, who wears a fedora as he paddles a canoe to meet with the Bororo, and Tabu, a 1949 fiction short about a legendary Amazonian monster. In the clip the apelike creature turns out to be Brazilian dancer Felicitas, who peels off the animal disguise to perform, similar to a scene of Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932). There are animated shorts about Brazil’s progress and “racial democracy” in which the Indian is represented by a half-naked figure in a headdress. Among classic movie clips to appear in Yndio do Brasil are scenes from Vittorio Capellaro’s O caçador de diamantes (1933, Diamond hunter), about a sixteenth-century Portuguese nobleman and his faithful Indigenous companion, and Humberto Mauro’s 1937 O descobrimento do Brasil (The Discovery of Brazil), about friendly relations between sixteenth-century Portuguese navigators and Indians, who are crudely characterized. Yndio do Brasil begins with a long battle sequence from Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu francês (1972, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman) in which the captive Frenchman Jean mans a cannon to support his Indigenous captors against their tribal enemies. One of the film’s last clips is from Luiz Paulino dos Santos’s documentary Ikatena (1983, Let’s hunt), showing children from the Zoró tribe at play in a river on a Rondônia reserve. In her article “Sylvio Back,” Rosane Kaminski discusses Back’s interest in a “cinema desideologizado” (de-ideologized cinema), an idea he proposed in a 1986 manifesto in which he declares, “I love to mess with History.” Kaminski states, [Back] preferred to opt against positing any truth in his films, and instead presented themes, signs, images and sounds to viewers for them to draw their own conclusions about what was shown on screen. The “de-ideologized cinema” for Back did not mean, after all, an aim at neutrality, but an attempt to point out contradictions

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in the way people and situations were being portrayed. This would be his way of declaring his opposition to certain kinds of films being produced since the seventies in Brazil with which he did not agree.4 Yndio do Brasil’s wild mixing of documentary and fiction footage demonstrates his enjoyment of messing with history. If the point is to call attention to the various ways Brazilian Indians have been represented, the film is an important record of their myriad portrayals throughout the twentieth century, most of which are stereotypes designed to promote their exoticism or show that they have been properly civilized. But the addition of anachronistic music and verses spoken off screen to denounce exploitation by forces such as the Church and the military cannot be described as deideological. Although viewers may be in doubt as to the period or work from which footage has been taken, the images themselves already speak to the stereotyping. Even so, images separated from their historical and political context lose much of what they can tell the audience. Back’s documentary and the clips have ideological purposes. The Brazilian government was the producer of footage showing the three races, one of them as a stereotyped Indian figure. The selection process itself is ideological, and a film about representations of Indians already suggests a political position. In an earlier essay on Yndio do Brasil, Kaminski characterizes the long introductory clip from Como era gostoso o meu francês and subsequent footage from O descobrimento do Brasil as Back’s homages to the two works.5 Yet there is nothing in the film to indicate that these segments are homages; they simply appear on the screen prior to the credits. In fact, the carnival-style music added as soundtrack to the clip of O descobrimento do Brasil seems more pointedly ridiculing than praiseful. There is a ludic quality to the film that seems in keeping with Back’s desire to challenge viewers who are accustomed, especially in documentaries, to being provided a context for evidence presented on screen. Yndio do Brasil is a riveting work whose subject matter and unusual style are provocative, yet one cannot help but feel that its impact might have been greater had Back gestured in some way to the historical connections and relevance of his archival finds. In 1987 the French-born anthropologist, activist, and filmmaker Vincent Carelli began work with Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), a nonprofit organization to train Indigenous peoples to make movies to preserve their traditions and languages. Introducing video cameras into villages was the first step, followed by workshops to teach tribal members how to operate camcorders. These skills also helped tribes document their

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discussions of rights and legislation with government and other groups. In the short documentary Video in the Villages Presents Itself (2002), a young filmmaker from the Xavante tribe repeats the phrase “The camera is a gun.” His words evoke the 1969 revolutionary manifesto of the Argentine directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in which they compare the camera to a rifle and the projector to a gun that shoots twenty-four frames per second.6 The Vídeo nas Aldeias project was initiated not long after Carelli and Marcelo dos Santos, a FUNAI field officer, traveled to southern Rondônia in 1986 to look for traces of an isolated Indigenous people who had been killed off by a logging company on land acquired at an auction during the military regime.7 Carelli videotaped their initial encounter with the company’s lawyer, who prevented their entry onto the property. Nine years later Carelli and Santos returned to the area, where large tracts of forest had been razed for lumber. Support from FUNAI gave then access to the property, where they discovered two survivors of the Kanoé tribe living in a wooded area. The discovery became a national news item; shortly thereafter, the federal government closed off the area to protect the Kanoé and prevent further forest devastation. Ten years later, in 2005, Carelli and Santos made a return visit to the Kanoé, who helped them locate survivors from the same region’s Akuntsu tribe. The story of Carelli and Santos’s twenty years of off-and-on exploration and investigation resulted in Carelli’s feature documentary Corumbiara (2009), whose title refers to the Rondônia municipality where the Kanoé lived. Shot in color with a Betacam, the film offers a rare glimpse of a little-known people and way of life wholly dependent on the land. Despite the violence inflicted on their tribe and after some reluctance, the Kanoé demonstrate amazing openness and kindness toward the filmmaker and crew, with whom they hold hands in a gesture of friendship. As an ethnographic film, Corumbiara documents the Kanoé’s language, mannerisms, dress, interactions with one another and with whites, and their daily activities, such as food gathering and healing and purification practices.8 Corumbiara is also a suspense film that creates a feeling that violence in the past could be repeated in the future. It investigates a violent act perpetrated on a people to remove them from the land and has blackand-white footage and a tape recording made clandestinely to document comments by a female farmworker who recalls the violence. Her statements add proof to the words of the leader of Akuntsu survivors, who describes the sound of big machines and bullets that injured him and killed his brother.

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The Kanoé with Vincent Carelli in Corumbiara.

Not everyone accepts the presents and offers of friendship from the film team. After their initial encounter with the Kanoé, Carelli, Santos, and crew learn of another survivor in the area, whom they finally locate in 1998. Footage shot at the site shows a single thatched hut from which projectiles fly at the group; after many hours they abandon their attempt to draw him out. A zoom lens captures the Indian’s solemn visage through a hole in the thatch. Despite the team’s apparent goodwill, their persistence in the face of the man’s silence and resistance has an unsettling effect. Although no charges of murder were brought against the landowner-perpetrators, whose business by 2006 had shifted from timber to cattle raising and soybeans, Corumbiara made a strong case for protecting isolated Indigenous people. It traveled the film festival circuit, where it garnered numerous prizes, and was broadcast on Brazilian television, as were other Vídeo nas Aldeias productions; among them is the ten-part educational series Índios no Brasil (2000), which appeared on the TV Escola channel.9 Narrated by the Indian rights activist and journalist Ailton Krenak of the Krenak tribe, one of nine tribes featured in the series, the first episode, “Quem são eles?” (Who are they?) sets the tone with street interviews in which non-Indigenous citizens are asked to tell what they know about the country’s Indians. Despite the media focus on the Amazon and the many legislative advances and rights achieved by Indigenous groups, interviewees often appear baffled by the question. Several respondents hark back to colonial images, describing Indians as primitive, unproductive, and dirty. One man complains of excessive government support that gives Indians land, homes, and cars. One woman refers to their quickly disappearing race, although Krenak informs his viewers that the population is stable at

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Xingu women performing a ritual in As hiper mulheres.

350,000. He also says that the communities speak 180 languages, although many more languages have been lost. Despite population stability and gradual growth, languages remain at risk. Episode 2 in the series focuses on the history of Indigenous language suppression that began with the Jesuits and continued into the early years of the military dictatorship. Other episodes in the series focus on customs and rituals, agricultural work, small-business endeavors, and the many challenges that Native inhabitants face, from the continued razing of the forest and conflicts over land to racial discrimination. Several episodes show a small group of young white Brazilians being introduced to the cultures of different tribal communities where they reside and work for short periods. The youths are clearly affected by the Indigenous customs and build friendships with the children and adults who have welcomed them into their villages. One of the best-known and widely acclaimed documentaries by Vídeo nas Aldeias is the color feature As hiper mulheres (2011, The Hyperwomen), a collaboration of Carelli with Mahajugi Kuikuru and Takimã Kuikuru from the Xingu tribe in Mato Grosso. There is an urgent need behind the filming of a female ritual called jamurikumalu. The ailing wife of an elder wishes to sing the ritual’s songs and is the last member of the tribe who knows the verses. The film follows the various preparations for performing the ritual and rehearsals by a group of Xingu women, who, along with the film, ensure the verses’ survival. Vídeo nas Aldeias is a project directed especially toward younger generations, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Protecting and honoring a minority’s communities, languages, and customs, the documentaries are an important educational tool for the tribes as well as a means for them to control their own narratives. They also have much to teach those on the outside.

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Black Representation and the Media Despite Indigenous peoples’ small numbers in Brazil’s population of more than two hundred million, Indian villages and activist groups made significant legal gains with the implementation of Article 231 in the 1988 Constitution, which officially recognized “Indian social organizations, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions, as well as their original rights over the lands which they originally occupied.”10 Continuing conflicts over land and devastating fires keep international focus on the Amazon and, to a lesser extent, the rights and welfare of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples.11 In contrast, Brazil’s large Black and mixed-race populations had to wait several more years for legislation to address issues of discrimination and inequality. The decades-long promotion of the country as a racial democracy, beginning under Getúlio Vargas and continuing with the military dictatorship, made it possible to ignore and deny economic and social injustices.12 In 2001 the Congress and the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso passed an affirmative action law to give more educational opportunities to students who self-identified as African Brazilian. As was and continues to be the case in the United States, the law in Brazil was not without controversy, especially given Brazil’s longstanding denial of racial prejudice and belief in the rainbow palette that many citizens preferred over being classified as Black. The 1976 census listed a record 134 colors registered by citizens to describe their identities based on skin tone; fifteen years later, the 1990 census listed only 4.9 percent of the population self-identifying as Black.13 Affirmative action brought a reversal in attitudes, especially among younger Brazilians applying to university who self-identified as Black. But the situation became more complicated when the government established committees to decide eligibility based on phenotype. It was not enough to be African-descended; to qualify for affirmative action, one had to possess physical traits associated with Blackness. Committees used students’ application photographs to determine which were eligible for support, based on skin color, noses, lips, and hair texture.14 In 2000, just months before the passage of the affirmative action law, the filmmaker Joel Zito Araújo released his feature documentary A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (Denying Brazil: Blacks in the Brazilian Telenovela) about the absence of Black actors in Brazil’s popular soap operas broadcast each weekday evening to millions of viewers. Financed by various entities including Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and the Ford Foundation, the film was based on Araújo’s research leading to his 2000

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dissertation at the Universidade de São Paulo. Like most documentaries, the film had no commercial distribution and was shown mostly at festivals or on university campuses. It is a rare film for Brazil, calling attention not only to the lack of Black actors on screen in a country with a large Black population but also to how that denial affected the way Black Brazilians saw themselves and those with whom they identified. A negação do Brasil is Araújo’s statement about his difficulty in finding positive role models on screen with whom he could identify as a Black child in the 1950s and 1960s and as an adult beginning in the early 1970s. As happened in Hollywood and early television in the United States, Brazilian media also avoided using Black actors on screen except in traditionally accepted roles such as the mammy, enslaved and other servant types, and the occasional music and dance performer. Araújo narrates the first part of A negação do Brasil, discussing his childhood fascination with cinema and how his thinking and attitudes as a Black youth were shaped by images of a society in which Blacks rarely appeared. Accompanying his narrative is archival footage showing rare instances of Black actors in film and on television. The most compelling part of the film consists of interviews with several Black performers who talk about their experiences in media. Milton Gonçalves is especially outspoken; he came to films after working with Augusto Boal’s Teatro de Arena in São Paulo and writing plays for Abdias do Nascimento’s Teatro Experimental do Negro in Rio. He recounts the troubling story of TV Globo contracting the white actor Sérgio Cardoso to play the lead role in the 1968 telenovela version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.15 Gonçalves is an engaging storyteller and spares nothing in his description of Cardoso wearing blackface and a woolly wig and using small pieces of cork in his nostrils to broaden his nose. Gonçalves, who had a secondary role in the production, is amusing and merciless in his imitation of Cardoso’s attempt to speak like an elderly Black man. Globo took a similar approach in its 1976 production of A escrava Isaura (The slave Isaura), based on the nineteenth-century novel by Bernardo Guimarães about a mixed-race domestic servant who, after myriad calamities and crises, weds Álvaro, a rich white landowner, and becomes mistress of a plantation whose enslaved workers are set free. Guimarães’s own descriptions of his African-descended heroine were problematic in emphasizing the beauty of her white skin. The white actor Lucélia Santos was given the role of Isaura; her nemesis, the enslaved domestic Rosa, is played by the Black actor Léa Garcia, who talks frankly in the documentary about the difficulties of playing that villainous role. One of

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Sérgio Cardoso in blackface with Ruth de Souza in Negação do Brasil.

the most popular telenovelas ever made was Globo’s 1975 adaptation of Jorge Amado’s 1958 novel Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1962), about a free-spirited, dark-skinned woman. Director Walter Avancini cast Sônia Braga as Gabriela, a role that gained her national attention and led to her international stardom in the film Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1976), adapted from Amado’s bestselling novel (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1969). In his interview with Araújo, Avancini goes to considerable lengths to defend his casting of Braga as Gabriela, stating that at the time there were no qualified Black actors to play the role; it is a ridiculous comment that reinforces the documentary’s evidence of racism in the media. Among the strengths of A negação do Brasil are the testimonies of four Black female actors gathered around a television set viewing clips from telenovelas and commenting on roles they and other Black performers played. It is an excellent strategy for enabling frankness on a topic that even in 2000 was not widely discussed and certainly not in such a public

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way. Two of the actors are more constrained in their comments, but all voice strong agreement on the racism displayed in the climactic scene from the 1979 TV Tupi telenovela Como salvar meu casamento (How to save my marriage). Zita, a Black domestic servant played by Lizette Negreiros, enters a TV singing competition on the order of American Idol. After winning the competition, she tells the white emcee that she works as a maid and that her (white) employer, Dona Dorinha (Nicette Bruno), supported her decision to compete. Instead of congratulating Zita, the announcer looks at the camera and repeatedly hails Dorinha as the reason for Zita’s success. Following the competition on television from their house, Dorinha and her daughter are jubilant and moved to tears by the announcer’s acknowledgment. Actors Ruth de Souza, Léa Garcia, Cléa Simões and Maria Ceiça, who are watching the clip for the documentary, are adamant in their critique of the scene, which shifts focus away from Zita’s prize-winning singing talents to her supposed fortune as Dorinha’s domestic servant. In a separate interview, Zezé Motta recalls her excitement in playing the lead in Carlos Diegues’s Xica da Silva (1976), a role that brought her international attention. Based on an actual eighteenth-century figure, the formerly enslaved Xica becomes rich and powerful as the consort of a successful Portuguese contractor in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. Motta describes being contacted about a part in a new telenovela after the film’s successful release by TV Globo. Eagerly anticipating a significant offer and strong role, she was stunned to learn the company was offering to cast her in a minor part as a domestic. Despite the opportunity of steady employment and the chance to break into prime-time television, Motta declined the offer, a decision that, she explains, had professional repercussions. Araújo also discusses Globo’s 1985 adaptation of Jorge Amado’s novel Tenda dos milagres (1968; Tent of Miracles, 1971), a rare telenovela in which several Black actors appear in significant roles, including the lead. The action takes place in Salvador and focuses on the African Brazilian community and the Candomblé religion. As in the novel, the telenovela explicitly addresses issues of race, including discrimination in the workplace; it also promotes miscegenation, a practice that began with the arrival of Portuguese sailors and settlers who came without wives to a land initially populated only by Indians and not long afterward by thousands of enslaved Africans brought to the New World. Milton Gonçalves, who appeared in the telenovela, says that despite the popularity of Amado’s novel, Globo was uneasy broadcasting the program during prime time because of its

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emphasis on Black Brazil. Ultimately the network decided to bury it in a late-night spot, at 11 p.m. The documentary’s clips from 1990s telenovelas show some progress in storylines with more complex characters, although most roles for Blacks remained tied to poor and working-class characters. Recognition by television networks that Black viewers constituted a significant consumer population also brought about certain changes, among them the development of occasional characters who represented the middle and professional classes. Viewers were also becoming more proactive about what telenovelas showed and did not show. In 1994 protests and a lawsuit against Globo occurred because of a particularly offensive scene in Pátria minha (Country of mine). A young Black man, son of a Black domestic in a white household, is accused by the homeowner of stealing clothing from his bedroom closet. The homeowner’s tirade is filled with accusations all too familiar to many Black viewers. Caught unaware, Globo rushed to fix the racist outburst with a scene in which the young man’s mother talks to him about racism and explains how he should act when accused of misbehavior or a crime. But no lesson on behavior was required for or pressed upon the racist homeowner. In a 2015 interview for Al Jazeera America, some fifteen years after making A negação do Brasil, Araújo was slightly more optimistic about the situation of Black actors in the media, noting a rise in the number of middle-class and professional-type roles available to them. But he also talks about race largely remaining a veiled and unspoken subject in Brazil and says it was rare to see an entire Black family represented on screen.16

“In Search of” Documentaries A negação do Brasil might be considered within the subgenre described by Jean-Claude Bernardet as “documentários de busca” (in-search-of documentaries) in a 2005 essay about Kiko Goifman’s 33 (2002) and Sandra Kogut’s Um passaporte húngaro (2001, A Hungarian Passport).17 Bernardet describes a tendency by documentary filmmakers in the late 1990s to use personal searches involving parentage and ancestry as well as media role models as inspiration for their works. Goifman’s 33 was about his search for his biological mother; Kogut, whose grandparents were Hungarian, filmed her tortured journey through government bureaucracies to prove her Hungarian ancestry and secure a passport. In May 1999 the Brazilian-born Kogut, who was living in Paris, began

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filming a documentary to record on-the-spot activities and conversations stemming from her decision to apply for Hungarian citizenship. As the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews who left Budapest in 1937 and emigrated to Brazil, Kogut had that right, but the film never discloses the reason for her decision. At the time of her application, Hungary was still four years away from entering the European Union, although one could assume that a Hungarian passport for someone living in Paris might have certain advantages over a Brazilian passport. Sidestepping her reasons, Kogut focuses on the steps necessary to proceed with the application; the process ultimately involved traveling between embassies, consulates, and archives in Paris, Budapest, and Recife as well as visiting her grandmother’s home in Rio de Janeiro. The process took two years to complete. In his 2005 essay about documentaries based on searches, Bernardet discusses what he describes as fictional aspects of Um passaporte húngaro rather than dealing with the issues raised by the film about immigration, nationality, and citizenship. He contends that Kogut, who narrates the film but rarely appears on screen, is a character who is being directed by and based on herself: “in filming, Sandra positions herself as character and director; in a certain sense, as director, she guides the situation but also self-directs herself: Sandra the director directs Sandra the actor, who works with the material of Sandra the person.”18 Bernardet’s commentary derives from correspondence with Kogut, who writes about her director instincts during filming that impelled her to ensure that viewers would understand what was happening on screen. She writes, “When the consul spoke to me about something I already knew, but that the film still did not know, I asked [him] again, even if it were for the third time. I saw people sometimes looking at me surprised, thinking I must have some difficulty in understanding things.”19 These are interesting insights into the making of the film, which, because it had no script, required Kogut to think as much about how to make her encounters with the bureaucracy as comprehensible as possible to viewers as it was to deal personally with questions, frustrations, and challenges presented to her by the legal system. Yet it is the social and political issues raised by Kogut’s transatlantic, intergenerational, and multilinguistic journey that make Um passaporte húngaro such a compelling and original project. A significant part of the documentary and one of the reasons for its success appears in Kogut’s conversations with her ninety-something grandmother Mathilde in Rio de Janeiro. A small, spry, and smiling woman, Mathilde appears at different points in the film talking about the past over meals with Kogut at her dining

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Mathilde Latja in Um passaporte húngaro.

table. Kogut needs to submit her grandparents’ passports to the Hungarian authorities as part of the application procedure. Thumbing through her own and her deceased husband’s passports in one scene, Matilde translates what is written in Hungarian and speaks of events from the couple’s past. Kogut’s ventures into the labyrinth of governmental bureaucracies and her archival search in Recife, where her grandparents first arrived in Brazil, are particularly engaging. But the segments with her grandmother are the most riveting and informative, providing the larger historical context for understanding certain difficulties and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that Kogut faces as she struggles her way through the process. Kogut’s struggle is a relatively minor one compared to the life-threatening situation faced by her grandparents in Hungary in the mid-1930s. A Jewish couple expecting their first child, they were intent upon finding a homeland safe from the dangers presented by Hitler’s rise as German chancellor and president, his military alliance with Mussolini, and his plans for the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy and Japan. Mathilde had already given up her Austrian citizenship, which was required when she married her Hungarian-born husband. But she tells her granddaughter she somehow knew much worse things were in store for them both if they did not leave Budapest. As she reads the stamped pages in their decades-old passports, she recalls the difficulties in obtaining visas to Brazil and, after the long journey to Recife, of their being prevented from disembarking until a relative came to escort them off the ship. With a slight smile, she recounts how this person had to bribe not once but twice the official in charge, who said he had not one daughter but two.

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In a conversation with a government archivist in Recife, Kogut learns that her grandparents were identified on the ship’s passenger list as Jewish, while others on the list, who tried to disguise their Jewishness by claiming to be Catholic, were reclassified by someone using a red pencil, who crossed out the word “Catholic” on the roster and wrote in the word “Israel.” The archivist also talks about the problems facing emigrant Jews like her grandparents in 1937 because of Circular 1127. Created by Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and authorized by Vargas just months before his November 1937 proclamation of the Estado Novo, the secret circular prohibited further issuance of visas to people of “Semitic origin,” which, as pointed out by the historian Jeffrey Lesser, resulted in a 75 percent reduction in Jewish immigration to Brazil by the following year.20 The archivist further explains that the capital letter “K” stamped on her grandparents’ passports by Hungarian officials meant that the couple could never return to their homeland. Despite Kogut’s second-generation status, little knowledge about Hungary, and not speaking the language, the bureaucratic difficulties she encounters after completing all the necessary forms and submitting documentation appear related to her Jewishness. An older Hungarian bureaucrat who at first seems kindly, makes this clear when he says that she does not look like a Jew, assumes that her mother was not, and says that her father must have been part Jewish. When she firmly declares she is 100 percent Jewish, he says that she could deny it on her application. Kogut quickly and crisply replies, “It’s not possible.” At the beginning of the film Kogut is told that getting a Hungarian passport will be easy, but after her documents are examined behind closed doors, she is informed that the process will be complicated. At other times she is told that citizenship requires her to learn enough Hungarian to write an essay on one of fifteen possible topics she is shown, most of which deal with the country’s political system. She shares her concerns with Hungarian relatives, whom she travels to see in Budapest and who counsel her in French and English and discuss the family’s and Hungary’s past. Another Hungarian acquaintance urges Kogut to learn more about the country and takes her on a tour of Budapest and its museums. Later that day, the woman kneads a bowl of dough in her kitchen as she explains to Kogut the cultural significance of Hungarian cuisine. This is a tricky moment in the film; while a viewer might side with Kogut’s slightly tongue-in-cheek treatment of the rather imposing woman and her advice, there is little question that knowing something about the language and culture of the country she wishes to adopt is important. Kogut also learns that she must

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relinquish her Brazilian citizenship to become a Hungarian national. Like other bits of information picked up in the process, such as the language and essay test, there is no further reference to giving up her citizenship in the film. Kogut films the citizenship ceremony in the Hungarian embassy, where newly inducted citizens take the oath and raise glasses of champagne to toast their good fortune. The film’s final scene takes place in a passenger car on a train leaving Budapest for Paris. A uniformed official appears in the doorway and asks the occupants for their passports. Confused by her presenting a Hungarian passport but not understanding him when he asks her destination, he inquires in English why she does not speak the language and if she has any other proof of identification. When she says she does not, the official leaves the car with her document but soon returns and hands it back to her, and everything seems to be all right. But everything is not all right, as Kogut has learned from her Budapest relative, who translates for her the last line on her citizenship papers. It declares that her status as a Hungarian national is for one year and she must reapply if she wishes to retain it. The seventy-minute black-and-white documentary 33 chronicles Kiko Goifman’s search for his biological mother in Belo Horizonte. The number 33 resonates throughout the work: Goifman is thirty-three; he was adopted as a newborn by a woman born in 1933 in Belo Horizonte; and he has allotted himself just thirty-three days to uncover the name and whereabouts of the person who brought him into the world. Beginning with the number 3, Goifman employs a numerical timeline on screen similar to a date in a diary to track his progress every three days until his search is successfully concluded or until his thirty-three-day shooting deadline is up. 33 is a stylishly shot film inspired by classic Hollywood detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s film noir in which private eyes like Philip Marlowe launch investigations into family situations, nearly always involving an elusive female. Goifman begins the film with an homage of sorts to the writer Dashiell Hammett that takes the form of a quote from a 1928 letter Hammett wrote to his future editor Blanche Knopf: “I am one of the few—if there are any more—people who take the detective story seriously.” Goifman also takes the genre seriously; he includes talking-head interviews with actual private investigators to get their opinions about his search and learn something of their methods. The advice varies, and in one or two instances Goifman critiques it in his voice-over commentary. He adopts the standard investigative practices of the classic gumshoe; he interviews those closest to the case; he walks the city by day, following up

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The mother search in 33.

leads to possible witnesses including the doctor who delivered him; he scours hospital documents, telephone directories, and newspapers for clues. At night Goifman and his wife drive seemingly aimlessly through the dark, empty streets of Belo Horizonte. The scenes in the car are artfully photographed; from behind the windshield the city’s inky darkness is occasionally striated by the bright blur of oncoming headlights and shimmering streetlights. Goifman’s face is framed in the rearview mirror, another trope of noir, as he talks about the day’s search. Other times, the city at night is shot as if in a narrow rearview mirror around which everything is completely black. Goifman also uses his noir references in chiaroscuro scenes featuring his adoptive mother, whose face, slightly turned from the camera, melds into darkness. Her memory of the place and faces associated with his adoption is vague and dimmed by age, although she and her sister, who accompanied her to a building to receive the baby, remember certain landmarks and that an espírita (person who believes in communication with spirits of the dead) was the one who handed over the newborn. Other bits of information emerge: the mother finds a piece of paper handed to her at the adoption, and Goifman locates an eighty-eight-year-old midwife who recognizes her handwriting on the piece of paper. But there is no other document or witness to be found. On the cusp of the thirty-third day of shooting he learns that the espírita, the only link to the identity of his biological mother, who might perhaps be the very woman herself, is dead. The same argument made by Bernardet about the fictional aspects of Um passaporte húngaro could also apply to 33, in which Goifman the person is being played by Goifman the character, whose scenes, along with those of others who appear as themselves, are being shot by Goifman the director.

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But 33 is far less conventional, as Goifman is as intent on creating an atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty with blurry lights and meandering nighttime drive sequences as he is in the results of the search itself, which meanders until it hits a dead end. The film is sophisticated and artistic, demonstrating the unequivocal relationship between the world we live in and the stories we read.

CHAPTER 7

Biographies of a Sort, Part II (1994–2016) The Sights and Sounds of Music Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business We Brazilians rejected Carmen for a long time. Our reconciliation with her is, in some form, our reconciliation with ourselves. Helena Solberg Helena Solberg’s much-admired, prize-winning Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business was released in 1994 and soon after premiered at Brasília’s twenty-seventh annual film festival, where it captured the Best Film, Special Jury, and Critic Awards. Invited to some twenty additional festivals worldwide in 1995 and 1996, riding a wave of Brazilian cinema called the retomada (resurgence), the film also garnered major prizes in Havana, Montevideo, Chicago, and Yamagata, Japan. Produced by Channel 4 Films and Riofilme with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it was distributed theatrically by International Cinema and broadcast on PBS. Widespread critical reception in the United States saw favorable reviews in the New York Times, Daily News, Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, and Time Out. Writing for the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris listed it among the best nonfiction films for 1995, the year marking the fortieth anniversary of Miranda’s death. Carmen Miranda is a complex history about the Portuguese-born “Brazilian Bombshell” (1909–1955), who left Rio in 1939 to perform on Broadway and soon after in Hollywood, where, under contract with 20th Century Fox, she became the industry’s highest-paid star in the mid-1940s.1 The complexity of the film stems from the various images of Miranda that 167

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emerge in interviews with family members, close friends, and performers in the entertainment industry in Brazil and the United States. Among the many voices, none is more important than Solberg’s own highly personal off-screen commentary about the “Pequena Notável” (The amazing little one), a Brazilian name given to Miranda to describe an oversized talent packed into a five-foot frame. Solberg identifies with Miranda as a transplanted Brazilian while emphasizing fundamental differences between her own privileged upbringing and Miranda’s working-class background, which, before singing catapulted her to national attention, included a job sewing women’s hats. Solberg’s primary focus is on geographical and cultural differences between the image of Miranda she grew up with in Brazil and the caricature Miranda became after relocating to the United States. Carmen Miranda follows the singer’s career from her success at the Urca Casino and in movie musicals in Rio to her stage and cabaret performances in New York for Lee Shubert and Darryl M. Zanuck. The crowds who flocked to see her on Broadway are credited with pushing attendance and saving the city-sponsored 1939 World’s Fair. Her gradual transformation in Hollywood moves from a musical and fashion icon to a source for comedic and often crude impersonations by stars such as Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis and even cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny. A representative of official Good Neighbor relations between the United States and Brazil during World War II, Miranda was increasingly viewed as a tropical commodity alongside the bananas in her towering tutti-frutti hat in Busby Berkeley’s extravaganza The Gang’s All Here (1943). Shortly after that film’s release, the United Fruit Company adopted her image for its Chiquita banana logo. Miranda often quipped that she made her money with bananas. There was more truth to that statement than was generally known. Before leaving Rio, Miranda appeared in Ruy Costa’s Banana da terra (1939) a musical compilation featuring acts by the Banda da Lua, Carmen’s backup band, and her sister and occasional singing partner, Aurora. The film is important because it has Carmen’s first appearance as the baiana character for which she became internationally known. She sings the Bahian composer Dorival Caymmi’s “O que é que a baiana tem?” (What does the Baiana have?) that later became a hit song. In her appropriation of the African Brazilian figure who typically dresses modestly in white, Miranda adopted a sparkling turban, large hoop earrings, bangles, a heavily beaded bodice, and a long satin skirt. The song’s list of what the baiana has includes a rosary, earrings, necklace, and bangles, but there is no mention of bananas or any other fruit.2 Hers is a charmingly delicate and rhythmically

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The quintessential Carmen Miranda in Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business.

slow performance in comparison with her gradually exaggerated character in Hollywood. In Solberg’s interview with Cesar Romero, who starred with Miranda in Weekend in Havana (1941), Romero gently criticizes his costar for playing what became increasingly a caricature of herself. But Alice Faye, with whom she starred in Springtime in the Rockies (1941), was adamant that Hollywood would never have allowed Miranda to break away from that money-making role. In addition to these and other interviews, Carmen Miranda has archival footage, photographs, memorabilia, and motion-picture clips as well as rare home-movie footage of Miranda dancing with the Nicholas Brothers and painting outdoors at an easel. Costs for the docudrama, initially a modest project, rose steadily to well over a half million dollars as more studio footage and songs under copyright were added. Solberg shot on location in Rio, Hollywood, the Portuguese village where Miranda was born, and England, where she entertained troops during World War II. Solberg used two actors to play Miranda in a few scenes from her youth and at other key moments, such as Miranda’s widely publicized shipboard interview with reporters before arriving in New York. The film begins and ends with imagined scenes at home, where she suffers a fatal heart attack not long after performing on The Jimmy Durante Show. A third actor appears briefly in the film as the hybrid-named columnist “Luella Hopper,” who sits in front of a microphone to report to radio audiences on Miranda’s activities from Hollywood. The scenes with the actors are seamlessly integrated with documentary footage, and Letícia Monte (young Miranda) and Cynthia Adler (Luella Hopper) are convincing in their brief appearances. Where the film makes its most daring move is in longer sequences with the Brazilian actor Erick Barreto, whose Miranda impersonation was recommended to Solberg by

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Erick Barreto as Carmen Miranda with a veil in Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business.

Carmen’s sister, Aurora. His impersonations are impressive not only for his remarkable physical transformation into a Miranda lookalike but also for sensitive interpretations of the star’s facial and body gestures. In the shipboard sequence Solberg showcases his talent by juxtaposing actual newsreel footage of Miranda dressed in a tailored suit and talking to reporters with Barreto’s reenactment of the scene in an identical outfit. His smiles and poses are remarkably like hers, and one could easily believe that the person on the screen is Miranda herself. Solberg elaborated on her use of what she calls “fakes” in an interview with Mariana Tavares for a volume about Solberg’s films: We decided to use the fake to our advantage. But using actors in scenes from several moments in Carmen’s career should be done carefully to avoid creating doubts about the veracity of the material in general. The idea of the fake is fundamental to the image that Hollywood created of Carmen. An image that began as something real, but was transformed into something more, an image that was uncomfortable for us Brazilians.3 One of the film’s most important points involving the geographical and cultural North-South divide is its comment on the way gay male culture has appropriated Miranda’s image, as evidenced by Barreto’s impersonation, which he lovingly honed over many years. There is a significant difference between the buffoonish impressions by presumably straight, male comedians and gay performances such as Barreto’s that highlight Miranda’s femininity, fashion sense, and physical grace. The Hollywood comic renditions by Mickey Rooney, Jerry Lewis, and others are never feminine; rather, they emphasize the actors’ masculinity in ways typical of

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classic Hollywood comic drag routines, warding off homophobic anxieties that might be caused by men in women’s clothes. Solberg’s narrative delves further into the North-South divide in attitudes about Miranda after her initial success in Hollywood when she returned to Rio for a performance at the Urca Casino and was poorly received by a high-society audience who disliked her newly minted North American image. Even before she left for the United States, the upper class tended to regard her samba rhythms and baiana persona, both with roots in Africa, as lower-class entertainment. In her voice-over, Solberg points to her own mother as an example of that attitude, recalling that she prevented Solberg from publicly mourning Miranda’s death with thousands of others in Rio who left their homes to accompany her casket as it was carried through the streets to the cemetery. As Solberg shows in a clip from a 1990s carnival in Rio with male performers in sparkling Miranda dress, she remains a popular figure whose influence and legacy are part of the nation’s identity. Nelson Freire This solitude has always existed. . . . It exists even today. But I learned to like it. . . . I miss it. I need it. . . . You study alone. Just you and the piano. Nelson Freire Following Notícias de uma guerra particular (1999, News from a Personal War), a groundbreaking TV documentary with Kátia Lund about drug traffickers and police raids in a Rio favela, João Moreira Salles made Nelson Freire (2003), a documentary profile of a child prodigy born in 1944 in a small town in Minas Gerais who became an internationally renowned concert pianist. While the difference between the worlds explored in Notícias de uma guerra particular and Nelson Freire could not be greater, they both deal with little-known private lives and intimate settings that required permission to film. In 2018 Moreira Salles distinguished between them by remarking that the Freire documentary “may be my first film in which I am conscious of film form.”4 Neither a concert film nor a conventional biography, Nelson Freire is structured along the lines of Notícias de uma guerra particular, an hourlong documentary with nine segments and title cards with descriptions such as “Combat” and “Weapons.” The feature-length Nelson Freire has thirty-two titled segments, many of which employ the language of music

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and often in amusing ways. While Notícias is loosely chronological, Nelson Freire is random in design, with unexpected shifts in tone and locations. It features the soft-spoken and rather shy Freire at home in Rio, in the Brussels home of the Argentine classical pianist Martha Argerich, and in concert halls across the globe. At the same time, the film has a circularity, beginning with curtain calls and an encore and ending backstage, where Freire receives his many admirers. In montage fashion, the alternating private and public moments of Freire’s life give a dynamism to the documentary.5 They also show the extent to which music occupies Freire’s entire life, from the work of concert rehearsals and performances to the simple joys of listening to old recordings at home and playing the piano for his dog Danuza, who sits in rapt, sorrowful attention as he performs the soulful “Alma brasileira” (Brazilian soul) by Heitor Villa-Lobos. The private Freire also delights in watching TV clips of a joyful Errol Garner playing jazz piano and Rita Hayworth dancing with Fred Astaire in the Hollywood musical You Were Never Lovelier (1942). He confesses his passion for jazz but his inability to improvise and is adamant about the need to feel pleasure while performing. Asked off screen if he feels pleasure when he plays, in one of only two times an interviewer’s question is audible, his answer is a vaguely amused, ambiguous look. The third and fourth segments, “Martha Argerich” and “Primeira leitura” (First reading), focus on Freire’s longtime friendship and frequent collaboration with Argerich in her Brussels home. Freire becomes less timid with Argerich, who sometimes teases him as they reminiscence about their first meeting in Vienna. Their memories are accompanied by on-screen photographs of Argerich alone and with Freire as young concert pianists. Their conversations about the past and more practical matters, such as how best to clean piano keys, are combined with them playing a Rachmaninoff waltz written for four hands and a bailecito (little dance) for two pianos by Carlos Guastavino that they rehearse for the first time. The segment ends with their onstage performance of the bailecito five days later. A segment titled “Valsa” (Waltz) toward the end of the film transports the audience back to Argerich’s home for an encore performance of their Rachmaninoff suite for two pianos. The camera keeps tempo with the waltz, with alternating close-ups of their hands in musical dialogue with one another. Montage is also used to convey the repetitive nature of concert performance. The section “Bis” (encore) seamlessly shifts between São Paulo and Saint Petersburg, Russia, concert halls as Freire plays Gluck’s “Sgambati Melody” from the opera Orpheus and Eurydice. In subsequent scenes he

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winds through backstage corridors and settles into rooms stocked with refreshments before a reception. Other offstage sequences emphasize the waiting before concerts, time he spends smoking cigarettes, sitting in empty rooms, or roaming outdoors in his tuxedo. There are self-reflexive moments in the film when the documentary calls attention to its filming. Twice in the segment titled “Tributo a Rita Hayworth” Freire silently encourages the camera to turn away from him to the performance on the TV. Here and during other TV clips, the camera zooms in to display the sea of pixels that make up an image. An especially amusing segment is titled “TV.” Here Moreira Salles films a French crew preparing Freire for a poolside interview in La Roque d’Anthéron, a city famous for its international piano competitions. The French news director first asks Freire to pose reading a newspaper. He then asks him to say the name of the town. When Freire pronounces La Roque d’Anthéron in perfect French, the director is surprised and asks Freire to say it with a Brazilian accent. Freire does not know how to do that. Turning to the Brazilians filming off screen, the director asks how they would pronounce the name. Satisfied with their reply, he asks Freire to imitate the accented version on camera. The infelicities continue when Freire is asked if being born in a hot country affects the way he plays. All this demonstrates how not to conduct an interview, as indicated by Freire’s mildly dissatisfied look. It also contrasts with the film, in which the camera and director are quiet during on-camera interviews, creating a more relaxed atmosphere for a man who says little but responds thoughtfully to unheard questions off screen. Other segments have curious titles such as “Cacoete” (Mania), a montage of Freire practicing scales in different locations, and “Perigo” (Danger), in which he refers to pain caused by a fan’s crushing handshake. Among the segments with musical titles are “Conversa entre piano, flauta e clarineta” (Conversation between piano, flute, and clarinet), showing Freire playing Rachmaninoff for a Saint Petersburg audience, and “De compasso (e seu acerto)” (Out of step [and back in]) of a rehearsal in which the Russian conductor adjusts the tempo to ensure the orchestra is in synch with Freire’s playing. In “Um contratempo” (A setback), a worried Freire oversees a keyboard adjustment prior to a performance in Brazil. He anxiously paces the empty concert hall’s stage and nervously consults the technician. As he paces he calls the piano “nasty” and worries out loud about why it does not like him. But Freire’s performance here, as elsewhere, is impeccable. The length of filmed performances varies, but they tend to be excerpts of only a few minutes. Scenes alternating smoothly between

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Nelson Freire at home in Rio in Nelson Freire.

rhythmically moving mid-range shots and extreme close-ups add to the beauty of his performances. These include unusually low-angle close-ups of the movement of the keys as Freire’s fingers dance over the keyboard. Biographical details appear intermittently to provide background and context. Two letters written years earlier to Freire offer such details. One is from his father about the family’s decision to leave their home, friends, and relatives in Boa Esperança to further the six-year-old’s musical education in Rio; the other is from Nise Obino, Freire’s beloved piano teacher, describing her first impressions of the small boy who became a lifelong friend. As photos of the two appear on screen, Freire speaks warmly and amusingly of Obino, who scandalized his conservative parents with her independence and politics. In another childhood photograph he stands between two barefoot cousins. The picture elicits his pained observation about himself as a sickly child who never played sports and had to wear shoes. A picture of him in his school uniform leads to another confidence: he tried to hide his sheet music and talent from classmates because he wanted to fit in but could never become like them. Nelson Freire combines excerpts of compelling performances with lengthy scenes of relative silence or ambient sound appropriate to its subject, a man who speaks little and avoids the trappings of celebrity. At one point Freire remarks that attention should be given to the music and not to the performer. The segment “Autógrafos” (Autographs) features outdoor scenes with a seated Freire signing programs and CDs for fans. Argerich appears alongside him at certain moments in a skillfully crafted compilation of shots filmed largely over Freire’s shoulder, focusing on the faces of his admirers. Although a few muted words can be heard, the soundtrack is Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite for Two Pianos, and its onstage performance by Freire and Argerich begins and ends the segment. The film’s generous sampling of Freire’s repertoire demonstrates his

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virtuoso talent. His observations about the profession and the solitude of solo performance and the many backstage glimpses of life as a concert pianist also add a somewhat poignant quality to his portrait as an artist. Nelson Freire nevertheless captures his passion for music and lovingly shares it with viewers. A música segundo Tom Jobim In my day there was a great rapprochement between bossa nova and Cinema Novo. Tom did various soundtracks and was the one most in demand. . . . We began thinking of music as a dimension parallel to our life and culture. Nelson Pereira dos Santos Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s A música segundo Tom Jobim (2012, The Music According to Antônio Carlos Jobim) is a feature documentary about singer-composer Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927–1994), whose bossa nova rhythms and romantic, often soulful lyrics became synonymous with Rio de Janeiro and more broadly Brazil. Jobim and Pereira dos Santos were in the vanguard of new waves in Brazilian music and film, albeit with varied interests, as suggested by two classic works of the early 1960s, Jobim’s song “Garota de Ipanema” (1962, “The Girl from Ipanema”) and Pereira dos Santos’s film Vidas secas (1963, Barren Lives). Jobim was an ideal subject for Pereira dos Santos, a music aficionado whose second film, Rio, Zona Norte, about a samba composer, features the music of the samba legend Zé Keti, who also scored Rio, 40 graus (1956, Rio, 100 Degrees). Pereira dos Santos regularly contracted major artists for his soundtracks, among them Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, and Paulo Jobim, the composer’s son, who arranged the music for A música segundo Tom Jobim. This was also Pereira dos Santos’s second documentary about Jobim. The first was a four-part series made in 1984 for TV Manchete that has an interesting relation to the later work. Filming for the TV documentary took place in Jobim’s home in the Jardim Botânico neighborhood, where he invited various artists to perform songs with him and talk about composers. The first vocalist is Gal Costa, who sings compositions by Ary Barroso (1903-1964) such as “Aquarela do Brasil” (“Brazil”); that song was made famous in Walt Disney’s animated watercolor segment in the 1942 film Saludos amigos! Another guest was Chico Buarque de Holanda, who sang melodies by the legendary samba composer and singer Noel Rosa (1910-1937). In the final segment Jobim performs an early version of his

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Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s tribute to Antônio Carlos Jobim from A música segundo Tom Jobim.

composition “Passarim” (Little bird) surrounded by friends and family, several of whom were members of his recording and touring group Banda Nova, a name perhaps mirroring “Cinema Novo.” Archival material such as photographs of Jobim with Barroso and other composers appear at intervals in the footage. Unfortunately, the 168-minute film was lost, possibly discarded when TV Manchete closed its doors in 1999. But Pereira dos Santos kept its memory alive, drawing from that experience and using the series title, A música segundo Tom Jobim, for his new documentary.6 The film project was a collaborative effort involving Jobim’s family and the Instituto Antônio Carlos Jobim. Dora Jobim, the composer’s granddaughter, is credited as the film’s codirector. Pereira dos Santos frequently talked in interviews about structuring the film around three topics that were important to Jobim’s creativity: Rio de Janeiro, women, and nature. The original plan also called for talking-head and voice-over

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commentary. But as he scoured archives and gathered footage of Jobim recordings by a wide range of artists, Pereira dos Santos changed his plan and decided to let the music speak for itself. The result is a montage of more than forty performances in black and white and color intercalated with archival materials: footage of Rio, photographs of Jobim with the lyricist Vinícius de Moraes and others, concert posters and album covers, and more personal items such as his birth certificate and passport. The documentary begins with pristine black-and-white 1950s footage of a Brazilian PanAir plane flying over Rio, reminiscent of the aerial panorama of the city that begins Rio, 40 graus. Other 1950s footage shows cars traveling along Guanabara Bay past acreage soon to become Rio’s largest park, the Aterro do Flamengo. Filmed during the period of “fifty years of progress in five” under President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), the footage projects an image of Rio as a city on the move, with shots of its trademark Pão de Açucar (Sugar Loaf) peak and beaches with sunbathers and surfers. The soundtrack is an up-tempo symphonic rendition of “Garota de Ipanema.” The documentary ends with 1992 footage of Jobim atop a lavish carnival float traveling down Rio’s Sambadrome. Dressed in white with a white baby grand at his side, he waves to audiences in a tribute organized by the Mangueira samba school. Although his movements suggest a fast-beat melody, the soundtrack overlaid on the clip, which concludes with audiences waving back as if in goodbye, is the mournful, quasi-elegiac instrumental “Saudade do Brasil.” There are two chronologies at work in the film. The more general one is based on biographical materials, primarily photographs, shown between the myriad performance recordings. A less obvious chronology is determined by the songs themselves as they appear in the film according to their initial recording dates. The first song is “Se todos fossem iguais a você” (If everyone was like you, recorded in English as “Someone to Light Up My Life”) from Jobim’s score for Vinícius de Moraes’s 1956 play Orfeu da Conceição, the basis of the classic film Orfeu negro (1959, Black Orpheus). Many artists have recorded the song over the years, including de Moraes, who wrote the Portuguese lyrics, as well as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Jobim.7 Pereira dos Santos’s selection of Gal Costa’s moving 1993 rendition may have been his way of acknowledging her close friendship with Jobim, her status as one of Brazil’s most popular singers, and possibly that she was Jobim’s pick to open the 1984 documentary. After a brief montage of early biographical material, the chronology continues with a clip of the Brazilian Elizeth Cardoso seductively singing “Eu não existo sem você” (1957, I don’t exist without you) to the guitar of bossa nova

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great João Gilberto in Pista de grama (1958, Tract of grass), an adventure film scored by Jobim and directed by Haroldo Costa. Especially popular songs such as “Garota de Ipanema,” “Desafinado” (Off-key), “Insensatez” (“How Insensitive”), and “Samba de uma nota só” (“One-Note Samba”) are interpreted by more than one singer in the film. The segment featuring recordings of “Garota de Ipanema” highlights the international and generational reach of Jobim’s music in performances dating from the mid-1960s to 2010 by vocalists and musicians from Brazil, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Rejecting interviews and off-screen commentary, Pereira dos Santos also decided not to identify performers or songs as they appear in the documentary, and he removed any information about them from TV broadcasts. Although Brazilian audiences were familiar with most local vocalists and musicians on screen, other audiences recognized songs but probably few of the Brazilian artists. Pereira dos Santos also included recordings of performers whose identities may have eluded Brazilians, such as Japan’s Marcia, Germany’s Birgit Brüel, the Italian vocalist Mina, and the French singer-composer Pierre Barouh. There are rare clips of artists from the United States such as Gary Burton on the xylophone and Gerry Mulligan on clarinet. One of the most unusual performances is by Sammy Davis Jr., who does not sing but taps his body with his hands like an instrument to the beat of “Desafinado.” Clips from the famous concert by Sinatra and Jobim with the Nelson Riddle orchestra mingle with perhaps the rarest segment, from a Mike Douglas TV show in which Judy Garland, not long before her death, sings a heart-wrenching version of “How Insensitive.” The film ends with a long credit sequence that lists the artists and songs with their recording dates in the order they appear. A small frame capture from each filmed recording accompanies the information to identify the performer and performance. The credits are a gift to the viewer; at the same time, their placement honors Jobim’s words quoted on screen: “Musical language is enough.”

The Spectacle and Reality of Violence: Ônibus 174 This here is no action film, no. Sandro do Nascimento What began on June 12, 2000, as an all-too-common holdup of passengers on a Rio bus spiraled out of control into a four-plus-hour hostage situation

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broadcast live on television to more than thirty-five million viewers. A SWAT team was held at bay by a young man brandishing a gun and threatening to kill the hostages, all of whom were women.8 During the crisis he draped clothing around his head for a mask, yelled at police as reporters and camera crews documented the scene, and held tight to different hostages, one of whom used lipstick to write messages of his threats on the bus windows. At one point he defied the police to shoot him, sticking his head and gun arm out a window in a rage-filled taunt. The police negotiator called him Sérgio. When he stepped off the bus with a hostage as a shield, an unexpected move that surprised the SWAT team, an armed special forces officer rushed him from the side; instead of shooting the hijacker, who suddenly turned, the officer shot the hostage in the face. Falling with her to the ground, the hijacker discharged his gun three times in her back. Her name was Geísa Firmo Gonçalves (1980–2000), and she was a teacher. Unharmed, the hijacker was hustled into the back of a police van, where police officers pushed him down and suffocated him to death off-camera. He was later identified as Sandro Rosa do Nascimento (1978–2000). Ultimately the number of the bus line was changed from 174 to 158, as if to erase the stigma. But 174 remains in the national consciousness, its memory kept alive by TV networks that mark the anniversary with special reports. It is also ineluctably tied to José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s Ônibus 174 (2002, Bus 174), a critically acclaimed, Peabody and Emmy award–winning documentary about the televised hijacking, which left many questions unanswered, including who the hijacker was. At the heart of the film’s interest in Sandro do Nascimento is its critique of the media’s reluctance, especially television, to cover the relation of the crisis to the consequences of everyday poverty and violence. This is the structuring absence in the televised footage, which becomes clearer through the telling of Sandro’s life story.9 As the media scholar Esther Hamburger has noted, an exception to this lack of television analysis was Aqui, Agora (1991–1997, Here, now), a weekly tabloid news program on the SBT channel with on-the-spot coverage of assaults, suicides, and other harsh realities in the periphery. But, Hamburger adds, by the late 1990s, everyday life in the favela had changed from individual acts of violence to a war between police and drug traffickers, a war documented by João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund in the 1998 television series Notícias de uma guerra particular.10 Hamburger argues that four years later, a different kind of war emerged with Ônibus 174 over the control of representations in the media.11 Padilha and Lacerda’s film takes control of the televised footage to

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position what happened on June 12, 2000, alongside Sandro’s story, which unfolds through interviews with people who knew him, including his aunt Julieta, the older mother figure Dona Elza, his capoeira teacher, and former street friends. We learn of Sandro’s trauma at witnessing his mother’s stabbing and murder when he was a child and at losing friends massacred by police outside Candelária church, where he often slept. Drug use, idleness, petty crime as a minor, and an assault as an adult led to stretches in a reformatory and prison. The film crew documents the raw conditions in the reformatory, where idleness prevails, and in a hellish overcrowded prison, where toothbrushes tied to strings fixed to the ceiling dangle in the air. Among criticisms lodged against Ônibus 174 was its portrayal of Sandro as a victim, perhaps because the film shows that Sandro, unlike many abandoned and abused youths forced to live on the streets, had caring adults in his life with whom he sometimes stayed. Dona Elza escorts the camera crew to his small room in her home in the low-income Nova Holanda community where she talks about his longing to be famous. His aunt Julieta recalls his oscillating highs and lows, from talks about finding a good job to laments about his lack of skills. The filmmakers also interview his former friends, a few of whom managed to leave the streets. They concur he was never violent with others in their groups but tended to withdraw and oftentimes disappeared. That tendency may have saved him from the 1993 Candelária massacre. It also explains his brief membership in a university-sponsored capoeira youth program he joined in 1993 and suddenly left. One member interviewed recalls encouraging Sandro to give up glue-sniffing, a practice endemic to street youth culture at the time. Old footage of Sandro’s capoeira baptism shows a skinny fifteenyear-old dressed in white successfully performing a martial arts routine. In a photograph with the group he looks back at the camera with a small, sad smile. There seems little resemblance between the teenager briefly performing on camera and the twenty-two-year-old whose actions riveted millions of television viewers for hours. Ônibus 174 does not exculpate Sandro; rather, it shows connections between his mad act of violence and systemic problems facing low-income, largely Black populations in the periphery, where drugs and battles between gangs and with police are commonplace but ignored and purposefully kept out of sight. This was the situation in Nova Holanda, where Sandro sometimes stayed with Dona Elza; the favela was occupied in 1999 and 2000 by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), one of Rio’s two major drug gangs that battled for its control.

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More than fifteen years later, little had changed. In preparation for the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Brazilian government refortified a ten-foot-high wall built in 2009 on the favela’s Guanabara Bay perimeter, supposedly as an acoustic barrier to protect residents from the noise of nearby airport traffic. The Telegraph of London reported on what locals had long called the “wall of shame” disguised by large, colorful Olympic posters.12 The hijacking was in a space altogether different, on a heavily traveled artery that passes through the Jardim Botânico neighborhood in the trendy Zona Sul where, a street friend says, Sandro used to sleep under a bridge. This is where the bus was held up, a fashionable residential area suddenly under siege by the actions of an armed Black man. Reporters and camera crews rushed to the scene. Ônibus 174 opens with a bird’s-eye view of the startling immensity of favelas tucked in valleys behind hillsides and their proximity to middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. Other narratives in the documentary emerge from interviews with a news reporter who comments on the SWAT team’s difficulties in controlling the scene, ranging from the lack of communication equipment to government pressure not to shoot the hijacker on live TV. Surrounded by cameras and onlookers, the televised footage has the look of live theater, with an unfolding drama visible through the bus’s large windows. The footage also suggests the degree to which Sandro was aware of the media’s presence, first hiding his face from cameras and then using the media to carry his messages of outrage, shouting at one point, “This here is no action film, no.” Hostages interviewed in the documentary talk about Sandro’s instructions as if he were cognizant of the power of on-camera performance. He encouraged the writing of dire warnings on bus windows, like messages on placards in Brechtian theater. A university student, Jaína Neves, describes lying on the bus floor out of sight of police and cameras and pretending to be killed when Sandro fired his gun. What began for another student, Luanna Belmont, as an inconvenient holdup that she described in a call to an employer to explain she would be running a bit late, devolved into a mass-media spectacle with no certain end in sight. It was an unlikely stage, but Sandro held his audience’s attention with denunciations of police brutality and the Candelária massacre while issuing threats to retaliate and placing the barrel of his gun in a hostage’s mouth. Apparently overcome with rage and frustration, he made no demands. Hostages talk about their attempts to calm him with questions about who he was and his personal history, a practical strategy that seems to have eluded the tactics of the police. They say they have now forgiven him, while Damiana Nascimento

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A defiant Sandro Nascimento with a hostage in Ônibus 174.

de Souza, who was released from the bus, blames the police for not shooting him when he poked his head out the window. Ônibus 174 includes footage and interviews with individuals who did not know Sandro but live on the street. Children juggle balls in human pyramids in the hopes of attracting tips from drivers at a stoplight. Slightly older boys talk about trying to sell their wares on the street and being harassed by the police. Their complaints are tiny echoes of Sandro’s raging protests. A young man, possibly Sandro’s age, wearing a mask, whose voice is disguised, is frightening with his talk of wanton violence and slitting the throats of police. He ridicules Sandro’s actions, his petty holdup for a bit of change, his stupidity at allowing things to get out of hand, and his failure to get away in the bus. It does not take much to connect the dots between images of impoverished children performing for change, adolescent vendors who sit frustrated and idle, and the professional robber who kills. The documentary does not speculate why Sandro left the bus but replays in slow motion the scene of his departure with Geísa, culminating with the appearance off screen of the officer with a rifle, the confusion of bodies, and the shots as Sandro tumbles with Geísa to the ground. Cameras show once-silent male bystanders madly rushing the scene, yelling “bastard” and “kill” as police push back. An off-screen voice comments on the crowd’s powerless ire, like Sandro’s own, and the frenzied demand to be rid of him raised by his momentary visibility and televised protests. Ônibus 174 ends with two similar but contrasting scenes: the public outpouring of grief for Geísa and her family at graveside, and the single mourner, Dona Elza, at Sandro’s burial. Geísa’s casket is carried by pallbearers; Sandro’s casket arrives on a two-wheel wooden cart. A title card at the end of the film states that police officers tried for his murder were found not guilty, a verdict in keeping with the different values placed on human life in areas like Jardim Botânico and the favela.

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Living on the Edge: Estamira I, Estamira, visible and invisible. . . . I am truth, I am of truth. Estamira Gomes de Sousa In 2000 Marcos Prado began filming a documentary about a woman who traveled on foot and by bus for more than twenty years to scavenge at the Jardim Gramacho, a massive dump site on the outskirts of Rio and, until it was closed in 2012, one of the world’s largest landfills. Estamira Gomes de Sousa (1941-2011) was fifty-nine when Prado approached her at Jardim Gramacho, which he had been photographing since 1994.13 Like individuals interviewed by Eduardo Coutinho for his documentary Boca de lixo (1992, Scavengers), Estamira lived on the margins of society, in a wooden shack furnished with useful objects rescued from the trash.14 Unlike Coutinho’s interview subjects, however, Estamira was mentally challenged, her periods of calmness and lucidity oscillating with angry outbursts and irrational talk that includes speaking in tongues. Prado has been criticized on ethical grounds for making a film in which consent was clouded by the subject’s unstable mental condition.15 Keenly aware of the ethics debate, Prado insists in a 2010 interview that Estamira approved the project as a way to “reveal her mission,” as is consistent with her on-screen statements. He adds that she was the first to see the film when it was completed, and her postscreening comment about not recognizing herself in certain scenes caused him to rethink their inclusion.16 Other criticism has focused on issues of style, arguing that the film aestheticizes the landfill and Estamira’s personal misery. In a rejoinder to this critique, Prado remarks, “Am I showing that garbage is pretty? Am I valorizing misery? What does to aestheticize mean?”17 The film may have contributed to the 2005 closing of Jardim Gramacho. In the two years after its release, Estamira was awarded twenty-five prizes at festivals around the world. In 2017 the Brazilian Association of Film Critics ranked it eighteenth in its list of the country’s one hundred most important documentaries.18 If one of the aims of documentary and of art in general is to make visible the otherwise invisible in a world of endless possibilities, Estamira brings into powerful relief a quasi-symbiotic relationship between a physical and a mental imaginary landscape. No less than other forms of art, it has an estranging effect, bringing into focus the seemingly boundless and jumbled terrain where Estamira works and sometimes sleeps, and her apocalyptic prophesies, astral teachings, and warnings about a Trickster

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who uses deceptive language. Her mental upheavals ebb and flow like the turbulent waves in the nearby Guanabara Bay, which she confronts in the film’s final scenes. Amid her dark memories of abuse during childhood and unfaithful husbands and her unfettered outbursts raging against God and human perversion, she declares a love for Jardim Gramacho and her work. A mother of three and a grandmother, she lives on her own and credits the dump for the shack in Campo Grande that is her home. Like Estamira’s shifting psychological state, Prado’s film moves unexpectedly between deliberately grainy black-and-white footage and piercingly brilliant scenes in color. The film begins with long, grainy tracking shots of Estamira traveling from her home to the landfill some twenty miles away. From a distance, the camera follows her slowly climbing a wide, dusty road leading to the dump as empty tractor trailers pass in the opposite direction. The grim yet visually compelling sequence is made the more powerful by the nondiegetic music of Décio Rocha’s wailing, eerie instrumental “Janela de apartamento” (Apartment Window). Black-and-white panoramas follow Estamira and others wading through a sea of debris. Color sequences show her suiting up in work overalls, smoking, cooking, and bedding down as methane wells in the dump spew fire into the night. There is nothing romanticized about the work or the dump, with its passels of hungry, roaming dogs, screeching seagulls, and hunched-shouldered vultures that pace and circle like watchful sentinels everywhere. Prado captures some extraordinary moments: a shot of vultures overhead flapping their wings against a bright blue sky alongside flying pieces of trash; black silhouettes on the far horizon of an elderly horse barely ambling across a garbage heap as two dogs bound alongside, perhaps sensing its demise; majestic cloud formations before an electrical storm as high winds create a flying chaos of trash that drives Estamira and others to shelter. The soundtrack is a mix of ambient noise, postproduction sound effects, and occasional music, including Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Valse” (Waltz) from his 1976 album Urubu (Vulture). With few exceptions the voice-over in the film is Estamira’s own.19 There is no filter sparing Estamira in the scenes that document her mental instability. In one of the most intimate moments she holds a discarded telephone receiver to her ear and conducts a one-way conversation in a strange language replete with pauses, as if an interlocutor were on the other end. As she talks, she moves her fingers as if they were tapping out code. Her disposition on the phone as she speaks and listens changes radically from an indignant rage to a smiling, almost gentle sign-off. On many occasions she addresses the camera directly about sublime and earthly

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matters, often in tutorial fashion; from discourses on cosmic remote control she moves into ecological-style discussion of the terrain. She explains that gases from trash are responsible for the bubbling in a nearby pool of brown water. She also uses visual aids to make her point, holding up a large glass jar of preserved hearts of palm and saying they are edible and she intends to cook them at home. In her view, she is putting back into the system what has been indiscriminately thrown away; in her words, “To avoid waste is marvelous.” As she explains the still-useful hearts of palm, she gently wipes soil and grime from the jar’s exterior to reveal what otherwise is invisible. Contrasting with the immensity of Jardim Gramacho is the space she calls home, a rambling wooden structure surrounded by vegetation near an open field. Most of the scenes here are shot in a small sitting area where family members often visit. Estamira’s rage at her son, Hernani, a Jehovah’s Witness who antagonizes her with talk of religion and who once had her committed to a mental facility, is magnified by the tight indoor space. In an off-screen commentary, Estamira’s older daughter Carolina explains her mother’s loss of faith and onset of hallucinations after being raped and sodomized one evening on her way home from a supermarket job she held between periods of working at the landfill. Estamira’s anger at Hernani and an adolescent grandson, who separately raises the subject of God, is explosive, and her retorts are crude, littered with references to sticking things up the anus. Her wrath toward God seems driven not only by the rape but also by years of sexual abuse from childhood into adolescence, when at the age of twelve she was left at a brothel by a relative. Prado contrasts Estamira’s outbursts and enraged visage with a photograph of her as a lovely young wife and mother, smiling at the camera with Hernani, her first-born, and her husband. Estamira acknowledges her mental disability and confesses long-held guilt for abandoning her own troubled mother, who was committed to an asylum where she was beaten. She describes being both invisible and visible, being here and there and everywhere. She uses her name as an identifier when speaking as an oracle of truths, as did poets from antiquity whose words were thought to be direct communications from the divine. One of those truths has to do with education in the schools, which she denounces as mere copying. She also uses the word “copy” to complain of the medical world. Sitting on her bed at home, she pulls out package after package of diazepam and other drugs prescribed at a local mental health clinic, which she decries as part of a “copying” approach to the treatment of mental disease. After myriad scenes documenting her mental swings as well as her energy at home as she prepares meals for visiting family, Prado includes

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Estamira at home in Estamira.

a painfully disturbing shot of a barely recognizable Estamira bloated and sedated sitting in her chair and speaking in a low, cadenced voice. Prado withholds until late the sight of Estamira’s younger daughter, Maria Rita, who worked alongside her mother at Jardim Gramacho until she was seven, when Hernani placed her with a family to raise. A high school graduate, she sits in her mother’s shack, joyfully eating a huge plate of spaghetti that she describes as her favorite meal. She says she missed her mother and would have preferred staying with her despite the hardships. There is a remarkable relationship between Estamira and her children and grandchildren, who visit at Christmas celebrations and gather in her home to eat special foods she has prepared and who seem inured to her bouts. Perhaps years of loss have created a different bond between Rita and her mother, who sit comfortably side by side with Rita’s head on Estamira’s shoulder. In a remarkable but natural gesture, Estamira calmly strokes her daughter’s hair. The film ends as it begins, with grainy black-and-white footage of Estamira, now standing at the edge of the sea. Prado intercuts her shouts from the shoreline with her off-screen comments about love for Jardim Gramacho and her family and friends and her lament at never having experienced good luck. On screen she stands in defiance of the sea, unbinding her topknot and letting her hair flow in the wind. Stepping into the water, she is unexpectedly caught up in a wave and retreats to recover and sit back, gesturing and shouting to a sea god that she is not yet ready to surrender. Her defiance here echoes her comment off screen, “I will not cede my being to anything.” The final shot is magisterial in beauty and significance: Estamira, a solitary figure, stands before the vast, spectacular, roiling sea, whose waves churn and explode high in the air.

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Estamira confronting the sea in Estamira.

Icons and the Annus Mirabilis of 1931 Onde a terra acaba On May 17, 1931, the Chaplin Club in Rio de Janeiro hosted a special showing of Limite (1931, Limit), an avant-garde, black-and-white, silent film by the twenty-two-year-old, first-time director Mário Peixoto (1908–1992). What club members and their guests, enthusiasts of artful black-and-white silent cinema, viewed at the Cinema Capitólio is widely regarded by today’s critics as the most important Brazilian film ever made. Yet it was never commercially released. After another special screening, on January 19, 1932, sponsored by the magazine Bazar at the Cinema Eldorado, followed by reports of a bewildered audience, Peixoto withdrew all copies of his film from exhibition.20 Ten years later, on July 29, 1942, the poet and newspaper film critic Vinícius de Moraes arranged a private showing of Limite for Orson Welles, who was in Rio making It’s All True. Other guests included the Hungarian director George Fanto, who was Welles’s cameraman in Rio; María Rosa Oliver, the director of the Argentine literary magazine Sur; the British baritone Frederick Fuller, and the French actress Falconetti.21 The critic José Carlos Avellar notes that beginning in 1942, the physics professor Plínio Süssekind Rocha, a former Chaplin Club member and champion of the film, showed a copy of Limite every year in the Salão Nobre of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. In 1954 a reel with disintegrating footage had to be left out. After a single 1959 projection minus other damaged and unusable portions, decomposition had reached a point that exhibition was no longer possible.22

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Avellar writes that in 1966 the right-wing military dictatorship confiscated the copy held at the university, along with copies of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother.23 Ultimately released by the government, Limite remained out of sight for many more years until an initial restoration was completed in the late 1970s by Saulo Pereira de Mello.24 During its long absence, the film assumed quasimythic status, while Peixoto, regarded by many as a cinematic wunderkind, had long retreated from public view. Sérgio Machado’s Onde a terra acaba (2001, Where the Land Ends) is a biographical documentary about Peixoto and the origins and making of Limite, Peixoto’s only completed film; about a second, incomplete project filmed in 1931, Onde a terra acaba, whose history is far less known; and about Peixoto’s home, Sítio do Morcego (Home of the Bat), on an island off Angra dos Reis south of Rio. He withdrew in 1933 to the tumbledown, seventeenth-century house and grounds that he hoped to make into a museum, his project for the next forty-three years. Onde a terra acaba is an impressive tribute to Peixoto, mostly in 35 mm black and white, with images of nature interspersed amid a treasure trove of archival materials: stills and rare footage from Peixoto’s two film projects, personal items such as photographs of him as a child and teenager, and pages from a 1927 diary he wrote while studying for a short time in England.25 Intertitles in a script similar to Peixoto’s handwritten diary appear at different junctures. Off-screen readings from the diary and other autobiographical writings are done by the popular Brazilian actor Matheus Nachtergaele, who assumes the voice of a young Peixoto. A spritely seventy-something Peixoto appears in interview segments from Ruy Solberg’s 1980 documentary O homem do Morcego (The man from Bat), a black-and-white short advertised as the first time in fifty years that Peixoto spoke publicly about his work and himself.26 Machado seamlessly mixes occasional voice-over commentary by the older Peixoto and Nachtergaele’s off-screen readings. The film’s few 35 mm color sequences consist of brief interviews with four people who knew Peixoto and short comments by the directors Carlos Diegues and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. The soundtrack begins with Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” a slow, atmospheric piece chosen by Peixoto for Limite’s opening that has become his and the film’s musical signature. Tying the great variety of archival materials together in Machado’s Onde a terra acaba are lyrical, evocative, black-and-white shots of sky, sea, and nature, elements central to Limite and Peixoto’s second incomplete film as well as to his secluded island project, Sítio do Morcego. Peixoto

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Olga Breno in Limite.

often speaks in the 1980 interview of time as an illusion, and Machado plays with this idea early in the film with a fast-motion shot of clouds rolling and dispersing across the sky and more languid scenes of birds slowly flying over the sea. Limite itself appears to be slow cinema with four characters, two men and two women without names, three of whom are adrift in a rowboat where their unhappy stories about the constraints of love and work unfold.27 This is how Limite begins, after a shot of vultures on a mountaintop and a close-up of a dark-haired woman looking at the camera and encircled from behind by a man’s arms whose wrists project out toward the camera, locked together by large manacles. A third extreme close-up pauses on the look in the woman’s eyes and is followed by a long take of sparkling waters in a sea. The film ends as it begins, in the boat, where, one by one, all three characters disappear into the water. Machado blends biographical materials and clips from Limite into a making-of section that revisits the celebrated film’s remote shooting location on a farm owned by Peixoto’s uncle in Mangaratiba, outside Rio. Rare footage follows young cast members as they pet pigs and walk with Peixoto through wooded areas to the nearby shore, where much of the movie was shot. A shift to color shows an eighty-nine-year-old Olga Breno, who was twenty at the time of the filming, sitting on the farmhouse porch and reminiscing off screen about that experience. Hers is the famous face in Limite’s dramatic opening behind the spiked manacles and in the extreme close-up of her eyes and penciled brows. In an homage, Machado films Breno’s face in tight close-up as she gazes off screen, her visage still remarkably recognizable after nearly seventy years, with her staring eyes and penciled brows.

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The making-of section foregrounds the easy working relations among members of the small company and the artistic closeness between Peixoto and the German-born cinematographer Edgar Brasil, who insisted on panchromatic film for the project, the first time it was used in Brazil.28 Some of the most captivating scenes in Limite resulted from Brazil’s technical innovations such as a small elevator to move the camera smoothly up and down and an open-sided litter for shooting close to the ground. Seated inside the litter, which was carried by four workmen, Brasil was able to photograph two characters from their ankles down as they strolled along the shore, leaving a trail of footprints behind. Photographs and footage in Machado’s film show Brasil’s various innovations. Brasil had the use of four cameras: a Hernimann, a Mitchell, a Parvo, and a handheld Kinamo used to create the dizzying 360-degree camera turns filmed from a cliff looking down at the sea. He also built an on-site lab. Peixoto’s well-to-do family supported the project, which, Nelson Pereira dos Santos remarks in a brief interview in the film, gave the young director total artistic freedom without financial worries or outside pressure.29 Despite the lack of a film industry like Hollywood, there were small independent companies in Brazil and individuals such as the movie star Carmen Santos, who invested in films before she started her own firm. She is the link between the documentary’s making-of sections on Limite, where she makes a cameo appearance, and Peixoto’s Onde a terra acaba, which she commissioned him to write and direct. Originally titled Sonolência (Somnolence), Peixoto’s unfinished film concerns a woman who leaves the city for an island to write a novel. There she encounters two men, a handsome love interest played by Raul Schooner and her ex-husband, an island smuggler played by Brutus Pedreira, both of whom starred in Limite. Machado’s impressive black-and-white photography of woodlands and sea accompanies Nachtergaele and Peixoto’s voice-overs about that project, especially the remoteness of the shooting location in Marambaia off the Rio coast that took four days for the cast and crew to reach. Edgar Brasil continued his work as Peixoto’s cameraman, setting up a lab and a water-filtration system that was nightly dismantled by invading monkeys. Stills from the project show the cabin that Brasil built for Santos’s character, with inconspicuous openings to allow outdoor light for his interior camerawork. In addition to photographs of the cast, there are pictures of the rascally monkeys. A nature lover, Peixoto remarks in voice-over that despite their frustrating destructiveness, the monkeys were not harmed. Because of Carmen Santos, Onde acaba a terra, unlike Limite, received widespread publicity as shooting got under way. Newspaper headlines

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announce that it was the most expensive and greatest film ever to be made in Brazil. Shooting delays occurred because of weather, Santos’s trips back to Rio, and ill health on the set. Stunning rare footage of a scene between the rivals Schooner and Pedreira on a hill focuses on their feet as they warily move as if readying for a fight. Brasil also shot candid footage of the cast, showing Schooner lazily stretching out on a camp bed and Santos approaching the cabin. One-third of the film had been shot when Santos’s long absences drove Peixoto to abandon the project. Much of that footage was destroyed in a fire at a lab where it was sent for developing. Later, the project continued with Santos and Brasil under the same title but with a different story, based on the nineteenth-century novel Senhora by José de Alencar. In a voice-over, Peixoto recalls an encounter with Santos a bit later when she gave him three hundred meters of the original footage; that footage is the source of the rare fragments Machado presents on screen. The third segment of Machado’s film depicts Peixoto’s lifelong project to transform the rundown property bought for him by his father in 1933 into an island museum. Color sequences with interviews of two former employees show a carefully preserved house in a lush, green, wooded setting. Busts and other marble statuary purchased by Peixoto eerily grace the grounds amid large agaves that he planted by hand and nurtured over the years. His former employees talk about the hours Peixoto spent to plant and replant young agaves to achieve an exact upright position. As word of the island project spread, reporters began to appear on the property to ask to speak to Peixoto. The former employees speak amusingly of their failure to recognize that the person turning them away on behalf of the owner was Peixoto himself. Years of acquiring expensive original period furnishings, artwork, and items for the smallest restoration ultimately led Peixoto to severe financial difficulties, and he was forced to sell the property in 1976. In an epilogue, the Brazilian director Walter Salles talks about seeking out Peixoto, who spent his remaining years in a small apartment in Angra dos Reis. In his on-screen interview about that first encounter, Salles emphasizes Peixoto’s continued preoccupation with time, asking Salles to turn and look at a wall clock and say what it meant to him. After Peixoto’s gentle dismissal of Salles’s remarks that the clock was working and tells the time, Peixoto told the young director that the ticking and passing of minutes meant “one less, one less.” Machado’s Onde a terra acaba does not address the larger historical context for Peixoto’s film work, which overlapped with the October 1930 revolution that ushered Getúlio Vargas into the presidency. Machado’s

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silence about the surrounding political and social turmoil is in keeping with the sense that Peixoto, who led a highly privileged life, had only one revolution in mind, an aesthetic one, first in filmmaking and then in architectural and landscape design. Peixoto continued to write film scripts and published poetry and part of a projected six-volume novel titled O inútil de cada um (The futility of each one); the novel was influenced by the temporal imaginings in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the name of Peixoto’s protagonist. Walter Salles was essential to Limite’s 2012 restoration by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, in alliance with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Arquivo Mário Peixoto. Machado’s Onde a terra acaba provides the important backstory for that national treasure and other works by a man whose life, although mostly turned in toward the self, was far from futile. Christo Redemptor From the window one can see Corcovado The Redeemer, oh how lovely. Antônio Carlos Jobim, “Corcovado” In anticipation of the 1922 celebrations of the centennial of Brazilian independence, the government announced a competition for proposals for a statue of Christ to be erected on Corcovado, the granite peak some 2,300 feet high overlooking the nation’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. The idea of a monumental religious sculpture on a Rio mountaintop dates to the mid-nineteenth century and was rekindled in 1888 after Princess Isabel, daughter of Pedro II, proclaimed the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) that abolished slavery in Brazil. Nicknamed “A Redentora” (the redeemer) because of her strong Catholic faith and bold act, she declined a statue in her likeness and proposed Christ as the subject. With the 1889 overthrow of the monarchy and subsequent separation of church and state under the republic, the project was put on hold for the next thirty years. Bel Noronha’s documentary short Christo Redemptor (2005, Christ the Redeemer) tells the story of the famous statue and her great-grandfather Heitor da Silva Costa (1873-1947), a civil engineer who won the competition to build the iconic figure recognized worldwide and one of the “new seven wonders of the world.”30 Christo Redemptor draws extensively from public archives and private collections of black-and-white photographs and period footage as well as

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a personal diary. The statue’s story ends with its dedication on October 12, 1931. Among the historical footage is an impressive, quasisurreal aerial shot of a completely bare Corcovado, described by one off-screen commentator as a “strange, absurd” sight. The idea of Rio before the statue seems unimaginable, as another person remarks off screen: “I think when Rio was born, Christ was already there.” Noronha incorporates black-andwhite title cards into the narrative that evoke graphic design in intertitles from silent cinema. Noronha also uses talking heads, shot in color. What gives several of her interviews a special aura are the individuals themselves, mostly women, who were young witnesses to the project as it grew into a nationwide fund-raising cause.31 The scholar Maria Amélia Buarque de Holanda (1910–2010) recalls an excited Silva Costa greeting her father in the Petrópolis train station with the news that he had won the competition. Branca Rabello Cotrim (1912–2010) remembers the little lapel pins given to men who donated on the street. She tells an amusing story about her young boyfriend, who received a pin but had nothing in his pocket to offer except his bus pass. That offer, she said, was rejected, and the pin was taken back. Lygia Daudt da Veiga (1914–2010) describes large bedsheets being carried by their four corners through streets to collect donations from the public. Her husband, Fábio Penna da Veiga (1905–2007), went door to door for donations and chuckles as he recalls the miraculous absence of illicit use of funds. Photographs and footage of different fund-raising activities accompany the various interview narratives. In one photo, a small Black child drops a coin into a can. The museologist Maria Augusta Machado (1915–2010) says children were given cards at school to punch with each donation. She adds that the young recruits mostly tapped their own family members. The Catholic Church and especially the lay association Círculo Católico do Rio de Janeiro (Catholic Circle of Rio de Janeiro) were central players in moving the project from an idea to a reality involving a nationwide fund-raising effort called Monument’s Week, announced in September 1923 by Rio’s Cardinal Sebastião Leme. Selected by a jury of Catholic Circle members, Silva Costa’s proposal offered a design and model of a Christ figure supporting a large cross in one hand and holding a world globe in the other. A globe, a “celestial sphere,” often appeared in Renaissance paintings of Christ such as Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500), which some attribute to Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian’s Christ with Globe (1530). In an interview, the architect Jorge Scévola de Semenovitch humorously describes public reaction to the model when it was put on display in a shop window

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Christ with the ball in Christo Redemptor.

in downtown Rio. To many of the thousands of passersby, it looked as if Christ were holding a soccer ball instead of a globe. Soon after that, he says, the irreverent Carioca spirit took over, and citizens began referring to “O Cristo da Bola” (Christ of the Ball). Silva Costa worked with the artist Carlos Oswald on other possible designs for the statue, sketches of which appear on screen. Off-screen readings of Silva Costa’s diary reveal that the idea for an open-armed Christ in the form of a cross originated in Botafogo. There, from his father’s house, he noticed an antenna with a crossbar at the very top of the radio and telephone tower on Corcovado. From that fortuitous sighting, the idea of the cross design was born. One sketch resembles Da Vinci’s openarmed Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490). Other parts of Silva Costa’s diary record his travels around the city to determine the optimum size and position of the statue to ensure its visibility from the various neighborhoods. He calculated a statue thirty meters high with an eight-meter pedestal, for a total of about 125 feet, one-tenth the height of the topmost and narrowest part of Corcovado’s summit. An off-screen commentary indicates that some Brazilians still believe that, like the Statue of Liberty, Christ the Redeemer was a present from France. Although not a gift, the association with France is understandable; while in Europe from 1924 to 1927 to work on technical calculations, Silva Costa chose the Parisian sculptor Paul Landowski (1875–1961) to create more refined models for the final monumental piece. The French engineer Albert Caquot (1881–1976) worked with Silva Costa on calculations, models, and blueprints. Among the film’s compelling archival

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materials are photographs of Landowski’s studio, where he sculpted the head (nearly twelve and a half feet) and hands (ten and a half feet each) that were later shipped to Rio. One photo, shot from outside his atelier, shows Landowski and another man working on a thirteen-foot version of the statue that served as a model for construction in Rio. In an interview, the pianist Françoise Landowski (1917–2007), the sculptor’s daughter, remembers as a child climbing between the fingers of the giant hands in her father’s studio. The simplicity of the statue’s art deco design, she adds, was in direct contrast to the challenge of a work of art associated with such complex feelings. In the voice-over reading of Silva Costa’s diary is a passage about discovering the perfect finish for the statue in Paris at the Galerie des Champs Élysées. There, in the new gallery atrium, he saw a fountain whose surface, including rounded parts, was covered with tiny mosaics. Back in Rio, society women volunteered to arrange and glue together one-inch triangles of weather-resistant soapstone that were later affixed to the statue by tile setters. A photograph taken at the time shows several women at a long table with finished tile slates as a priest looks approvingly at the fruits of their labor. A black-and-white photograph with a close-up of part of the statue’s face brings into relief the sea of tiny triangles from cheekbone to nose and mouth. The documentary focuses on the challenges of building the statue on the peak. Elevators and a tram were constructed to carry workers and materials to the top; mathematically precise scaffolding was built to reach the width of the open arms and hands, given that the terrain reached less than half the distance to the fingertips. This meant working on a scaffold that partly extended over a precipice and 2,300-foot drop. An entire economy with workers’ housing, stores, and supply depots sprang up to support the nearly four-year construction project. Photos of religious and political figures visiting the site are accompanied by stunning 1930 aerial footage of the immense wooden scaffold fitted around the Christ figure from head to foot like a second tunic. In an interview, the historian Milton Teixeira describes the drama surrounding the initial lighting of the statue. An on-screen image of a Brazilian newspaper headline announces that the shortwave radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) would push a button from his home in Rome to transmit a radio signal to turn on the floodlights in Rio. Noronha interviews Marconi’s daughter, Elettra Marconi (b. 1930), who confirms that was the case, although she was only a year old when the lighting occurred. Fábio Penna da Veiga laughingly disputes this claim, remarking

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Inauguration of a world landmark in Christo Redemptor.

that while Marconi’s name added fanfare to the event, the button was pressed in Rio by the Catholic writer Gustavo Corção (1896–1978), who at the time was an electrical engineer.32 The dedication date, October 12, was selected for its historical significance as the day Columbus purportedly landed in the New World in 1492. Aerial footage of the event shows Air Force planes circling the statue to drop flowers. Getúlio Vargas, cabinet ministers, Cardinal Sebastião Leme, and some fifty bishops from around the country attended the dedication. The event showcased not only a monumental artistic achievement but also the mutual support between Vargas’s provisional government and the Catholic Church. The political scientist Boris Fausto has observed that in April 1931, just months before the ceremony, the government passed a decree that permitted religion to be taught in the public schools.33 In addition to the rich collection of archival materials from the period, Noronha bookends the documentary with modern aerial shots and

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impressive images of the statue emerging from clouds. She also inserts footage from Roland Henze’s prize-winning 1969 documentary short A lavagem do Cristo (The washing of Christ). It features two brothers, Floriano and Denilson, who, without safety gear, open the trap doors at the top of the statue’s shoulders and head and duck-walk barefoot with brushes and buckets of soapy water along the outstretched arms to wash the statue. In one of the most poignant shots, water droplets stream down Christ’s face like tears. The brothers did this once a year to fulfill a spiritual promise. Viewers with a fear of heights need to prepare for nail-biting footage of two men who, like the many before them who built the statue, defied the odds of gravity and without a net.

