by/Por: 
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Images of a Strange CarnivalFlávia Cesarino Costa
Translated by: 
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Images of a Strange Carnival
4/15/2022
PT / ENG
To think of Gerson Tavares’ Before, The Summer (1968) is to immediately recall Norma Bengell’s indecipherable face. In the words of Nelson Rodrigues, “Only the face is indecent. From the neck down, we could all go naked.” And naked is Norma Bengell’s body as she is embraced by Jardel Filho’s anxious arms, under the high sun on a terrace in Cabo Frio, in one of the hottest erotic scenes of Brazilian cinema. Before that, one murder, two affairs, one separation: a middle-aged couple, with grown-up sons, watches as their marital crisis is turned into a criminal investigation. 

Having produced Ruy Guerra’s Os Cafajestes (1962) and Walter Hugo Khouri’s Noite Vazia (1964), and having shot his first feature film, Amor e Desamor (1966), Tavares added a touch of noir and heavy doses of eroticism to existentialist Brazilian film with Before, the Summer. That is not to say that its predecessors - both also starring Norma Bengell - did not use their actresses’ curves as a resource in their mise-en-scène, or that their plots didn’t revolve around sex - or the lack thereof.
However, in Before, the Summer, eroticism not only brings about a reflection on existence - or even the impossibility of existence -, it cements the plot of marital investigation. With that, it is worth adding that such Antonioni-esque incommunicability - often attributed to many Brazilian films and filmmakers of that time - finds its limit in the bodies of the characters. The bodies do communicate, between themselves and with the audience, first and foremost. In the first few minutes of the film, Jardel Filho’s naked torso sends a clear message: before, the heat.

While the murder scene which opens the film, the recurring shadows on the walls, and the crime thriller atmosphere - not to mention Norma Bengell’s married femme fatale - may place Before, the Summer within the spectrum of film noir, the tanned bodies, which are prominent even in the sun-drenched black and white of José Rosa’s cinematography, immediately situate it in the Southern Hemisphere. But the dissonance does not stop there. The opening shot, with the headlights closing in on Hugo Carvana’s character, set to Erlon Chaves’ score, introduces the jazzy tone which sets the pace of the flashback-torn narrative created through Roberto Pires’ editing work.
Before, however, comes Norma Bengell’s face. It is with her frozen image that Tavares ends the film. It is the enigma of her melancholic eyes - headlights of a body in heat - which draws the audience in and drives the plot forward. We watch the film through the perspective of Jardel Filho’s character, his memories, his demons, and his desires. Bengell is an image presenting itself to our inquisitive eye. That image is often blurry, tense and fascinated; its motivations are unknown to us - as are her husband’s. But we recognize the fear and the desire on her face.

‍Before, the Summer can be thought of as a story of separation, like many films of its kind from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the end of a marriage becomes a flagrant possibility. The shadow of conjugal dissolution is evident in their plots, their characters and even the very fabric of those films: the happy ending is no longer an axiom. If imminent divorce brings a quasi-abstract existential crisis in the case of Luis (Jardel Filho); for Maria Clara (Norma Bengell), it materializes on her body. Divorce runs her over. And her face shows it throughout the 80 minutes runtime. What crimes are contained in those eyes, the eyes of a mature woman with a pulsating body? Why does she flinch? Is she unfaithful? Is she a murderer? There is, however, another sign on Maria Clara’s sphynx-like face: that of desire. Desire, not fear, will cause Luis - much in the vein of Bentinho, the protagonist of Machado de Assis’ classic Brazilian novel Dom Casmurro - to accuse her of two crimes: adultery and murder.
For Luis, the marital crisis is a crisis of his own masculinity, his sexual power. Another man - younger, with a fresh body - knocks on his door: a friend of their sons’ might take his place. And his wife may be there to take him in. What dangers lurk behind that blurry image of an inaccessible woman ridden with fear and desire? In such a game of possibilities, the greatest crime might be cheating - whether explicit or merely suggested -, murder, or imminent separation. The crime of divorce is framed by the fear and the desire of a couple in a crisis - such feelings are intensely present on Bengell’s face - and its secretive and irresolute nature are preserved by Tavares’ elegant experimentation. Here, the transgressions go on behind closed doors.
Pensar em Antes, o Verão (1968), de Gerson Tavares, é encarar de imediato o rosto indecifrável de Norma Bengell. “Só o rosto é indecente, do pescoço para baixo podia-se andar nu.”, disse Nelson Rodrigues. E nu é como está o corpo de Bengell, enlaçado pelos braços aflitos de Jardel Filho sob o sol a pino em um terraço em Cabo Frio, em uma das cenas eróticas mais quentes do cinema brasileiro – e não são poucas. Antes disso, um assassinato, duas traições, uma separação: um casal de meia idade, com filhos crescidos, vê sua crise conjugal virar uma investigação policial.

Depois de produzir Os Cafajestes (1962), de Ruy Guerra e Noite Vazia (1964), de Walter Hugo Khouri, e de filmar seu primeiro longa-metragem, Amor e Desamor (1966), Tavares tempera o cinema existencialista brasileiro com pitadas de noir e doses fartas de erotismo, com Antes, o Verão. Não que seus predecessores – dois deles também protagonizados por Bengell – não contassem com as curvas das atrizes para deslizar a sua mise-en-scène, ou não tivessem em torno do sexo, ou da sua falta, a sua trama principal.
No entanto, em Antes, o Verão, o erotismo não é apenas o disparador de uma reflexão sobre a existência, ou mesmo da sua impossibilidade, mas é o cimento com o qual Tavares constrói a sua trama investigativa nupcial. Dito isto, a incomunicabilidade à Antonioni, tão atribuída aos filmes brasileiros deste período e desta geração de cineastas, tem seu limite nos corpos dos personagens. Estes sim se comunicam, entre eles e com o público, antes de tudo. O torso nu de Jardel Filho já nos primeiros minutos de filme não deixa dúvidas: antes, o calor.

Enquanto a cena de assassinato que abre o filme, as recorrentes sombras nas paredes e a atmosfera policial – além, claro, da femme fatale de família de Norma Bengell – podem localizar Antes, o Verão em um espectro do cinema noir, os corpos bronzeados, destacados mesmo no preto e branco ensolarado da fotografia de José Rosa, o lançam imediatamente abaixo da linha do equador. As dissonâncias não param por aí. A imagem de abertura, com os faróis que acossam o personagem de Hugo Carvana ao som da trilha assinada por Erlon Chaves, apresenta o tom jazzístico do filme, que dará o compasso da narrativa, fragmentada em flashbacks e da montagem de Roberto Pires.
Mas antes, o rosto de Norma Bengell. É com a sua imagem congelada que Tavares encerra o filme. É o enigma de seus olhos melancólicos, faróis de um corpo em estado de desejo, que intriga a espectadora e conduz a trama. Assistimos ao filme pela perspectiva do personagem de Jardel Filho, suas memórias, suas lembranças, seus fantasmas e desejos. Bengell é uma imagem, que se dá ao nosso olhar inquiridor. Imagem muitas vezes opaca, de tensão e fascinação, da qual, juntamente com o marido, não sabemos as motivações. Mas sabemos do medo e do desejo de seu rosto.

‍Antes, o Verão pode ser visto como um filme de separação conjugal, destes tão presentes entre as décadas de 1950 e 1970, quando terminar um casamento se torna uma possibilidade flagrante. A sombra da ruptura nupcial é notável nas tramas, nos personagens e mesmo no tecido fílmico: o happy end não é mais um axioma. Se o divórcio iminente no filme de Tavares arrasta com ele uma crise existencial quase abstrata para Luís (Jardel Filho); para Maria Clara (Norma Bengell), ele se concretiza no corpo. É um atropelamento. E seu rosto espelhará este vulto ao longo dos 80 minutos de Antes, o Verão. Que delitos guardam este olhar de mulher madura e de corpo pulsante? Por que ela se esquiva? Traiu, matou? Mas há outra marca estampada no rosto esfíngico de Maria Clara: o desejo. E é esta marca, e não a primeira, que fará com que Luís, aos moldes de Bentinho, personagem do clássico da literatura brasileira, Dom Casmurro, de Machado de Assis, impute a ela o crime duplo: traição e assassinato.
A crise do casamento para Luís é a crise da sua própria masculinidade, de seu poder sexual. Outro homem, mais jovem, de corpo fresco, bate à sua porta: o amigo dos filhos sempre pode tomar o seu lugar. E sua esposa poderá estar lá para acolhê-lo. Que perigos esta imagem opaca de mulher, intransponível, carregada de medo e de volúpia, guarda em si? Neste jogo de possibilidades, o grande crime pode estar entre uma traição explícita, uma sugerida, um assassinato ou uma separação eminente. O delito do divórcio emoldurado pelo medo e o desejo de um casal em crise – inscritos de forma intensa no rosto de Bengell – tem seus segredos e irresoluções preservados pelo experimentalismo elegante de Tavares. Suas transgressões continuam entre quatro paredes.
In June 1960, Cinelândia magazine published news about the storming of a movie theater in Taubaté, São Paulo. The reason: without tickets, a crowd of people ran to watch a movie that would be shown in only two sessions. Everyone, between their shoving and elbowing, wanted to see Amácio Mazzaropi's Jeca Tatu.1
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The character Jeca Tatu, which originated from the pen of writer Monteiro Lobato (first appearing in Urupês, his debut book, in 1914), soon became the archetypal figure of the caipira in Brazil, a social figure described by literary critic Antonio Candido, in a seminal sociological study, dwelling in the rural landscapes that harbored a way of life and society in the São Paulo countryside.2
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A hard drinker and a sickly man, lacking formal education or work, Jeca was an easy prey for powerful landowners, a tool in the system of coronelismo and clientelismo that marked the years of the First Republic in Brazil (1889-1930). Lobato portrayed him as a scourge of the Brazilian social landscape, a specimen who attested to the backwardness and abandonment of the countryside.
The patched clothes and the bare feet, the clumsy walk, followed by a mutt, were also part of the caipira figure that Amácio Mazzaropi had germinated since the 1920s, in the ring of the Circo La Paz, in that same city of Taubaté. This disheveled and burlesque type, which had already been portrayed by the comical figure of radio and film, Genésio Arruda (1898-1967), would have in Mazzaropi a very popular interpreter.
According to Cinelândia Magazine, the film that provoked the storming of Taubaté's theater made 6 million cruzeiros in its opening week in São Paulo alone.3 According to Maria do Rosário Caetano's estimate, Mazzaropi's Jeca Tatu is among the biggest box office records in the history of Brazilian cinema, with approximately 8 million tickets sold.4
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At that time, Amácio Mazzaropi already had other films contracted by the newly created TV Excelsior. He was a recurring figure in Brazilian TV, alongside Geny Prado, his longest lasting comical partner. Since his appearance as the driver Isidoro in Sai da Frente (Abílio Pereira de Almeida, 1952), produced by Companhia Vera Cruz, he appeared in almost one film a year. In 1958, he created PAM Filmes and started to take responsibility for the production of his movies. Jeca Tatu would be directed by Milton Amaral, who had already directed Chofer de Praça (1958), the first production of PAM Filmes.
But what place did Mazzaropi occupy in a country such as 1960s Brazil, which dreamed of being modern and thriving? Under the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1955-1960), Brazil was looking at so-called First World countries and discussing its way out of underdevelopment. The agrarian and pre-industrial country would soon be overcome by unstoppable progress, materialized in the development of technology and science.
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In government offices and universities, it was believed that two Brazils would coexist: The urban one, powerful and vigorous, owing little to the industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere; the other, a rural, archaic Brazil, stuck to semifeudal practices, and to labor exploitation. The "Brazilian Revolution", on the left and right of the ideological spectrum, was debated as a way to break this duality, which relegated the country to being under the shadow of the developed nations.
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The arts would soon address the notion of the two irreconcilable Brazils. For Cinema Novo, which was linked to the engaged art of the late 1950s,  the man of the sertão - this rural and archaic Brazil - was a raw and massacred person, sometimes tormented by hunger and oppression, sometimes stimulated by a redemptive revolt. In avant-garde production, the first movements of Cinema Novo sought the Marxist new man, whose alienated consciousness had to be overcome to give way to the imagined revolution. The aesthetics of hunger, the refusal of industrial cinema and of everything deemed a deceptive machination of reality - in the anti-colonial spirit that animates the new Latin American cinema at the end of the 1950s - drive a cinema that preferred beaten-down people and rough landscapes.
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Dissidence will be another key aspect of Mazzaropi's cinema. His Jeca's manners are also dislocated from the lofty future that the end of the 1950s announced. The lazy indolence of his personality, being disinterested and averse to work, all went against the image of a modern and urban Brazil. The 1950s announced themselves in the optimistic propaganda of Jean Manzon, whose short films were continuously shown before the main sessions in the movie theaters throughout the country. The Brazil of the cities, sustained by conquering the backlands, of which Brasília - the new capital built in the conquered backland - was a symbol, and seemed to aim at a future that did not include the indolent figure of a Jeca Tatu.
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Mazzaropi, however, remade the character that Lobato had invented at the beginning of the century that had then become a sort of symbol of the country man, albeit under a different guise. By then, Lobato’s character, which was a commercial success, was the poster boy for Fontoura Medicamentos, advertising famous vitamin compounds which promised to fight diseases attributed to poor hygiene and poor nutrition.
"Jeca Tatu would spend his days squatting, smoking huge straw cigarettes, lacking the willpower to do anything", according to Jeca Tatuzinho magazine, which in 1966 was published with a circulation of 35 million copies for free distribution. But Jeca’s condition was nothing that the compound couldn't cure. "The Biotonic made him handsome, ruddy, and strong as a bull".5
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From being a symbol of backwardness and abandonment of the countryside, Jeca - by learning notions of hygiene and taking vitamins from the Fontoura farm - found his redemption, not through revolutionary consciousness, but other more prosaic ones: he himself became a "colonel", rich, successful and loved by his people. The Jeca Tatu of the pharmacy almanac is the antithesis of the rural man dreamed of by the revolutionaries of the 1960s. From this reformulation, Mazzaropi draws his Jeca Tatu, as his film informs us right from the opening text.
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Mazzaropi's caipira ways came from observing the customs of the men and women of São Paulo's countryside. His laziness contrasted with a certain romantic naivety. His pranks were only a way to resist the adversities of a hard life. Despite his poverty, he preserved his moral rectitude at any cost. His Jeca Tatu is not the one conceived by Lobato, a sad and decadent symbol of a desolate countryside. Translated by popular comedy and rewritten with commercial overtones, he is a character that Mazzaropi managed to transform into a successful comic model.
Concurrently with the Cinema Novo wave, Mazzaropi's cinema resurrects the formula of the chanchadas, which modern critics wanted to be left behind: slapstick and circus humor, easy jokes, and musical numbers sung by famous radio and theater stars. Mazzaropi mastered all that, as he himself had worked in the circus and radio, where comical characters based on common people were successful before transitioning to the big screen in the 1940s.
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Often despised by critics ("an actor applauded by audiences that are not very demanding", Pedro Lima wrote in the newspaper Diário da Noite, in a review of Jeca Tatu),6 Mazzaropi filled the movie theaters of Brazil with a character in double disagreement with the ideas of modernity in vogue in the 1960s - the modernity of machines and cities, on one hand; the modernity of a cinema that vigorously rejected the resources of the chanchada, on the other. 

The turmoil of that movie session in Taubaté, and the immense popularity that Mazzaropi would sustain until his death, in 1981, reveal a cinema that is, perhaps, rebellious: when the country imagined the future, Mazzaropi turned to the geography and the people of the countryside; when the critics rejected the easy and cheap humor of the chanchada, Mazzaropi preserved circus-like characters. Against the vogue, Mazzaropi always knew how to be popular.
1. Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, June 1960, p. 71.

2. Candido, Antonio. Os parceiros do Rio Bonito: estudo sobre o caipira paulista e a transformação dos seus modos de vida. São Paulo: Ouro Sobre Azul, 2017.

3. Aproximately US$ 3 million in actualized values. Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, Março de 1960, p. 71.

4. Films before the creation of Embrafilme (Empresa Brasileira de Filmes), in 1969, have no official box office data. Caetano, Maria do Rosário. as maiores bilheterias do cinema nacional.
Revista de Cinema. Editora Abril, 2002.
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5. Jeca Tatuzinho, Instituto Medicamenta Fontoura, 1966.

6. Diário da Noite, Rio de Janeiro, 2 de maio de 1960, p. 29.
Em junho de 1960, a revista Cinelândia trazia a notícia de uma invasão a uma sala de cinema de Taubaté, no interior do estado de São Paulo. O motivo: sem ingressos, uma multidão correu para assistir a uma fita que seria exibida em apenas duas sessões. Todos, entre empurrões e cotoveladas, queriam ver o Jeca Tatu de Amácio Mazzaropi.1
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O personagem, que veio originalmente da pena do escritor Monteiro Lobato (aparece logo em Urupês, de 1914, seu livro de estreia), cedo se tornaria no país a figura arquetípica do caipira, tipo social que o crítico Antonio Candido, em estudo sociológico seminal, descreveu nas paisagens rurais que abrigavam um modo de vida e de sociedade do interior paulista.2
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Beberrão e doente, sem estudo ou trabalho, o Jeca era uma presa fácil para os donos do poder, na engrenagem do coronelismo e do clientelismo que marcam os anos da Primeira República no Brasil (1889-1930). Lobato desenhou-o como uma chaga da paisagem social brasileira, espécime do atraso e do abandono do campo.
As roupas remendadas e os pés descalços, o andar desengonçado, acompanhado de um cachorro vira-lata, já estavam também na figura do caipira que Amácio Mazzaropi germinava desde a década de 1920, no picadeiro do Circo La Paz, na mesma cidade de Taubaté. O tipo desengonçado e burlesco, que antes fora representado na figura também cômica do radialista e cineasta Genésio Arruda (1898-1967), teria em Mazzaropi um intérprete popularíssimo.
Segundo a Cinelândia, o filme que provocou a invasão do cinema de Taubaté rendeu 6 milhões de cruzeiros só na primeira semana de exibição em São Paulo.3 e acordo com estimativa de Maria do Rosário Caetano, o Jeca Tatu de Mazzaropi está entre os maiores recordistas de bilheteria da história do cinema no país, com aproximadamente 8 milhões de ingressos vendidos.4
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Naquele momento, Amácio Mazzaropi já tinha outros filmes encomendados pela recém-criada TV Excelsior. Era, aliás, figura recorrente na tevê brasileira, ao lado de Geny Prado, sua mais longeva parceira cômica. Desde que despontara como o motorista Isidoro em Sai da Frente (Abílio Pereira de Almeida, 1952), da Companhia Vera Cruz, aparecia em quase um filme por ano. Em 1958, ele cria a PAM Filmes e passa a assinar a produção das fitas. Seu Jeca Tatu será dirigido por Milton Amaral, que já dirigira Chofer de Praça (1958), o primeiro da produtora.
Mas que lugar ocupava Mazzaropi em um Brasil que, nos anos 1960, se sonhava moderno e pujante? Sob a presidência de Juscelino Kubitschek (1955-1960), o Brasil mirava os países do chamado Primeiro Mundo e discutia a saída do subdesenvolvimento. O país agrário e pré-industrial haveria de ser superado por um progresso imparável, materializado no desenvolvimento da técnica e da ciência.
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Nos gabinetes de governo e nas universidades, acreditava-se que coexistiriam dois Brasis: um deles, o das cidades, potente e vigoroso, que pouco devia aos países industrializados do hemisfério norte; o outro, um Brasil rural, arcaico, preso a lógicas semifeudais, à exploração do trabalho. A “Revolução Brasileira”, à esquerda e à direita do espectro ideológico, era debatida como saída para romper essa dualidade, que teimava em deixar o país à sombra das nações desenvolvidas.
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As artes logo tratariam da tese dos Brasis inconciliáveis. No Cinema Novo, articulado à arte engajada do fim dos anos 1950, o homem dos sertões – esse Brasil rural e arcaico – é o sujeito bruto e massacrado, ora acossado pela fome e pela opressão, ora animado pelo fôlego de uma revolta redentora. Na produção de vanguarda, as primeiras movimentações do Cinema Novo procuravam o homem novo de Marx, aquele cuja consciência alienada havia de ser superada para dar curso à revolução imaginada. A estética da fome, a recusa ao cinema industrial e ao que supunha uma maquinação enganosa da realidade – no espírito anticolonial que anima o novo cinema latino-americano no fim dos anos 1950 – movimentam um cinema que preferia os tipos humanos rotos e as paisagens castigadas.
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A chave de dissidência será outra no cinema de Mazzaropi. Sua jequice é também deslocada do futuro sobranceiro que o fim dos anos 1950 anunciava. A indolência preguiçosa de seus modos, o jeito desinteressado, avesso ao trabalho, tudo ia de encontro à imagem de um Brasil citadino e moderno. Os anos 1950 anunciavam-se na propaganda otimista de Jean Manzon, cujos filmes curtos eram continuamente exibidos antes das sessões principais nas salas de cinema do país. O Brasil das cidades, sustentado no desbravamento dos sertões, de que Brasília – a nova capital erguida no sertão desbravado – era símbolo, parecia mirar um futuro que não comportava a figura indolente de um Jeca Tatu.
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Mazzaropi, entretanto, refazia o personagem que Lobato inventara no começo do século e que, naquele momento, convertera-se em espécie de símbolo do homem caipira, mas já com outra roupagem. Àquela altura, o Jeca Tatu, um sucesso comercial, já se tornara garoto-propaganda dos produtos da Fontoura Medicamentos, famosos compostos vitamínicos que prometiam combater doenças atribuídas à má higiene e à má nutrição.
“Jeca Tatu passava os dias de cócoras, pitando enormes cigarrões de palha, sem ânimo de fazer coisa nenhuma”, lia-se na revista do Jeca Tatuzinho, que em 1966 era editada com tiragem de 35 milhões de exemplares para distribuição gratuita. Mas nada que o composto não curasse. “O Biotônico deixou-o bonito, corado, forte como um touro”.5
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De símbolo do atraso e do abandono do campo, o Jeca – que aprendia noções de higiene e tomava as vitaminas da Fazenda Fontoura – tomava o caminho de sua redenção, não pela consciência revolucionária, mas outros mais prosaicos: tornava-se ele mesmo um “coronel”, rico, bem-sucedido e amado pela sua gente. O Jeca Tatu do almanaque de farmácia é a antítese do homem rural sonhado pelos revolucionários dos anos 1960. É dessa reformulação do Jeca Tatu que Mazzaropi retira o seu personagem, como o filme nos informa logo nos primeiros letreiros.
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A caipirice de Mazzaropi vinha da observação dos costumes dos homens e mulheres do interior de São Paulo. Seu tipo vadio contrastava com certa ingenuidade romântica. Suas traquinagens eram só um modo de resistência às adversidades de uma vida apertada. Apesar da pobreza, conservava sua retidão moral a qualquer custo. Seu Jeca Tatu não é aquele original de Lobato, símbolo triste e decadente de um campo desolado. Traduzido pela comédia popular e reescrito por tintas comerciais, é um personagem que Mazzaropi conseguiu transformar em modelo cômico de sucesso.
Ao mesmo tempo da onda cinemanovista, o cinema de Mazzaropi retoma a fórmula das chanchadas, que a crítica moderna queria ver superada: o humor trapalhão circense, as piadas ligeiras, os musicais com estrelas consagradas do rádio e do teatro. Recursos, aliás, que Mazzaropi dominava por ser ele próprio egresso do circo e do rádio, onde os tipos populares fizeram sucesso antes de chegarem ao cinema nos anos 1940.
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Não raramente desprezado pela crítica (“um ator aplaudido por plateias poucos exigentes”, Pedro Lima escrevia no jornal Diário da Noite, em crítica sobre Jeca Tatu),6 Mazzaropi lotava as salas de cinema do país com um personagem em duplo desacordo com as ideias de modernidade em voga nos anos 1960 – a modernidade das máquinas e das cidades, de um lado; a modernidade de um cinema que vigorosamente rejeitava os recursos da chanchada, de outro. 
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O empurra-empurra daquela sessão de cinema em Taubaté e a imensa popularidade que Mazzaropi sustentaria até morrer, em 1981, mostram um cinema, talvez, rebelde: quando o país imaginava o futuro, Mazzaropi voltava-se à geografia e ao homem rural; quando a crítica desancava o humor ligeiro e popularesco da chanchada, Mazzaropi conservava o tipo mambembe e circense. Contra a voga, Mazzaropi soube ser popular.
1. Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, June 1960, p. 71.

2. Candido, Antonio. Os parceiros do Rio Bonito: estudo sobre o caipira paulista e a transformação dos seus modos de vida. São Paulo: Ouro Sobre Azul, 2017.

3. Aproximately US$ 3 million in actualized values. Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, Março de 1960, p. 71.

4. Films before the creation of Embrafilme (Empresa Brasileira de Filmes), in 1969, have no official box office data. Caetano, Maria do Rosário. as maiores bilheterias do cinema nacional.
Revista de Cinema. Editora Abril, 2002.
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5. Jeca Tatuzinho, Instituto Medicamenta Fontoura, 1966.

6. Diário da Noite, Rio de Janeiro, 2 de maio de 1960, p. 29.
Mazzaropi is a well known traditional figure of Brazilian cinema: he is synonymous with Jeca, the country bumpkin with a shabby checkered shirt, a clumsy walk, and a strong accent from the Brazilian countryside. He is a simple and innocent guy, without malice, but sometimes lazy and hot-headed. Another side of Mazzaropi are his urban characters; those who make a living going around the city, such as a sausage seller or a driver. Mazzaropi plays characters composed in the realm of comedy who resort to stereotypes or exaggerations, seeking to communicate with all kinds of audiences in films that drew crowds to the movie theaters and broke box-office records.
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However, there is a darker side to Mazzaropi's "caipira" and urban characters beyond this prism of innocence and naivety. As protagonists, characters like Jeca Tatu are well defined: they push the story forward, they pursue their goals, face challenges, and protect themselves using intelligence and street-smartness. The same cannot be said of the female characters who follow them throughout the plot, especially in the case of their love partners, often played by actress Geny Prado.

Prado's characters, both the country and urban dwellers, are treated by male protagonists in ways that are unacceptable by today's standards. The female co-stars are systematically seen from above by the male gaze, in a world where patriarchal power and the consequent trivialization of violence against women prevail. Name-calling, aggression, manipulation and threats are constant and surprisingly portrayed as comical: they are the jokes themselves. That same innocence of Jeca, when it comes to his relationship with a woman, is pervaded by violence.

Even if we consider the different times these films were made in and the prevailing worldviews of that moment, the frequency, levity and questionable humor associated with situations of humiliation towards female characters remain indigestible. How then is it possible to interpret this facet of comedy that stems from the naturalization of violence against women in Mazzaropi's cinema, consumed for decades by thousands of Brazilians?

Without ignoring the contribution of Mazzaropi's films to Brazilian cinema and its history, I propose a feminist revision of some of the storytelling and filmmaking strategies in Mazzaropi's cinema. My focus is the representation of female characters, especially those played by Geny Prado in the films Jeca Tatu (1959) and O Vendedor de Linguiça (1962).
O vendedor de linguiça in theaters in Rio de Janeiro.
Source: Diário de Notícias, Rio de Janeiro, 1962.
1
On the premiere day of a new Mazzaropi film, the lines to buy tickets outside cinemas in downtown São Paulo would go around the blocks, as shown in the famous photograph in front of the now defunct Cine Art Palácio on São João Avenue. With lights and big letters, the theater promoted the arrival of O Noivo da Girafa in 1957.
Premiere of O Noivo da Girafa in 1957.
The cinema of Amácio Mazzaropi is renowned for its independence and for its approach to issues inherent to Brazilian society - such as caipira culture, the remnants of coronelismo1 in rural areas, and social inequality in urban areas. Throughout his film career, Mazzaropi acted in more than 30 films and directed 13 feature films, even founding his own production company, PAM Filmes (Produções Amácio Mazzaropi).

Mazzaropi is also remembered for being the creator of remarkable characters, such as Jeca, whose name is in the title of eight of his films. Mazzaropi revisited popular cultural figures, such as Monteiro Lobato's2 Jeca Tatu. He interpreted these characters with his own particular style of comedy, even if reinforcing certain stereotypes. He built characters who connected with and became beloved by a general public that eagerly awaited to see him on the big screen.

Alongside Jeca and the Mazzaropi urban types, however, we find another figure - the woman, the companion, the wife, the partner of many decades who lives with the protagonist, often played by Brazilian actress Geny Prado.3 Prado was constantly remembered by the media for her role as "Jeca's wife", or even referred to as the "partner", "companion", and "sidekick" of Amácio Mazzaropi.
Geny Prado, “companheira” (“Partner”) of Mazzaropi. 
Source: Cinelândia magazine, Rio de Janeiro, 1960
Born in the countryside of São Paulo state in 1919, in the city of São Manuel, Geny Prado was a Brazilian actress renowned for her characters in Mazzaropi's films. They shared the screen in eighteen films over three decades: Chofer de Praça (1959), Jeca Tatu (1959), As Aventuras de Pedro Malazartes (1960), Zé do Periquito (1960), Tristeza do Jéca (1960), O Vendedor de Linguiça (1962), Casinha Pequenina (1963), O Lamparina (1964), Meu Japão Brasileiro (1965), O Jeca e a Freira (1968), No Paraíso das Solteironas (1969), Betão Ronca Ferro (1970), Um Caipira em Bariloche (1973), O Jeca Contra o Capeta (1976), Jecão... Um Fofoqueiro no Céu (1977), Jeca e Seu Filho Preto (1978), A Banda das Velhas Virgens (1979) and, finally, O Jeca e a Égua Milagrosa (1980). In addition to her film career, Prado acted in more than twenty works for television.

Prado's last film role came five years later in André Klotzel’s A Marvada Carne (1985). In this film, she plays Nhá Policena, the mother of Sá Carula (played by Fernanda Torres). In this final performance, she takes on the role of a country woman; this was Klotzel's tribute to her film career. Prado passed away in 1998.

When looking at Prado's filmography today, a number of problems are evident, as exemplified by the films Jeca Tatu (1959) and O Vendedor de Linguiça (1962). Firstly, her characters are always under the shadow of the protagonist played by Mazzaropi, serving as "bridges" for his jokes - which, as we will see, are often humiliating and derogatory. Second, the characters written for Geny Prado are repetitive: mother, wife, washing, cooking, tidying up, doing the chores that her husband wont do and being mistreated by him. Over the course of decades, her characters, though occasionally fundamental to the plot, were given but a few lines and almost no power of action in the narrative; this being the privilege of the male characters who pushed the story forward.
2
In the classic Jeca Tatu (1959), Geny Prado plays Jerônima, and the issues are there right from the opening sequence. The film, based on a novel by Monteiro Lobato, is directed by Milton Amaral (who had also directed Mazzaropi in his directorial debut, Chofer de Praça), with a script written by Mazzaropi. The film tells the story of Jeca, who, in the midst of disputes over his land and the hand of his daughter, sees his house burned down and leaves for the city to recover his property with the help of a politician.
Poster of the film Jéca Tatú, 1959
Source: Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural
The film opens with a sequence that reveals the daily work being done on the farm. Jerônima, an older woman in a worn dress, is already outside, cutting wood to light the stove inside the house. Meanwhile, Jeca is asleep. With the heavy accent commonly attributed to the caipira culture of the Paraíba Valley region, she complains to her husband: "I got up two hours ago and you are still sleeping", a line which emphasizes her double workload.

Then, Jerônima goes out to milk the cow. Jeca takes over, but only to show his wife how to do it properly, underestimating her. After threatening to assault her, he splashes milk at her, making her fall backwards. Not only does Jerônima need to take over Jeca's post, but she is also humiliated when she tries to do so.

The examples add up. When the family house is burned down, Jerônima and her daughter desperately run to try to save a few belongings from the fire. Jeca, on the other hand, remains seated inside the house, watching the flame grow taller, in a state of lethargy. Jerônima asks for his help, but Jeca only tells her to take a pair of his pants off the stove so that it doesn’t catch fire. We can conclude that there is nothing more natural then for Jeca to sit and wait while the women do everything around him.

However, it is worth noting that Jeca's lethargy and laziness originates from the notion that the caipira, afflicted by the insalubrity of rural life before basic sanitation, was a victim of diseases such as yellow fever, which made the body anemic and weak, as was the case with Monteiro Lobato's Jeca Tatu. The same anemic body, however, is the one that deauthorizes and ridicules the wife, dumping the family responsibilities on her, as we see in the scene of the fire.
Fé in Jeca Tatu
Source: Cinelândia magazine, Rio de Janeiro, 1961
As Tolentino (2001) argues in his fundamental work on the representation of rural life in Brazilian cinema:

‍Just as romance plays a marginal role in the central plot, so do the women occupy the same status in relation to the axis of the film (...) It is striking that all the women are invariably mistreated by Jeca Tatu, as an embarrassingly sexist way to get a laugh. (TOLENTINO, 2001, p. 119)
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At the very beginning of the film, Jerônima is humiliated by Jeca Tatu, who calls her a "dumb illiterate" and threatens to beat her up. The tone, however, is one of comedy. The gestures, the heavy accent, and the musical accompaniment try to suggest how funny the situation is: even in the countryside, among simple and poor people, the husband shows "who's boss" to his wife, who deserves to be "put in her place".
The main interpreter and his “partner”
Source: Cinelândia magazine, Rio de Janeiro, 1960.
In O Vendedor de Linguiça, this issue is even more relevant. Released in 1962, O Vendedor de Linguiça is directed by Glauco Mirko Laurelli (who also directed other films starring Mazzaropi and Geny Prado, such as Casinha Pequenina and Meu Japão Brasileiro). The film was written by Milton Amaral and Mazzaropi, and produced by PAM Filmes.

O Vendedor de Linguiça has no caipira traces, instead portraying descendants of Italian immigrants living in urban centers. Interspersed with some romantic musical numbers, the film centers on Gustavo, a sausage seller who drives around in his truck selling meat by the meter, singing to advertise his product. Gustavo is married to Carmela and has two adult children with whom he lives in a house in a small village. There, the older village women form long lines to wash their clothes in a public laundry sink while others go out to work in the city. The plot, in general, centers around small “causalities" and eventualities that end up with all the characters at the police station, such as when a dog steals sausages from Gustavo's truck and Gustavo's daughter gets married.
Mazzaropi "dominates" the slum washerwomen
Source: Diário da Noite, 19/04/1962
Here, the problem lies in how systematic Gustavo's behavior is in humiliating the women around him. The frequency with which he acts to threaten, assault, and belittle women is such that, as the film progresses, it becomes impossible to predict how his character will behave. He might tell some woman to shut up or threaten to hit her with some object, such as a sausage or a ball.
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Gustavo's misogyny also manifests itself in relation to the wealthy family of his daughter's husband. He loudly calls the rich woman "a nuisance", forcing her to ride in his truck to travel with strangers and to undress in the middle of the beach against her will. Even if the ridicule of elitism is one of the film's high points, the spontaneous and nonchalant way in which Gustavo curses the rich woman - and not her husband or son - is symptomatic.
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It is worth noting that Gustavo is quick to become aggressive and offensive especially with mature or elderly women, such as his wife Carmela, the Italian neighbors, and the wealthy woman. Women who have already lost that which, from a more conventional male perspective, is their greatest value: physical beauty and sexual appeal. They are the most subject to violence disguised as comedy, camouflaged by comic sound effects. Geny Prado's characters, consequently, face such a "curse". Playing alongside Mazzaropi, the wives, already mature and seen as "old", are the greatest victims of his cowardice and hostility, as can be seen when the rich woman wants to throw Gustavo and Carmela out of her house, at which moment the tongue-tied man threatens to hit her with a ball on the head.
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In fact, in most cases Mazzaropi's characters only threaten violence. It is rare that his words turn into actions. Furthermore, the threat of aggression with silly objects like a sausage suggests that all this is banal, as if this aggression is not capable of causing fear or pain. Today we publicly discuss the seriousness of psychological violence, but such debate was still embryonic at that time, and inaccessible to most Brazilian women. Hence, the excessive repetition of this type of scene and the comic treatment given to aggressive behavior against women, making it a laughingstock - but only for men.
3
The naturalness with which Mazzaropi's characters address women in a pejorative way is what allows us to ask: what does it mean to despise women with such ease, in that historical and social context, at that moment in Brazilian film history and in those audiovisual works capable of reaching large audiences and filling movie theaters?
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In these cases, it is possible to question whether there is violence, misogyny, or any contempt addressed specifically to women. One might say that it was a different time, with a different worldview, and there were different ways of coexistence between women and men that did not boil down to the contemporary view that, fortunately, has gained from the countless conquests of feminism and the struggles of various social movements for equality.
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On one hand, it is possible to point out the open misogyny that manifests itself in several Mazzaropi films as a result of a naturalization of violence against women in Brazilian society. This misogyny is not born in the cinema, but is reflected in the audiovisual production of the country. On the other hand, we do not seek to reduce such cinema to this issue, all the more so because of its reach and repercussions throughout decades in Brazil.
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The films of Jeca and Mazzaropi's urban films do, in fact, touch on aspects of social reality and serious issues, bringing moments of social criticism in the midst of comedy. This kind of social criticism can be found, for instance, in the scenes that expose the inequality between classes and the abyss between the poorest and richest in Brazil. In O Vendedor de Linguiça, when Gustavo and Carmela go live in the family home of their daughter's husband, a gesture of generosity by the sausage seller causes a malaise that is typical of the naturalization of misery. The sequence begins with a dubious joke: during a walk through the rich neighborhood, the couple sees a homeless woman who says she doesn't want a job because her job is "begging" - an opinion that is repeated in Brazilian common sense, that poverty is an "excuse" for not working for those who are vulnerable. Gustavo is moved to learn that the woman has no home, so he invites her to spend the night in his guest room, stating that her whole family is welcome to do the same.
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Through the open gate, however, arrive several other men, women, and children, who occupy the empty spaces of the mansion. One of them says he is ashamed to be in such a beautiful house, as he is so dirty. However, generosity has its limits. Their arrival is accompanied by a suspenseful soundtrack, as if the entrance of the poor into the house was a reason to be frightened. Or, in a scene that is embarrassing because of the frivolity with which the Holocaust is mentioned, a rich neighbor is impressed to see the poor, saying that the mansion would become a "concentration camp". Under pressure from the owners of the mansion and their neighbors, who are already calling the police, an embarrassed Gustavo is forced to expel all the homeless people from the house.
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The sequence is striking for its portrayal of the proximity between extreme poverty and extreme wealth, a pressing issue in the history of Brazil which has become emphasized under the current administration. The film approaches the issue with a certain seriousness, at first with sparse humor, but later with a sentimental and melancholic potency not seen until that point. To add to Gustavo's rebellion, the soundtrack is kept in a tone of suspense and conflict. Hence, the seriousness of the problem is evident, and the seriousness with which the film represents it - which doesn't occur, not even remotely, in relation to the treatment of the female characters.
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Mazzaropi's films are remembered through a bias of beautiful nostalgia, as the fruit of a long-lost innocence, of a sweetness and ease of everyday life and of life in the countryside that is no longer seen in the many large Brazilian cities and in changing social customs and practices. However, these films, watched by thousands of Brazilians since their release until today, end up reinforcing stereotypes and a misogynistic mentality that, even now, are still repeated: "women can't drive", "women only cry", "women talk too much", "women like to be beaten", "a woman's place is in the house", or even "a woman's place is doing the laundry", as seen in the first scene of O Vendedor de Linguiça.
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On the other hand, it is worth thinking: by threatening the women in his films, wouldn't Mazzaropi be "denouncing" the naturalness of such behavior in Brazilian society, and opposing it? The films say otherwise, as one can see that the scenes of aggression towards women are not based on a critical tone, but are the very source of comicality, reinforced by pathetic sound effects, physical comedy and the exaggerated tone that marks Mazzaropi's style of comedy. Thus, this kind of scene serves to demonstrate how acceptable it was to ridicule a woman and to find it funny, as a form of humor authorized by the sexist mentality established in Brazilian society in the decades when Mazzaropi's films thrived, instead of criticizing the sexism of those times.
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If we emphasize from the beginning that, despite what has been pointed out, Mazzaropi's filmography is a milestone in the history of Brazilian cinema and contributes to discuss social problems such as inequality and the legacy of coronelismo, for example, what is the point of a feminist and contemporary reading of films produced more than sixty years ago?
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The critique of anachronism claims that we should not look with contemporary eyes at what was made in the past. If this is so, then it would be ineffective to review the cinematographic techniques for the representation of country women in Mazzaropi’s cinema. It would also be unproductive to question openly racist postures and words in Mazzaropi's comedies - and in many other works of Brazilian cinema, since in late works, such as Jeca e Seu Filho Preto, the film portrays racial prejudice and stands against discrimination.
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But the representation itself needs to be analysed. The way art creates images about reality, based on interpretations of such reality, culminates in the repetition of stereotypes. For decades, film has contributed to create the idea that caipira women are crude, and therefore naturally subject to the violence that was camouflaged in Jeca’s innocence. For decades, film showcased and reinforced images which implied that it was natural to threaten a woman like Carmela in a marital relationship and that the male power in a marriage was unquestionable. To critique such standards, dismantling stereotypes and, finally, "deconstructing" the foundation that suggests comical and banal scenes of oppression to women, are resources that allow us to change the focus and find new ways to see what is being portrayed.
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Authors such as Tolentino (2001) and Fressato (2008) state that, by assuming the role of a “coronel”, Jeca goes from oppressed to oppressor, and ceases to be a mere "jeca”.4 Much earlier in the film, however, we see Jeca as an oppressor - not in the key of class difference or political power, but in the dimension of sexual difference; who benefits from violence to subjugate women, given the levity with which he threatens, ridicules, and humiliates Jerônima, in acts that at first sight are harmless, like mere threats, but are well rooted in the male mentality and daily life.

