Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

explains the spectacular magnificence of Tropicalist films,
and their inversion of the revolutionary strategy of the
aesthetics of hunger for an ironic tactic of social reform,
which tries to recover the carnivalesque underside of
uneven development.
Tropicalism’s ultimate goal, however, was to break
its dependence on official patronage and ideological censorship,
to get rid of its paradoxical alliance with the
authoritarian regime, thus solving the intractable question
of the popular: in a word, how to make films
attractive to the public while still representing the interests
of the people. After their return from exile in 1973,
though Cinema Novo had largely disappeared as a cultural
movement, Cinema Novo directors continued to
dominate the scene under the auspices of the cultural
policies of General Ernesto Geisel. In 1975, they revitalized
Embrafilme and created Concine and Funarte,
institutions dedicated to the promotion of the arts.
Embrafilme’s budget rose from $600,000 to $8 million;
it distributed over 30 percent of Brazilian films and
cofinanced up to 50 percent of the annual film production.
The screen quota was increased from 42 days in
1959 to 140 days in 1980, and the share of Brazilian
films went from 15 percent in 1974 to 30 percent in
1980 (Johnson, Film Industry). The dilemma for filmmakers
was whether these tangible benefits could write
off the political costs of accepting the support of a
repressive regime, whose interest in the arts was part of
its modernizing policies. Some filmmakers rejected
Embrafilme as a co-opting device and a mechanism of
cultural control; others, including Rocha, Pereira dos
Santos, and Diegues, who became sub-director of
Embrafilme under Roberto Farias, thought that
Embrafilme was a way to confront the power of multinational
corporations in Brazil.
Meanwhile, some filmmakers, known to be part of
the Udigrudi (underground), rejected any form of state
support as an ideological sellout and questioned the
artistic hegemony of Cinema Novo directors. The
Udigrudi filmmakers’ aesthetic of garbage expressed a
feeling of cynical despair that anticipated the postmodern
dismissal of modern utopias. However, according to
Rocha, they shared the same objectives of conquering
the market and maintaining economic independence to
sustain freedom of production (‘‘From the Drought to the
Palm Trees,’’ in Johnson and Stam, p. 88). Obandidoda
luz vermelha (The Red Light Bandit, RogerioSganzerla,
1968), Matou a familia e foi ao cinema (Killed the Family
and Went to the Cinema, Julio Bresanne, 1969), and
Bangue-Bangue (Bang Bang, Andrea Tonacci, 1971) follow
this line of breaking the codes, mixing genres, transgressing
morals, and dumping Cinema Novo’s revolutionary
optimism within corrosive nihilism.
Brazil
All this revealed a profound ideological and cultural
crisis, but it also contributed to spark anew the debate on
‘‘the popular’’ and the social role of the intellectual,
revealing that the national and the popular are not something
hidden from everyday reality that artists and intellectuals
should unearth, but that same everyday social
reality in which people live, including, of course, religion
and television. This notion is consciously examined in
Pereira dos Santos’s O amuleto de Ogum (The Amulet of
Ogum, 1974) and Memórias do cárcere (Prison Memories,
1984), Guerra and Nelson Xavier’s A queda (The Fall,
1977), and O homen que virou suco (The Man Who
Turned into Juice, João Batista de Andrade, 1980).
THE GLOBALIZATION OF NATIONAL CINEMA
Although the modernization and globalization of
Brazilian culture can be traced back to the 1960s, the full
effects of globalization would not be noticeable until the
1980s, when the Brazilian ‘‘economic miracle’’ vanished
amid the tremors of the Latin American ‘‘lost decade,’’ as
the 1980s, dominated by neoliberal policies, have been
called. While the crisis led to certain political democratization,
it also shattered national cinema, unable to cope
with the sharp decline in public attendance, the dwindling
of state funding, and the television networks.
Television was promoted by the military as a magnet
for economic development and an apparatus of national
security, and it had taken over the entertainment market
and become the main shaper of the national imagination.
Telenovelas, in fact, became the undisputed form of
popular entertainment as well as an exportable commodity
and symbol of modern Brazil. Therefore, the crisis
was not just economic, but as Randal Johnson argues, it
also represented the bankruptcy of the state-supported
mode of film production, which, despite some remarkable
success during the 1970s, did not lead to the consolidation
of a self-sustaining industry (‘‘Rise and Fall,’’
pp. 366–373).
While the transitional government of José Sarney
(1985–1989) offered tax incentives for film investment,
the neoliberal administration of Fernando Collor de
Mello (1990–1992), the first democratically elected president
in thirty years, abolished all state film agencies and
protectionist measures, which had long ceased to be
effective anyway, given that pornography accounted in
the 1980s for nearly 70 percent of total production
(Johnson, ‘‘Rise and Fall,’’ p. 363). However, production
fell to a historical low: thirteen films in 1990, three in
1993. The situation improved slightly during Fernando
Henrique Cardoso’s tenure (1995–2003); the government
passed some tax incentives, authorized direct state
funding, and reestablished a reduced exhibition quota.
Nevertheless, the feeling that ‘‘Brazilian cinema is dead,’’
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 175