The Dictatorship Revisited Dzi Croquettes Neither gentlemen, nor ladies People from there, people from here We are not men, we are also not women We are people, computed just like you. Dzi Croquettes One would need the genius of Jean Genet to capture the richness of this world. It makes us feel ashamed of the prosaic nature of our normality. Sábato Magaldi Brazil’s foremost theater critic Sábato Magaldi wrote the lines quoted above in his 1973 review of Dzi Croquettes, a thirteen-member, avant-garde theatrical group from Rio and their edgy, sexually groundbreaking show Andróginos—Gente computada igual a você (Androgynes: People computed just like you), at the Ton Tonnightclub in São Paulo. Writing for the newspaper Jornal da Tarde, Magaldi notes that with modest changes and relocation to a theater to accommodate the people who stood in lines outside the nightclub, the show would be essential vanguard drama for all to see.34 Not long after that show and review, Dzi Croquettes were performing for packed audiences at the historic Treze de Maio theater in downtown São Paulo. The show was written by Wagner Ribeiro de Souza (1936–1994), a medical student-turned-actor, and directed by Brooklyn-born Lennie Dale (1943–1994), a former Broadway dancer and singer. Their gender-bending

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spectacular featuring sleek, male torsos with body hair in flamboyant costuming and makeup played for close to a year in São Paulo, after which they returned to Rio. Following a brief engagement in the port city of Santos in São Paulo state, the troupe made their way to Europe.35 In 2009 the actor-director Tatiana Issa and her co-director Raphael Alvarez released their feature documentary about the troupe, from its formation by Wagner Ribeiro in 1972 to its gradual demise resulting from artistic disagreements and the rise of AIDS, which ultimately took the lives of four performers. Dzi Croquettes is a personal film; Tatiana Issa’s father, Américo Issa (1950-2001), who also died of AIDS, worked as a set designer for the group in Europe. In occasional voice-over she talks about her childhood memories of the performers, as images of her young daughter appear on the screen. Benedicto Lacerda, one of the group’s five surviving members who are interviewed, recalls that the name “Dzi Croquettes” came about in a restaurant where Ribeiro and a few others decided to combine the playful “dzi,” a Brazilian pronunciation of “the,” with a “double-T” spelling of the Portuguese word croquete, a tube-shaped, vaguely phallic fried snack food that is often meat-filled. Lacerda explains that meat, flesh, was what made everyone the same regardless of biology. But the elongated croquette was also an obvious reference to the phallus, what the gay and bisexual members had in common, whether on display in their sexy dance productions in satiny black thongs or hidden under vaudeville-style, baggy-pants outfits and colorful, feminine frocks oftentimes with flounces.36 The documentary weaves back and forth between talking-head interviews with the five former members plus Brazilian celebrities and other Dzi fans and footage of the group’s performances of elaborate dance numbers and skits with Ribeiro, who charmed audiences with his little-girl falsetto voice. In one of the most extravagant numbers, the troupe is dressed in multicolored, billowy, gauzy costumes with panels of fabric attached to their arms that they raise and lower like winged creatures as they dance to the music of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprache Zarathustra.” In another sequence, two members, one in a body-hugging dress and the other in shirt, pants, and straw hat, cling to one another in a romantic, seductive bolero. The professional precision and group camaraderie in performances were a result of hard work and a reflection of their closeness in daily life. The members lived together and adopted nicknames as part of a family headed by Ribeiro, (the mother) and Dale (the father). When Dale joined the group and became their choreographer, he was already a popular artist in Brazil, performing his US jazz-inflected bossa nova songs and dance.

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Dzi Croquettes received strong backing from Liza Minnelli, who knew Dale from his days on Broadway. An admirer of his dancing, she appears several times in the documentary, recalling the excitement of seeing Dzi Croquettes perform in Rio. During their engagement in Paris, she invited a coterie of stars, among them Jeanne Moreau and Omar Sharif, to a special midnight performance; her invitations attracted widespread publicity and launched the group, making it a French theatrical sensation. One of their fans was Josephine Baker, who suggested that in the event of her death the troupe replace her at the Bobino Theater, where she had just opened to celebrate her fifty years on stage. When Baker died a few days later, the Bobino management did just that, announcing their appearance in a colorful poster that proclaimed, “Dzi Croquettes. Un Spectacle Fou . . . Fou . . . Fou . . .” (Dzi Croquettes. A Mad . . . Mad . . . Mad Show). One of the strengths of the documentary is its opening, superimposing images of the group with their heavily made-up faces and outlandish costumes over images of armed soldiers and mass protests of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The regime’s increasingly punitive institutional acts culminated in 1968 with AI-5, a law that closed Congress and deprived citizens of their civil rights. A title card informs viewers that AI-5 also censored an estimated five hundred films, four hundred theatrical pieces, and one thousand song lyrics. Images of military police arresting protesters are accompanied by interviews with personalities such as the singer Ney Matogrosso and actors Marília Pêra and Norma Bengell, who talk about the brutality of the period and the rise of a late 1960s countercultural movement that was well under way when Dzi Croquettes appeared.37 The film’s opening also indicates that Dzi Croquettes had problems with censors, as suggested by the capitalized word “CENSURADO” (Censored), which appears in a box after the title credit, resembling the stamp mark officials used. Dzi Croquettes undoubtedly were thumbing their noses at the ultraright government. In one comedy skit, a character in ridiculous clothes and painted face wears a German helmet with a large swastika; other footage shows actors with tiny Hitler mustaches. Oddly, only one interview addresses the censorship issue directly. Dzi member Cláudio Tovar talks briefly about representing the group at a meeting with a military colonel who, after ranting about the show, allowed them to continue performing. It seems the main complaint had to do with the amount of flesh exposed in certain numbers, which they tempered following the troupe’s brief suspension.38 Censors were mostly concerned about the potentially subversive content of radio, film, and plays that attracted large audiences. Dzi Croquettes

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Lennie Dale in Dzi Croquettes.

played in small cabaret settings in Rio’s Lapa and Ipanema neighborhoods and in São Paulo’s Ton Ton before relocating to the modest-size Treze de Maio theater. Far more subversive than any one song or skit was Dzi Croquettes’ physical appearance, with their painted faces, huge false eyelashes, and bizarre, often hilarious costuming, with an occasional feminine frock worn with high-heeled platform shoes or rubber boots, and near-naked torsos with body hair liberally sprinkled with glitter. Their most powerful subversion was directed at norms associated with sexual identity and social decorum, seemingly far less threatening than mass-media calls to resist and overthrow the government. The most important part of the film is the archival footage that shows Dzi Croquettes in their splendor.39 As choreographer, Lennie Dale brought a rigor and professionalism to the fascinating dance numbers. Several of those interviewed talk about Dale and his demanding eight-hour rehearsals for the group, in sharp contrast to his erratic, bad-boy personality. Minnelli is ecstatic in her praise of Dale’s musical talents and dance moves, one of which she amusingly attempts to imitate from her seated interview position. The most spellbinding sequence is a solo performed by Dale, whose lithe, taut body dressed in a thong and black leather boots speeds across the stage in spectacular leaps and pirouettes. With his heavily painted face and torso covered in glitter, he glides to the floor on his knees; with a sinuous forward body thrust, he rises from his kneeling position to his toes with only his leg muscles as torque. Although the counterculture was well established when Dzi Croquettes debuted, there is little question that they were in the vanguard of the gay movement in Brazil. If one considers the enthusiastic commentary of women interviewed in the film, the troupe also motivated female fans to act out in more sexually liberated ways. Several talk about attending

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numerous shows where women arrived wearing outlandish outfits and makeup inspired by what they saw on stage. There was even an all-female spin-off called the Croquettas, and in turn, their singing and dancing influenced As Frenéticas (The Frenetics), a six-woman vocal group in Rio who came onto the disco scene in 1976. As Frenéticas’ success into the 1980s as singers and ultimately theatrical performers owed much to the trail blazed by the highly talented, comic, and joyfully irreverent Dzi Croquettes. Cidadão Boilesen The “pau de arara” [parrot’s perch] was one method used. Another was subjecting the victim to electrical shocks at various places on the body, including the sexual organs. Still another torture was “The Telephone,” whereby the prisoner is bound to a chair and an interrogator, standing behind, smashes his cupped hands over the victim’s ears, in some cases bursting the eardrums by the resultant pressure. Departamento de Ordem Política e Social memo, October 7, 1970 Winner of the prize for Best Brazilian Documentary at the 2009 É Tudo Verdade film festival in São Paulo, Chaim Litewski’s feature Cidadão Boilesen (Citizen Boilesen) looks back at the dictatorship’s anos de chumbo (years of lead) following the proclamation of AI-5 in 1968 and the role of the Danish-born industrialist Henning Boilesen (1916–1971) in the workings of Operação Bandeirante (OBAN, Operation Flag Bearer). The operation was launched in 1969 and worked from a privately funded São Paulo detention center where citizens suspected of armed resistance were jailed, interrogated, and tortured by members of the military and police. The film’s release in 2009 marked thirty years since Brazil’s amnesty law was enacted, allowing those targeted by the dictatorship to return from exile and freeing others held in prison. The law did not extend to domestic terrorists or assassins, but it did protect members of the military and others who had tortured and killed prisoners at places like the OBAN detention center on Tutóia Street. Although tactics remained the same, OBAN was renamed DOI-CODI in 1970 as part of a nationwide system of government intelligence centers under the supervision of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who appears in an interview in the film.40 The São Paulo

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Business executive Henning Boilesen in Cidadão Boilesen.

center became known as the Tutóia Hilton, a reference to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of the number of people held and tortured there. Other talking heads in the film are military and government figures as well former members of the resistance movement who describe torture at the OBAN facility. Litewski includes an interview with Boilesen’s son, Henning Boilesen Jr., who defends his father from accusations as a torturer and complains of the government’s failure to prosecute those in the armed resistance who gunned him down on a São Paulo street in 1971. In an interview, Carlos Eugênio Paz, one of the gunmen amnestied in 1982, describes delivering the “mercy shot” to Boilesen. Litewski spent fifteen years making the documentary. The title Cidadão Boilesen is an obvious reference to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Boilesen rose to a position of social and political power as an industrialist associated with major public-service programs such as the Centro de Integração Empresa-Escola (Center for the Integration of Business and School). From a modest background in Copenhagen, he married a Brazilian he met in Denmark with family ties to the Danish consulate in Brazil. Emigrating to Rio with his wife at age twenty-two, he relocated to São Paulo and moved in social circles where, according to those interviewed, he was well liked for his athleticism, good looks, and outgoing personality. He rose steadily in the business world, working for the international firms Firestone and Copenhagen-based Dan Top from 1942 to 1952, when he became a naturalized citizen. In 1952 he signed on with Ultragaz, a distribution company whose trucks delivered bottled gas to the homes of millions. By 1967 he was president of Ultragaz, one of the largest businesses in Brazil. A friend of government ministers and military leaders, Boilesen was a strong supporter of the dictatorship; he was the major financial force and collector for OBAN, which former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso

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describes in an interview as a “clandestine” operation to fight communist infiltration and, he adds sardonically, to create a “syndicalist republic.” Individuals interviewed say Ultragaz trucks were at sites where suspected opposition militants were seized by OBAN operatives. Boilesen is also linked in commentaries to Sérgio Fleury, a police officer working with the repressive Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS, Department of Political and Social Order) who was notorious for leading death squads in São Paulo. Protests and armed resistance grew steadily after the promulgation of AI-5, with bank holdups and kidnappings. On September 4, 1969, the US ambassador to Brazil, Charles Elbrick, was released by the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro after the military government freed fifteen political prisoners who went into exile. The documentary depicts the military as being caught off guard and unprepared for armed resistance. Panic also ran through the business community; in São Paulo it led to the alliance of military, police, and civilian leaders such as Boilesen and other major industrialists. One of the few to reject affiliation with OBAN was José Mindlin, head of Metal Leve, an auto parts company. Perhaps best remembered today as a collector of rare books and manuscripts in the largest private collection in Latin America, Mindlin also appears in the documentary. One of the aims of Cidadão Boilesen is to call attention to the littlediscussed partnership between business and financial leaders, the dictatorship that spawned OBAN, and the use of torture on suspected radicals who, under AI-5, had no recourse to habeas corpus. To emphasize this point, Litewski incorporates interview footage from Haskell Wexler and Saul Landau’s documentary, Brazil: A Report on Torture (1971), in which former prisoners living in exile describe and reenact heinous methods used on them. One was the parrot’s perch, a bar from which victims, usually naked, were hung from the back of their knees, with their hands tied to their ankles, and subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and water boarding. The documentary is even-handed in its portrait of Boilesen, from praise by military and civilian friends of his charismatic personality, business acumen, and public spirit to accusations by former OBAN prisoners that he attended torture sessions armed with an electroshock device called the “pianola Boilesen.” In his interview, Ustra states that Boilesen came to OBAN only once and that the attribution of the pianola to the industrialist was ungrounded. His interview predates the 2008 civil court case brought against him in which Ustra was found guilty of being a military torturer.

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The film’s picture of Boilesen is fraught with images that contradict one another. Litewski had access to the family’s archive, and he uses numerous photographs and footage of the industrialist enjoying the company of society leaders and government officials and receiving awards; Denmark’s Order of the Dannebrog Prize was given to him personally by King Frederick IX. Yet even his son reveals a disturbing facet of Boilesen’s personality that required intervention. He would become so irate and abusive at the home soccer team when they were losing at São Paulo’s Pacaembu stadium that he had to be physically removed to the local police station. Despite knowledge of a hit list of businessmen connected to OBAN, Boilesen refused protection; for those who knew him, his refusal seemed foolhardy but in keeping with his self-assured, larger-than-life personality. Caught in a trap and forced to flee his car, he was shot in the back several times and lay mortally wounded in a gutter when Paz approached and shot him in the head. To represent the action that took place, Litewski incorporates graphic novel-style images of a man running for his life and being shot down, a strange approach to representing both those who sought justice and the targeted victim. Boilesen’s death captured news headlines around the country, and his funeral with a long line of mourners was televised; images from TV footage are in the film. The documentary begins and ends with interviews of individuals living on a São Paulo street named for Boilesen in 1973. In the introductory segment, no one asked knows who he was. At the end of the film, a woman says he was an “administrator,” the word used on a small building plaque in his honor that also gives his dates of birth and death. In the final street interview a man comes closest in his recollection of Boilesen as the man who headed Ultragaz. But his memory fails him when he states that Boilesen was kidnapped, confusing him with the US ambassador Charles Elbrick. Yet the confusion is not that strange. Both men were public figures and targets of the resistance. The US government and multinationals like General Motors and Ford were complicit in supporting the dictatorship and used whatever means they possessed to suppress the opposition. When Litewski asked for documents pertaining to Boilesen and OBAN from Washington under the Freedom of Information Act, his request was denied for reasons of national security. Cidadão Boilesen makes a strong case against the business and financial sectors that facilitated torture in Brazil. It is an ugly chapter in the country’s history left out of history books long after democracy was reestablished. Litewski’s film provides an outline for a story that until today has yet to be fully told.41

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Cinema Novo Redux It had more to do with a generation than the articulation of an ideology. . . . It was being invented as it was created. Mário Carneiro Even though the starting point of the film is Cinema Novo, I think it’s a film about the present. Eryk Rocha In 2016, Eryk Rocha released Cinema Novo, his Cannes prize-winning feature about a group of directors who forever changed the face of Brazilian cinema with films about rural peasants and the urban poor and working class. It is an unconventional documentary, as might be expected of Rocha, the son of Glauber Rocha, who directed some of the most conceptually and stylistically daring films made in the 1960s and 1970s.42 Reviews have described Cinema Novo as everything from a poetic film-essay to a bio-pic, but it is probably best described as a documentary collage of historical material and a biography of a group. Eschewing the typical off-screen voice of God, Rocha prefers to let the films and directors speak for themselves in a dazzling assemblage of more than one hundred interview and movie clips. These and most other materials, including photographs, newsreel footage, and home movies, date from the 1960s and 1970s. At certain points Rocha replaces original soundtracks with new music, special effects, and other audio experiments. In an interview in Comparative Cinema, Rocha says he filmed a few surviving directors for his documentary but decided against using the footage to avoid an image of Cinema Novo as a relic. For Rocha, the cinematic zeitgeist of those years remains alive and relevant to present-day Brazil.43 Perhaps in consideration of younger audiences or those outside Brazil, Rocha inserts a caption to identify each filmmaker who appears, whether in on-screen interviews or off-screen commentaries. His approach to the dozens of movie clips is different. Somewhat like Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s A música segundo Tom Jobim, Rocha’s film withholds identifying clips until the closing credits. But whereas Pereira dos Santos’s film identifies performers and songs in the order they appear in the movie, Rocha simply provides a list of film titles. It is hard to imagine any alternative method of identification because there are so many clips mixed in with interviews and other materials. Rocha also taps certain films for more than one clip, separating them from one another within the documentary. Returning to

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Othon Bastos from Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol in Cinema Novo.

a work in this way, as he does with the iconic close-up of Othon Bastos as the bandit in Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, he gives it importance on the order of a musical motif; he also brings details of style and content into greater focus. Snips of conversations with directors offer a loose chronology of the period based on signal cultural and political events. Carlos Diegues mentions the importance of the 1964 Cannes festival, where Vidas secas, Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, and his own Ganga Zumba were hailed by the French as a “new cinema” from Brazil. The critic Alex Viany refers to the economic challenges of making and distributing movies; the producer Luiz Carlos Barreto notes that those challenges resulted in the creation of Difilm, a collaborative venture beginning in 1965 to distribute films commercially. Diegues is heard perhaps more than any other director in the documentary. At one point he talks about the fragmentation of Cinema Novo’s collective spirit by the hardline dictatorship and its repressive institutional acts. Rocha introduces a soundtrack of screams on one clip as a reminder of the government-sanctioned torture of those who defied the dictatorship. Leon Hirszman and other directors offer thoughts on what the early period was like. Hirszman describes Pereira dos Santos’s leadership and generous editorial assistance; Gustavo Dahl says that as young filmmakers they became friends and artistically grew with one another; Geraldo Sarno comments on the influential novels of protest from the 1930s that were adapted to the screen. Literature about the impoverished Northeast was indeed a rich source of material for the young filmmakers, and Rocha offers a good sampling, with segments from classic films such as Vidas secas, Hirszman’s São Bernardo, and Walter Lima Jr.’s Menino de engenho. Diegues notes with a hint of irony that their cinematic call to arms failed to appeal to the general moviegoing public.

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Although there is no specific organizing principle determining the order of the mostly black-and-white clips, there are instances in which a topic or theme emerges. The film begins with several clips of characters running. Two of the best-known scenes show the peasant couple Manuel and Rosa from Deus e o diabo frantically racing across the backlands toward the sea and the young peanut vendor in Rio, 40 graus rushing into the street and being run over by a car. In Deus e o diabo, Rocha substitutes the northeastern ballad on the original soundtrack with the sounds of lightning, thunder, and rain. The thunderclaps give the scene of the couple racing across the landscape an apocalyptic feel. The sound of rain provides a counterpoint to the hot, rocky ground over which they flee. The documentary’s dramatic introduction suggests the dynamism and propulsion of what for some was a cinematic movement and for others an idea. Rocha uses other clips of people rushing forward at the film’s end, perhaps his way of representing Cinema Novo’s invincible and enduring spirit. Though the clips in general do not follow any obvious pattern or chronology, they emphasize backlands poverty. In his famous 1965 manifesto “An Esthetic of Hunger,” Glauber Rocha describes early Cinema Novo works as “sad, ugly . . . screaming, desperate films.” In a clip from a press conference following a showing of Antônio das Mortes at Cannes in 1969, a reporter asks Glauber Rocha why there was so much violence in the film. As if offering a tutorial, the director explains that Latin America is a violent, bloody region and cites statistics about the large number of murders and stabbings that occur daily in Brazil. His point here, harking back to his manifesto, is that in countries like Brazil where the majority are struggling to survive, “the most noble manifestation of hunger is violence.”44 Violence takes different cinematic forms, as scenes in the documentary demonstrate: peasant massacres, popular uprisings, conflicts fomented by politicians, bandits, and messianic leaders as well as violence against women. Even though Eryk Rocha does not make this point, Cinema Novo was a cinema of white, middle-class men concerned with poverty and class struggle who did not delve into issues of gender and oppression. For the most part, women in their films appear in conventional roles as mothers, wives, and lovers whose destinies are determined almost exclusively by men. Whether intentionally or not, the documentary gives a sense of this sexism in a block of clips from different movies in which women are partially or totally nude. Objects of sexual desire, they are seen dancing and gyrating, rolling back and forth seminude in the sand, and pressing

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up against a wall. Individual shots emphasize the eroticism of the scenes by focusing on bared underarms, buttocks, and breasts. One might see this long segment on women as a critique, but with the exception of a brief clip from Walter.doc, Beth Formaggini’s 2000 short about the director Walter Lima Jr., not a single woman filmmaker or critic is represented in Cinema Novo, as if nothing had changed between the films of the 1960s and the making of the documentary. This obvious omission might have been partly remedied by including clips from Helena Solberg’s A entrevista, which challenges patriarchal expectations and constraints placed on women. Solberg was friends with Pereira dos Santos and other Cinema Novo directors, and although she was never officially part of the group, neither were Olney São Paulo, Luís Sérgio Person, or Walter Hugo Khouri, whose works do appear in the documentary. There are other lacunae unrelated to gender, most prominently Lima Barreto and Anselmo Duarte’s northeastern dramas O cangaceiro (1953) and O pagador de promessas (1962, Journey to Bahia), which were highly influential with wide distribution. The absence of O cangaceiro is especially curious when many of the clips from Glauber Rocha’s films feature the northeastern bandit figure that Barreto’s film, winner of the Best Adventure prize in Cannes, made world-famous. Cinema Novo acknowledges the importance of documentary to Pereira dos Santos, Hirszman, and other directors who moved back and forth between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. Shot on location, often with nonprofessional actors, their fictional dramas are imbued with the raw realism and sense of purpose seen in Aruanda and Arraial do Cabo, groundbreaking documentary shorts that preceded them. Eryk Rocha’s assemblage of clips enables the viewer to appreciate the influences of these and earlier touchstones, such as Humberto Mauro’s rural drama O canto da saudade (1952, Song of longing) and Mário Peixoto’s silent classic, Limite. Cinema Novo also reminds viewers of the importance of Cinema Novo in the representation of Black Brazil. Black actors often played serious leads as opposed to the occasional roles as mammies, enslaved field hands, or buffoonish characters appearing in most movies and the emerging telenovelas. Pereira dos Santos’s Rio, 40 graus led the way with its portrait of young Black peanut vendors and a favela community never seen as clearly before on the big screen. As his problems with the government’s censors demonstrated at the time, filming poor Black youths and favelas was also risky business, even during the more liberal mid- to late 1950s. Eryk Rocha richly documents Black performance with segments featuring some of

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Brazil’s major acting talents, among them Grande Otelo in Rio, Zona Norte, Luiza Maranhão in Barravento (1963, The Turning Wind) and A grande feira (1962, The Big Fair), Milton Gonçalves in Couro de gato (1962, Cat’s skin) and Gimba (1963), and Antônio Pitanga in Ganga Zumba (1963). Clips also show the many nonprofessional Black child actors who debuted in Rio, 40 graus and the collaborative Cinco vezes favela (1962, Five times favela). To these Rocha adds footage of Black populations in Salvador in Um dia na rampa and Bahia de Todos os Santos (1960) and in the Northeast interior in Aruanda. Black Brazilians also are seen in clips from films about soccer such as Garrincha: Alegria do povo (1962, Garrincha: Joy of the People) and Subterrâneos do futebol, some of the few instances of Black professionals prevailing on screen.

CHAPTER 8

The City and the Countryside The jungle interior and the city represented in No país das amazonas and São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole emphasize the economic growth of a country celebrating its centennial of independence and motto of “order and progress.” Only a few decades later the exuberance culminated in the transfer of the nation’s capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, a city built in the wilderness by a largely migrant worker population. But the euphoria associated with Brasília’s inauguration in 1960 was soon being questioned in documentaries about the planners’ failure to accommodate into the Plano Piloto those who had constructed the capital. I discuss a few of those early documentaries here and a more recent film that delves deeper into how a population was forcibly removed from the city’s center to the periphery. Brasília is not the only city to receive attention to its problematic designs and social structure, as seen in a faux documentary about the northeastern capital of Recife. The need for agrarian reform drew young filmmakers to the countryside in the early 1960s to portray, mostly in fiction films of Cinema Novo, the problems associated with latifundismo. Documentarians of that period and into the 1970s registered the hardships of migrants displaced by inequitable land distribution and drought in the Northeast. In Cabra marcado para morrer, Eduardo Coutinho returned after twenty years to complete a film about large-scale landowners’ violence against those who contested their rules. I also look at more contemporary documentaries about the countryside that are no less attentive to the economic struggles of northeasterners but focus on them in different and sometimes intensely intimate ways, from interviews with rural octogenarians about their lives to a portrait of a town and its survival in a drought-ridden backland. The films I discuss document not only personal and economic challenges but also the resilience of a people who have been mostly invisible on screen. 211

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Urban Planning, Modernist Design, and Landscape Architecture Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova In Brasília there is often the conflict of architecture and ornamentation, between the architect’s conception and the resident’s taste. Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova One of the clips in Eryk Rocha’s Cinema Novo comes from Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova (1967, Brasília: Contradictions of a new city), a twenty-two-minute color short financed by the Olivetti typewriter company in São Paulo. Made six years after Brasília’s 1960 inauguration and three years into the military dictatorship, the film was shelved by Olivetti because of its unsettling look at a city proclaimed in an unofficial national hymn as the “capital of hope.”1 Shelving the film did not keep a copy from screening at the 1967 Brasília film festival, where Andrade received an honorable mention for direction. Over the years, Brasília: Contradições de uma nova capital ’s penetrating social analysis and subtle irony have served as touchstones for other documentaries about the city such as Adirley Queirós’s A cidade é uma só? (2011, The City Is Only One?), which was released shortly after Brasília’s fiftieth anniversary. The main point of Andrade’s film is to show how a planned city created in the name of national development and democracy suffers from the same inequities and oppression found in other parts of Brazil.2 The documentary builds slowly in making this point, beginning with tourist-style travel footage of the Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan), with its monumental government and civic buildings, modern housing in superquadras (residential blocks), and generous parkways. Considerable attention is focused on the superhighway system designed to keep cars and pedestrians separate and unimpeded in their movements. The voice-over by the poet Ferreira Gullar resembles a conventional travelogue narrative, with information about the city’s founding and architectural design, giving special attention to the superquadras with their own neighborhood clubs, large recreation areas, and schools. Erik Satie’s dreamy “Gymnopédie No. 3” accompanies the images. Perhaps unknown to viewers then and now, many of the scenes in the introduction and later in the film are from Fernando Cony Campos’s Brasília: Planejamento urbano (1964, Brasília: Urban planning), an upbeat educational short by INCE, the government Instituto Nacional de

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Cinema Educativo. Gullar’s narration also mimics the facts and figures commentary in Campos’s film, which draws from the urban planner Lúcio Costa’s “Relatório do Plano Piloto de Brasília” (Report on the Pilot Plan of Brasília) published in Arquitetura e Engenharia in 1957. The INCE production represents Brasília as a white, middle-class utopia; Andrade focuses on problems and divisions in the capital, especially those that affect the large dark-skinned working class. About four minutes into Andrade’s Brasília, a decided shift in rhetorical style and scenery occurs. Shots of vast empty spaces confirm the narrator’s observation that the city is unfinished and has only one operating cinema and little other nighttime entertainment for residents. A subsequent scene features a traffic jam on a major thoroughfare that was originally designed for trucks only, to keep them on the move. Planning also dictated the placement of cemeteries outside the Plano Piloto to keep slow-moving funeral processions and images of death away from the majestic government buildings on the Monumental Axis. On the screen mostly women and children walk among opened and recently occupied graves. In a moment both ironic and macabre, the narrator forgoes any mention of loss and suffering, preferring to point out the streamlined, flat grave markers adopted in the “maneira inglesa,” ostensibly imitating the “English style.” But the image of mourning widows and children tells another story about high mortality rates among workers. With few skills and little or no protective gear, migrant laborers risked injury and death on job sites made even more dangerous by the imposition of impossible construction deadlines. Among institutions featured in the film is the Universidade de Brasília, which attracted top-tier faculty to what was widely touted as the nation’s vanguard institution of higher education. But that situation changed after the 1964 military coup and invasions of the campus to expel faculty and others deemed subversive by the regime. By fall 1965, of the 305 faculty members, 220 either had been fired or resigned in protest of the purges.3 On the screen, a group gathers in a hallway, seemingly at a loss about class offerings and schedules. Off screen, one person remarks that it would have been better to close the university than submit to pressures for traditional instruction. Here, as at other points in the film, the narrator reminds viewers that the capital has problems just like other cities in Brazil.4 That motif resounds in footage showing endless lines of men and women waiting for buses to return home after a long workday. The narrator describes the location of worker housing as distant and inconvenient, often a three-hour ride away. He also observes that a central mission of the Pilot

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Interviewing a displaced family in Brasíla: Contradições de uma cidade nova.

Plan was to avoid the social separation of the rich and the poor, which obviously did not happen. A traveling shot shows a bus passing the presidential palace, parkways, and superquadras to arrive at modest government housing built for workers in a satellite city. In the background, beyond the rows of tiny prefab units, lies a seemingly endless sea of makeshift wooden shacks. Seated in front of one of these shacks is a young mother who speaks candidly about the government’s expulsion of families from communities built near construction sites and workplaces in the Plano Piloto. Moved to the outskirts without benefit of resources, they were forced to clear land by hand before building their shelters. During that time, she says, children and adults died from exposure to the cold. Others interviewed in outlying areas describe still more problems; one man talks about how short-term contracts force workers to move from one company to another. In this way, he says, the principal firm that owns these smaller companies can avoid paying worker benefits. Accompanying images of migrant workers is a soundtrack of Maria Bethânia singing “Viramundo,” about the endless migration and strength of northeastern peasants. In a scene shot inside a bus traveling to Brasília, passengers from different northeastern states talk about their hopes of finding work and a better life in the capital. The film ends as it begins, with traveling shots of landmark buildings such as the crown-shaped and buttressed cathedral, the presidential palace, and the towers, cup, and dome of the National Congress building. As in the introductory sequence, Andrade incorporates a few clips from another promotional documentary, Brasília em 1965.5 The film concludes inside an unfinished high-rise structure where workers are busy performing various tasks. But the sense of a city and its workers on the move upward and together is undercut by the film’s final words: “By pushing from its core the humble men who constructed it, Brasília embodies the basic conflict in Brazilian art, that it remains beyond the reach of the majority of people.”

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A cidade é uma só? Years later, so many struggles, so many plans, They tossed my plans into the periphery. Verses sung in A cidade é uma so? Adirley Queiros’s first feature, A cidade é uma só? (2011, The City Is Only One?), is a film that shifts between documentary and fiction. Like Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s short, it is about the socioeconomic stratification of haves and have-nots in a capital built with the promise of equitable housing for all. The film has three main figures: Nancy Araújo, a real-life singer who performs on a radio station in Ceilândia, a sprawling exurb of the capital; Dildu (Dilmar Durães), who plays her nephew campaigning to represent his Ceilândia district as a candidate for the nonexistent Partido de Correria Nacional (PCN, National Rushing Around Party); and Zé Bigode (Wellington Abreu), a character who gets lost while driving the filmmaker through Ceilândia’s expanding and labyrinthine developments and helps Dildu on the road with his political campaign.6 Queirós also takes his lead from propaganda films about life in the modern capital. One of the social programs promoted in late-1960s government newsreels and newspapers was the Campanha de Erradicação de Invasões (CEI, Campaign for the Eradication of Invasions), which resulted in the creation of Ceilândia, a satellite city named after the campaign. In just a few years, the campaign forced thousands of workers and their families from the large community called Vila IAPI near the Plano Piloto to the still undeveloped Ceilândia. In an essay about inequitable construction in the urban space, Aldo Paviani writes about the forced relocation of the IAPI community: At the end of the ’60s, the government of the Federal District verified that innumerable favelas (“the large invasions”) and construction sites (called provisional localities), with close to 82,000 inhabitants, occupied strategic territories in the proximity of the Pilot Plan. As reported by the press, then President of the Republic (General Médici) expressed to the Governor-General (Colonel Prates da Silveira) his displeasure at the numerous and “troubling invasions” he had to pass on the way to the presidential palace and from there to [the residential area] Riacho Fundo. Heeding the presidential observation and attempting to limit the proliferation of favelas (always attributed to strong migrations), the government

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of the Federal District instituted the Campaign for the Eradication of the Invasions (CEI), which, between 1971 and 1972, registered all existing shacks in the outlying areas of the Núcleo Bandeirante and then moved the population to a new place called Ceilândia. The move was made without any resistance from those being transferred despite problems (dust, mud, lack of water and work). The favelados’ “proper behavior” was also attributed to the promise of the “legalization” of plots of land at low cost and quick installation of services, such as schools, running water, and electricity, facilities not found in the favelas or makeshift housing on construction sites built on the periphery of the Núcleo Bandeirante.7 A cidade é uma só? looks back at the CEI through the eyes of Nancy, who as a child was selected with other young schoolchildren in 1970 to perform the government jingle “A cidade é uma só” (The city is only one), promoting the displacement of IAPI residents to a distant territory. She recalls feeling proud of being chosen to sing about the eradication of IAPI, where her family and friends lived; unaware of the meaning of the upbeat verses, she and classmates sang to encourage everyone’s participation in the great collective move. The film follows adult Nancy to an archive where she searches for photographs and other materials documenting their jingle performance, which the government filmed. Queirós includes a clip from the official footage that shows the children singing on a stage and dressed in government-issued school uniforms. Nancy talks about how IAPI was targeted for demolition to prevent airline passengers, among them many visiting dignitaries, from seeing the community from the air as they flew in and out of the airport. Among her most vivid recollections is the large “X” painted on her family’s and other homes to mark them for eradication. Working as a janitor in a building in the Plano Piloto, Dildu spends a good part of his day riding a bus back and forth between his job and Cei­ lândia. Several shots show him either sleeping during the long bus rides or walking across a large open field, apparently en route from the bus station to the building in the distance where he works. After his day job of cleaning floors, he passes out campaign leaflets to passersby in shopping malls and other places. He tells potential voters that he is working for the indemnization promised by the government to those who were removed from IAPI. Emblazoned on his campaign T-shirt is a large “X,” a painful reminder of the way an entire community was marked for destruction by the CEI. Despite his few resources, Dildu arranges for a low-cost campaign

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“X” for removal to the periphery from A cidade é uma só?

recording, an obvious reference and counterpart to the one used by the CEI. The scene in the small recording studio is both funny and disturbing. After the CEI refrain “Let’s participate” and giving his name and district number, Dildu quickly shouts, “Let’s vote!” A strangely dark, unsettling scene ensues as sounds of a gun being cocked and fired are added by the studio worker, who thinks a “bang-bang” and gangster-style jingle would be more effective in attracting voter attention. The next time the announcement comes from a loudspeaker rigged on Zé Bigode’s rusted-out car as he and Dildu slowly travel through Dildu’s home district. The car stalls on an empty, dusty road, and the antics of Zé and Dildu to get the car started resemble a Laurel and Hardy routine. Yet the film’s ending is far from humorous. As Dildu walks along a highway, a large convoy of high-end trucks and cars with banners and loudspeakers playing music and slogans in support of Dilma and local candidates passes by him going in the opposite direction. His is a sad figure fighting a hopeless one-man campaign against the moneyed class and parties that wield power to control the political machine. Queirós emphasizes the contradictions of the capital, no longer new, by playing the soundtrack of an old government propaganda song that describes Brasília as a glorious “epic adventure.”