In the end, the women played by Geny Prado showcase symptoms of a time that we sometimes remember with nostalgia and associate with a certain lost innocence. Both films begin with sequences that show, as if it were normal, the excessive workload of the wives and the carelessness of their husbands. Both films let us glimpse at disrespected, destitute women, who get used to that kind of life due to the violence of repetition and their lack of education.
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It is not by chance, after all, that it was only in 2021 that psychological abuse within marital relationships was criminalized in Brazil. It is an instilled practice that reveals the seriousness of the situations to which women are subjected in Brazilian society, as seen in Mazzaropi's films. So, we perceive Mazzaropi's cinema and Geny Prado's presence as a historical register of male perspectives and attitudes over the female figure, internalized via comedy by audiences and Brazilian society, in many cases up until the present day, which it is up to us to overcome.
1. A system of power control led by "colonels" mainly in rural regions of Brazil that marked the country's first republican period beginning in 1889.

2. Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is considered one of the greatest Brazilian writers despite his racist and eugenicist stance and writings (see Habib,2003). Jeca Tatu is one of his literary creations, which initially represented peasant populations in a pejorative way, as a lazy figure unfaithful to progress. Later, Jeca is transformed into the "poster boy" of the campaign for the medicalization of rural areas and for basic sanitation in rural Brazil.

3. Or Geni Prado, as found in period records such as film magazines and newspapers from the 1950s and 1960s.

4. In Brazilian Portuguese, "jeca" became an adjective, being used to mean a person of bad taste, without refinement, a "caipira" in the pejorative sense of the word.
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5.. This research is further developed in the dissertation Representações da mulher caipira no cinema brasileiro: Amélia (2000), de Ana Carolina, e Uma vida em segredo (2001), de Suzana Amaral, and in articles and more publications from this author.
A tradição mazzaropiana no cinema é bem conhecida: Mazzaropi é sinônimo de Jeca, o caipira de camisa xadrez puída, caminhar desengonçado, sotaque forte do interior do Brasil, da roça. Um tipo simples, inocente, sem malícia, mas por vezes preguiçoso e melindroso. Outra face do mesmo Mazzaropi são seus tipos urbanos, que ganham a vida circulando pela cidade, como um vendedor de linguiça ou um motorista. Personagens construídas na linguagem da comédia, que resvalam em estereótipos ou exageros, na busca por comunicar-se com todos os tipos de público em filmes que atraíam multidões para as salas de cinema e geravam recordes de bilheteria.

O outro lado do prisma da inocência e da ingenuidade do caipira e do tipo urbano de Mazzaropi, porém, é mais sombrio. Como protagonistas, as personagens como Jeca Tatu são bem definidas, detêm o poder de ação na narrativa, perseguem seus objetivos, enfrentam desafios, protegem-se a si mesmas usando da inteligência ou dos artifícios da malandragem. O mesmo não ocorre com as personagens femininas que os acompanham ao longo da trama, especialmente no caso de suas parceiras amorosas, representadas inúmeras vezes pela atriz Geny Prado.

As personagens de Prado, tanto as caipiras quanto as moradoras da zona urbana, são tratadas pelo protagonista homem de formas, hoje, inaceitáveis. As coadjuvantes femininas são sistematicamente vistas de cima pelo olhar masculino, em um mundo em que predomina o poder patriarcal e a consequente banalização da violência contra mulheres. Xingamentos, agressões, manipulações e ameaças são constantes, e, surpreendentemente, são retratados como disparadores de comicidade: são as próprias piadas. Aquela mesma inocência do Jeca, quando se trata da relação com uma mulher, é atravessada pela violência.

Mesmo considerando a diferença de épocas e visões de mundo, a frequência, a leviandade e o humor questionável associados às situações de humilhação contra as personagens femininas restam indigestos. Como é possível, então, interpretar essa faceta da comédia que deriva da naturalização da violência contra mulheres no cinema de Mazzaropi, consumido por décadas por milhares de brasileiros?

Sem ignorar a contribuição dos filmes de Mazzaropi para o cinema brasileiro e sua história, proponho uma revisão feminista de algumas das estratégias narrativas e de linguagem cinematográfica no cinema mazzaropiano na representação de personagens femininas, em especial aquelas interpretadas por Geny Prado nos filmes Jeca Tatu (1959) e Vendedor de linguiça (1962).
O vendedor de linguiça em cartaz nos cinemas cariocas.
Fonte: Diário de Notícias, Rio de Janeiro, 1962.
1
Em dia de estreia de um novo Mazzaropi, as filas para comprar ingressos dobravam quarteirões nos cinemas de rua do centro de São Paulo, como bem mostra a famosa fotografia do público diante do extinto Cine Art Palácio, da Avenida São João, que em seus letreiros reluzentes com letras garrafais anunciava a chegada de O noivo da girafa, em 1957.
Estreia de O noivo da girafa em 1957.
Fonte: Divulgação.
O cinema de Amácio Mazzaropi é consagrado pela sua realização independente, e pela abordagem de questões próprias da realidade social brasileira – como a cultura caipira, os resquícios do coronelismo1 em zonas rurais e a desigualdade social no meio urbano. Ao longo de sua carreira no cinema, Mazzaropi atuou em mais de 30 filmes e dirigiu 13 longas-metragens, tendo fundado sua própria produtora, a PAM Filmes (Produções Amácio Mazzaropi).

Mazzaropi é também lembrado por ser o criador de personagens marcantes, como seu Jeca, que dá nome a oito dos filmes que protagoniza. Revisitando imagens populares como o Jeca Tatu de Monteiro Lobato,2 com um estilo de comédia particular, ainda que reforçando determinados estereótipos, Mazzaropi construiu personagens que dialogavam com o grande público e se tornavam figuras queridas, ansiosamente aguardadas nas telas de cinema.

Ao lado de Jeca e dos tipos urbanos mazzaropianos, porém, encontramos outra figura – a “muié”, a companheira, a esposa, a parceira de muitas décadas que faz par com o protagonista, interpretada na maioria das vezes pela atriz brasileira Geny Prado,3 constantemente lembrada pela mídia por seu papel como “a mulher do Jeca”, ou ainda “partner”, “companheira”, “parceira” e “dupla” de Amácio Mazzaropi.
Geny Prado, “companheira” de Mazzaropi. 
Fonte: Revista Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 1960.
Nascida no interior do estado de São Paulo, na cidade de São Manuel, em 1919, Geny Prado foi uma atriz brasileira consagrada por suas personagens nos filmes de Mazzaropi. Juntos, contracenam em dezoito filmes ao longo de três décadas: Chofer de Praça (1959), Jeca Tatu (1959), As Aventuras de Pedro Malazartes (1960), Zé do Piriquito (1960), Tristeza do Jéca (1960), O vendedor de linguiça (1962), Casinha Pequenina (1963), O Lamparina (1964), Meu Japão Brasileiro (1965), O Jeca e a Freira (1968), No Paraíso das Solteironas (1969), Betão Ronca Ferro (1970), Um Caipira em Bariloche (1973), O Jeca Contra o Capeta (1976), Jecão... Um Fofoqueiro no Céu (1977), Jeca e Seu Filho Preto (1978), A Banda das Velhas Virgens (1979) e, finalmente, O Jeca e a Égua Milagrosa (1980). Além da carreira cinematográfica, Geny Prado atuou em mais de vinte trabalhos para a televisão.

O último papel de Geny Prado no cinema se dá cinco anos mais tarde em A marvada carne (1985), dirigido por André Klotzel, com a personagem Nhá Policena, mãe de Sá Carula, interpretada por Fernanda Torres. Aqui, novamente, interpreta uma mulher caipira, como uma homenagem de Klotzel à sua carreira no cinema. Prado vem a falecer em 1998.

Hoje, rever os trabalhos de Geny Prado explicita problemas, como o caso dos filmes Jeca Tatu (1959) e Vendedor de linguiça (1962) vem ilustrar. Em primeiro lugar, porque suas personagens sempre estão sob a sombra do protagonista interpretado por Mazzaropi, servindo como “pontes” para suas piadas – as quais, como veremos, são em diversos casos humilhantes e depreciativas. Em segundo lugar, as personagens escritas para Geny Prado se repetem: mãe, esposa, lavando, cozinhando, arrumando, fazendo as tarefas que o marido não faz e sendo maltratada por ele. Ao longo de décadas, seus papéis, ainda que em alguns momentos fundamentais, eram limitados a poucas falas e quase nenhum poder de ação na narrativa, este reservado somente às personagens masculinas que conduziam a história.
2
Com a Jerônima de Geny Prado no clássico Jeca Tatu (1959), tais questões se colocam desde as sequências iniciais. O longa-metragem baseado na literatura de Monteiro Lobato é dirigido por Milton Amaral (que também havia dirigido Mazzaropi em seu primeiro filme, Chofer de Praça, de 1958), com argumento escrito por Mazzaropi. O filme nos conta a história de Jeca, casado com Jerônima, que em meio a disputas por terras e pela mão de sua filha, tem sua casa incendiada e parte para a cidade para recuperar suas propriedades com a ajuda de um político.
Cartaz do filme Jéca Tatú, 1959
Fonte: Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural
O filme se abre com uma sequência que revela o trabalho na lavoura. Jerônima, a mulher de idade mais avançada, com o vestido largo surrado, já está do lado de fora, cortando lenha para acender o fogareiro dentro de casa, enquanto Jeca dorme. Com o sotaque carregado, comumente atribuído à cultura caipira do Vale do Paraíba, ela reclama para o marido: “faz duas horas que eu levantei e você ainda tá dormindo”, evidenciando seu trabalho dobrado.

Logo em seguida, Jerônima sai para ordenhar a vaca. Jeca assume seu posto, mas só para mostrar à esposa como se faz, subestimando-a. Depois de ameaçar agredi-la, joga leite nela, fazendo-a cair para trás. Não só Jerônima precisa assumir o posto de Jeca, mas também é humilhada quando tenta fazê-lo, tanto em suas faculdades mentais quanto fisicamente, quando Jeca usa da ordenha para espirrar leite nela.

Os exemplos se somam. Quando a casa da família é incendiada, Jerônima e a filha, desesperadas, correm para tentar salvar alguns poucos pertences do fogo. Jeca, pelo contrário, continua sentado dentro da casa, vendo a chama crescer, em um estado de letargia. Jerônima pede sua ajuda, mas Jeca somente manda que pegue uma de suas calças de cima do fogão para que não queime. Não há nada mais natural, então, do que Jeca esperar sentado enquanto as mulheres correm para fazer tudo ao seu redor.

Por um lado, podemos lembrar que essa letargia e a preguiça do Jeca se origina na noção de que o caipira, acometido pela insalubridade da vida rural pré-saneamento básico era vítima de doenças como o amarelão, que tornavam o corpo anêmico e fraco, como ocorria com o Jeca Tatu de Monteiro Lobato. O mesmo corpo anêmico, porém, é o que desautoriza e ridiculariza a esposa, despejando as responsabilidades familiares sobre ela, como vemos na cena do incêndio.
Fé in Jeca Tatu
Fonte: Cinelândia magazine, Rio de Janeiro, 1961
Como argumenta Tolentino (2001), em seu trabalho fundamental sobre a representação da vida rural no cinema brasileiro:

‍Assim como o romance desempenha um papel marginal à trama central, também as mulheres ocupam esse status em relação ao eixo do filme (...) Chama atenção o fato de que todas as mulheres são, invariavelmente, destratadas pelo Jeca Tatu, como uma forma constrangedoramente machista de obter o riso. (TOLENTINO, 2001, p. 119)
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É que logo no início do filme, Jerônima é humilhada por Jeca Tatu, que a xinga de “analfabeta burra”, ameaçando agredi-la. A tônica, porém, é de comédia, pois os gestos, o sotaque carregado e o acompanhamento musical vêm sugerir a graça daquela situação: até na roça, entre pessoas simples e pobres, o marido mostra “quem manda” para sua esposa, a qual merece ser “colocada em seu lugar”.
O intérprete principal e sua “partner”
Fonte: Revista Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 1960.
Em O vendedor de linguiça, essa problemática ganha um relevo ainda maior. Lançado em 1962, trata-se de um filme dirigido pelo cineasta Glauco Mirko Laurelli (que dirige também outros filmes estrelando Mazzaropi e Geny Prado, como Casinha Pequenina, de 1963, e Meu Japão Brasileiro, de 1964), com roteiro de Milton Amaral e Mazzaropi, produzido pela PAM Filmes. 

‍O vendedor de linguiça não tem traços de caipira, mas tem de descendentes de imigrantes, especialmente italianos, em centros urbanos. Entrecortado por alguns números musicais românticos, o filme se centra na figura de Gustavo, o vendedor de linguiça que sai pelas redondezas em seu caminhão vendendo a carne por metro, cantando para anunciar seu produto. Gustavo é casado com Carmela e tem dois filhos adultos, com quem mora em uma casa de uma pequena vila. Ali, as mulheres mais velhas formam longas filas para lavar a roupa no tanque público, enquanto outros saem para o trabalho na cidade. A trama, em geral, centra-se ao redor de pequenos “causos” e eventualidades que terminam na delegacia de polícia, como um cachorro que rouba linguiça do caminhão e o casamento da filha de Gustavo.
Mazzaropi "domina" as lavadeiras do cortiço
Fonte: Diário da Noite, 19/04/1962
Aqui, o incômodo recai sobre quão sistemático é o comportamento de Gustavo na humilhação das mulheres ao seu redor. A frequência com que age para ameaçar, agredir e esnobar mulheres é tamanha que, conforme o filme avança, é possível até prever como a personagem irá se comportar: mandando alguma mulher calar a boca ou ameaçando agredi-la com algum objeto patético, como uma linguiça ou uma bola.

A misoginia de Gustavo se manifesta também com a família grã-fina do esposo de Flora. Em alto e bom tom, chama a ricaça de enjoada, obrigando-a a montar em seu caminhão para viajar com desconhecidos e forçando-a a se despir em plena praia, contra a sua vontade. Se por um lado a ridicularização do elitismo é um dos pontos altos do filme, a forma espontânea e despreocupada com que Gustavo xinga a mulher rica – e não seu esposo ou filho – é sintomática.

Vale ressaltar que Gustavo é rápido em se tornar agressivo e ofensivo especialmente com mulheres maduras ou idosas, como sua esposa Carmela, as vizinhas italianas e a “grã-fina”. Mulheres que já perderam o que, sob a perspectiva masculina mais convencional, é o seu maior valor: a beleza física e o apelo sexual. São elas as mais sujeitas à violência disfarçada de comédia, camuflada pelos efeitos sonoros de comicidade. As personagens de Geny Prado, consequentemente, enfrentam tal “maldição”. Ao interpretar, ao lado de Mazzaropi, as esposas, já maduras e vistas como “velhas”, são as maiores vítimas de sua covardia e hostilidade, como se percebe quando a grã-fina quer expulsar Gustavo e Carmela de sua casa, momento em que o linguiceiro ameaça “arrebentá-la” com uma bola na cabeça.

De fato, em muitos casos as personagens de Mazzaropi ficam só na ameaça. São poucas as vezes em que suas palavras se transformam em ações que ferem fisicamente as personagens femininas. Além disso, a ameaça de agressão com objetos toscos como uma linguiça sugere que tudo aquilo é banal, como se aquela agressão não fosse capaz de causar medo ou dor. Entretanto, se hoje discutimos publicamente a gravidade da violência psicológica, esse debate era ainda embrionário naquela época, e inacessível para a maioria das brasileiras. Daí, então, a repetição excessiva desse tipo de cena e o tratamento cômico dado aos comportamentos agressivos contra mulheres, tornando-os motivo de piada – para os homens.
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A naturalidade com que as personagens de Mazzaropi se dirigem a mulheres de forma pejorativa é o que permite questionar: o que significa desprezar mulheres com tanto desembaraço, naquele contexto histórico e social, naquele momento do cinema brasileiro e naquelas obras audiovisuais capazes de atingir grandes públicos e lotar salas de cinema?

Nesses casos, é possível questionar se há violência, misoginia ou qualquer desprezo endereçado especificamente a mulheres, visto que eram outros tempos, outros olhares, outras formas de convivência entre mulheres e homens que não se resumiam à visão contemporânea que, felizmente, herda das inúmeras conquistas do feminismo e das lutas de diversos movimentos sociais pela igualdade.

Por um lado, é possível apontar a aberta misoginia que se manifesta em diversos filmes estrelados por Mazzaropi como resultado de uma naturalização da violência contra a mulher na sociedade brasileira, que não nasce no cinema, mas que se reflete na produção audiovisual do país. Por outro lado, não buscamos reduzir tal cinema a essa problemática, ainda mais por seu alcance e repercussão ao longo de décadas no Brasil. 

Os filmes de Jeca e os filmes urbanos de Mazzaropi fazem, de fato, apontamentos sobre a realidade social e sobre questões graves, trazendo ao público momentos de crítica social em meio à comédia. Esse tipo de crítica social é exemplificado, por exemplo, nas cenas que escancaram a desigualdade entre classes e o abismo entre os mais pobres e mais ricos no Brasil. Em O vendedor de linguiça, quando Gustavo e Carmela vão morar na casa da família do marido de sua filha, um gesto de generosidade do linguiceiro causa um mal-estar próprio da naturalização da miséria. A sequência se inicia com uma piada duvidosa: durante um passeio pela rica vizinhança, o casal vê uma mulher desabrigada que afirma não querer um emprego pois seu emprego é “pedir esmola” – aqui, então, se reproduz uma opinião que se repete no senso comum brasileiro, a de que a miséria é usada por pessoas em situação de vulnerabilidade social como “desculpa” para não trabalhar. Comovido ao saber que a mulher não tinha onde morar, Gustavo a convida para passar a noite no quarto de hóspedes, dizendo que poderia chamar a família inteira.

Pelo portão aberto, porém, chegam diversos outros homens, mulheres e crianças, que ocupam os espaços vazios da mansão. Um deles diz ter até vergonha de estar em uma casa tão bonita de tão sujo que está. Porém, ali, a generosidade tem limite. Sua chegada é acompanhada pela trilha sonora de suspense, como se a entrada dos pobres na casa fosse um motivo de assombro. Ou, em uma cena constrangedora pela leviandade com que se menciona o Holocausto, uma vizinha rica se impressiona ao ver os pobres, dizendo que a mansão se tornaria um “campo de concentração”. Pressionado pelos proprietários e pelos vizinhos que já começam a chamar a polícia, um Gustavo envergonhado é forçado a expulsar da casa todos os desabrigados.

A sequência é impactante no seu retrato da proximidade entre a extrema pobreza e a extrema riqueza, problemática candente na história do Brasil, que tem se brutalizado com projetos de governo atuais. O filme aborda a questão com certa seriedade, de início com recursos de humor esparsos, mas depois com uma carga sentimental e melancólica inédita na narrativa. Além da revolta de Gustavo, a trilha sonora se mantém em uma tônica de suspense e conflito. Daí se evidencia a gravidade do problema, e a seriedade com que o filme o representa – o que não acontece, nem de longe, em relação ao tratamento das personagens femininas.

Os filmes de Mazzaropi são lembrados com uma cortina de bonita nostalgia, como fruto de uma inocência há muito perdida, de uma doçura e facilidade da vida cotidiana e da vida na roça que não se vê mais nas diversas grandes cidades brasileiras e na mudança dos costumes e práticas sociais. Entretanto, esses filmes, consumidos por milhares de brasileiros desde seu lançamento até os dias atuais, acabam reforçando estereótipos e pensamentos misóginos que, ainda agora, podemos ouvir por aí: “mulher não sabe dirigir”, “mulher só chora”, “mulher fala demais”, “mulher gosta de apanhar”, “lugar de mulher é dentro de casa” ou ainda “lugar de mulher é no tanque”, vide a primeira cena de O vendedor de linguiça.

‍Por outro lado, vale pensar: ao ameaçar Jerônimas ou humilhar Carmelas, não estaria Mazzaropi “denunciando” a naturalidade de tais comportamentos na sociedade brasileira, colocando-se contra tal? Os filmes dizem o contrário, pois se nota que as cenas de agressão à mulher não se baseiam em um tom crítico, mas sim no próprio recurso de comicidade, reforçado pelos efeitos sonoros patéticos, pela comédia corporal e pela tônica exagerada que marcava o estilo da comédia de Mazzaropi. Assim, esse tipo de cena vem mais demonstrar o quão aceitável era ridicularizar uma mulher e ainda encontrar graça nisso, como uma forma de humor autorizada pela mentalidade machista estabelecida na sociedade brasileira nas décadas em que o cinema de Mazzaropi borbulhava, em vez de criticar o machismo do período.

Se desde o início ressaltamos que, apesar do que vem sendo apontado, o cinema de Mazzaropi é um marco na história do cinema brasileiro e contribui para discutir problemas sociais como a desigualdade e a herança do coronelismo, por exemplo, de que vale a leitura feminista e contemporânea de filmes produzidos há mais de sessenta anos atrás? 

A crítica do anacronismo considera que não devemos olhar com olhos “de hoje” para o que foi feito no passado. Se é assim, então, seria ineficaz rever as técnicas cinematográficas para a representação da mulher caipira no cinema mazzaropiano. Seria, ainda, improdutivo questionar posturas e palavras abertamente racistas nas comédias de Mazzaropi – e em muitas outras obras do cinema brasileiro, visto que em trabalhos tardios, como Jeca e seu Filho Preto, o filme retrata o preconceito racial e se coloca contra a discriminação.

Porém, a própria representação necessita análise. A forma como as artes criam imagens sobre a realidade, baseadas em interpretações sobre tal realidade, culminam na repetição de estereótipos. Durante décadas, o cinema contribui para criar a ideia de que a caipira é chucra, e que o natural é que esteja sujeita à violência que foi camuflada na inocência e doçura do Jeca. Durante décadas, o cinema acabou transmitindo e reforçando imagens de que era natural ameaçar uma mulher como Carmela em uma relação conjugal e de que o poder masculino no casamento seria incontestável. Rever tais padrões, desmontar estereótipos e, enfim, “desconstruir” o alicerce que sugere comicidade e banalização nas cenas de opressão a mulheres são recursos que nos permitem realocar focos e encontrar novas formas de ver o que o cinema projeta.

Autoras como Tolentino (2001) e Fressato (2008) afirmam que, ao assumir o papel de coronel, Jeca, de oprimido se torna opressor, deixando de ser um mero “jeca”.4 Muito antes, porém, vemos Jeca como opressor – não na chave da diferença de classes ou do poder político, mas na dimensão da diferença sexual, que se beneficia da violência para subjugar mulheres, dada a leviandade com que ameaça, ridiculariza e humilha Jerônima, em atos à primeira vista inofensivos, como meras ameaças, mas bem enraizados na mentalidade masculina e no cotidiano.

Ao cabo, as mulheres interpretadas por Geny Prado revelam alguns sintomas de um tempo que às vezes lembramos com saudade e associamos a uma certa inocência perdida. Ambos os filmes se iniciam com sequências que mostram, com naturalidade, a carga de trabalho excessiva das esposas e a displicência dos maridos. Os dois filmes deixam entrever mulheres desrespeitadas, destituídas, que pela violência da repetição e pela falta de instrução se acostumam com aquele tipo de vida – se é que é possível se acostumar, como bem vemos Jerônima dizendo que um dia ainda daria um tiro em Jeca.

Não é por acaso, afinal, que somente no ano de 2021 foi criminalizado o abuso psicológico dentro de relações conjugais no Brasil, prática inculcada que revela a gravidade das situações a que mulheres estão submetidas na sociedade brasileira, tal como se vê nos filmes de Mazzaropi. Aqui, então, percebe-se o cinema de Mazzaropi e a presença de Geny Prado como um registro histórico de perspectivas e atitudes masculinas sobre a figura feminina, consumidas através da comédia pelo público de cinema e pela sociedade brasileira, em muitos casos até os dias de hoje, a que nos cabe ultrapassar.5 
1. Sistema de controle do poder encabeçado por “coronéis” sobretudo em regiões rurais brasileiras que marcou o primeiro período republicano do país iniciado em 1889.

2. Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) é considerado um dos maiores escritores brasileiros apesar de sua postura e escritos racistas e eugenistas (ver Habib, 2003). Jeca Tatu é uma de suas criações literárias, vindo de início representar as populações campesinas de forma pejorativa, como uma figura preguiçosa desafeita ao progresso. Mais tarde, Jeca é transformado em “garoto propaganda” da campanha pela medicalização da zona rural e pelo saneamento básico no Brasil rural.

3. Ou Geni Prado, como se encontra em registros de época como as revistas de cinema e jornais da década de 1950 e 1960.

4. No português brasileiro, “jeca” se tornou adjetivo, sendo utilizado com sentido de pessoa de mau gosto, sem requintes, “caipira” no sentido pejorativo da palavra.
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5. Esta pesquisa se aprofunda na dissertação Representações da mulher caipira no cinema brasileiro: Amélia (2000), de Ana Carolina, e Uma vida em segredo (2001), de Suzana Amaral, e em artigos e demais publicações da autora.
References
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Fressato, Soleni. O caipira Jeca Tatu: uma negação da sociedade capitalista? Representações no cinema de Mazzaropi. IV ENECULT - Encontro de Estudos Multidisciplinares em Cultura
28 a 30 de maio de 2008. 

Habib, Paula Arantes Botelho Briglia. "Eis o mundo encantado que Monteiro Lobato criou": raça, eugenia e nação. Dissertação (Mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. Campinas, 2003.

Tolentino, Célia Aparecida Ferreira. O rural no cinema brasileiro. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2001.

I – In Good Company
We all know that Carmen was born in Portugal. She came to Brazil as a child at the beginning of the 20th century. A coquettish, pretty girl, a store clerk. It was the roaring twenties, Latin America, Rio de Janeiro, the federal capital of the "United States of Brazil" - the name that, since 1889, was used to baptize the former Empire.

The writer João do Rio, had he known the future, could have interviewed Carmen. He would have said: "Little one, we both suffer from the same curse: we will die early, in the mist of the world". But he was no soothsayer and the colossal headline would never come to be. He died at the age of 39. Carmen, at 40-something. Frozen, lonely, blue on a morgue table.

Well then. Did readers really think that I would start a text about Helena Solberg referring to Carmen Miranda? I am sorry, but it is not so. 

It is obvious that Bananas is my business (1995) remains, to date, the greatest success in Solberg's career. An award-winning film, on the threshold between the biography of Carmen and the purging of the director's personal memory.

Because of the film, La Solberg and La Miranda often appear together in the same sentence, closely followed by the ghost of Cinema Novo. Something like Heathcliff, Cathy and the Heights. This was all because, for a while, Helena circulated with the group linked to Glauber Rocha - the pater familias of the movement, the man who carried the tablets of law. 

But Brazil is not just about the obvious. I see an aleph, hidden in an old house in rua do Ouvidor, the old center of Rio. It’s there after escaping from the mansion in Buenos Aires, described by Jorge Luís Borges. Through the aleph, the spectator finds a fantastic labyrinth of Marias and Carmens, at different dimensions and times, which intersect and flow through this text.

In the first paragraph, for example, I referred not to Carmen Miranda (born in Portugal, in 1909), but to Carmen Santos (born in Portugal, in 1904). Both had the same official name, given by their parents: Maria do Carmo.
Carmen Santos was an actress, director, producer, and diva of Brazilian cinema. A former seamstress and former saleswoman, like so many immigrants. Like so many "portuguese girls", who climbed the bohemian and stony hillsides of Rio. Carmen Santos (aka Maria do Carmo Santos Gonçalves) worked in the Parc Royal boutique. Carmen Miranda (aka Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha) was an employee at the Radiante boutique - not by chance, the same name as Helena Solberg's company, Radiante Filmes. 

You see, reader, if there is a similarity between these two Marias, I now call a third: Adalgisa Nery, aka Adalgisa Maria Feliciana Noel Cancela Ferreira. Born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1905, daughter of a Portuguese mother. Her mother died early, a fact that yielded the painful pages of A Imaginária, a book (unjustly) seldom read.
A woman with the same cry for freedom deep in her heart, Adalgisa was not from show biz like the other girls. She was a writer, a friend of Frida Khalo, and the widow of the painter Ismael Nery. She married Lourival Fontes, an ogre nurtured by the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship. Behold: separated from Lourival, she became a congresswoman, faced Institutional Act 5 - the same AI-5 that intoxicated the characters in Meio-Dia (1969), which we will talk about later. Adalgisa has always stood between intelligence and personal promotion. A sphinx-like creature.

As if the three Marias mentioned so far were not enough, here comes the fourth: Helena Solberg herself. Aka Maria Helena Collet Solberg. She debuted as a director with the short film A Entrevista (1966), followed by the short film Meio-Dia, while still living in Brazil. Soon thereafter, she would move to the United States of America for three decades.
It is, therefore, in the midst of this feminine universe that we understand Helena Solberg and her role in Brazilian cinema. In good company, surrounded by different generations and noises. Someone who is not limited to a single menu - Cinema Novo. Even because cinema is only a piece in the mission she faced: that of breaking her own mirror.
II – Bélle Epoque in the Counterculture?
Carmen Santos, Carmen Miranda, Adalgisa Nery. All three are of the same generation as that of another lady, Celina Solberg, Helena's mother. All of them were born in the first decade of the 1900's, old enough to be daughters of Helena Morley, a pseudonym used by Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant (1880-1970).

This is a great clue for Solberg: her parents' generation. Yes, parents. That traditional and droppable institution questioned by the counterculture of the 1960s, of which A Entrevista and Meio-Dia are classic examples.

From the age of thirteen to fifteen (1893-1895), Alice Brant wrote diaries. Almost fifty years later, they were published under the title Minha Vida de Menina. The text was received as a masterpiece by literary critics. In 1969, director David Neves adapted them for cinema (Memória de Helena). He used urban elements, such as Super-8, cars, asphalt streets, a leading man with long hair.

A century after the creation of the diaries, it was Solberg's turn to write and direct Vida de Menina (2004). Together with Elena Soárez, the co-author, the two captured the atmosphere of the past. They plunged into the period from 1893 to 1895 for a portrait as close as possible to Alice's daily life.
But beyond this: Helena (Solberg), Elena (Soárez) and Helena (Morley) gave themselves over to a lost continent - childhood - to which we always return. 

At this point in the text, the aleph determines an expansion of consciousness for the reader. There are dimensions that are strangely similar, despite being far apart in time and space. They defy the laws of nature. They are cosmic dust.

On one side, the 19th century, the countryside. On the other, the 21st century, the movie theater. In between, supernaturally connected, is adolescence. Just as in Meio-Dia - filmed in 1969 - Alice's diaries feature a rebellious girl who challenges authority and hates being coerced by older people. 

Of course, there are nuances. Alice Dayrell saw slavery up close - without metaphors, since it was only a short time before the "emancipation" of black people in Brazil (1888). However, the mixture of oppression and delicacy in Vida de Menina also takes us back to Meio-Dia and A Entrevista. Alice did not know how to deal with so much anxiety, so much desire to circumvent and, at the same time, respect religious education. To fulfill the (sacred) duty of an honest woman. The girls in A Entrevista also have doubts between the futile and the complex. How can they be both happy and discreet? Shall they comb their hair, but also think about the meaning of life?

Alice Dayrell was countercultural in her own way. A real-life Josephine March, who didn't consciously realize how literature saved her life. She drew beauty from the microcosm of everyday life: the smell of the cake baked by her grandmother, the figures in the town of Diamantina. No running water, no sewage, but with hormones racing. Only in 1942, at the age of 62, did Dayrell have the courage to publish her writings, which reveals a remnant of guilt for her excesses as a girl. And guilt is the full course of A Entrevista.
III – Inside the Home: A Entrevista
Far from the belle époque of the 19th century, A Entrevista and Meio-Dia represent the turn of the 1960s to the 1970s. 

‍Meio-Dia carries the slogan "it is forbidden to forbid" in the eyes of the children. A Entrevista is a collection of conversations with women, whose voices are heard as one of them prepares, it seems, for a wedding ceremony. Glória Solberg, Helena's sister-in-law, poses as an actress in the neorealist style, with no training for the job.

Gloria walks lightly, and lies on the beach. In a sweet, enchanting eroticism, she rubs sunscreen in the folds of her bikini, and the viewer is left in the tension between rigor (from the statements they hear) and sensuality (from the beautiful scene).
The opening credits mix religious preaching, children's portraits, nursery rhymes, witches, and debutantes. The caption reads: "The testimonies used in the narration were chosen among seventy interviews recorded with girls between the ages of 19 and 27, belonging to the same social group". 

Taking advantage of the synchronicities again - I return to the aleph - it is worth pointing out two simple facts. The director of photography, Mário Carneiro, had the same name as Mário Cunha, Carmen Miranda's good-looking boyfriend. Look for photos of the couple and the indelible carnaval behind them. Also pay attention to the editor of A Entrevista: Rogério Sganzerla. The enfant terrible who, in 1968, directed O Bandido da Luz Vermelha, a film that created one of the many splits in Cinema Novo - a movement that was not as solid as they say. 

Helena placed Gloria in a wedding dress, with a long white tail. There is a quiet gaze on her face. In one of the most spectacular scenes, the image of a Catholic saint discreetly accompanies her in the corner of the screen. Shortly before, she had opened a closet full of shoes: a clear sign that she was a worldly woman in the eyes of God. Worldly even in the eyes of the critics and the public who would like to see a socio-economic vision of the class struggle.
A Entrevista spends a great deal of time with bourgeois women who, nevertheless, have internal and external barriers between them. We hear statements about marriage, religion, education, control, motherhood, sex, and even a female version of the myth of the toothless vagina - "I hate being dominated by a man," says one of the voices. 

There are female interviewees capable of clichés ("a woman is only fulfilled when she gets married") or of defeatism ("I would like to be active, to do things. But I don't really see a path. Maybe a confusion of ideas"). Others, of pure delirium (the woman should be "socially perfect [...] She needs to be cultured, read a lot. Fill her life with classes, lectures, but not devote herself to a job"). 

The breaking of taboos is translated visually at one moment: Gloria bites her nails, annoyed. She talks about accepting her own ambiguities, about the "incoherence of things". Notice Helena Solberg sitting on the sofa, in a Hitchcockian intervention, gazing at her sister-in-law with nonchalant elegance. Helena placed A Entrevista inside her own house.
Although made three years later, it makes perfect sense to watch Meio-Dia right after A Entrevista. The final scenes of A Entrevista serve as a bridge to Meio-Dia, between shots of the "March with God for Freedom" - a conservative movement that supported the military regime of 1964, father of the AI-5. Rogério Sganzerla, prophet of chaos, assembles the last moments with a confusing mass of images, sounds, and cuts. However, one can hear something that is typical of Solberg's lyricism. One of the interviewees says, in the delicious prosody of the carioca women of the 1960s: "I think politics deteriorates man a little. [...] Kind of animals, you know?" Although it does not deal with political activism - a target of the director in the 1970s - A Entrevista speaks of existential ruptures, doubts and revolutions of manners.

In an exercise of abstraction, Helena's mother, Celina Solberg, could serve as an example for the internal contradictions presented in the film. Celina was born in the seigniorial neighborhood of Botafogo. Far away from rua do Ouvidor and the bohemian glories sung by Carmen Miranda and Carmen Santos. She forbade her daughter to go to Miranda's funeral, whom she didn't like. 

Elderly, Celina has made peace with the past. Perhaps she has managed to open her arms to what is different. During the recording of Bananas is my business, she fell in love with Eric Barreto, the actor who served as Carmen Miranda's host. Eric and Miranda formed a single entity. It is possible to feel Celina, Eric, and Miranda inhabiting the invisible, the glorious beyond. I imagine them talking about a new chapter for Religiões do Rio, João do Rio's classic work. Preferably about Umbanda. João watching everything, with a slight torpor and sincere interest.
IV – Beyond the Mirror
In A Entrevista, Helena talked to women of her same age group and social background. The result sounds à la clef, like someone standing in front of a mirror and deciding to break it. 

After all, in 1966, Helena was also married with children. She was fulfilling the social duty imposed on every human being born with a vulva. She signed the short film as Helena Solberg Ladd - then wife of James Ladd. In the future, she would leave her last name dormant, preferring her paternal Solberg. She attended the Catholic Pontifical University. She studied with men, something unheard of for someone raised in a nun's school. 

It had only been four years since both the interviewer and the interviewees had received small handouts from Brazilian legislation. In 1962 the Married Women's Statute (Law No. 4.121/62) was published. The utmost boldness was allowed. Women were allowed to conclude business deals without their husbands' endorsement. To exercise their professions and make use of their work output. They were allowed to keep custody of their children in case of separation - but remarry only after 1977, with the Divorce Law.

This background is not always mentioned when discussing the film, but it is directly linked to the asphyxia that prevails in the air. And that reigned for eons in Brazilian society. 

Adalgisa Nery was one of the girls who used her marital status to escape from her original family. She betrayed, was betrayed, loved, unloved. Little did she know that her first husband's home, surrounded by religious madwomen, was more hallucinatory than the previous one.

As the aleph orders, this unsuspecting woman was also responsible for the preservation of Parque Lage, in 1960. Lota de Macedo (aka Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares), architect and former companion of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, considered it a twin of the Bois de Bologne. At Parque Lage, as a child, Arduíno Colassanti - the long-haired leading man in Memória de Helena - lived there. (The dimensions of space and time always intersect).

For it was Lourival Fontes' ex-wife who had a firm hand, eagle eyes, and collaborated to maintain the park. Without her, the place would probably have become a myriad of gray buildings. Solberg's colleagues could thank her: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade shot Macunaíma at Parque Lage in 1969. Glauber Rocha, Terra em Transe, in 1967. 

It is also near Parque Lage, in Jardim Botânico, that the character Ana, in the short story "Love", by Clarice Lispector, has a vertigo and sudden uneasiness. A lonely housewife, on the verge of exploding. One more suffocated in the world. It would fit like a glove in A Entrevista.

In the prehistory of the sexual revolution, existing was not easy. Just remember the girl who, abandoned by the father of her son, runs with the boy in her arms until, exhausted, before closing her eyes to death, she sees the child being devoured by a wild animal - "Os porcos" (1903), a short story by Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Just leave even 1903 and reach the 21st century in Solberg's documentary Meu Corpo, Minha Vida (2017). The brutality is the same. 

Hence the revolutionary character of the financial independence of women like Carmen Miranda and Carmen Santos. Miranda's millionaire balangandans and Santos' Brasil Vox Filmes. In this broth of backwardness and Brazilian epiphanies, it is easy for the spectator to become depressed by some of the women in A Entrevista. What they could have been and were not.
V – Meio-Dia and the World Outside
Solberg went beyond. Already without Ladd, she wrote Meio-Dia. The film continued to deal with prohibitions, this time with children. If A Entrevista touched the taboo of the virginal woman, Meio-Dia touched the taboo of child naivety. 

In an emblematic scene, actor João Farkas raises his bangs and throws the schoolbook into the middle of a river. One might remember the canoe in A Margem (1968), by Ozualdo Candeias. In the film, a select (and dreamlike) club of passengers sails down a river, as if to represent those on the margins of society - hence, for many, the nickname cinema marginal.
It turned out that, amazingly enough, the students of Meio-Dia were also on the sidelines, squeezed between obedience and anger. Ready to use the techniques of preadolescence.

