The Newer Brazilian Cinema: Subjectivity and Social Change
August Winds, Gabriel Mascaro (2014)
Brazilian filmmaking has experienced an intense transformation throughout the past thirty years. After a long period of stagnation during the late 1980s and early 1990s, production activity resumed incrementally thanks to tax incentives and regulatory agencies—the Culture Incentive Law, known as the Rouanet Law (1991); the Audiovisual Law (1993); the National Cinema Agency (Ancine), in 2001; the Contribution to the Development of the Film Industry (Condecine/2002); the Audiovisual Sectorial Fund (FSA), in 2006; and a 5% share of the Telecommunications Inspection Fund (Fistel), also instituted in 2006, went to film production. Today, Ancine is defunded and poorly managed, and film production has been substantially affected due to both financial and ideological attacks from a conservative government and reactionary social sectors.
Despite all the constraints the Brazilian film industry faces, there is no doubt that a robust national cinema thrives in terms of its quality, range, and creative drive. The films currently screening in Filmatique's Spotlight on Brazil II series comprise the work of a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers whose future is clearly perceptible. Despite the significant aesthetic differences, divergent cultural and geographical contexts of their emergence, and the heterogeneity of these films, a remarkable feeling of renewal is in the air, fed by the expansion of film schools and festivals across the country, as much as the participation of Brazilian films at international festivals.
More traditional national festivals (Gramado Film Festival, Brasília Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival) and the most recent ones (Tiradentes Film Festival and Recife Audiovisual Festival or Cine-PE, both founded in 1997)have functioned as important launching pads for independent Brazilian cinema, supporting restless, powerful, and productive films, stimulating the expansion of the so-called novissimo (brand new) Brazilian Cinema, which has also been visible at Cannes, Berlinale, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Venice.
Front and center, these "newer" film narratives are immersed in multiple forms of adherence to the subjects of their worlds. Individual desire and memory are tied to collective experience, enforcing their placement in a socio-political milieu undergoing radical transformation. The four filmmakers featured in Spotlight on Brazil II explore these subjectivities and the multiple ways they articulate themselves in a broader context of societal interactions, dislocating perceptions regarding what is, and can be, imminently political.
Hard Labor, Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas (2011)
Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra & the Horrors of Middle-Class Identity
In Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas's first feature, Hard Labor (Trabalhar Cansa, 2012), Helena (Helena Albergaria) is a middle-class housewife living in the mammoth metropolis of São Paulo, and married to the white-collar worker Otávio (Marat Descartes). In the opening sequence, she assesses a rental space that used to be a mini-market. The real-estate broker stresses the qualities of the shop, while evading Helena's questions about the previous tenants who left the place without notice. A twinkling yellow light, old tin cans left on the shelves, and stains on the wall create a somewhat disturbing atmosphere. When she returns home, she learns that Otávio was laid off.
From these two scenes on we see Helena's conversion into an entrepreneur, a petit bourgeoisie who grows ungenerous and mean while asserting her class identity, which is also reinforced by her relationship with subordinates both in the store and at home. Helena constantly harasses and watches over her employees, while she and her jobless husband are disparaging towards their maid Paula (Naloana Lima), who lives in the impoverished suburbs on the margins of the city. All the stereotypes present in Brazil's middle-class imagination about the popular classes—that they are unclean, treacherous, cunning—are reflected in Helena and Otávio's shared demeanor.
Hard Labor, Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas (2011)
The store thrives, but the price to pay is high, as both Helena and the space she inhabits go through simultaneous sinister transformations. The metaphysical incidence of something ominous ends up materializing in a horrific presence, which Helena simply eliminates. Coldly, she moves on. Horror, we learn, is right there—not in the supernatural world, but in our menial interactions. Her desperate husband ends up screaming in despair.
Since their beginnings as film students in the School of Arts and Communication at the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP) in the 1990s, Dutra and Rojas have developed a unique style that combines drama, horror, and irony. After founding the São Paulo-based Filmes do caixote film collective alongside with director Caetano Gotardo (whose film is analyzed below), Dutra and Rojas started making very low budget and yet acclaimed short and feature films in a variety of formats.