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HU Then I think about what would be more just: to have [the hospital] as a monument to a misconceived vision? Was it a misconceived vision? Or was it a grand aspiration? A patient, in HU I think back to Brasília, which is the other side. As Brasília establishes itself as the new capital, it does so at the expense of this other piece of Brazil [Rio], which is falling apart. Margareth Perth, in HU The vast, empty expanse of the barren wing cast a shadow of failure and deathliness over the completed and overcrowded wing. The University Hospital was already born with a partial death sentence. Beatriz Jaguaribe, Urban Life through the Eyes of the City A ruin of urban modernist architecture disparagingly called “Perna Seca” (withered leg), the Hospital Universitário’s large and long-abandoned wing was cut from the hospital’s main body with jackhammers and pickaxes and imploded on December 19, 2010. It was an enormous operation involving the demolition of many thousands of square feet from the two million-plus of the thirteen-floor, L-shaped structure. Proposed in the early 1950s under Getúlio Vargas’s second administration as another plan to modernize Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital, the research and teaching hospital took more than twenty years to build because of funding lapses and changes of government. The gigantic edifice was finally inaugurated in 1978 during the military dictatorship. Designed by Jorge Machado Moreira, who, like Oscar Niemeyer, was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier, the hospital was just one part of Moreira’s commission to design a modern university city on Fundão, an artificial island created for that purpose in Rio’s northern zone on Guanabara Bay. HU (2011, University Hospital), a film codirected by Pedro Urano and Joana Traub Csekö, was financed by and made for DOCTV, the principal state-funded program for documentary production in Brazil beginning in 2003. Urano said the idea for the film came after he saw Traub Csekö’s

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photographs of the half-empty hospital during a visit to her atelier.8 The photographs were shot as part of Csekö’s 2008 master’s thesis, “O enigma do HU,” about the campus hospital. Many examples of her compelling black-and-white photography appear among the documentary’s traveling shots and other sequences inside the hospital’s functioning and empty parts where interviews with hospital staff and an architect take place. Sound effects with clanging pipes and the diegetic sights and sounds of falling debris emphasize the degree of ruin of the hospital’s massive leg. The global COVID-19 pandemic has made people more aware of hospitals and the shortages they all too often suffer. The state-of-the-art Hospital Universitário (HU), with 2,300 workers at the time of shooting in 2011, had long experienced difficulties with supplies and basic infrastructure, especially deterioration in the unfinished leg. In one sequence, nurses talk to one another about the shortage of alcohol for disinfecting; in other scenes, people wait for the few, full elevators as they slowly travel up and down the hospital’s thirteen floors. In an interview with the hospital’s founding director, Clementino Fraga Filho, for whom the building’s leg was named, he says funding was cut when the Ministry of Health and Education was split into two entities; the academic hospital fell under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and suffered austerity measures in education in the 1980s and 1990s. The few areas of the leg that once had offices were closed. One staff person likens the rapid shutdown to an emergency lockdown before a hurricane. Another employee talks about thieves ransacking vacated offices for the windows and fixtures and about graffiti and occupations by the homeless. As she walks along a bank of intact windows, the architecture researcher and professor Margareth Perth praises the windows, whose design permits just the right amount of sunlight. She laments the loss to students of ever gaining this level of architectural expertise. Some of the most impressive footage is in traveling shots through hallway doors that separate familiar hospital sights and sounds from vast spaces that look bombed out. One scene follows a woman walking down a corridor decorated for Christmas with a nativity and potted ferns. A nearby door opened onto the ruined side reveals the origin of the ferns, from large leafy beds that have pushed their way up through cracked cement on the ground floor. Split screens are another effective means of showing the stark contrasts and mere inches between the two settings. Much of the deterioration came from rainwater seeping from the thirteenth-floor rooftop down to the lower levels. A worker remarks that there are places

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Split screen with the functioning hospital and its ruined appendage in HU.

in the hospital where debris can be heard falling from ruined ceilings; he adds a chilling note, that should one of the building’s crumbling support pillars fail, other pillars would suffer even more pressure, possibly causing, in the worst of all scenarios, a domino effect. An earth tremor on the island finally prompted the decision to amputate and implode the leg. Among the powerful images showing implosion preparations is a traveling shot of a vertical cut to be made from the thirteenth floor to the ground floor. Captured on film from on high in the main wing, the implosion sets off a tsunami of dust. Shot from another angle, possibly from an airplane or drone, the hospital completely disappears as the soot billows out and over the island greenways bordering the bay. The image is startling and surreal, more like special effects created for a Hollywood action movie. HU also focuses on stem-cell and other cutting-edge research and successful surgeries carried out in the hospital. Yet its waiting rooms are full, and appointment delays can be long. A cancer patient describes her difficulty in getting proper care and says urgent treatment is given only to those who pass out in the waiting room and are close to death. There are other poignant moments; staff take breaks in the withered leg, whose louvered exterior looks out on the bay. The camera moves back and just outside one of the louvers to show a staff member partly framed as she gazes south to the postcard image of Rio’s beachfront, modern high-rises, and Pão de Açucar in the distance.9 The unnamed inpatient quoted in the epigraph puts succinctly the complicated relationship between modernism and national identity and the potential for grand structures like the Hospital Universitário and even cities built as paeans to progress to become monuments of a “misconceived vision” bordering on the dystopian. Margareth Perth aptly remarks in her tour of the hospital ruins, “How can one be responsible for dreams that are greater than our ability to dream?”

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Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx Our land finds itself occupied or on the way to occupation. Harmonizing human action with nature, planning each interference, should be a constant concern, mainly when technological means further increase our ability to abruptly transform the landscape. Roberto Burle Marx, “Recursos paisagísticos do Brasil” In the city’s central square, in the new state of Rondônia, a colossal piece of dead tree trunk was set in place, proof of the exaggerated nationalist pride with which one destroys in this country. Roberto Burle Marx, “Paisagismo e devastação” João Vargas Penna’s Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx (2018, Landscape film: Roberto Burle Marx) is a quiet tribute to Burle Marx (1909–1994), one of the world’s most famous modern landscape architects, who was also renowned for his modernist paintings and tapestries inspired by nature in the tropics. The biographical documentary is presented in the guise of an autobiography; Vargas Penna wrote the film’s script drawing from Burle Marx’s commentaries in his 1987 collection, Arte e paisagem. The first-person, off-screen narrator (Amir Haddad) speaks as an older Burle Marx, who begins by recounting how his passion for Brazilian flora and the arts blossomed during a childhood of privilege and supportive parents. Dramatic reenactments of scenes from his youth and early adulthood feature the family’s plantation-style home outside Rio, along with clips from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) to represent a one-year stay in Berlin with his parents in 1928 and 1929. A camp, Weimar-period cabaret clip alludes to Burle Marx’s homosexual awakening.10 Other awakenings in the German capital occurred during his visits to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden, where greenhouses introduced him to plants native to but largely unknown in Brazil. The reminiscing voice-over says that seeing these transplants in Berlin made him aware of his Brazilianness. Returning to Rio, he remembers walking through the Praça Paris (Paris Square) and wondering why the flora planted there was French and not Brazilian. This was typical in large and small city gardens and parks throughout Brazil, where flora from France was de rigueur.

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Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century, France was the primary source of literary, cultural, and artistic inspiration in Brazil. Burle Marx’s growing collection of native plants at his family home became a focus of interest for his friends, among them his neighbor and later the Brasília urban planner Lúcio Costa. For Burle Marx’s first large commission, a garden in a public square in Recife, he used local flora. Burle Marx was influenced by Le Corbusier’s sense of design, especially the modernist waves and curves he adopted for his garden projects and the Copacabana beachfront sidewalk along Avenida Atlântica. But he was also skeptical of the modernist architecture vogue and fearful of its damage to the natural environment. The film does an especially good job of integrating present-day scenes of Burle Marx’s colorful, lush gardens with older documentary footage such as clips of him and his team as they travel into remote areas to collect for transplant myriad species of little-known plants, saving them from ecologically destructive projects like the Trans-Amazonian Highway. One segment shows the team in São Simão, a municipality in south-central Goiás, where a hydroelectric power plant was built. The Burle Marx narrator recounts the decimation of the area’s plant life and probably its animal life by the construction of the multimillion-dollar dam and reservoir. While researching this construction, I came across a once-confidential report by World Bank president Robert S. McNamara dated May 3, 1972. It goes into detail about the site, describing the justification of the project and its costs, the amount of power to be produced, and the amount of the loans to be made by the World Bank and other entities. On the subject of the dam’s ecological impact, there are only two sentences: “The ecological effects of the Sao Simao [sic] project have been studied and it appears that the environmental damage would be minimal. The cost of the measures to be taken to protect the environment will be an insignificant part of the project’s total cost” (my emphasis).11 In Filme paisagem Burle Marx expresses concern about projects such as São Simão, saying, “I don’t know what the future [of Brazil] will be.” And they were many, as the military dictatorship pushed forward into the 1970s with plans to achieve an “economic miracle” based on large multinational investment. Developmentalism did not begin with the military dictatorship, but it took on new meaning and had severe yet little-disclosed human as well as financial costs under military rule.12 Burle Marx was more pointedly critical of the far-reaching ecological impact of the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the razing of vast wooded areas for cattle ranching, soybean farms, and other agribusinesses. As scenes of the

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rainforest destruction appear, he remarks, “Brazil is being totally divided up into lots.” Documentary footage of the unveiling of a plaque to celebrate the highway’s inauguration is accompanied by his words denouncing the felling of a two-hundred-foot mahogany tree for the sole purpose of affixing and displaying the ceremonial plaque. Filme paisagem brings into relief aspects of Roberto Burle Marx’s career that are less known to audiences than his internationally celebrated landscape designs, many of which are featured in the film. They include his innovative garden designs for Brasília and the Paris-based UNESCO building, with views of the latter that were specially created for the pleasure of those working inside the building. His legacy is evident in the gardens he designed and planted that continue to enthrall us as well as in the home he donated to the Brazilian government. There one can visit the thousands of plants he and his team painstakingly collected over his lifetime, reminders of the gifts that nature has bestowed upon a world whose treatment of plant life is often supremely unkind.

A Tale of One City: Recife frio In this edition, Recife, the city that ceased to be tropical. Pablo Hundertwasser, in Recife frio Three years prior to the release of O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds), Kléber Mendonça Filho’s 2012 award-winning feature fiction debut, he made Recife frio (2009, Cold Tropics), not so much a mockumentary as a short faux documentary using documentary footage. Its popularity in Brazil ranks second only to Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores, made twenty years earlier. There are similarities between the two films. Both derive much of their wit from the surreal humor of Monty Python, as Mendonça Filho even acknowledges at the end of his film, and both use an object to launch their respective searing political commentaries. In Ilha das Flores, a tomato and its journey from a field to a dump site bring biting humor and moments of pathos to a broad set of issues, among them the invention of money, capitalist exchange, the food chain, and grinding poverty and hunger. Recife frio is more a social anatomy of a city, revealing its class structure, its brutalist architecture, and its popular culture. It is also a satire about climate change. The film begins with a meteorite that travels to earth and crashes on a beach near Recife, Pernambuco’s capital in the Northeast, where Mendonça Filho lives. One might expect from this opening a sci-fi

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parody, replete with the intertitle “a few years from now,” but while the meteorite’s journey is over, the strange and even dire consequences of its arrival are not. Viewers are alerted early on to its effects by the film’s unsettling introductory music from Joseph Green’s 1962 sci-fi thriller The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Off screen a Spanish-speaking male news reporter comments on the most immediate consequence: three people singing at a party on the beach were taken out by the extraterrestrial object’s plunge. The dark humor turns giddy as a scientific team in otherworldly hazmat suits retrieve a guitar off the beach and slip it into a bag. The narrator says that although there is nothing directly linking the meteorite’s fall to a radical dip in the regional temperature, penguins have begun to appear at the beach at Recife, a humid city where 80 degrees in summertime can feel like 100. Newspaper headlines and the close-up of a penguin flash on the screen. The off-screen voice belongs to a reporter identified as Pablo Hundertwasser, who suddenly appears on camera at the beach wearing an overcoat and talking to viewers for a TV program called El Mundo en Movimiento (The world in motion). It may be no coincidence that the name Hundertwasser was a pseudonym of Friedrich Stowasser, an Austrian-born New Zealand artist and architect known for his work in environmental protection.13 Standing with his back to the ocean, he appears alongside a sign in Portuguese and English warning swimmers to beware of sharks. Signs like this were posted everywhere along the beach at the time Recife frio was being filmed. Just three years later the city would hold the world record for shark attacks and a death toll far exceeding the beach fatalities lampooned in the film.14 Other ironies may be less apparent. In a short segment to acquaint viewers unfamiliar with Recife, Hundertwasser uses a throwback to a World War II invention called “magic geography,” an arrow icon moved on a map to identify strategic locations. This technique was adopted in wartime Hollywood movies like Casablanca. Hundertwasser’s geography lesson uses a magic map of Brazil replete with a tiny World War II plane icon that moves up the country’s coast until it reaches Recife. The map and little airplane hark back specifically to Disney’s 1942 Saludos amigos!, a Good Neighbor animated and live-action documentary featuring Donald Duck and Zé Carioca that premiered to great success in Brazil. At regular intervals, the Disney documentary shifts to a map where a tiny airplane moves around the South American continent to identify stops made by Disney’s staff on their World War II Good Neighbor tour. Hundertwasser’s

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Bagging evidence from the meteorite’s fall in Recife frio.

map also evokes sixteenth-century maps of Brazil by Portuguese and other foreign artists with static icons identifying local resources such as timber, water, and birdlife.15 Despite Recife’s historical importance as an economic, political, and cultural center, the amusing Hundertwasser TV map shows only a sun icon over the area, as if fine weather were its only resource, that is, until the meteorite touchdown. At a later point in the film, a Brazilian TV station’s weatherman points to a large cloud icon over Recife, the only overcast city on the country’s entire coastline. Hundertwasser’s report includes funny scenes of unsuspecting locals shivering on street corners in summer apparel, while others don hats, gloves, and coats. There are glimpses of a man kneeling in prayer on the street; two juxtaposed church scenes show a Catholic service to alleviate worshippers’ guilty fear that God may have caused the climate change and an evangelical minister performing an exorcism to cast out evil. The phenomenon’s international implications go beyond the Spanish-speaking world, suggested by the clip of a United Nations representative saying to the full assembly in English, “It just doesn’t make sense.” Mendonça Filho’s relentless satire shows the degree to which foreign influences and investment, such as a tropical Santa Claus and a Frenchowned hotel, have been affected by the climate shift. Hundertwasser goes to the humble home of an older, bearded man who performs as the city’s Santa Claus each year. In an on-screen interview the man describes his years of suffering from the tropical heat while wearing his made-inLapland Santa suit. Turning to an old-style TV set, he plays and narrates footage of himself in his Santa outfit, drawing special attention to a sequence with him on a busy downtown street where he staggers and

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ultimately collapses from the heat. With deadpan off-screen delivery, Hundertwasser says the Santa performer is the only person in Recife to benefit from the climate change. In a follow-up segment, Hundertwasser interviews from off camera the French owner of the seaside hotel Le Soleil who laments in French the loss of business from his homeland in Brittany. Subsequent footage shows him sitting bereft on the hotel’s veranda as rain drips around him, then wandering into an empty hotel suite, where he lovingly touches a bedspread. Later, standing outdoors, he calls the reporter’s attention to penguins on a nearby beach and muses about forming an adopt-the-penguin NGO for the French at one euro per bird. This line might have drawn inspiration from the widely popular nature documentary March of the Penguins (2005), originally a French production, which anthropomorphized the penguins by giving them human voices and feelings, including romantic love pangs.16 Nothing seems to escape Mendonça Filho’s critique, from souvenir shops with winterized versions of popular arts and crafts to bonfires built in the streets to warm the homeless, whose frozen bodies with toe tags pile up in hospital corridors. The documentary is especially ruthless about the proliferation of oceanside high-rises whose narrow, lofty verticality results from regulations that buildings be spaced generously apart for ventilation purposes. Ventilation is also paramount inside units cooled by breezes from large balconies that open onto the interiors. One of the film’s harshest critiques is directed toward the remnants of the colonial system of masters and slaves, as shown in an interview with one high-rise household. The family’s teenage son has taken over the tiny maid’s room in the back because its inadequate ventilation and warmth make it more desirable. The reporter uses a blueprint to call attention to the similarity between the high-rise floor-plan design and plantation houses with slave quarters located in the back. The amusing scene shows the live-in maid, who is Black, mildly arguing with the teenager, who is white and rationalizes that she will have a bigger bedroom. The son, now tucked in the maid’s small bed, ludicrously waves around a portable hair dryer to try to heat the room. The next shot shows the maid still at work, standing in the larger room over an iron that she passes back and forth to warm the chilly bedding. Mendonça Filho’s architectural critique extends to shots of long stretches of walls erected outside high-rises to keep the well-to-do safe. Bordering city sidewalks, the towering size and unattractiveness of the walls also thwart social interaction on streets now empty and bleak. Hundertwasser asks rhetorically where all the people are, as the camera shifts to a

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crowded mall parking lot. Similar to piped-in music at shopping centers, the soundtrack of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 accompanies scenes of shoppers as they line up at a cloak room to divest themselves of winter outerwear. Seasonal consumerism and diversions are observed in documentary low-angle shots of shoppers’ bare legs and sandaled feet as they move in mass along a hallway. Christmas trees and other glitzy holiday decor regularly displayed at Christmastime seem strangely in keeping with the bizarre temperature drop outside. Forsaking the outdoors, people huddle around indoor activities, with children bouncing in plastic bubble-pods on a faux waterway and ice skating on an artificial pond. Despite chilly rain, desolate streets, and the social upheaval associated with the meteorite’s fall, a ray of hope is suggested in the final segment, which shifts from a weather report on Brazilian TV to a scene on the overcast beach. A group of people in winter wear hold hands and form a circle around the real-life Black performer Lia de Itamaracá. Dressed in colorful African Brazilian garb and a short fur coat, she stands in the circle’s center and sings as the group moves counterclockwise in a traditional dance called the ciranda. The buoyant lilt in her voice and the communal spirit of the ciranda, with its participatory call and response “para todos” (for all), seems to push at the heavy clouds above. In an homage to Vittorio De Sica’s 1951 fantasy film Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan), the clouds part and a round spotlight of yellow sunbeams appears on the beach in the distance, as if by magic, and the dancers run toward it. There they gather to form another circle, this time huddling shoulder to shoulder to bathe in the welcome rays of the sun.

Being and Existence in the Backlands O fim e o princípio In 2003, nearly forty years after filming a protest over the assassination of peasant leader João Pedro Teixeira that was the seed of his now classic Cabra marcado para morrer, Eduardo Coutinho returned to Paraíba with a small crew, this time without prior research or a topic to film. The first fifteen minutes of O fim e o princípio (2005, The End and the Beginning) serve as a sort of making-of documentary. Coutinho is in a van filmed from behind as it travels past fields on narrow dirt roads; he describes in voiceover the lack of preparation except for “a good hotel” arranged in São João do Rio do Peixe, a town three hundred miles inland from the coast. There he hopes to find an open, accepting community for a four-week shoot. If

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not there, he says, then perhaps the film will simply be about the search for such a place in the northeastern interior. Like visitors in a foreign land, the travelers need a guide, and with hotel staff help they find Rosilene (Rosa) Batista, a young schoolteacher and Children’s Mission volunteer who knows the area well. Coutinho’s crew documents his first encounter with Rosa, who lives with her parents in Araçás, a farming area where her family has lived for more than a hundred years. Standing outside her home, he tells her their objective: “We want to hear stories. We want to hear people talk about their lives.” Sitting on the porch is Zefinha, Rosa’s ninety-four-year-old grandmother. As if on cue, Rosa leans over and asks Zefinha to talk about the 1915 drought, “when you ate roots not to starve.” Hard of hearing, the tiny, frail woman speaks haltingly about eating boiled cactus, hoeing fields, spinning cotton, and using prayer to heal children sickened by “the evil eye.” Rosa asks her to perform a healing prayer for Coutinho; in the next shot, Zefinha passes an olive tree sprig over her granddaughter’s head as she prays for evil to “get thee away.” The poignant scene conveys the closeness between Rosa and her aged grandmother, whose gaunt, lined face is imprinted with a lifetime’s labors in the hot northeastern sun. It also conveys an older peasant culture on the fringe of the modern world that believes in the divine to protect and miraculously cure. Zefinha’s impromptu fragments of a story provide a template for what Coutinho seeks. After disappointing interviews with two people Rosa knows professionally but whom he finds too impersonal, he asks Rosa to focus on her closer relationships in Araçás. Her first step as guide and intermediary is drawing a map of Araçás that she outlines on a large piece of paper tacked to her family’s dining table. Starting with her home, she marks the locations of family and friends whose homes are spread out on the map like a constellation. As she plots a course, she comments on a few to be interviewed, another Zefinha and Vermelha, who are relatives; Leocádio, who knows how to read and is “a bit stuck up”; and Maria Borges, a midwife. Rosa announces their arrival at the places they visit by clapping her hands and calling out, in a preindustrial tradition still practiced in the backlands. She introduces Coutinho and explains the reason for the film crew’s visit. Interviews gradually ensue indoors with men and women, some living alone, others with spouses, one of whom joins her husband in the conversation. Despite the paucity of telephones, word circulates about the outsiders and their project. Coutinho is documenting a rustic society and an oral culture; most of those who appear on camera are elderly and many sick or frail.

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Mariquinha in O fim e o princípio.

The film’s title, O fim e o princípio, may be an allusion to their stories, which begin at the end of their lives as they look back and reminisce. Rarely appearing on screen while interviewing, Coutinho speaks softly and sits close to his subjects, a few of whom are hard of hearing. His offscreen gentleness and proximity create an intimacy rare for a talking-heads documentary. Not surprisingly, there is reticence, even reluctance, by a few at the start. Wearing a nightdress, her white hair in a bun, an elderly woman nicknamed Mariquinha tells her goddaughter Rosa that she is sick, but she agrees to talk. The camera follows her and Rosa from the kitchen in the back to the front of her small dwelling, where Coutinho waits to greet her. She moves slowly, nodding as Rosa informs Coutinho, perhaps to urge her cooperation, that Mariquinha is an important person in the community. Mariquinha wonders aloud why anyone would want to talk to “an old hag.” Her expression never changes in these first minutes, which are filmed without a cut. Seemingly indifferent to the unexpected visitors and introductions, she blinks and raises her hand to shield her eyes from the lighting equipment, then turns her back to follow Rosa, who arranges chairs nearby for the interview. There is a cut between this introductory segment and the start of the interview; seated with a kerchief tied over her hair, Mariquinha appears in powerful close-up, a weathered face crisscrossed with wrinkles, a small, toothless mouth, and eyes clouded by cataracts. She begins by telling Coutinho her given name, Maria Ambrosina Dantas, preferring he call her Maria and not Mariquinha because “if you pray over someone with their nickname, it doesn’t work.” A faith healer like Zequinha, she describes the many diseases she has cured with prayer, from falling breastbones to chilblains; she demonstrates with her arms and hands specific movements used in the healing process such as tugs on earlobes. Zequinha has taught the crew a prayer, but

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Mariquinha refuses to do so when asked, cautioning that prayers are not to be taught. Coutinho inquires off camera if she charges for her services, and she responds, “Never” and adds, “Prayer is not for sale.” Mariquinha’s story is not unusual for an elderly peasant woman in an impoverished countryside; widowed for forty-five years, she talks of a single marriage for seventeen years and of giving birth to fourteen children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. She seems at ease confiding in Coutinho about her “terrible” marriage to a “drinker mean as the devil” who was murdered as he stumbled drunk one night through the brush. A tearful sadness descends upon her when she mentions her son far away in Rondônia whom she sees once every five years. When Coutinho asks if he writes to her, she gives a slight nod; Rosa quickly interjects that he phones her, a subtle reminder that like most elderly in Araçás, Mariquinha cannot read. Small expressions of Mariquinha’s independence and spirit appear throughout the interview. When Rosa prompts her about her past taste for moonshine, she admits to liking an occasional nip. The camera draws back to show a mildly surprised Rosa, who asks if she still takes a drink. Mariquinha defends having a drink when she wants and further insists that she pays for it with her own money. The seventy-year-old Coutinho seeks Mariquinha’s opinion about death, a subject he raises in other interviews. She replies that she believes Jesus determines the number of days each one is on earth; it is one of several invocations of Jesus, whose image appears in pictures on one wall of the house. Asked if she fears dying, she replies, “Scared to death, aren’t you?” and covers a tiny, shy laugh with her hand. Returning to the subject, she remarks, “What can you do? . . . When the time comes, farewell!” She emphasizes “farewell” with a hand clap. Here as elsewhere in the interview, her hands speak and are nearly always near her face in the close-up. Sometimes she rests her chin on her hand, other times she raises a finger inches from her face to make a point, and still other times she uses one or both hands to hide a smile or tears. Thickened by hard work, with slightly crooked fingers spotted by age and work-soiled nails, her hands convey as much about her life as her deeply wrinkled face does. Breaking with interview convention, Mariquinha points to a technician behind the camera and comments on his serious look; after another timid laugh behind her hands, she asks where he is from. The amusing moment, with the interview tables turned, elicits a round of soft laughter from the crew off screen. A sense of camaraderie and greater intimacy emerge as she compliments Coutinho on his kindness, calling him a “very nice man . . .

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easy to talk to.” Pausing a beat, she seems to reflect on what has transpired between them; as if to deflect or discount anything she might have said, she lightly jokes, “Old people like to gossip and natter on.” Suddenly she reaches out, and her hand disappears from the frame to give Coutinho an affectionate pat. Mariquinha’s is the first of more than a dozen interviews conducted in similar fashion, with individuals seated and in close-up in their modest brick-and-mortar homes. One of the exceptions is the “know-it-all” Leocádio Avelino do Nascimento, a gaunt, elderly man whom Rosa beckons outside a large, open window at the side of his rough-hewn house. Appearing bare-chested, squinting and rubbing his eyes as if awakened, he professes illness, weakly declining an interview, saying his “‘punctuation’ is off today.” But a conversation emerges with Coutinho gently coaxing from outside as Leocádio is filmed in close-up, standing at the window with nothing but darkness behind him. Like Mariquinha, Leocádio gestures with hands bearing the ravages of field labor. He is the only person interviewed who never married, and when asked why, he says to remain “free as a bird.” Learning from Rosa that he is literate, Coutinho asks about his education; Leocádio credits the Bible, his favorite reading, as well as newspapers and almanacs. Even before mentioning the Bible, he talks about the story of Daniel and the lion’s den and his belief in the eternal. He also reads chapbooks, the cheaply printed booklets of popular verse sold at outdoor markets, and praises one title by name for its poetry. As evidence of his learning, he shows Coutinho an almanac carefully stored in a yellow binder and quotes from memory the distance from earth to moon recorded in its pages. Despite his frailty, Leocádio is curious about the visitors and asks how many there are and where they are from. Coutinho responds that there are six or seven of them and they come from Rio. Concealing a laugh with his forearm, Leocádio likens Coutinho to the “captain of the caravels . . . Pedro Cabral when he discovered Brazil,” a sly remark about travelers from afar who “found” (film) a land and people unknown to the outside world. His comment also evokes attitudes found even in urban centers like Recife about visitors from the industrial South who regard the Northeast as provincial and the “true” Brazil. In a documentary filmed by Carlos Nader not long before Coutinho died, Coutinho talks about the interview with Leocádio and their conversation about language.17 Coutinho was intrigued by Leocádio’s distinction between the “common word” and the “proper word,” the latter found in the dictionary that he says few people know. In Coutinho’s film Leocádio

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Leocádio in O fim e o princípio.

describes the common word as the “one word for one thing when Jesus made the world,” and the proper word “when the word is not the thing,” caused by the Tower of Babel, when misunderstandings and confusion reign. What fascinates Coutinho from his conversation with Leocádio is the similarity between Leocádio’s understanding and Walter Benjamin’s distinction between an original, “pure” language in which words have single referents and the “fall of the language,” with a Babel of confusion of tongues, when words begin to have multiple meanings.18 In talking about language, Leocádio also asserts his preference for the common word, rapping on the window’s wooden frame as if to emphasize the solidity of the “one word-one thing.” Several of the other people interviewed in the film also talk about long hours working the cotton fields. Among them is Rita Maria do Nascimento, who is unique in saying she misses those days. A brief segment introducing her interview shows a close-up of a hand spinning cotton into yarn that is then pulled, twisted, and tightly wrapped around a long, thin wooden spindle; this medieval practice was largely replaced by the spinning wheel in the eleventh century and later technologies, yet it still is found in Araçás and artisan handicrafts. Discussions of married life often turn on the issue of good and bad relationships, as Mariquinha’s remarks about her husband make clear. The midwife Maria Borges and the widow Tia Dora characterize their marriages as good because their husbands did not beat them. Unexpected intimate declarations of this kind are often accompanied by popular expressions of faith. Tia Dora thanks God and again “the Creator” for her marriage to a good, serious man. The eighty-year-old Assis, who compares life to the ticking clock on his wall, describes himself as someone “who was never beaten or beat.” Rosa’s relative Vermelha, a widow, talks about her married life in a different way, saying she barely sleeps since being alone.

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There are moving and often painful stories about childbearing and infant mortality told in straightforward, often unimpassioned ways. Sebastiana, the wife of Neném Grande, who worked in the fields until he was eighty years old, tells her story about bearing eighteen children, all of whom she named Francisco, after Saint Francis, to protect them after the first three died. Tia Dora says she “almost went crazy” with the loss of her first of four children. Widowed with three girls to raise on her own, she describes a brutal life working in the fields, where she also cooked and fed her children. Among the slightly better off is Geraldo Timóteo, who declares his belief in “all the saints.” A farmer with a few cattle, he introduces Coutinho to his trusted donkey, which faithfully carries him home after too many drinks. When the animal becomes too old to work, Geraldo Timóteo says with affection, he plans to put him out to pasture to graze and rest before he dies. When asked about children, Timóteo says he and his first wife, of twenty-nine years, had none, adding philosophically that “good and bad travel together.” He is also sanguine about avoiding the problems that arise between parents and children and gives the example of a father who killed his son. His comment has resonance for viewers who are aware that in 2014, Coutinho’s son, who suffers from schizophrenia, killed his father while in a psychotic state. Coutinho has a brief written exchange outdoors with the elderly and deaf José de Sousa, who spends his days in a chair at the side of a road. He then interviews Chico Moisés, who at fifty-seven is the youngest by far of the many who appear in the documentary. It is an unusual conversation, punctuated by Moisés’s sly side glances, knowing winks and smiles, and habit of short, staccato comments, often questioning as much as replying to Coutinho’s queries. When asked how long he has been married and if he has children, he toys with the question, answering he was twenty-five when first married and is now fifty-seven. He adds mischievously that it was his wife who had the children. Eventually he reveals there are five children. A bitterness emerges when Moisés replies to a question about his childhood, which he describes in one word as “terrible.” Asked to elaborate, he talks about his father, who made him drop out of school to work the fields. His anger and resentment remain tangible. In a cat-and-mouse exchange, Moisés’s remarks touch on a life of hard farm labor, ill health, futility of wishes and prayers, and admiration for Saint Thomas, who doubted and believed in only what he could touch and see. He is dogmatic about the “world of lies” and strangely revealing when he confirms the importance of concealing from others what one knows. Despite his cynicism, he says he believes in redemption and describes a dream of approaching a flaming

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hell with boiling waters and a devil without horns but at the last minute being stopped at the gate and “thrown out.” When asked by whom, Moisés makes the sign of the cross, invoking Our Lady of Perpetual Help. At the interview’s conclusion, Moisés reaches beyond the camera frame to shake the director’s hand. With the same sly look and disconcerting laugh, he says it was “good talking to a wise person.”19 At various intervals the documentary interjects brief outdoor segments that give a glimpse of daily life in Araçás. One wide shot captures a group of schoolchildren singing “Ave Maria” as they walk along a winding dirt road. Another scene follows a cowhand through a field where he calls out to cattle and patiently herds them toward home. In a shot almost otherworldly in contrast to the depressed agrarian world of the interviewees, a van with loudspeakers and covered with political ads pumps out blaring music and election messaging as it bumps over a field in search of voters. The documentary ends with segments showing Coutinho saying goodbye to several of those interviewed, promising each his return in a year with the completed film. Here and there other everyday activities and emotional moments are captured. Mariquinha lights a pipe with a candle stuck in a tin can whose flat bottom she uses to tamp down the tobacco. She talks about getting her pension check and buying moonshine, and she becomes pensive and tearful when Coutinho talks about leaving. The camera records the emotional moment with Coutinho’s face suddenly appearing partly in the frame alongside hers. In another farewell scene, Assis shows off a boio, a small cup made of horn, which he strikes with a flint to light his pipe. Geraldo arrives home leading his donkey and tells a story about animals like donkeys and dogs that give up part of their preordained existence to humans to avoid additional years of suffering. Nato, a water diviner who is also interviewed, opens an old trunk to show the green dress his mother wore that he cherishes as a keepsake. Two farewells conclude the film. A gaunt Leocádio approaches the crew in the yard with a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear. He talks about faith and resurrection, and at one point he asks Coutinho, a nonbeliever, if he believes in God, to which the director replies, “It’s complicated.” Because of advanced age or ill health, the question of living to see the film arises. Chico Moisés says, “I can’t guarantee I will be here.” When Coutinho tells him to have faith, he looks askance at the filmmaker and asks, “Faith?” But the irascible Moisés and most others did survive, as implied by the closing credits, and a memorial tribute appears to Leocádio and José de Sousa, the deaf man seated at the side of the road.

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Aboio Aboio: Plaintive song with which cowboys guide their herd of oxen. Pequeno dicionário brasileiro da língua portuguesa To make Aboio (2005, Cattle Callers), her first feature film, Marília Rocha traveled the interior of Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Pernambuco in search of vaqueiros (cowboys) who still practiced a melodious form of calling to herd cattle released by owners into the woodland interior, where they roam to feed. One of the most moving descriptions of the aboio culture is João Guimarães Rosa’s story “O burrinho pedrês” (1946, The little spotted burro), about a rancher who orders his ranch hands to saddle up and move his herd.20 The drive involves days of riding over rough terrain and crossing a river swollen by floodwaters in which several cowboys on horseback perish. Two who make it safely across hold onto an old burro who, put out to pasture long before, finds himself drafted by the rancher to make the long trek. Despite his small size and worn appearance, in contrast to the muscular horses, the burro remains cautious and sure-footed, a veteran of drives whose only interest now is returning to his life of quiet pastoral leisure. During the drive, cowboys sing out to urge cattle along, each call with a unique style and phrasing. Sometimes pitched high and drawing out their encouragements, the calls drop an octave or two for a soothing, staccato refrain, “Eêêê, bô-ôi. . . . Eh, boi lá! . . . Eh-ê-ê-eh, boi! . . . Tou! Tou! Tou . . .”21 As a young doctor, Guimarães Rosa rode horseback to see his patients in the Minas Gerais interior, where he witnessed firsthand the cowboy-callers. In his impressive body of fiction he later chronicled backlands oral traditions such as the aboio. Rocha discovered in her tristate research and filming sixty years later that those traditions were approaching extinction. Several factors had profound impacts on the business of lengthy cattle drives and calling, none more than construction of highways into the interior, especially the Trans-Amazonian, that made moving cattle in trucks to markets more efficient. Large ranches gradually displaced smaller ones, and releasing cattle into the wilderness to feed was replaced by retaining animals in fenced pastures and feed yards. One of the six cattle-calling cowboys Rocha found and filmed makes the case succinctly: “Good things are transforming into another.” Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna illustrate in their 1974 docudrama Iracema: Uma transa amazônica the destruction

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and transformation of the Amazon as transporting cattle in trucks from large ranches to coastal markets became a more lucrative business than transporting lumber from forests razed expressly for cattle ranching. Rocha provides a sense of the vanishing aboio culture in grainy blackand-white sequences of a few cowboys as they work cattle through the backlands. Most of the black-and-white footage documents the exigencies of their slow meandering to locate and drive animals through spiny thickets that require their use of head-to-toe protective leather gear. The dangerous nature of their profession is captured in a scene when two riders converge on a stray bull hidden in the brush. Reluctant to be driven, the bull twists its body, swiping at the horses with its massive horns and then turning on two herder dogs, scooping one of them up with its horns, and tossing the dog in the air. A subtle but powerful black-and-white shot shows a parched landscape bare of anything except a single tree and a tiny house built from mud. The desolation suggested here is compounded by the voice-over of an interviewed cowboy who says his father had no education whatsoever and raised him like “a small animal in the woods.” Another cowboy has a different childhood memory: “I didn’t sleep when my father said he was taking me [on a drive]. . . . That night we were to set out, I couldn’t sleep for the thrill. . . . Oh, how I love to dream about all that.” Asked in one of the few questions posed off screen if he misses the drives that lasted days from sunup to sundown, he answers in the negative. Another cowboy says, “It was pretty, but we suffered.” Another question off screen is whether a cowboy has ever seen or would like to see the sea. His response is a crisp and definitive “No.” The grainy black-and-white footage with frequent close-ups of the thorny wilderness is intercalated with color sequences of a cloudless sky with soaring birds and cattle gently nudging one another in a small herd. Much of the color footage is devoted to the individual cowboys, whose recollections and brief comments about their profession are accompanied by demonstrations of their aboio techniques. One cowboy says aboio is not an art to be taught or learned but a talent a person is born with. Rocha’s frequent low-angle shots of her subjects on horseback and wearing their distinctive leather gear make them seem larger than life, the heroic last practitioners of a dying backlands tradition. Interviewed indoors, an older man, a former cowboy, takes pride that although he suffered numerous broken bones, he was never gored or otherwise seriously injured on the drives. As he speaks, the camera turns to a woman, possibly his wife, who stands in a doorway listening to his recollections with a young boy at her

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side. Rocha pays special tribute to women whose lot was to wait at home for their husbands’ return. In a Vermeer-inspired shot, an older woman stands in profile, gazing out an open window with her face and body bathed in a soft, white light. One of the issues indirectly treated in the film is the close relationship between cattle callers and the animals they tend; tanned cowhides provide the material for the round-brimmed hats and other garments essential for working in the wilderness. A remarkable sequence juxtaposes color telephoto close-ups of the wrinkled skin around the eye of an old ox and the eye of an elderly man. Because of the intensity of the close-ups, it is at first difficult to grasp that the second shot is of a human being because his eye, like that of the animal, is so deeply set into a heavily wrinkled countenance. Before the camera draws back to disclose what viewers are seeing, the difference between the eyes, both of which stare and blink, is suddenly revealed, as if in an epiphanic moment, by the blue of the human iris. Seca Maria Augusta Ramos’s feature-length color documentary Seca (2014, Drought) takes place in Carnaíba, Pernambuco, a municipality 250 miles inland from the coastal capital of Recife. An Indigenous name, Carnaíba refers to the prickly vegetation endemic to the semiarid region where, because of persistent drought, water from the Pajeú River is delivered by small tanker trucks to townspeople and those in outlying areas. In this quiet example of slow cinema, ambient sounds prevail, none more than the sound of water rushing from a tanker hose into barrels and buckets brought by residents to be filled. An impressive wide shot pauses on a building’s bright, multicolored façade where containers of different hues and sizes sit alongside doorways for easy daily access to water. Other shots of an abandoned, rusty tanker and discarded containers too broken for use suggest the toll exacted by drought. Because of water’s scarcity, its commonplace sights and sounds become extraordinary visual and auditory moments. In one scene a mother bathes a toddler who squirms as she tips water from a small container over his head. The child’s excited reaction to the outdoor minishower is charming, but more profound is the sound his tiny feet make as they slap at water pooled on the ground. The documentary’s principal focus is the trucker Patrício, who works long hours hauling water to residents. There are no interviews with Patrício or anyone else in Seca and no narration; rather, with few exceptions, the film silently follows his truck to the places and people he serves. Delivery scenes

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are strikingly similar whether in remote rural areas, where filled barrels are carried off by donkey cart, or in small town squares; little or nothing is said as people stand and wait for containers to be replenished. Patrício’s small movements constitute the main action in these scenes as he adjusts the position of the hose, moves a barrel closer to the flow of water, or turns on and off the tanker faucet. Remarkable patience is demonstrated by those who wait in a routine reenacted by three children in a scene of outdoor play; squatting on the ground, they fill small soda bottles with sandy soil and use them to fill a bigger bottle, all with considerable concentration and care. The film’s myriad close-ups of the crystal-clear water and the bubbling sound as it flows into containers create an acute awareness of the vital resource. Ramos captures this attention in a close-up of faces looking down in a wavy reflection as water rushes toward a container’s brim. The bright blue of the barrel gives the incoming water the color and look of a clear blue sea. The film’s close-ups of water serve as counterpoint to wide shots of Patrício’s truck slowly traveling dusty roads through sandy terrain dotted with prickly plants and rocky hillsides. Almost appearing as still photographs, occasional wide shots without the truck emphasize the slow passage of time and the backland’s vast, rugged beauty with a striking mix of mostly brown and gray tones. Purposefully still, they combine with scenes of the truck’s unhurried overland course and the wait for delivery and filling of containers to suggest an idea of time other than what is measured in hours and minutes. Time is the subject of a brief conversation between Patrício and two fellow truckers as they sit together and wait to fill up the truck tanks at a water station under military control. With few words they refer to long working hours and station delays caused by power outages. Time drags as Patrício listens to a military man’s directions about signatures for delivery paperwork, followed by a long wait in his truck as two soldiers carry out a vehicle inspection.22 Weaving in and out of scenes with Patrício on the road are views of a man digging a well. One might say the film is composed of alternating horizontal and vertical views of the semiarid land. This second narrative begins as Nato, a water diviner, holds a forked stick that indicates a promising spot and a second man, never named, begins digging with a shovel. The only sound heard in these scenes is the shovel’s plunging into sandy soil with the rhythmic regularity of a metronome. As the film progresses the hole grows wider and deeper to the point where the top is no longer visible. Only the man is seen somewhere inside the hole, encircled by its earthen wall, heaving shovelfuls of dirt upward over his head.