They were evil: they assaulted a teacher. They were suckers: scorned at a soccer game. They were confused: they had homes and livelihoods; others did not. 

And if none of it is real, the reader should not despair. Many times, the short film seems like a hallucination. Few dialogues, many external scenes, the graffiti "the dictatorship is fucked up" on the school's wall. The film brings a direct reference to the Parisian slogan "prohibition is forbidden", the same one that Caetano Veloso borrowed in the homonymous song, heard during the short film. In this continuum of sixty-odd ideas, everything conspires like the director's howl, but placed in the soft mouths of little angels, between truth and illusion.

The promise of suicide of one of the boys - he puts a plastic bag around his head - is the external expression of what was happening inside himself. The right to cut class - a human and fundamental right - is exercised without linearity, without a beginning-middle-and-end. The scenes overlap, at high speed. Marcelo Zona Sul (1970), by Xavier de Oliveira, would treat in a Zen-like way the Maoist questioning in Meio-Dia.
Mauro Alice, the late, legendary editor, once told me that as a little boy he saw Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan) in the cinema. What enchanted Mauro - interestingly Alice, like Dayrell - was the children's sense of belonging. The charitable hand of the teacher, who felt penalized by them. Meio-Dia has an oppressive atmosphere and the unity of the children. However, nothing of the charitable hand of the adults. If there was, the hand would probably be severed.

Helena Solberg usually approximates Meio-Dia with Jean Vigo's Zero Conduct (1933) and Truffaut's The Misunderstood (1959). This approximation sounds quite important. For most of his Cinema Novo colleagues, Truffaut was considered alienated, petit bourgeois, and mediocre. They preferred Jean-Luc Godard or Roberto Rossellini. To create a chronicle of the middle class, like Solberg's, seemed like a waste of time. 

Not by chance, Antônio Calmon - Glauber Rocha's assistant in Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) - left the group and went to read the literature of Yukio Mishima. He was looking for a profane work, far from the aesthetics of hunger and the backlands of Euclydes da Cunha. The cracks in Cinema Novo became larger and larger. In Boca do Lixo, in the underground of São Paulo, other idols appeared. 

We should not blame the groups themselves or even the excess of testosterone. It is necessary to put the magnifying glass on the historical moment, on what was deep and psychotic in the country and that flowed into the cinema. Otherwise, we would be engaging in a witch hunt exercise. Several topics were left out of the so-called "intellectual" and "serious" cinema. Besides Calmon, José Silvério Trevisan lived hippism in his own way. Walter Hugo Khouri was an existentialist in the middle of a crossfire, at the margin of state incentive. Other examples continue, down the road.

As for the rare female participation behind the camera, you can count on your fingers the women who, up to the 1960s, had directed, produced, scripted, or approached films. And this over a considerable lapse of time. 

I mention two more women from Solberg's parents' generation, born in 1904. Cléo de Verberena, aka Jacyra Martins da Silveira, director of The Mystery of the Black Domino (1931), and Gilda Abreu, director of O Ébrio (1946) - a blockbuster starring her husband, singer Vicente Celestino -, actress and director in Coração Materno (1950) - also with Celestino.
The reporter Dulce Damasceno de Brito walked the fine line between a Hedda Hopper and an industry trailblazer. In her book Lembranças de Hollywood she provided the testimony of someone who worked in the press for a long time. Also deceased, Maria Beatriz Roquette-Pinto Bojunga - daughter of Edgard Roquette-Pinto, master of broadcasting in the country - worked at INCE (National Institute of Educational Cinema), circulating among names such as Humberto Mauro. In the middle of 2021, researcher Alice Gonzaga is discussing national cinema and, as a bonus, maintaining the legacy of her father, Adhemar Gonzaga, founder of Cinédia studios. 

For Solberg's contemporaries, figures like Carmem Santos sounded like Roman vestals, vanished on the Palatine Hill. In 1967, filmmaker Ana Carolina was studying at the Cinema School of the São Luís College. She started out in documentaries and later delved into the exact opposite, with surrealist films. 

All in all, the cinema created by women in Brazil is a fusion of styles, of social cuts, of political follies. However, the alert persists. They were and are anointed in the spirit of freedom.

Helena Solberg did not see the clash of currents that bled the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1970s up close. In 1971, she went with her family to the United States, when another phase in her work began - linked to the feminist movement, and later to Latin American politics. The time in the US grew. Grew, and so many moons passed. When she returned to Brazil, she arrived in the videocassette era, one step away from the Internet. Then she began producing, writing, and directing the phenomenon Bananas is my business. From the 1990s to the 2020s, she returned to documentary and fiction, with no defined order, interspersing projects. Helena opens whatever imaginary door she prefers and focuses on the present, the past, or the future. As a documentarian or fictionist, Helena Solberg remains in action.
I – Em Boa Companhia
Todos sabem que Carmen nasceu em Portugal. Veio criança para o Brasil, no início do século XX. Uma garota coquete, lindinha, vendedora de loja. Eram os roaring twenties, a América Latina, o Rio de Janeiro, a capital federal dos “Estados Unidos do Brazil” – nome que, desde 1889, passou a batizar o antigo Império.

O escritor João do Rio, se adivinhasse o futuro, poderia ter entrevistado Carmen. Diria: “Pequena, nós dois sofremos da mesma maldição: morreremos cedo, no azeviche do mundo”. Mas não era adivinho. Não conseguiu a manchete colossal. Morreu aos 39 de idade. Carmen, aos 40 e poucos. Gelada, solitária, azul em uma mesa de necrotério.

Pois bem. O leitor realmente achou que eu começaria um texto sobre Helena Solberg citando Carmen Miranda? Sinto muito. Errou. 

É óbvio que Bananas is my business (1995) continua a ser, até o momento, o maior sucesso na trajetória de Solberg. Premiadíssimo, no limiar entre a biografia de Carmen e a purgação da memória pessoal da diretora.

Por conta do filme, La Solberg e La Miranda costumam aparecer juntas na mesma frase, seguidas de perto pelo fantasma do Cinema Novo. Algo como Heathcliff, Cathy e os morros. Tudo porque, durante um tempo, Helena circulou com o grupo ligado a Glauber Rocha – o pater familias do movimento, o homem que carregava as tábuas da lei. 

Porém, o Brasil não se resume ao óbvio. Vejo um aleph, escondido em um sobrado na rua do Ouvidor, centro antigo do Rio, depois de fugir da mansão em Buenos Aires, descrita por Jorge Luís Borges. Através do aleph, o espectador encontra um labirinto fantástico de Marias, Carmens, dimensões e tempos diferentes, que se cruzam e entram neste texto.

No primeiro parágrafo, por exemplo, eu me referi não à Carmen Miranda (nascida em Portugal, em 1909), mas à Carmen Santos (nascida em Portugal, em 1904). Ambas tinham o mesmo nome oficial, dado pelos pais: Maria do Carmo.
Carmen Santos foi atriz, diretora, produtora, diva do cinema brasileiro. Ex-costureira e ex-vendedora, como tantas imigrantes. Como tantas “portuguesinhas”, que subiam as ladeiras boêmias e pedregosas do Rio. Carmen Santos (aka Maria do Carmo Santos Gonçalves) trabalhava na boutique Parc Royal. Carmen Miranda (aka Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha) era funcionária da loja Radiante – não por acaso, mesmo nome da empresa de Helena Solberg, a Radiante Filmes. 

Veja o leitor que se existe uma semelhança entre aquelas duas Marias, eu chamo agora uma terceira: Adalgisa Nery, aka Adalgisa Maria Feliciana Noel Cancela Ferreira. Nascida no Rio de Janeiro, em 1905, filha de mãe portuguesa. A mãe morreu cedo, fato que rendeu páginas doídas de A Imaginária, livro (injustamente) pouco lido.
Também mulher e com um grito de liberdade dentro do peito, Adalgisa não era do mesmo show biz das outras meninas. Foi escritora, amiga de Frida Khalo, viúva do pintor Ismael Nery, casou-se com Lourival Fontes, ogro da ditadura de Getúlio Vargas. Pasmem: separada de Lourival, virou deputada, enfrentou o Ato Institucional nº 5 – o mesmo AI-5 que intoxicou os personagens de Meio-Dia (1969), sobre o qual falaremos mais à frente. Adalgisa sempre esteve entre a inteligência e a promoção pessoal. Criatura esfíngica.

Como se não bastassem as três Marias citadas até o momento, eis que surge a quarta: a própria Helena Solberg. Aka Maria Helena Collet Solberg. Estréia como diretora no curta-metragem A Entrevista (1966), seguido pelo também curta-metragem Meio-Dia, quando ainda morava no Brasil, antes de se mudar por três décadas para os Estados Unidos (da América).
É, portanto, no meio desse universo feminino que entendemos Helena Solberg e o seu papel no cinema brasileiro. Em boa companhia, cercada de gerações e ruídos diferentes. Alguém que não se resume a um cardápio único – o Cinema Novo. Até porque o cinema é apenas uma peça na missão que ela encarou: a de quebrar o próprio espelho.
II – Bélle Epoque na Contracultura?
Carmen Santos, Carmen Miranda, Adalgisa Nery. Todas as três são da mesma geração de uma outra senhora, Celina Solberg, mãe de Helena. Todas nascidas na primeira década dos 1900, com idade para serem filhas de Helena Morley, pseudônimo usado por Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant (1880-1970).

Essa é uma ótima pista para Solberg: a geração de seus pais. Sim, os pais. Aquela entidade tradicional e caretíssima, questionada pela contracultura dos anos 1960, da qual A Entrevista e Meio-Dia são exemplos clássicos.

Dos treze aos quinze anos de idade (1893-1895), Alice Brant escreveu diários. Quase cinquenta anos depois, foram publicados com o título de Minha Vida de Menina e receberam a aura de obra-prima, pela crítica literária. Em 1969, o diretor David Neves adaptou-os para o cinema (Memória de Helena). Usou elementos urbanos, como Super-8, carros, ruas asfaltadas, galã de cabelo comprido.

Um século depois da criação dos diários, foi a vez de Solberg roteirizar e dirigir Vida de Menina (2004). Ao lado da corroterista Elena Soárez, as duas mantiveram a atmosfera do passado. Mergulharam no período de 1893 a 1895 para um retrato mais próximo – tanto quanto é possível – do cotidiano de Alice.
Mais do que isso: Helena (Solberg), Elena (Soárez) e Helena (Morley) entregaram-se a um continente perdido – a infância –, ao qual sempre retornamos. 

Nessa altura do texto, o aleph determina uma expansão de consciência ao leitor. Existem dimensões que são estranhamente parecidas, apesar de estarem muito distantes, no tempo e no espaço. Elas desafiam as leis da natureza. São poeira cósmica.

De um lado, o século XIX, o interior do país. Do outro, o século XXI, a sala de cinema. No meio, dando uma liga sobrenatural, a adolescência. Assim como em Meio Dia – filmado em 1969 –, os diários de Alice trazem uma garota rebelde, que contesta a autoridade e detesta ser coagida por pessoas mais velhas. 

Evidentemente, existem nuances. Alice Dayrell viu de perto uma escravidão literal – sem metáforas, pois apenas há pouco tempo havia ocorrido a “emancipação” dos negros no Brasil (1888). No entanto, a mistura de opressão e de delicadeza em Vida de Menina também nos remetem a Meio-Dia e A Entrevista.

Alice não sabia lidar com tanta ansiedade, tanta vontade de driblar e, ao mesmo tempo, respeitar a educação religiosa. Cumprir o dever (sagrado) de mulher honesta. As moças de A Entrevista também têm dúvidas. Entre o fútil e o complexo. Como ser feliz e recatada? Como pentear o cabelo e pensar no sentido da vida?Alice Dayrell foi contracultural a seu modo. Uma Josephine March da vida real, que não percebeu, de forma consciente, o quanto a literatura salvou a sua vida. Tirou beleza do microcosmo do cotidiano: o cheiro do bolo feito pela avó, as figuras da cidade de Diamantina. Sem água encanada, sem esgoto, mas com os hormônios pulando. Apenas em 1942, aos 62 de idade, Dayrell teve coragem de publicar os escritos, o que revela um resquício de culpa pelos excessos de menina. E culpa é o prato cheio de A Entrevista.
III – Dentro de Casa: A Entrevista
Longe da belle époque do século XIX, A Entrevista e Meio-Dia representam a virada dos anos 1960 para os 1970. 

‍Meio-Dia traz o slogan “é proibido proibir”, no olhar das crianças. A Entrevista é uma coleção de conversas com mulheres, cujas vozes são ouvidas enquanto uma delas prepara-se, ao que parece, para uma cerimônia de casamento. Glória Solberg, cunhada de Helena, posa de atriz à moda neorrealista, sem treinamento para o ofício.

Glória anda leve, deita-se na praia. Em um erotismo doce, encantatório, passa filtro solar nas dobras do biquíni e o espectador fica na tensão entre o rigor (dos depoimentos que ouve) e a sensualidade (da bonita cena).
Os créditos iniciais misturam pregações religiosas, retratos de crianças, cantigas de roda, bruxas, debutantes. O letreiro: “Os depoimentos utilizados na narração foram escolhidos entre setenta entrevistas gravadas com moças de 19 a 27 anos de idade, pertencentes a um mesmo grupo social”. 

Aproveitando novamente as sincronicidades – eu retorno ao aleph –, vale a pena destacar dois fatos singelos. O diretor de fotografia, Mário Carneiro, tinha o mesmo prenome de Mário Cunha, o namorado boa-pinta de Carmen Miranda. Procurem fotos do casal e do indefectível carnaval a tiracolo. Atenção também para o montador de A Entrevista: Rogério Sganzerla. O enfant terrible que, em 1968, dirigiu O Bandido da Luz Vermelha, filme que criou uma das muitas cisões do Cinema Novo – movimento que não era tão sólido quanto dizem. 

Helena colocou Glória de vestido de noiva, cauda longa, olhar pacato. Em uma das cenas mais espectrais, a imagem de uma santa católica a acompanha discretamente, no canto da tela. Pouco antes, havia aberto um closet cheio de sapatos: sinal claro de que era uma mundana aos olhos de Deus. Mundana inclusive aos olhos da crítica e do público que desejassem uma visão sócio-econômica da luta de classes. 
A Entrevista esbalda-se com grã-finas que, nem por isso, deixam de ter barreiras internas e externas entre si. Ouvimos depoimentos sobre casamento, religião, educação, controle, maternidade, sexo e até o mito da vagina dentata em versão feminina – “eu tenho horror de ser dominada por um homem”, diz uma das vozes. 

Há entrevistadas capazes de clichês (“a mulher só é realizada quando se casa”) ou de derrotismos (“Eu gostaria de ser ativa, de fazer coisas. Mas não vejo bem um caminho. Talvez uma confusão de ideias”). Outras, de puro delírio (a mulher deve ser “socialmente perfeita [...] Ela precisa ser culta, ler muito. Encher a vida com aulas, conferências, mas não se dedicar a um trabalho”). 

A quebra dos tabus é traduzida visualmente em um momento: Glória rói as unhas, incomodada. Fala sobre aceitar as próprias ambiguidades, sobre as “incoerências nas coisas”. Reparem Helena Solberg sentada no sofá, em uma intervenção hitchcockiana, mirando a cunhada com displicente elegância. Helena colocou A Entrevista dentro da própria casa.
Apesar de realizado três anos mais tarde, faz todo sentido ver Meio-Dia logo em seguida, após A Entrevista. As cenas finais deste servem de ponte para Meio-Dia, entre fotos da “Marcha com Deus Pela Liberdade” – movimento conservador que apoiou o regime militar de 1964, pai do AI-5. Rogério Sganzerla, profeta do caos, faz a montagem dos últimos instantes com uma massa confusa de imagens, sons e cortes. Porém, ouve-se algo que é a cara do lirismo de Solberg. Uma das entrevistadas afirma, na deliciosa prosódia das mulheres cariocas dos anos 1960: “Eu acho que a política deteriora um pouco o homem. [...] Meio animais, entendeu?”. Embora não trate de ativismo político – alvo da diretora na década de 1970 –, A Entrevista fala de rupturas existenciais, dúvidas e revoluções de costumes.

Em um exercício de abstração, a mãe de Helena, Celina Solberg, poderia servir de exemplo para as contradições internas apresentadas no filme. Celina nasceu no bairro senhorial de Botafogo. Bem distante da rua do Ouvidor e das glórias da boemia, cantadas por Carmen Miranda e Carmen Santos. Proibiu a filha de ir ao velório de Miranda, de quem não gostava. 

Idosa, Celina fez as pazes com o passado. Talvez tenha conseguido abrir os braços para o diferente. Durante a gravação de Bananas is my business, caiu de encantos por Eric Barreto, o ator que serviu de hospedeiro para Carmen Miranda. Eric e Miranda formaram uma única entidade. É possível sentir Celina, Eric e Miranda habitando o invisível, no glorioso além. Imagino-os conversando sobre um novo capítulo para Religiões do Rio, obra clássica de João do Rio. De preferência sobre umbanda. João assistindo a tudo, com leve torpor e sincero interesse.
IV – Além do Espelho
Em A Entrevista, Helena conversou com mulheres de sua mesma faixa etária e origem social. O resultado soa à la clef, como alguém que está diante do espelho e decide quebrá-lo. 

Afinal, em 1966, Helena era também casada e com filhos. Cumpridora do dever social imposto a todo ser humano nascido com vulva. Assinou o curta-metragem como Helena Solberg Ladd – então esposa de James Ladd. No futuro, deixaria o último sobrenome adormecido, preferindo o Solberg paterno. Frequentava a Pontifícia Universidade Católica. Estudava com homens, algo inédito para alguém criada em colégio de freiras. 

Fazia apenas quatro anos que tanto a entrevistadora quanto as entrevistadas haviam recebido pequenas esmolas da legislação brasileira. Em 1962 foi publicado o Estatuto da Mulher Casada (Lei nº 4.121/62). Permitiu-se o máximo da ousadia. Mulheres concluírem negócios sem o aval do marido. Exercerem profissões e disporem do produto do trabalho. Manterem a guarda dos filhos, em caso de separação – novo casamento apenas a partir de 1977, com a Lei do Divórcio.

Esse pano de fundo nem sempre é mencionado ao se debater o filme, mas está diretamente ligado à asfixia que impera no ar. E que imperou por éons na sociedade brasileira. 

Adalgisa Nery foi uma das garotas que usaram o status de casada para fugirem da família original. Traiu, foi traída, amou, desamou. Mal sabia que o lar do primeiro marido, cercado de religiosas loucas, era mais alucinado que o anterior.

Como o aleph ordena, essa insuspeita mulher também foi responsável pela preservação do Parque Lage, em 1960. Lota de Macedo (aka Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares), arquiteta e ex-companheira da poeta Elizabeth Bishop, considerava-o um congênere do Bois de Bologne. No Parque Lage morou, quando criança, Arduíno Colassanti – o galã do cabelo comprido de Memória de Helena. (As dimensões de espaço e tempo sempre se cruzam.)

Pois foi a ex-esposa de Lourival Fontes quem bateu o pulso firme, os olhos de águia e colaborou para a manutenção do parque. Sem ela, provavelmente o local teria virado uma miríade de prédios cinzas. Colegas de Solberg poderiam agradecê-la: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade rodou Macunaíma no Parque Lage, em 1969. Glauber Rocha, Terra em Transe, em 1967. 

É também perto do Parque Lage, no Jardim Botânico, que a personagem Ana, do conto “Amor”, de Clarice Lispector, tem uma vertigem e súbito mal-estar. Dona de casa, solitária, a ponto de explodir. Mais uma asfixiada no mundo. Caberia feito luva em A Entrevista.

Na pré-história da revolução sexual, existir não era fácil. Basta lembrar da moça que, abandonada pelo pai do filho, corre com o menino nos braços até que, exausta, antes de fechar os olhos para a morte, vê a criança ser devorada por um animal selvagem – “Os porcos” (1903), conto de Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Basta sair até mesmo de 1903 e chegar ao século XXI, no documentário Meu Corpo, Minha Vida (2017), de Solberg. A brutalidade é a mesma. 

Daí o caráter revolucionário da independência financeira de mulheres como Carmen Miranda e Carmen Santos. Os balangandãs milionários de Miranda e a Brasil Vox Filmes, de Santos. Nesse caldo de atraso e epifanias brasileiras, é fácil o espectador tomar-se de uma cava depressão por algumas das mulheres de A Entrevista. O que poderiam ter sido e não foram.re not..
V – Meio-Dia e o Mundo Lá Fora
Solberg foi além. Já sem o Ladd, assina Meio-Dia. O filme continuou a tratar de proibições, dessa vez com crianças. Se A Entrevista mexeu no tabu da mulher virginal, Meio-Dia mexeu no tabu da ingenuidade infantil. 

Em cena emblemática, o ator João Farkas levanta a franja e arremessa o livro escolar no meio de um rio. Alguém pode se lembrar da canoa de A Margem (1968), de Ozualdo Candeias. No filme, um seleto (e onírico) clube de passageiros navega por um rio, como a representar que estavam à margem da sociedade – daí, para muitos, a alcunha de cinema marginal.
Acontece que, por incrível que pareça, os alunos de Meio-Dia também estavam à margem, espremidos entre a obediência e a raiva. Prontos para usarem as técnicas da pré-adolescência.

Eles eram maléficos: agrediram um professor. Eram otários: desprezados em jogo de futebol. Eram confusos: tinham casa e sustento; outros, não. 

E, se nada disso for real, o leitor não se desespere. Muitas vezes, o curta parece uma alucinação. Poucos diálogos, muitas externas, a pichação “a ditadura é foda” no muro da escola. O filme traz referência direta ao slogan parisiense “é proibido proibir”, o mesmo que Caetano Veloso pegou emprestado na canção homônima, ouvida durante o curta-metragem. Nesse continuum de idéias sessentaoitistas, tudo conspira como um urro da diretora, mas colocado nas suaves bocas dos anjinhos, entre a verdade e a ilusão.

A promessa de suicídio de um dos garotos – coloca um saco plástico em torno da cabeça – é a expressão externa do que acontecia dentro dele mesmo. O direito de cabular aula – direito humano e fundamental – é exercido sem linearidade, sem princípio-meio-e-fim. As cenas se superpõem, em alta velocidade. Marcelo Zona Sul (1970), de Xavier de Oliveira, trataria de um modo zen os questionamentos maoístas de Meio-Dia.
Mauro Alice, o falecido e lendário montador, disse-me certa vez que, quando pequeno, viu no cinema Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan). O que encantou Mauro – curiosamente Alice, como a Dayrell – foi a sensação de pertencimento das crianças. A mão caridosa da professora, que se sentia penalizada por elas. Meio-Dia tem um clima opressivo e a união das crianças. Porém, nada da mão caridosa dos adultos. Se houvesse, provavelmente a mão seria decepada.

Helena Solberg costuma aproximar Meio-Dia de Zero de conduta (1933), de Jean Vigo, e de Os Incompreendidos (1959), de Truffaut. Soa bastante importante essa aproximação. Para boa parte dos colegas do Cinema Novo, Truffaut era tido como alienado, pequeno-burguês, medíocre. Preferiam Jean-Luc Godard ou Roberto Rossellini. Realizar uma crônica da classe média, como as de Solberg, parecia perda de tempo. 

Não à toa, Antonio Calmon – assistente de Glauber Rocha em Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) – pulou fora do grupo e foi ler Yukio Mishima. Buscou uma obra profana, distante da estética da fome e dos sertões de Euclydes da Cunha. As rachaduras dentro do Cinema Novo foram ficando cada vez maiores. Na Boca do Lixo, no underground da cidade de São Paulo, surgiram outros ídolos. 

Não devemos culpar os grupos em si ou até mesmo o excesso de testosterona. É necessário colocar a lupa sobre o momento histórico, sobre o que havia de profundo, de psicotizante no país e que desaguou no cinema. Do contrário, faríamos um exercício de caça às bruxas. Várias pautas ficaram de fora do cinema dito “intelectual” e “sério”. Além de Calmon, José Silvério Trevisan viveu o hippismo à sua moda. Walter Hugo Khouri foi existencialista no meio de um fogo cruzado, à margem do incentivo estatal. Outros exemplos continuam, pela estrada afora.

Quanto à rara participação feminina atrás das câmeras, contam-se nos dedos as mulheres que, até os anos 1960, haviam dirigido, produzido, roteirizado ou se aproximado dos filmes. E isto em um lapso de tempo considerável. 

Cito mais duas mulheres da geração dos pais de Solberg, nascidas em 1904. Cléo de Verberena, aka Jacyra Martins da Silveira, diretora de O mistério do dominó preto (1931), e Gilda Abreu, diretora de O Ébrio (1946) – arrasa-quarteirão, estrelado pelo marido, o cantor Vicente Celestino –, atriz e diretora em Coração Materno (1950) – também com Celestino.
A repórter Dulce Damasceno de Brito andou na linha tênue entre uma Hedda Hopper e uma desbravadora da indústria. No livro Lembranças de Hollywood deu o testemunho de alguém que permaneceu longo tempo na imprensa. Também falecida, Maria Beatriz Roquette-Pinto Bojunga – filha de Edgard Roquette-Pinto, mestre da radiodifusão no país –, trabalhava no INCE (Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo), circulando entre nomes como Humberto Mauro. Em pleno 2021, a pesquisadora Alice Gonzaga debate o cinema nacional e, de quebra, mantém o legado do pai, Adhemar Gonzaga, fundador dos estúdios da Cinédia. 

Para os contemporâneos de Solberg, figuras como Carmem Santos soavam como vestais romanas, desaparecidas no monte Palatino. Em 1967, a cineasta Ana Carolina estudava na Escola Superior de Cinema da Faculdade São Luís. Começou em documentários e depois aprofundou-se no exato oposto, com filmes surrealistas. 

Em vista de tudo, o cinema criado por mulheres no Brasil é uma fusão de estilos, de cortes sociais, de loucuras políticas. Persiste, porém, o alerta. Foram e estão ungidas no espírito de liberdade.

Helena Solberg não viu de perto o choque de correntes que sangrou a vanguarda brasileira nos anos 1970. Em 1971, foi com a família para os Estados Unidos, quando começou outra fase em seu trabalho – vinculado ao movimento feminista e, depois, à política latino-americana. A temporada nos EUA cresceu, cresceu, e assim passaram-se muitas luas. Quando retorna ao Brasil, chega na era do videocassete, a um passo da Internet. Então produz, roteiriza e dirige o fenômeno Bananas is my business. Dos anos 1990 aos 2020, retornou ao documentário e à ficção, sem ordem definida, intercalando projetos. Helena abre a porta imaginária que preferir e escolhe o presente, o passado, o futuro. Como documentarista ou ficcionista, Helena Solberg permanece em ebulição.
Life, after all
Since Rosza Filmes’ Café com Canela (2017) came out, critics and audiences alike noticed that an important movement was taking place in Brazilian Cinema. The first feature film directed by Glenda Nicácio and Ary Rosa won the Audience Prize at the 50º Brasília Film Festival, calling attention to the cinematographic production from Recôncavo Baiano.2 Ilha (2018) and Até o Fim (2019), the other two feature films that came out over the following years, further solidified the importance of Rosza Films to the discussion on Brazilian black and queer cinema, their work suggesting ways in which queerness and blackness can be articulated as methodologies of decolonization through and beyond images.

In Café com Canela, Babu Santana plays Ivan, a black gay doctor who is coping with the death of his husband after twenty years of marriage. The actor is best known for playing roles that associate blackness with violence and vulnerability: he plays a drug dealer in Cidade de Deus (2002), Cidade dos Homens (2007), and Era uma Vez… (2008) and a policeman in Batismo de Sangue (2007) and Os Normais 2 (2009). The invitation to play Dr. Ivan was offered to Santana after Nicácio and Rosa watched an interview where he mentioned his desire to play a gay character in a movie. In the same interview, Santana talked about the ambiguity of his previous work and how he dealt with racism within and outside cinema. He describes one particular confrontation with racism, his classmates in school calling him “baboon” – which he reclaims by taking “Babu” as his artistic name.
Café com Canela narrates the reunion between Violeta (Aline Brunne) and her former teacher Dona Margarida (Valdinéia Soriano). After the death of her son, Dona Margarida lives in isolation, inhabiting an endless cycle of mourning. Surrounded by memories of her son in her home, once familiar rooms quickly turn into psychological mazes, making Dona Margarida experience great anguish within her own living space. Violeta, on the other hand, is married and is the mother of two children. She divides her time between taking care of her grandmother and riding a bicycle through the cities of Cachoeira and São Félix selling coxinhas.3 After Violenta knocks on Dona Margarida’s door by chance to sell the snacks made according to her grandmother’s secret recipe, she quickly takes an interest in the well-being of Dona Margarida.
The rapprochement of these two characters is interspersed with scenes of the daily life of Violeta and her neighbors, including Dr. Ivan, who speaks the first lines in the film, sharing memories with his friends as they gather to drink and celebrate life:
Think about it: a teenager, the son of a repressive father and an overprotective mother, parachuting in the capital to go to college. There was no way it could go well, right? It was six months of pure hell-raising. Think of a slutty person... That was me! I tried everything that I could and that I couldn’t try... I tried everything and a little bit more! And then one day I went to a bar and there was Adolfo. Girl, Adolfo was such a charming daddy, easy to talk to, intelligent... Think of a perfect man. That was Adolfo. He wasn’t rich. He never really was. He even had money, but he spent it all on parties, on trips, on gifts, those sorts of things... He didn’t save a cent. If there’s one thing you can’t say about Adolfo, it's that he was stingy, you hear me? He was not. I went crazy for that man. In fact, I was completely in love... A week later I was living with him, making plans, craziness... The craziest thing of my life. Then, after twenty years the bastard left me alone... Now I just miss him... I just miss him... C’est la vie. I’ll get another beer…
Babu Santana’s first appearance as Dr. Ivan and the lines his character says which convey his queerness directly contrasts with the characters that Santana played in his previous roles. In those past roles, his masculinity and heterosexuality are constantly invoked in order to forge roles that support places of violence and danger in which blackness is always ambiguously positioned.

Studies on black masculinity have tried to expose the ways by which it is built as a nihilistic threat that sustains the fantasy of white fear while also pressuring black men towards self-destruction. According to Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, the anti-black violence that sustains the modern world causes black people to live in zones of non-being, experiencing a kind of metaphysical holocaust, a constant fall into an abyss of terror and (self) annihilation. When asking, “What does the black man want?” Fanon introduces the dimension of desire as a fundamental aspect of the ontological (im)possibilities of this abysmal position. As a speculative gesture, I propose that Babu Santana’s desire to play a queer character presents one of the possible answers to this Fanonian question, allowing us to perceive some means of dissolving blackness-as-death by its articulation with queerness and as a method of decolonization of image and matter. It is an intervention in the field of cinematographic representation and sensitivity and in the life of the actor himself. I believe that Babu’s desire must be taken less as a fetishistic drive for becoming minorities than as a move to imagine his own blackness from other angles, so that “queerness” does not compose a field apart from his raciality, but broadens its senses in the infinite directions in which it expands. Beyond this, Rosa and Nicácio’s gesture in actualizing the actor’s desire makes us think about the possibilities of cinema. When building the conditions for Babu Santana to play Dr. Ivan, the directors show an understanding of cinema that goes through and beyond image. A cinema linked to existence, which is able to move not only the sphere of representation, but of life itself in its materiality. In that sense, a cinema implicated in the world and which presents itself as a tool capable of producing other ways of being here and now, with and after/before images.

During the film, we follow the character’s stories, their daily lives, and moments of anguish and happiness. We see the quotidian moments of a black city in Recôncavo and its people who celebrate life and support each other in difficult times, such as when Dr. Ivan finds his husband dead and is consoled by his neighbors. Despite sad moments such as these, the characters in Café com Canela are not destined for tragedy. The pains experienced by them are always underscored by the light moments of everyday life. Café com Canela explores life despite social death as a condition of blackness, realizing in the quotidian of black affection tactics of crossing to a world where (self) destruction is not an irreducible destiny.
Life is Like That: Courage is What it Wants from Us
In Ilha, Rosza Filmes’ second feature film, Emerson (Renan Motta) is a young black resident of an island from which no one can leave. To make a film about his life, he kidnaps Henrique Santos (Aldri Anunciação), a renowned black filmmaker from Bahia, forcing him to film a script he wrote that chronicles the most remarkable moments of his life, including his relationship with an abusive father who torments him because of his sexuality. Throughout the course of the film, we follow the relationship between this always-dreaming young man with unsettling ideas about cinema and his idol, Henrique, who we learn has accommodated himself to the gears of the mainstream film industry. When Henrique asks Emerson why he was chosen for this forced film experiment, Emerson replies: “For me, for my history/story.4 For you, for you to make a movie again”. After the director’s initial resistance, the two begin a relationship that develops slowly, as the character Emerson begins to present a deeper complexity. This figure is a black queer filmmaker/drug dealer who “hijacks cinema” in order to express his feelings, thoughts, and desires that have been stifled by the racist structures of Brazilian audiovisual history. “You gonna have to swallow my subjectivity hard!” he shouts, looking straight into the camera.‍
Ilha intentionally plays with stereotypes of black masculinity and with cinematographic language. In the opening scene, Emerson is introduced to us as a kidnapper, reproducing the violent image of the black-man-with-a-gun as he tortures Henrique and tries to “convince him” to join his project. Throughout the film, this image is crossed and displaced by the sexual/affective desire that arises among the protagonists. When they finally get to have sex, Nicácio and Rosa’s choices on how to film the scene points to the construction of images of black affectivity, the directors refusing to film them in a fetishistic way. As soon as Henrique and Emerson start kissing, the camera operator rests the camera on the floor and leaves the scene, disappearing on the road behind them. We see the gestures that indicate sex but these gestures are not totally given to visibility, thus erasing a certain iconography of black masculinity centered in strategies of hypersexualization, objectification and animalization of the black body. Once again, queerness and blackness are articulated to produce another image. In the final signs, we read that Ilha is dedicated “to the girls and boys who chose cinema, but who were not chosen by it”. The film brings up the question of black queer authorship and the formation of black queer cinemas in Brazil as a gesture of crossing the historically constructed images and social structures that intend to tie blackness and queerness in positions of vulnerability. “Courage is what cinema wants from us!” says Emerson in one of the scenes as he climbs a ladder towards the sky.5
Até o Fim
Até o Fim narrates the one night reunion of the Arcanjo sisters, Geralda (Wall Diaz), Rose (Arlete Dias), Bel (Maíra Azevedo), and Vilmar (Jenny Müller) who are coming together due to the imminent death of their father in the small town of Recôncavo. The film’s plot is similar to that of Filhas do Vento6 (Joel Zito Araújo, 2005), an important film for black cinema in Brazil. In that film, the sisters Maria Aparecida (Ruth de Souza) and Maria D’Ajuda (Léa Garcia) meet again for their father's funeral after many years apart. Aparecida leaves for Rio de Janeiro where she continues her acting career and D’Ajuda forms her family in the small town in Minas Gerais where the sisters were born. The family reunion in Filhas do Vento brings up past traumas, disagreements, reconciliations and also promotes the rare meeting of black Brazilian actors and actresses of different generations, such as Thalma de Freitas, Taís Araújo, Rocco Pitanga, Maria Ceiça, Dani Ornellas, Zózimo Bulbul, Léa Garcia, Ruth de Souza and Milton Gonçalves. As in Filhas do Vento, the encounter between the Arcanjo sisters in Até o Fim sparks the recollection of their life memories, inciting fresh laughs and tears. The film moves repeatedly between light humor and the weight of the situations of violence that emerge through the memories of a common childhood. One by one, Rose, Bel, and Vilmar arrive at Geralda’s bar, filling the screen with their stories and their bodies amplified through the cinematographic image, constructing a rare event in Brazilian cinema: a feature film in which black women fill each and every frame, in addition to occupying key-positions in the technical team.
Although there are no men in the film, the father being mourned is a central character. While his image is absent, he remains violently present in the memories that the sisters share. One of such memories unearths the fact that Vilmar is the result of Geralda’s rape by the father, who then forced her to hide her motherhood and assume the role as the sister of her own daughter. Vilmar, we learn, ran away from home as a child, her mother eagerly waiting for her return. After Vilmar’s finally arrives to the bar, the conversation mostly revolves around her life as a trans lesbian woman. She enters the scene causing a strong reaction in Geralda, who was unaware of her daughter’s transition. Geralda’s reactions are at first stereotypically transphobic, which does not prevent Vilmar’s angered response to her sister/mother’s violence. Her other sisters’ insistent questions about Vilmar's gender identity repeat these violent choreographies. Despite this, the scenes in which Vilmar answers such questions are extremely didactic, exerting a pedagogical intervention in the dialogue with her family and with the audience. Between the irreducible defense of her right to exist and the moments of affective negotiation with the other black women who make up her ancestry, Vilmar’s speeches show the fictitious and oppressive character of gender and sexuality as colonial norms, allowing not only her experience to be perceived as subjected to white cisheteronormativity, but that of all of her sisters as well.

‍Café com Canela, Ilha and Até o Fim are films that indicate the transformative power of cinema. Articulating blackness with queerness, the films produced by Rosza Filmes make us think about the necessity of creating a new world in which being black and queer does not mean disappearance and destruction. In focusing on their characters everyday lives, Glenda Nicácio and Ary Rosa film black queer affection as a way to resist the violence that supports modern civilization. There is life, the images tell us. Life, after all. Life despite and beyond death as destination.
1. Professor at Universidade do Estado da Bahia.
2. RecôncavoBaiano is a region of Bahia of great historical, cultural and spiritual importance.
3. Coxinha is a chicken-based Brazilian snack.
4. In Portuguese, the words history and story are pronounced the same way.
5. “Courage is what cinema wants from us” is a line based on Guimarães Rosa’s novel Great Backlands: Paths (Grande Sertão: Veredas, 1956): “The flow of life wraps everything up, life is like that: it heats up and cools, squeezes and then loosens, settles and then rests. Courage is what it wants from us.”
6. The film title makes an explicit reference to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, 1991.
Depondo para uma burocrata que o interroga, Edson, personagem de Joel Barcellos, é surpreendido por badaladas de sinos. Ele está numa sala clara, pouco mobiliada, e foi trazido àquele ambiente estranho por agentes não identificados. Os sinos à distância só o confundem ainda mais. A mulher que está diante dele explica, com um sorriso malicioso, de canto de boca, que havia chegado "a hora da Ave Maria". E a sequência seguinte de fato transcorre ao som de "Ellens dritter Gesang", a peça musical de Franz Schubert popularmente conhecida como "Ave Maria". O que está em tela, no entanto, contrasta brutalmente com a música: é uma sequência violenta, em que Edson é espancado, torturado por dois dos agentes que o sequestraram. A imagem do protagonista do filme sendo espancado é uma das mais memoráveis quando se fala sobre da obra, e não por acaso: uma porção significativa de seus noventa minutos de duração é dedicada a mostrar o personagem de Barcellos sendo submetido a diversas baterias de interrogação e tortura.
O assunto aqui é Jardim de Guerra, primeiro longa-metragem do cineasta brasileiro Neville D'Almeida, filmado e lançado no ano de 1968. Antes, o diretor já havia feito algumas incursões fílmicas, como o curta-metragem O Bem Aventurado, para o festival JB-Mesbla de 1966. Seu primeiro longa, no entanto, já possui aspirações mais ambiciosas. Saído de Belo Horizonte, capital do estado brasileiro de Minas Gerais, D'Almeida imigrara aos EUA pouco antes de ocorrer, em seu país natal, o golpe civil-militar que instaurou a ditadura que governaria o país entre 1964 e 1985. Seu objetivo era estudar cinema em Nova York, mas percebeu que seria um esforço infrutífero ao descobrir que os professores novaiorquinos possuíam uma visão sobre o cinema excessivamente estadunidense.

