Sertão

INTRODUCTION xxv
of Indians in 100 years of Brazilian film history. Departing from a
contemporary example of a TV miniseries A invenção do Brasil (The
Invention of Brazil, Guel Arraes and Jorge Furtado, 2000), set 500
years ago, at the time of Brazil’s discovery, his chapter embarks on
a retrospective of Brazilian Cinema, from the silent period up to
contemporary production. In this fascinating journey, we meet the
‘romantic Indian’, the ‘documented Indian’, the ‘modernist
Indian’, the ‘patriotic Indian’ and the ‘tropicalist Indian’, finally
returning to the 1990s, when all these types seem to find a place
on the screen. Stam’s view is that Brazilian Cinema and popular
culture ‘have both prolonged and critiqued the myths and fictions
inherited from Indianismo.’ He hopes, however, that in the twenty
first century, ‘the native Brazilian will emerge to speak in a more
full-throated manner, as an integral part of the cultural polyphony
which is Brazil.’
Lisa Shaw, who has been developing important research on the
Brazilian musical comedies of the 1940s and 50s called chanchadas,
analyses the film For all: o trampolim da vitoria (For All, Luiz Carlos
Lacerda and Buza Ferraz, 1998) as a legacy of both the chanchada
and Hollywood paradigms, with particular reference to the US
war-time musical. Shaw interweaves Brazilian and American (film)
histories, which were closely linked in the 1930s and 40s, the time
of the Good Neighbour Policy that boosted ‘latino’ movies, several
of them starring the Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda. She then
reads For all as a ‘nostalgia film’ that quotes the chanchada as well
as Hollywood musicals, and functions as a pastiche of the musical
genre itself.
José Carlos Avellar, a key figure in the Brazilian film revival as
the head of Rio’s film production and distribution company
Riofilme, also embarks on a voyage through Brazilian film history.
He uses some of Pasolini’s linguistic ideas on cinema to describe
1960s cinema (or Cinema Novo) as equivalent to the ‘spoken word’,
because ‘it expressed itself by using the direct and only partially
articulated elements of spoken language,’ whereas current
Brazilian Cinema could be compared to the ‘written word’, ‘as a
means of writing down the way of speaking of the 1960s.’ For him,
cinema in Brazil has undergone a process of ‘resensitization’ – an
expression used by Walter Salles to define the experience of
Central do Brasil’s main character. ‘This process’, he explains, ‘is to
an extent the reunion of the father (the old Cinema Novo?) and the
nation. It is a way of understanding Brazil.’