Some of the pair's shorts are especially noteworthy. The White Sheet (O lençol branco, 2004) chronicles Cecília's (Clarissa Kiste) journey waiting an entire day for a morgue official to pick up her recently deceased infant corpse. In Pra eu dormir tranquilo (2011) Luís (David Navarro), a little boy from a middle-class family, feels undermined by his mother's pregnancy and the prospects of a new baby in the house. Sad and rejected, he can't sleep. One night, his deceased nanny comes back to care for him. Dora is now a vampire, and with Luís's help, she will feed her hunger by making his family disappear.
In these films, the macabre leaves the realm of the extraordinary and positions itself in everyday life. In an irreverent gesture, Rojas and Dutra stretch the limits of the real by making horror a disruptive, but not destructive, component, and an essential part of the quotidian. For these filmmakers, certain aspects of human experience could not be expressed without it. Awarded at both national and international festivals, their work, like that from other burgeoning film collectives in Brazil, has established a trend in the county's cinema scene during the last fifteen years. In a film industry that diversifies in multiple directions and has escaped the dichotomies between commercial and art-house films, Rojas and Dutra have made innovative, independent, and inexpensive films, with the exception of their most recent feature Good Manners (As boas maneiras, 2017), a high-budget horror film that incorporates musical numbers, comedy, horror, and thriller elements.
The Moving Creatures, Caetano Gotardo (2012)
Caetano Gotardo: Unbearable Loss and Lyricism
In the second strand of Caetano Gotardo's The Moving Creatures (O que se move, 2012), Eduardo (Rômulo Braga) abruptly enters a recording studio, interrupting the orchestra's performance. The producer's off-screen voice questions him; Eduardo, puzzled, leaves the room. Stumbling towards his office, he cries inconsolably—his despair is a mystery to him. Later on, a colleague suggests that he should go to the doctor. Eduardo walks to the parking lot and discovers, horrified, that he left his baby inside the car. The child is now dead from extreme heat and dehydration. That morning, Eduardo forgot him there, and the rest of the day he suffered the excruciating pain of the loss of his child, even if he was still unaware of the outcome.
In his first feature, Gotardo explores the agony of losing loved ones and the moments people create, in their daily lives, to cope with despair to keep on living. The film's three tales are centered on parents mourning their children after tragic events which erupt unpredictably into the texture of the quotidian, changing their lives forever. Three different mothers sing of their unspeakable grief; music then becomes the expression of utmost sadness but also what carries them on and connects them to life.
Gotardo, who among other things was the editor of Hard Labor and Good Manners, shares with his fellow filmmakers in the collective Filmes do Caixote a taste for genre and experimentation. The Moving Creatures is loosely based on three isolated cases he read in the newspapersat the beginning of the 2000s. Despite the fact that these are all "real" stories, Gotardo chooses to move away from any concept of verisimilitude and opts for the musical as expression of the journey these women go through. Singing allows them to break free from the expected role of suffering mothers, a trope that has a significant place in Brazilian visual culture and in the universe of far-reaching television soap operas.
Gotardo's previous works, including his acclaimed short The Japanese Boy (O menino japonês, 2009), and his next two features Your Bones and Your Eyes (Seus ossos e seus olhos, 2019) and All the Dead Ones (Todos os Mortos, 2020, co-directed with Marco Dutra), are characterized by a formal rigor and exquisite framing. Beautifully crafted scenes blur the line between the events his subjects experience and their memory and perception of them. This approach explains the sharp dialogues present in all his films: his characters meditate on the weight and nature of their impressions, invoking these events recurrently, reinterpreting them endlessly.
All the Dead Ones (Todos os Mortos), Caetano Gotardo & Marco Dutra (2020)
Gabriel Mascaro: Sadness and Desire
If the relentless untangling of words and memories are a hallmark of Gotardo's films, reticence governs Gabriel Mascaro's August Winds (Ventos de Agosto, 2014). The director's first narrative feature follows Shirley (Dandara de Morais), a young woman sent by her mother from the city to a small fishing village in the northern state of Alagoas, to look after her elder grandmother (Maria Salvino dos Santos). Shirley works transporting coconuts from a local plantation, and engages in a relationship with the taciturn Jeison (Geova Manoel dos Santos), who also works on the plantation and lives with his authoritarian father (Antonio Jose dos Santos).
