Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Brazil
Challenge, Paulo Saraceni, 1967), and O bravo guerreiro
(The Brave Warrior, Gustavo Dahl, 1968).
CANNIBALISM AND TROPICALISM
The year 1968 fragmented the artistic milieu and nurtured
the emergence of new aesthetic strategies of resistance:
cannibalism, Tropicalism, and the aesthetics of
garbage dominated the third phase of Cinema Novo.
Cannibalism, inspired by the modernist movement of
the 1920s, was a nationalist strategy of cultural antiimperialism,
according to which the culture imposed by
the First World should be devoured, digested, and
recycled according to local needs. ‘‘Cannibalism is an
exemplary mode of consumerism adopted by underdeveloped
peoples,’’ wrote Joaquim Pedro de Andrade for
the presentation of Macunaíma (1969), the film adaptation
of the modernist novel by Mário de Andrade that
became a box-office hit and a milestone in Cinema Novo
(‘‘Cannibalism and Self-Cannibalism,’’ in Johnson and
Stam, p. 68). Another splendid cannibal film is Pereira
dos Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu francês (How Tasty
Was My Little Frenchman, 1971).
Tropicalism, though conceptually related to cannibalism,
is a complex Brazilian variant of pop with which a
growing number of avant-garde musicians, writers, artists,
and theater and film directors identify themselves. Though
clearly a reaction to the economically ultramodern but
ideologically ultraconservative neoliberal modernization
imposed by the military, Tropicalism rendered patriarchal,
traditional cultures anachronistic using the most advanced
or fashionable idioms and techniques in the world, thus
producing an allegory of Brazil that exposed a real historical
abyss, a junction of different stages of capitalist development.
However, the Tropicalist message was at least
ambiguous, since the line between covert criticism and
overt commercialism is blurred, providing the stock for a
genuine ‘‘snobbery for the masses’’ (Schwarz). In consequence,
contrary to the aesthetic of hunger, Tropicalism’s
formula mixed reflection with entertainment, with fiesta,
carnival, and chanchada, to entice the public, as in dos
Santos’s Tenda dos milagros (Shop of Miracles, 1977) and
Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two
Husbands, 1976), arguably the most successful film in
Brazilian filmmaking, and Diegues’s works Xica da Silva
(1976), Bye Bye Brasil (1980), and Quilombo (1984). This
Tropicalism in Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye Brasil (1980). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
174 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM