Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Carlos Diegues. Ó FORESTIER YVES/CORBIS SYGMA.
THE AESTHETICS OF HUNGER
The history of Cinema Novo can be divided into three
phases linked to major political events. The first phase
lasted until the coup of 1964. It was a formative period
dominated by a sense of political urgency aptly captured
by neorealist, documentary-style narratives that went out
to the streets to film popular subjects. Pereira dos
Santos’s Rio 40 graus (Rio 40 Degrees, 1955) and Rio
zona norte (Rio Northern Zone, 1957) followed the daily
life of peanut-seller boys and a samba composer in the
slums of Rio, while Rocha’s Barravento (The Turning
Wind, 1962) laid bare the alienating function of religion
and its clash with modern ideas in a traditional fishing
community. Several seminal films were released in 1963,
many of them located on the sertão, the mythical locus of
uncontaminated Brazilianness in the Northeastern backland:
dos Santos’s Vidas secas (Barren Lives), Guerra’s Os
fuzis (The Guns), and Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do
sol (Black God, White Devil ). Although Carlos Diegues’s
Ganga Zumba retraces the roots of Afro-Brazilian culture,
based as it is on the seventeenth-century maroon community
of Palmares, it shares with the other films a
Brazil
similar concern with the socially and ethnically downtrodden
and a similar optimism about the revolutionary
creativity of the national-popular. As Rocha summed
it up, these films ‘‘narrated, described, poeticized, discussed,
analyzed, and stimulated the themes of hunger:
characters eating dirt and roots, characters stealing to eat,
characters killing to eat, characters fleeing to eat’’
(‘‘Esthetic of Hunger,’’ in Johnson and Stam, p. 54).
These are the bases for his aesthetics of hunger:
‘‘Economic and political conditioning has led us to
philosophical weakness and impotence....It is forthis reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an
alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society’’
(‘‘Esthetic of Hunger,’’ in Johnson and Stam, p. 56).
Based on the homonymous novel by Graciliano
Ramos and released amid widespread debates on land
reform, Vidas secas tells the story of a family of landless
peasants forced to migrate to the modern cities by cyclical
droughts, endemic poverty, and quasi-feudal socioeconomic
relations. Os fuzis tells the allegorical story of the
conflicts that arise between the soldiers sent to a village in
the sertão to protect the warehouse of the landowner and
the starving peasants, whose initial passivity and fatalism
seem to give way to some form of symbolic rebellion that
will also change the soldiers’ minds. Deus e o diabo is a
condensed allegory whose narrator, the blind singer-poet
of cordel literature (Northeastern broadsheets), traverses
tradition and modernity to tell the story of a peasant
couple torn between following the messianic call of a
religious leader shaped after the historical figure of
Antônio Conselheiro and adhering to the murderous rage
of the last cangaceiro (a social bandit). Neither morality
nor rationality prevails in this apocalyptic society shaped
by colonial insanity. Deus e o diabo, its sequel, Antônio
das Mortes, matador de cangaceiros (Antonio das Mortes,
1969), and Terra em transe (Land in Anguish, 1967), all
by Rocha, show an avant-garde experimentalism at its
peak.
Cinema Novo’s second phase lasted from 1964 to
1968, when the AI-5 (Fifth Institutional Act) radicalized
the repressive nature of the military regime. Despite this,
during those years the counterculture and Cinema Novo
continued to flourish. This uneasy marriage of convenience
was due to the growth of state funding through the
Instituto Nacional do Cinema (National Film Institute),
which was established after GEICINE (Executive Group
of the Film Industry), which provided financial support
for the importation of equipment and the production of
films and established compulsory exhibition quotas for
films. These nationalistic policies divided the field, and
the improbable alliance inspired some films that directly
addressed the role of middle-class intellectuals in social
struggle, such as Rocha’s Terra em transe, O desafio (The
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 173