Trabalhando como garçom e tendo largado os estudos, D'Almeida encontrou um oásis em outro brasileiro auto-exilado na mesma cidade: o escritor e músico Jorge Mautner. Juntos, elaboraram o argumento e o roteiro de Jardim de Guerra. Quando Nelson Pereira dos Santos vai a Nova York rodar algumas sequências para seu filme Fome de Amor, D'Almeida o auxilia como assistente de direção, e com ele volta ao Brasil. Lá, começa o processo de arrecadar fundos para poder filmar seu primeiro longa, em um processo completamente independente.
Jardim de Guerra é um filme difícil de se situar entre os movimentos dos anos 60. Definitivamente não pertence ao Cinema Novo. D'Almeida assistira, sim, às produções de diretores como Glauber Rocha e Carlos Diegues ainda em Nova York; elas o influenciaram substancialmente e o motivaram a retornar ao Brasil e fazer cinema brasileiro. Mas o filme de D'Almeida tem outras preocupações, outros discursos, outros processos. Tampouco pertence ao movimento conhecido por "Cinema de Invenção" ou "Cinema Marginal"; de Rogério Sganzerla e Julio Bressane. Quando se fala ou escreve sobre o primeiro momento da obra de Neville D'Almeida, que compreende filmes mais experimentais em linguagem e associados à contracultura entre os anos 1960 e 1970, seu nome é comumente associado ao Cinema de Invenção. Isso está fundamentalmente errado; é um erro primário, mas muito difundido, inclusive entre a imprensa da época. Segundo D'Almeida, ele sempre foi renegado pelo Cinema Marginal. O que é, então, Neville D'Almeida? Um contemporâneo ao Cinema Novo e o de Invenção, mas que não se encaixa nesses rótulos. Vive, portanto, fora de qualquer tipo de grei – ainda que Jardim de Guerra tenha, em seu coração pulsante, todo o espírito do período em que foi rodado.

Tendo sido pontuadas as informações extrafílmicas de maior importância, é necessário, naturalmente, apresentar algum contexto propriamente fílmico para que se escreva sobre Jardim de Guerra, até porque trata-se de um longa pouco visto e pouco lembrado, por motivos que discutiremos mais adiante. Seu personagem principal, Edson, é um jovem. Vive na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, que é onde o filme se passa. O ator Joel Barcellos aparenta ter uns vinte e poucos anos no papel – que, aliás, lhe rendeu um troféu de Melhor Ator no Festival de Brasília. O espectador não recebe muitas informações sobre sua origem, mas parece seguro supor, pelo que é apresentado, que se trata de um jovem que cresceu pobre, ou numa classe média-baixa, se tanto. E logo nas primeiras sequências de Jardim de Guerra, é mostrado tendo suas primeiras interações com uma jovem cineasta chamada Maria (vivida por Maria do Rosário). Com uma câmera 16mm em mãos, ela filma Edson em alguns filmetes jocosos. Brincam, filmam um ao outro na displicência de um casal recém-formado compartilhando um momento sublime. Os dois engatam uma espécie de namoro (ainda que Edson se relacione sexualmente com outras mulheres, sem que o filme explicite se isso ocorre com ciência da outra parte do casal). A partir desse namoro, o personagem de Barcellos passa a ingressar em círculos sociais aos quais, antes, não tinha acesso.
Se debruçar inicialmente mais sobre aspectos narrativos do que imagéticos, estéticos, de linguagem, pode parecer um exercício fútil. Nada aqui, no entanto, é colocado sem um propósito, porque no que se refere à narrativa, o que interessa em Jardim de Guerra é falar sobre o social, sobre as temáticas discursivas inseridas no grosso caldo cultural de que é feito, e em como elas são trabalhadas justamente nas imagens. 

O importante, nesse momento, é que a partir do instante em que firma sua conexão com Maria, Edson passa a frequentar as festas da esquerda universitária, intelectual; aquela que foi apelidada de "festiva" pelo humor ácido de cronistas brasileiros da época, como Paulo Francis e Nelson Rodrigues. Seguro sob as paredes dos apartamentos grã-finos da zona sul do Rio de Janeiro, ele subitamente se vê atolado até o pescoço em ideias que eram chamadas, pela ditadura que então governava o país, de "subversivas". No entanto, não escapa de D'Almeida a percepção de que uma parcela significativa das pessoas naquele tipo de ambiente mostra-se mais interessada nos aspectos propriamente festivos desse tipo de reunião social do que nas pautas sociais que supostamente unem os que estão ali presentes.

Isso é muito bem colocado em uma sequência que se envereda por uma dessas festas: ao som de um disco de Nina Simone, os expoentes da festiva confraternizam entre sim, bebidas e cigarros à mão; Edson tenta interagir, ainda que inicialmente de modo tímido. Corta para um personagem interpretado pelo lendário ator Antônio Pitanga, em frente a uma parede (e sozinho no quadro, ainda que falando para um pretenso grupo de ouvintes fora de cena). Pitanga vocifera um discurso inflamado, potente, sobre as desigualdades raciais às quais o povo negro foi (e ainda é) historicamente submetido no Brasil e no mundo, frisando que o movimento black power não seria algo relativo apenas aos EUA, mas sim um ideal de escala global.
Pitanga discursa durante alguns minutos, mas o filme logo corta para a festa prosseguindo normalmente, em clima leve e descontraído – ironicamente, ainda sob a música de Nina Simone – enquanto a figura que pregara a revolução entre os festivos se vê isolada, recostada em uma parede, com uma expressão de desolação e cansaço. Seu discurso eventualmente é retomado, apenas para a ação voltar novamente à festa: não importa o quanto ele fale, suas ideias não causam nenhum efeito sobre aquelas pessoas.

Alguém minimamente familiarizado com o contexto das lutas raciais nos Estados Unidos pode achar diversos ideais propagados pelo personagem em seu discurso alinhados com uma visão mais próxima ao pensamento de Malcolm X do que ao de Martin Luther King – e curiosamente, Pitanga também interpreta um intelectual de ideais malcolmnianos em Compasso de Espera (1973), de Antunes Filho. Aqui não importa tanto para onde o discurso pende ideologicamente, mas sim de onde ele vem. A pauta racial negra existe no Brasil desde o momento em que diversos grupos vindos do continente africano chegaram no país sob a condição de prisioneiros escravizados, a serem postos à venda. Mas na fala de Pitanga, o que permanece clara é a influência dos movimentos organizados estrangeiros, dos EUA, mesmo que o personagem frise a universalidade desses ideais. Fato é que toda a carga intelectual, toda a mensagem, todas as pautas inseridas por D'Almeida e seu co-roteirista Mautner no filme, formam um caleidoscópio de tudo o que os dois absorveram durante os anos em que viveram em Nova York, de tudo o que estava fervilhando na contracultura política e artística local durante aquele período e que se desenvolvia em paralelo no Brasil, seja organicamente ou por meio de influências externas.

Assim como fala sobre o black power, Jardim de Guerra também fala sobre o crescente movimento feminista, sintetizado aqui por um discurso entoado pela atriz Dina Sfat. Dentre os outros tópicos, estão a necessidade da preservação do território amazônico; o uso recreativo de drogas; o amor e o sexo livres; a ascensão da China enquanto uma superpotência mundial; a história das revoluções de esquerda ao redor do mundo. Além, claro, da tortura.

Na intenção de conseguir dinheiro para bancar um filme para Maria, Edson vai até a casa de um criminoso (vivido pelo genial Paulo Villaça, em uma breve participação) e se oferece a realizar um serviço para ele. A sequência imediatamente posterior já mostra Edson em uma zona portuária, com uma maleta em mãos, pronto para realizar uma entrega. É aí que, quando acha que encontrou a pessoa para quem deve repassar a valise, é pastoreado para dentro de um carro, e de lá para um ambiente desconhecido, onde momentos depois ele ouviria os sinos que anunciam a hora da Ave Maria. Toda a sequência da condução de Edson da zona portuária até o local onde ele será espancado é conduzida de maneira silenciosa; D'Almeida e o diretor de fotografia Dib Lutfi (câmera do Terra em Transe, de Glauber Rocha) seguem Joel Barcellos de uma distância segura, como se realmente estivessem acompanhando uma abdução em tempo real.
É a partir daí que Edson passa uma porção considerável do filme sendo interrogado e torturado, com breves pausas entre um e outro. Dentre seus algozes, alguns rostos reconhecíveis: os atores Hugo Carvana, Guará Rodrigues, Glauce Rocha, a já mencionada Dina Sfat e até mesmo o cineasta Nelson Pereira dos Santos, que aqui faz uma participação em retribuição ao auxílio prestado por D'Almeida em seu filme Fome de Amor. Ainda nos primeiros momentos do protagonista naquele ambiente, não tarda a ser revelado o motivo de sua estadia ali: a maleta que ele estava transportando guardava uma metralhadora.

D'Almeida nunca deixa claro que as pessoas que estão submetendo o personagem principal do filme àquela inquisição são funcionários do governo. Nada se fala de militares, policiais ou DOPS. A ambiguidade nisso tudo talvez seja proposital; mesmo os poucos filmes que falavam abertamente sobre tortura durante os primeiros anos da ditadura militar sessentista não se atreviam a ligá-la diretamente ao governo que vigorava no país. Se o diretor de Jardim de Guerra o tivesse feito, é difícil saber o que poderia ter acontecido com ele.

Dado todo esse leque de pautas subversivas e a dedicação que o longa tem em retratar a tortura, o destino ao qual ele foi acometido foi impiedoso. Logo antes de sua segunda exibição comercial no Festival de Brasília, o mais tradicional evento dedicado ao cinema brasileiro, Jardim de Guerra foi proibido de ser exibido, confiscado e submetido à Censura da Polícia Federal da ditadura militar. Isso aconteceu em novembro de 1968, um mês antes do Ato Institucional de número 5, que tornou o regime militar ainda mais sangrento e deu início ao período que ficou conhecido como "os anos de chumbo".

O filme só foi propriamente censurado já em 1969, sujeito a uma série de cortes que visava extirpá-lo de todo conteúdo considerado ideologicamente perigoso. A cópia censurada só começou a circular (e parcamente) em 1970, sendo considerada verdadeiramente ininteligível por críticos como Jairo Ferreira em decorrência do que lhe fora subtraído.

Mais de cinquenta anos depois, Jardim de Guerra permanece fora dos anais da historiografia oficial do cinema brasileiro – talvez por não ser claramente afiliável ao Cinema Novo ou ao Cinema de Invenção, talvez por ter sido censurado de maneira tão brusca e privado de um impacto mais significativo no cenário cultural do país (ainda que sendo inovador em aspectos imagéticos: é um dos primeiros filmes brasileiros a utilizar, como recurso de linguagem, posters e projeções de slide).
Uma única cópia 35mm sem cortes do longa sobreviveu, por ter sido enviada às pressas para a Europa, onde abriu a primeira Quinzena dos Realizadores da história do Festival de Cannes, em 1969. Em 2018, após décadas no acervo de uma cinemateca alemã, a versão integral de Jardim de Guerra retornou ao Brasil, armazenada e preservada na Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. E o resto, como dizem, é história.
1. "the leaden years"
While speaking to a bureaucrat who interrogates him, Edson, played by Joel Barcellos, is surprised by the ringing of bells. He is in a bright, sparsely furnished room, and has been brought to this strange environment by unidentified agents. The bells in the distance only confuse him further. The woman in front of him explains with a mischievous smile that "Hail Mary time" has come. And the following sequence unfolds to the sound of "Ellens dritter Gesang", the musical piece by Franz Schubert popularly known as “Ave Maria”. What takes place on screen, however, brutally contrasts with the music: there is a violent sequence in which Edson is beaten, tortured by two of the agents who kidnapped him. The image of the film's protagonist being beaten is one of the most memorable when discussing it, and not by chance: a significant portion of the film’s ninety minutes is dedicated to showing Barcellos' character being subjected to various batteries of interrogation and torture.
We are referring to Jardim de Guerra, the first feature film by Brazilian filmmaker Neville D'Almeida, filmed and released in 1968. Before that, the director had already made some filmic incursions, such as the short O Bem Aventurado, made for the JB-Mesbla festival in 1966. His first feature, however, is much more ambitious than his short. Originally from Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, D'Almeida had immigrated to the U.S. shortly before the civil-military coup that resulted in the dictatorship that would rule the country from 1964 to 1985. His goal was to study cinema in New York, but he realized that it would be a fruitless effort when he discovered that the professors in New York had an excessively American vision of cinema.

Working as a waiter and having dropped out of school, D'Almeida found an oasis in another Brazilian who was self-exiled in the same city: writer and musician Jorge Mautner. Together they wrote the screenstory and the screenplay for Jardim de Guerra. When Nelson Pereira dos Santos went to New York to shoot some sequences for his film Hunger for Love, D'Almeida helped him as assistant director, and went back to Brazil with him. Once back in Brazil, D'Almeida began the process of raising funds to film his first feature, which would be produced independently.
Jardim de Guerra is a difficult film to situate between Brazil’s film movements of the 60s. It definitely does not belong to Cinema Novo. D'Almeida had indeed seen the productions of directors such as Glauber Rocha and Carlos Diegues while still in New York. They greatly influenced him and motivated him to return to Brazil and make Brazilian cinema. But D'Almeida's film has other concerns, other discourses, other processes. Nor does it belong to the movement known as “Cinema of Invention” or “Cinema Marginal”; helmed by Rogério Sganzerla and Julio Bressane. When one speaks or writes about the early part of Neville D'Almeida's career, which comprises films that are more experimental in language and associated with the counterculture between the 1960s and 1970s, his name is commonly associated with the Cinema of Invention. This is fundamentally wrong; it is an obvious, but very widespread mistake, even among the press of the time. According to D'Almeida, he has always been disowned by Cinema Marginal. Who, then, is Neville D'Almeida? He is a contemporary of Cinema Novo and Cinema of Invention, but he doesn't fit into those labels. D’Almeida therefore lives outside any groups - even though Jardim de Guerra has, in its pulsating heart, all the spirit of the period in which it was shot.

Having covered the most important extrafilmic information, it is necessary, of course, to present some filmic context in order to write about Jardim de Guerra, because it is a feature film that has been little seen and little remembered for reasons to be discussed later. Its main character, Edson, is a young man. He lives in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which is where the film takes place. Actor Joel Barcellos looks about twenty-something in the role - which, by the way, won him a trophy for Best Actor at the Brasília Film Festival. The viewer is not given much information about his background, but it seems safe to assume, from what is presented, that he is a young man who grew up poor, or lower-middle class. And in the very first sequences of Jardim de Guerra, Edson is shown having his first interactions with a young filmmaker named Maria (played by Maria do Rosário). With a 16mm camera in hand, she films him in some jocular shots. They joke, film each other in the nonchalance of a newly graduated couple sharing a sublime moment. The two begin a sort of courtship (although Edson has sexual relations with other women, and the film does not relay whether this happens with her knowledge). After this courtship, Barcellos’ character starts to enter new social circles that weren’t accessible to him before.
To initially dwell more on narrative aspects than on imagery, aesthetics or language may seem a futile exercise. Nothing in the film, however, is there without purpose, because narratively, Jardim de Guerra wants to discuss the social issues which compose the cultural amalgamation around which it is built, and in how they are dealt with, visually. 

What matters at this point is that, from the moment he establishes his connection with Maria, Edson starts attending the parties of intellectual, university-linked leftists; those that were nicknamed "the festive left" by the acid humor of Brazilian chroniclers of the time, such as Paulo Francis and Nelson Rodrigues. Safe behind the walls of the rich apartments in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro, Edson suddenly finds himself up to his neck in ideas that were deemed "subversive" by the dictatorship ruling the country at the time. However, D'Almeida's perception is that a significant portion of the people in that sort of environment were more interested in the festive aspects of this type of social gathering than in the social agendas that supposedly brought the attendees together.

This perception is reflected in a sequence set in one of these parties: to the sound of a Nina Simone record, the exponents of the party interact with each other, drinks and cigarettes in hand; Edson tries to interact, even if initially in a timid way. Cut to a character played by legendary actor Antônio Pitanga, standing in front of a wall (and alone in the frame, although speaking to a would-be group of listeners offstage). Pitanga delivers an impassioned, powerful speech about the racial inequalities to which black people have been (and still are) historically subjected in Brazil and in the world, stressing that the black power movement is not something relative only to the USA, but a movement with a global scale.
Pitanga speaks for a few minutes, but the film soon cuts to the party carrying on as usual in a light, relaxed atmosphere - ironically, still under the music of Nina Simone - while the figure who had preached the revolution among the partygoers finds himself isolated, leaning against a wall, with an expression of desolation and weariness. His speech is eventually taken up, only for the action to return again to the party: no matter how much he speaks, his ideas have no effect on these people.

Anyone minimally familiar with the context of the racial struggles in the United States might find several ideals propagated by the character in his speech that are aligned with a vision closer to Malcolm X's thought than to Martin Luther King's - and curiously, Pitanga also plays an intellectual of Malcolm's ideals in Antunes Filho's Compasso de Espera (1973). It is not so important here where the discourse is ideologically inclined, but where it comes from. The black racial agenda has existed in Brazil since the moment when several groups coming from the African continent arrived in the country as enslaved prisoners to be sold. But in Pitanga's speech, what remains clear is the influence of foreign organized movements, from the USA, even if the character stresses the universality of these ideals. The fact is that all the intellectual charge, the weight of the message, all the guidelines inserted by D'Almeida and his co-scriptwriter Mautner in the film, form a kaleidoscope of everything that the two absorbed during the years they lived in New York, of everything that was simmering in the local political and artistic counterculture of that period, and that developed in parallel in Brazil, whether organically or through external influences.

In addition to talking about black power, Jardim de Guerra talks about the growing feminist movement, reflected here through a speech intoned by actress Dina Sfat. Among the other topics are the need for the preservation of the Amazon territory, recreational drug use, free love and sex, the rise of China as a world superpower, the history of leftist revolutions around the world, and above all, torture.

With the intention of getting money to finance a film for Maria, Edson goes to the house of a criminal (played by the brilliant Paulo Villaça, in a brief performance) and offers to perform a service for him. The following sequence shows Edson in a port area, with a suitcase in hand, ready to make a delivery. It is there that, when he thinks he has found the person to whom he should pass the suitcase, he is shepherded into a car. Edson is taken to an unknown environment, where moments later he hears the bells announcing Hail Mary time. The entire sequence of Edson's drive from the port area to the place where he will be beaten is conducted silently; D'Almeida and director of photography Dib Lutfi (cameraman of Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe) follow Joel Barcellos from a safe distance, as if they were following an abduction in real time.
From then on, Edson spends a considerable portion of the film being interrogated and tortured, with brief pauses in between. Among his torturers, some recognizable faces: actors Hugo Carvana, Guará Rodrigues, Glauce Rocha, the aforementioned Dina Sfat, and even filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who here participates in retribution for the help provided by D'Almeida in his film Fome de Amor. During our protagonist's first moments in captivity, the reason he was taken there is revealed: the suitcase he was carrying held a machine gun.

D'Almeida never makes it clear that the people who are subjecting the main character in the film to torture and interrogation are government officials. Nothing is said about the military, police, or DOPS. The ambiguity in all this is likely intentional; even the few films that openly discussed torture during the first years of the military dictatorship did not dare to link it directly to the government. If the director of Jardim de Guerra had done so, it is hard to know what might have happened to him.

Given such range of subversive agendas and the feature's dedication to portraying torture, the fate to which it was subjected was merciless. Right before its second commercial screening at the Brasília Film Festival, the most traditional event dedicated to Brazilian cinema, Jardim de Guerra was forbidden to be shown. The film was confiscated and submitted to the Federal Police Censorship of the military dictatorship.

This happened in November 1968, one month before the Institutional Act number 5, which made the military regime even bloodier and started the period that became known as "os anos de chumbo".1

The film was only properly censored in 1969. It was subjected to a series of cuts that aimed to gut it of all content considered ideologically dangerous. The censored copy only began to circulate in 1970, being considered by critics like Jairo Ferreira as truly unintelligible due to what had been subtracted from it.

More than fifty years later, Jardim de Guerra remains absent from the annals of the official historiography of Brazilian cinema - perhaps because it is not clearly affiliable to Cinema Novo or Cinema de Invenção, perhaps because it was censored so abruptly and deprived of a more significant impact on the country's cultural scene (despite its innovative imagery: it is one of the first Brazilian films to integrate posters and still photos to the elements of film language).
A single uncut 35mm copy of the feature survived, as it was rushed to Europe to open the first Directors' Fortnight in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, in 1969. In 2018, after spending decades in the archives of a German cinematheque, the complete version of Jardim de Guerra returned to Brazil, to be stored and preserved by the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. And the rest, as they say, is history.
1. "the leaden years"
#Human-more-than-human-transmutation
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In Uma noite sem lua (Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, 2020) a voice asks us, “e se eu abandonasse todas vocês?”.1 Abandoning the binarism of polarization, the limit of the human, and anthropocentric separations are the challenges the film takes up. Undoing the idea of the human point of view as the camera's point of view, and merging varied positionalities to film living beings and entities - mixing ways of seeing (and being seen by) the sky, the sea, the earth, plants, animals, human and celestial bodies. Vitorino Brasileiro creates, thus on film, the desire to live the completeness of the hybrid, of the more than human. Their audiovisual creation calls for a perception of sensorial cinema in which the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsaid, overexposure and secrecy are not polarized counterpoints (shot and reverse shot, in-frame and out-of-frame), but are stakes in the invention of another regime of sensibility (hybrid, transhuman, more-than-human).

Vitorino Brasileiro's voice guides us through this uncertain journey of moving bodies, between love, fear, doubts, and pleasures. A voice punctuated by the repetitive strangeness of sounds and noises that run through the film. With more questions than statements, this voice modulates the sensations and possible ways to "dematerialize gender and race in the body," suggests the narration, using for that the unquestionable materiality of the film's images and sounds. There is a game, therefore, with a hyperbolized materiality, which superimposes and mixes textures and senses. Thus, in the dance at the end of the film, the drawings on the wall, the painting on the buttocks, the patterns of the bikini, and the skirt worn by Vitorino Brasileiro come together. Rolling and orbiting terrestrial and sidereal spaces in a non-hierarchical way, the artist announces theirself: "I am the messenger that announces the transvestite transmutation." A presentation that establishes the principles of their cinema.
Those principles seem to mirror Denise Ferreira da Silva's philosophical proposal to imagine "each existing thing (human and more-than-human) as singular expressions of every existing being and also of the all implied in what/how they exist" (A dívida Impagável, p. 43). In many moments of the film, the body (human and more-than-human) dances: singular, erratic, uncontrollable, and sublime. Head, arms, ass, and hands. The body is mandinga2 and transmutation, the artist tells us. The body is fish, turtle, sea plants, stone. Bodies slide at the bottom of the sea, float in the gale, and collide in the cosmos. They are transmuted.
# To (Un)forget-To Show-To Listen
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One of the first images of the documentary Lembrar daquilo que esqueci (Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, 2020) is a letter denouncing a crime against humanity addressed to the government of Espírito Santo for institutional and systemic racism by erasing the Bantu people in the constitution of the history and culture of the state. While we are reading the letter, an off-key voice asks us: “então qual é a cura para o povo afrodescendente?”.3 The question and the document synthesize the investigation of the film: to question what healing can be (through a series of off-screen statements) by creating images that are in themselves a spiritual and therapeutic process of healing. Images that are records of belonging and encounters: a capoeira circle, a celebration for Iemanjá, a youth choir performing in the street. In a junction of public moments, like those of the artist's exhibition, and intimate ones, such as hair being braided at home and the preparations for a birthday party.
With no interest in a definitive answer, healing is a continuous act and a process of contradictions and superimpositions. Thus it is possible to compose a sequence that goes from the Brazilian flag (with its positivist motto, "Order and Progress") to the poster of the artist's exhibition that states "Trauma is Brazilian". And also compose a whole sequence that asks the viewer about what could be an image of a mermaid. Could it be the young black girl posing and dancing in front of the white and blonde mermaid painted on the wall? Is it the Indian deity picture on this woman's canga?4  More than an image, it is the superposition and the meeting between them.

The film sets up the healing process in time and space as repetition by inserting drawings in red on the black screen that divide the various blocks of the film and subvert the possibilities of understanding what can be the shortest distance between two points (not always a linear straight line). With the Pilgrimage of the Female Testicles through the center of the city of Vitória to the gallery of the exhibition “O trauma é brasileiro”,5 the artist undoes and remakes the meanings of territory and belonging. The Romaria is set against the images of the convent of Nossa Senhora da Penha, resituating the meanings of Catholic architecture over the city. Walking through the city, through Beira-mar Avenue, can also be part of a healing process.
Vitorino Brasileiro's body and the bodies that the artist finds as belonging in the film (human and more-than-human) are ultimately space, time, and healing. The film is not the end, but the very process of remembering, listening, and sometimes seeing.
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#See-Unsee-Listen
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To the sound of the drumming of the Caboclo Sete Estrelas do Mar Spiritist Center, Vitorino Brasileiro conjures their spell: “Eu agora vou falar para todas as moças. Eu agora vou bater, para todas as moças. Para todas as travestis, para todas elas. Eu agora vou fazer macumba para todas as bixas. Para todos os testículos femininos, para todas elas,”6 in Para todas as moças (2019). Guided by her singing, the images follow one another in a montage of rhythm and multiple textures: the heat of the healing room - with candles, stones, shells, and various objects of macumba -, a bluish and shaky recording made with a cell phone in front of the Penedo rock in the bay of Vitória/ES, and an official NASA footage of the Earth seen from space. Thus, between the hot, the cold, and the neutral institutionality are conjured the film-macumba-spell to break colonial vessels.
Thinking about the audiovisual incursions of  Vitorino Brasileiro - an artist, candomblé practitioner and psychologist - is to simultaneously face this gesture of landing on the ascent of the Fonte Grande hill, of sinking into the deep waters of the island of Vitória, and of banishing oneself (“afastar-se da Terra maldita, Terra que a assassina”)7 - gestures that are as much embodied (by the performance) as they are immaterial (by maintaining the mystery).

In Para todas as moças, these gestures are transmutations that also destabilize the wandering movement of the camera through the inventory of objects (candle, bone, leaves, stones) - once again in the exercise of a non-hierarchical or anthropocentric audiovisual gaze. Objects, entities, beings, that are always more than can be seen/shown. Just as in Vitorino Brasileiro's performance by the sea, the cell phone camera images play with the appearing and hiding of their choreography - interrupted by a black mask that sometimes shows and sometimes hides what we can see. 

Vitorino Brasileiro's creation reminds us that: seeing is not the same as perceiving. Visibility and opacity are not opposites. And listening to voices and sounds are precious portals for the perception of the invisible in the visible.
1. “What if I abandoned all of you?”
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2. Mandinga could refer to magic spells, but also, in the context of Capoeira, to the ability of surprising one’s opponent with body movements.

3. "So, what is the cure for people of African descent?"

4. Canga is a piece of cloth commonly wrapped around the waist.
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5.  'Trauma is Brazilian' is Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s first solo exhibition.
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6. "Now I'm going to talk to all the girls. I am now going to hit, for all the girls. For all the transvestites, for all of them. I am now going to make macumba for all the sluts. For all the female testicles, for all of them,"
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7.  "To go away from the cursed Earth, the Earth that murders her”
# Humano-Mais-que-humano-Transmutação
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Em Uma noite sem lua (Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, 2020) uma voz nos pergunta: “e se eu abandonasse todas vocês?”. Abandonar o binarismo da polarização, o limite do humano e as separações antropocêntricas são os desafios aos quais o filme se lança. Desfazendo a ideia de ponto de vista humano como ponto de vista da câmera, e mesclando posicionalidades variadas para filmar seres vivos e entidades - misturando formas de ver (e ser visto por) o céu, o mar, a terra, as plantas, os animais, os corpos humanos e celestes.  Vitorino Brasileiro cria, assim em filme, o desejo de viver a completude do híbrido, do mais que humano. A sua criação audiovisual convoca a uma percepção de cinema sensorial em que visível e invisível, dito e não dito, superexposição e segredo não são contrapontos polarizados (plano e contraplano, quadro e fora de quadro), mas sim apostas na invenção por um outro regime do sensível (híbrido, transhumano, mais-que-humano).

A voz de Vitorino Brasileiro nos guia por essa jornada incerta dos corpos em movimento, entre amor, medo, dúvidas e prazeres. Uma voz pontuada pela estranheza repetitiva de sons e ruídos que atravessam o filme. Com mais perguntas do que afirmações, essa voz modula as sensações e caminhos possíveis para “desmaterializar o gênero e a raça no corpo”, sugere a narração, usando para isso a materialidade inquestionável das imagens e sons do filme. Há um jogo, portanto, com uma materialidade hiperbolizada, que sobrepõe e mistura texturas e sentidos. Assim, na dança do final do filme juntam-se os desenhos da parede, a pintura na bunda, as estampas do biquíni e da saia vestidas por Vitorino Brasileiro. Rebolando e orbitando espaços terrestres e siderais de forma não hierarquizada, a artista se anuncia: “Eu sou a mensageira que anuncia a transmutação travesti”. Uma apresentação que estabelece os princípios do seu cinema.
Princípios que nos parecem especular com a proposta da filosofia de Denise Ferreira da Silva de imagear “cada coisa existente (humano e mais-que-humano) como expressões singulares de cada um dos outros existentes e também do tudo implicado em que/como elas existem” (A dívida Impagável, p. 43). Em muitos momentos do filme, o corpo (humano e mais-que-humano) dança: singular, errático, incontrolável e sublime. Cabeça, braços, bunda e mãos. O corpo é mandinga e transmutação, nos diz a artista. O corpo é peixe, tartaruga, plantas marinhas, pedra. Corpos deslizam no fundo do mar, flutuam na ventania e colidem no cosmos. Transmutam-se.
# (D)esquecer-Mostrar-EscutarUma das primeiras imagens do documentário Lembrar daquilo que esqueci (Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, 2020) é a de uma carta denúncia de crime de Lesa a humanidade endereçada ao Governo do Espírito Santo por racismo institucional e sistêmico pelo apagamento dos Povos Bantus na constituição da história e da cultura do estado. Enquanto lemos a carta, uma voz em off nos pergunta: “então qual é a cura para o povo afrodescendente?”. A pergunta e o documento sintetizam a investigação do filme: questionar o que pode ser a cura (através de uma série de depoimentos também em off) articulando com um processo de criação de imagens que são em si um processo espiritual e terapêutico de cura. Imagens que são registros de pertencimento e encontros: uma roda de capoeira, uma celebração para Iemanjá, um coral de jovens que se apresenta na rua. Numa junção de momentos públicos, como as da exposição da artista, e de íntimos, o cabelo sendo trançado em casa e os preparativos para uma festa de aniversário.
Sem interesse em uma resposta fechada, a cura é ato e processo contínuo de contradições e sobreposições. Assim é possível compor uma sequência que vai da bandeira do Brasil (com o seu “Ordem e Progresso” positivista) ao cartaz da exposição da artista que afirma “O trauma é brasileiro”. E também compor toda uma sequência que nos questiona sobre o que pode ser uma imagem de sereia. Seria a jovem negra que posa e dança na frente da sereia branca e loira pintada no muro? Seria a divindade indiana na estampa da canga dessa mulher? Mais do que uma imagem, a sobreposição e o encontro entre elas.

O filme instaura o processo de cura no tempo e no espaço como repetição ao inserir desenhos em vermelho na tela preta que dividem os diversos blocos do filme e subvertem as possibilidades de entendimento do que pode ser a menor distância entre dois pontos (nem sempre uma reta linear). Com a Romaria dos Testículos Femininos pelo centro da cidade de Vitória até a galeria da exposição “O trauma é brasileiro”, a artista desfaz e refaz os significados do território e pertencimento. A Romaria é posta  em contraposição às imagens do convento de Nossa Senhora da Penha, ressituando os significados da arquitetura católica sobre a cidade. Andar a cidade, a avenida Beira-mar, pode ser também um processo de cura.
O corpo de Vitorino Brasileiro e os corpos que a artista encontra como pertencimento no filme (humanos e mais-que-humanos) são por fim espaço, tempo e cura. O filme não é o fim, mas o próprio processo de lembrar, escutar e, às vezes, ver.
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#Ver-Desver-Ouvir
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Ao som do batuque do Centro Espírita Caboclo Sete Estrelas do Mar, Vitorino Brasileiro conjura o seu feitiço : “Eu agora vou falar para todas as moças. Eu agora vou bater, para todas as moças. Para todas as travestis, para todas elas. Eu agora vou fazer macumba para todas as bixas. Para todos os testículos femininos, para todas elas”, em Para todas as moças (2019). Guiada por seu canto, as imagens se sucedem em uma montagem de ritmo e texturas múltiplas: o calor do quarto de cura - com velas, pedras, conchas e objetos diversos de macumba -, uma gravação azulada e tremida feita com celular em frente a pedra do Penedo, na baía de Vitória/ES, e uma filmagem oficial da NASA da Terra vista do espaço. Assim, entre o quente, o frio e a institucionalidade neutra é conjurado o filme-feitiço-macumba para quebrar as embarcações coloniais.
Pensar as incursões audiovisuais da artista, macumbeira e psicóloga é encarar simultaneamente esse gesto de aterrar-se na subida do morro da Fonte Grande, de afundar-se nas águas profundas da ilha de Vitória, e de desterrar-se (“afastar-se da Terra maldita, Terra que a assassina”) - gestos que são tão corporificados (pela performance), quanto imateriais (pela manutenção do mistério). 

Em Para todas as moças, esses gestos são transmutações que desestabilizam também o mover errante da câmera pelo inventários de objetos (vela, osso, folhas, pedras) - mais uma vez no exercício de um olhar audiovisual não hierarquizante ou antropocêntrico. Objetos, entidades, seres, que são sempre mais do que se pode ver/mostrar. Assim como na performance de Vitorino Brasileiro a beira mar, as imagens da câmera de celular jogam com o aparecer e esconder-se da sua coreografia - entrecortada por uma máscara preta que ora mostra, ora esconde o que podemos ver. 

A criação de Vitorino Brasileiro nos lembra que: ver não é o mesmo que enxergar. Visibilidade e opacidade não são opostos. E a escuta das vozes e sons são portais preciosos de percepção do invisível no visível.
1. “What if I abandoned all of you?”
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2. Mandinga could refer to magic spells, but also, in the context of Capoeira, to the ability of surprising one’s opponent with body movements.

3. "So, what is the cure for people of African descent?"

4. Canga is a piece of cloth commonly wrapped around the waist.
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5.  'Trauma is Brazilian' is Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s first solo exhibition.
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6. "Now I'm going to talk to all the girls. I am now going to hit, for all the girls. For all the transvestites, for all of them. I am now going to make macumba for all the sluts. For all the female testicles, for all of them,"
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7.  "To go away from the cursed Earth, the Earth that murders her”
When dealing with matters of film history, specifically its archiving and curation, one quickly learns that the establishment of “firsts” is a fool’s errand. To begin with, it is not our collective ignorance about this or that film that necessarily determines its extant status. But the agreed-upon legend states that Um Clássico, Dois em Casa, Nenhum Jogo Fora (1968) is the first film released in Brazil with characters explicitly displaying same-sex desire.

But claiming to be the first is not what makes Djalma Limongi Batista’s debut a special object. Its bold and experimental manner is what stands out most and continues to resonate well with contemporary audiences. Its revolutionary style, contributing to one of the most creative eras in Brazilian film history, has been left aside for too long, but its status is slowly but surely witnessing restoration. 

Fifty-odd years after its initial production, Um Classico is perhaps not the type of work that the average budding cinephile would associate with the established canon of queer cinema landmarks. It is not romantic, it is not sweet, it is not hopeful or particularly uplifting. It does not deal directly with the representation of an externally homophobic society — in fact, the only moment of homophobia is acted out by one of the film’s protagonists.

Batista has claimed decades later that the film owes too much to existentialism, in particular the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. It is a very 1960s film indeed, with its mélange of references and anxieties, coupled with a certain feeling that although the world is in turmoil (and the soundtrack certainly helps in that regard), there is nothing we can do to change it. 

It is a film from a time in which there was no need or desire to include a moral statement at the end. The characters were not supposed to be mirrors for the spectators, and such is how they operate in Um Classico. They behave strangely, they do things that one would not expect them to do. How would one go about explaining the end of the film today, in which the characters don't fulfill any teleology?

Our protagonist and his desire for hookups is something that is not (yet) socially permissible and the urban world seems like a completely alien concept to him.

To understand the impact of the film, we must therefore explore what is now - retroactively - considered to be the early stages of Brazilian queer cinema, with its elusive representations of LGBT identities, desires, acts, and characterizations. We will also do a brief overview of Limongi Batista’s life and work leading up to the production of the film.

Queer cinema in Brazil before Um Clássico, Dois em Casa, Nenhum Jogo Fora
The first compendium on LGBT representation in Brazilian cinema was produced by Antonio Moreno, in his master’s thesis, completed in 1995 at the State University of Campinas. Titled “A personagem homossexual no cinema brasileiro” (“The homosexual character in Brazilian cinema”),1 the thesis was very much indebted to the line of identity theory established by Vito Russo for American cinema and disseminated throughout the world in many LGBT film histories that were being studied during the 1980s and 1990s.

Transformed into a book published in 2001 and finding a later iteration as a film festival in 2014, the filmography of Brazilian queer cinema begins with Augusto Anibal Quer Casar (Barros, 1923), a lost silent short in which friends play a trick on the protagonist, who discovers at the altar that his bride is actually a man, played by Darwin, a famous theater “Transformist”, as it was billed at the time.2
To Moreno, after a handful of films that either showed queer characters as a laughingstock or only as subtext in films, it was only in 1960 that a film clearly addressed same-sex desire, with the release of Bahia de Todos os Santos (Neto, 1961). Luiz Francisco Buarque Lacerda Júnior, also known as director Chico Lacerda, agrees with this assessment in his study on the vast history of male homoeroticism in Brazilian Cinema, “Cinema gay brasileiro: políticas de representação e além”,3 but brings attention to the fact that while homosexuality is never expressed, it is clearly understood by connotation. 

It is the same connotation that I present in my analysis of Poeira de Estrelas, a 1948 lesbian film, in my MSc thesis “Em Busca de um cinema queer no Brasil”, presented at Universidade Federal de São Carlos.4 The trouble with connotation is that even if it is more obvious than subtext, it still may pass unnoticed either by absent-minded spectators or by (rare) foreign viewers, relying on poor subtitles that do not fully capture the nuances presented by the script. A handful of other films released before 1960 prove this point: although they are analyzed on those two landmark studies and my following contribution, there is no evidence that they were understood at the time as representations of same-sex desire or acts.

Lacerda goes on to point out two mid-1960s films that display homosexuality more explicitly than ever before, but never focusing on the desire felt by the characters, and instead on the fear and persecution suffered by the main character, judged and persecuted due to a homophobic society. While a British film like Victim (Dearden, 1961) showed the ordeals suffered by a number of closeted people in a successful attempt to politically impact and overturn anti-LGBT laws in the UK, the Brazilian films O Beijo (Tambellini, 1964) and O Menino e o Vento (Christensen, 1967) never acknowledge the desires of their characters in a country that has never officially forbidden same-sex relationships, but always found ways to control it.
In both of the aforementioned films, our protagonists are exposed as deviant, gay, and referred to by several Brazilian terms equivalent to “fag”. Not only this but they also become suspected of crimes related to their supposed queerness. While the Brazilian law never forbade same-sex acts, it had several measures that could be used to jail people who looked or acted gay.5

We can therefore safely assume that Um Clássico, Dois em Casa, Nenhum Jogo Fora was truly the first film to openly show LGBT characters that desire each other and for that, it was a groundbreaking work. These men never kiss or promise their love to each other, but their desire is pledged. They still feel persecuted, like the other films, but for the first time we are somehow on their side and no longer pretending that they are “innocents”.

In O Beijo, based on a Nelson Rodrigues play, our protagonist is subject to an ordeal after a dying man asks for a kiss on the lips as his last wish and becomes an innocent victim of homophobia, only to find out at the end that his father-in-law, the instigator of many of his problems, secretly desires him, while portrayed as an old and disgusting queer.6 In O Menino e o Vento, an old queer colleague comes to shed light on some of the shadier aspects of our protagonist’s life, who is on trial for the disappearance of a local boy, with whom he shared a very affectionate and loving relationship.

In both films, innocent straight characters in need of help and full of love are put through tribulations because a sickened society sees wrongdoing in their pure acts. If in the end of O Menino e o Vento, a gust of wind operates as deus ex machina and seems to show that the love shared between the protagonist and their lover is stronger than anything, it could also be read as a sign of “innocence” of the man guilty in the eyes of a scared society.
These were the ways in which homosexuality was depicted until the mid-1960s, as a frightful mark that any innocent man could be tagged with, wrongly accused of such an act.7 But we must assume the existence of a queer audience in Brazil for whom these works would provide some sort of recognition. That perspective obviously suited theorists and researchers focused on the aspect of identity, but if they were to follow a strict chronological path, they would be left puzzled by Um Clássico, which as we shall discuss, still uses some aspects of this game as its protagonist somehow falls into a trap by another queer man, but turns its head around as he voluntarily follows his desire and eagerly accepts his fate. 