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Trucking water across an arid backland in Seca.

The alternating narratives also represent two kinds of labor and life: the servicing of a community by a modernized workforce and an individual laborer who, without mechanized means, digs for water based on belief in a diviner’s fork that proves to be accurate when the man strikes water in the hole. One of the film’s achievements is the way it documents the long, arduous, repetitious nature of work. A woman in close-up is cutting off cactus limbs; the perspective shifts to a dazzling wide shot of her small figure with two others wheelbarrowing the green pieces across the immense, barren landscape. The next shot is at the woman’s farm as she feeds one by one the limbs trimmed of needles into a grinder as feed for her hungry, thirsty cattle. At another juncture, two teenagers repeatedly fill potholes with dirt on a busy, dusty, unpaved road and reach out to passing motorists for tips. Mixed with these images are occasional glimpses of how individuals live with drought. One of the film’s few indoor scenes takes place in a classroom with children who take turns reading aloud from a book about hygiene and the importance of washing hands, brushing teeth, and bathing. When the reading is finished, the teacher turns to the class with the book open to the page with illustrations of various bathroom fixtures including a large bathtub. She asks the children about the images, and several respond that they do not have tubs because there is little water. A student speaks up about a nearby dam that has dried up. The teacher agrees that the book does not represent their reality. There is a connection between this scene and Patrício’s truck as it passes by the school before the camera moves inside the classroom. A similar link is made between Patrício appearing with his truck at an outdoor market where cowboys in protective leather gear arrive on horseback with a steer. The cowboys’ slow, easygoing manner contrasts sharply with their wild chase through a thicket in a previous scene that shows the skill required to corral the recalcitrant animal. There is a festival atmosphere at the small market, with the sounds of the lively northeastern forró music and shots of

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couples dancing close and keeping time to the music’s quick beat. The chase and dancing shots contrast with the silence and slowness characterizing most other scenes, as if referring to different kinds of time. A principal focus at the market is on two repentistas, poet-singers who alternate their improvised verses in a duel of rhyming references to familiar images such as dried-up wells and water trucks. Later, Patrício’s truck passes a large church where penitents slowly climb stone steps on their knees and receive a priest’s blessing in a celebration of suffering, repentance, and redemption. The market activities and religious practices shown in the film have long been associated with the Northeast. Here as in many works, they represent timeless traditions that endure despite drought and other hardships. The image of the steer chase through the thicket and the music and verses by balladeers pay direct tribute to films by directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha who brought the customs and culture of the Northeast to widespread attention. Ramos turns her camera to an anniversary event in another small town that features a small Catholic high school band and baton-twirling dancers led by majorettes holding banners and flags. The celebration seems at odds with the long waits for water and even the market activities and religious ritual, hardworking cowboys on horseback, versifiers improvising duels about backland strife, and the faithful seeking salvation. More startling is the sight of a large, brightly lit, outdoor stage blasting rock music, with a singer wearing dark glasses and a few dancers in tight-fitting outfits performing before a sea of happy faces. The celebration features a speech by the mayor about progress and monies promised for bike paths, public restrooms, and a hospital. A politician on the stump, he makes no reference to the exigencies caused by endless drought. Then the townspeople’s celebration is over, and only hard work remains. The film ends with two scenes of work. In the first, the man in the hole continues to shovel as water gathers about his feet. In the second scene, a wide shot of backlands terrain, Patrício’s truck appears, slowly climbing a dusty road until it disappears around a bend. In the foreground of the deserted terrain sits a small billboard announcing a water park for children that supposedly will be coming shortly. The sign is no more fanciful than a textbook’s image of a bathtub during a drought or a politician’s promises for improvements requiring a steady water supply.

EPILOGUE

A COUNTRY IN CRISIS

O processo and Democracia em vertigem First screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019 as part of its World Cinema Documentary Competition, Petra Costa’s Democracia em vertigem (2019, The Edge of Democracy) was picked up by Netflix and streamed into homes six months later. It is undoubtedly the most widely seen and reviewed feature documentary to come out of Brazil since Ônibus 174 (Bus 174). Short essays by influential critics praising Democracia em vertigem appeared online and in newspapers including the Guardian and New York Times. Writing from the culture desk for the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson compares viewing it to “watching a Greek tragedy from a box seat and being ushered into actors’ dressing rooms between acts.”1 Prior to its Netflix release, the film played at major festivals in Guadalajara, San Francisco, London, and Havana and at special showings in Los Angeles and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, garnering praise from directors such as Spike Lee, who introduced the MoMA event. Its continued success seemed assured with the Oscar nomination for 2019 Best Documentary Feature by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although the film lost to the Obamas’ coproduced American Factory, it won other prestigious prizes, including a Platino from the Ibero-American Film Festival and a Peabody for best documentary. A two-hour color film that incorporates black-and-white archival materials along with television footage and home movies, Democracia em vertigem examines the circumstances leading to the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff during her second term and the April 2018 arrest of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her political ally in the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers Party) and predecessor in the presidential palace. The film begins and ends with scenes of Lula bidding farewell to friends, colleagues, and a massive PT constituency assembled outside the ABC metalworkers 241

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union headquarters, where Lula presided for years and returns to address an adoring audience on the cusp of his imprisonment.2 Television footage shows the plane carrying him away to begin a twelve-year sentence in the southern state capital Curitiba for corruption and money laundering. Lula was released in November 2019 after the Supreme Court decided he was denied due process. In March 2021, while he was free and preparing appeals, the Supreme Court annulled his convictions on procedural grounds involving the judge and the jurisdiction. He was still potentially subject to retrial in another venue. In September 2021 Lula led polls as the main opposition figure for the 2022 presidential election. It is difficult to know how the October 2018 election would have ended had Lula been able to run for a third term as president when, from prison, he was ahead in polls. In August, two months before the election, the nation’s highest electoral court blocked his candidacy, basing the decision on his failed January 2018 appeal to overturn his conviction. The failed appeal for one of nine charges involving corruption and money laundering resulted in an increase of his sentence from nine to twelve years. With Lula barred from the race and without a popular and nationally recognized PT candidate to replace him, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, longtime congressman, and far-right candidate, won the run-off election handily with 55 percent of the votes.3 Narrated by Costa, Democracia em vertigem focuses squarely on the process of Dilma’s impeachment, although the seismic event unfolds within a much broader political and personal context harking back to the period of the military dictatorship. It is this broader scope, along with Costa’s narration, interviews with Dilma and others, and a music score, that distinguishes the film from Maria Augusta Ramos’s equally impressive O processo (2018, The Trial), which won prizes in Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Lisbon, two awards at São Paulo’s oldest and largest film festival, and critical attention in Variety and Film Quarterly, among other US publications. In her 2018, two-and-a-half-hour color feature, Ramos zeroes in on the Senate proceedings between April 28, 2016, when Dilma was charged with two criminal counts, and the August 31, 2016, final vote to impeach (61 to 20) that sealed her fate.4 Ramos rarely departs from her fly-onthe-wall approach to the Senate debates and private discussions between José Eduardo Cardozo and Gleisi Hoffmann, the principal senators on Dilma’s defense team.5 Eschewing narration and interviews, Ramos’s stealth technique captures the trial’s tedium as well as its clashes between Dilma’s defenders and detractors. It also captures fascinatingly strange moments, such as Janaína Paschoal, a congresswoman and law professor

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Dilma Rousseff on trial from O processo.

at the Universidade de São Paulo, warming up with arm stretches before giving an over-the-top, melodramatic speech asking that charges against Dilma be entered into the record.6 Ramos introduces title cards at different intervals to provide the date and context for the acts in a televised political drama that kept viewers riveted for months.7 The film begins with a dramatic drone shot whizzing along a wide corridor of greenway in front of the National Congress where two long rows of police and a specially erected barrier separate protesters for and against impeachment. A ground view of the barrier appears shortly after the final impeachment vote, when it stands like a ruin in the empty parkway green. In Costa’s more elaborate 2019 film, the barrier represents not only the division between the left and right in Congress and the population at large, as seen in Ramos’s work, but also the split in Costa’s own family that is an integral part of the story she tells in Democracia em vertigem. O processo and Democracia em vertigem are sympathetic in different degrees to Dilma’s plight as her case is argued back and forth between PT members in power since Lula’s 2003 election. Opposition to the PT was strengthened by Dilma’s precipitous slide in popularity from a 2013 bus fare increase and initiatives alienating banks and members of the centrist Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), whose leader, Michel Temer, was vice president. The left-liberal protest began in São Paulo against a forty-centavos hike in the bus fare. Within the next several weeks the protest expanded beyond that city and assumed a more

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Separating sides in the nation’s capital in Democracia em vertigem.

conservative posture of attacking the PT leadership. In diagrams Costa charts Dilma’s steep drop in just three months from a strong 65 percent approval rating in March to 30 percent by the end of June 2013. Among those appearing in Democracia em vertigem pushing for Dilma’s impeachment are Chamber of Deputies President Eduardo Cunha (PMDB); Senator Aécio Neves (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB), who refused to accept his defeat by Dilma in the 2014 presidential race; Representative Janaína Paschoal, who initiated the impeachment process in the Chamber of Deputies; and Temer, who presided over the final Senate vote. Costa shows Temer already uncomfortably distancing himself from Dilma in footage of their 2011 inauguration celebration outside the presidential palace. Not long after the corruption charges were announced, Temer withdrew from the PT coalition and formed a new alliance with the PSDB, the country’s third-largest party and the PT’s principal opposition, led by Aécio Neves. It is difficult to know if the Brazilian public at the time fully understood the intricacies of the charges against Dilma; the allegations did not include personal gain, unlike the growing number of charges against the oil giant Petrobrás, contracting firms, politicians, and others who were accused of bribery, money laundering, and corruption in the widely publicized federal investigation begun in March 2014 known as Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash). The PT was brought to its knees with charges against nearly every major figure in Lula’s administration and ultimately Lula himself. Costa’s film shows Lula’s gradual demonization in the press alongside the meteoric popular rise of Paraná federal judge Sérgio Moro, who headed the investigation, questioned Lula on television on the charges, and sentenced him to jail.8 Moro went on to serve as Minister of Justice in the Bolsonaro administration. Costa shows a similar media critique of

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Dilma carried out on covers of the popular Veja magazine, where her face appears, increasingly brooding and dark, finally gone from view under a bowed head. Costa had personal access to Dilma and to footage of conversations between Dilma and Lula that enabled her to chart the gradual crumbling of a seemingly invincible party leadership.9 At one point Lula remarks in a call, perhaps rightly, that Dilma’s impeachment is the opposition’s means of targeting and bringing him down.10 His fall is undoubtedly the greater, as charted by Costa, who surveys his popular rise from union leader and PT founder to president who left office with an 87 percent approval rating. In still other scenes on the phone, Lula gives Dilma advice, looking troubled as her presidency becomes increasingly less secure. They are a close political pair; Dilma plans to offer him a chief of staff post in March 2016, which would keep him safe from prosecution just days after his and his son’s houses were searched by investigators.11 The film shows images of disarray and furnishings tossed over in the two men’s homes. A discreet conversation between Dilma and Lula about details of such an appointment was recorded by Moro, and the tape and a transcription were immediately released to the media, igniting massive protests in the streets mostly against the two PT leaders. Wrapped in the Brazilian flag, anti-PT protesters carry blow-up punching dolls with Lula’s image in prison stripes and signs reading “Tchau querida” (Goodbye dear). These were Lula’s last words on his taped call to Dilma and became the growing opposition’s rallying cry for her impeachment and dismissal. The image of a nation split apart is color-coded in the film, the pro-impeachment’s “patriotic” green and yellow of the Brazilian flag and the anti-impeachment’s red of the PT flag. The same colors, signs, and dolls appear in the Chamber of Deputies. In one clip, a politician tries to deflate a Lula doll in his hand by biting it with his teeth. Another congressman reaches over to tear at the doll. He is gearing up for a presidential run; his name is Jair Bolsonaro. Where the two films differ significantly is the emphasis given to the personal. In Democracia em vertigem, the story of Dilma’s early militancy and imprisonment and torture by the dictatorship in 1970 are intertwined with the stories of Costa and her mother, Marília Andrade, who, as a young activist, protested the military regime. Briefly jailed in 1968, the mother lived with her young family in hiding for several years. Costa first gained access to Dilma in a meeting with historians in which she handed Dilma a copy of her 2012 documentary, Elena, about Costa’s older sister, who lived with her family in hiding from the military dictatorship. Costa’s mother

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and Dilma appear together in a scene exchanging comments about that difficult time, with Dilma lamenting the loss of anonymity and freedom that comes with being a public figure. Like two war veterans, they share stories about a common struggle, except that one of them happens to be president, now fighting for her political life against a charge of fiscal finagling, and her fate is being debated live in a televised, drama-filled trial accompanied by a media-driven sea change in public opinion. The title of Ramos’s film directly references Franz Kafka, and in one scene Senator Lindbergh Farias of the PT compares Dilma to Joseph K., the protagonist bewildered by the incomprehensible juridical proceeding against him. Costa magnifies this comparison with footage of Dilma describing herself as Joseph K. while traveling in a car seated next to her lawyer Cardozo. It is a revelatory moment; maintaining a stoicism in the face of adversity, Dilma interjects an ironic note into the comparison, saying that unlike Kafka’s character, she at least has a lawyer. Both films document an unflinching Dilma speaking to her accusers about tests of endurance she won involving torture and disease. Costa displays a photograph of a much younger Dilma on trial, standing with head held high while regime officials seated above her on a platform cover their faces with their hands. In a few instances, Costa’s brief exchanges with politicians in hallways reveal that their opposition has nothing to do with any of the actual charges. Here, as in Ramos’s film, male legislators criticize Dilma for her lack of warmth and failure to greet colleagues with the customary Brazilian embrace. Introduced early in the film, Costa’s own story is also part of her narrative, beginning with a 1984 home-movie clip of her first birthday party. That year also marked the twentieth anniversary of the military coup d’état leading to the increasingly violent regime against which her parents rebelled and finally fled, moving to the remote capital Londrina in southern Paraná. In addition to arrest photos of her mother and father, Manoel Costa Júnior, she includes newsreel footage with images of military police on horseback chasing down and beating protesters in the street. She reveals that her parents named her after the militant leader Pedro Pomar, founder in the early 1960s of the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCdoB) and her mother’s political mentor. She adds a newspaper photograph of Pomar’s bloody, bullet-riddled body sprawled on the floor of a house in the Lapa neighborhood of São Paulo where he and other PCdoB leaders were meeting secretly on December 16, 1976. When the military learned of the meeting from another PCdoB member caught by the police, forty agents surrounded and entered the house, killing Pomar and two of his

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colleagues. Their assassinations became known as the Chacina da Lapa, the Lapa Massacre. That image pulled from a São Paulo archive became the source of controversy in Brazil not long after Democracia em vertigem began streaming on Netflix. It was discovered that Costa had doctored the original photograph by erasing a revolver and a rifle at the sides of Pomar and his PCdoB colleague Antônio Arroyo, who was also killed by police in the Lapa house. When asked by Revista Piauí about the doctored image, Costa replied in an email, There is a reason for that, I was expecting someone from the public to notice. As I said in the documentary, Pedro was my mother’s political mentor, and it was widely known that the police planted weapons around the bodies of the assassinated activists, as an excuse for their brutal assassinations. . . . And even the very Truth Commission brought evidence for allegations that the police planted the weapons after Pedro’s death, and therefore I opted to remove that element and honor Pedro with an image closer to the “probable” truth.12 She adds that her action was inspired by Werner Herzog and Joshua Oppenheimer’s search for “ecstatic truth.” One of several premises in Herzog’s 1999 “Minnesota Declaration” on truth in documentary has to do with the relationship between manipulation and “ecstatic truth”: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”13 This, however, seems a dubious rationale for doctoring images. Costa’s erasure was a surprise to the documentary filmmaker Eduardo Escorel, who was an editing consultant on the movie for several months. He and others interviewed for the article in Revista Piauí were of like mind about the importance of being faithful to the official record, regardless of “probable” truths that might contest it. Commentaries in the magazine are largely uniform in stating that Costa should have used the original and contested its veracity in her narration. One person suggests incorporating both images to represent the debate over the official document. The real difficulty posed by the erasure was keeping it from not only Escorel and others who worked on the film but also the viewing public. The autobiographical aspects of the film had already voiced issues about subjectivity beyond those normally associated with documentary. Manipulation of even

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a single image without acknowledgement affects the integrity of the overall work, especially in a documentary of this kind, so engagingly focused on a transformative political event in a nation’s history. In telling her own story, Costa is frank about the political split in her family, most of whom she describes as aligned with the right and supporters of the ouster of President João Goulart in the 1964 military coup. She comes from a family of privilege; her maternal grandfather was Gabriel Donato de Andrade, a founding member of Andrade Gutierrez, one of the nation’s largest construction companies. Established in the 1940s, the company rose to prominence during President Juscelino Kubitschek’s “fifty years of progress in five” as a builder of interstate highways that connected the interior and northern regions with the coastal south. Costa includes aerial footage of Brasília under construction shot by her grandmother, adding that her grandfather was reluctant to be involved in its building, fearing that Kubitschek, whose vice president was Goulart, might be deposed before the capital could be finished. Costa’s mother as a child is shown in footage of an outdoor gathering with Kubitschek when he was governor of Minas Gerais, where Costa, her grandfather, and her mother were all born. To add to the family record, Costa provides a shot of a plaque outside the presidential palace listing Andrade Gutierrez among the businesses honored for “voluntary actions” to preserve the capital. Divided into two columns of honorees, Andrade Gutierrez appears as a contributor under both Fernando Collor de Mello’s right-wing government, which lasted two years before he was impeached, and Lula’s administration, which had extended a friendly hand to big business to win the 2003 presidential election.14 The plaque is a reminder that while governments of different political persuasions come and go, the entrepreneurial elite remains in place. Importantly, Costa notes that like many other large companies, Andrade Gutierrez did not escape the net cast by the Lava Jato criminal investigations.15 Democracia em vertigem’s constant shifting between the personal and the political, between the past and the present, is an engaging technique. Costa has talked about the many individuals working with her who filmed outside protests as well as insider action in Chamber of Deputies and Senate meetings, often behind closed doors, in hallways, on stairways, and even inside cars. That rich repository of materials, whose assemblage involved more than a dozen editing specialists, gives the sense that her camera, like a panopticon, is multidirectional and sees everything. Two scenes deserve special mention in this regard. At one point Costa

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approaches Bolsonaro, following him as he walks through a crowd of politicians talking about his hatred of homosexuals and desire to grant landowners permission to shoot members of the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Movement) who were occupying underused lands. He has just cast his vote to impeach Dilma, and like many of his opposition colleagues, he dedicates his act to someone he honors. Janaína Paschoal hypocritically defends her pro-impeachment position, stating that it benefits Dilma’s grandchildren. Bolsonaro offers his vote in memory of Coronel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the figure most responsible for torture during the dictatorship, whose victims included Dilma.16 Bolsonaro occupies a modest office and invites the camera to follow him inside. A panning shot moves from his desk covered with papers to a gallery of framed photographs that line the back wall. Raising his arm like a tour guide, he points to the gallery and directs the camera’s attention to portraits of “the most recent presidents.” Without exception, the photographs to which he refers are of military leaders who became president during the dictatorship. He begins by naming Humberto Castelo Branco and then jumps over Artur Costa e Silva to Emílio Médici, who presided over the most ruthless period of the regime. He next points to the picture of Ernesto Geisel and praises him for “treating bandits like bandits,” a reference to the tortures and deaths of left-liberals such as the popular journalist Vladimir Herzog. The astonishing scene is a prelude to Bolsonaro’s hardline speeches and gunfighter finger gestures on the presidential campaign trail. Off screen, Costa sadly confides that most of her family voted for him in the 2018 presidential election. Another scene, one of the most compelling in Democracia em vertigem, takes place on a stairway where three women are busy cleaning the steps. The contrast between their quiet work and dignified demeanor and the political maelstrom with its rival colors, placards, and raucous behavior is striking. Only one woman speaks, wishing the political situation could be cleaned up with a bucket of water like the debris they wipe with water from the steps. She refers to the “dirtiness” of what is happening and says in a neutral voice, “No one is clean.” Soft-spoken and sympathetic to Dilma, the woman makes the point that the president was elected by the people and that dissatisfaction with Dilma’s administration should be addressed in a general election. Because the people did not vote Dilma out of office, she contends her impeachment is not the act of a democracy. She adds somberly, “Democracy does not exist.” O processo brings that sentiment to the fore in a prelude that shows a chaotic Chamber of Deputies meeting and vote presided over by Eduardo

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Cunha, who had helped Temer avoid impeachment charges as vice president while allowing charges to proceed against Dilma. Under investigation in Lava Jato for money laundering and political intimidation, in May 2016, just days after the Chamber vote, Cunha was removed from office by the Supreme Court. The raucous session on the Chamber floor seems uglier and more unruly than the large protests outside. Ramos alternates the reactions of individuals and small groups of protesters outdoors with the televised votes for and against impeachment. Bolsonaro in close-up, dedicates his vote to “families and schoolchildren ignored by the PT,” then to Ustra and the armed forces, and finally to Brazil and God. Surrounding him, pro-impeachment representatives look on placidly as Bolsonaro celebrates an infamous torturer and the military. Off camera a uniform chorus of disapproval erupts. Outdoors, Dilma supporters dressed in red stand silently and listen with solemn faces. Ramos was not new to filming court proceedings. Prior to O processo, her best-known work was a documentary trilogy about state oversight of society. Her films Justiça (2004, Justice) and Juízo (2007, Behave) document a judicial system that grinds out prosecutions of criminal cases involving a mostly poor and uneducated population, with special focus in Juízo on young offenders and the harm they face while in custody. In Morro dos prazeres (2013, Hill of Pleasures) she portrays the year-old coexistence of a poor community in Rio de Janeiro and a Police Pacification Unit sent there to bring an end to drug trafficking and violence. Used in classrooms and by legal groups, the success of the trilogy helped Ramos gain access to Dilma’s trial otherwise limited to the general media, including private discussions by Dilma’s Senate defense team. Arriving in Brasília just days before the Chamber of Deputies vote took place, Ramos states in an interview that she had no idea what the result of the vote would be. She also talks about her desire to film both sides but that Senate conservatives denied her request to film behind-the-scenes deliberations, fearing she might leak their strategies.17 A less costly documentary than Costa’s, Ramos’s film had a crew to help shoot what resulted in 450 hours of footage that she and editor Karen Akerman cut over a period of six months to just under two and a half hours. There is an eeriness to Ramos’s juxtaposed segments of senators arguing in session, often heatedly with signs held aloft; in echoing, tunnel-like hallways; and after-hours with a near-empty building while cleaning personnel silently clear detritus for the next day’s business. Outdoor daytime views of protesters segue into nighttime shots of the illuminated National Congress, whose grounds are completely vacant except for a man walking alone in

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silhouette in front of the dome-shaped Senate building. Ramos’s camera captures the uproar both outdoors and inside during the proceedings and during protests a year later, when Temer, officially accused of corruption, refused to resign as president. “Fora Temer” (Temer out) becomes the new opposition rallying cry; perhaps not surprisingly, the Senate votes against putting him on trial. Ramos ends her documentary with prescient references to Temer’s policies, which included limiting workers’ rights and lifting restrictions on oil drilling, a small preview of the tidal wave of far-right actions with impacts on the Amazon, Indigenous peoples, wildlife, human rights, public health, and culture and the arts by the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

33. Dir. Kiko Goifman, TV Cultura, 2003. Aboio (Cattle Callers). Dir. Marília Rocha, Grupo Novo de TV e Cinema, 2005. África eterna (Eternal Africa). Dir. Estanislau Szankovski, E. Szankovski Produções Cinematográficas, 1970. Aleluia, Gretchen! (Hallelujah, Gretchen!). Dir. Sylvio Back, prod. Sylvio Back, 1976. Almoço no Kaiser oferecido ao Presidente da República e esposa (Lunch on the Kaiser offered to the president of the republic and his wife). Dir. Alfredo Musso, Musso Filmes, 1914. Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (The Amazon, the largest river in the world). Dir. Silvino Santos, prod. Alvelino Cardoso and Manoel Gonçalves, 1918–1920. Ancoradouro de pescadores na Baía de Guanabara (Anchorage of fishermen in Guanabara Bay). Dir. José Roberto da Cunha Sales, 1897. Anemic Cinema. Dir. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, 1926. Os anos JK: Uma trajetória política (The JK Years: A Political Trajectory). Dir. Sílvio Tendler, Terra Filmes, 1980. Antônio das Mortes (original title in Portuguese: O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro). Dir. Glauber Rocha, Mapa Filmes, 1969. Um apólogo—Machado de Assis: 1839–1939 (An apologue—Machado de Assis: 1839–1939). Dir. Humberto Mauro and Lúcia Miguel-Pereira, INCE, 1936; color version, 1939. As aranhas (Spiders). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1938. Arraial do Cabo. Dir. Mário Carneiro and Paulo César Saraceni, Saga Filmes, 1959. Aruanda. Dir. Linduarte Noronha, Noronha e Vieira, 1960. Baile perfumado (Perfumed Ball). Dir. Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira, Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, Eletrobrás, Banco do Nordeste do Brasil, 1997. Bahia de Todos os Santos. Dir. Trigueirinho Neto, Ubayara Filmes, 1960. Barravento (The Turning Wind). Dir. Glauber Rocha, Iglu Filmes, 1962. 253

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The Battleship Potemkin. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, Mosfilm, 1925. Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. Dir. Walter Ruttmann, Les Productions Fox Europa, Deutsche Vereins-Film, 1927. Beste (Crossbow). Dir. Sérgio Muniz, Thomaz Farkas, 1970. Blonde Venus. Dir. Josef von Sternberg, prod. Josef von Sternberg, 1932. Boca de lixo (Scavengers). Dir. Eduardo Coutinho, Cine Clube da FAFICH, 1992. Brasa dormida (Sleeping ember). Dir. Humberto Mauro, prod. Agenor Cortes de Barros and Humberto Cortes Domingues, 1928. Brasil verdade (Brazil truth). Dir. Thomaz Farkas, prod. Thomaz Farkas, 1968. (Four Caravana Farkas shorts.) Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova (Brasília: Contradictions of a new city). Dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Filmes do Serro, 1967. Brasília: Planejamento urbano (Brasília: Urban planning). Dir. Fernando Cony Campos, INCE, 1964. Bye Bye Brasil (Bye Bye Brazil). Dir. Carlos Diegues, Produções Cinematográficas L. C. Barreto, 1980. Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later). Dir. Eduardo Coutinho, Centro Popular de Cultura da UNE, 1984. Caiçara. Dir. Adolfo Celi, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1950. Câncer. Dir. Glauber Rocha, Mapa Filmes, 1972. Cândido Portinari: Um pintor de Brodósqui (Cândido Portinari: A painter from Brodósqui). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, Instituto Nacional de Cinema, 1968. O cangaceiro (The Bandit). Dir. Lima Barreto, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1953. O canto da saudade (Song of longing). Dir. Humberto Mauro, Estúdios Rancho Alegre, 1952. Carlota Joaquina: Princesa do Brazil (Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil). Dir. Carla Camurati, Quanta Central de Produção, 1995. Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. Dir. Helena Solberg, International Cinema Corporation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Channel 4 Television, National Latino Communications Center, Rádio e Televisão Portuguesa, 1994. Casa da farinha (Manioc flour house). Dir. Geraldo Sarno, Thomaz Farkas, 1969–1970. Casa grande & senzala (Masters and the Slaves). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Regina Filmes, VideoFilmes, GNT Globosat, 2001. Certas palavras com Chico Buarque de Holanda (Certain words with Chico Buarque de Holanda). Dir. Maurício Berú, Thomaz Farkas, 1980.

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255

Céu do Brasil no Rio de Janeiro (Brazilian sky in Rio de Janeiro). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE 1937. Christo Redemptor (Christ Redeemer). Dir. Bel Noronha, Bel Noronha Produções Artísticas, 2005. Cidadão Boilesen (Citizen Boilesen). Dir. Chaim Litewski, Palmares Produções e Jornalismo, 2009. A cidade é uma só? (The City Is Only One?) Dir. Adirley Queirós, 400 Filmes Serviço de Produção, Cinco da Norte—Serviços Audiovisuais, 2011. O cineasta da selva (Filmmaker of the Jungle). Dir. Aurélio Michiles, Cinematográfica Superfilmes, 1997. Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures). Dir. Marcelo Gomes, REC Produtores Associados, Dezenove Som e Imagens, 2005. Cinema Novo. Dir. Eryk Rocha, Companhia Eryk Rocha, 2016. O circo (The circus). Dir. Arnaldo Jabor, Sagitário Produções Cinematográficas, 1965. Circuito de São Gonçalo (São Gonçalo circuit). Dir. Alberto Botelho, 1909. Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles, prod. Orson Welles, 1941. The Cockettes. Dir. Bill Weber and David Weissman, prod. David Weiss­ man, 2002. Como era gostoso o meu francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Condor Filmes, Produções Cinema­ tográficas L. C. Barreto, 1972. Corumbiara. Dir. Vincent Carelli, Vídeo nas Aldeias, 2009. Couro de gato (Cat’s skin). Dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Saga Filmes, 1962. De raízes e rezas, entre outros (About roots and prayers, among others). Dir. Sérgio Muniz, Thomaz Farkas, 1972. Democracia em vertigem (The Edge of Democracy). Dir. Petra Costa, Busca Vida Filmes, 2019. O descobrimento do Brasil (The Discovery of Brazil). Dir. Humberto Mauro, Instituto de Cacau da Bahia, Ministério da Educação e Saúde Pública, INCE, Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1937. Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil). Dir. Glauber Rocha, Copacabana Filmes, 1964. Di Cavalcanti. Dir. Glauber Rocha, Embrafilme, Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1977. Um dia na rampa (A day at the ramp). Dir. Luiz Paulino dos Santos, prod. R. Fonseca, Primo Carbonari, 1960. Dia da pátria (Day of the fatherland). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1937. Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands). Dir. Bruno Barreto, Produções Cinematográficas L. C. Barreto, 1976.

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Dzi Croquettes. Dir. Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez, TRIA Productions, Canal Brasil, 2009. O engenho (The mill). Dir. Geraldo Sarno, Thomaz Farkas, 1970. A entrevista (The interview). Dir. Helena Solberg, Comissão de Ajuda à Indústria Cinematográfica, 1966. Era uma vez Iracema (Once upon a time there was Iracema). Dir. Jorge Bodanzky, CTAV, 2005. Estamira. Dir. Marcos Prado, Zazen Produções Audiovisuais, 2004. Expedição Roosevelt ao Matto Grosso (Roosevelt expedition to Mato Grosso). Dir. Luiz Thomas Reis, Comissão Rondon, 1915. F for Fake. Dir. Orson Welles, François Reichenbach, Dominique Antoine, Richard Drewett, 1973. A família do Presidente Prudente de Morais no Palácio do Catete (The family of President Prudente de Morais in the Catete Palace). Dir. Afonso Segreto, 1898. Febre amarela I; Febre amarela II (Yellow Fever I; Yellow Fever II). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1938. As festas no Amazonas (Festivities in the Amazon), 1909. Festejos realizados no Rio de Janeiro em honra do ex-Presidente Theodoro Roosevelt (Festivities held in Rio de Janeiro in honor of former President Theodore Roosevelt), 1913. A fiandeira (The spinner). Dir. Ana Carolina, Área Produções Cinemato­ gráficas, 1970. Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx (Landscape Film: Roberto Burle Marx). Dir. João Vargas Penna, prod. André Carreira and João Vargas Penna, 2018. O fim e o princípio (The End and the Beginning). Dir. Eduardo Coutinho, TV Bandeirantes and Shell, 2006. Fome de amor (Hunger for Love). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Produtora Cinematográfica Herbert Richers, 1967. Fortalezas e navios de guerra na Baía de Guanabara (Forts and warships in Guanabara Bay). Dir. Afonso Segreto, 1898. Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon). Dir. Walter Avancini, Globo TV, 1975. Gamal: O delírio do sexo (Gamal: Delirium of sex). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, Tecla Produções Cinematográficas, 1971. The Gang’s All Here. Dir. Busby Berkeley, William Goetz, and William LeBaron, 1943. Ganga bruta. Dir. Humberto Mauro, Estúdios Cinédia, 1933 Ganga Zumba. Dir. Carlos Diegues, Copacabana Filmes, 1963.

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257

Garrincha: Alegria do povo (Garrincha: Joy of the People). Dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Produções Cinematográficas Herbert Richers, Produções Cinematográficas L. C. Barreto, 1962. Getúlio Vargas. Dir. Ana Carolina, Zoom Cinematográfica, 1974. Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil (Glauber, the film—Labyrinth of Brazil). Dir. Sílvio Tendler, Riofilme and Caliban Produções Cinematográficas, 2002. A grande feira (The Big Fair). Dir. Roberto Pires, Iglu Filmes, 1961. The Great Train Robbery. Dir. Edwin S. Porter, 1903. Herança do Nordeste (Northeastern heritage). Anthology produced by Caravana Farkas: Casa da farinha (Manioc flour house), dir. Geraldo Sarno, 1969–1970; Rastejador, s.m. (Tracker, m.n.), dir. Sérgio Muniz, 1972; Erva bruxa (Witch herb), dir. Paulo Gil Soares, 1969–1970; Jaramataia, dir. Paulo Gil Soares, 1970; Padre Cícero, dir. Geraldo Sarno, 1971. As hiper mulheres (The Hyperwomen). Dir. Vincent Carelli, Mahajugi Kuikuru, and Takimã Kuikuru, Vídeo nas Aldeias, 2011. O homem do Morcego (The man from Bat). Dir. Ruy Solberg, Sagitarius Filmes, 1980. La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces). Dir. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Grupo Cine Liberación, 1968. HU (University Hospital). Dir. Pedro Urano and Joana Traub Csekö, prod. Samantha Capideville, 2011. I Walked with a Zombie. Dir. Jacques Tourneur, prod. Val Lewton, 1943. Ikatena (Let’s hunt). Dir. Luiz Paulino dos Santos, Embrafilme, 1983. Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers). Dir. Jorge Furtado, Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre, 1989. Os imaginários (The image makers). Dir. Geraldo Sarno, Saruê Filmes, 1970. Índios no Brasil (Indians in Brazil). Dir. Vincent Carelli, Vídeo nas Aldeias, 2000. Indústria (Industry). Dir. Ana Carolina, 1969. Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Iracema). Dir. Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, Stopfilm, Jorge Bodanzky, and ZDF, 1974. Jango. Dir. Sílvio Tendler, Caliban Produções Cinematográficas and Rub Filmes, 1984. Joanna Francesa. Dir. Carlos Diegues, Zoom Cinematográfica, 1973. O joão de barro (Ovenbird). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1938, 1956. Jorjamado. Dir. Glauber Rocha, Embrafilme, 1977. (Also titled Jorge Amado no cinema.) Juízo (Behave). Dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, Diler e Associados, Nofoco Filmes, 2007.

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Jungle Headhunters. Dir. Julian Lesser, prod. Julian Lesser, 1950. Justiça (Justice). Dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, Limite Produções, Selfmade Filmes, NPS, 2004. Lampião. Dir. Benjamin Abrahão, Aba Film, 1936. A lavagem do Cristo (The washing of Christ). Dir. Roland Henze, Grupo Filmes, 1969. Lavra dor (Work pain). Dir. Paulo Rufino, prod. Paulo Rufino and Ana Carolina, 1968. Liberdade de imprensa (Press freedom). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, Grêmio da Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, Universidade de São Paulo, Jornal Amanhã, 1967. Limite (Limit). Dir. Mário Peixoto, prod. Mário Peixoto, 1931. Maioria absoluta (Absolute majority). Dir. Leon Hirszman, Leon Hirszman Produções, 1964. Man with a Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov, VUFKU, 1929. Manhã cinzenta (Gray morning). Dir. Olney São Paulo, 1968. Manhatta. Dir. Paul Strand, 1921. Mato eles? (Should I Kill Them?). Dir. Sérgio Bianchi, Sérgio Bianchi Produções Cinematográficas, 1983. Memória do cangaço (Memory of banditry). Dir. Paul Gil Soares, Thomaz Farkas, 1964. Menino de engenho (Plantation Boy). Dir. Walter Lima Jr., Mapa Filmes, 1965. Migrantes (Migrants). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, TV Cultura Raíz Produções Cinematográficas, 1972. Monteiro Lobato. Dir. Ana Carolina, Saruê Filmes, 1971. Morro dos prazeres (Hill of Pleasures). Dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, prod. Janneke Doolaard and Maria Augusta Ramos, 2013. A morte do boi (Death of the ox). Dir. Paulo Gil Soares, Thomaz Farkas, 1969–1970. O mundo mágico dos Trapalhões (The magic world of the Trapalhões). Dir. Sílvio Tendler, Renato Argão Produções Artísticas, 1981. A música segundo Tom Jobim (The Music According to Antônio Carlos Jobim). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Regina Filmes, 2012. Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert Flaherty, Les Frères Revillon, Pathé Exchange, 1922. A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (Denying Brazil: Blacks in the Brazilian Telenovela). Dir. Joel Zito Araújo, Casa de Criação, 2000. Nelson Pereira dos Santos saúda o povo e pede passagem (Nelson Pereira greets the people and asks to enter). Dir. Ana Carolina, Embrafilme, 1978. Nelson Freire. Dir. João Moreira Salles, VideoFilmes, 2003.

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259

Night Mail. Dir. Harry Watt and Basil Wright, prod. Henry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936. Night of Terror. Dir. Benjamin Stoloff, Bryan Foy Productions, 1933. Nossa escola de samba (Our samba school). Dir. Manuel Horacio Giménez, Thomaz Farkas, 1965. Notícias de uma guerra particular (News from a Personal War). Dir. João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund, VideoFilmes, 1999. Obras novas: A evolução de uma indústria (New works: The evolution of an industry). Dir. Lima Barreto, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1953. Onde a terra acaba (Where the Land Ends). Dir. Sérgio Machado, VideoFilmes, 2001. Ônibus 174 (Bus 174). Dir. José Padilla and Felipe Lacerda, Zazen Produções, 2002. A opinião pública (Public opinion). Dir. Arnaldo Jabor, Sagitário Produções, Verba, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1967. O pagador de promessas (Journey to Bahia). Dir. Anselmo Duarte, Cinedistri, 1962. O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds). Dir. Kléber Mendonça Filho, Cinemascópio Produções, 2012. Painel (Panel). Dir. Lima Barreto, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1950). No país das amazonas (In the country of the Amazons). Dir. Silvino Santos, prod. J. G. de Araújo, 1922. Panorama do cinema paulista (Panorama of São Paulo cinema). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, 1972. Series with Paulicéia fantástica (Fantastic São Paulo), 1970; Eterna esperança (Eternal hope), 1971; Vera Cruz, 1972. Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus). Dir. Marcel Camus, Dispat Films, 1959. Um passaporte húngaro (A Hungarian Passport). Dir. Sandra Kogut, Zeugma Films, República Pureza Filmes, Arte France, Hunnia Film Studio, Cobra Filmes, RTBF-Brussels, CIVC Pierre Schaeffer, 2001. Pátria minha (Country of mine). Dir. Dennis Carvalho, Rede Globo, 1994–1995 (203 episodes). Pedreira (Quarry). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, TV Cultura, 1973. Poços rurais (Rural wells). Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1959. O processo (The Trial). Dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, Nofoco Produções Cinematográficas, Autentika Films, Canal Brazil, 2018. Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, prod. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. ¡Qué viva México! Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1931; Mexican Picture Trust, 1979.