Mascaro, who belongs to a northeastern film collective that has developed a robust body of work since the mid-90s, explores the subjectivity of his characters methodically, as he does in previous documentaries High-Rise (2009) and Housemaids (2012). In the former, Mascaro interviews the people who live in penthouses facing the beach in Rio de Janeiro and Recife—talking at length, they reveal their vision of the world framed by class and racial prejudice. In the Housemaids, seven middle-class teenagers film their family's domestic workers for one week; Mascaro assembles these fragments to compose his documentary.
Housemaids, Gabriel Mascaro (2012)
Unlike these films, August Winds is almost devoid of dialogue—Mascaro delves into the subjectivity of his two main characters vis-à-vis beautifully crafted images of the landscape that surrounds them. Shirley dreams of living in the big city and running a tattoo parlor, while Jeison endures his father's sermons and obsesses over a corpse that has washed up on the beach, which the local police seem unwilling to recover. Despite the blatant eroticism of their relationship, the film does not examine Shirley and Jeison's connection, but rather focuses on how each of the characters are sunk in their own interiority, in a landscape that does not invite melancholic feelings.
August Winds, Gabriel Mascaro (2014)
Mascaro's next films carefully approache the intersections between intense personal experience and societal constrains in contemporary Brazil. Neon Bull (Boi Neon, part of Filmatique's Queer Cinema series) explores Brazil's vaquejadas (rodeos), tracing the complex life of Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), a heterosexual bull wrangler who aspires to become a clothing designer for women. Divine Love (Amor Divino, 2019) is a futuristic allegory of an evangelical-ridden Brazil, with characters driven by intense sexual desires but immersed in a profoundly hypocritical universe—a prophecy of the post-Bolsonaro era. Once again, Mascaro presents convoluted and dense characters who remain inextricable from their circumstances.
Casa Grande, Fellipe Barbosa (2015)
Fellipe Barbosa: Reinterpreting the Old Myths in Brazilian Culture
Halfway through Fellipe Barbosa's first narrative film, Casa Grande, Hugo and Sônia Cavalcanti, their seventeen-year-old son Jean, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Natalie are hosting a barbecue at their home in a gated, affluent neighborhood in the western suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Jean (Thales Cavalcanti), who enjoys the perks of being in an upper middle-class household, like attending an exclusive private school, has invited Luiza (Bruna Amaya), his dark skinned girlfriend, who attends a public school. A harsh conversation on college and the new legislation on affirmative action ensues, and Hugo (Marcello Novaes) and his financier friend Hilton (Sandro Rocha) viciously attack Luiza's favorable arguments towards the system.
This scene captures the general tone of the film. Casa Grande's narrative is certainly focused on Jean's sexual and emotional awakening—however, this is an experience deeply embedded in intricate relations of class, race, and gender which ultimately constitute Brazil's social fabric. In a house where the family and its domestic workers live intimately, Jean's sexual desire seems to be ignited by the live-in maid Rita (Clarissa Pinheiro), reproducing ideas immortalized by Gilberto Freyre's 1933 book Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), which examines cultural and social relations between whites and blacks in Brazil since colonial times. The film ironically nods to the widespread notion that young white men sexually initiated by their black and mulatto slaves in the past, and by their maids nowadays, represent proof of a cordial coexistence. Barbosa dives deep into an all-too-accepted social practice which veils the past and present of racism in the Brazilian society.
Casa Grande, Fellipe Barbosa (2015)
There is much of Barbosa's own biographical life experience in this film—a criticism of his own class, the narrative also aims to highlight the economic failure of his father Hugo, who loses his position as a hedge-fund manager. Along with Sônia (Suzana Pires), Hugo will do whatever he needs to maintain his pretense of affluence, including firing their employees without any severance.
Similar class and racial issues are explored in Domingo (Clara Linhart and Fellipe Barbosa, 2018). The film focuses on an emblematic date—January 1, 2003—the day the country celebrated the investiture of the first Worker's Party President, Ignacio 'Lula' da Silva. That Sunday, an upper middle-class family in financial ruin gathers in a run-down house in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. The matriarch, Laura (the iconic Cinema Novo actress Ítala Nandi) is terrified that the new president, who in his inaugural speech promises to end the social gap and uplift the significant poverty-ridden strata of the population, will diminish her authority and wealth even more. Here again, the white boy covets the daugher's maid, and the perennial theme of interclass and interracial relationships is presented in a somber light. The help listens Lula's speech on the radio mindfully while going about their daily chores, leaving the house once and for all by the end of the day.
Domingo, Clara Linhart and Fellipe Barbosa (2018)