Djalma Limongi Batista managed to be an outcast both in the bigger scheme of Brazilian film history, but also during the first wave of LGBT revisionism, that could not properly identify if the characters in Um Clássico were good or bad, unable to trace how they connected to a broader gay community, or answer if they showed a positive or negative aspect of homosexuality. This assumes, obviously, that they could watch the film in the first place. Highly celebrated in the (small) festival circuit at the time, it was soon to be censored and shelved, but not forgotten and luckily not lost. Now, restored and again making the festival rounds, it resumes once again its place at the forefront of queer film history. But before we delve into the film, it is important to turn back to understand Djalma Limongi Batista, the man behind this film, and the time/circumstance of its release.
The Formative Years of Djalma Limongi Batista
Brazil’s film history, like many other national cinemas, is known to be full of “cycles”, or waves, usually very short-lived and with different degrees of success in the continued hope that one day the industry would surge. One-time wonder Mario Peixoto, creator of the landmark masterpiece Limite (1931), could be described as the patron saint of Brazilian artists caught in the rolling tides of lack of funding and industry, who were not able to forge a large and multifaceted body of work. It would be possible to create long lists of amazing films that were made by directors who never went back to the set after having impressive debuts.

Djalma Limongi Batista is one of the main figures of Brazilian cinema who, despite not being able to create a long and stable body of work, managed to produce a lasting impact on film history with his handful of films.
Batista only directed three feature films, released between 1981 and 1997. Together with his first three short films, shot in 1968 and 1969, Batista created a unique visual and thematic style. Rarely seen until today, Um Clássico is still a hugely unique experience, but still connected somehow with other films made during the period. It is such a shame that he was not able to continue his career, partly due to funding issues and controversy over his projects, but also the lack of a more robust film system in Brazil, which leaves some out-of-place auteurs without resources to film their worlds.

Born on October 9th, 1947, Djalma Limongi Batista lived in a large house with his parents and seven siblings. His hometown of Manaus, at the heart of Amazon forest and the most important city on northern Brazil, used to be a very rich city at the boom of rubber exploration in the early 20th century, but by the 50s it had regressed to the status of a fairly sleepy and rainy town surrounded by huge buildings that reminded its inhabitants of an opulent past.

It was in this atmosphere that Djalma and his brother Gualter used to go to the movies at every opportunity, forging a shared passion. When it was time to go to college, Batista’s father, an important doctor and scientist, was able to take him during work trips to get to know the main cities and universities of Brazil. He had chosen to enroll in the new University of Brasilia, one of the leading projects from the recently built capital of the country.

There, he met Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes and Jean-Claude Bernardet, perhaps the two most influential Brazilian film scholars of the era, responsible for a revolution in Brazilian cinema studies: their ideas of values would discreetly but surely shape Batista’s films, and their connections to Brazilian culture, society, and history. 

Batista moved to Brasilia in 1964, the same year a military junta deposed João Goulart, the sitting left-wing elected President, and started its process of clawing to power. At the end of 1965, during a political clash between the federal government and the country’s professors, the UnB was shut down. Suddenly feeling lost, Limongi Batista told a biographer that he had been given an opportunity by a colleague of his father to go to the University of California, Berkeley (where he could have conceivably been a classmate of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). Instead, he decided to follow the path of his mentors in Brasilia and go to São Paulo, where Salles Gomes, Jean-Claude and Lucila Bernardet created a film course at Universidade de São Paulo (USP).8

With USP’s location in a metropolis full of social inequality, it was natural that the professors at the Film department would prefer to produce documentaries, especially at a time in which the camera and sound equipment had become flexible enough to go on the streets and film ‘reality’, resulting in a production boom in the documentary mode in Brazil. So, it was quite a shock when Djalma jumped the gun and created Um Clássico on his own and with a little help from his friends. Its 28 minutes of personal conflicts amidst a crazy and angst society somehow had the “documentary style” that his professors hoped for, but no sociological thesis behind it.

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The film opens up with close shots of Antonio, played by the handsome and fresh Eduardo Nogueira, waking up on a bed to the sounds of a football match on the radio. As the camera shows the rest of the room, we see another man grumpily adjusting his tie as Eduardo slowly awakes to the day. One could assume that this is a sexual partner and the film certainly invites this idea for the confused viewer, but we find out that it is his brother. 

Next, we see the family kitchen, where the father, mother, and brother discuss various problems of the middle class while being served by an older maid, a constant presence in Brazilian families. The father complains about not getting a promotion at his job, and all find a common interest in belittling the lazy brother. Scenes like this set around a kitchen table over breakfast could be seen all over the Brazilian cinema in late 1960s, most notably Copacabana Me Engana (Fontoura, 1968). Just as in the British kitchen sink realism films, these scenes oppose the running wheels of the Brazilian middle-class and outsider characters who are desperate about their socio-economic situation and not sure how to get away from it.
Unlike Fontoura’s feature which created a world where the rebellious younger and older brothers could find in sex some common ground, Limongi Batista promotes a total rupture. After the “men of the family” leave for work, Antônio finally gets out of bed to find the women of the house doing their daily chores, and goes outside, perhaps to never return.

Probably the most interesting scenes from a contemporary perspective would be those where the protagonist walks around São Paulo’s downtown, crossing with many people in their day-to-day lives. In the age of portable phones and images everywhere, it is curious to see how those kinds of shots were common in Brazilian cinema from the 1960s and 1970s and slowly disappeared as people grew more self-aware of their image and media impact. To a current spectator, it offers an amazing glimpse of urban São Paulo in the 1960s and its citizens.

Those shots establish the world of Antonio, lost in the crowd and eager to find someplace to fit in. He goes to a shop, where a friend works, and they have an argument in the middle of the street, where they appear to break up. We can assume that probably is an ex-boyfriend, but at the time we are left to wonder what has happened. We enter into Antonio’s world step by step, where there is too much confusion, noise, and obstacles around him. He walks around, watches a colorful wrestling fight - extremely popular at the time - browses magazines, until in a POV, the camera focuses and flirts with another boy. We may risk labeling this as the first moment that homosexual desire was put at the forefront of Brazilian cinema. No connotation, no hidden text: Antonio looks at Isaias (played by Carlos Alberto) and wants him.
The final act takes place in Isaias's apartment. As he declares that “I’m not from here, I’m from the north, very far from here”, on some level he may be seen as a representation of the director himself, a country boy lost in the big city, not sure how to find his way. Antonio also reassures him that “I'm from the Northeast, I came when I was 11 years old”. São Paulo, a no-man’s land that is also a place in which queer people can seek out those like themselves. A place for strangers to call home.

The two boys never kiss, have sex or completely undress on-screen, so perhaps a modern queer audience would leave the theater a bit disappointed. But they caress each other, show desire for one another. Isaias asks to be killed because he knows things are never going to be the same after this encounter and as they can not be together, he might as well die. Antonio seems to be taken aback but eventually agrees. The problem is that now he has also entered a world from which there is no return. 

According to the director in his biography, "at the time, I started to have some of my first concerns with my sexual orientation, and as I was always too impetuous, I decided to write it down” (39). He also said that:
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 "The funny thing is that it never crossed my mind that to make "Um Clássico..." was a courageous act. Today I see it like that, but at the time it was just fun and games. Or, perhaps, a revolutionary need. The 20th century's sexual revolution was happening!” (41).
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It strikes one that such a profound work, overtly influenced by existentialism, was the first film at all from someone with no experience on film sets whatsoever. Perhaps, it had to be the first film in order to show such raw emotions, the equivalent of a 1960s version of the equally anguished and full-of-melancholic-queerness Limite. 

A very important dialogue happens when the two are in Isaias’s apartment. He tells Antonio that sometimes “some fags play ‘Free Again’, a very faggoty music and ….”, adding that “they are so fag”, and that seems to be the key to understanding the fate of our players. The song by Barbara Streisand goes on to blare “Free again, independent me, free again”…“back to being on my own”. Antonio and Isaias are both free, they can cruise and express their desire on the streets of São Paulo, but society and family still control them, and they can never truly choose their own destiny. They act free for now but know their freedom will not last.

As the boys look out the window, they only see people whom they can not possibly relate to, either the average and straight man, a product of the system, or the “fags” that proudly display their queer bodies and voices. They don’t identify with anything, caught between pride and shame of what is already perceived as an identity, something you can not deny. Early on in the film, Antonio apparently breaks up with his first boyfriend because he saw him with a woman. It is a sign that the former option of being in the closet and living a “straight” family life is not on the table anymore, but we are still in the middle ground, queer public life is not yet acceptable if it does not break away completely with tradition in society.

Antonio and Isiais are lost on their own, and there is no way out. That description unfortunately would not be inapt when applied to Limongi Batista’s life/career after this film. The film premiered at the Short Film Festival promoted by Jornal do Brasil, one of the leading newspapers at the time. It was a sensation at the mythical Cine Paissandu, and the film won best film, director, editing, screenplay and actor for Nogueira. The film caught the attention not only of the main Brazilian filmmakers who were at the festival, but also from the press, with a more negative note coming from the professors at the University who had no idea Batista was already making films. Batista’s father even flew to São Paulo with concerns about the themes presented by the film. If nowadays some people do their coming out in Youtube or Tiktok videos, Djalma Limongi Batista was a pioneer in staging his coming out with an awarded short film.
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Um Clássico, Dois em Casa, Nenhum Jogo Fora was the first film produced by the Film Department at the University of São Paulo (USP). Limongi Batista followed that with two other experimental short films made in 1969, O Mito da Competição do Sul and Hang-five, always with Eduardo Nogueira, a “handsome swimmer and surfer, dazzling, that instantly became my fetish-actor”.9 Following this, he helmed three short films Puxando Massa (1972), Porta do Céu (1973) and Rasga Coração - O Teatro Brasileiro de Anchieta ao Oficina (1973). All of these films are documentaries, more aligned to the intellectual interests of university policies, but still with an eye to the human behind the mass, the individual inside the collective, and nods to the baroque style of Um Clássico.  

In the 1980s, Batista finally directed two feature films, amid working in advertising and photographic laboratories: Asa Branca, Um Sonho Brasileiro, in 1981, and Brasa Adormecida, five years later. Both of them can be seen as part of the 1980s Brazilian cinema towards a more visual and spectacular cinema, something particularly true to São Paulo’s filmmakers. They are, perhaps, the perfect definition of queer: while there is no overt homosexual plotline, they are always present on the subtext and the male body is treated as an object of desire and affection.

In Asa Branca, Batista commits the sacrilege of (homo)sexualizing a football player, the most important macho figure in Brazil. A teen from the countryside dreams of becoming a member of the national team and with the big help of an older businessman, he manages to make the right connections and achieve his dream. 

One of the prizes for this feature film was a grant to produce a second one. For Brasa Adormecida, Batista was offered the screenplay of a pornochanchada, a genre that brought a lot of eroticism to the comedy of manners, usually objectifying women. He rewrote it almost entirely, but kept the main idea of a love triangle between three cousins, two males and one female. Once again, the male body is shot with a kind of awe. At the very end, the groom reveals to the male cousin that he was really in love with him and then they proceed to kiss, witnessed by guests on binoculars. We only see the reaction. In his biography, Limongi Batista says he regrets not having shot the kiss and that all the crew and cast (including Edson Celulari and Paulo César Grande, two well-known hunk actors at the time) asked him to shoot, but he was afraid to be stigmatized, especially during the HIV outbreak, and because unconsciously he tried to take away every sexual representation found in the original screenplay.

This anecdote is a perfect metaphor for Limongi Batista’s career. Such an act of self-censorship is to be found unconsciously for decades in many of his projects. Today, during a boom in Brazilian queer cinema, he remains a very reclusive figure, refusing many spotlights. But he is not without his reasons: throughout his career, he was the target of censorship several times. First of all, a shot in Asa Branca of Edson Celulari naked walking around the moonlight on Estádio Maracaná, the biggest soccer temple in the world, never left the editing table. As he was battling for funds for a new project in the early 80s on Pan, Amor e Fantasia (never made) and old university colleague now in charge of Embrafilme not only refused the film, but asked him if he “wanted to become the gay Brazilian filmmaker”. This story is told on page 144 of his biography compiled by Marcel Nadale, where he bitterly adds: “After Asa Branca, I was ready to fight tooth and nail for this title. But HIV made me retreat completely backwards. I took a very Brazilian attitude: I shut down the floodgate. The opposite of, say, Pedro Almodóvar in Spain, who faced the bull and ran towards it”.

It took him years to reconcile himself and his cinema not only with his sexuality but with the bureaucracy of film production in Brazil. In 1997 he released his third and to-date last feature film, Bocage, an over-the-top homage not only to the Portuguese poet, but to an entire kitsch and baroque cinema. Unfortunately what seemed to be a resurgence after 10 years without a film, turned out to start a longer period of reclusion, which we hope ends soon. Djalma Limgoni Batista’s special and unique voice on Brazilian queer cinema needs to be heard once more.
1. Available in Portuguese on [http://repositorio.unicamp.br/handle/REPOSIP/285133?mode=full]. Last access on June 30th, 2021.
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2. Luciana Correa de Araújo, a leading scholar on Brazilian silent cinema, wrote an article on the film, “Augusto Annibal quer casar!: teatro popular e Hollywood no cinema silencioso brasileiro” for Alceu n.31 (jul/dec 2015). Available on [http://revistaalceu-acervo.com.puc-rio.br/media/alceu%2031%20pp%2062-73.pdf]. Sancler Ebert, a PhD student at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), currently undergoes an extensive research on Darwin. Among his writings: EBERT, Sancler. Darwin, o imitador do belo sexo: dos palcos às telas. In: XXI Encontro da Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual, 2018, João Pessoa. Anais do XXI Encontro da Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual, 2018.
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3. PhD Thesis, available on [https://repositorio.ufpe.br/handle/123456789/15772]. Last access on June 30th, 2021.
4. Available in Portuguese on [https://repositorio.ufscar.br/handle/ufscar/9909].
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5. On that regard, James Green’s book on the history of male homosexuality in 20th century Brazil and João Silvério Trevisan’s large study on same-sex desire and representation in Brazil are still important landmark studies. See: GREEN, James. Além do Carnaval. A homossexualidade masculina no Brasil doséculo XX. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2000 [1999]. Translated by Cristina Fino and Cássio Arantes Leite from the original in English; TREVISAN, João Silvério. Devassos no Paraíso (4ª edição, revista e ampliada) - A homossexualidade no Brasil, da colônia à atualidade. São Paulo: Editora Objetiva, 2018
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6. Curiously the opening credits of this film references the 12 “Stations of Cross”. But it’s never the homossexual that is compared with the pain experienced by Jesus, but the heterossexual that has his sexuality mistaken.

7.  Lacerda has a perfect analysis of the inner homophobia in films that supposedly goes against it in his fourth chapter of his thesis, already mentioned (72-88).

8. NADALE, Marcel. Djalma Limongi Batista: livre pensador. São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2005. This book is basically a first-person account by Limongi Batista organized and introduced by Nadale. All the following quotes from Limongi Batista on this article are taken from this book, unless mentioned it.

9. NADALE, Marcel (pp 39-40).“Ator-fetiche”, literally “fetish-actor”, usually translated as “favorite actor” is a portuguese and french expression designed to term an actor that constantly appears at the director’s films. We have chosen to use the literal translation, as it carries a sexual appeal not translated to the english but is fundamental to Limongi Batista’s filming of Nogueira.
Since the 1990s, the most ambitious and well-funded film restoration projects in Brazil have focused on the filmography of renowned filmmakers from the Cinema Novo movement such as Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. These projects restored and produced new exhibition prints of many titles that were already considered classics. But the canonical status of the works that these directors produced, such as Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967) or They Don't Wear Black Tie (Leon Hirszman, 1981), aren’t going to be further elevated through film restorations. Rather, the restoration of these films only reinforced the notion that they were the single-best titles Brazilian cinema had to offer. 

This list, based on my experiences as a film archivist and film scholar, privileges initiatives that have focused on historically ignored films, periods, or genres throughout Brazilian cinema history. I attempted to list projects, retrospectives, and events carried out over the last two decades that allowed researchers and academics the opportunity to reevaluate the history of Brazilian cinema in their work. These projects brought to light films from the past that had not been widely seen or discussed for many years (some even since they were first released), provoking feelings of freshness, surprise, and novelty towards a wider historical array of Brazilian films.

One of the criteria in compiling this list was that each project expanded, altered, or revised long existing Brazilian Cinema canons. Thus, an important program such as the 2013 “Clássicos e raros do nosso cinema”, conducted by the Cinemateca Brasileira with the sponsorship of the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB), was not included in this list despite its undeniable merits. While new 35mm prints were struck as a result of that program, these prints were projected very few times outside of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the main cities the program took place in) because they were elevated to the status of preservation prints. 

In addition, important projects such as the digitization and DVD release of films by Hugo Carvana and Aloysio Raulino by the Centro Técnico do Audiovisual (CTAv) in 2017 were not included in this list because it is still too recent to evaluate their impact on the academic world. There are also situations in which academic interest preceded preservation actions. This seems to have been the case with the “rediscovery” of the first Brazilian feature film directed by a black woman, Adélia Sampaio’s Amor maldito (1984). When Amor Maldito was written about in the PhD thesis of Edileuza Penha de Souza, “Cinema na panela de barro: mulheres negras, narrativas de amor, afeto e identidade” (UnB, 2013), the new attention given to the film led to it being widely requested for exhibitions in around 2017. However, the circulating copies of the film were unfortunately in bad quality and did not correspond to the film’s renewed interest.

In this list, I generally sought to show how originality, care and research involved in these projects were fundamental to their success. I also tried to highlight the relevant and continuous impact that preservation and diffusion actions have in reshaping the historiography of Brazilian cinema. Finally, the objective of this list is less to rank different preservation projects than to stimulate new debate about them.
Corcina and Rio de Janeiro’s Underground Cinema
Roberto Moura, the (now retired) filmmaker and professor at UFF, began a research project in the 2000s that focused on what he called “cinema alternativo carioca” (Rio de Janeiro underground cinema). This project focused on the wide ranging film production (especially of short films) of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s and early 1980s. Involving members of the Brazilian Association of Documentarians (ABD), production companies would include Corisco, Moura himself, and especially Corcina - Cooperative of Independent Film Directors. The underground films of this period are marked by a diversity and experimentalism which flourished under the so-called “Lei do Curta” (the mandatory exhibition of Brazilian short films together with foreign features). Directors such as José Joffily, Sérgio Péo, Sylvio Da-Rin, all participated in making bold short works. More recently, Lucas Parente (son of the multimedia artist and professor André Parente, who directed some short films that are included in this trend), started a movement to rescue this material, together with the Cinemateca do MAM, Dobra - International Festival of Experimental Cinema, and others. As a result of these efforts, a 2019 digitalization of Eclipse (Antonio Moreno, 1984), an animation painted directly on film, was exhibited in several festivals and academic events, giving continuity to Roberto Moura's research, and fostering a renewed interest in these films and directors.
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The DVD Release of A Rainha Diaba
O Centro Técnico do Audiovisual (CTAv) has launched beautiful DVD editions of films from its collection over the past decades, such as silent films made in Cataguazes and Recife or even sound feature films such as O Saci (Rodolfo Nanni, 1951) and Assault on the Pay Train (Roberto Farias, 1962). Special mention should be made of the 2004 release of Antonio Carlos Fontoura's second feature film “A Rainha Diaba” (1974) on a beautiful DVD copy. This “pop-gay-black thriller” (as it was announced at the time of its release) was rediscovered two years after the premiere of Madame Satã by Karïm Anouz, helping to highlight that A Rainha Diaba is one of the most interesting Brazilian films of the 1970s. This is a beautiful example of the rescue of a film that was still very “modern” even at the time of its rediscovery. The neat edition of the DVD, filled with well-produced extras (interviews, making-ofs, trailers, etc.), was another incentive for the wide circulation of A Rainha Diaba after a certain ostracism to which the film had initially been unfairly relegated.
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The Reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários (1929)
The reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários (1929) was a project developed by the University Laboratory of Audiovisual Preservation of the Federal Fluminense University (LUPA-UFF) and carried out by myself and professor Reinaldo Cardenuto. The project resulted in the 2019 launch of a shortened version of the first Brazilian sound feature film, which is considered lost. This project gathered together different remaining fragments of the work such as excerpts of moving images, photographs and sound records. This audiovisual preservation project, unlike the rest on this list, was a consequence of and not the impetus for academic research. As the study of the arrival and popularization of sound cinema in Brazil motivated the interest of several researchers such as Fernando Morais da Costa (UFF), Carlos Roberto de Souza (UFSCar), and Carlos Eduardo Pereira (Cinemateca do MAM), the work of Luiz de Barros began receiving more attention from researchers as well. Researchers of Luiz de Barros include myself, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo (UFScar) and her graduate student Evandro Vasconcellos, author of the M.A. dissertation “Entre o palco e a tela: as relações do cinema com o teatro de revista nas comédias de Luiz de Barros” (UFSCar, 2015). The reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários, on the other hand, may come to encourage other projects that combine historical research and audiovisual preservation, bringing universities and film archives closer together.
01
“Classics of Cinédia” Restorations
In 2004, Cinédia released copies of four restored films produced by the company through a project sponsored by BR Distribuidora. One of them, Alô, alô, carnaval (Adhemar Gonzaga and Wallace Downey, 1936), was already the most well-known Brazilian musical of the 1930s. But two others - Mulher (Octávio Gabus Mendes, 1931) and 24 horas de sonho (Chianca de Garcia, 1941) - were true “novelties” for researchers, as they had not been widely circulated for many years. Directed by Octávio Gabus Mendes, Mulher was a silent film with music synchronized with Vitaphone records at a time when talkies were already the norm in Brazil for two years. However, at that time, many movie theaters, especially in the suburbs and in the countryside, had not yet begun the move toward sound cinema. The film is highly sophisticated, comparable to another late silent production by Cinédia, the classic Ganga Bruta (Humberto Mauro, 1933). In addition to prompting interesting research on sound in cinema and silent cinema, the restoration of Mulher was the subject of the M.A. dissertation by Joice Scavone, “Mulher: a trajetória do som do primeiro filme synchronizado da Cinédia” (UFF, 2013), which discussed the close link between film studies and film preservation in academia. The Classics of Cinédia restorations remain in restricted circulation, many of the works still unavailable in digital format. As a result, the fourth film which was restored, Adhemar Gonzaga’s 1944 Romance proibido remains practically unknown to audiences. Despite this, the films that are accessible had an extremely significant impact on the academic world.
01
Duplication of Fábula or Mitt Hem är Copacabana by Arne Sucksdorff
Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff was best known in the history of Brazilian cinema for having offered a film course in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, which became a milestone moment for the emerging Cinema Novo movement. However, before moving to Mato Grosso’s Pantanal (where he would live until his death), Sucksdorff shot the fascinating Fábula (1965) in Rio de Janeiro. This feature film was co-produced with Sweden and it had been practically forgotten since its initial release. However, in the mid-1990s, in a project in partnership with the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB), Chico Moreira, who was then the head of conservation at the Cinemateca do MAM, duplicated the film. Chico produced a new 16mm exhibition print optically reduced from the original 35mm internegative of the Brazilian version of the film which had been preserved by the film archive. In the 2000s, Hernani Heffner - who succeeded Chico at the Cinemateca do MAM - began to frequently screen that 16mm print of Fábula, always with enormous success among the public who were dazzled by this practically unknown work. Scholars soon became interested. João Luiz Vieira analyzed the film in the award-winning 2009 book “World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives”, edited by Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. I myself wrote about the film in the catalog of the “Olhares Neo-Realistas” film series, held at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in 2006. The film also became the subject of a wider research project by professor Esther Hamburguer (USP), which brought to Brazil a digital copy of the Swedish version. The interest aroused by the film was such that in 2011 the Moreira Salles Institute financed the making of a new print of the Brazilian version – this time in 35mm – from the original internegative.
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DVDs "Os filmes de Zózimo Bulbul" and " Obras raras: o cinema negro da década de 70" (Films of Zózimo Bulbul" and "Rare works: Black Cinema of the 70s)
Released in 2005 and 2006 through a partnership between the Centro de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento, Afro Carioca Cinema Center and the Palmares Cultural Foundation of the Ministry of Culture, the DVDs “Films of Zózimo Bulbul” and “Rare works: the black cinema of the 70s” were fundamental towards expanding the circulation of films by important black Brazilian filmmakers as well as contributing to their revaluation. The double DVD-set “Films of Zózimo Bulbul” featured six films by the actor and director, made between the 1970s and 2000s. Bulbul’s first short film Alma no Olho (1973) has been reevaluated as the masterpiece that it is, being recently chosen as the 11th best short film in the history of Brazilian cinema in a list made by the Brazilian Association of Film Critics (Abbracine) in 2019. The double DVD “Rare works: black cinema of the 70s” presented six films directed by Antunes Filho, Antonio Pitanga, Zózimo Bulbul, Ola Balogun, Waldir Onofre and Odilon Lopez. Of particular note is the feature film As aventuras amorosas de um padeiro (1975), Onofre's debut feature film produced by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. In addition to the black protagonist, this erotic comedy produced during the “climax” of pornochanchada stands out for its feminist tone, rare in a genre filled with sexist works. Thus, in addition to contributing to the growing interest in black cinema in the academic world, the DVD also helped newly highlight Onofre's cinema and, more broadly, the pornochanchada itself.
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Event “Cinema Brasileiro, a vergonha de uma nação” (Brazilian Cinema, the Shame of a Nation)
Researcher Remier Lion had the ambition to hold a large retrospective of Brazilian exploitation films with this provocative title (a reference to Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface) at the Cinemateca do MAM when it had just resumed its programming after a serious crisis hit the institution in the early 2000s. However, his idea was not well received by the institution’s then curator Gilberto Santeiro, who was very uncomfortable with the provocation aimed at the respectability of Brazilian cinema. Despite this, Remier brought part of his program to film clubs in different locations of Rio de Janeiro, titling the new program “Malditos films brasileiros” (Damned Brazilian Films). Finally, the program reached the Cinemateca Brasileira, where it was held with enormous success in 2004, even leading Remier to join the programming team of the film archive. Working at the Cinemateca Brasileira provided Remier with access to even rarer materials for his project. Although Remier’s  program can be understood as a general revision and revaluation of the films made at the “Boca do Lixo” (the neighborhood that gathered commercial film professionals in São Paulo from the 1960s to 1980s), the screening series “Brazilian Cinema: the shame of a nation” had a broader scope, incorporating a filmmaker that Remier was researching for a very long time, Nilo Machado, who independently produced strip-tease films in Rio de Janeiro since the 1960s. In general, the exhibition at the Cinemateca Brasileira shed light on several unknown examples of the long trajectory of Brazilian commercial, popular, and genre cinema, which had not yet been explored in Brazilian film historiography due to its penchant for emphasizing auteurs. Thus, this event received enormous media coverage and had great repercussion among film critics. It was also aligned with an academic research trend that was just burgeoning, exemplified by Rodrigo Pereira's dissertation “Western Feijoada: o faroeste no cinema brasileiro” (Unesp, 2002), or by works which were then yet to have been completed, including the doctoral theses of Laura Cánepa “Medo de que?: uma história do horror nos filmes brasileiros” (Unicamp, 2008) and Alfredo Suppia “Limite de alerta! Ficção cientifica em atmosfera rarefeita : uma introdução ao estudo da FC no cinema brasileiro e em algumas cinematografias off-Hollywood” (Unicamp, 2007).
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Restoration of Aviso aos navegantes
With the sponsorship of BR Distribuidora and Petrobrás, the Centro de Pesquisadores do Cinema Brasileiro (CPCB) has carried out important restorations of films from different periods and directors over the last few decades. Perhaps the most notable restoration was the chanchada Aviso aos navegantes (Watson Macedo, 1950), completed between 1999 and 2000. When the 1950s musical comedies known as chanchadas started to be revaluated in the 1970s, Jean-Claude Bernardet highlighted Nem Sansão nem Dalila (Carlos Manga, 1954) as one of the most important political films in Brazilian cinema. From then on out, if any chanchada was included on the list of the most important Brazilian films of all time, it was usually this Hollywood parody full of criticism about the Getúlio Vargas government. Subsequently, based on studies such as those of João Luiz Vieira, Robert Stam and Arthur Autran, the film Carnaval Atlântida (José Carlos Burle, 1952) became the most valued example of the genre, with its reflexive character and sophisticated discussion about the politics of Brazilian cinema. Burle's film came to occupy the prominent place within the chanchada genre previously given to Carlos Manga's film. Produced before Carnaval Atlântida and Nem Sansão nem Dalila, Aviso aos navegantes stands out not as an exception to the genre, but as the rule. Rather than subverting the conventions of chanchadas, the film brilliantly employs all of its clichés, with an excellent cast of Oscarito and Grande Otelo, villain José Lewgoy and the romantic duo of Eliane Macedo and Anselmo Duarte. Restored by Chico Moreira at Labocine from different prints of various gauges, Aviso aos navegantes gradually and deservedly became the main chanchada reference for scholars of the genre.

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Restoration of Moacyr Fenelon’s films.
Conducted by the Instituto para Preservação da Memória do Cinema Brasileiro (IPMCB), an organization run by Alice Gonzaga and Hernani Heffner, the restoration project of the films of Moacyr Fenelon extended between 2006 and 2010 and was sponsored by the Petrobrás Cultural Program. The project brought to light five feature films made between 1948 and 1951 that had not been seen in decades. Moacyr Fenelon is best known as a pioneer sound technician during the 1930s and as one of the creators of the Atlântida studio in 1941. Fenelon had the final part of his career recovered by the restoration project: the years when he created his company the Cine-Produções Fenelon and then joined Flama Filmes studio. Unfortunately, his relatively early death in 1953 prevented the director from having a more effective participation in the movement he helped to foster, keeping in mind that Nelson Pereira dos Santos not for nothing named the crew who made Rio 40 degrees, “Team Moacyr Fenelon”. In my PhD thesis, “Carnaval, mistério e gangsters: o filme policial no Brasil: 1915-1951” (UFF, 2011), two films restored by this project served as fundamental examples for my research of a dramatic cinema made during post-War times in Brazil: Obrigado, Doutor (1948), based on a homonymous radio series, and Domino Negro (1950), adapted from a novel by Hélio Soveral. More broadly, Fenelon's role as an “independent producer” was one of the main themes of Luís Alberto da Rocha Melo's fantastic PhD thesis, “Cinema Independente: produção, exibição e distribuição no Rio de Janeiro: 1948 to 1954 (UFF, 2011). In that thesis, he demonstrated Fenelon's pioneering leadership in developing the mode of production that would later be followed by “auteurs” who are identified today with the so-called “independent cinema of the 50s”, such as Alex Viany, Roberto Santos and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Finally, Fenelon’s musical Poeira de Estrelas (1948) surprised today’s audiences by portraying the love between two women, receiving a pioneering analysis by Mateus Nagime in one of the chapters of his M.A. dissertation “Em busca das origens de um cinema queer no Brasil” (UFSCar, 2016).
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DVD Box-Set “Coleção CTAv” (CTAv Collection)
Initiative of the Centro Técnico do Audiovisual (CTAv) in partnership with the Cinemateca Brasileira, the digitization of short films produced by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE), the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC) and Embrafilme, made a large number of documentaries produced by the State between the 1930s and the 1970s accessible. The beautiful DVD box-set “CTAv Collection” which resulted from the digitization project was sent to many universities for free. It contained 110 titles divided into 20 discs, not only allowing for a broader view of filmmaker Humberto Mauro’s filmography, but also shedding light on lesser-known works by several other important directors such as Leon Hirszman, Arthur Omar, Adhemar Gonzaga, Linduarte Noronha, and a wide range of educational, ethnographic, animation and compilation films. Mauro's rural education films from the 1950s, for example, would go on to be written about in a special chapter by Sheila Schwarzman in the recent book “Nova história do cinema brasileiro” (2018). Also, films that address the very history of Brazilian cinema such as the important Mulheres de cinema (Ana Maria Magalhães, 1976) was the subject of Luís Alberto Rocha Melo's chapter in the seminal book “Feminino e plural: mulheres no cinema brasileiro”, organized by Marina Tedesco and Karla Holanda, from his project on audiovisual historiography of Brazilian cinema. These films released on DVD also became accessible through the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais website (www.bcc.gov.br).5
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Event “Cinema Marginal e suas fronteiras” (Cinema Marginal and its Borders)
Initially held in São Paulo in 2001, the film screening series “Cinema Marginal and its Borders” was perhaps the greatest event dedicated to Brazilian cinema among the series of outstanding screenings sponsored by the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB) in the 2000s. Organized by the founder of Heco Produções Eugenio Puppo, the event brought together a wide range of films that had not been shown for many years, much less together. The event also helped to consolidate a successful formula for future events: film screenings + debates + catalog with texts specially written by specialists + new prints struck to premiere at the event. The impact of the experimental and iconoclast films made between the 1960s and 1970s was enormous, especially in comparison with the expensive and inexpressive films that comprised most of the contemporary Brazilian cinema of the “Retomada”. At UFF, professor João Luiz Vieira built a course around Cinema Marginal in light of the event, his students attending many screenings and becoming more interested in Cinema Marginal. In the wake of the event and its success, producers and critics from Rio de Janeiro later organized film series dedicated to directors Rogério Sganzerla and Julio Bressane, notable auteurs of the Cinema Marginal period. These series took place in the same cultural center, and new film prints were especially struck, allowing for the (re)discovery of lesser known titles from the filmography of these filmmakers. 
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The event also had a major impact on the academic world, as a huge number of dissertations and theses were soon dedicated to Cinema Marginal. The topic of Cinema Marginal would soon go to supplant the Cinema Novo movement in popularity at universities. As a result of such success, Heco Produções launched the 2009 DVD collection “Cinema Marginal Brasileiro” in partnership with Lume and the Cinemateca Brasileira, institutions further collaborating to widely circulate Cinema Marginal films. At the same time, a film like Copacabana mon amour (Rogério Sganzerla, 1970), restored between 2013 and 2015 through the Petrobras Cultural Program and then released on DVD, became the subject of numerous academic research projects and became an often debated work at conferences.

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Project “Resgate da obra cinematográfica de Gerson Tavares” (Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ Films)
Director of two fictional features in the 1960s and several short documentaries between the 1950s and 1970s, Gerson Tavares had his name and films erased from the history of Brazilian cinema. The project “Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ films” was approved in the first (and until today only) edition of the “Preservation and Conservation of the Fluminense Artistic Memory” public call4 by the Rio de Janeiro Secretariat of Culture in 2012. “Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ films” had the initial objective of restoring the film “Antes, o Verão” (1968), which was in danger of being lost as its only two remaining 35mm prints were already deteriorating. However, the scope of the project was widened, allowing us to digitize the feature film “Amor e desamor” (1966) as well as seven other shorts by the director. These films would go on to be released on a non-commercial double DVD. The completion of the project allowed for what was almost a new premiere of Gerson’s films, and a real rediscovery of the octogenarian director by new generations occurred. Often compared to Walter Hugo Khouri who worked in São Paulo, the work of Gerson Tavares is proof that there was quality dramatic cinema made in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s outside of the Cinema Novo movement. Absent from most panoramic books on the history of Brazilian cinema until then, the project allowed the name of Gerson Tavares to be reinserted in that history. As an example, Fernão Ramos mentioned Gerson’s films in his chapter about Brazilian cinema of the 60s in the the recent book “Nova história do cinema brasileiro” (Sesc, 2018), organized by Sheila Schvarzman and Ramos himself.

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DVD Box-Set “Resgate do cinema silencioso brasileiro” (Rescuing Silent Brazilian Cinema)
In his fundamental 1979 book “Cinema Brasileiro: propostas para uma história”, Jean-Claude Bernardet pointed out the importance of documentary (or “natural”) film in Brazilian silent cinema, despite the much greater attention allotted to fictional (“posado” or staged) film by historians. While the availability of newsreels, actualities and documentary films produced up until 1930 has always been scarce, these works in fact represent a much larger volume of preserved titles than the even scarcer availability of fiction films. A fundamental action towards providing access to silent documentary films was a project developed with the Cinemateca Brasileira by Carlos Roberto de Souza: the 2009 DVD box-set “Rescuing Silent Brazilian Cinema”. Sponsored by Caixa Econômica Federal, this box-set was composed of 27 films gathered into five DVDs and came with a booklet written by Carlos Roberto. Despite the presence of “posados” (fictional films), such as the oldest preserved fictional Brazilian film, Os óculos do vovô (Francisco Santos, 1913), the vast majority of titles within the box were “naturais” (that is, documentaries) grouped into 5 themes: “Riches of São Paulo”, “Aspects of Brazil", "Sciences (or occultism) and riches", "Daily life" and “Public ceremonies". The circulation of these films provided researchers with greater access to a wide range of films that had rarely been seen, promoting new research on Brazilian silent cinema. However, research into this field had already begun gaining momentum during gathering sessions of scholars at the Cinemateca Brasileira that resulted in the book “Viagem ao cinema silencioso do Brasil” (Azougue, 2011), organized by Samuel Paiva and Sheila Schvarzman, also largely dedicated to documentary silent films. In addition to that, important articles were written about this topic by Eduardo Morettin and Hernani Heffner. Subsequently, the films included in the DVDs became accessible through the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais website (www.bcc.gov.br).3
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Canal Brasil's “Como era gostoso o nosso cinema” (How Tasty was Our Cinema) Program.
The emergence of pay-TV Channel Canal Brasil in 1998 provided a new window for showing old Brazilian films on television. Canal Brasil needed to acquire Brazilian cinema content for its programming, so they offered to pay producers for broadcasting rights in addition to paying for the telecine costs of films that did not yet have video copies (Beta, then Full-HD). For some Brazilian producers, especially producers of commercial works who had been unable to monetize their films since the decline of the VHS market in the mid-2000s, it was as if money was coming from heaven. They finally had a way to commercially release their films through Canal Brasil. 
Naturally, the main type of film that reached Canal Brasil was the popular pornochanchada. These were soft-core porn films produced between the 1970s and 1980s. The telecineing of many pornochanchada films motivated Canal Brasil to create the program “How tasty was our cinema” (mocking the title of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1971 film How Tasty was My Little Frenchman), a series of live airings dedicated to the genre. Soon after these pornochanchadas were shown on Canal Brasil, they became widely available (as people would pirate recordings of the live TV presentation and post them online). With new access to these films, an extraordinary revision of the genre occurred. 
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Although authors such as Jean-Claude Bernardet, José Carlos Avellar and José Mário Ortiz Ramos wrote about pornochanchadas in the 1970s and 1980s, few working within the field of academia after them (perhaps with the exception of Nuno Cesar Abreu) realized the quality and perspicacity of these pioneering works. Only more recently have there been new academic dissertations that go beyond a totalizing and simplistic analysis of the genre. These texts move away from the point of view that pornochanchadas merely held a mechanistic relationship with censorship, and that the “birth” of the genre was merely the result of State repression. Instead, they focus on specific films and filmographies, pointing out the diversity of pornochanchadas in terms of themes, approaches and quality. 
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M.A. dissertations such as Luiz Paulo Gomes Neves’ “A construção de um profeta: A prática discursiva enquanto distinção de autoria no gênero pornochanchada” (UFF, 2012) and Luciano Carneiro de Oliveira Júnior’s “Masculinidades excessivas e ambivalentes na pornochanchada dos anos 1980” (UFF, 2019), both supervised by professor Mariana Baltar, are two good examples of the kind of positive influence that a large number of digitally available titles can have on film genre studies. 

1.  Telecine is the process of transferring motion picture film into video. Telecine enables a motion picture, captured originally on film stock, to be viewed with standard video equipment such as television sets, video cassette recorders (VCR), DVD, Blu-ray Disc or computers.

2. One exception to this is actor, director, and producer Carlo Mossy, whose films were acquired by Canal Brasil and then also released in a 2013 DVD collection.

3. Due to Cinemateca Brasileira’s current crisis resulting from recent government actions, the website of the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais, hosted by the Cinemateca, has often suffered from technical problems

4. In Brazil, governments occasionally put out “public calls”, which are similar to grants. Public calls are opportunities open to anybody to compete to get something funded, usually cultural works or research projects.