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Rádio auriverde (Green and yellow radio). Dir. Sylvio Back, Sylvio Back Produções Cinematográficas, Usina de Kyno, 1991. Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Regina Filmes, VideoFilmes, 2003. Rastejador, s.m (Tracker, m.n. [masculine noun]). Dir. Sérgio Muniz, Thomaz Farkas, 1972. Recife frio (Cold Tropics). Dir. Kléber Mendonça Filho, Cinemascópio Produções, 2009. O rei Pelé (King Pelé). Dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen, prod. Fábio Cardoso, 1962. República Guarani (Guarani republic). Dir. Sylvio Back, Usina de Kyno, Embrafilme, 1981. Restos (Remains). Dir. João Batista de Andrade, Raíz, 1975. Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time). Dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, Néofilm, 1926. Rio, 40 graus (Rio, 100 Degrees). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Equipe Moacir Fenelon, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1956. Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, Northern Zone). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, prod. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1957. Rocha que voa (Stones in the Sky). Dir. Eryk Rocha, Tarcisio Vidigal, 2002. Rondônia. Dir. Edgard Roquette-Pinto, 1912. Saludos amigos! Dir. Walt Disney, prod. Walt Disney, 1942. Sangue mineiro (Blood of Minas). Dir. Humberto Mauro, Phebo Filme do Brasil, 1929. Santuário (Sanctuary). Dir. Lima Barreto, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1951. São Bernardo. Dir. Leon Hirszman, prod. Márcio Noronha, Henrique Coutinho, and Luna Moschovitch, 1972. São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (São Paulo: Symphony of the metropolis). Dir. Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig, Rex Filme, 1929. São Paulo em festa (São Paulo in celebration). Dir. Lima Barreto, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, 1954. São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas (São Paulo in twenty-four hours). Dir. Alberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig, Rex Filme, 1934. Seca (Drought). Dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, Nofoco Filmes, 2014. La spirale (The Spiral). Dir. Chris Marker, Les Films Molière, 1975. Springtime in the Rockies. Dir. Irving Cummings, prod. William LeBaron and William Goetz, 1941. Subterrâneos do futebol (Dark side of soccer). Dir. Maurice Capovilla, Thomaz Farkas, 1965.

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261

Tarzan, the Ape Man. Dir. W. S. Van Dyke, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932. Tenda dos milagres (Tent of Miracles). Dir. Paulo José, Walter Campos, Denise Saraceni. TV series, Rede Globo, 1985, 30 episodes. Terra em transe (Land in Anguish). Dir. Glauber Rocha, Mapa Produções Cinematográficas, 1968. Tesouro perdido (Lost treasure). Dir. Humberto Mauro, Phebo Sul-América Filme, 1927. The Third Man. Dir. Carol Reed, London Films, 1949. Tire dié (Throw Me a Dime). Dir. Fernando Birri, prod. Edgardo Pallero, 1958. Três desenhos (Three designs). Dir. Ana Carolina, Área Produções Cinematográficas, 1970. La via del petrolio (The path of oil). Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, prod. Giorgio Patara, 1967. Vidas secas (Barren Lives). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, prod. Herbert Richers, Danilo Trelles, and Luiz Carlos Barreto, 1963. Video in the Villages Presents Itself. Dir. Mari Corrêa and Vincent Carelli, Vídeo nas Aldeias, 2002. Viramundo (World traveler). Dir. Geraldo Sarno, Thomaz Farkas, 1964–1965. Vitória régia. Dir. Humberto Mauro, INCE, 1937. Walter.doc. Dir. Beth Formaggini, prod. Beth Formaggini, 2000. Weekend in Havana. Dir. Walter Lang, prod. William LeBaron and Darryl F. Zanuck, 1941. Xica da Silva. Dir. Carlos Diegues, J. B. Produções Cinematográficas, Distrifilmes, 1976. Yndio do Brasil (Our Indians). Dir. Sylvio Back, Usina de Kyno, 1995.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Ancoradouro de pescadores na Baía de Guanabara (1897); Fortalezas e navios de guerra na Baía de Guanabara (1898); A família do Presidente Prudente de Morais no Palácio do Catete (1898). In the booklet Resgate do cinema silencioso brasileiro (2010, Recovery of Brazilian silent cinema) accompanying a DVD collection of twenty-seven early films prepared by Cinemateca Brasileira, the staff estimates that of the more than four thousand documentary and fiction films made prior to sound (1930) in Brazil, only 7 percent, 120 hours of projection, has survived. The oldest fragment of a fiction film is from Os óculos do vovó (1913, Grandad’s spectacles), made in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, by the Portuguese actor and businessman Francisco Santos. 2. There is no material evidence of that footage. Numerous fires caused by nitrate films at the Cinemateca Brasileira greatly affected its archive of early silent cinema. 3. The Rio debut of the machine called the Omnigraph was on July 8, 1896, which is generally the date given for Brazil’s first film showing. The Rio newspaper Jornal do Comércio reported, “It is possible that in the race to exploit commercially the projection of animated images, the Lumières were beat out in Brazil by some rival Franco-sharpshooter.” The newspaper article is quoted in Vicente de Paula Araújo, A bela época do cinema brasileiro, 74. Araújo’s book is an essential source for the history of early cinema based on newspaper commentary of the period. 4. “Silent Documentary,” in Fernão Ramos and Luiz Felipe Miranda, eds., Enciclopédia do cinema brasileiro, 177–180. 5. The dates are based on Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque. 6. All film titles in translation that are italicized were released in English-language versions with English subtitles. Those that are not italicized are my translations. 7. For the film, little more than a minute, and an overview of the footage and its context, consult Pedro de Albuquerque Maranhão, “Circuito de São Gonçalo,” Bandeira Quadriculada, http://www.bandeiraquadriculada.com.br/Circuito%20de​ %20S.Goncalo.htm. For a detailed study of the images, see Carolina Azevedo di Giacomo, “Espectadores em trânsito.” 8. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Portuguese are my own. 9. A power outage at the shuttered Cinemateca Brasileira resulted in the institution’s reference site, Banco de Conteúdos Culturais, going offline in late 2020. Fixed and back online over a year later, the site is at http://www.bcc.gov.br. 263

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10. The resurgence benefited from audiovisual incentives under the 1991 Rouanet Law and the 1993 Audiovisual Law. For a detailed study of the retomada in its economic and political context, see Marcelo Ikeda, Cinema brasileiro a partir da retomada. Chapter 1. The Jungle and the City 1. The epigraph and the information on Amazons Day are from Eduardo Morettin, “Tradição e modernidade nos documentários de Silvino Santos,” 163. Luciana Martins describes the many steps taken by the government to modernize Rio in preparation for the exhibit (“Silvino Santos: Documenting Modern Brazil,” especially 21–27, in her Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil). 2. Selda Vale da Costa and Narciso Júlio Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 166. 3. Vale da Costa and Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 39. 4. Vale da Costa and Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 19. 5. Márcio Souza, Silvino Santos: O cineasta do ciclo da borracha, 77-78; Marcia Eliane Alves de Souza e Mello, “O império comercial de J. G. Araújo e seu legado para a Amazônia (1879-1989),” 29. 6. Vale da Costa and Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 23–24. 7. Silvino Santos, Álbum de fotografías. 8. Vale da Costa and Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 31. 9. Vale da Costa and Freire Lobo, No rastro de Silvino Santos, 31. 10. One example is the exhibition of artwork by Anita Malfatti in São Paulo in 1917. Her modernist paintings were scathingly critiqued by the veteran conservative writer Monteiro Lobato in a review for the Estado de São Paulo that was reprinted as “Paranóia ou mistificação” (Paranoia or mystification) under the title “A propósito de Anita Malfatti” (On the subject of Anita Malfatti) on December 20, 1917. 11. Ismail Xavier, Sétima arte: Um culto moderno, 145. The film critic José Carlos Avellar states in his book O cinema dilacerado that Mário de Andrade was “filming” in his literary works better than people who were in the movie business in Brazil at that time (204). For more on Andrade and the cinema, see João Manuel dos Santos Cunha, A lição aproveitada. 12. The data on the number and titles of films released in 1922 are from Antônio Leão da Silva Neto, ed., Dicionário de filmes brasileiros, 919. 13. Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 13. See also Maite Conde’s discussion of the economic situation at the time as well as influential early newsreels (cavações) and stylistic considerations in her chapter on São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole in Foundational Films, 224–241. 14. Eduardo Morettin writes that Independência collaborated on films with the Rio production company Omnia Film, headed by Mário Almeida Borges Barreto. One of their commissions was to make a film about the state of São Paulo. In “Um apóstolo do modernismo,” Morettin also offers details on Pamplona’s work for the Rio centennial.

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15. For more information on Kemeny, see Maria Rita Galvão, Crônica do cinema paulistano, 159–166; Luiz F. Miranda, ed., Dicionário de cineasts brasileiros, 176–177. 16. According to information in the Cinemateca Brasileira’s online Filmografia, the music for São Paulo was composed by the renowned Gaó Gurgel, who, as a young talent in the 1910s and 1920s, adapted music for silent movies. 17. Galvão, Crônica do cinema paulistano, 163. In his enthusiastic review of São Paulo in the September 18, 1929, issue of Cinearte, the critic Octávio Gabus Mendes mentions the influence of Berlin, which had played at the Royal cinema; his review is archived at the Biblioteca Nacional’s Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira, http://hemerotecadigital.bn.br/acervo-digital/cinearte/162531. 18. André P. Gatti, “Uma metrópole em busca da sua autodeterminação cinematográfica.” To date, no documentation has been found on the film’s finances. 19. The only other Black person to appear in the film is an enslaved man in a reenactment of Brazilian independence. 20. For more on A Defesa Nacional and its publishers’ ideology, see Frank D. McCann, Soldiers of the Pátria, especially 184. 21. According to 1916 data, Italian immigrants and descendants constituted nearly 40 percent of the capital’s population. This explains the number of Italian newspapers in São Paulo, although only some of the population was literate (Angelo Trento, Do outro lado do Atlântico, 124). 22. See Maria Luzia Tucci Carneiro, “Fascistas à brasileira,” 434. 23. Fascism would gain further ground after the October 1930 revolution and rise of Getúlio Vargas, with the founding of Brazilian Integralism in 1932 by Semana de Arte Moderna writer-participant Plínio Salgado. His green-shirted paramilitary organization was especially attractive to the Italian-Brazilian and German-Brazilian popular classes and wielded considerable power during the early years of Vargas’s presidency. 24. Paramount was the main distributor for Rex Filme newsreels, São Paulo, and documentary shorts. Their relationship lasted until the late 1930s (Galvão, Crônica do cinema paulistano, 162). 25. Interestingly, Coisas nossas featured the poet and film critic Guilherme de Almeida among its actors; Gaó Gurgel, who arranged the musical accompaniment for São Paulo, was among the composers whose music appeared in the film. A Rossi-Rex production, São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas was made after Rex Filme joined forces in 1933 with Rossi Filmes, which made government documentaries. Their relationship lasted until 1938. Ultimately, Lustig and Kemeny abandoned production and specialized in technical assistance as photographers, cameramen, and sound experts. Information is from the online Filmografia at the Cinemateca Brasileira. Chapter 2. Government Educational Shorts, Bandit Footage, and Vera Cruz Documentaries The epigraph is quoted from a speech titled “O cinema nacional” that Vargas gave in 1934 at a gathering of Brazilian film distributors and exhibitors. The full text

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is posted in the presidential library archives, at http://www.biblioteca.presidencia​ .gov.br/presidencia/ex-presidentes/getulio-vargas/discursos/1934/04.pdf/view. 1. The “whereas” section that begins Decree 21.240, establishing the censorship commission, can be found on the website of the Associação Nacional de Cinema (Ancine), https://www.ancine.gov.br/pt-br/legislacao/decretos/decreto-n-21240​ -de-4-de-abril-de-1932. 2. Eduardo Morettin, “Cinema educativo,” 14–15. 3. Article 7, section 3. Not everyone was happy with the government’s push for educational films to replace commercial entertainment for children. In a July 30, 1933, interview in the Diário de Notícias, the law professor and cinephile Gilberto Amado stated, “If they begin changing cinema from entertainment into an in­stru­ ment of moral enforcement, then there goes one of humanity’s most beautiful inventions” (Arquivo Roquette-Pinto, folder 26-6-10, Academia Brasileira de Letras, Rio de Janeiro). 4. The film historian Randal Johnson and other scholars have noted that the 1932 decree mandating compulsory educational film showings did not take effect until 1934. For additional discussion of the legislation and the film industry’s reaction, see Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil, especially 46–51; Anita Simis, Estado e cinema no Brasil. 5. Numerous documents in the Roquette-Pinto archive at the Academia Brasileira de Letras pertain to the rules and regulations of and correspondence received by the censorship committee. In a July 27, 1932, letter, Ademar Leite Ribeiro of the Associação Brasileira de Cinematografia requests that the committee lift the censoring of Tarzan, the Ape Man; it includes an article with a photograph that shows a long line of children waiting to see the film in Baltimore, Maryland. In a letter dated December 31, 1933, Alberto Torres Filho, president of the Associação Brasileira de Cinematografia, asks that the censorship of newsreels be lifted to ensure that news would reach the public. There were also complaints leveled at the committee. On March 7, 1933, Roquette-Pinto received a telegram from Joaquim Rodrigues protesting the release of a film shown at Rio’s Odeon movie theater with “genteel young ladies dressed [in] bathing suits [with an] ill-at-ease attitude as well as [a] dispiriting campaign against Lloyds of Brazil and appearances of carnival revelers sleeping in the street as if they were drunk all this causing [the] worst effect [on the] spirit [of] foreigners [who] visit us.” In a letter dated November 10, 1934, Eduardo Pacheco de Andrade, a member of the censorship commission, resigned his seat, disagreeing with the censorship of Columbia Pictures’ 1932 Night of Terror while other horror films were passed by the committee. These and other documents on censorship can be found in the Academia Brasileira de Letras archive folder “Censura cinematográfica” no. 27-6-01. 6. For a detailed discussion of the power struggle between education and justice see Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, especially chapter 3. 7. Vargas, “O cinema nacional” speech. The National Constituent Assembly voted for Vargas as president and legitimized his provisional government that

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had been installed after the October 1930 revolution overthrew the São Paulo stronghold of President Washington Luís, whose term was about to end. Luís’s candidate from São Paulo, Júlio Prestes, had won the 1930 presidential election but had yet to be inaugurated when the revolutionary forces ushered Vargas, the opposition candidate from Rio Grande do Sul, into office. For a detailed study of this period, see Thomas Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 3–48. 8. The INCE was officially decreed on January 13, 1937. For a discussion of educational films and activities prior to the creation of INCE, see Eduardo Morettin, Humberto Mauro, cinema, história, especially 148–159. 9. An annual catalogue of INCE films suggests that the total number from 1936 to 1966 was 412 titles. This number does not include educational films acquired domestically and abroad for the institute’s lending film library, which had close to 600 titles. Carlos Roberto de Souza has found that films acquired from abroad were “adapted” to the Brazilian reality, which involved translating subtitles, adding soundtracks, or making editing changes (“Cinema em tempos de Capanema,” 168–169). See also Souza’s Catálogo de filmes produzidos pelo INCE based on various publications about annual INCE production. The number of films made by Mauro is based on this catalogue. 10. In a September 22, 1934, letter, the cabinet official Luiz Simões Lopes wrote enthusiastically to Vargas about the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Lopes expressed admiration for the ways it had rapidly shaped mass communication to support Hitler’s National Socialist regime. Lopes wrote that he was so impressed that he stayed eight days in Berlin to take notes on the ministry’s activities and legislation. Lopes’s letter is available in the Arquivo Gustavo Capenema at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, http://docvirt.com/docreader.net/docreader​ .aspx?bib=ARQ_GC_G&pasta=GC%20g%201934.09.22. 11. For more information on the functions of the DIP see “Fatos e imagens, DIP,” Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, n.d., http://cpdoc.fgv.br/producao/dossies​ /FatosImagens/DIP. 12. C. Souza, “Cinema em tempos de Capanema,” 161. 13. Machado de Assis, Seus 30 melhores contos, 308. 14. C. Souza, “Cinema em tempos de Capanema,” 170. 15. Sheila Schvarzman, Humberto Mauro e as imagens do Brasil, 216. 16. Among other places, INCE films were shown in Brussels and at West Point Academy in the United States. Considerable publicity about INCE films in the 1950s is archived at the Cinemateca, including the article “O INCE na vanguarda do cinema brasileiro” in A Noite of November 13, 1956 (folder 3, Pedro de Lima Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo). 17. Eduardo Morettin writes the definitive study of O descobrimento do Brasil in Humberto Mauro, cinema, história. 18. Randal Johnson writes at length on Mauro’s Brasilianas series in

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“Documentary Discourses and National Identity,” 193–206. Mauro encouraged young directors and lent Nelson Pereira dos Santos a camera to make his first feature, Rio, 40 graus (1956), which is widely regarded as the precursor of Cinema Novo. 19. Marcelo Gomes’s 2005 movie Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures) is about a German salesman of Bayer aspirin who befriends a peasant turned movie projectionist in pre–World War II Brazil. 20. Frederico Pernambuco de Mello, Benjamin Abrahão: Entre anjos e cangaceiros, 135, 213. 21. Pernambuco de Mello, Benjamin Abrahão, 175, 205. 22. “Brasiliana fotográfica,” Instituto Moreira Salles, http://brasilianafotografica​ .bn.br/?tag=lampiao. 23. There are estimates of eight hundred meters and two thousand meters (Pernambuco de Mello, Benjamin Abrahão, 160, 214). 24. Quoted in Pernambuco de Mello, Benjamin Abrahão, 143. 25. Quoted in Pernambuco de Mello, Benjamin Abrahão, 142. 26. For more commentary on the surge of cultural activity in São Paulo in this period, consult Maria Rita Galvão, Burguesia e cinema; Afrânio Mendes Catani, “A aventura industrial e o cinema paulista.” 27. Campos Silva’s observations are cited in Catani, “A aventura industrial,” 193–194. 28. Already in 1951, Vera Cruz was writing to INCE to inquire about some form of governmental support (letter to Roberto Assumpção de Araújo, INCE, April 15, 1951, Arquivo Roquette-Pinto, folder 27-6-09). 29. A fifth documentary, on the art of Marcelo Grassman, was made by Walter Khouri in 1971 under the Vera Cruz name, although the company ceased making films in 1954. 30. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, 115. 31. A melodrama about romantic tensions on Ilhabela, an island off the São Paulo coast, the plot involves faux African incantations and rituals reminiscent of the voodoo segments in Hollywood’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943). 32. The panels were sold because the Colégio de Cataguases could not afford to preserve them. A mural-size photograph of the panels replaced the original artwork at the school. 33. In Tribuna da Imprensa, September 3, 1951. Barreto had a reputation for being a difficult person. On April 11, 1953, a biographical piece about him in Manchete quoted him: “I was always pretentious and I always practiced pretentiousness on purpose.” 34. There is no reference to the composer of the music, but it was likely Gabriel Migliori, with whom Barreto worked on Santuário. Chapter 3. Documentary and Cinema Novo 1. In interviews, Pereira dos Santos often talked about learning his craft and earning a living by shooting documentary footage that was used without attribution

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on news programs and other broadcasts. His first film, Juventude (Youth), was a 16 mm, black-and-white documentary about São Paulo workers; he made the forty-five-minute film with engineering student Mendel Charatz. It was shown at the Communist Party’s Youth Festival in Berlin in 1950, and the negative was never returned to Brazil. Charatz said pieces of the negative were used in propaganda films made later in Berlin. Information on Juventude is from the Cinemateca Brasileira’s online Filmografia, at http://cinemateca.org.br/filmografia-brasileira/. 2. For more on the history and mission of this government initiative, consult Iraíde Marques Freitas Barreiro, Política de educação no campo. 3. “50 anos em 5” was the motto of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s government (1956–1961) and is most closely associated with the building of Brasília. 4. The film historian Alexandre Figuerôa reports that Arraial was shown at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris as part of an ethnographic film series proposed by Jean Rouch, who had awarded the prize to the film in Santa Margherita (Cinema Novo, 41). 5. Walter C. Luiz Mattos Pereira, “Vagas da modernidade,” 331. 6. Mattos Pereira, “Vagas da modernidade,” 331. 7. Mattos Pereira, “Vagas da modernidade,” 335. 8. Mattos Pereira, “Vagas da modernidade,” 330. 9. Paulo César Saraceni, Por dentro do Cinema Novo, 51–53. 10. The text was written by Cláudio Melo Souza and narrated by Ítalo Rossi. 11. Jean-Claude Bernardet, “Dois documentários,” in Trajetória crítica, 52. 12. Mattos Pereira, “Vagas da modernidade,” 338. 13. Glauber Rocha, “Documentários: Arraial do Cabo e Aruanda.” 14. Despite Noronha’s claim to have written the script alone, Carvalho and Mello are on record as having worked on it. Disagreement over this issue caused a twenty-year break in the friendship between Noronha and Carvalho, the latter of whom went on to direct several important documentaries. Aruanda’s credits begin with “Noronha e Vieira Apresentam,” acknowledging Noronha’s appreciation for his cinematographer, while Carvalho and Mello are credited as assistant directors. For more on the film’s history see José Marinho, Dos homens e das pedras. 15. There are but a few bars of music played repeatedly by Pombal. Noronha was firm in his desire to use local music despite concern that the music was too repetitious and did not work in the film. He mentioned this to Humberto Mauro, who encouraged him to use the soundtrack. Noronha’s interview is quoted in Marinho, Dos homens e das pedras, 158. 16. The interview is from an unpublished text by Saulo Moreno quoted in Marinho, Dos homens e das pedras, 120. 17. Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, “Quilombo and Utopia,” 248. 18. Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes’s November 19, 1960, article is reprinted in his Crítica do cinema no Suplemento Literário 2:292–295. He refers to Rocha’s essay “Documentários” published August 6, 1960, in Jornal do Brasil. Rocha was unable to attend the São Paulo conference because he was shooting his first fiction film, Barravento, in Bahia.

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19. Rocha recognized the existence of still other young documentary filmmakers in Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul who were working along lines similar to those of Saraceni and Noronha. In his Jornal do Brasil essay “Documentários,” his dismissal or lack of knowledge of earlier documentarians, with the exception of Humberto Mauro, is an example of Rocha’s tendency toward sweeping, hyperbolic, and debatable statements. But in the essay Rocha also suggests his support for cinematic efforts outside the film capitals of Rio and São Paulo, a comment that would include his own productions. 20. Jean-Claude Bernardet, “Dois documentários,” in Trajetória crítica, 55. 21. The background information on Barravento is from the online Filmografia at the Cinemateca Brasileira, at http://cinemateca.org.br/filmografia-brasileira/. 22. Dates vary on the production between 1955 and 1957, but the film was released in 1960. 23. I am grateful to Carlos Sandroni for finding the source of the film’s soundtrack. 24. Suely Braga da Silva reports that 93 percent of investment went to the first three sectors, while education and food received the rest. Brasília was financed separately (Silva, “50 anos em 5”). 25. Helena Salem, Leon Hirszman, 104. 26. Jabor is cited in Salem, Leon Hirszman, 149. For additional reading on Maioria absoluto see Arthur Autran, “Leon Hirszman: Em busca do diálogo.” 27. The reformas de base also pushed to ensure individual voting rights, force proper payment of taxes by multinationals for investment in Brazil, and wage a battle against illiteracy. 28. Salem, Leon Hirszman, 152. Salem quotes Ferreira Gullar, a well-known leftist at the time who said he hid for a month after the coup before recording the film’s narration. 29. For a study of coronelismo, see Marcos Vinicios Vilaça and Roberto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, Coronel, coronéis. 30. Leon Hirszman, interview, in O processo do cinema novo, 293. 31. Rocha writes about how unusual it was for the Brazilian government to have invited Sucksdorff to teach film classes at the time. Sucksdorff remained in Rio for many years. In 1965 he directed a docudrama titled My Home Is Copacabana (Rocha, Revolução do cinema novo, 446). 32. Jabor is interviewed on the DVD of O circo and his 1967 one-hour documentary A opinião pública. The DVD was produced by Versátil Home Video in 2006. 33. In Bye Bye Brasil, Diegues shifts emphasis from the impact on the circus of movies to that of television and the telenovela. 34. Two other important crew members who earlier worked on Arraial do Cabo were João Ramiro Mello and Vladimir Carvalho as assistant directors. 35. Rocha, Revolução do cinema novo, 466.

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Chapter 4. Documentary, Dictatorship, and Repression 1. For more on this period see Marshall C. Eakin, Brazil: The Once and Future Country, 55–60. 2. Additional information on Farkas and his photographic and film productions can be found in the February 26, 2014, online essay “A Caravana Farkas” by Sérgio Burgi at the Moreira Salles Institute site’s page on Farkas, at https://ims.com.br​ /por-dentro-acervos/a-caravana-farkas/. 3. Nontheatrical shorts were of less concern to the regime than features shown in theaters. The only censorship restriction placed on Brasil verdade was an audience-suitability rating that prevented anyone fourteen years or younger from seeing it. 4. Among other international awards received by Viramundo were for Best Documentary in Chile and in Uruguay and the Grand Prize in Evián, France. Memórias was awarded Best Documentary in Berlin and the Critics’ Award in Tours, France. 5. For additional commentary on the politics of direct sound in this period, see Sérgio Muniz, “Cinema direto—Anotações.” 6. Bumba-meu-boi is a northeastern folk performance in which rural workers confront and critique the landowning class. It involves music, dance, a resurrected ox figure, and audience participation. 7. Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Brazil, 179. 8. Like Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha had, Sarno also adopted a different view of religion from his filmmaking; for Sarno, that came about after making Viramundo. The syncretic mix of African Brazilian and Catholic religions, especially Candomblé, became more closely associated with solidarity and community activism for Sarno and other Cinema Novo directors. 9. Caravana Farkas’s Sérgio Muniz filmed the 35 mm color short Rastejador, s.m. (1970, Tracker, m.n. [masculine noun]) about professional trackers who helped the militia in their pursuit of bandits in the backlands. A former tracker recounts helping hunt down Lampião and his band in the mid-1930s. In the mid-1960s, after the military coup, the government sent troops with trackers to hunt down jagunços, hired guns contracted by powerful landowner bosses who often held honorific military titles such as “colonel.” 10. A 1963 memoir by João Saldanha, Os subterrâneos do futebol, about his career with the Botafogo soccer team, has a very different perspective from that of the film. 11. The film crew included Farkas as cinematographer and assistant director Terezinha Muniz. 12. In 1969, accused of aiding and abetting urban armed guerrillas, Thomaz Farkas was arrested by the regime. Found innocent of the charge, he was released after being imprisoned for one week. In 1970 his son, Pedro, was arrested and imprisoned for helping individuals targeted by the regime to flee the country. This information was provided to me by Sérgio Muniz and Pedro Farkas in an email dated January 14, 2019.

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13. In another email on January 14, 2019, Muniz wrote that he had to cut the scene to get approval, but he retained it when the film was shown nontheatrically. 14. There are references to their codirectorship of the film, but only Rufino appears as director in the film credits. 15. The epigraph is from Goulart’s speech at Rio’s Central do Brasil train station at that rally, published in Goulart, Discursos selecionados. 16. Marcos Napolitano, “The Brazilian Military Regime 1964-1985.” 17. Rufino invited a local politician to read from Goulart’s speech; the actor Jofre Soares, whom Nelson Pereira dos Santos had cast as the cruel landowner in Vidas secas, gives voice to the peasant. 18. Chamie’s volume received wide critical praise and in 1963 won the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters Jabuti Prize for literature. 19. In addition to Lavra dor, she arranged the music for three 1970 Caravana Farkas films directed by Geraldo Sarno: Casa da farinha (Manioc flour house), Os imaginários (The image makers), about Northeastern artisans, and O engenho (The mill), about sugarcane processing. 20. Ultimately the industrial push was stalled by the worldwide impact of the 1973 oil crisis. Brazil’s dependence on foreign oil led to increasingly heavy borrowing by the dictatorship and a burgeoning national debt. By the late 1970s the failure of the “Brazilian miracle” was more than evident, leading to the military’s decision to gradually return Brazil to civilian rule. 21. For a detailed discussion of Indústria, see Jean-Claude Bernardet, “A voz do documentarista,” in his Cineastas e imagens do povo, 98–109. 22. The biographical information is based on Mariana Tavares’s commentary in her introduction to Helena Solberg, 24, 26. The volume derives from a retrospective of Solberg’s films organized by the festival É Tudo Verdade in 2014. 23. João Batista de Andrade, “Uma trajetória particular,” 250. 24. The unfinished short was a collaboration by Andrade and three other students in a film group called the Grupo Kuatro; they had planned to make a series of documentaries for the student union. (Ramos and Miranda, eds., Enciclopédia do cinema brasileiro, 22). 25. Renata Alves de Paiva Fortes, “A obra documentária de João Batista de Andrade,” 35. 26. Andrade’s frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Bernardet called Andrade’s on-screen presence a tactic to disrupt the “fetish of the real” (“Em busca de uma nova dramaturgia documentária,” in Bernardet’s Cineastas e imagens do povo, 74–75). 27. Even prior to the military dictatorship, such expectations of political fidelity can be seen. In 1963 Nelson Pereira dos Santos was criticized by left-wing film critics for having adapted Boca de ouro (Gold Mouth) by the conservative playwright Nelson Rodrigues. 28. Bernardet was codirector on the series, but his name could not be used on the project. In 1969 he and many others were targeted by the dictatorship for their political activism and stripped of their civil rights. Panorama do cinema paulista

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included discussion of Paulicéia fantástica (1970, Fantastic São Paulo), about the early history of cinema in São Paulo; Eterna esperança (1971, Eternal hope), a critique of a 1930s company, Companhia Americana de Filmes, whose only film was titled Eterna esperança (1940); and Vera Cruz, about the Hollywood-style studio from the late 1940s and early 1950s. 29. Gamal was one of a growing number of erotic films appearing during the post-1968 dictatorship. “Boca do Lixo” refers to an area in downtown São Paulo where cheap independent movies with erotic content were made. Regarded as the most ambitious of the Boca do Lixo productions, Gamal was awarded the Air France Prize. In later years Andrade wrote critically about Gamal as an escapist film and radical departure from his long-held political interests (“Uma trajetória particular,” 257). This was true of other filmmakers during the regime, as evidenced by the surge in erotic and iconoclastic movies and the boom in pornochanchadas (soft-core musical comedies), all of which often received government backing. 30. Jordão and Herzog left Brazil after the military coup and worked for the BBC in London until their return in 1972. 31. Andrade writes that he had to defend himself from those who felt his move to television was “a ‘treason’ against cinema, culture, and the opposition” (O povo fala, 39). For an extended comment on filmmakers who worked for television see Ana Cláudia de Freitas Resende, “Globo Repórter.” 32. J. Andrade, O povo fala, 258. 33. Shortly after its appearance on television, Migrantes won the prize for best 16 mm documentary at a festival in Salvador sponsored by the Universidade Federal da Bahia. The film can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch​ ?v=cRu06H45eE4. Sebastião was an obvious inspiration for Deraldo (José Dumont), a migrant from the Northeast recently arrived in São Paulo; Deraldo is the protagonist in Andrade’s popular dramatic feature O homem que virou suco (1980, The Man Who Turned into Juice). Although Deraldo is an exaggeratedly defiant and sassy as well as tragic-comic character, like Sebastião, he is not afraid to speak out against middle-class prejudices toward northeastern migrants. 34. J. Andrade, O povo fala, 90–91. 35. J. Andrade, O povo fala, 92. The materials, including the three documentaries, are housed at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo. By government order, Jordão was removed from his position at Hora da Notícia in 1974; subsequently he joined TV Globo, where he headed the news program Globo Repórter and hired Andrade to make documentaries. In 1975, a year after leaving Hora da Notícia, Vladimir Herzog was invited to return to TV Cultura to relaunch the news program. The invitation came as the hint of a political opening was in the air under President Ernesto Geisel. Herzog’s public renown as a journalist did not spare him from attacks by the conservative press. A member of the banned Communist Party, he was arrested and taken for interrogation to jail, where he was tortured and died.

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Chapter 5. Biographies of a Sort, Part I (1974–1989) In the epigraph on page 135, Julião refers to Francisco Julião, a lawyer who worked on behalf of peasant leagues in the Northeast. 1. Thayer Watkins, Plano de Integração Nacional (PIN); Colin M. MacLachlan, A History of Brazil, 152–153. 2. The documentary is on the DVD of Iracema produced in 2005–2006 by VideoFilmes. 3. Ismail Xavier, “Iracema: Transcending Cinema Verité,” 368. 4. For more on the early Geisel administration, consult Thomas Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, especially 172–178. 5. Early civilian opposition groups included the Church and the bar association. 6. Ana Carolina (Teixeira Soares), interview, Memória do cinema brasileiro, 28. 7. The scene from the 1957 film is historically incongruent with the rest of the film’s footage, but Ana Carolina was an admirer of Nelson Pereira dos Santos and clearly wanted to showcase his work and Grande Otelo’s singing. Her follow-up to Getúlio Vargas was a 1978 feature about the director’s career titled Nelson Pereira dos Santos saúda o povo e pede passagem (Nelson Pereira dos Santos greets the people and asks to enter). 8. In 1980 it was also shown at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Gramado Film Festival in Rio Grande do Sul, where it won the Special Jury Prize and prize for Best Editing. The film went on to circulate widely and was another example of the commercial potential of documentary. 9. Amir Labaki, Introdução ao documentário brasileiro, 108–109. In a 2012 interview Tendler talks about the dangers of making the film at the time and expresses his gratitude to producer Hélio Prado Ferraz and Terra Filmes for staying the course with him. Conducted by Claudiney Ferreira, the interview is part of a series by Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. 10. Skidmore, Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 203. 11. Ramos and Miranda, eds., Enciclopédia do cinema brasileiro, 537–538; Tendler, interview by Ferreira, Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural. 12. Tendler, interview with Ferreira, Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural. Tendler notes that Godard had bars installed on his lower-floor office windows, apparently to keep out fascists. 13. In his 2012 interview with Claudiney Ferreira, Tendler talks about his exhaustive search for archival material on JK. His research took him to the Arquivo Nacional, the Cinemateca Brasileira, and the Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio, none of which had the kind of cataloguing systems that exist today. He also contacted private film collectors and retrieved footage stored in warehouses. 14. There was an attempt to undermine JK’s inauguration by a segment of the military and Carlos Luz, who had replaced the ailing Café Filho as president. Spearheaded by the minister of war, General Henrique Teixeira Lott, what is

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sometimes called the Revolution of November 11 successfully countered any such revolt, and Luz was replaced until JK took office. 15. Bernardet, “Os anos JK: Como fala a história?,” in his Cineastas e imagens do povo, 250. 16. Bernardet, “Os anos JK,” in Cineastas e imagens do povo, 251. 17. Tendler’s comment is from the 2012 interview with Ferreira. The statistics are from Ancine, “Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual,” https://​ oca.ancine.gov.br/cinema. 18. The quote is from Miranda, ed., Dicionário dos filmes brasileiros, 441. Tendler’s company, Caliban, produced the film with Hélio Paulo Ferraz. Other funding came from Antônio Balbino, the governor of Bahia, who had been a minister in the Vargas government. As with Os anos JK, Tendler paid staff based on profits made by the film. 19. Box-office figures are from Ancine, “Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual,” https://oca.ancine.gov.br/cinema. Filmed in Africa, África eterna is a 16 mm color feature about a group of Brazilian and Portuguese hunters on safari in the southern part of the continent. Tendler’s second documentary after Os anos JK is O mundo mágico dos Trapalhões (1981, The magic world of the Trapalhões); the film about the famous comedy group had nearly two million viewers and led the one million-plus box-office sales for documentary features made from 1976 to 2007 (Ancine, “Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual,” https:// oca​.ancine.gov.br/cinema). 20. Tendler, interview by Claudio Bojunga, “A reconstrução da memória,” 20. 21. The information is from an interview with Vargas’s daughter, Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, that appeared in the weekly magazine Fatos e fotos of October 5, 1963 (John W. F. Dulles, “Farewell Messages of Vargas,” 551–552). 22. In their article “Labor and Dictatorship in Brazil,” Paulo Fontes and Larissa Corrêa write that when the Family March took place on April 2, 1964, immediately after the coup, “jubilant businessmen watched the movement on the streets, pleased by the success of the fight against ‘communism.’” Their comment is based on information in René Dreifuss, 1964, a conquista do estado, 420–421, 433. 23. Leaders of the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB, Communist Party of Brazil) were unhappy with Goulart’s decision to bring the more centrist PSDB into the Workers-Communist PTB-PCB coalition. The film does not focus on the troubled relations within the far left; in fact, Tendler dedicates Jango to the memory of Gregório Bezerra, the PCB leader whose arrest and imprisonment after the coup is featured in the film footage. 24. Marcos Napolitano, “Nunca é cedo para se fazer história,” 151. 25. The Portuguese word for panther (pantera) also can mean a cruel figure. Written in 1912, Augusto dos Anjos’s sonnet “Versos íntimos” (Intimate verses) is among his best-known poems and appears in his only published volume, Eu e outras poesias (I and other poems). The poem in my translation reads,

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You see! No one attended the formidable Funeral of its last chimera. Only Ingratitude—that panther— Was your inseparable companion! Get used to the dirt that awaits you! Man, who, in this miserable land, Lives among beasts, feels inevitable Need also to be a beast. Take a match. Light your cigarette! A kiss, friend, is the eve of spittle, The hand that caresses is the same that throws stones. If someone still causes pain to your wound, Stone that vile hand that caresses you, Spit in that mouth that kisses you! Glauber Rocha’s reference to Cavalcanti as “Di (Das) Mortes” playfully fuses his Antônio das Mortes character and Mexico’s celebratory Day of the Dead. 26. Information on Di’s release and subsequent suppression is from the Cinemateca Brasileira’s Filmografia, at http://cinemateca.org.br/filmografia-brasileira/. 27. Randal Johnson, Cinema Novo x 5, 135. 28. Suffering financial difficulties and a fire, TV Tupi had its broadcast license canceled by the military in 1980. It was Brazil’s first TV station. 29. Coutinho, interview in O processo do Cinema Novo, 421. 30. Most of the cast members from 1964 had died. Those who remained lived near Galiléia or as far away as Rio and São Paulo. A few of Elizabeth’s children had also left the Northeast for those cities. 31. She took her son Carlos with her when she fled. Another son was studying in Cuba on a scholarship and remained there; he was interviewed in Cuba for the film. 32. The ballad is part of a literary genre known as literatura de cordel (chapbook). The booklet ends with information on the size of the Northeast, “three times larger than France,” and statistics about the dire economic conditions and human costs: “The average lifespan in the Northeast is just twenty-seven years” (Ferreira Gullar, João Boa-Morte, 27). Gullar was president of the Popular Center for Culture at the time. 33. Vincent Canby, “Film ‘Twenty Years Later.’” 34. The Brazilian “northeastern” novels of the 1930s and early 1940s called attention to hardships suffered by rural workers under latifundismo. Works by Jorge Amado, José Lins do Rego, Raquel de Queirós, and Graciliano Ramos remain among the best-known titles in Brazilian literature. João Cabral de Melo Neto’s

