'Cinema Novo' a cultural revolution on screen

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1986

'Cinema Novo'

'CINEMA Novo', or the NewCinema of Brazil, was hailed by its main spokesman and theorist, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, as an authentic revolution in both expression and production, two closely connected aspects of an art which is also an industry.

Expression. Forty years after the BrazilianModernist movement of 1922 attempted to lay the foundations of a distinct Brazilian aesthetic in literature and the plastic arts, Cinema Novo aspired to define a truly Brazilian form of expression in film. Hitherto, Brazilian film-makers had contented themselves with local themes and characters, and in the process of film-making itself, usually considered as a purely technical operation, had stuck to the conventional formulae of Hollywood and the European cinema. They turned out comedies, melodramas and musical comedies replete with cliches inherited from the dominant modes of film production. In this way a dichotomy between form and content was created, and film-makers had no choice but to present local reality through established cinematographic conventions which they regarded as ideal.

Cinema Novo transformed this situationby seeking to develop a Brazilian film language which would be in harmony with the other forms of expression of Brazilian culture and particularly with the most innovative creative trends in narrative, drama, the plastic arts and music.

The best example of that stylistic innovation,and of a form of nationalism which by no means implies xenophobia or a rejection of foreign influences, is still Deus e o diabo na terra do sol ("Black God--White Devil"), made by Glauber Rocha in 1963. This film succeeds in integrating a whole series of disparate elements: the montage technique of Eisenstein and the poetry of the literatura de cordel of northeastern Brazil (see page 27); the rich texture of Visconti's films and the dynamic quality of Westerns; the preoccupations of the social documentary and the choreography of samurai films; the psychological introspection of Stanislavsky and the distancing of Brecht; the choral complexity of opera; the lyricism of the Bachianas brasileiras of Villa-Lobos and the simplicity of folk melodies; specific details about Rocha's native region; and the general problems of underdevelopment.

Glauber Rocha interwove all these elementsto produce an original, personal creation, just as a writer such as Guimaraes Rosa used the folk themes and traditions of his own region. Glauber Rocha showed that this approach was suitable not only for analysing bygone situations and handling traditional issues, but also for describing the modern world. His film Terra em transe ("Earth Entranced") of 1967 is a dissection of the political world at that time, showing the manipulations of populism, the messianic temptation of guerrilla warfare and the conflicts between elites. It contributed to the national debate with an acuteness and lucidity seldom achieved on film.

Production. Here too Cinema Novo rejectedimitation, which had hitherto been regarded as inevitable in film production. This innovatory movement emerged from critical thinking about the failure of attempts to transplant to Brazil the kind of film industry found in the industrially developed countries. The colonization of the Bra zilian cinema was not only a consequence of the domination of the market by foreign output; it was also an alienating attempt to transplant a method of production-line filming in vast studios with large teams of technicians, based on the star system and the conventions of the Hollywood film.

The new Brazilian cinema took underdevelopmentas its starting point and devised production formulae which were better suited to the circumstances. It returned to the tradition of craftsmanship established by the pioneers of film, abolished the frontiers between fiction and documentary, and explored new channels of distribution.

Because of these two revolutionary departures,in expression and in production, Cinema Novo stood out as an alternative model for the emergent cinemas of Latin America and the Third World as a whole, as did its quest for paths to economic and ideological decolonization. Glauber Rocha expounded the theory of the movement in such manifestos as Uma estetica da fome ("An Aesthetics of Hunger") and Uma estetica da violencia ("An Aesthetics of Violence", 1965), and in many articles collected in his book Revolucao do Cinema Novo ("The Revolution of Cinema Novo", 1981), which had a worldwide impact.

Nevertheless, this new approach tofilm-making was not so much a formal school as a movement for those who rejected dogmatism. Although the influence of Neorealism can be seen in such early works as Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio 40 graus ("Rio, 40 Degrees", 1955) and Rio zona norte ("Rio Northern District", 1957), Cinema Novo diverged from Neorealism and was fundamentally in sympathy with Luis Bunuel's criticism of the sentimentality of post-war Italian cinema, while also rejecting the stereotypes and Manichaeism of socialist realism.