5. See 3
Desde os anos 1990, os mais ambiciosos e vultuosos projetos de restauração de filmes realizados no Brasil foram aqueles voltados para a filmografia de consagrados cineastas do Cinema Novo, como Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman e Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Foram projetos que restauraram e produziram novas cópias de exibição de muitos títulos que já eram considerados clássicos. De certo modo, não fizeram filmes como “Terra em transe” (Glauber Rocha, 1967) ou “Eles não usam black-tie” (Leon Hirszman, 1981) serem necessariamente considerados mais importantes do que eles já eram para a história do cinema brasileiro. Essa lista, pautada pela minha experiência pessoal, privilegia outros tipos de iniciativas. Tentei elencar projetos realizados nas últimas duas décadas que tiveram um amplo impacto, particularmente junto a pesquisadores e professores universitários, para um movimento de revisão da história do cinema brasileiro. Foram projetos que provocaram sentimentos de frescor, surpresa e novidade. Um dos critérios fundamentais na escolha desses dez projetos foi sua ampla repercussão e alcance, tendo ajudado a ampliar, alterar ou revisar os cânones. Assim, um projeto importante como “Clássicos e raros do nosso cinema”, realização da Cinemateca Brasileira com o patrocínio do Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, não foi incluído apesar de seus inegáveis méritos. Afinal, o projeto viabilizou a feitura de novas cópias 35mm que, elevadas a materiais de preservação, foram projetadas pouquíssimas vezes para além da exibição contratual nas mostras que viabilizaram sua produção, restritas a São Paulo e, no máximo, também ao Rio de Janeiro. Além disso, projetos importantes, porém mais recentes, como a digitalização e lançamento em DVD de filmes de Hugo Carvana e de Aloysio Raulino, também não foram incluídos por sua repercussão na academia – não tão imediata quanto na crítica, por exemplo – ainda me parecer estar sendo processada. Podemos mencionar ainda situações em que o interesse acadêmico antecedeu as ações de preservação. Esse parece ser o caso da “redescoberta” do primeiro longa-metragem dirigido por uma cineasta negra – “Amor maldito” (Adélia Sampaio, 1984) – pela tese de Edileuza Penha de Souza (Cinema na Panela de Barro: Mulheres Negras, Narrativas de Amor, Afeto e Intimidade, UnB, 2013). A atenção dada a “Amor maldito” levou à situação do filme passar a ser amplamente solicitado para exibições por volta de 2017, mas circulando então em cópias antigas cuja qualidade não correspondia ao renovado interesse por ele. De um modo geral, busquei nessa lista evidenciar como a originalidade, o cuidado e a pesquisa envolvida na curadoria, planejamento e realização de projetos de digitalização, duplicação, difusão e restauração são fundamentais para o seu sucesso. Tentei ainda destacar a relevante e contínua influência de ações de preservação e difusão na historiografia do cinema brasileiro. Por fim, o objetivo principal é menos hierarquizar diferentes ações do que estimular o debate.
Corcina and Rio de Janeiro’s Underground Cinema
Roberto Moura, the (now retired) filmmaker and professor at UFF, began a research project in the 2000s that focused on what he called “cinema alternativo carioca” (Rio de Janeiro underground cinema). This project focused on the wide ranging film production (especially of short films) of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s and early 1980s. Involving members of the Brazilian Association of Documentarians (ABD), production companies would include Corisco, Moura himself, and especially Corcina - Cooperative of Independent Film Directors. The underground films of this period are marked by a diversity and experimentalism which flourished under the so-called “Lei do Curta” (the mandatory exhibition of Brazilian short films together with foreign features). Directors such as José Joffily, Sérgio Péo, Sylvio Da-Rin, all participated in making bold short works. More recently, Lucas Parente (son of the multimedia artist and professor André Parente, who directed some short films that are included in this trend), started a movement to rescue this material, together with the Cinemateca do MAM, Dobra - International Festival of Experimental Cinema, and others. As a result of these efforts, a 2019 digitalization of Eclipse (Antonio Moreno, 1984), an animation painted directly on film, was exhibited in several festivals and academic events, giving continuity to Roberto Moura's research, and fostering a renewed interest in these films and directors.
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The DVD Release of A Rainha Diaba
O Centro Técnico do Audiovisual (CTAv) has launched beautiful DVD editions of films from its collection over the past decades, such as silent films made in Cataguazes and Recife or even sound feature films such as O Saci (Rodolfo Nanni, 1951) and Assault on the Pay Train (Roberto Farias, 1962). Special mention should be made of the 2004 release of Antonio Carlos Fontoura's second feature film “A Rainha Diaba” (1974) on a beautiful DVD copy. This “pop-gay-black thriller” (as it was announced at the time of its release) was rediscovered two years after the premiere of Madame Satã by Karïm Anouz, helping to highlight that A Rainha Diaba is one of the most interesting Brazilian films of the 1970s. This is a beautiful example of the rescue of a film that was still very “modern” even at the time of its rediscovery. The neat edition of the DVD, filled with well-produced extras (interviews, making-ofs, trailers, etc.), was another incentive for the wide circulation of A Rainha Diaba after a certain ostracism to which the film had initially been unfairly relegated.
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The Reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários (1929)
The reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários (1929) was a project developed by the University Laboratory of Audiovisual Preservation of the Federal Fluminense University (LUPA-UFF) and carried out by myself and professor Reinaldo Cardenuto. The project resulted in the 2019 launch of a shortened version of the first Brazilian sound feature film, which is considered lost. This project gathered together different remaining fragments of the work such as excerpts of moving images, photographs and sound records. This audiovisual preservation project, unlike the rest on this list, was a consequence of and not the impetus for academic research. As the study of the arrival and popularization of sound cinema in Brazil motivated the interest of several researchers such as Fernando Morais da Costa (UFF), Carlos Roberto de Souza (UFSCar), and Carlos Eduardo Pereira (Cinemateca do MAM), the work of Luiz de Barros began receiving more attention from researchers as well. Researchers of Luiz de Barros include myself, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo (UFScar) and her graduate student Evandro Vasconcellos, author of the M.A. dissertation “Entre o palco e a tela: as relações do cinema com o teatro de revista nas comédias de Luiz de Barros” (UFSCar, 2015). The reconstruction of Acabaram-se os otários, on the other hand, may come to encourage other projects that combine historical research and audiovisual preservation, bringing universities and film archives closer together.
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“Classics of Cinédia” Restorations
In 2004, Cinédia released copies of four restored films produced by the company through a project sponsored by BR Distribuidora. One of them, Alô, alô, carnaval (Adhemar Gonzaga and Wallace Downey, 1936), was already the most well-known Brazilian musical of the 1930s. But two others - Mulher (Octávio Gabus Mendes, 1931) and 24 horas de sonho (Chianca de Garcia, 1941) - were true “novelties” for researchers, as they had not been widely circulated for many years. Directed by Octávio Gabus Mendes, Mulher was a silent film with music synchronized with Vitaphone records at a time when talkies were already the norm in Brazil for two years. However, at that time, many movie theaters, especially in the suburbs and in the countryside, had not yet begun the move toward sound cinema. The film is highly sophisticated, comparable to another late silent production by Cinédia, the classic Ganga Bruta (Humberto Mauro, 1933). In addition to prompting interesting research on sound in cinema and silent cinema, the restoration of Mulher was the subject of the M.A. dissertation by Joice Scavone, “Mulher: a trajetória do som do primeiro filme synchronizado da Cinédia” (UFF, 2013), which discussed the close link between film studies and film preservation in academia. The Classics of Cinédia restorations remain in restricted circulation, many of the works still unavailable in digital format. As a result, the fourth film which was restored, Adhemar Gonzaga’s 1944 Romance proibido remains practically unknown to audiences. Despite this, the films that are accessible had an extremely significant impact on the academic world.
01
Duplication of Fábula or Mitt Hem är Copacabana by Arne Sucksdorff
Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff was best known in the history of Brazilian cinema for having offered a film course in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, which became a milestone moment for the emerging Cinema Novo movement. However, before moving to Mato Grosso’s Pantanal (where he would live until his death), Sucksdorff shot the fascinating Fábula (1965) in Rio de Janeiro. This feature film was co-produced with Sweden and it had been practically forgotten since its initial release. However, in the mid-1990s, in a project in partnership with the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB), Chico Moreira, who was then the head of conservation at the Cinemateca do MAM, duplicated the film. Chico produced a new 16mm exhibition print optically reduced from the original 35mm internegative of the Brazilian version of the film which had been preserved by the film archive. In the 2000s, Hernani Heffner - who succeeded Chico at the Cinemateca do MAM - began to frequently screen that 16mm print of Fábula, always with enormous success among the public who were dazzled by this practically unknown work. Scholars soon became interested. João Luiz Vieira analyzed the film in the award-winning 2009 book “World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives”, edited by Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. I myself wrote about the film in the catalog of the “Olhares Neo-Realistas” film series, held at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in 2006. The film also became the subject of a wider research project by professor Esther Hamburguer (USP), which brought to Brazil a digital copy of the Swedish version. The interest aroused by the film was such that in 2011 the Moreira Salles Institute financed the making of a new print of the Brazilian version – this time in 35mm – from the original internegative.
01
DVDs "Os filmes de Zózimo Bulbul" and " Obras raras: o cinema negro da década de 70" (Films of Zózimo Bulbul" and "Rare works: Black Cinema of the 70s)
Released in 2005 and 2006 through a partnership between the Centro de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento, Afro Carioca Cinema Center and the Palmares Cultural Foundation of the Ministry of Culture, the DVDs “Films of Zózimo Bulbul” and “Rare works: the black cinema of the 70s” were fundamental towards expanding the circulation of films by important black Brazilian filmmakers as well as contributing to their revaluation. The double DVD-set “Films of Zózimo Bulbul” featured six films by the actor and director, made between the 1970s and 2000s. Bulbul’s first short film Alma no Olho (1973) has been reevaluated as the masterpiece that it is, being recently chosen as the 11th best short film in the history of Brazilian cinema in a list made by the Brazilian Association of Film Critics (Abbracine) in 2019. The double DVD “Rare works: black cinema of the 70s” presented six films directed by Antunes Filho, Antonio Pitanga, Zózimo Bulbul, Ola Balogun, Waldir Onofre and Odilon Lopez. Of particular note is the feature film As aventuras amorosas de um padeiro (1975), Onofre's debut feature film produced by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. In addition to the black protagonist, this erotic comedy produced during the “climax” of pornochanchada stands out for its feminist tone, rare in a genre filled with sexist works. Thus, in addition to contributing to the growing interest in black cinema in the academic world, the DVD also helped newly highlight Onofre's cinema and, more broadly, the pornochanchada itself.
01
Event “Cinema Brasileiro, a vergonha de uma nação” (Brazilian Cinema, the Shame of a Nation)
Researcher Remier Lion had the ambition to hold a large retrospective of Brazilian exploitation films with this provocative title (a reference to Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface) at the Cinemateca do MAM when it had just resumed its programming after a serious crisis hit the institution in the early 2000s. However, his idea was not well received by the institution’s then curator Gilberto Santeiro, who was very uncomfortable with the provocation aimed at the respectability of Brazilian cinema. Despite this, Remier brought part of his program to film clubs in different locations of Rio de Janeiro, titling the new program “Malditos films brasileiros” (Damned Brazilian Films). Finally, the program reached the Cinemateca Brasileira, where it was held with enormous success in 2004, even leading Remier to join the programming team of the film archive. Working at the Cinemateca Brasileira provided Remier with access to even rarer materials for his project. Although Remier’s  program can be understood as a general revision and revaluation of the films made at the “Boca do Lixo” (the neighborhood that gathered commercial film professionals in São Paulo from the 1960s to 1980s), the screening series “Brazilian Cinema: the shame of a nation” had a broader scope, incorporating a filmmaker that Remier was researching for a very long time, Nilo Machado, who independently produced strip-tease films in Rio de Janeiro since the 1960s. In general, the exhibition at the Cinemateca Brasileira shed light on several unknown examples of the long trajectory of Brazilian commercial, popular, and genre cinema, which had not yet been explored in Brazilian film historiography due to its penchant for emphasizing auteurs. Thus, this event received enormous media coverage and had great repercussion among film critics. It was also aligned with an academic research trend that was just burgeoning, exemplified by Rodrigo Pereira's dissertation “Western Feijoada: o faroeste no cinema brasileiro” (Unesp, 2002), or by works which were then yet to have been completed, including the doctoral theses of Laura Cánepa “Medo de que?: uma história do horror nos filmes brasileiros” (Unicamp, 2008) and Alfredo Suppia “Limite de alerta! Ficção cientifica em atmosfera rarefeita : uma introdução ao estudo da FC no cinema brasileiro e em algumas cinematografias off-Hollywood” (Unicamp, 2007).
01
Restoration of Aviso aos navegantes
With the sponsorship of BR Distribuidora and Petrobrás, the Centro de Pesquisadores do Cinema Brasileiro (CPCB) has carried out important restorations of films from different periods and directors over the last few decades. Perhaps the most notable restoration was the chanchada Aviso aos navegantes (Watson Macedo, 1950), completed between 1999 and 2000. When the 1950s musical comedies known as chanchadas started to be revaluated in the 1970s, Jean-Claude Bernardet highlighted Nem Sansão nem Dalila (Carlos Manga, 1954) as one of the most important political films in Brazilian cinema. From then on out, if any chanchada was included on the list of the most important Brazilian films of all time, it was usually this Hollywood parody full of criticism about the Getúlio Vargas government. Subsequently, based on studies such as those of João Luiz Vieira, Robert Stam and Arthur Autran, the film Carnaval Atlântida (José Carlos Burle, 1952) became the most valued example of the genre, with its reflexive character and sophisticated discussion about the politics of Brazilian cinema. Burle's film came to occupy the prominent place within the chanchada genre previously given to Carlos Manga's film. Produced before Carnaval Atlântida and Nem Sansão nem Dalila, Aviso aos navegantes stands out not as an exception to the genre, but as the rule. Rather than subverting the conventions of chanchadas, the film brilliantly employs all of its clichés, with an excellent cast of Oscarito and Grande Otelo, villain José Lewgoy and the romantic duo of Eliane Macedo and Anselmo Duarte. Restored by Chico Moreira at Labocine from different prints of various gauges, Aviso aos navegantes gradually and deservedly became the main chanchada reference for scholars of the genre.

01
Restoration of Moacyr Fenelon’s films.
Conducted by the Instituto para Preservação da Memória do Cinema Brasileiro (IPMCB), an organization run by Alice Gonzaga and Hernani Heffner, the restoration project of the films of Moacyr Fenelon extended between 2006 and 2010 and was sponsored by the Petrobrás Cultural Program. The project brought to light five feature films made between 1948 and 1951 that had not been seen in decades. Moacyr Fenelon is best known as a pioneer sound technician during the 1930s and as one of the creators of the Atlântida studio in 1941. Fenelon had the final part of his career recovered by the restoration project: the years when he created his company the Cine-Produções Fenelon and then joined Flama Filmes studio. Unfortunately, his relatively early death in 1953 prevented the director from having a more effective participation in the movement he helped to foster, keeping in mind that Nelson Pereira dos Santos not for nothing named the crew who made Rio 40 degrees, “Team Moacyr Fenelon”. In my PhD thesis, “Carnaval, mistério e gangsters: o filme policial no Brasil: 1915-1951” (UFF, 2011), two films restored by this project served as fundamental examples for my research of a dramatic cinema made during post-War times in Brazil: Obrigado, Doutor (1948), based on a homonymous radio series, and Domino Negro (1950), adapted from a novel by Hélio Soveral. More broadly, Fenelon's role as an “independent producer” was one of the main themes of Luís Alberto da Rocha Melo's fantastic PhD thesis, “Cinema Independente: produção, exibição e distribuição no Rio de Janeiro: 1948 to 1954 (UFF, 2011). In that thesis, he demonstrated Fenelon's pioneering leadership in developing the mode of production that would later be followed by “auteurs” who are identified today with the so-called “independent cinema of the 50s”, such as Alex Viany, Roberto Santos and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Finally, Fenelon’s musical Poeira de Estrelas (1948) surprised today’s audiences by portraying the love between two women, receiving a pioneering analysis by Mateus Nagime in one of the chapters of his M.A. dissertation “Em busca das origens de um cinema queer no Brasil” (UFSCar, 2016).
01
DVD Box-Set “Coleção CTAv” (CTAv Collection)
Initiative of the Centro Técnico do Audiovisual (CTAv) in partnership with the Cinemateca Brasileira, the digitization of short films produced by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE), the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC) and Embrafilme, made a large number of documentaries produced by the State between the 1930s and the 1970s accessible. The beautiful DVD box-set “CTAv Collection” which resulted from the digitization project was sent to many universities for free. It contained 110 titles divided into 20 discs, not only allowing for a broader view of filmmaker Humberto Mauro’s filmography, but also shedding light on lesser-known works by several other important directors such as Leon Hirszman, Arthur Omar, Adhemar Gonzaga, Linduarte Noronha, and a wide range of educational, ethnographic, animation and compilation films. Mauro's rural education films from the 1950s, for example, would go on to be written about in a special chapter by Sheila Schwarzman in the recent book “Nova história do cinema brasileiro” (2018). Also, films that address the very history of Brazilian cinema such as the important Mulheres de cinema (Ana Maria Magalhães, 1976) was the subject of Luís Alberto Rocha Melo's chapter in the seminal book “Feminino e plural: mulheres no cinema brasileiro”, organized by Marina Tedesco and Karla Holanda, from his project on audiovisual historiography of Brazilian cinema. These films released on DVD also became accessible through the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais website (www.bcc.gov.br).5
01
Event “Cinema Marginal e suas fronteiras” (Cinema Marginal and its Borders)
Initially held in São Paulo in 2001, the film screening series “Cinema Marginal and its Borders” was perhaps the greatest event dedicated to Brazilian cinema among the series of outstanding screenings sponsored by the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB) in the 2000s. Organized by the founder of Heco Produções Eugenio Puppo, the event brought together a wide range of films that had not been shown for many years, much less together. The event also helped to consolidate a successful formula for future events: film screenings + debates + catalog with texts specially written by specialists + new prints struck to premiere at the event. The impact of the experimental and iconoclast films made between the 1960s and 1970s was enormous, especially in comparison with the expensive and inexpressive films that comprised most of the contemporary Brazilian cinema of the “Retomada”. At UFF, professor João Luiz Vieira built a course around Cinema Marginal in light of the event, his students attending many screenings and becoming more interested in Cinema Marginal. In the wake of the event and its success, producers and critics from Rio de Janeiro later organized film series dedicated to directors Rogério Sganzerla and Julio Bressane, notable auteurs of the Cinema Marginal period. These series took place in the same cultural center, and new film prints were especially struck, allowing for the (re)discovery of lesser known titles from the filmography of these filmmakers. 
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The event also had a major impact on the academic world, as a huge number of dissertations and theses were soon dedicated to Cinema Marginal. The topic of Cinema Marginal would soon go to supplant the Cinema Novo movement in popularity at universities. As a result of such success, Heco Produções launched the 2009 DVD collection “Cinema Marginal Brasileiro” in partnership with Lume and the Cinemateca Brasileira, institutions further collaborating to widely circulate Cinema Marginal films. At the same time, a film like Copacabana mon amour (Rogério Sganzerla, 1970), restored between 2013 and 2015 through the Petrobras Cultural Program and then released on DVD, became the subject of numerous academic research projects and became an often debated work at conferences.

01
Project “Resgate da obra cinematográfica de Gerson Tavares” (Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ Films)
Director of two fictional features in the 1960s and several short documentaries between the 1950s and 1970s, Gerson Tavares had his name and films erased from the history of Brazilian cinema. The project “Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ films” was approved in the first (and until today only) edition of the “Preservation and Conservation of the Fluminense Artistic Memory” public call4 by the Rio de Janeiro Secretariat of Culture in 2012. “Rediscovery of Gerson Tavares’ films” had the initial objective of restoring the film “Antes, o Verão” (1968), which was in danger of being lost as its only two remaining 35mm prints were already deteriorating. However, the scope of the project was widened, allowing us to digitize the feature film “Amor e desamor” (1966) as well as seven other shorts by the director. These films would go on to be released on a non-commercial double DVD. The completion of the project allowed for what was almost a new premiere of Gerson’s films, and a real rediscovery of the octogenarian director by new generations occurred. Often compared to Walter Hugo Khouri who worked in São Paulo, the work of Gerson Tavares is proof that there was quality dramatic cinema made in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s outside of the Cinema Novo movement. Absent from most panoramic books on the history of Brazilian cinema until then, the project allowed the name of Gerson Tavares to be reinserted in that history. As an example, Fernão Ramos mentioned Gerson’s films in his chapter about Brazilian cinema of the 60s in the the recent book “Nova história do cinema brasileiro” (Sesc, 2018), organized by Sheila Schvarzman and Ramos himself.

01
DVD Box-Set “Resgate do cinema silencioso brasileiro” (Rescuing Silent Brazilian Cinema)
In his fundamental 1979 book “Cinema Brasileiro: propostas para uma história”, Jean-Claude Bernardet pointed out the importance of documentary (or “natural”) film in Brazilian silent cinema, despite the much greater attention allotted to fictional (“posado” or staged) film by historians. While the availability of newsreels, actualities and documentary films produced up until 1930 has always been scarce, these works in fact represent a much larger volume of preserved titles than the even scarcer availability of fiction films. A fundamental action towards providing access to silent documentary films was a project developed with the Cinemateca Brasileira by Carlos Roberto de Souza: the 2009 DVD box-set “Rescuing Silent Brazilian Cinema”. Sponsored by Caixa Econômica Federal, this box-set was composed of 27 films gathered into five DVDs and came with a booklet written by Carlos Roberto. Despite the presence of “posados” (fictional films), such as the oldest preserved fictional Brazilian film, Os óculos do vovô (Francisco Santos, 1913), the vast majority of titles within the box were “naturais” (that is, documentaries) grouped into 5 themes: “Riches of São Paulo”, “Aspects of Brazil", "Sciences (or occultism) and riches", "Daily life" and “Public ceremonies". The circulation of these films provided researchers with greater access to a wide range of films that had rarely been seen, promoting new research on Brazilian silent cinema. However, research into this field had already begun gaining momentum during gathering sessions of scholars at the Cinemateca Brasileira that resulted in the book “Viagem ao cinema silencioso do Brasil” (Azougue, 2011), organized by Samuel Paiva and Sheila Schvarzman, also largely dedicated to documentary silent films. In addition to that, important articles were written about this topic by Eduardo Morettin and Hernani Heffner. Subsequently, the films included in the DVDs became accessible through the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais website (www.bcc.gov.br).3
01
Canal Brasil's “Como era gostoso o nosso cinema” (How Tasty was Our Cinema) Program.
The emergence of pay-TV Channel Canal Brasil in 1998 provided a new window for showing old Brazilian films on television. Canal Brasil needed to acquire Brazilian cinema content for its programming, so they offered to pay producers for broadcasting rights in addition to paying for the telecine costs of films that did not yet have video copies (Beta, then Full-HD). For some Brazilian producers, especially producers of commercial works who had been unable to monetize their films since the decline of the VHS market in the mid-2000s, it was as if money was coming from heaven. They finally had a way to commercially release their films through Canal Brasil. 
Naturally, the main type of film that reached Canal Brasil was the popular pornochanchada. These were soft-core porn films produced between the 1970s and 1980s. The telecineing of many pornochanchada films motivated Canal Brasil to create the program “How tasty was our cinema” (mocking the title of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1971 film How Tasty was My Little Frenchman), a series of live airings dedicated to the genre. Soon after these pornochanchadas were shown on Canal Brasil, they became widely available (as people would pirate recordings of the live TV presentation and post them online). With new access to these films, an extraordinary revision of the genre occurred. 
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Although authors such as Jean-Claude Bernardet, José Carlos Avellar and José Mário Ortiz Ramos wrote about pornochanchadas in the 1970s and 1980s, few working within the field of academia after them (perhaps with the exception of Nuno Cesar Abreu) realized the quality and perspicacity of these pioneering works. Only more recently have there been new academic dissertations that go beyond a totalizing and simplistic analysis of the genre. These texts move away from the point of view that pornochanchadas merely held a mechanistic relationship with censorship, and that the “birth” of the genre was merely the result of State repression. Instead, they focus on specific films and filmographies, pointing out the diversity of pornochanchadas in terms of themes, approaches and quality. 
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M.A. dissertations such as Luiz Paulo Gomes Neves’ “A construção de um profeta: A prática discursiva enquanto distinção de autoria no gênero pornochanchada” (UFF, 2012) and Luciano Carneiro de Oliveira Júnior’s “Masculinidades excessivas e ambivalentes na pornochanchada dos anos 1980” (UFF, 2019), both supervised by professor Mariana Baltar, are two good examples of the kind of positive influence that a large number of digitally available titles can have on film genre studies. 

1.  Telecine is the process of transferring motion picture film into video. Telecine enables a motion picture, captured originally on film stock, to be viewed with standard video equipment such as television sets, video cassette recorders (VCR), DVD, Blu-ray Disc or computers.

2. One exception to this is actor, director, and producer Carlo Mossy, whose films were acquired by Canal Brasil and then also released in a 2013 DVD collection.

3. Due to Cinemateca Brasileira’s current crisis resulting from recent government actions, the website of the Banco de Conteúdos Culturais, hosted by the Cinemateca, has often suffered from technical problems

4. In Brazil, governments occasionally put out “public calls”, which are similar to grants. Public calls are opportunities open to anybody to compete to get something funded, usually cultural works or research projects.

5. See 3
This selection of “Ten Brazilian Films that Remain in the Shadows due to Poor Accessibility” is based on my experiences as a film preservationist over the last fifteen years as well as my work as a professor and film club organizer. As a film professor and film club organizer, I often faced the difficulty of finding a copy of a film that I wanted to screen in class or at the club. However, these difficulties in accessing Brazilian films has changed over time. For example, In the mid-2000s, I and some friends ran a film club dedicated to Brazilian films at the Museum of Modern Art FilmArchive in Rio de Janeiro (Cinemateca do MAM) called“Cineclube Tela Brasilis”. There, we had the chance of using the vast collection of film prints of the MAM Film Archive and we usually chose films that people couldn’t find anywhere else. So, we often programmed 35mm or 16mm prints of Brazilian films that weren’t available in other carriers, either video or digital. Some of the films we screened then are still widely rare and unknown as they haven’t been digitized since that time. In this list compiled for Limite, Veneno is one of the titles we screened in Tela Brasilis program of July 25th, 2009. On the other hand, the short film Bossa Nova: a moderna música popular brasileira, also in this list, is a title that we wanted to show in one of Tela Brasilis exhibitions, but we couldn’t, as there was only a preservation master, but no exhibition print, neither on film nor digital. 

As a film professor at Federal Fluminense University (UFF), whereI have been teaching courses on Brazilian Film History to graduate students for almost ten years, the problem is quite different. In the classroom, I am only able to screen DVDs or digital files, which often limits the selection of Brazilian features from the silent period to the 1940s that I can show. Unfortunately, many titles that are important to show to students exist only in very bad digital copies taken from VHS tapes, which is the case of Alô, Alô, Carnaval, for instance. That’s why I’ve occasionally taken the opportunity to bring my students to the MAM Film Archive for their classes, where we would screen films in beautiful 35mm prints, something that my students are not used anymore. That was when I was able to watch, for example, a 35mm print of É Simonal (mentioned in the list) that was borrowed from the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection.
Fragments of Terra Encantada (Silvino Santos, 1922)
São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole (dir. Rudolf Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, 1929)
Alô, Alô, Carnaval (Wallace Downey and Adhemar Gonzaga, 1936)
Eterna esperança (Leo Marten, 1940)
Carnaval no fogo (Watson Macedo, 1949)
Veneno (Gianni Pons, 1952)
Cinco vezes favela (several directors, 1962)
Bossa Nova: a moderna música popular brasileira (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1963)
É Simonal (Domingos de Oliveira, 1970).
This selection of “Ten Brazilian Films that Remain in the Shadows due to Poor Accessibility” is based on my experiences as a film preservationist over the last fifteen years as well as my work as a professor and film club organizer. As a film professor and film club organizer, I often faced the difficulty of finding a copy of a film that I wanted to screen in class or at the club. However, these difficulties in accessing Brazilian films has changed over time. For example, In the mid-2000s, I and some friends ran a film club dedicated to Brazilian films at the Museum of Modern Art FilmArchive in Rio de Janeiro (Cinemateca do MAM) called“Cineclube Tela Brasilis”. There, we had the chance of using the vast collection of film prints of the MAM Film Archive and we usually chose films that people couldn’t find anywhere else. So, we often programmed 35mm or 16mm prints of Brazilian films that weren’t available in other carriers, either video or digital. Some of the films we screened then are still widely rare and unknown as they haven’t been digitized since that time. In this list compiled for Limite, Veneno is one of the titles we screened in Tela Brasilis program of July 25th, 2009. On the other hand, the short film Bossa Nova: a moderna música popular brasileira, also in this list, is a title that we wanted to show in one of Tela Brasilis exhibitions, but we couldn’t, as there was only a preservation master, but no exhibition print, neither on film nor digital. 

As a film professor at Federal Fluminense University (UFF), whereI have been teaching courses on Brazilian Film History to graduate students for almost ten years, the problem is quite different. In the classroom, I am only able to screen DVDs or digital files, which often limits the selection of Brazilian features from the silent period to the 1940s that I can show. Unfortunately, many titles that are important to show to students exist only in very bad digital copies taken from VHS tapes, which is the case of Alô, Alô, Carnaval, for instance. That’s why I’ve occasionally taken the opportunity to bring my students to the MAM Film Archive for their classes, where we would screen films in beautiful 35mm prints, something that my students are not used anymore. That was when I was able to watch, for example, a 35mm print of É Simonal (mentioned in the list) that was borrowed from the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection.
Fragments of Terra Encantada (Silvino Santos, 1922)
São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole (dir. Rudolf Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, 1929)
Alô, Alô, Carnaval (Wallace Downey and Adhemar Gonzaga, 1936)
Eterna esperança (Leo Marten, 1940)
Carnaval no fogo (Watson Macedo, 1949)
Veneno (Gianni Pons, 1952)
Cinco vezes favela (several directors, 1962)
Bossa Nova: a moderna música popular brasileira (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1963)
É Simonal (Domingos de Oliveira, 1970).
When he arrived in the city of Recife, Brazil, in 1952 to shoot O canto do mar, filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti had already accomplished several feats in his brief, troubled, and memorable stint in the Brazilian film industry. After decades of work in Europe, yielding an output that earned him the international reputation as the most renowned Brazilian filmmaker at the time, Cavalcanti returned to his native country in September 1949 to lecture at the Cinema Seminar promoted by the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MASP).1 Shortly thereafter, he was hired to work as general producer at the newly founded Vera Cruz Motion Picture Company, created by a group of Italian businessmen and funded by industrialist Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho and engineer Franco Zampari, a top-ranking employee at Matarazzo Industries, who assumed the role of CEO in the new company. 

Cavalcanti would become involved with the production of the first run of Vera Cruz films: the features Caiçara (Celi, 1950), Terra é sempre terra (Payne, 1951), and Ângela (de Almeida & Payne, 1951); and the documentary shorts Painel (1950) and Santuário (1951), directed by Lima Barreto. Prior to his work in these productions, he devoted himself to hiring technicians from Europe and managing the purchase of equipment and the construction of sets – albeit not always in consonance with Zampari. The disagreements between the two resulted in Cavalcanti's departure in early 1951 during the  filming of Angela, just over a year after he was hired. 

Still in the first half of 1951, after an invitation from President Getúlio Vargas, he took part in the project for the INC (Instituto Nacional de Cinema), which never came to fruition. The following year he directed his first film in Brazil, the comedy Simão, o caolho — produced by Cinematográfica Maristela and starring the brilliant comedian Mesquitinha — he acted as producer for the documentary short Volta Redonda (Waterhouse, 1952); and published the book Filme e Realidade, which compiled the aforementioned lectures at MASP. In 1952, Cavalcanti served as one of the founding members of Kino Filmes, which despite its short-lived existence resulted in the production of two feature films under his direction in Brazil: O canto do mar (1953) and Mulher de Verdade (1954), which would only debut in 1955, after Cavalcanti had returned to Europe in May of 1954. 

Following his arrival in Brazil, Cavalcanti attracted immense interest from the national press as much as the film industry. Newspapers never failed to publicize his actions and provide ample opportunities for both defenders and detractors to express their diverse, yet always passionate opinions about the world-famous Brazilian filmmaker. Things were no different in Recife. Cavalcanti's presence in the city stirred up the cultural milieu and provided fuel for the local film critic scene, especially active at the time with several collaborators writing about cinema in the city’s five daily newspapers. Cavalcanti’s arrival in Recife was met with great expectation concerning the production of a feature film in the city and what this event could represent ten years after the musical Coelho sai (1942), the first sound feature produced in the state of Pernambuco. As the first news emerged about the release of O canto do mar, newspapers published numerous press releases and news stories as well as an impressive number of criticisms, controversies, qualms, defenses, and accusations surrounding the film and its director.2

Cavalcanti’s ties with the Northeast can be traced along his family roots. His father was originally from the state of Alagoas and his mother, Anna Olinda do Rego Rangel Cavalcanti, belonged to a traditional family in the state of Pernambuco. O canto do mar, an adaptation of En rade – a French film directed by Cavalcanti in 1927 – to Brazil’s northeastern coast was a personal project of the filmmaker and listed among Vera Cruz’s future productions in documents dating back to 1950. Cavalcanti once again mentioned the project the following year during his visit to Recife, where he declared his plans to film O cântico do mar [sic] and Menino de engenho, an adaptation of José Lins do Rego’s regionalist novel. The production, however, would only come to fruition in 1952 through Kino Filmes. In August, while in Recife, Cavalcanti harnessed his prestige and experience as a producer to successfully establish an official institutional support network – starting with the State Government – which enabled him to organize the film’s production, including accommodations for the crew, an airplane for filming in the arid hinterlands of the sertão, and support from the Documentation and Culture Department for systematizing the several forms of local cultural artifacts and expressions that appear throughout the film.

The filming process began in October, after the arrival of technicians and equipment from São Paulo, but it was not until December that they were able to shoot with the cast, comprised entirely of local artists, most of whom with prior experience only in theater and radio. By June 1953, filming was concluded after a series of hindrances caused by, among other reasons, the lack of negatives and delays in the arrival of sound recording equipment. The film premiered on October 3, 1953 at a midnight screening hosted by the luxurious Cine São Luiz, inaugurated in the previous year. 

Ten years later, in a chapter dedicated to “Cavalcanti and Vera Cruz” in the book Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro, Glauber Rocha described O canto do mar as an “inconsistent, wavering film, yet nonetheless marked by a vision that defined Cavalcanti's stance towards Brazil”.3 We find it hard to disagree with Glauber. Nevertheless, in addition to inconsistencies and other limitations raised by Glauber in the chapter (“an overtly academic dramatization”, mesmerized by the exotic), one also finds in O canto do mar conspicuous similarities with Brazilian films produced in the following years, including Glauber's own Barravento (1962). Furthermore, the film also reveals several overlaps with Cavalcanti’s previous production and European cinema in general. 

Inspired by the plot of En rade, which is set in the port of Marseille, O canto do mar promptly reminds us of Cavalcanti's French period (roughly 1915-1933), a formative and investigative period for the filmmaker, who worked first as a set designer before his time directing. His gaze upon the urban everyday life and the city’s most vulnerable residents is prominent in what has remained Cavalcanti’s best-known French film, Rien que les heures (1926), often placed within the lineage of cinematic urban symphonies. This film explores an interweaving between fiction and documentary which is also present in O canto do mar.

In fact, one of the most common criticisms directed at O canto do mar objects to the poor synergy between the film’s fictional scenes and its conspicuous documentary moments, connected through a vague and not always harmonious concept. The film begins with a documentary prologue, in which an offscreen narrator presents the misery of the arid hinterland, without rain and lacking humane living conditions. We then see sertanejos4 abandoning their homes and travelling on a flatbed truck to Recife, where they set sail to the south in the hopes of finding work. Upon arriving in Recife, the driver stops the truck on the oceanfront and runs off for a swim, while the peasants marvel at the sea. From that moment the film turns to its narrative, focused on the quotidian drama of a family that lives in one of the beachside huts: the protagonist Raimundo (Rui Saraiva); his mother Maria (Margarida Cardoso), who works as a laundress; his sister Ponina (Cacilda Lanuza) and younger brother. The migrant peasants and the narrator's voiceover will reemerge later, when the former board the ship ready to sail south. In addition to the truck driver, who remains a character in the story, the prologue relates to the plot through the theme of displacement, driven by poverty and lack of prospects. Traveling south and starting a new life is the dream of Raimundo, who plans to run away with his girlfriend Aurora (Aurora Duarte).

Handling verité moments with great skill and beauty, Cavalcanti films some of the region’s signature popular cultural expressions: frevo, a dance and musical style characteristic of the carnaval in Recife; the bumba-meu-boi, a theatrical dance celebration that acts out the death and resurrection of an ox; the Xangô de Pernambuco, an Afro-Brazilian religious cult specific to that state. Cavalcanti's talent and expertise in documentary filmmaking truly shine in these moments, revealing why he became one of the leading figures of the British documentary movement in the 1930s. Hired by John Grierson to join the GPO Film Unit, a branch of the UK General Post Office where he remained between 1934 and 1939, Cavalcanti worked on dozens of these productions as a sound technician, screenwriter, editor, director, and producer. 
‍
‍O canto do mar bears witness to extraordinary local songs and chants, the preoccupation with the recording and documentation of which can be seen as begun with Cavalcanti’s work for the GPO. During the xangô scene, when Raimundo takes his deranged father to cure himself with a pai-de-santo, the fictional action is interspersed with the beat of drums and images of rituals in which worshippers dance and enter a trance. The images and sounds throughout this sequence, wholly unusual in commercial Brazilian cinema at the time, may be seen as vigorous precursors of what Cinema Novo would accomplish years later, among which in Glauber Rocha’s debut feature, Barravento (1962), where the universe of Candomblé in Bahia is intrinsic to the film’s narrative.
Fig. 1. O canto do mar
Fig. 2. Barravento
With images of the arid hinterlands of the sertão, the prologue calls to mind another Cinema Novo production, Vidas secas (1963), albeit through differences and ruptures. Cavalcanti incorporates a series of procedures in his rendition of the sertão which Nelson Pereira dos Santos would categorically reject, such as the use of filters and light reflectors to tame the harsh sunlight, the use of extradiegetic music and the expository and solemn narration.
Fig. 3. O canto do mar
Fig. 4. Vidas secas
Fig. 5. Vidas secas
Fig. 6. O canto do mar
The frevo sequence in O canto do mar is particularly exhilarating. Shot outdoors among coconut trees on the beach, the scene shows a group of people dancing to the sound of a small brass orchestra. With an impeccable rhythm, the montage alternates general shots of the crowd and orchestra with close-up images of the dancers’ feet and parasols, a typical frevo adornment. Despite being professional dancers, the performers wear everyday clothes and many of them are barefoot, while holding parasols of varying sizes and patterns. At that time, frevo was commonly used in chanchada musical numbers, albeit filmed in a studio setting with a more stylized treatment. While Cavalcanti’s images are also markedly stylized, the visual style of the dancers and the conception of the frevo scene in O canto do mar is fresher, heavily reminiscent of Pierre Verger’s photographs from 1947 capturing the street carnaval celebrations in Recife.
Fig. 7. O canto do mar
Fig. 8. O canto do mar
Fig. 9. O canto do mar
Fig. 10. “Frevo”. Pierre Verger, 1947
Fig. 11. Carnaval Atlântida (Burle, 1952)
Cavalcanti’s documentary work in O canto do mar relates to other productions of the period, equally driven by the desire to embrace the richness of popular cultural manifestations, among which is the documentary Bumba-meu-boi: o Bicho Misterioso dos Afogados (1953), filmed in Recife by the Frenchman Romain Lesage and produced by the Joaquim Nabuco Institute. We may also draw a connection with the work of the Folklore Research Mission, founded by writer Mário de Andrade (of Macunaíma fame) during his travels among Brazil’s North and Northeast in 1938, which resulted in over 30 hours of recorded music, more than 600 photographs, and 15 films.5 O canto do mar, however, being a commercial fiction feature film and screened in movie theaters, allowed for a much broader circulation of these precious visual and sound recordings of popular cultural expressions in Pernambuco. Today, these filmic records comprise an undeniable historical document.