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dramatic poem Morte e vida severina (1955, The Death and Life of a Severino) is one of the strongest denunciations of the feudal system. 35. The National Student Union and the Centro Popular de Cultura, entities that supported Gullar’s publication and Coutinho’s filming at Galiléia, were attacked after the coup. The union’s headquarters in Rio were set on fire; attempts by students in 1980 to rebuild the headquarters were repulsed by the regime. 36. Coutinho, interview in O processo do Cinema Novo, 413–414. 37. Jean-Claude Bernardet, “Vitória sobre a lata do lixo na história,” in Cineastas e imagens do povo, 229. 38. Eduardo Coutinho, “Filme marcado para reviver,” in Eduardo Coutinho, 14-15. 39. For more on the association and its top-100 list see Abraccine , “‘Ilha das Flores’ é eleito o melhor curta-metragem brasileiro de todos os tempos,” May 5, 2019, https://abraccine.org/2019/05/05/ilha-das-flores-e-eleito-o-melhor-curta​ -metragem-brasileiro-de-todos-os-tempos/. Chapter 6. Documenting Identity 1. On November 4, 2019, Reuters journalist Max Baring reported the killing of the Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara by illegal loggers on a federally protected reserve in Maranhão (“Backstory”). Although far from unique, such acts against Native inhabitants seem likely to increase under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, who opened the Amazon rainforest to more development. 2. Our Indians was the choice for the film’s title in English. Back used the archaic spelling yndio (Indian) in the Portuguese title, although it is more commonly associated with sixteenth-century Spanish. 3. Robert Stam, “Cabral and the Indians,” 223. 4. Rosane Kaminski, “Sylvio Back e o cinema desideologizado,” 49. In other statements, Back criticized biographical films appearing in the 1970s that he described as “cinema hagiográfico” (hagiographic cinema). 5. Rosane Kaminski, “Yndio do Brasil, de Sylvio Back,” 191–192. 6. The manifesto by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino is titled “Toward a Third Cinema.” 7. Despite reports about the 1985 massacre, nothing was done to investigate the crime. The Cinemateca Brasileira’s online Filmografia describes Video in the Villages Presents Itself. Information on it and other Brazilian films is available at http://cinemateca.org.br/filmografia-brasileira/. 8. For an extensive discussion of the Vídeo nas Aldeias project, consult Gustavo P. Furtado’s “Reparative Mediations” in his book Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil. Robert Stam also writes about Vídeo nas Aldeias in his overview of images of Indians in Brazilian cinema in his “Cinematic Images of the Brazilian Indian.” 9. Free access to the series is available on the Video nas Aldeias website, at

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http://videonasaldeias.org.br/loja/. Their other films, mostly shorts, are available through the site’s on-demand streaming channel. Documentary Educational Films distributes many of their films with English subtitles. 10. Elizabeth Allen, “Brazil: Indians and the New Constitution,” 155. 11. The journalists Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado reported in November 2019 that under President Jair Bolsonaro, a forested area twelve times the size of New York City had been destroyed (“Amazon Deforestation in Brazil”). 12. From the 1940s until his death in 2011, the activist, playwright, and politician Abdias do Nascimento was among the few who strongly contested the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy, an idea initially promoted by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre in works such as Casa grande e senzala (1933), published in English in 1946 as The Masters and the Slaves. 13. For more on the census see IBGE, “What Color Are You?,” 386–390. 14. In 2007, the PBS program Wide Angle aired director Adam Stepan’s Brazil in Black and White, an important documentary on affirmative action in Brazil that discusses problems arising from assessments. In one case, twin brothers applied to the program; while one was deemed eligible, the other was not. The film is no longer available at PBS online, but the accompanying educational materials are, at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/uncategorized/brazil-in-black-and-white​ -issues-to-consider/4325/. 15. With more than two hundred episodes, A cabana do Pai Tomás played in the prime-time 7 p.m. slot for over a year. 16. Araújo’s comments appear in Matt Sandy and Morgann Jezequel, “Brazilian Soap Operas Slowly Cast Black Middle Class.” 17. Jean-Claude Bernardet, “Documentários de busca.” 18. Bernardet, “Documentários de busca,” 148-149. Consuelo Lins also discusses this aspect of the film in “Um passaporte húngaro.” 19. Kogut quoted in Bernardet, “Documentários de busca,” 148. 20. Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables, 92. Chapter 7. Biographies of a Sort, Part II (1994–2016) The epigraph on page 171 is quoted from the film Nelson Freire, which was Moreira Salles’s second film to explore the subject of music after Blues (1990), a made-for-television documentary about Black music in the United States. The epigraph on page 201 is from “Conditions in DEOPS [sic] Prison as Told by Detained American Citizen,” October 7, 1970. The memorandum is based on a conversation with the US citizen Robert H. Horth, who was arrested and held by the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS, Department of Political and Social Order) in São Paulo on suspicion of being Robert Henry Roth; Horth’s name was confused with that of Roth, a member of the Weatherman group. In his September 30, 1970, statement Horth describes torture tactics used on suspected subversives who were his cellmates. The declassified document is posted at George

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Washington University’s National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu​ /NSAEBB/NSAEBB478/docs/doc5.pdf. 1. For more information on Miranda see Ana Rita Mendonça, Carmen Miranda foi a Washington; Lisa Shaw, Carmen Miranda; and Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez, Creating Carmen Miranda. 2. For more on this historic performance see Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema, 121–124. Some film historians claim that a little basket she attached to the top of her turban held fruit. In a rare clip of Miranda’s performance it is difficult to see what besides leafy foliage is in the basket; the clip is posted on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojo3I59Gn6c). “O que é que a baiana tem” is a three-minute segment from the 1939 film posted by Doni Sacramento on April 2, 2007. 3. Solberg, in Mariana Tavares, Helena Solberg: Do cinema novo ao documentário contemporâneo, 147. 4. Moreira Salles, interview, “The Film Is the Sweat.” 5. A “shuffle” option on the DVD version of the film automatically scrambles the segments except for the first and last. As in music composition and performance, the aleatory function involves elements of chance or random choice. Here the aleatory option is related to the possibilities of cinematic form and the way perceptions and meaning are determined by the arrangement of the parts. 6. Short clips from three of the four segments can be seen on YouTube. The program may have had some influence in Jobim’s decision to record his 1987 album Inédito in his home. 7. The English lyrics were written by Gene Lees. 8. The attacker released the male driver, male passengers, and later a woman who was ill. Six women were left on the bus. 9. In addition to film reviews, Ônibus has been written about in numerous journal articles and books. For a few examples, see Amy Villarejo, “‘Bus 174’ and the Living Present”; Lorraine Leu, “Spaces of Representation and Remembrance in the City”; Cecilia Sayad, “Narrative, Visibility, and Trauma in Bus 174”; Furtado, Documenting Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil; Sandra Nodari, “Ônibus 174: A intertextualidade entre cinema e televisão.” 10. In the essay “Imagens do conflito,” Moreira Salles comments on the absence of media coverage of violence in Brazil. He asks, “Why do the major Brazilian newspapers not show images of our social conflict on their front pages? What is the reason for this great silence, a silence not only visual but also of the written word?” (85). 11. Esther Hamburger cites films such as Cidade de Deus (City of God), Carandiru, and O invasor (Trespasser) as other examples of the battle to control representations on screen (“Políticas de representação,” 202–203). One could look back to the early films by Vídeo nas Aldeias as depicting the struggle to control how Indigenous communities were represented.

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12. Donna Bowater, “Rio’s ‘Wall of Shame.’” 13. Prado was awarded a prize for his early black-and-white photographs of the dump site in 1996. These and later pictures appear in his book Jardim Gramacho, which includes a section titled “Estamira” with her photograph and transcriptions of much of what she says in the film. 14. Among several important Brazilian documentaries about dump sites, Coutinho’s Boca de lixo is the best known. Shot in color on analog videotape, the fifty-minute documentary follows his journey to a dump outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. There he and his crew approach adults and children who scale sodden trash heaps to retrieve recyclables and foodstuff. Several of them initially hide their identities from the camera, fearing, as later interviews indicate, that they might be accused of stealing. Their conversations with Coutinho offer a window onto the joys and sorrows of citizens whose survival depends on scavenging. Boca de lixo ends with Coutinho back at the site, projecting the footage on a makeshift screen for the workers to see. 15. See, for example, Nicola Gavioli, “Mythicizing Disability.” 16. In a 2010 interview Prado talks about her feedback and excising disturbing scenes between Estamira and family members even though she did not ask for any changes. Upon reflection, Prado says, he put the material back into the film in order not to “sanctify Estamira” (interview, “O porta-voz”). 17. Prado, interview, “O porta-voz.” 18. Maria do Rosário Caetano, “100 melhores documentários brasileiros.” 19. For a Marxist and comparativist reading of the film consult Geoffrey Kantaris, “Waste Not, Want Not.” 20. For a discussion of Limite and the Chaplin Club see Conde, Foundational Films, 211–213. 21. Vinícius de Moraes, “Exibição do filme Limite de Mário Peixoto.” 22. José Carlos Avellar, “Limite,” 16. Süssekind was cofounder of the Chaplin Club in 1928 with the novelist Octávio de Farias and others. In 1942 the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro was called the Universidade do Brasil. 23. Avellar, “Limite,” 16. 24. In 1979 Pereira de Mello published Limite: Filme de Mário Peixoto, in which he documents the film frame by frame with short technical and content descriptions. 25. Materials came largely from the Arquivo Mário Peixoto founded in 1996 by Walter Salles, whose company, VideoFilmes, produced Machado’s documentary. Information on the archive can be found in a post by Michael Korfman, “Mário Peixoto,” May 24, 2020, at Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, https://​ www.ufrgs.br/mariopeixoto/en/introduction/. 26. Ruy Solberg is listed in the film credits as Machado’s collaborator. The script for O homem do Morcego was written by Saulo Pereira de Mello, who had extensive contact with Peixoto over many years. 27. In the initial credit sequence of Limite, the actors Olga Breno, Tatiana Rei, Raul Schnoor, and Brutus Pedreira are identified simply as Woman No. 1, Woman No. 2, Man No. 1, and Man No. 2.

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28. Panchromatic film captures a broader spectrum of light than orthochromatic film and registers black and white tones that more closely approximate those seen in everyday life (Trevor Lee, “Panchromatic vs Orthochromatic Film”). 29. The family money from the paternal side came from investment in sugarcane. The maternal side had money from the coffee economy. Both plantation economies relied on enslaved labor until emancipation was proclaimed in 1888. Information on the origins of the family’s wealth is from Palmireno Moreira Neto, “Viagem ao Morcego,” 13. 30. In 2007 the Swiss New 7 Wonders Foundation announced its list of seven from votes cast by millions over several years following the firm’s initial call in 2000. 31. In 2002 Bel Noronha located and interviewed several people who had personally experienced events surrounding the statue’s construction (Noronha texts, March 19, 2020). 32. In their book Austregésilo de Athayde (296-297), Cícero Sandroni and Laura Sandroni quote Athayde, who wrote that he and Corção were on standby at Mount Sumaré in Rio in case the signal sent by Marconi was unsuccessful. Other writings about the event refer to weather problems that caused Marconi’s signal to be too weak and the need for a second locally transmitted signal. 33. Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 199. 34. Sábato Magaldi, “Andróginos: Gente computada igual a você.” 35. My former colleague Heitor Martins saw their show at the Treze de Maio theater in 1973. He says that despite the show’s starting at midnight, the theater was packed. He accompanied two women who were actors in the theater. He remembers the high quality of the performance, playful and joyous, as well as Lennie Dale’s impressive dancing and a hilarious imitation of Gal Costa singing her 1972 hit song “Índia” (Indian) dressed as an Indian (Martins, phone conversation, April 13, 2020). 36. The name Dzi Croquettes evokes the late-1960s San Francisco hippie theater group The Cockettes, whose camp, loosely structured performances, often spoofs of old Hollywood films and Broadway musicals, showcased male and female artists with exaggerated makeup and outlandish costumes assembled from thrift-shop purchases. Male performers called attention to their beards and body hair by sprinkling them with glitter. The Cockettes had a short life; San Francisco was the ideal setting for their psychedelic, anarchic performances, which gained a popular following including West Coast celebrities and a degree of notoriety. Invited to perform in New York, they failed to win over audiences with their ad hoc style. The group disbanded in 1972, the same year that Dzi Croquettes emerged. In 2002 Bill Weber and David Weissman made a documentary, The Cockettes, about the troupe. Information is available in “The Cockettes: A Film by David Weissman and Bill Weber,” at https://www.cockettes.com/history/. 37. For more on this movement see Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden. 38. An online page about the group states that three members of Dzi Croquettes were sons of military officers and got a reprieve for a suspension of the group’s

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performances. It also notes that despite the reprieve, the group remained insecure about its future under the dictatorship, and the uncertainty resulted in their decision to travel to Europe (Monique Anny, “Dzi Croquettes”). 39. Offstage and performance footage was recovered from German TV NDR Hamburg and TV Globo. Other sources include private collections of Dzi Croquettes members and several individuals interviewed in the film. 40. The Destacamento de Operações e Informações-Centro de Operações e Defesa Interna (DOI-CODI, Detachment for Operations and Informations-Center for Operations and Internal Defense) had units in the nation’s major cities under the command of the Exército II (Second Army). Figures on a rare DOI-CODI document from the São Paulo division indicate that more than two thousand people were imprisoned in November 1974, forty-seven of whom died there (Arquivo Nacional, http://w ​ ww.arquivonacional.gov.br/br/difusao/arquivo-na-historia/696 -doi-codi.html). 41. The 2015 Truth Commission of the State of São Paulo made six recommendations in a section of the dossier on torture during the dictatorship. The recommendations include opening all existing archives on OBAN and listing every person who financially supported it (Comissão da Verdade do Estado de São Paulo, http://comissaodaverdade.al.sp.gov.br/relatorio/tomo-i/parte-i-cap8.html). 42. Eryk Rocha’s directorial debut, Rocha que voa (2002, Stones in the Sky), is a documentary about his father’s self-exile in Cuba in the early 1970s. 43. Eryk Rocha, “Interview with Eryk Rocha.” 44. Glauber Rocha, “An Esthetic of Hunger.” Chapter 8. The City and the Countryside The epigraphs on page 221 are from public lectures by Roberto Burle Marx published in his Arte e paisagem, 58, 99. 1. The 1960 unofficial hymn “Brasília, capital da esperança” was composed by Simão Neto and Capitão Furtado. The lyrics describe Brasília as “the most fantastic city.” Performances of this and other patriotic compositions were scheduled for the capital’s sixtieth anniversary celebration in 2020, which was postponed. 2. Programming material for A cidade é uma só? was documented by the Cinemateca Brasileira and posted to its online Filmografia, at http://cinemateca.org.br​ /filmografia-brasileira/. The movie critic Jean-Claude Bernardet and São Paulo architect Luís Saia cowrote the film. For additional reading on the film see Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, “Beleza e poder.” 3. Universidade de Brasília, “Invasões históricas,” https://www.unb.br/a-unb​ /historia/633-invasoes-historicas?menu=423. 4. The film makes an interesting point about the conflation of modernity and tradition in its description of the Palácio da Alvorada (Palace of Dawn), where the president resides. Despite its modernist design, the building’s large exterior veranda and chapel are styled after the large plantation houses associated with the colonial period and an agrarian economy dependent on slavery. In this short sequence on

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the palace’s architecture, strange and mostly unflattering pictures of presidents who have occupied the palace are accompanied by a soundtrack with bird tweets and an organ playing a Strauss waltz. 5. The clips of the cathedral and the bus traveling on the Eixo Monumental are from the four-minute newsreel “Brasília em 1965” (posted to YouTube April 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6K2tUyWsdM). 6. For additional reading on the film see Furtado, Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil, 123–129. 7. Aldo Paviani, “A construção injusta do espaço urbano,” 128-129. Suely Franco Netto González estimates that between 1970 and 1976, nearly 120,000 people were moved from the Plano Piloto area to Ceilândia (“As formas concretas da segregação residencial em Brasília,” 83). 8. Pedro Urano, “HU enigma.” 9. The Hospital Universitário is far from the only modernist landmark in Rio that has experienced structural problems and decay. One of the best examples is the former Ministry of Education and Culture building, a Corbusier-inspired structure built during the Estado Novo, whose architects included Oscar Niemeyer and Jorge Machado Moreira. 10. The anthropologist Luis Fernando Dias Duarte contends that Burle Marx was overtly gay (“Damascus in Dahlem”). In May 2019, Burle Marx’s work was the focus of the World Pride Night at New York City’s Botanical Gardens. 11. “Report and Recommendation of the President to the Executive Directors,” World Bank, May 3, 1972, http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en​ /465441468005676460/pdf/multi0page.pdf. 12. For a detailed discussion of developmentalist policy in Brazil and the regime’s “miracle” plan and its consequences, consult Theotônio dos Santos, “Brazil: Unmasking the Miracle.” 13. “Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000),” Hundertwasser Foundation, 2001, https://hundertwasser.com/en. 14. Between 1992 and 2012 there were fifty-six shark attacks, twenty-one of which were fatal (Ariel Schwartz, “There’s a Terrifying Reason No One Goes in the Ocean in This Major Brazilian City”). 15. For more information on World War II magic geography and Disney films, see Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All, 45–57. 16. An example is the editorial “Lessons of the Penguins” in the Japan Times of September 18, 2005, at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2005/09/18​ /editorials/lessons-of-the-penguins. 17. Carlos Nader, Eduardo Coutinho, 7 de outubro. 18. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in his Selected Writings, 2:62–74. 19. For other comments on Mariquinha, Leocádio, and Moisés, see Claudia Mesquita and Consuelo Lins, “O fim e o princípio: Entre o mundo e a cena.” 20. João Guimarães Rosa, “O burrinho pedrês,” in his collection Sagarana.

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21. Guimarães Rosa, “O burrinho pedrês,” in Sagarana, 23. 22. Conversation is minimal or altogether absent in scenes showing Patrício with others outside of work. Yet the topic of water and work are always at issue. In one scene he and his wife sit silently as they listen to a weather report forecasting rain for various regions except their own. In another brief segment he tells his wife that his boss has yet to pay him for two months’ deliveries. The most conversation in the film takes place in a café where Patrício and a friend talk in telegraphed phrases about difficult childhoods and work. Epilogue 1. Jon Lee Anderson, “The Fracturing of Brazil in ‘The Edge of Democracy.’” 2. “ABC” stands for the municipalities São André, São Bernardo, and São Caetano in the state of São Paulo. 3. Lula’s running mate, former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, began his presidential bid just weeks before the election. He received 45 percent of the vote in the run-off. 4. The two charges stated that Dilma had issued fiscal decrees without congressional approval and had practiced what was called pedaladas (pedaling), in this case, delaying repayment of agricultural subsidies spent by state banks during her 2014 reelection campaign. This fiscal maneuvering was not new to government but was prohibited by the constitution and opened her up to charges by opposition parties, notably the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, whose candidate Aécio Neves she defeated in a run-off election. The bitterness from that election and an ongoing financial crisis that required austerity measures made Rousseff especially vulnerable. 5. Cardozo was minister of justice under Dilma and was her lead lawyer during the impeachment proceedings. Hoffmann was Dilma’s chief of staff and in 2017 assumed the national leadership of the PT. 6. Following the impeachment, Paschoal joined the far-right Partido Social Liberal. 7. I was teaching at the Universidade de São Paulo at the time, and residents in high-rises were showing their frustration by beating on pots and pans at open windows and on balconies, a protest activity called panelaço. 8. During the time of Lula’s trial, taped conversations reported by The Intercept show that Moro colluded with Lava Jato prosecutors when he should have remained impartial as a judge. Moro resigned as minister of justice in April 2020 after Bolsonaro fired Maurício Valeixo, the federal police chief. 9. In interviews Costa describes her family’s relationship to Lula’s daughter, Lurian, who lived with them for a time in the 1990s when Costa’s mother was studying in Paris. In 2016, Costa wrote to Lula for an interview and only succeeded in 2018, after stationing herself for hours in his institute. 10. In her film Costa acknowledges using the work of Ricardo Stuckert, who was the official photographer during Lula’s administration and who filmed Lula

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during Dilma’s impeachment proceedings as well as scenes of the outdoor protests. Stuckert’s comments on his participation in the film appear in Felipe Moraes, “Fotógrafo de democracia em vertigem.” 11. Called foro privilegiado, the law provides parliamentary protection for politicians, who can only be tried and convicted by the Supreme Court. Given the court’s overload of cases, greatly increased by Operation Car Wash, prosecutions have been delayed for years. 12. Costa’s email is quoted in Tiago Coelho, “Memória desarmada.” The National Truth Commission to which Costa refers was established under Dilma in 2011 to investigate human rights violations primarily during the military dictatorship of 1964–1985. 13. Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration: Defining ‘Ecstatic Truth’” appears in a UWA Film Society post of March 16, 2015, by Jaymes Durante, at https://​ uwafilmsociety.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/read-werner-herzogs-manifesto​ -minnesota-declaration-truth-and-fact-in-documentary-cinema/. 14. The film includes a fascinating montage of Lula TV spots from his 1989, 1994, 1998, and 2002 campaigns. From a forceful position on social reform and keeping banks and businesses in check, in 2002 he reaches out to the elite, talking about the importance of entrepreneurs in his program for change. 15. In December 2018 Andrade Gutierrez signed an agreement to pay the government nearly $400 million to settle corruption charges pending from the investigation. As with various companies and political figures, settlement deals included testifying about others involved in bribes and other criminal acts (Lisandra Paraguassu, “Andrade Gutierrez to pay $381 Million Fine to Settle Graft Charges”). 16. The head of Brazil’s secret service, Ustra was the only military figure found guilty during the National Truth Commission proceedings. When Ustra died in 2015, Bolsonaro publicly lamented the passing of a national hero. 17. Maria Augusta Ramos, interview by Steve Macfarlane, “O processo.”

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INDEX

Note: page numbers followed by f and n refer to figures and notes, respectively. 33 (Goifman), 159, 163–165, 164f Abertura (TV Tupi), 133, 134 Aboio (M. Rocha), 235–237 Abrahão, Benjamin, 45f; L. Barreto’s O cangaceiro and, 52; Lampião, 35, 43–50, 45f, 47f, 49f Abrantes, Bebeto, 4 Adriani, Jerry, 83 affirmative action, 155, 278n14 África eterna (Szankovski), 128, 275n19 African Brazilian representation: baiana character and Carmen Miranda, 168–169; Cinema Novo and, 208–209; Um dia na rampa (L. Santos), 73–75; A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (J. Araújo), 155–159 AI-5 law (1968), 199, 203 Akerman, Karen, 250 Albuquerque, Adhemar Bezerra de, 44 Albuquerque, Ricardo, 46 Aleluia, Gretchen! (Back), 148 Alencar, José de, 115, 146, 191 Alexander, Robert J., 92–93 Aliança Nacional Libertadora, 46 Almeida, Guilherme de, 23, 25, 265n25 Almoço no Kaiser oferecido ao Presidente da República e esposa (Musso), 3–4 Alvarez, Raphael: Dzi Croquettes (with Issa), 197–201, 200f

Álvarez, Santiago, 125 Amado, Gilberto, 266n3 Amado, Jorge, 97, 134, 157, 158, 276n34 Amazon, developmentalism in, 116– 120, 222–223. See also Trans-Amazonian Highway Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (S. Santos), 4, 11 Américo, Pedro, 32 Ana Carolina (Teixeira Soares): A fiandeira, 121; on gender in film­ making, 104; Getúlio Vargas, 120– 124, 123f; Indústria, 104–105, 121; Lavra dor (with Rufino), 101–104, 121; Monteiro Lobato, 121; Nelson Pereira dos Santos saúda o povo e pede passagem, 274n7; N. Santos and, 274n7; Três desenhos, 121 Anchieta, Padre, 148 Ancoradouro de pescadores na Baía de Guanabara (Sales), 263n1 Anderson, Bronco Billy, 47 Anderson, Jon Lee, 241 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de, 84 Andrade, Eduardo Pacheco de, 266n5 Andrade, Gabriel Donato de, 248 Andrade, João Batista de: Cândido Portinari: Um pintor de Brodósqui, 109; Capovilla’s Subterrâneos do futebol and, 107; Cinema Novo and, 104; Eterna esperança, 273n28; Gamal: O delírio do sexo, 109, 273n29; 297

298 |  

index

Liberdade de imprensa, 107–109; Migrantes, 110–112, 111f, 273n33; Panorama do cinema paulista, 109, 272n28; Paulicéia fantástica, 273n28; Pedreira, 112; O povo fala (memoir), 112; Restos, 107; Vera Cruz, 273n28 Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 63; Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova, 212–214, 214f; Couro de gato, 208; Garrincha: Alegria do povo, 209 Andrade, Marília, 245–246 Andrade, Mário de: Avellar on, 264n11; Paulicéia desvairada, 23–24, 25, 27 Andrade, Oswald de, 23 Andrade Gutierrez company, 248, 285n15 Anemic Cinema (Duchamps, Ray), 26 Anjos, Augusto dos, 275n25 Os anos JK: Uma trajetória (Tendler), 124–129, 126f Antônio das Mortes (G. Rocha), 72, 126, 132, 207 Apollinaire, Guillerme, 23 Um apólogo—Machado de Assis: 1839– 1939 (Mauro, Miguel-Pereira), 38–39 Aqui, Agora (SBT), 179 Arana, Julio César, 10–11, 17 As aranhas (Mauro), 41–43 Araújo, Agesilau de, 8, 10, 13 Araújo, Joaquim Gonçalves “J. G.,” 8–10. See also J. G. Araújo Company Araújo, Joel Zito: A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira, 155–159, 157f Araújo, Nancy, 215 Araújo, Vicente de Paula, 263n3 architecture. See urban planning and architecture Argerich, Martha, 172

Arraial do Cabo (Carneiro, Saraceni), 61, 62–67, 65f, 71–72, 90, 208, 269n34 Arroyo, Antônio, 247 Aruanda (L. Noronha), 43, 61, 63, 66–73, 69f, 71f, 90, 208, 209 Askanasy, José Prates e Miécio, 73 assembly-line production, 12, 15–18, 17f Associação Brasileira Cinematográfica, 266n5 Associação Brasileira de Educação, 36 Astaire, Fred, 172 Atlântida Company, 50 Augusta, Nísia Floresta Brasileira, 30 Avancini, Walter: Gabriela, cravo e canela, 157 Avellar, José Carlos, 187, 264n11 Babenco, Héctor: Carandiru, 279n11 Back, Sylvio: Aleluia, Gretchen!, 148; “cinema desideologizado” and, 150–151; Rádio auriverde, 148; República Guarani, 148; Yndio do Brasil, 148–151, 149f Bahia de Todos os Santos (Neto), 209 Baile perfumado (Caldas, Ferreira), 50 Baker, Aloha, 150 Baker, Josephine, 199 balata latex, 20–21 Balbino, Antônio, 275n18 Banana da terra (R. Costa), 168 Banda Nova, 176 Os bandeirantes (Mauro), 148 banditry, 43–50, 95–96 Baring, Max, 277n1 Barouh, Pierre, 178 Barravento (G. Rocha), 72, 73, 208, 269n18 Barreto, Bruno: Dona Flor e seus dois maridos, 157 Barreto, Erick, 169–170, 170f Barreto, Lima: O cangaceiro, 51–52,

index  |

208; Obras novas: A evolução de uma indústria, 58–59, 59f; Painel, 52–55, 54f; reputation of, 268n33; G. Rocha and, 52; Santuário, 55–58, 57f; São Paulo em festa, 59–60; Vera Cruz studio and, 52 Barreto, Luiz Carlos, 206 Barreto, Mário Almeida Borges, 264n14 Barroso, Ary, 175–176 Bastos, Othon, 126, 205, 206f Batista, Rosa, 228–229 The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 129, 188 Belmont, Luanna, 181 Ben, Jorge, 73, 133 Bengell, Norma, 199 Benjamin, Walter, 232 Bennett, Tony, 177 Bento, Zé, 66–70 Berkeley, Busby: The Gang’s All Here (et al.), 168 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Ruttmann), 25–26, 221 Bernardes, Artur, 8–9 Bernardet, Jean-Claude, 2, 66, 72, 127, 139, 159–160, 164, 272n26, 272n28, 282n2 Bertolucci, Bernardo: La via del petrolio, 76 Berú, Maurício: Certas palavras com Chico Buarque de Holanda, 89 Beste (Muniz), 101 Bethânia, Maria, 214 Bezerra, Gregório, 275n23 Bianchi, Sérgio: Mato eles?, 145–148, 147f Bienal de São Paulo, 50, 53 biographical narratives: about, 115; Os anos JK: Uma trajetória (Tendler), 124–128, 126f; Cabra marcado para morrer (Coutinho), 135–140, 136f, 140f; Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is

299

My Business (H. Solberg), 167–171, 169f, 170f; Christo Redemptor (B. Noronha), 192–197, 194f, 196f; Cidadão Boilesen (Litewski), 201–204, 202f; Cinema Novo (E. Rocha), 205–209, 206f; Democracia em vertigem (Costa), 241–249, 244f; Di Cavalcanti (G. Rocha), 131–133, 132f; Dzi Croquettes (Issa, Alvarez), 197–201, 200f; Estamira (Prado), 183–186, 186f, 187f; Getúlio Vargas (Ana Carolina), 120–124, 123f; Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil (Tendler), 133–135, 134f; Ilha das Flores (Furtado), 140–143, 142f; Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Bodanzky, Senna), 115–120, 117f, 119f; Jango (Tendler), 128–131, 130f; A música segundo Tom Jobim (N. Santos), 175–178, 176f; Nelson Freire (J. Salles), 171–175, 174f; Onde a terra acaba (Machado), 188– 192; Ônibus 174 (Padilha, Lacerda), 178–182, 182f; O processo (Ramos), 5, 242–246, 243f, 249–250 Birri, Fernando: Capovilla and, 96; Tire dié, 99 Black Brazilian representation. See African Brazilian representation blackface, 156, 157f Black self-identification, 155 Blanco, Márcio, 4 Blonde Venus (von Sternberg), 150 Blues (J. Salles), 278n Boal, Augusto, 75, 91, 156 Boca de lixo (Coutinho), 183, 280n14 Bodanzky, Jorge: Caravana Farkas and, 101; Era uma vez Iracema, 118–119; Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (with Senna), 115–120, 117f, 119f, 235–236 Boilesen, Henning, 201–204, 202f Boilesen, Henning, Jr., 202

300 |  

index

Bolsonaro, Jair, 6, 120, 242, 249–251, 278n11, 284n8, 285n16 Bororo tribe, 150 Braga, Sônia, 157 The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (Green), 224 Branco, Humberto Castelo, 249 Brant, Beto: O invasor, 279n11 Brasa dormida (Mauro), 42 Brasil, Edgar, 190–191 Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova (Pedro de Andrade), 212–214, 214f Brasília em 1965, 214 Brasília film festival, 212 Brasília inauguration, 211. See also urban planning and architecture Brasiliana series (Mauro), 42–43 Brasília: Planejamento urbano (Campos), 212–213 Brasil verdade anthology (Farkas), 89–100 Brazil: A Report on Torture (Wexler, Landau), 203 Brazil in Black and White (Stepan), 278n14 Brazil nut workers, 15–18, 17f Brecht, Bertolt, 103 Breno, Olga, 189, 189f Brezhnev, Leonid, 129 Brüel, Birgit, 178 Burton, Gary, 178 Butantã Institute, 28 Bye Bye Brasil (Diegues), 81, 269n33 Cabra marcado para morrer (Coutinho), 90, 135–140, 136f, 140f, 211, 227 O caçador de diamantes (Capellaro), 150 Caiçara (Celi), 55 Caldas, Paulo: Baile perfumado (with Ferreira), 50 Caliban, 275n18 Calmon, João, 108 Calmon, Miguel, 8

Caminha, Pero Vaz de, 42 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 68 Campanha de Erradicação de Invasões (CEI), 215–217 Campanha Nacional de Educação Rural, 62 Campos, Fernando Cony: Brasília: Planejamento urbano, 212–213 Campos Silva, Silvio de, 51 Camurati, Carla: Carlota Joaquina: Princesa do Brasil, 5 Camus, Marcel: Orfeu negro, 99–100, 177 Canby, Vincent, 137 Câncer (G. Rocha), 76 Cândido Portinari: Um pintor de Brodósqui (Batista de Andrade), 109 Candomblé, 73, 158, 271n8 O cangaceiro (L. Barreto), 51–52, 208 O canto da saudade (Mauro), 208 Capanema, Gustavo, 37 Capellaro, Vittorio: O caçador de diamantes, 150 Capinam, José Carlos, 91 capoeira, 74 Capovilla, Maurice: Sarno’s Viramundo and, 91; Subterrâneos do futebol, 90, 96–98, 98f, 107, 209 Caquot, Albert, 194 Carajá tribe, 150 Carandiru (Babenco), 279n11 Caravana Farkas project, 89–101 Cardin, Pierre, 121 Cardoso, Elizeth, 177–178 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 155, 202 Cardoso, Sérgio, 156, 157f Cardozo, José Eduardo, 242, 246, 284n5 Carelli, Vincent, 153f; Corumbiara, 152–154, 153f; As hiper mulheres (et al.), 154, 154f; Índios no Brasil, 153– 154; Video in the Villages Presents

index  |

Itself (with Corrêa), 152; Vídeo nas Aldeias project and, 151–154 Carioca, Zé, 224 Carlota Joaquina: Princesa do Brasil (Camurati), 5 Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (H. Solberg), 167–171, 169f, 170f Carneiro, Mário: Arraial do Cabo (with Saraceni), 61, 62–67, 65f, 71–72, 90, 208, 269n34; on Cinema Novo, 204; G. Rocha’s Di Cavalcanti and, 131; Tendler’s Glauber, o filme, 134 Carvajal, Julianne Burton, 2 Carvalho, Dennis: Pátria minha, 159 Carvalho, Ronald de, 23 Carvalho, Vicente de, 39 Carvalho, Vladimir, 67, 269n14, 269n34 Casablanca (Curtiz), 224 Casa da farinha (Sarno), 101, 272n19 Casado, Letícia, 278n11 Casa grande & senzala (N. Santos), 5 Castro, Carlos Rey de, 10–11 Castro, Ferreira de, 9 Catholicism: Christo Redemptor and, 192–194, 196; in A entrevista (H. Solberg), 106; Ilha das Flores (Furtado) and, 141; Jews and, 162; Lampião and, 43–44; in Obras novas (L. Barreto), 59; in Recife frio (Mendonça), 225; in Viramundo (Sarno), 93–94, 271n8 cattle ranching and cowboys, 22, 235–237 Cavalcanti, Alberto: Rien que les heures, 26–27; Vera Cruz and, 51–52 Cavalcanti, Elizabeth di, 131, 134–135 Cavalcanti, Emiliano di, 131–133, 132f Caymmi, Dorival, 168 Ceiça, Maria, 158 Ceilândia, 215–216, 283n7

301

Celi, Adolfo: Caiçara, 55 censorship: AI-5 law and, 199; João Andrade on strategies against, 112; Caravana Farkas project and, 90; complaints, 266n5; Dzi Croquettes (Issa, Alvarez) and, 199–200; INCE and, 36–37; Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Bodanzky, Senna) and, 115; Lampião (Abrahão) and, 35, 45–46; Lei de Imprensa (1967), 107–108; mass media and, 89; A opinião pública (Jabor) and, 87 Centro de Integração Empresa-Escola, 202 Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC), 76–77, 135, 276n32, 277n35 Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 63 Certas palavras com Chico Buarque de Holanda (Berú), 89 Céu do Brasil no Rio de Janeiro (Mauro), 41 Chacina da Lapa (Lapa Massacre), 246–247 Chagas, Evandro, 39 Chagas Filho, Carlos, 39 Chamie, Mário, 103, 105 Chaplin Club, 187, 280n22 Charatz, Mendel, 269n1 Christensen, Carlos Hugo: O rei Pelé, 97 Christo Redemptor (B. Noronha), 192– 197, 194f, 196f Cícero, Padre, 44 Cidadão Boilesen (Litewski), 201–204, 202f Cidade de Deus (Meirelles, Lund), 279n11 A cidade é uma só? (Queirós), 212, 215–217, 217f Cinco vezes favela anthology, 76, 208 O cineasta da selva (Michiles), 5, 33 Cinejornal Brasileiro newsreels, 37, 39

302 |  

index

Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Gomes), 268n19 Cinema Novo: agrarian reform and, 211; Banda Nova and, 176; Black representation and, 208–209; Candomblé and, 271n8; Carneiro on, 204; INCE and, 43; Macalé and, 122; precursors of, 61–62, 68, 71–72; sexism and, 207; television films and, 109–110; women and, 104–106 Cinema Novo (E. Rocha), 205–209, 206f, 212 Cinemateca Brasileira: Ana Carolina and, 121; closure of, 4, 6; fires at, 263n2; Lampião (Abrahão) restoration, 46; Limite (Peixoto) restoration, 192; Maioria absoluta (Hirszman) and, 80; Resgate do cinema silencioso brasileiro, 263n1; São Paulo (Kemeny, Lustig) restoration, 33; Vera Cruz and, 4 O circo (Jabor), 81–83, 83f Circuito de São Gonçalo, 3 Circular 1127 (1937), 162 Círculo Católico do Rio de Janeiro, 193 Citizen Kane (Welles), 202 city-symphony films, 25–28. See also São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (Kemeny, Lustig) The Cockettes (Weber, Weissman), 281n36 Coisas nossas (Downey), 33, 265n25 Colégio de Cataguases in Minas Gerais, 52–53, 268n32 Columbia Pictures, 51 Coluna Prestes (Prestes Column), 43 Como era gostoso o meu francês (N. Santos), 150, 151 Como salvar meu casamento (TV Tupi), 158 Companhia Nacional de Álcalis, 62–67

Comte, Auguste, 29, 30 Conde, Maite, 2 A condição brasileira series (Farkas), 101 Confraria dos Negros, 68 Constitution (1988), 155 Constitutional Revolution (São Paulo, 1932), 59–60 Corção, Gustavo, 196, 281n32 coronelismo, 78–79 Corrêa, Larissa, 275n22 Corrêa, Mari: Video in the Villages Presents Itself (with Carelli), 152 Corumbiara (Carelli), 152–154, 153f Costa, Gal, 175, 177, 281n35 Costa, Haroldo: Pista de grama, 178 Costa, Lúcio, 213, 222 Costa, Petra: Democracia em vertigem, 241–249, 244f; Elena, 245–246, 284n9 Costa, Ruy: Banana da terra, 168 Costa, Silva, 193–195 Costa Júnior, Manoel, 246 Cotlow, Lewis, 150 Cotrim, Branca Rabello, 193 Couro de gato (Pedro de Andrade), 208 Coutinho, Eduardo, 140f; arrest of, 136; Boca de lixo, 183, 280n14; Cabra marcado para morrer, 90, 135–140, 136f, 140f, 211, 227; censorship of, 80–81; death of, 233; DOCTV and, 6; O fim e o princípio, 227–234, 229f, 232f; Hirszman’s Maioria absoluta and, 76; on interviewing, 139; on G. Rocha, 133 COVID pandemic, 4 Cretã, Ângelo, 147–148 Cristiano, Zé, 55–58 Cruz, Oswaldo, 39 Csekö, Joana Traub: HU (with Urano), 218–220, 220f; photography of, 219 Cummings, Irving: Springtime in the Rockies, 169 Cunha, Eduardo, 244, 249–250

index  |

Cunha, Euclides da, 39 Curta!, 6 Curtiz, Michael: Casablanca, 224 Dahl, Gustavo, 101 Dale, Lennie, 197, 199–200, 200f, 281n35 Dantas, Maria Ambrosina (“Mariquinha”), 229–231, 229f, 234 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 178 A Defesa Nacional newspaper, 29–30 Del Picchia, José, 24 Del Picchia, Menotti, 23, 24 Democracia em vertigem (P. Costa), 241–249, 244f Dennison, Stephanie, 2 Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP), 37, 38, 39 Departamento de Ordem Social e Política (DOPS), 203 De raízes e rezas, entre outros (Muniz), 101 O descobrimento do Brasil (Mauro), 42, 150, 151 De Sica, Vittorio: Miraculo a Milano, 227 Destacamento de Operações e Informações–Centro de Operações e Defesa Interna (DOI-CODI), 201, 282n40 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (G. Rocha), 72, 205–207, 206f developmentalism in the Amazon, 116–120, 222–223. See also Trans­ Amazonian Highway Dia da pátria (Mauro), 39 Um dia na rampa (L. Santos), 73–75, 74f, 75f, 209 Di Cavalcanti (G. Rocha), 131–133, 132f, 140 Diegues, Carlos: Bye Bye Brasil, 81, 269n33; Ganga Zumba, 206; Joanna Francesa, 121; in Machado’s Onde a terra acaba, 188; in E. Rocha’s