In addition to the documentary dimension, popular culture also acquires phantasmagoric contouring in O canto do mar. During Raimundo’s nightmare, which precedes the film’s ending, Cavalcanti infuses the images and sound of the maracatu with a dreamlike tone. The documentary vein continues in the exuberant maracatu parade, during which we see the imposing figure of Dona Santa, to this day the most widely known queen of maracatu, as well as other emblematic figures and characters of Pernambuco culture and carnaval, such as the spearmen of the maracatu de baque solto and the caboclinhos. These traditional elements, however, assume a spectral nature as the beat of the drums is incorporated into the trance-like atmosphere, during which the protagonist’s subjectivity merges with collective rituals; Dona Santa transforms into Maria, Raimundo’s mother, and Aurora participates in the maracatu procession.6

These documentary imprints traverse the entire film, constantly attentive to the sounds and images of human and geographic landscapes: the anonymous faces of fishermen and prostitutes, the geometry of rooftops in the neighborhood of São José, the street musicians, the constant presence of the sea breeze in Recife, swaying clothes, hair, and curtains. Hence, it may be more coherent, and much more inspiring, to embrace film critic Ruy Gardnier’s suggestion and contemplate, among the various Alberto Cavalcantis, the “Anthropologist Cavalcanti”. According to the film critic, “much more than a documentarist, his desire to enter a place and from there extract a rhythm to cinema, an impression, an atmosphere, makes Alberto Cavalcanti one of the rare anthropological travelers in the history of cinema”.7

Here, Cavalcanti makes the most of the location shots, unlike his prior experience in his first work for Vera Cruz, Caiçara, in which the geographical and human landscape of Ilha Bela, on the São Paulo coastline, mostly serves as a backdrop for the drama of the protagonists.8 Furthermore, by opting to work with local artists (who dubbed their own lines), the film propagated Northeastern faces and accents largely unknown to the general audience in the rest of the country. On the other hand, O canto do mar does bear marked similarities to the initial Vera Cruz productions, especially Caiçara: a stagnated atmosphere (the image of the whirlpool is common to both films) and a morbid mood permeates both stories, especially as reflected (though not exclusively) in the long scenes showing the children’s burial; the contained expression of the inexperienced actors in the main roles (Eliane Lage in the Vera Cruz film; Rui Saraiva in O canto do mar); the “overtly academic dramatization”, as defined by Glauber Rocha, which ultimately stifles both the narrative flow as well as the actors’ performances.

‍O canto do mar also bears its fair share of connections with European art cinema, which Cavalcanti had been involved with since the 1920s. There is an undeniable dialogue with Italian neorealism, especially La terra trema (1948), Luchino Visconti’s film set in a fishing village in Sicily, in which non-actors speak in a local dialect. As in Visconti's film, O canto do mar also transpires against the backdrop of a fishing community, even though the main characters are not directly involved in this activity. In both films, miserable living and work conditions, as well as the lack of prospects for any foreseeable change, ultimately cause the family group to dissolve. Cavalcanti also returns to visual motifs from La terra trema, such as the dark silhouette of women on the beach rocks, waiting for men who may have died at sea; and the personal chest that holds otherworldly possibilities – in Visconti's film, the protagonist uses it to store clothes and postcards from his military days; in O canto do mar, Raimundo stores travel pamphlets and the ship ticket he bought for his southbound travel.
Fig. 12. O canto do mar
Fig. 13. La terra trema
Fig. 14. O canto do mar
Fig. 15. La terra trema
Both films make use of an offscreen narrator. While O canto do mar restricts its use to the documentary scenes with the rural migrants, in La terra trema narration serves as a constant resource, commenting as well as explicating the plot, thus assisting the Italian audience in understanding the regional dialect spoken in the film. However, the two films have vastly different approaches to the socioeconomic issue. In La terra trema, poverty and family dissolution result from economic exploitation, which reigns over the working conditions of fishermen, a mechanism that the film exposes and reiterates. In turn, while O canto do mar expresses a “social sensibility”, which Cavalcanti believed every film should have,9 the vision is somewhat diffuse. Misery exists and is shown on screen, but lacking exploration of structural elements that would allow us to see beyond mere observation. 
‍
This social sensibility takes on a more vigorous and poignant dimension when translated into visual composition. In these moments we find the plastic and poetic ingenuity Cavalcanti exhibited as a set designer and director in his silent work. The film’s opening image, after the initial credits, is an admirable fusion between the map of the Northeast, with the state of Pernambuco in the center, and an image of the cracked soil in the arid hinterlands of the sertão. The similar geometric figures formed by the lines and cracks plastically introduce the drought of the sertão, serving as a visual metaphor of imprisonment, which will reemerge in different visual formations (whirlpools, grids, cages) throughout the film. 

Two particular visual compositions could be placed in dialogue with one of the most dazzling films from the silent era, Der müde Tod (1921), directed by Fritz Lang. When filming Ponina, Raimundo’s sister, climbing the stairs of a brothel, Cavalcanti frames an exquisitely beautiful shot, reminiscent of the moment when the protagonist in the German film enters the realm of death. In O canto do mar, the long staircases, commonly seen in the bungalows of Recife, signal Ponina’s passage between the two worlds as she opts for sex work to escape family poverty.
Fig. 16. O canto do mar
Fig. 17. Der müde Tod
In the elaborate sequence depicting the death of Raimundo’s brother, Cavalcanti composes a detailed choreography of gestures and lights from oil lamps, which the neighbors carry to light the way to the family hut where the child is being prepared for burial. The sequence begins with tears flowing from Ponina’s face, as she breaks the news to Raimundo, overlapping and merging with the images of lamps carried by the neighbors walking in the dead of night. Inside the house, each person arriving gives a lamp to a family member, who places them on the furniture and shelves. The candle-lit environment surrounding the child’s body resembles the room full of candles in Der müde Tod, in which each candle symbolizes a human life. While extinguishing one of the flames, Death carries in its arms a child who recently passed away.
Fig. 18. Der müde Tod
Fig. 19. Der müde Tod
Fig. 20. Der müde Tod
Fig. 21. O canto do mar
Fig. 22. O canto do mar
Fig. 23. O canto do mar
Cavalcanti reinvents Lang’s visual metaphor from elements belonging to the secular and religious world of the Brazilian Northeast, visually translating the vulnerability of those lives, both in the sertão and on the coast, in fiction and reality.
1. Our main source for biographical information about Cavalcanti is the appendix “Alberto Cavalcanti”, taken from Maria Rita Galvão's PhD dissertation, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz: a fábrica de sonhos. São Paulo: Faculty of Philosophy, Languages, and Human Sciences/University of São Paulo, 1976, p. 709-799.
‍
2. See Araújo, Luciana. A crônica de cinema no Recife dos anos 50. Recife: Fundarpe, 1997.

3. Rocha, Glauber. Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1963, p. 52.

4. Sertanejos are people who come from the sertão region, far from the coast.

5. Sandroni, Carlos. “O acervo da Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas, 1938-2012”. Debates, n. 12, June 2021, p. 55-62.
‍
6. Unfortunately, the commonly available copy is extremely dark, hindering the night sequences with the maracatu and bumba-meu-boi.
‍
7. Gardnier, Ruy. “Um ou vários Cavalcantis?”. Contracampo, n. 71. Available at http://www.contracampo.com.br/71/umouvarioscavalcantis.htm
8.  Maria Rita Galvão addresses this as well as other issues in her brilliant analysis of Caiçara. See Galvão, Maria Rita. Burguesia e cinema: o caso Vera Cruz. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira/Embrafilme, 1981, p.225-55.

9. Eliachar, Leon. “Cavalcanti – O diretor e o homem”. A Scena Muda, Rio de Janeiro, n. 39, 27 September 1949,
When he arrived in the city of Recife, Brazil, in 1952 to shoot O canto do mar, filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti had already accomplished several feats in his brief, troubled, and memorable stint in the Brazilian film industry. After decades of work in Europe, yielding an output that earned him the international reputation as the most renowned Brazilian filmmaker at the time, Cavalcanti returned to his native country in September 1949 to lecture at the Cinema Seminar promoted by the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MASP).1 Shortly thereafter, he was hired to work as general producer at the newly founded Vera Cruz Motion Picture Company, created by a group of Italian businessmen and funded by industrialist Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho and engineer Franco Zampari, a top-ranking employee at Matarazzo Industries, who assumed the role of CEO in the new company. 

Cavalcanti would become involved with the production of the first run of Vera Cruz films: the features Caiçara (Celi, 1950), Terra é sempre terra (Payne, 1951), and Ângela (de Almeida & Payne, 1951); and the documentary shorts Painel (1950) and Santuário (1951), directed by Lima Barreto. Prior to his work in these productions, he devoted himself to hiring technicians from Europe and managing the purchase of equipment and the construction of sets – albeit not always in consonance with Zampari. The disagreements between the two resulted in Cavalcanti's departure in early 1951 during the  filming of Angela, just over a year after he was hired. 

Still in the first half of 1951, after an invitation from President Getúlio Vargas, he took part in the project for the INC (Instituto Nacional de Cinema), which never came to fruition. The following year he directed his first film in Brazil, the comedy Simão, o caolho — produced by Cinematográfica Maristela and starring the brilliant comedian Mesquitinha — he acted as producer for the documentary short Volta Redonda (Waterhouse, 1952); and published the book Filme e Realidade, which compiled the aforementioned lectures at MASP. In 1952, Cavalcanti served as one of the founding members of Kino Filmes, which despite its short-lived existence resulted in the production of two feature films under his direction in Brazil: O canto do mar (1953) and Mulher de Verdade (1954), which would only debut in 1955, after Cavalcanti had returned to Europe in May of 1954. 

Following his arrival in Brazil, Cavalcanti attracted immense interest from the national press as much as the film industry. Newspapers never failed to publicize his actions and provide ample opportunities for both defenders and detractors to express their diverse, yet always passionate opinions about the world-famous Brazilian filmmaker. Things were no different in Recife. Cavalcanti's presence in the city stirred up the cultural milieu and provided fuel for the local film critic scene, especially active at the time with several collaborators writing about cinema in the city’s five daily newspapers. Cavalcanti’s arrival in Recife was met with great expectation concerning the production of a feature film in the city and what this event could represent ten years after the musical Coelho sai (1942), the first sound feature produced in the state of Pernambuco. As the first news emerged about the release of O canto do mar, newspapers published numerous press releases and news stories as well as an impressive number of criticisms, controversies, qualms, defenses, and accusations surrounding the film and its director.2

Cavalcanti’s ties with the Northeast can be traced along his family roots. His father was originally from the state of Alagoas and his mother, Anna Olinda do Rego Rangel Cavalcanti, belonged to a traditional family in the state of Pernambuco. O canto do mar, an adaptation of En rade – a French film directed by Cavalcanti in 1927 – to Brazil’s northeastern coast was a personal project of the filmmaker and listed among Vera Cruz’s future productions in documents dating back to 1950. Cavalcanti once again mentioned the project the following year during his visit to Recife, where he declared his plans to film O cântico do mar [sic] and Menino de engenho, an adaptation of José Lins do Rego’s regionalist novel. The production, however, would only come to fruition in 1952 through Kino Filmes. In August, while in Recife, Cavalcanti harnessed his prestige and experience as a producer to successfully establish an official institutional support network – starting with the State Government – which enabled him to organize the film’s production, including accommodations for the crew, an airplane for filming in the arid hinterlands of the sertão, and support from the Documentation and Culture Department for systematizing the several forms of local cultural artifacts and expressions that appear throughout the film.

The filming process began in October, after the arrival of technicians and equipment from São Paulo, but it was not until December that they were able to shoot with the cast, comprised entirely of local artists, most of whom with prior experience only in theater and radio. By June 1953, filming was concluded after a series of hindrances caused by, among other reasons, the lack of negatives and delays in the arrival of sound recording equipment. The film premiered on October 3, 1953 at a midnight screening hosted by the luxurious Cine São Luiz, inaugurated in the previous year. 

Ten years later, in a chapter dedicated to “Cavalcanti and Vera Cruz” in the book Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro, Glauber Rocha described O canto do mar as an “inconsistent, wavering film, yet nonetheless marked by a vision that defined Cavalcanti's stance towards Brazil”.3 We find it hard to disagree with Glauber. Nevertheless, in addition to inconsistencies and other limitations raised by Glauber in the chapter (“an overtly academic dramatization”, mesmerized by the exotic), one also finds in O canto do mar conspicuous similarities with Brazilian films produced in the following years, including Glauber's own Barravento (1962). Furthermore, the film also reveals several overlaps with Cavalcanti’s previous production and European cinema in general. 

Inspired by the plot of En rade, which is set in the port of Marseille, O canto do mar promptly reminds us of Cavalcanti's French period (roughly 1915-1933), a formative and investigative period for the filmmaker, who worked first as a set designer before his time directing. His gaze upon the urban everyday life and the city’s most vulnerable residents is prominent in what has remained Cavalcanti’s best-known French film, Rien que les heures (1926), often placed within the lineage of cinematic urban symphonies. This film explores an interweaving between fiction and documentary which is also present in O canto do mar.

In fact, one of the most common criticisms directed at O canto do mar objects to the poor synergy between the film’s fictional scenes and its conspicuous documentary moments, connected through a vague and not always harmonious concept. The film begins with a documentary prologue, in which an offscreen narrator presents the misery of the arid hinterland, without rain and lacking humane living conditions. We then see sertanejos4 abandoning their homes and travelling on a flatbed truck to Recife, where they set sail to the south in the hopes of finding work. Upon arriving in Recife, the driver stops the truck on the oceanfront and runs off for a swim, while the peasants marvel at the sea. From that moment the film turns to its narrative, focused on the quotidian drama of a family that lives in one of the beachside huts: the protagonist Raimundo (Rui Saraiva); his mother Maria (Margarida Cardoso), who works as a laundress; his sister Ponina (Cacilda Lanuza) and younger brother. The migrant peasants and the narrator's voiceover will reemerge later, when the former board the ship ready to sail south. In addition to the truck driver, who remains a character in the story, the prologue relates to the plot through the theme of displacement, driven by poverty and lack of prospects. Traveling south and starting a new life is the dream of Raimundo, who plans to run away with his girlfriend Aurora (Aurora Duarte).

Handling verité moments with great skill and beauty, Cavalcanti films some of the region’s signature popular cultural expressions: frevo, a dance and musical style characteristic of the carnaval in Recife; the bumba-meu-boi, a theatrical dance celebration that acts out the death and resurrection of an ox; the Xangô de Pernambuco, an Afro-Brazilian religious cult specific to that state. Cavalcanti's talent and expertise in documentary filmmaking truly shine in these moments, revealing why he became one of the leading figures of the British documentary movement in the 1930s. Hired by John Grierson to join the GPO Film Unit, a branch of the UK General Post Office where he remained between 1934 and 1939, Cavalcanti worked on dozens of these productions as a sound technician, screenwriter, editor, director, and producer. 
‍
‍O canto do mar bears witness to extraordinary local songs and chants, the preoccupation with the recording and documentation of which can be seen as begun with Cavalcanti’s work for the GPO. During the xangô scene, when Raimundo takes his deranged father to cure himself with a pai-de-santo, the fictional action is interspersed with the beat of drums and images of rituals in which worshippers dance and enter a trance. The images and sounds throughout this sequence, wholly unusual in commercial Brazilian cinema at the time, may be seen as vigorous precursors of what Cinema Novo would accomplish years later, among which in Glauber Rocha’s debut feature, Barravento (1962), where the universe of Candomblé in Bahia is intrinsic to the film’s narrative.
Fig. 1. O canto do mar
Fig. 2. Barravento
With images of the arid hinterlands of the sertão, the prologue calls to mind another Cinema Novo production, Vidas secas (1963), albeit through differences and ruptures. Cavalcanti incorporates a series of procedures in his rendition of the sertão which Nelson Pereira dos Santos would categorically reject, such as the use of filters and light reflectors to tame the harsh sunlight, the use of extradiegetic music and the expository and solemn narration.
Fig. 3. O canto do mar
Fig. 4. Vidas secas
Fig. 5. Vidas secas
Fig. 6. O canto do mar
The frevo sequence in O canto do mar is particularly exhilarating. Shot outdoors among coconut trees on the beach, the scene shows a group of people dancing to the sound of a small brass orchestra. With an impeccable rhythm, the montage alternates general shots of the crowd and orchestra with close-up images of the dancers’ feet and parasols, a typical frevo adornment. Despite being professional dancers, the performers wear everyday clothes and many of them are barefoot, while holding parasols of varying sizes and patterns. At that time, frevo was commonly used in chanchada musical numbers, albeit filmed in a studio setting with a more stylized treatment. While Cavalcanti’s images are also markedly stylized, the visual style of the dancers and the conception of the frevo scene in O canto do mar is fresher, heavily reminiscent of Pierre Verger’s photographs from 1947 capturing the street carnaval celebrations in Recife.
Fig. 7. O canto do mar
Fig. 8. O canto do mar
Fig. 9. O canto do mar
Fig. 10. “Frevo”. Pierre Verger, 1947
Fig. 11. Carnaval Atlântida (Burle, 1952)
Cavalcanti’s documentary work in O canto do mar relates to other productions of the period, equally driven by the desire to embrace the richness of popular cultural manifestations, among which is the documentary Bumba-meu-boi: o Bicho Misterioso dos Afogados (1953), filmed in Recife by the Frenchman Romain Lesage and produced by the Joaquim Nabuco Institute. We may also draw a connection with the work of the Folklore Research Mission, founded by writer Mário de Andrade (of Macunaíma fame) during his travels among Brazil’s North and Northeast in 1938, which resulted in over 30 hours of recorded music, more than 600 photographs, and 15 films.5 O canto do mar, however, being a commercial fiction feature film and screened in movie theaters, allowed for a much broader circulation of these precious visual and sound recordings of popular cultural expressions in Pernambuco. Today, these filmic records comprise an undeniable historical document.

In addition to the documentary dimension, popular culture also acquires phantasmagoric contouring in O canto do mar. During Raimundo’s nightmare, which precedes the film’s ending, Cavalcanti infuses the images and sound of the maracatu with a dreamlike tone. The documentary vein continues in the exuberant maracatu parade, during which we see the imposing figure of Dona Santa, to this day the most widely known queen of maracatu, as well as other emblematic figures and characters of Pernambuco culture and carnaval, such as the spearmen of the maracatu de baque solto and the caboclinhos. These traditional elements, however, assume a spectral nature as the beat of the drums is incorporated into the trance-like atmosphere, during which the protagonist’s subjectivity merges with collective rituals; Dona Santa transforms into Maria, Raimundo’s mother, and Aurora participates in the maracatu procession.6

These documentary imprints traverse the entire film, constantly attentive to the sounds and images of human and geographic landscapes: the anonymous faces of fishermen and prostitutes, the geometry of rooftops in the neighborhood of São José, the street musicians, the constant presence of the sea breeze in Recife, swaying clothes, hair, and curtains. Hence, it may be more coherent, and much more inspiring, to embrace film critic Ruy Gardnier’s suggestion and contemplate, among the various Alberto Cavalcantis, the “Anthropologist Cavalcanti”. According to the film critic, “much more than a documentarist, his desire to enter a place and from there extract a rhythm to cinema, an impression, an atmosphere, makes Alberto Cavalcanti one of the rare anthropological travelers in the history of cinema”.7

Here, Cavalcanti makes the most of the location shots, unlike his prior experience in his first work for Vera Cruz, Caiçara, in which the geographical and human landscape of Ilha Bela, on the São Paulo coastline, mostly serves as a backdrop for the drama of the protagonists.8 Furthermore, by opting to work with local artists (who dubbed their own lines), the film propagated Northeastern faces and accents largely unknown to the general audience in the rest of the country. On the other hand, O canto do mar does bear marked similarities to the initial Vera Cruz productions, especially Caiçara: a stagnated atmosphere (the image of the whirlpool is common to both films) and a morbid mood permeates both stories, especially as reflected (though not exclusively) in the long scenes showing the children’s burial; the contained expression of the inexperienced actors in the main roles (Eliane Lage in the Vera Cruz film; Rui Saraiva in O canto do mar); the “overtly academic dramatization”, as defined by Glauber Rocha, which ultimately stifles both the narrative flow as well as the actors’ performances.

‍O canto do mar also bears its fair share of connections with European art cinema, which Cavalcanti had been involved with since the 1920s. There is an undeniable dialogue with Italian neorealism, especially La terra trema (1948), Luchino Visconti’s film set in a fishing village in Sicily, in which non-actors speak in a local dialect. As in Visconti's film, O canto do mar also transpires against the backdrop of a fishing community, even though the main characters are not directly involved in this activity. In both films, miserable living and work conditions, as well as the lack of prospects for any foreseeable change, ultimately cause the family group to dissolve. Cavalcanti also returns to visual motifs from La terra trema, such as the dark silhouette of women on the beach rocks, waiting for men who may have died at sea; and the personal chest that holds otherworldly possibilities – in Visconti's film, the protagonist uses it to store clothes and postcards from his military days; in O canto do mar, Raimundo stores travel pamphlets and the ship ticket he bought for his southbound travel.
Fig. 12. O canto do mar
Fig. 13. La terra trema
Fig. 14. O canto do mar
Fig. 15. La terra trema
Both films make use of an offscreen narrator. While O canto do mar restricts its use to the documentary scenes with the rural migrants, in La terra trema narration serves as a constant resource, commenting as well as explicating the plot, thus assisting the Italian audience in understanding the regional dialect spoken in the film. However, the two films have vastly different approaches to the socioeconomic issue. In La terra trema, poverty and family dissolution result from economic exploitation, which reigns over the working conditions of fishermen, a mechanism that the film exposes and reiterates. In turn, while O canto do mar expresses a “social sensibility”, which Cavalcanti believed every film should have,9 the vision is somewhat diffuse. Misery exists and is shown on screen, but lacking exploration of structural elements that would allow us to see beyond mere observation. 
‍
This social sensibility takes on a more vigorous and poignant dimension when translated into visual composition. In these moments we find the plastic and poetic ingenuity Cavalcanti exhibited as a set designer and director in his silent work. The film’s opening image, after the initial credits, is an admirable fusion between the map of the Northeast, with the state of Pernambuco in the center, and an image of the cracked soil in the arid hinterlands of the sertão. The similar geometric figures formed by the lines and cracks plastically introduce the drought of the sertão, serving as a visual metaphor of imprisonment, which will reemerge in different visual formations (whirlpools, grids, cages) throughout the film. 

Two particular visual compositions could be placed in dialogue with one of the most dazzling films from the silent era, Der müde Tod (1921), directed by Fritz Lang. When filming Ponina, Raimundo’s sister, climbing the stairs of a brothel, Cavalcanti frames an exquisitely beautiful shot, reminiscent of the moment when the protagonist in the German film enters the realm of death. In O canto do mar, the long staircases, commonly seen in the bungalows of Recife, signal Ponina’s passage between the two worlds as she opts for sex work to escape family poverty.
Fig. 16. O canto do mar
Fig. 17. Der müde Tod
In the elaborate sequence depicting the death of Raimundo’s brother, Cavalcanti composes a detailed choreography of gestures and lights from oil lamps, which the neighbors carry to light the way to the family hut where the child is being prepared for burial. The sequence begins with tears flowing from Ponina’s face, as she breaks the news to Raimundo, overlapping and merging with the images of lamps carried by the neighbors walking in the dead of night. Inside the house, each person arriving gives a lamp to a family member, who places them on the furniture and shelves. The candle-lit environment surrounding the child’s body resembles the room full of candles in Der müde Tod, in which each candle symbolizes a human life. While extinguishing one of the flames, Death carries in its arms a child who recently passed away.
Fig. 18. Der müde Tod
Fig. 19. Der müde Tod
Fig. 20. Der müde Tod
Fig. 21. O canto do mar
Fig. 22. O canto do mar
Fig. 23. O canto do mar
Cavalcanti reinvents Lang’s visual metaphor from elements belonging to the secular and religious world of the Brazilian Northeast, visually translating the vulnerability of those lives, both in the sertão and on the coast, in fiction and reality.
1. Our main source for biographical information about Cavalcanti is the appendix “Alberto Cavalcanti”, taken from Maria Rita Galvão's PhD dissertation, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz: a fábrica de sonhos. São Paulo: Faculty of Philosophy, Languages, and Human Sciences/University of São Paulo, 1976, p. 709-799.
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2. See Araújo, Luciana. A crônica de cinema no Recife dos anos 50. Recife: Fundarpe, 1997.

3. Rocha, Glauber. Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1963, p. 52.

4. Sertanejos are people who come from the sertão region, far from the coast.

5. Sandroni, Carlos. “O acervo da Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas, 1938-2012”. Debates, n. 12, June 2021, p. 55-62.
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6. Unfortunately, the commonly available copy is extremely dark, hindering the night sequences with the maracatu and bumba-meu-boi.
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7. Gardnier, Ruy. “Um ou vários Cavalcantis?”. Contracampo, n. 71. Available at http://www.contracampo.com.br/71/umouvarioscavalcantis.htm
8.  Maria Rita Galvão addresses this as well as other issues in her brilliant analysis of Caiçara. See Galvão, Maria Rita. Burguesia e cinema: o caso Vera Cruz. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira/Embrafilme, 1981, p.225-55.

9. Eliachar, Leon. “Cavalcanti – O diretor e o homem”. A Scena Muda, Rio de Janeiro, n. 39, 27 September 1949,
Introdução
Minha inserção profissional em preservação audiovisual coincide com o início da utilização das ferramentas digitais na área de restauração de filmes no Brasil. A experiência prática nos arquivos audiovisuais e em restauração, iniciada justamente no período de transição para o digital, em 2000, permitiu um olhar a partir de uma perspectiva privilegiada, ao possibilitar acompanhar de perto, na lida cotidiana, a transformação da área. O desejo de investigar essas experiências, sistematizá-las e transformá-las em objeto de estudo, a fim de tentar contribuir para a reflexão sobre o campo no Brasil, desembocou na minha pesquisa de doutorado iniciada na Universidade de São Paulo em 2016. A pesquisa foi finalizada em dezembro de 2020,1 e o foco foi a restauração de filmes no Brasil e a incorporação da tecnologia digital no século XXI, realizada na Universidade de São Paulo. Esta investigação incorpora uma dupla dimensão: por um lado, minha experiência profissional e, por outro, o interesse em refletir sobre esses processos sob uma perspectiva histórica, incluindo os aspectos técnicos, estéticos e éticos da restauração de obras brasileiras. Um pequeno recorte deste trabalho será abordado nesse artigo, onde apresentarei, em linhas gerais, um olhar histórico sobre a restauração de filmes no Brasil, um breve panorama da trajetória do campo da restauração digital desde o ano 2000 e alguns marcos históricos desde seus primórdios.
A Importância do Ano 2000
Nas últimas duas décadas, o campo da preservação audiovisual passou por profundas transformações. Uma das evidências dessa transformação pode ser encontrada na crescente quantidade de pesquisas conduzidas sobre o tema da preservação de filmes e seus diversos aspectos. A incorporação da tecnologia digital no processo de restauração de filmes permitiu que o campo ganhasse mais destaque tanto em termos de habilidades práticas quanto como disciplina acadêmica. Como resultado, os estudiosos tentaram defini-lo teoricamente por meio de uma análise mais profunda de seus muitos complexos elementos. A bibliografia internacional também cresceu consideravelmente desde os anos 2000, incluindo bem-vindas contribuições de pesquisadores e estudiosos brasileiros. Embora pesquisas aprofundadas sobre restauração de filmes ainda não sejam muito comuns no Brasil, o surgimento de trabalhos recentes com destaque sobre o tema e questões relacionadas prova que há interesse no assunto e na preservação audiovisual como disciplina acadêmica.
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Do final dos anos 1990 até meados dos anos 2000, as ferramentas digitais de restauração foram introduzidas e disseminadas entre os principais arquivos de filmes, com o apoio financeiro de grandes companhias produtoras.2 No início, devido aos custos proibitivos para a maioria das instituições e arquivos, essas ferramentas eram utilizadas apenas ocasionalmente. No entanto, os avanços tecnológicos permitiram que se tornassem mais acessíveis para projetos não comerciais e mais amplamente adotadas no processo de restauração de filme ao longo da primeira década de 2000.
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A tecnologia digital foi incorporada ao fluxo de trabalho de restauração no Brasil no início do século XXI, a exemplo do que acontecia em alguns países da Europa e nos Estados Unidos. Até aquele momento, cada etapa do processo de restauração era fotoquímica. Os restauradores de filmes utilizavam equipamentos analógicos que haviam sido usados por anos em laboratórios cinematográficos comerciais e a equipe técnica da maioria dos projetos de restauração foi treinada, principalmente, enquanto trabalhava para esses laboratórios. Com o advento das ferramentas digitais, as intervenções no processo de restauração passaram a ser realizadas por computadores e profissionais com novas competências. Esses novos restauradores tinham conhecimento dos softwares de restauração digital e da tecnologia computacional, experiências profissionais diferentes dos técnicos que haviam trabalhado apenas em laboratórios de cinema. Antes de elaborar uma análise mais aprofundada do campo da restauração digital no Brasil, é necessário, primeiramente, apresentar um panorama histórico resumido dos laboratórios cinematográficos brasileiros.
Laboratórios Cinematográficos no Brasil
Nas primeiras décadas da realização cinematográfica no país, a maior parte das pequenas companhias produtoras possuíam seus próprios laboratórios, valendo-se, provavelmente, de instrumental semelhante ao que era utilizado para a revelação fotográfica de imagens fixas, sendo a própria câmera de filmar o copiador, característica presente nos modelos da época. Na cadeia de processamento de material fotoquímico, o primeiro passo é a revelação do material negativo para então sua posterior copiagem para o material positivo, isto é, as cópias de projeção. Será na década de 1910 que o laboratório da Botelho Film, de Alberto Botelho, consegue dar os primeiros passos rumo à alguma padronização dos procedimentos realizados, obtendo resultados acima da média e, por conseguinte, a confecção de cópias melhores até então produzidas no Brasil. Localizamos referências sobre alguns outros laboratórios do período. Por exemplo, companhias como a Independência Film, de José e Victor del Picchia, e a Benedetti Film, de Paulo Benedetti, possuíam laboratórios, onde teria sido realizado o processamento de títulos como Braza dormida (Mauro, 1928), Barro humano (Gonzaga, 1929) e Limite (Peixoto, 1931). Um marco importante acontecerá próximo ao final da década de 1920, com a chegada dos fotógrafos e laboratoristas húngaros Adalberto Kemeny e Rudolf Lustig,3 que compram o laboratório da Independência Film e o transformam nos Laboratórios Rex, que funcionará até a década de 1970. Os conhecimentos técnicos dos imigrantes húngaros permitiram um maior controle dos parâmetros necessários para o melhor processamento dos materiais, como o controle da temperatura e do tempo, sendo responsáveis por melhorias na qualidade técnica dos materiais brasileiros. 

A passagem para o cinema sonoro nos anos 1930 vai tornar o processamento laboratorial ainda mais complexo e irá provocar o progressivo fechamento dos laboratórios de pequeno porte oriundos do período silencioso. Na contramão dessa tendência, a companhia produtora Cinédia, fundada em 1930 por Adhemar Gonzaga, irá constituir seu próprio laboratório ainda nessa década.
Adhemar Gonzaga abrindo a caixa da reveladora Multiplex recém-chegada à Cinédia, em 20 de maio de 1937
O laboratório da Cinédia funcionou com muitos contratempos até ao final da década de 1940, período particularmente difícil para a empresa. O contexto da Segunda Guerra Mundial apenas agravou as dificuldades da Cinédia, chegando mesmo a fazer com que encerrasse momentaneamente as suas operações no final de 1941. Em março de 1942, os estúdios da Cinédia reabriram para as filmagens de É tudo verdade, de Orson Welles, mas só retomaram totalmente as produções no ano seguinte. Os efeitos desastrosos causados pela guerra, como a falta de estoque de filme virgem e produtos químicos para o seu processamento, foram sentidos pela Cinédia ao longo da década. O impacto da guerra, entre outros fatores, culminou com o seu desmantelamento em 1949, quando Adhemar Gonzaga decidiu se desfazer dos equipamentos cinematográficos do laboratório. Em 1951, Gonzaga interrompeu as atividades da Cinédia e alienou parte do terreno dos estúdios para liquidar todos os compromissos financeiros da empresa. O laboratório foi posteriormente desmontado e sua produção foi definitivamente interrompida.
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Outro marco importante para o restauro de filmes no Brasil foi a criação do único laboratório de restauração existente em um arquivo audiovisual brasileiro: o da Cinemateca Brasileira. Criado em 1976 a partir de aquisição de equipamentos e peças descartadas pela então chamada Líder Cinelaboratórios,4 empresa carioca que havia recém adquirido os laboratórios Rex com a finalidade de expandir seus negócios para São Paulo. A aquisição se iniciou após convencê-los de que a Cinemateca não se constituiria como concorrente de mercado, o que não seria mesmo possível, visto o caráter cultural da instituição. A partir daí, uma parceria informal se estabelece, e a empresa passa a comunicar a Cinemateca periodicamente quando do descarte de algum equipamento antigo. 
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Carlos Augusto Calil, responsável pelo Departamento de Preservação da Cinemateca Brasileira à época, foi quem esteve à frente desse processo. Seu senso de oportunidade foi essencial para que a empreitada fosse bem-sucedida, já que teve a perspicácia de perceber e tirar proveito de um momento singular – ou seja, o momento de descarte do maquinário antigo dos laboratórios Rex por conta da modernização tecnológica empreendida pelos novos donos – para adquirir a infraestrutura básica necessária, e, o mais importante, a preços acessíveis, para a implementação de um laboratório na instituição.
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Durante o período de implementação do laboratório na Cinemateca Brasileira, Calil teve a oportunidade de realizar o II Curso de Verão organizado pela FIAF (Federação Internacional de Arquivos de Filme) no Staatlichesfilmarchiv (Arquivo de Filmes da República Democrática Alemã). O curso abordou, sobretudo, questões relacionadas à conservação e restauração de filmes e acabou sendo muito importante para os profissionais brasileiros. Ao longo do curso, Calil teve acesso a publicações sobre documentação e catalogação de filmes ainda não publicadas no Brasil, materiais que ele compartilharia com os técnicos da Cinemateca Brasileira. Isso garantiu que o conhecimento dos métodos de preservação de filmes em uso em instituições estrangeiras fosse compartilhado e aplicado pelos profissionais brasileiros em seus próprios trabalhos. No entanto, uma das principais lições que Calil aprendeu foi que a solução para os problemas de preservação dos filmes brasileiros teria que ser inventada e desenvolvida por brasileiros. Essa conclusão se deve ao que hoje é uma história bem conhecida na comunidade de preservação audiovisual brasileira. Calil conta que Hans Karnstädt, responsável pelo laboratório de conservação e restauração de Staatlichesfilmarchiv, foi questionado sobre o tratamento adequado para filmes de nitrato melados. Karnstädt ficou surpreso com a pergunta e respondeu que nunca havia visto nenhum material em tais condições. Algumas razões para tal fato podem ser apontadas: como a Alemanha tem um clima frio e suas instituições culturais são financeiramente estáveis ​​(permitindo a manutenção dos níveis adequados de temperatura e umidade dos depósitos), eles nunca tiveram que se preocupar com cenários em que grande parte de suas coleções encontram-se em estágios avançados de degradação. Mas no Brasil, devido ao clima quente e a instabilidade crônica da área, filmes de nitrato e acetato melados eram (e ainda são) uma ocorrência muito mais comum. Embora essa situação tenha acontecido há quatro décadas, os problemas enfrentados pelos arquivos e profissionais brasileiros não mudaram substancialmente. As condições de conservação da maior parte do patrimônio audiovisual do país apresentam problemas específicos que somente a experiência de trabalho no Brasil local pode resolver.
A Restauração Digital de Filmes no Brasil: O Nascimento e a Rápida Decadência de um Campo
Mas será efetivamente no final de maio de 1977 que o Laboratório de Restauração da Cinemateca Brasileira passará a operar realizando atividades de copiagem e revelação. Uma das figuras centrais para tal fato será João Sócrates de Oliveira,5 arquiteto de formação que entra na instituição sem ter tido experiência prévia na área de cinema e se tornará um restaurador de filmes de renome internacional.
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Entre as décadas de 1970 e 2000, as restaurações de filmes no Brasil foram capitaneadas, sobretudo, pelos arquivos audiovisuais, e realizadas em parceria com laboratórios comerciais ou pelo laboratório da Cinemateca Brasileira. A chegada da primeira década de 2000 representou o crescimento dos aportes públicos em preservação audiovisual e o início da realização um significativo número de projetos de restauração de filmes brasileiros. Nesse período, se destacaram o restauro de títulos de diretores integrantes do Cinema Novo, através de projetos liderados por suas herdeiras. Alguns poucos anos depois, em 2007 e 2009, a Petrobras investirá em dois editais públicos de restauro coordenados pela Cinemateca Brasileira, atestando que, ainda que momentaneamente, um papel mais ativo do Estado no fomento da atividade.Será na virada do milênio, mais exatamente em 1996, que será utilizada pela primeira vez no Brasil a tecnologia digital durante o processo de restauro de um filme. Foi em O ébrio (Abreu, 1946), uma produção da Cinédia. Apesar de ter tido a imagem restaurada fotoquimicamente, se utilizou de um procedimento híbrido para o som, mesclando etapas fotoquímicas e digitais. O relançamento de O ébrio estava sendo pensado desde meados dos anos 1990, por conta do aniversário de cinquenta anos da primeira exibição do filme em 1996. Em março daquele ano, a Cinédia propõe a Riofilme6,um projeto de restauração do que teria sido a versão original da obra, incluído seu relançamento comercial ao final do processo. Uma das prioridades era o retorno do filme aos cinemas, talvez por conta disso o projeto tenha sido apresentado à uma distribuidora. Nesse sentido, ele parece ter fomentado possibilidades de atuação que inclusive tiveram outros frutos, visto que em 2002 é levado a cabo, também pela Riofilme, a reformatação digital e o relançamento de outro título do passado, Deus e diabo na terra do sol (Rocha, 1964).
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Mas será em 2003 que terá início um projeto que efetivamente pode ser considerado um marco para a restauração digital de filmes no Brasil: o restauro da obra completa de Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, idealizado pelos filhos do cineasta, Alice, Maria e Antonio de Andrade, iniciativa pioneira na utilização da tecnologia digital de 2K de resolução no país. Nesse momento, na área audiovisual, esse tipo de tecnologia era utilizado, sobretudo, para as etapas de intermediação digital realizadas durante o processo de finalização de um filme. É a primeira vez, portanto, que um projeto de restauração brasileiro emprega essa ferramenta, o que representou um marco decisivo para o desenvolvimento do campo no país, tendo sido um dos fatores responsáveis pela atualização tecnológica do Laboratório de Restauração da Cinemateca Brasileira, além de propiciar a criação de um Núcleo de Restauração na empresa de pós-produção audiovisual Teleimage, em São Paulo.
Comparação entre diferentes materiais de Macunaíma (Joaquim Pedro, 1969) durante o processo de restauro do filme
O pioneirismo e a envergadura do projeto (restaurar digitalmente a obra completa de um cineasta) fez com que a metodologia de trabalho, as escolhas técnicas e éticas fossem descobertas e aperfeiçoadas ao longo do processo. Como ainda era um campo emergente, a necessidade de os profissionais envolvidos ganharem experiência com ferramentas de restauração digital era essencial. Afinal, a realização de um projeto de restauro em 2K no Brasil era novidade para todos os envolvidos, o que representou um grande desafio. Será neste período, justamente por conta de projetos como o de Joaquim Pedro, que acontecerá a abertura de departamentos dedicados à restauração digital de filmes dentro de laboratórios comerciais de pós-produção, como é o caso dos Estúdios Mega e da Teleimage, ambos em São Paulo, e da Labocine, no Rio de Janeiro. 
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Desde 2000, os Estúdios Mega7 vinham investindo em seu parque tecnológico, com direcionamento para a aquisição de equipamentos de intermediação digital. Em 2001 foi adquirida uma estação de trabalho chamada Restore, que consistia de um software acompanhado de um computador exclusivo. Esse equipamento, fabricado pela empresa norte-americana Da Vinci Systems, pioneira na produção de equipamentos para pós-produção digital, teve um custo de 380 mil dólares (cerca de 760 mil reais à época). A estação não tinha a capacidade de digitalizar, sendo que os materiais tinham que ser digitalizados previamente em outra máquina, como, por exemplo, um telecine. Ainda assim, o custo era bem alto, se mostrando proibitivo para praticamente a totalidade dos arquivos audiovisuais brasileiros nesse momento. Por conta disso, os responsáveis pela introdução dessa tecnologia no Brasil foram as empresas de pós-produção e finalização audiovisual, que tinham que se adaptar rapidamente às tendências de mercado, sobretudo ao lucrativo mercado publicitário. 
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A Teleimage iniciou seu Departamento de Restauração com o filme Pelé eterno (Aníbal Massaini Neto, 2004), para a correção digital de parte das imagens de arquivo que integram o documentário, que levou cerca de cinco anos para ser concluído por conta do volume do trabalho de pesquisa. Após esse trabalho, a empresa decidiu expandir o setor com o projeto de restauração digital da obra completa de Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. 