303

Cinema Novo, 205–206; H. Solberg and, 105; Xica da Silva, 158 direct sound, early use of, 90, 91 Disney, Walt: Saludos amigos!, 175, 224 DOCTV, 6, 218 documentários de busca. See “in search of” documentaries documentary genre: as concept, 1; questioned, in Rufino and Ana Carolina’s Lavra dor, 102–103, 104 Documento especial: Televisão verdade (Hoineff), 5 Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (B. Barreto), 157 Downey, Wallace: Coisas nossas, 33, 265n25 Driver, Charles Henry, 28 Duarte, Anselmo: O pagador de promessas, 208 Duarte, Luis Fernando Dias, 283n10 Duchamps, Marcel: Anemic Cinema (with Ray), 26 Dumont, Santos, 39 Durgnat, Raymond, 55, 56 Dutra, Eurico, 53, 123 Dzi Croquettes (Issa, Alvarez), 197– 201, 200f educational shorts (government), 35–43, 62, 140–141 Eisenstein, Sergei: The Battleship Potemkin, 129, 188; ¡Qué viva México!, 47, 56, 64 Elbrick, Charles, 203, 204 Elena (P. Costa), 245–246, 284n9 Eles não usam black-tie (Guarnieri), 75–76 O engenho (Sarno, Farkas), 272n19 A entrevista (H. Solberg), 105–107, 107f, 208 Era uma vez Iracema (Bodanzky), 118–119 erotic films, 109, 273n29

304 |  

index

Erva bruxa (Soares), 101 Escorel, Eduardo, 101, 247 A escrava Isaura (Guimarães), 24, 156–157 Estado Novo, 35, 50, 53, 95, 122–124, 127, 283n9 Estamira (Prado), 183–186, 186f, 187f Eterna esperança (Batista de Andrade), 273n28 É Tudo Verdade film festival, 5, 201 Expedição Roosevelt ao Matto Grosso (Reis), 3 Exposição Internacional do Centenário de Independência (Interna­ tional Exhibition for the Centenary of Independence), 7–9, 23–24 Exu, 91 “fake” strategies, 5, 170. See also F for Fake (Welles et al.) Falconetti, 187 A família do Presidente Prudente de Morais no Palácio do Catete (Segreto), 263n1 Family Marches with God for Liberty, 106, 108, 128, 275n22 Fanto, George, 187 Farias, Lindbergh, 246 Farias, Octávio de, 280n22 Farkas, Pedro, 271n12 Farkas, Thomaz, 89–90, 271nn11–12. See also Caravana Farkas project Fascio Filippo Corridoni, 30 fascism: in Brazil, 29–30, 265n23; Getúlio Vargas (Ana Carolina) and, 122–123; Godard and, 274n12; São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (Kemeny, Lustig) and, 29–30 Fausto, Boris, 196 favelas, 98–100, 179–182, 215–216 Faye, Alice, 169 Febre amarela I and Febre amarela II (Mauro), 39–41

Fernandes, Loureiro, 145–146, 148, 150 Ferraz, Hélio Prado, 274n9, 275n18 Ferreira, Lírio: Baile perfumado (with Caldas), 50 Ferro, Marc, 125 As festas no Amazonas, 4 Festejos realizados no Rio de Janeiro em honra do ex-Presidente Theodoro Roosevelt, 3 F for Fake (Welles et al.), 1 A fiandeira (Ana Carolina), 121 Figuerôa, Alexandre, 269n4 Figueroa, Gabriel, 56 Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx (Penna), 221–223 O fim e o princípio (Coutinho), 227– 234, 229f, 232f Flaherty, Robert: Nanook of the North, 1 Fleury, Sérgio, 202–203 Fome de amor (N. Santos), 83 Fonseca, Hermes da, 4 Fontes, Lourival, 37, 46 Fontes, Paulo, 275n22 Formaggini, Beth: Walter.doc, 207 foro privilegiado, 285n11 Fortalezas e navios de guerra na Guanabara (Segreto), 263n1 Foster, David William, 2 Fowle, Chick, 51 Fraga Filho, Clementino, 219 Freire, Nelson, 171–175, 174f Freitas, Luís Carlos, 97–98 As Frenéticas, 201 Freyre, Gilberto, 278n12 Fuller, Frederick, 187 Fundação Carlos Chagas, 39 Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), 146–147, 152 Furtado, Gustavo P., 2 Furtado, Jorge: Ilha das Flores, 140– 143, 142f

index  |

Gabriela, cravo e canela (Avancini), 157 Gamal: O delírio do sexo (Batista de Andrade), 109, 273n29 Ganga bruta (Mauro), 42 Ganga Zumba (Diegues), 206 The Gang’s All Here (Berkeley et al.), 168 Garcia, Léa, 156, 158 Garland, Judy, 178 Garner, Errol, 172 “Garota de Ipanema” (Jobim), 175, 177, 178 Garrincha: Alegria do povo (Pedro de Andrade), 209 Gatti, André P., 27 Gauer, Wolf, 119–120 Geisel, Ernesto, 120–121, 249, 273n35 Getino, Octavio: La hora de los hornos (with Solanas), 104; “Toward a Third Cinema” manifesto (with Solanas), 152, 277n6 Getúlio Vargas (Ana Carolina), 120– 124, 123f Ghiu, Al, 46 Gil, Gilberto, 91, 175 Gilberto, João, 178 Gimba (Rangel), 208 Giménez, Manuel Horacio: Nossa escola de samba, 89–90, 98–100, 99f, 100f Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil (Tendler), 133–135, 134f Godard, Jean-Luc, 103, 125, 274n12 Goeldi, Oswaldo, 63, 64 Goifman, Kiko: 33, 159, 163–165, 164f Gomes, Carlos, 39, 143, 146 Gomes, Marcelo: Cinema, aspirinas e urubus, 268n19 Gomes, Paulo Emílio Salles, 71 Gonçalves, Geísa Firmo, 179 Gonçalves, Milton, 156, 158–159, 208

305

Gonzaga, Luiz, 122 González, Suely Franco Netto, 283n7 Goulart, João, 77, 91, 101–102, 106, 123–125, 128–130, 130f, 248 Goulart, Maria Teresa, 128 Gran Circo Norte-Americano, 81 A grande feira (Pires), 208 Grande Otelo, 122, 208, 274n7 Grassman, Marcelo, 268n29 The Great Train Robbery (Porter), 47 Green, Joseph: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, 224 Grierson, John, 51 Guajajara, Paulo Paulino, 277n1 guaraná fruit, 20, 20f Guarani, 146–147 Guarnieri, Gianfrancesco, 75–76 Guastavino, Carlos, 172 Guevara, Che, 138 Guimarães, Bernardo, 24 Gullar, Ferreira, 76, 135, 137, 212– 213, 269n28 Gurgel, Gaó, 265n16, 265n25 Haddad, Fernando, 284n3 Haffenrichter, Oswald, 51 Hamburger, Esther, 179, 279n11 Hammett, Dashiell, 163 Hardenberg, Walter, 11 Hayworth, Rita, 172, 173 Henze, Roland: A lavagem do Cristo, 197 Herança do Nordeste anthology (Farkas), 101 Herzog, Vladimir, 91, 109, 121, 249, 273n30, 273n35 Herzog, Werner, 247 Heuzi, Marcos, 126 As hiper mulheres (Carelli et al.), 154, 154f Hirszman, Leon: Maioria absoluta, 76–80, 80f, 86, 90; Pedreira de São Diogo, 76; in E. Rocha’s Cinema Novo, 206, 208; São Bernardo, 206

306 |  

index

Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho, 54 Hitler, Adolf, 161, 267n10 Hoffmann, Gleisi, 242, 284n5 Hoineff, Nelson: Documento especial: Televisão verdade, 5 Holanda, Chico Buarque de, 89, 175 Holanda, Maria Amélia Buarque de, 193 Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de, 5 O homem do Morcego (R. Solberg), 188, 280n26 Hora da Notícia (TV Cultura), 109– 113, 273n35 La hora de los hornos (Solanas, Getino), 104 Horth, Robert H., 278n Hospital Universitário, 218–220, 220f HU (Urano, Csekö), 218–220, 220f Ikatena (L. Santos), 150 Ilha das Flores (Furtado), 140–143, 142f illiteracy, 76–80 Os imaginários (Sarno), 272n19 Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Conspiracy), 52–53 Independência Filme, 24, 264n14 Indigenous peoples: O caçador de diamantes (Capellaro), 150; Como era gostoso o meu francês (N. Santos), 150, 151; Corumbiara (Carelli), 152–154, 153f; O descobrimento do Brasil (Mauro), 42, 150, 151; As hiper mulheres (Carelli, Kuikuru, Kuikuru), 154, 154f; Ikatena (L. Santos), 150; Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Bodanzky, Senna), 115– 119; Jungle Headhunters (Lesser), 150; Mato eles? (Bianchi), 145–148, 147f; No país das amazonas (S. Santos), 18–20, 20f; República Guarani (Back), 148; Video in the Villages

Presents Itself (Corrêa, Carelli), 152; Vídeo nas Aldeias project, 151–154; Yndio do Brasil (Back), 148–151, 149f Índios no Brasil (Carelli), 153–154 Indústria (Ana Carolina), 104–105, 121 “in search of” documentaries (documentários de busca): 33 (Goifman), 159, 163–165, 164f; A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (J. Araújo), 155–159, 157f; Um passaporte húngaro (Kogut), 159–163, 161f Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE), 36–43, 62, 67, 140–141, 212–213 Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 39–40 Instituto pela Pesquisa e Estudos Sociais (IPES), 129 Integralism, Brazilian, 122, 265n23 O invasor (Brant), 279n11 Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Bodanzky, Senna), 115–120, 117f, 119f, 235–236 Isabel, Princess, 192 Issa, Américo, 198 Issa, Tatiana: Dzi Croquettes (with Alvarez), 197–201, 200f Italian-language newspapers, 30, 265n22 Itamaracá, Lia de, 227 It’s All True (Welles), 64–65 Ivens, Joris, 125, 128–131 I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur), 268n31 Jabor, Arnaldo: O circo, 81–83, 83f; Hirszman’s Maioria absoluta and, 76, 80; A opinião pública, 83–87, 85f; H. Solberg and, 105 Jacquet, Luc: March of the Penguins, 226

index  |

Jaguaribe, Beatriz, 218 Jango (Tendler), 128–131, 130f Jaramataia (Soares), 101 Jardim Gramacho, 183–186 Jewish Brazilians, 160–163 J. G. Araújo Company, 11–12, 14, 21–22 Joanna Francesa (Diegues), 121 João Boa-Morte (Gullar), 135, 137 O joão de barro (Mauro) (1938), 41–43 O joão de barro (Mauro) (1956), 43 Jobim, Antônio Carlos, 175–178, 176f, 184, 192, 279n6 Jobim, Dora, 176 Jobim, Paulo, 175 Johnson, Randal, 2, 132, 266n4 Jordão, Fernando Pacheco, 109, 273n30, 273n35 Jorjamado (G. Rocha), 134 Juízo (Ramos), 250 Jungle Headhunters (Lesser), 150 Justiça (Ramos), 250 Juventude (N. Santos), 269n1 Kafka, Franz, 246 Kaminski, Rosane, 150–151 Kanoé tribe, 152–153 Kemeny, Adalberto: about, 24–25; Downey’s Coisas nossas and, 33; São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (with Lustig), 4, 7, 25–33, 26f, 31f, 92f, 211; São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas (with Lustig), 33, 265n25 Kennedy, John F., 129 Keti, Zé, 175 Khouri, Walter Hugo, 208, 268n29 Klotzel, André, 101 Kogut, Sandra: Um passaporte húngaro, 159–163, 161f Kozák, Vladimir, 145–146, 150 Krenak, Ailton, 153–154 Krenak tribe, 153–154

307

Kubitschek, Juscelino, 63, 66, 75, 105, 124–128, 126f, 177, 248, 269n3 Kuikuru, Mahajugi: As hiper mulheres (Carelli et al.), 154, 154f Kuikuru, Takimã: As hiper mulheres (Carelli et al.), 154, 154f Labaki, Amir, 5, 124 Lacerda, Benedicto, 198 Lacerda, Carlos, 108 Lacerda, Felipe: Ônibus 174 (with Padilha), 5, 178–182, 182f, 241 Lampião (Abrahão), 35, 43–50, 45f, 47f, 49f Lampião (Virgulino Ferreira da Silva), 35, 43–50, 45f, 52, 95–96 Landau, Saul: Brazil: A Report on Torture (with Wexler), 203 Landowski, Françoise, 195 Landowski, Paul, 194–195 Lang, Walter: Weekend in Havana, 169 latifundismo, 78–79, 91–92, 137–138, 211, 276n34 Latja, Mathilde, 160–161, 161f A lavagem do Cristo (Henzle), 197 Lavra dor (Rufino/Ana Carolina), 101–104, 103f, 121 Le Corbusier, 218, 222, 283n9 Lee, Spike, 241 Lei de Imprensa (1967), 107–108 Leme, Sebastião, 193, 196 Lemos, Tite de, 137 Leonardo da Vinci, 193–194 Lessa, Rodrigo Oliveira, 86–87 Lesser, Jeffrey, 162 Lesser, Julian: Jungle Headhunters, 150 Liberdade de imprensa (Batista de Andrade), 107–109 Lima, Estácio de, 96 Lima, Walter, Jr.: Formaggini’s Walter. doc, 207; Menino de engenho, 125, 206

308 |  

index

Limite (Peixoto), 187–190, 189f, 208 Lisboa, Antônio Francisco, 55 literatura de cordel genre, 276n32 Litewski, Chaim: Cidadão Boilesen, 201–204, 202f Lobato, Monteiro, 121, 264n10 Londoño, Ernesto, 278n11 Lopes, Luiz Simões, 267n10 Lott, Henrique Teixeira, 274n14 Lubitsch, Ernst, 24 Lufti, Dib, 83 Luís, Edson, 128 Luís, Washington, 27, 267n7 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 241–245, 248, 285n14 Lumière Brothers, 11 Lumière cinematograph, 3 Lund, Kátia: Cidade de Deus (with Meirelles), 279n11; Notícias de uma guerra particular (with J. Salles), 171–172, 179 Lustig, Rodolfo Rex: about, 24–25; Downey’s Coisas nossas and, 33; São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (with Kemeny), 4, 7, 25–33, 26f, 31f, 92f, 211; São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas (with Kemeny), 33, 265n25 Luz, Carlos, 274n14 Macalé, Jards, 122 Machado, Maria Augusta, 193 Machado, Sérgio: Onde a terra acaba, 188–192 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 38–39, 84 Madeira-Mamoré Railway, 21–22 Mad Maria (Souza), 21 Magaldi, Sábato, 197 Magalhães, José Telles de, 73 Maioria absoluta (Hirszman), 76–80, 80f, 86, 90 Malfatti, Anita, 264n10 manatees, 14, 15f Manhã cinzenta (São Paulo), 5

Manhatta (Strand), 26–27 Manuel, King of Portugal, 13 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 25, 27 Maranhão, Luiza, 208 March of the Penguins (Jacquet), 226 Marcia (Japanese singer), 178 Marconi, Elettra, 195 Marconi, Guglielmo, 195–196, 281n32 Maria Bonita (Maria Déia), 35, 43–50, 45f, 52, 95–96 Mariani, Glória, 105–107, 107f Markan, Geraldo, 63 Marker, Chris: La spirale, 125; Tendler’s Jango and, 129 Martins, Luciana, 2 Martius, Karl Friedrich Phillip von, 13 Marx, Roberto Burle, 221–223, 283n10 Mato eles? (Bianchi), 145–148, 147f Matogrosso, Ney, 199 Mattos, Carlos Alberto, 4, 119 Mauro, Humberto: Um apólogo— Machado de Assis: 1839–1939 (with Miguel-Pereira), 38–39; As aranhas, 41–43; Os bandeirantes, 148; Brasa dormida, 42; Brasiliana series, 42–43; O canto da saudade, 208; Carneiro and Saraceni’s Arraial do Cabo and, 67; Céu do Brasil no Rio de Janeiro, 41; O descobrimento do Brasil, 42, 150; Dia da pátria, 39; Febre amarela I and Febre amarela II, 39–41; Ganga bruta, 42; INCE and, 37–43; O joão de barro (1938), 41–43; O joão de barro (1956), 43; L. Noronha and, 269n15; Poços rurais, 62; Sangue mineiro, 42; N. Santos and, 268n18; Tesouro perdido, 42; Vitória régia, 39, 41 Mauro, José A., 62 Mayer, José, 149

index  |

Médici, Emílio, 117–118, 120–121, 127, 249 Meirelles, Fernando: Cidade de Deus (with Lund), 279n11 Mello, Fernando Collor de, 248 Mello, Frederico Pernambuco de, 46–48 Mello, João Ramiro, 67, 269n14, 269n34 Mello, Saulo Pereira de, 188, 280n24, 280n26 Memória do cangaço (Soares), 90, 91, 95–96, 96f, 271n4 Mendes, Chico, 120 Mendonça Filho, Kléber: Recife frio, 223–227, 225f; O som ao redor, 223 Menino de engenho (Lima), 125, 206 Mestre Bugalho, 74 Michiles, Aurélio: O cineasta da selva, 5, 33 middle class, 83–87 Migliori, Gabriel, 56, 268n34 Mignone, Francisco, 53–54 Migrantes (Batista de Andrade), 110– 112, 111f, 273n33 Miguel-Pereira, Lúcia: Um apólogo— Machado de Assis: 1839–1939 (with Mauro), 38–39 Mills, C. Wright, 87 mill workers, 22 Mina (Italian singer), 178 Mindlin, José, 203 Ministry of Culture, 6 Ministry of Education and Culture building, 283n9 Ministry of Education and Public Health, 36 Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs, 37 Ministry of Tourism, 6 Minnelli, Liza, 199, 200 Miraculo a Milano (De Sica), 227 Miranda, Carmen, 122, 124 modernity: in Brasília: Contradições

309

de uma cidade nova (Pedro de Andrade), 282n4; Brazilian, start of, 23; O circo (Jabor) and, 82; Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (Bodanzky, Senna) and, 116; in No país das amazonas (S. Santos), 7, 12, 15–20; order and progress theme, 7, 29–30, 32–33; positivism and, 29, 30; in São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (Kemeny, Lustig), 7, 27, 29–33 Modotti, Tina, 47 Moisés, Chico, 233–234 Montagna, Sérgio, 63, 64 Monteiro Lobato (Ana Carolina), 121 Montini, Marina, 132 Moraes, Vinícius de, 177, 187 Moreira, Jorge Machado, 218, 283n9 Moro, Sérgio, 244, 284n8 Morro dos prazeres (Ramos), 250 A morte do boi (Soares), 100–101 Mother (Pudovkin), 188 Motta, Flávio, 121 Motta, Zezé, 158 Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro, 203 Mulligan, Gerry, 178 O mundo mágico dos Trapalhões (Tendler), 275n19 Muniz, Sérgio: De raízes e rezas, entre outros, 101; Rastejador, s.m., 101, 271n9; Rufino and, 101; Sarno’s Viramundo and, 91 Muniz, Terezinha, 271n11 Murnau, F. W., 24 Museu Nacional, 63–64 A música segundo Tom Jobim (N. Santos), 175–178, 176f, 205 Musso, Alfredo: Almoço no Kaiser oferecido ao Presidente da República e esposa, 3–4 Mussolini, Benito, 30, 122, 161 My Home Is Copacabana (Sucksdorff), 269n31

310 |  

index

Nachtergaele, Matheus, 188, 190 Nader, Carlos, 231 Nagib, Lúcia, 2 Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 1 Na Real_Virtual seminars, 4–5, 6 Nascimento, Abdias do, 278n12 Nascimento, Leocádio Avelino do, 228, 231–232, 232f, 234 Nascimento, Milton, 128, 175 Nascimento, Rita Maria do, 232 Nascimento, Sandro do, 178–182, 182f National Propaganda Department, 45–46 National Student Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes), 76, 89, 105, 109, 121, 126, 135, 277n35 National Truth Commission, 247, 285n12, 285n16 nativista rhetoric, 13 Navarro, Vinícius, 2 A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (J. Araújo), 155–159, 157f Nelson Freire (J. Salles), 171–175, 174f Nelson Pereira dos Santos saúda o povo e pede passagem (Ana Carolina), 274n7 Neto, João Cabral de Melo, 276n34 Neto, Trigueirinho: Bahia de Todos os Santos, 209 Neves, Aécio, 244 Neves, David, 76, 105, 136 Neves, Naína, 181 newsreels: in Os anos JK (Tendler), 125–129; as artifacts, 127; in Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (H. Solberg), 170; CEI, promotion of, 215; censorship complaints, 266n5; Cinejornal Brasileiro, 37, 39; in Democracia em vertigem (Costa), 246; in Getúlio Vargas (Ana Carolina), 121–122;

in Liberdade de imprensa (Batista de Andrade), 108–109; in Yndio do Brasil (Back), 149–151 Niemeyer, Oscar, 52–55, 218, 283n9 Night Mail (Watt, Wright), 51 Night of Terror (Stoloff), 266n5 No país das amazonas (S. Santos), 9f, 15f, 17f, 19f, 20f; about, 7–9; O cineasta da selva (Michiles) and, 33; comparisons to, 28, 69f, 115, 145; “fake” strategies and, 5; jungle, city, and modernity in, 12–23, 211; shorts made from, 41 Noronha, Bel: Christo Redemptor, 192–197, 194f, 196f Noronha, Linduarte: Aruanda, 43, 61, 63, 66–73, 69f, 71f, 90, 208 Nossa escola de samba (Giménez), 89–90, 98–100, 99f, 100f Notícias de uma guerra particular (J. Salles, Lund), 171–172, 179 Nova Holanda community, 180–181 Nutels, Noel, 150 Obino, Nise, 174 Obras novas: A evolução de uma indústria (L. Barreto), 58–59, 59f Os óculos do vovô (F. Santos), 263n1 Olho d’Água, 66–67 Oliver, María Rosa, 187 Olympics (Rio, 2016), 181 Omnia Film, 264n14 Omnigraph, 263n3 Onde a terra acaba (Machado), 188–192 Onde a terra acaba (Peixoto), 190–191 Ônibus 174 (Padilha, Lacerda), 5, 178–182, 182f, 241 Operação Bandeirante (OBAN), 201–204 Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), 244, 284n8, 285n11 A opinião pública (Jabor), 83–87, 85f Oppenheimer, Joshua, 247

index  |

Orfeu negro (Camus), 99–100, 177 Oswald, Carlos, 194 Oswald, Henrique, 39 Padilha, José: Ônibus 174 (with Lacerda), 5, 178–182, 182f, 241 Padre Cícero (Sarno), 101. See also Cícero, Padre O pagador de promessas (Duarte), 208 Painel (L. Barreto), 52–55, 54f panchromatic film, 190, 281n28 panelaço protests, 284n7 Panorama do cinema paulista (Batista de Andrade), 109, 272n28 Paraíba, 67, 79, 135–140, 227–234 Paramount Studios, 25, 33, 265n24 Parintintin, 18–20, 20f Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB), 53, 122, 127, 246–247, 273n35, 275n23 Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), 244, 275n23, 284n4 Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), 243–244 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), 241–245, 250 Partido Social Democrático (PSD), 125 Partido Social Liberal (PSL), 284n6 Partido Trabalhador Brasileiro (PTB), 125, 129, 275n23 Paschoal, Janaína, 242–244, 249, 284n6 Um passaporte húngaro (Kogut), 159– 163, 161f Pátria minha (Carvalho), 159 Paulicéia desvairada (M. Andrade), 23–24, 25, 27 Paulicéia fantástica (Batista de Andrade), 273n28 Paviani, Aldo, 215–216 Paz, Carlos Eugênio, 202 Pedreira (Batista de Andrade), 112

311

Pedreira, Brutus, 190–191 Pedreira de São Diogo (Hirszman), 76 Peixoto, Francisco Inácio, 52 Peixoto, Mário: Limite, 187–190, 189f, 208; Onde a terra acaba, 190–191; writings, 192 Pelé, 97–98 Pena, Afonso, 3 Penna, João Vargas: Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx, 221–223 Pentecostalism, 93–94 Pêra, Marília, 199 Pereio, Carlos César, 116, 118–119, 120, 122 Pereira, Walter C. Luiz Mattos, 63, 66 Person, Sérgio, 208 Perth, Margareth, 218, 219–220 Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, 11 Pintagua, Antônio, 132 pirarucús, 14–15 Pires, Roberto: A grande feira, 208 Pista de grama (H. Costa), 178 Pitanga, Antônio, 208 Poços rurais (Mauro), 62 Pomar, Pedro, 246–247 Pombal, Manuel, 68 Porter, Edwin S.: The Great Train Robbery, 47 Portinari, Cândido, 52–55, 54f, 73, 91, 92f Portuguese Empire, 13 positivism, 29, 30 Prado, Marcos: Estamira, 183–186, 186f, 187f; Jardim Gramacho (book), 280n13 Prestes, Júlio, 33, 267n7 Prestes, Luís Carlos, 127 Primeira Convenção Nacional da Crítica Cinematográfica, 71 O processo (Ramos), 5, 242–246, 243f, 249–250

312 |  

index

Proust, Marcel, 192 Psycho (Hitchcock), 54 Pudovkin, Vsevolod: Mother, 188 Quadros, Jânio, 129 Quadros, João, 27 Queirós, Adirley: A cidade é uma só?, 212, 215–217, 217f Queirós, Raquel de, 46, 276n34 ¡Qué viva México! (Eisenstein), 47, 56, 64 race and representation. See African Brazilian representation; Indigenous peoples Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 172, 173 racial democracy, 150, 155, 278n12 Rádio auriverde (Back), 148 Raízes do Brasil (N. Santos), 5 Ramos, Graciliano, 22, 46, 80, 276n34 Ramos, Maria Augusta: Juízo, 250; Justiça, 250; Morro dos prazeres, 250; O processo, 5, 242–246, 243f, 249–250; Seca, 237–240, 239f Rangel, Flávio: Gimba, 208 Rastejador, s.m. (Muniz), 101, 271n9 Ray, May: Anemic Cinema (with Duchamps), 26 Rebelião em Novo Sol (Senna, Sarno), 91 Recife frio (Mendonça), 223–227, 225f Reed, Carol: The Third Man, 51 reformas de base (base reforms), 77, 269n27 Regeneration Institute penitentiary, São Paulo, 28–29 Rego, José Lins do, 276n34 O rei Pelé (Christensen), 97 Reis, Luiz Thomas: Expedição Roosevelt ao Matto Grosso, 3 República Guarani (Back), 148 Restos (Batista de Andrade), 107 Revolution of November 11, 274n14 Rex Filme, 25, 27, 265nn24–25

Ribeiro, Ademar Leite, 266n5 Ribeiro, Darcy, 145 Ribeiro, João Ubaldo, 134 Rien que les heures (Cavalcanti), 26–27 Rio, 40 graus (N. Santos), 66, 99, 175, 177, 206–208, 268n18 Rio, Zona Norte (N. Santos), 122, 175, 208 Rocha, Décio, 184 Rocha, Eryk: Cinema Novo, 205–209, 206f, 212; Rocha que voa, 282n42 Rocha, Glauber: on Abertura (TV Tupi), 133, 134; Antônio das Mortes, 72, 126, 132, 207; Barravento, 72, 73, 208, 269n18; L. Barreto and, 52; “a camera in the hand and an idea in the head,” 81; Câncer, 76; on Carneiro and Saraceni’s Arraial do Cabo, 66; death of, 133; Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 72, 205–207, 206f; Di Cavalcanti, 131–133, 132f, 140; “Documentários: Arraial do Cabo e Aruanda,” 71–72, 269n19; “An Esthetic of Hunger,” 207; Jorjamado, 134; Ramos’s Seca and, 240; E. Rocha’s Rocha que voa, 282n42; L. Santos’s Um dia na rampa and, 73; H. Solberg and, 105; on Sucksdorff, 269n31; Tendler’s Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil, 133–135, 134f; Terra em transe, 125 Rocha, Lúcia, 134–135 Rocha, Marília: Aboio, 235–237 Rocha, Plínio Süssekind, 187, 280n22 Rocha que voa (E. Rocha), 282n42 Rodrigues, Joaquim, 266n5 Rodrigues, José Augusto, 121 Rodrigues, Nelson, 272n27 Rodríguez, Juan Carlo, 2 Romão, Cícero, 43–44 Romero, Cesar, 169 Rondônia (Roquette-Pinto), 3 Roosevelt, Theodore, 3, 150

index  |

Roquette-Pinto, Edgard, 42f; censorship and, 266n5; INCE and, 36–39; Mauro’s Vitória régia and, 41; Rondônia, 3 Rosa, João Guimarães, 75, 235 Rosa, Noel, 175 Rossellini, Roberto, 132 Rossi, Ítalo, 269n10 Rossi Filmes, 265n25 Rouch, Jean, 125, 269n4 Rousseff, Dilma, 241–246, 243f, 249–250, 284n4 Rufino, Paulo: Lavra dor (with Ana Carolina), 101–104, 103f, 121 Ruttmann, Walter: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, 25–26, 221 Ryff, Raul, 129 Saia, Luís, 282n2 Saldanha, João, 271n10 Saldanha, Luís Carlos, 76 Sales, José Roberto da Cunha: Ancoradouro de pescadores na Baía de Guanabara, 263n1 Salgado, Plínio, 265n23 Salles, João Moreira: Blues, 278n; “Imagens do conflito,” 279n10; Nelson Freire, 171–175, 174f; Notícias de uma guerra particular (with Lund), 171–172, 179 Salles, Walter, 191, 192, 280n25 Saludos amigos! (Disney), 175, 224 Sandroni, Cícero, 281n32 Sandroni, Laura, 281n32 Sangue mineiro (Mauro), 42 Santos, Carmen, 190–191 Santos, Francisco: Os óculos do vovo, 263n1 Santos, Lucélia, 156 Santos, Luiz Paulino dos: Um dia na rampa, 73–75, 74f, 75f, 209; Ikatena, 150 Santos, Marcelo do, 152

313

Santos, Nelson Pereira dos: Ana Carolina and, 274n7; Casa grande & senzala, 5; Cinema Novo and, 104; Como era gostoso o meu francês, 150, 151; as editor and producer, 73, 76, 83; Fome de amor, 83; Hirszman on, 206; Juventude, 269n1; in Machado’s Onde a terra acaba, 188, 190; A música segundo Tom Jobim, 175–178, 176f, 205; political criticism of, 272n27; Raízes do Brasil, 5; Ramos’s Seca and, 240; Rio, 40 graus, 66, 99, 175, 177, 206–208, 268n18; Rio, Zona Norte, 122, 175, 208; in E. Rocha’s Cinema Novo, 208; G. Rocha’s Di Cavalcanti and, 131; Vidas secas, 22, 61, 68–69, 175, 206, 272n17 Santos, Silvino, 10f; about, 9–10; Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo, 4, 11; photographic commissions, 10–11; Souza’s Silvino Santos: O cineasta do ciclo da borracha, 33. See also No país das amazonas Santuário (L. Barreto), 55–58, 57f Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinho, 55–58, 57f São Bernardo (Hirszman), 206 São Paulo, Olney: Cinema Novo and, 208; Manhã cinzenta, 5 São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (Kemeny, Lustig), 4, 7, 25–33, 26f, 31f, 92f, 211 São Paulo em festa (L. Barreto), 59–60 São Paulo em vinte e quatro horas (Kemeny, Lustig), 33, 265n25 São Paulo film festival, 58 São Simão hydroelectric power plant, 222 Saraceni, Paulo César: Arraial do Cabo (with Carneiro), 61, 62–67, 65f, 71–72, 90, 208, 269n34; Por dentro do Cinema Novo (book), 63

314 |  

index

Sarno, Geraldo: Casa da farinha, 101, 272n19; DOCTV and, 6; O engenho, 272n19; Os imaginários, 272n19; Padre Cícero, 101; Rebelião em Novo Sol (with Senna), 91; Viramundo, 90, 91–95, 92f, 94f, 271n4 Sarris, Andrew, 167 Satie, Erik, 188, 212 Schooner, Raul, 190–191 Seca (Ramos), 237–240, 239f Segreto, Afonso, 3; A família do Presidente Prudente de Morais no Palácio do Catete, 263n1; Fortalezas e navios de guerra na Guanabara, 263n1 Segreto, Paschoal, 3 A Selva (Castro), 9 Semana de Arte Moderna, 23–24, 265n23 Semenovitch, Jorge Scévola de, 193–194 Senna, Orlando: Iracema: Uma transa amazônica (with Bodanzky), 115– 120, 117f, 119f, 235–236; Rebelião em Novo Sol (with Sarno), 91 “Se todos fossem iguais a você” (Jobim), 177 Shaw, Lisa, 2 Silva, Celso Monteiro da, 108–109 Silva, João Mariano da, 136, 138–139 Silva, João Virgílio, 139 Silveira, Antônio Fernandes “China” da, 99 Silvino Santos: O cineasta do ciclo da borracha (Souza), 33 Simões, Cléa, 158 Sinatra, Frank, 177, 178 Sítio do Morcego, 188–189 Skvirsky, Salomé Aguilera, 70 Soares, Ana Carolina Teixeira. See Ana Carolina Soares, Jofre, 272n17 Soares, Paulo Gil: Erva bruxa, 101; Jaramataia, 101; Memória do

cangaço, 90, 91, 95–96, 96f, 271n4; A morte do boi, 100–101 Sobrinho, Francisco Matazzaro, 50–51 soccer, 96–98 Solanas, Fernando: La hora de los hornos (with Getino), 104; “Toward a Third Cinema” manifesto (with Getino), 152, 277n6 Solberg, Helena, 107f; about, 105; Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business, 167–171, 169f, 170f; A entrevista, 105–107, 107f, 208; on use of “fakes,” 170 Solberg, Ruy: O homem do Morcego, 188, 280n26; Machado’s Onde a terra acaba and, 280n26 O som ao redor (Mendonça), 223 Sousa, Estamira Gomes de, 183–186, 186f, 187f Souza, Carlos Roberto de, 267n9 Souza, Cláudio Melo, 269n10 Souza, Damiana Nascimento de, 181–182 Souza, Márcio, 21, 33 Souza, Ruth de, 157f, 158 Souza, Wagner Ribeiro de, 197–198 La spirale (Marker), 125 Spix, Johann Baptist von, 13 Springtime in the Rockies (Cummings), 169 Sroulevich, Ney, 120–121 Stam, Robert, 2, 149 Stepan, Adam, 278n14 Stoloff, Benjamin: Night of Terror, 266n5 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 156 Strand, Paul: Manhatta, 26–27 Stuckert, Ricardo, 284n10 Subterrâneos do futebol (Capovilla), 90, 96–98, 98f, 107, 209 Sucksdorff, Arne: Jabor and, 81; My Home Is Copacabana, 269n31 Szankovski, Estanislau: África eterna, 128, 275n19

index  |

Tarzan, the Ape Man (Van Dyke), 266n5 Teixeira, Elizabeth, 135–139, 136f, 140f Teixeira, João Pedro, 90, 135–139, 227 Teixeira, Milton, 195 telenovelas, 81, 156–159 Temer, Michel, 243, 250–251 Tenda dos milagres (TV Globo), 158–159 Tendler, Sílvio: about, 125; Os anos JK: Uma trajetória, 124–129, 126f; Glauber, o filme—Labirinto do Brasil, 133–135, 134f; Jango, 128–131, 130f; O mundo mágico dos Trapalhões, 275n19 Tenreiro, Joaquim, 53 Terra em transe (G. Rocha), 125 Terra Indígena Mangueirinha, 145–148 Tesouro perdido (Mauro), 42 The Third Man (Reed), 51 Timóteo, Geraldo, 233 Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva Xavier), 52–53 Tiradentes (Portinari), 52–55 Tire dié (Birri), 99 Tiso, Wagner, 128 Torres Filho, Alberto, 266n5 Tourneur, Jacques: I Walked with a Zombie, 268n31 Tovar, Cláudio, 199 Trans-Amazonian Highway, 19, 21, 116–119, 222–223, 235 Três desenhos (Ana Carolina), 121 Truth Commission of the State of São Paulo, 282n41. See also National Truth Commission TV Cultura, 109–113, 273n35 TV Globo, 50, 81, 156–159, 273n35 TV Manchete, 175–176 TV Tupi, 133, 158, 276n28

315

ufanista rhetoric, 13, 25, 32 Umbanda, 91, 93–94 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 156 União Nacional dos Estudantes (National Student Union), 76, 89, 105, 109, 121, 126, 135, 277n35 Unidos de Vila Isabel samba school, 99–100 Universidade de Brasília, 213 Urano, Pedro: HU (with Csekö), 218–220, 220f urban planning and architecture: Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova (Pedro de Andrade), 212–214, 214f; Brasília inauguration, 211; A cidade é uma só? (Queirós), 212, 215–217, 217f; Filme paisagem: Um olhar sobre Roberto Burle Marx (Penna), 221–223; HU (Urano, Csekö), 218–220, 220f; Recife frio (Mendonça), 223–227, 225f Ustra, Carlos Alberto Brilhante, 201, 203, 249, 250, 285n16 Van Dyke, W. S.: Tarzan, the Ape Man, 266n5 Vargas, Getúlio: Arraial do Cabo (Carneiro, Saraceni) and, 66; Christ the Redeemer and, 196; Circular 1127 (1937), 162; CNA and, 63; death of, 66; educational shorts and, 35–37; Getúlio Vargas (Ana Carolina), 120–124, 123f; Goulart and, 129; Lampião and, 46, 95; Machado’s Onde a terra acaba and, 191–192; modernization and, 218; political career, 33, 35, 50, 125, 266n7; racial democracy and, 155; Subterrâneos do futebol (Capovilla) and, 97. See also Estado Novo Veiga, Fábio Penna da, 193, 195–196 Veiga, Lygia Daudt da, 193 Veloso, Caetano, 91

316 |  

index

Vera Cruz (Batista de Andrade), 273n28 Vera Cruz Companhia Cinematográfica, 36, 50–60 Vertov, Dziga: Man with a Movie Camera, 25, 27 La via del petrolio (Bertolucci), 76 Vianna Filho, Oduvaldo, 76 Viany, Alex, 80, 135–136, 206 Vidas secas (N. Santos), 22, 61, 68–69, 175, 206, 272n17 Video in the Villages Presents Itself (Corrêa, Carelli), 152 Vídeo nas Aldeias project, 151–154, 279n11 Vieira, Rucker, 67, 68, 70, 72 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 63, 104, 172 Viramundo (Sarno), 90, 91–95, 92f, 94f, 271n4 Vitória régia (Mauro), 39, 41 von Sternberg, Josef: Blonde Venus, 150

Weekend in Havana (Lang), 169 Weissman, David: The Cockettes (with Weber), 281n36 Welles, Orson, 125; Citizen Kane, 202; É Tudo Verdade film festival and, 5; F for Fake (et al.), 1; It’s All True, 64–65; Peixoto’s Limite and, 187 Wexler, Haskell: Brazil: A Report on Torture (with Landau), 203 Williams, Raymond, 127 Woolf, Virginia, 192 Wright, Basil: Night Mail (with Watt), 51 Wulfes, Alexandre, 46

Walter.doc (Formaggini), 207 Watt, Harry: Night Mail (with Wright), 51 Weber, Bill: The Cockettes (with Weissman), 281n36

yellow fever, 39–41 Yndio do Brasil (Back), 148–151, 149f

Xavier, Ismail, 2, 24, 119 Xavier, Joaquim José da Silva (Tiradentes), 52–53 Xavier, Nelson, 91 Xetá tribe, 145–148 Xica da Silva (Diegues), 158 Xingu tribe, 154

Zampari, Franco, 50–51