O caso da Labocine foi um pouco diferente em alguns aspectos. Como os dois exemplos citados, o setor de Restauração também se iniciou a partir dos serviços de intermediação digital já oferecidos por essas empresas, que se utilizavam da estrutura existente para servir de base para a inclusão da tecnologia destinada para o restauro digital de filmes. Isto é, softwares específicos, computadores com maior capacidade de processamento e servidores com capacidade de armazenamento adequada. Entretanto, ao invés de renomados cineastas do Cinema Novo, cujos filmes foram realizados a partir da década de 1960, a Labocine decide investir na restauração digital de Bonequinha de seda, obra realizada em 1936 por Oduvaldo Viana. O fato é que o filme foi produzido pela Cinédia, parceira de longa data do laboratório, e este talvez tenha sido o motivo principal para que o laboratório tenha assumido tal empreitada. Além, é claro, da possibilidade de adentrar em um mercado em expansão e com um diferencial em relação às outras empresas: ter como trabalho inaugural a restauração de um filme realizado na década de 1930, ou seja, há quase 80 anos atrás. Mas esse caso modelo levou muito mais tempo que se esperava. A restauração do título, que contou com uma etapa fotoquímica e outra digital, se iniciou em 2006 e levou cerca de sete anos para ser concluída, tanto por conta das interrupções provocadas pelas dificuldades técnicas encontradas quanto pelo aporte de investimentos efetuados ao longo do processo.8 Diferente dos Estúdios Mega e da Teleimage, a Labocine não contou com a garantia e o volume de recursos de um projeto de restauração composto por vários títulos ou de uma obra completa, como foi com a Coleção Glauber Rocha e com o projeto do Joaquim Pedro, mas sim o restauro de um único título, o que fez com que a empresa contasse com um montante de investimentos menor do que suas congêneres9  O que, por fim, representou menos profissionais exclusivamente dedicados ao projeto, menos equipamentos e, por conseguinte, menor velocidade na execução do trabalho. Apesar dos inúmeros desafios enfrentados, o esforço foi em certa medida recompensado devido à inestimável experiência acumulada pelos técnicos ao longo do processo. 

Além disso, uma questão importante merece ser ressaltada: o restauro de Bonequinha de seda acabou por revelar limitações intrínsecas das ferramentas digitais em relação a um dos grandes problemas apresentados pelos materiais remanescentes: a profusão de riscos e abrasões incorporadas fotograficamente à imagem (conforme figura abaixo). A resposta diante das primeiras etapas de tratamento do material no software de restauração Diamant, tanto na modalidade automática quanto semiautomática, foi mínima, visto que a ferramenta não conseguia localizar os problemas pois já faziam parte da imagem, revelando uma limitação inerente a estas formas de dano. Tentou-se interferir de maneira mais drástica e o resultado foi ainda pior, com a criação de inúmeros artefatos e a acentuação de algumas deformações na tentativa de estabilização geral ou parcial dos quadros.
Imagem com riscos incorporados fotograficamente e outros danos
Ou seja, no geral, a atuação da ferramenta digital não trouxe resultados significativos para os problemas considerados mais graves e de maior intensidade. Após a exibição de algumas amostras do trabalho e consultas a especialistas em eventos internacionais, comprovou-se que os procedimentos adotados estavam, a princípio, corretos, e que, infelizmente, a atuação dos softwares de restauração nos danos apresentados pelo filme não teria a repercussão desejada, ao menos não na versão em que se encontravam. Dada a particularidade dos danos, se estabeleceu um canal de comunicação permanente entre o laboratório e a empresa desenvolvedora do software, a HS-Art, o que viabilizou aperfeiçoamentos específicos para a limpeza dos riscos e arranhões incorporados fotograficamente na imagem.10
Mesma imagem anterior após a restauração
O que podemos notar através desse exemplo é que as ferramentas estrangeiras, mesmo as desenvolvidas especificamente para a restauração de filmes, como é o caso do software austríaco Diamant, não respondem de forma completamente satisfatória, dada a especificidade dos problemas de deterioração apresentados pelos filmes brasileiros, ainda que riscos e outros danos não sejam exclusividade de nossos materiais.11 Por conta disso, parcerias com laboratórios de restauração e fabricantes de softwares são importantes, sobretudo para projetos de pequeno porte e com materiais que estejam bastante comprometidos. Neste sentido, a ideia de se investir em um laboratório de restauração de um arquivo de filmes (como o da Cinemateca Brasileira) é uma opção estratégica, visto que a ótica de um laboratório comercial sempre será direcionada para projetos financeiramente lucrativos. 

A consolidação da intermediação digital como etapa integrante da produção audiovisual em meados da primeira década do século XXI parecia trazer consequências bastante benéficas para a área de restauração de filmes. Com o barateamento desse tipo de serviço, a tecnologia digital passou a ser adotada amplamente nos procedimentos de restauração e proporcionou o desenvolvimento das ferramentas e da própria área. Visto os projetos de restauro realizados desde a virada do milênio, o Brasil aparentava seguir por um caminho de desenvolvimento semelhante ao restante do mundo. No entanto, infelizmente, o campo da restauração digital de filmes no país começou a regredir em 2010. Neste ano, por falta de financiamento para projetos de restauro, os departamentos de restauração como o da Mega Studios começaram a fechar. O que antes era considerado um mercado em expansão, com o início do fechamento de Departamentos de Restauração nas empresas de finalização, logo se tornou um serviço de nicho.  

A partir de meados de 2010, a ampla adoção da tecnologia digital em todas as etapas da cadeira audiovisual – produção, distribuição e exibição – fez com que uma grande entrada de recursos nos laboratórios cinematográficos brasileiros, oriunda da confecção de cópias em película de filmes estrangeiros distribuídos no país, cessasse. Funcionava como uma reserva de mercado: era obrigatório que os filmes estrangeiros lançados nos cinemas brasileiros confeccionassem seus materiais de difusão em película no país. Apesar de empresas como Labocine, Teleimage e Estúdios Mega terem se mostrado parceiras importantes dos projetos de restauro citados, todas eram, afinal, empresas comerciais que visavam lucro. As que possuíam laboratórios fílmicos, como a Labocine, reduziram bastante sua margem de lucro com a diminuição e posterior interrupção de produção de cópias em película 35mm ao longo de 2010. 
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O volume de investimentos públicos em restauração de filmes (e em preservação audiovisual em geral) reduziu drasticamente a partir de 2011, o que gerou consequências nefastas para o campo. Uma das primeiras consequências mais notáveis aconteceu em 2015, com a extinção do Núcleo de Restauração da Teleimage e a demissão da equipe do setor. Para completar o cenário de decadência, a consolidação da projeção digital no circuito exibidor e a redução substancial do volume de processamento de cópias 35mm, maior fonte de renda da Labocine, inviabilizou a continuidade da empresa a longo prazo, o que culminou com seu fechamento definitivo em março de 2015. Desde então, a área de restauração de filmes no Brasil retraiu-se vertiginosamente, o que demonstra que apesar dos aportes iniciais realizados pelas empresas privadas, o setor era dependente dos recursos oriundos do Estado e de medidas de proteção de mercado. Com exceção do Laboratório de Restauração da Cinemateca Brasileira, que passou a operar sobretudo para demandas internas desde 2016, mas que está com suas atividades paralisadas desde março de 2020,12 e a empresa Afinal Filmes, que passou a oferecer serviços de restauração digital por volta de 2017, não há outras opções. 
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Existem projetos e filmes a serem restaurados, mas não há recursos ou políticas públicas de financiamento para esse tipo de atividade. Na verdade, nesse momento, quase não existem políticas públicas para a preservação audiovisual (ou para o setor audiovisual como um todo) no Brasil: o campo cultural, em geral, tem sido muito afetado pelo atual governo. Entretanto, em uma área historicamente ignorada em termos de investimentos e marcada pela instabilidade, como a área de patrimônio audiovisual no Brasil, é ainda mais grave. De mercado promissor à decadência em pouco mais de uma década, esse é o estado atual da restauração de filmes no Brasil.
1. Butruce, Débora Lúcia Vieira. A restauração de filmes no Brasil e a incorporação da tecnologia digital no século XXI. Tese (Doutorado). Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, 2020.
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2. A primeira experiência com o uso da tecnologia digital na restauração de um filme ocorreu em 1993, com Branca de Neve e os Sete Anões (Hand e outros, 1937). Este projeto foi capitaneado e financiado pela empresa Walt Disney.
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3. Kemeny e Lustig talvez sejam mais conhecidos por dirigirem o filme São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole (1929).
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4. Em 1998, a Líder Cinelaboratórios foi adquirida pelo investidor e empresário Wilson Borges, que então a renomeou como Labocine.
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5.   João Sócrates de Oliveira has worked with film restoration since the late 1970s. His career began at the Cinemateca Brasileira Restoration Laboratory. In the mid-1990s, he started to work as Technical Director at the Restoration Center of the British Film Institute in London. In 2002, he opened his own laboratory, the now defunct Prestech Laboratories. Oliveira has restored films such as Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), and O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (Glauber Rocha, 1969).
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6. A Riofilme é uma distribuidora cinematográfica brasileira criada em novembro de 1992 e gerida pela Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro. A partir de 2009, passa a atuar também como investidora nas áreas de produção, exibição, infraestrutura, difusão e capacitação, operando em parceria com a iniciativa privada.

7.  Os Estúdios Mega foi um importante parceiro no projeto Coleção Glauber Rocha, cujo objetivo era restaurar e relançar nos cinemas a obra do cineasta. Foi a empresa que realizou a digitalização de Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, estopim para a execução do projeto mais amplo de restauração da filmografia de Glauber Rocha.

8. Fui coordenadora técnica da restauração do filme junto com Hernani Heffner e acompanhei de perto a empreitada.

9. O custo do restauro foi de 100 mil dólares (cerca de 200 mil reais à época), valor considerado baixo para um trabalho desta envergadura.

10. Um representante do setor de desenvolvimento e manutenção da empresa até veio ao Brasil e presenciou os problemas que estavam acontecendo. Esta interlocução contribuiu para a melhoria significativa das ferramentas, melhorias estas que foram incorporadas nas versões posteriores do software.

11. Mais detalhes sobre a restauração de Bonequinha de seda em meu artigo “Restauração audiovisual: apontamentos conceituais, históricos e sua apropriação no Brasil” (2019). Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade, 8 (15), 169-181.
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12. Desde o início de 2020, a Cinemateca Brasileira vive uma das maiores crise de sua história. A crise vem causando muita mobilização, incluindo entrevistas e artigos sobre o assunto já publicados no Cinelimite. Vivomatografias, uma revista acadêmica argentina, também publicou recentemente um dossiê de entrevistas em espanhol sobre a crise: http://www.vivomatografias.com
/index.php/vmfs/article/view/338.
Introduction
My professional entry into the field of film preservation coincided with the emergence of digital restoration in Brazil. I began working within film archives in the year 2000. Being around archives at that time allowed me to witness the impact that digital technology was having on the still nascent field of digital film restoration. It was my desire to investigate my own early experiences as a film preservationist, systematize them, turn them into an object of study, and to contribute to a wider discussion on film restoration, that prompted me to begin doctoral research at the University of São Paulo in 2016. I finished this research at the end of 2020,1 focusing my dissertation on film restoration in Brazil and the incorporation of digital restoration technology in the 21st century. The research I conducted had two dimensions: on one hand, it included my professional experiences, and on the other, my interest in considering the historical process of film restoration in Brazil from technical, aesthetic and ethical perspectives. A small excerpt from this work will be addressed in this article, where I will present, in general terms, a historical background of film restoration in Brazil, a brief overview on the trajectory of the digital restoration field since the year 2000 and highlight some historical milestones since its early beginnings. 
Significance of the Year 2000
Over the last two decades, the field of audiovisual preservation has undergone profound changes. One of the evidences of this transformation can be found in the increasing amount of research being conducted on the topic of film preservation and its various aspects. The incorporation of digital technology within the film restoration process allowed the field to gain more prominence both in terms of practical skills and as an academic discipline. As a result, scholars have attempted to theoretically define it through deeper analysis of its many complex elements. The international bibliography on film preservation has also grown considerably since the 2000s, including welcome contributions from Brazilian researchers and scholars. Although in-depth film restoration research is still not very common in Brazil, the emergence of recent prominent writings on this topic and related issues proves that there is serious interest in the topic and in audiovisual preservation as an academic discipline.  
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From the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, digital film restoration tools were introduced and disseminated among major film archives, with financial support from big film production companies.2  At first, due to the prohibitive costs for most institutions and archives, these tools were only utilized occasionally. However, technological advancements allowed them to become more affordable for non-commercial projects and more widely adopted into the film restoration process along the first decade of 2000s. 
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Digital technology was incorporated into the restoration workflow in Brazil in the early 21st century, similar to what was taking place in some European countries and in the United States. Up until that point in time, each stage of the restoration process was photochemical. Film restorers were utilizing analog machines that had been used for years in commercial film laboratories and the technical staff behind most restoration projects were predominantly trained while working for these laboratories. With the arrival of digital tools, interventions into the restoration process began to be carried out by computers and professionals with new skills. These new restorers were well versed in digital restoration software and computer-based technology and had different professional backgrounds than the technicians who had only previously worked in film laboratories. Before providing a further analysis of the digital restoration field in Brazil, it is first necessary to present an overview of the history of Brazilian film laboratories.
Film Laboratories in Brazil
During the first few decades of filmmaking in Brazil, most of the small film production companies had their own laboratories. It is likely that these laboratories used similar tools to still photography laboratories. In the chain of processing photochemical material, the negative is first developed and then copied to a positive print, resulting in projection prints. In the 1910s, Alberto Botelho’s film laboratory took the first steps toward standardizing these procedures with above-average results. Consequently, their lab managed to create better film prints than what had previously been possible in Brazil. There are references to other laboratories of the time. For example, companies such as José and Victor del Picchia’s Independência Film and Paulo Benedetti Filmes had laboratories and processed titles such as Braza Dormida (Mauro, 1928), Barro Humano (Gonzaga, 1929) and Limite (Peixoto, 1931). A landmark moment for the film processing field occurred in the late 1920s, when Hungarian photographers and laboratory professionals Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolf Lustig relocated to Brazil.3 Kemeny and Lustig would go on to buy the Independência Film Laboratory and turn it into Rex Laboratories, which remained active until the 1970s. The technical knowledge that these Hungarian immigrants brought to Brazil allowed greater general control of the necessary parameters for processing film, such as temperature and time control, being responsible for improvements in the technical quality of Brazilian materials.
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The transition to sound cinema in the 1930s made laboratory processing even more complex and progressively caused the closure of small laboratories from the silent period. Regardless of these newfound challenges in film processing, the production company Cinédia, founded in 1930 by Adhemar Gonzaga, built its own laboratory in that decade. 
Adhemar Gonzaga opening the box containing the newly arrived Multiplex developer at Cinédia on May 20, 1937
The Cinédia laboratory operated with many setbacks until the end of the 1940s, a particularly difficult period for the company. The context of World War II only exacerbated Cinédia's difficulties, even causing them to momentarily shut down their operations at the end of 1941. In March 1942, the Cinédia studios reopened for the filming of Orson Welles’s It's All True, but only fully resumed productions the following year. The disastrous effects caused by the war, such as the lack of film stock and chemicals for processing films, was felt by Cinédia throughout the decade. The toll of the war on Cinédia culminated in their dismantling in 1949, when Adhemar Gonzaga decided to dispose of the laboratory film equipment. In 1951, Gonzaga interrupted Cinédia's activities and sold part of the studio grounds in order to liquidate all the company's financial commitments. The laboratory was subsequently disassembled and its productions halted. 
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A historical milestone for film restoration in Brazil particularly relevant to this discussion was the creation of the only existing restoration laboratory in a Brazilian film archive. The Cinemateca Brasileira Film Laboratory was created in 1976 from the acquisition of equipment and parts discarded by the formerly-named Líder Cinelaboratórios,4 a company from Rio de Janeiro that had recently acquired Rex Laboratories with the purpose of expanding its business to São Paulo. This acquisition began after Líder Cinelaboratórios was convinced that the Cinemateca Brasileira would not be a market competitor for them given their non-profit cultural mission. From then on, an informal partnership was established, and Líder began to periodically notify the archive whenever old equipment was discarded. 
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Carlos Augusto Calil, who was leading the Preservation Department of the Cinemateca Brasileira at the time, managed this acquisition process. His sense of opportunity was essential to the success of the undertaking. Calil had the insight to take advantage of a singular moment - the discarding of the old Rex laboratories machinery. Once the new owners of Rex laboratories began to modernize their lab with new technology, they decided to dispose of their older (but still functional) machinery. Calil was then able to purchase this machinery at discounted prices as a means of bolstering the infrastructure of the Cinemateca's laboratory.

While the old laboratory machinery was being implemented at the Cinemateca Brasileira, Calil had the opportunity to attend the second Summer course organized by FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) at the Staatlichesfilmarchiv (Film Archive of the German Democratic Republic). This course mainly addressed issues related to the conservation and restoration of films and it was very important for Brazilian professionals. During this course, Calil had access to publications on film documentation and cataloguing which had not yet been published in Brazil, materials that he would go on to share with his colleagues at the Cinemateca Brasileira. This ensured that the knowledge of the film preservation methods being used in foreign institutions would be shared and applied by Brazilian film preservationists in their own work. However, one of the major lessons that Calil learned was that the solution to Brazil’s film preservation problems would have to be invented and developed by Brazilians. This newfound understanding came to Calil from what is now a well-known story in the Brazilian audiovisual preservation community. Calil recounts that Hans Karnstädt, the person in charge of the conservation and restoration laboratory of Staatlichesfilmarchiv, was asked about proper treatment for nitrate films that have become sticky. Karnstädt was surprised with the question and answered that he had never seen any material in such condition. There are reasons for this can be pointed out: as Germany has a cold climate, and because their cultural institutions are financially stable (allowing the maintenance of adequate levels of temperature and humidity in the vaults), they never had to worry about scenarios where a large portion of their collections had undergone severe stages of degradation. But in Brazil, due to the hot climate and the chronic financial instability, sticky nitrate and acetate films were (and still are) a far more common occurrence. Although this situation happened four decades ago, the problems faced by Brazilian film archives and film preservationists have not changed substantially. The conservation conditions of most of the country's audiovisual heritage pose specific problems that only preservationists who have experience working in Brazil can solve.
Digital Film Restoration in Brazil: The Birth and the Rapid Decay of a Field
It was effectively at the end of May 1977 that the Cinemateca Brasileira Restoration Laboratory began duplication and restoration activities. One of the central figures for this was João Sócrates de Oliveira,5 a trained architect who entered the institution without previous experience in cinema, who went on to become an internationally renowned film restorer. 
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Between the 1970s and 2000s, film restoration projects in Brazil were mainly headed by film archives and carried out in partnership with commercial laboratories or by the Cinemateca Brasileira laboratory. The 2000s represented the growth of public investments in film preservation and the realization of a significant number of Brazilian film restoration projects. During this period, specific emphasis was given to the restoration of the titles of Cinema Novo filmmakers through projects led by their heirs. A few years later, in 2007 and 2009, Petrobras invested in two public calls for restoration coordinated by the Cinemateca Brasileira, attesting, albeit fleetingly, a more active role of the State in promoting and sponsoring film preservation.

At the turn of the millennium, in 1996, digital technology was used for the first time in Brazil during the restoration process of O ébrio (Gilda de Abreu, 1946), a Cinédia production. Despite the fact that O ébrio had its image photochemically restored, the restoration process included a hybrid procedure for sound, mixing photochemical and digital elements. The re-release of O ébrio had been considered since the mid-1990s, as 1996 marked the fifty-year anniversary of its first screening. In March of that year, Cinédia proposed the restoration project of what would have been the original version of the film to Riofilme,6 including its commercial re-release at the end of the process. One of the priorities of this project was ensuring that the film would return to the cinemas, which may be why this restoration project was presented to a distributor. By establishing a process where a newly restored film would be attached to a distributor, the restoration and exhibition of O Ébrio would impact other restoration projects that followed a similar path. In 2002, Riofilme also carried out the digital reformatting and the re-release of another classic Brazilian title, Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1964).

It was in 2003 that a project which can effectively be considered a milestone for digital film restoration in Brazil began: the restoration of the complete works of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. This restoration project was realized by his daughters Alice and Maria, and his son Antonio de Andrade. The restoration of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s complete filmography was a pioneering initiative in the use of 2K digital resolution technology in Brazil. At that time, this kind of technology was mainly being used for the digital intermediation stages performed during post-production for contemporary films. Therefore, this was the first time that a Brazilian restoration project employed this tool. The restoration of Andrade’s filmography represents a definitive milestone for the preservation field in Brazil, as it led to a major technological update for the Restoration Laboratory of the Cinemateca Brasileira. In addition to this update of the Cinemateca lab, the Joaquim Pedro project led to the creation of the Restoration Center at Teleimage, an audiovisual post-production company in São Paulo.
Comparison between different materials of Macunaíma (Joaquim Pedro, 1969) during the restoration process.
The pioneering initiative of using 2K resolution, and the scope of the project (to digitally restore the complete works of a filmmaker), made it possible for film restoration methodology to be practiced and improved by the archivists and technicians who were working on the project. As it was still an emerging field, the need for preservationists to gain experience with digital restoration tools was essential. After all, making a 2K digital restoration in Brazil was new for everyone involved, so this project represented a great challenge. It was around this time, precisely because of projects like Joaquim Pedro's, that many departments inside commercial post-production and finishing companies were created to exclusively focus on digitally restoring films. Mega Studios and Teleimage, both in São Paulo, and Labocine in Rio de Janeiro were the major companies that were concentrating on digital restoration during that time. 

Since 2000, Mega Studios7 has been investing in technological machinery, focusing on the acquisition of digital intermediation equipment. In 2001, they acquired a workstation called Restore, which consisted of a film restoration software built into an exclusive computer for the restoration process. This equipment, manufactured by the North-American company Da Vinci Systems (a pioneer in digital post-production equipment), cost $ 380,000 (about R$ 760,000 at the time). The station did not have the capacity to digitize. Instead, the materials had to be previously digitized by another machine (such as a telecine) in order to be used at the station. Because of this need for previous digitization, the cost of the entire restoration process was very high for Brazilian film archives at that time, leading to a situation where the post-production companies with larger budgets became primarily responsible for introducing restoration technology in Brazil. 
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Teleimage debuted its Restoration Department with the film Pelé Eterno (Aníbal Massaini Neto, 2004), digitally correcting part of the archival footage in the documentary. This project took about five years to be completed and demanded a lot of work from the restorers. It was only after completing their first restoration that Teleimage decided to expand their restoration division with the digital restoration of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's films.
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Overall, Labocine’s experience with digital preservation was different to that of Teleimage and Mega Studios. However, it was similar in the sense that its restoration sector began by offering digital intermediation services. Labocine, Teleimage and Mega Studios used their existing structure as a basis for the inclusion of technology destined for the digital restoration of films. That is, they bought specific restoration software, computers with greater processing capacity, and servers with adequate storage capacity. However, instead of investing its time in restoring the works of renowned Cinema Novo filmmakers, Labocine decided to digitally restore Bonequinha de seda, a film made in 1936 by Oduvaldo Viana. Bonequinha de seda was produced by Cinédia, a long-time partner of Labocine, which may have been the main reason why Labocine was interested in restoring the film. Restoring Bonequinha de seda presented the opportunity for Labocine to join an expanding national film restoration market. Also, restoring Bonequinha de seda as their first project, a work made almost 80 years ago, would allow them to stand out from other companies. However, the Bonequinha de seda restoration took much more time than what was initially expected. The restoration of the film, which included photochemical and digital tools, began in 2006 and took about seven years to be completed. The protracted length of the process was due to work interruptions which were caused by technical difficulties and the limited amount of funds available for the project.8 Unlike Mega Studios and Teleimage, Labocine did not have the volume of financial resources that a restoration project composed of several titles would have.9 While the restorations of the Glauber Rocha Collection and Joaquim Pedro’s filmography were well funded, the restoration of a single title made Labocine count on smaller investments. This meant that there were fewer professionals who were exclusively dedicated to the project, less equipment, and slower speed in the execution of the work. Despite the many challenges that this project faced, the effort to restore Bonequinha de seda was worthwhile due to the invaluable digital restoration experience that the technicians accumulated throughout the process. 
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The restoration of Bonequinha de seda ended up revealing the intrinsic limitations of new digital tools when dealing with scratches and abrasions that were incorporated photographically into the image (as shown below). The effectiveness of the Diamant restoration software (used in this process) during the first stages of digital treatment was minimal. This was because the tool could not locate the photographically incorporated scratches and abrasions that had become part of the image. Therefore, the first stages of digitally treating Bonequinha de seda revealed the inherent limitations of digital tools in fixing this type of damage. Also, after an attempt to use these digital tools to partially stabilize frames, the end product was even worse. The resulting creation presented numerous artifacts and the worsening of some of the photographically incorporated deformations.
A still from Bonequinha de seda with dirt, scratches and other damages.
Exhibiting samples of the work and consulting with specialists at international events revealed that the initially adopted procedures by the technicians in digitally restoring Bonequinha de seda were correct. However, the ability of the restoration software to deal with the damage presented on the film was not satisfactory. As a result, permanent communication was established between Labocine and the Diamant software developer company, HS-Art. Communicating the problems experienced in the Bonequinha de seda restoration made it possible for HS-Art to develop specific improvements to the software that would allow it to clean up the scratches and abrasions on the digital images.10
Same image after restoration with the improved software.
This story11 demonstrates that foreign digital restoration tools such as Diamant cannot completely respond to the specificity of the deterioration problems presented within Brazilian films.12 Because of this, establishing partnerships with restoration laboratories and software manufacturers is especially important for small projects that deal with materials in advanced stages of deterioration. In this sense, the idea of having a restoration laboratory in a film archive (such as at the Cinemateca Brasileira) is a strategic option, since a commercial laboratory will always aim at projects that are financially profitable.
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The global incorporation of digital intermediation as part of the audiovisual post-production process in the mid-2000s seemed to bring enormous benefits for the field of film restoration. As digital intermediation became less expensive, it was widely adopted in the restoration procedures and subsequently lead to the development of new digital restoration tools and the area itself. Given the restoration projects that were being carried out since the turn of the millennium, Brazil appeared to be following a similar path of development in the restoration field to the rest of the world. However, unfortunately, the field of digital film restoration started to regress in 2010. In that year, due to a lack of funding to restoration projects, restoration departments such as the one at Mega Studios began to close. What was once considered a widening market soon became a niche service. 
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From mid-2010, the widespread adoption of digital technology in film production, distribution, and exhibition has led to a decrease of financial resources being invested into Brazilian film laboratories. Prior to that point, the major sources of income for these film laboratories had been making prints of foreign films to be distributed throughout Brazil. This is because it was mandatory that foreign films being released in Brazilian movie theaters produced their 35mm projection prints in Brazil. There is no denying that companies such as Labocine, Teleimage and Mega Studios have shown to be important partners of the previously mentioned restoration projects. But they were also commercial companies, primarily interested in maintaining a profit. The companies which had film laboratories, such as Labocine, severely diminished its profit margins with the decrease and later interruption in the production of 35mm film prints throughout the 2010s. 
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The volume of public investments in film restoration (and in audiovisual preservation in general) drastically reduced from 2011 onwards, and this has generated harmful consequences for the field. The first notable consequence occurred in 2015 after the Teleimage Restoration Center closed and the company dismissed its staff. Further, the consolidation of digital projection in the commercial exhibition circuit and the substantial reduction in the processing of 35mm prints (Labocine’s largest source of income) made it impossible for the company to continue in the long term. Since the closure of the Teleimage Restoration Center and Labocine in 2015, the film restoration field in Brazil has shrunk vertiginously, revealing that despite the initial contributions made by private companies, the sector was dependent on State resources and measures of market protection. With the exception of the Cinemateca Brasileira Restoration Laboratory, which has mainly focused on its own internal needs since 201613, the only option to digitally restore a film in Brazil today is the company Afinal Filmes, which started offering digital restoration services in 2017. There are projects and films to be restored, but there are no resources or public funding policies for this type of work. In fact, today, there are almost no public policies for film preservation (or for the audiovisual sector at large) in Brazil: the cultural field, in general, has been greatly affected by the government. However, in an area such as the audiovisual heritage field in Brazil, which has been historically ignored in terms of investments and marked by instability, the repercussions have been even worse. From a promising market to a struggling one in just over a decade, such is the current state of film restoration in Brazil.
1. Butruce, Débora Lúcia Vieira. A restauração de filmes no Brasil e a incorporação da tecnologia digital no século XXI. Tese (Doutorado). Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, 2020.
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2. The first experience with the use of digital technology in the restoration of a film took place in 1993 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand & others, 1937). This project was carried out by the Walt Disney company.

3. EN: Kemeny and Lustig are perhaps best known for directing the city symphony film São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole (1929).

4. In 1998, Líder Cinelaboratórios was purchased by investor and businessman Wilson Borges. Borges then renamed it as Labocine.
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5.   João Sócrates de Oliveira has worked with film restoration since the late 1970s. His career began at the Cinemateca Brasileira Restoration Laboratory. In the mid-1990s, he started to work as Technical Director at the Restoration Center of the British Film Institute in London. In 2002, he opened his own laboratory, the now defunct Prestech Laboratories. Oliveira has restored films such as Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), and O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (Glauber Rocha, 1969).
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6. Riofilme is a Brazilian film distribution company created in November 1992 and managed by the Rio de Janeiro City Hall. Since 2009, the company has been investing in film production, exhibition, infrastructure and training in joint initiatives with the private sector.

7.  Mega Studios was an important partner for the Glauber Rocha Collection project, which aimed to restore and re-release in cinemas the filmmaker's work.

8. I worked as the technical coordinator for the restoration of Bonequinha de seda with film preservationist Hernani Heffner. Therefore, the experiences recounted here are those I experienced firsthand.

9. The cost of the project was US$ 100,000 (an amount considered small for a job of this magnitude).

10. A representative of the company's development and maintenance sector even came to Brazil and witnessed the problems taking place firsthand. This dialogue contributed to the significant improvement in the Diamant software’s ability to remove the photographically incorporated scratches in Bonequinha de seda. These developments were incorporated into later versions of the software.

11.For more information on the restoration of Bonequinha de seda, see my article “Restauração audiovisual: apontamentos conceituais, históricos e sua apropriação no Brasil” (2019). Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade, 8 (15), 169-181.
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12. This is true, although scratches and other damages are not exclusive to Brazilian materials.

13. Since the beginning of 2020, the Cinemateca Brasileira has been experiencing the biggest crisis of its history. The crisis has been causing a lot of mobilization, including interviews and articles on the subject already published on Cinelimite. Vivomatografias, an Argentinian academic journal, also recently published a dossier of interviews in Spanish about the crisis: http://www.vivomatografias.com/
index.php/vmfs/article/view/338.
When watching O que foi o Carnaval de 1920, a silent documentary shot by Alberto Botelho in Rio de Janeiro, our first reaction is puzzlement. The joy normally associated with people celebrating Carnaval in the streets seems strangely absent. The film consists of three parts. In the first, we see scenes of the corso parade with cars of wealthy cariocas1, driven by uniformed drivers and occupied by costumed men who repeatedly face the camera and pose for it. The whiteness of the passengers and their air of superiority are striking. Next, several shots taken at a children's Carnaval ball show costumed children posing or dancing for the camera, some quite serious and others with frightened faces on the verge of crying. The children all seem very uncomfortable, obeying the orders of the people behind the camera. The most uninhibited of the children, a girl named Hilda whom a title card describes as "little Feniana", appears in close-ups flanked by two small pierrots2, and we learn that she has won a prize. In the third part of the film, a title card announces the parade of the Sociedades Carnavalescas [Carnival Societies] of the Tenentes [Lieutenants], Fenianos and Democráticos. Different floats and their occupants are filmed, first waiting to enter the parade, then advancing through the downtown streets.

Who are these elegant Cariocas who parade their floats in the corso? What are these huge floats? Why do the residents of Rio de Janeiro’s faces appear only at the edges of the pictures, given that they are the crowd who were mainly participating in the Carnaval? To answer these questions, we will look at some details about Botelho's work in the context of Brazilian cinema history and comment on the transformations that Rio's Carnaval has undergone since the creation of the Sociedades Carnavalescas in the 19th century.

Alberto Botelho was a prolific cameraman in the early decades of the 20th century, when he filmed several “singing films” for Francisco Serrador's company as well as countless documentary films produced in the “cavação” scheme. These were commissioned films that documented various political, cultural, or sporting activities of the elites and authorities. Botelho filmed a multitude of parties, car and motorcycle races, inaugurations, civic events, picturesque excursions, and soccer games. In 1911, he was hired by Serrador to record, in the meadows of Moóca, São Paulo, the flights of the aviator Ruggerone, fiancé of the daughter of textile entrepreneur Rodolfo Crespi, who commissioned the films. In 1914, he documented the arrival of Santos Dumont in Rio de Janeiro. Botelho filmed Pathé Journal's newsreels in Brazil for over a decade, and also participated in the making of fiction films. In 1912, he produced and filmed in Rio de Janeiro a re-enactment of the famous "400 contos crime", in 1918 he photographed two productions by Luiz de Barros, and in 1920 he did the photography for one of the many versions of O Guarani, this one directed by João de Deus.

Rio de Janeiro's 19th century Carnaval celebrations were diverse and uncontrolled events of multiple cultural origins in which the whole city participated. But since their founding in the 1860s, the Sociedades Carnavalescas joined those who had long been fighting for greater public control over Carnaval to eliminate the anarchy of the celebrations and the “dangers” of the more popular versions of the party, such as entrudo, zé-pereiras, cucumbis, cordões, and ranchos - all of which we will elaborate on later. The Sociedades Carnavalescas wanted to offer a version of the festivities that restored their European characteristics and Venetian origins, thus eliminating the wild confusion of drumbeats and mass gatherings. These societies instituted two types of floats for their parades, those of  “critique” that criticized the socio-political situation of that period, and the floats of "allegories'' or "ideas," which were produced with the intention of reinforcing the impression of luxury and references to classical culture. The latter floats were made for the societies to differentiate themselves from the Carnaval of the lower classes. Botelho was often hired by these societies, and so the images he offered in his films were typically intended to highlight their cars and members. Therefore, what we see is not the party in its plurality, but only the organized revelry of Fenianos and Democráticos in their float parades, in their children's balls, and in the public ostentation of private cars, often rented, that paraded in the corso of Avenida Rio Branco. Advertisements in the press (see Figure 1) displayed costumes and party toys for the occasion. We see in these shots local people selling drinks to the occupants of the cars.
Figure 1: Advertisement for costumes for the corso in Fon-Fon magazine(February 14, 1920, page 5).
Botelho's work as a cinematographer on commissioned Carnaval films seems to have begun when he was hired by the Serrador Company to shoot O Carnaval do Rio in 1911. The film has since disappeared, but information in the film's file at the Cinemateca Brasileira3 indicates that the images featured costumed children and a Club dos Fenianos outing. In 1913 Botelho again filmed the corso on Avenida Rio Branco and some cars from the Clube dos Democráticos, and the following year he produced images of the corso on Avenida Paulista, where the São Paulo elite lived. There is, therefore, in the 1920 film, a repetition of the same subjects and financiers as in his earlier films about Carnaval.  

It should be noted that these films were shown in the central region of Rio, which had been reformed in the first decade of the century by the mayor Pereira Passos to expel the old tenements and working-class housing and replace them with wide avenues where new cinemas were built, next to symbols of modernity such as the Municipal Theater and the National Library. A sanitized image of Carnaval was therefore demanded by the press, the elite, and the public authorities to be shown in these new elegant cinemas (Morettin, 2005: 136). According to Bruno Carvalho, with these urban changes the city's Carnaval “split along socio-geographical lines”. On one side there were the private corsos and masquerade balls, which took place in elegant, closed venues, and the parades of the Grandes Sociedades, which were shown in the movies. On the other side, there was the effervescence invisible to the cinema, the lively and anarchic parties of the lower classes, “spontaneous and authentic expressions of the African populations of Brazil” that were concentrated around Praça Onze (2019: 202). According to Carvalho, it won't be until 1932, after the ascension of President Getúlio Vargas and his defense of samba and miscegenation as one of the elements for the construction of a national identity that the era of the escolas de samba (parades of Carnaval associations from cordões and ranchos) would begin. The newly created newspaper O Mundo Sportivo, headed by journalist Mário Filho, created “the hitherto sporadic practice of treating Carnaval parades as competitions”. Pedro Ernesto, mayor of Rio de Janeiro appointed by Vargas in September 1931, supported the schools, making the parades official and giving them guaranteed financial aid (Carvalho, 2019: 211). Thus, it is important that we understand the forms of Carnaval that were intended to be left out of cinematic images in the 1920s.

As Maria Clementina Cunha explains in her detailed historical study of Rio de Janeiro's carnaval between 1880 and 1920 (2001), entrudo was, for the population of Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century, synonymous with carnaval, a practice that had come from Portugal that, over three days of revelry, featured games for everyone - young and old, slaves and masters, women and men:
(...) It was the custom of getting each other wet and dirty with lemons or wax oranges filled with scented water, using syringes, troughs, tubes and even bathtubs - any container that could hold water to be thrown. It also included, in certain situations, the use of powder, “vermelhão”4, paints, flours, eggs and even mud, tar and fetid liquids, among them urine and "sewage" (Cunha, 2001: 54).
In the private space, the masters practiced a kind of domestic entrudo, and often the residents of houses on opposite sides of the street would shoot at each other, using smelly lemons that they would take from troughs held by slaves. In the street, these slaves participated more actively in the games. In the 1880s behaviors associated with entrudo began to be widely condemned by the Rio de Janeiro press, the police, and the Sociedades Carnavalescas, and the crudeness of entrudo was considered to be damaging to the reputation of Carnaval by the end of the century.

Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval also encompassed other popular practices. The cucumbis, for example, were parades of black people who, in the last years of the 19th century, dramatized in African languages the story of a black prince who dies after being attacked by a tribe dressed in feathers. At the end of the dramatization, the black prince is resurrected by a sorcerer and his return is celebrated. The Native Brazilian costumes of the parade had many feathers and necklaces of teeth, while the African court came with their drums and brought live or stuffed animals, such as snakes, turtles, lizards and others. Cunha explains that these parades, although criticized, were tolerated for their humble, primitive and even “picturesque” appearance. But after the abolition of slavery in 1888, these cucumbis began to be removed from what was considered the authentic Carnaval, a celebration without the portrayal of so much racial, social and cultural inequality. The cucumbis were labeled as “gangs of unruly blacks” disguised as Native Brazilians, and were literally banned from Carnaval celebrations.

Another form of popular practice during Carnaval were the noisy zé-pereiras, who invariably appeared and mingled with the larger crowds. These were parades created in the tenements, in which blacks, poor whites, prostitutes, manual laborers, and unemployed people paraded, ridiculing the upper classes by wearing ragged clothes inside out, beating tin drums, and displaying a banner made of cheap material. This modality was created in 1852 in Rio de Janeiro by a Portuguese shoemaker who felt nostalgia for the entrudo of his homeland (Cunha, 2001: 45-48).

Other important forms of popular Carnaval were cordões and ranchos, whose members came from the hills and distant neighborhoods. These celebrations were also considered crude and old-fashioned by the Sociedades Carnavalescas, but over the course of time they multiplied and managed to negotiate their survival in the face of the disciplinary project of Carnaval promoted by the Sociedades Carnavalescas and part of the press, which was losing strength in the early twentieth century. Many of these small popular Sociedades Carnavalescas requested public licenses to be able to go out during the Carnaval and visited the editorial offices of newspapers to acquire visibility.

There were important differences between cordões and ranchos. Cunha explains that while the cordões walked on foot, the ranchos rode allegorical floats on carts. The cordões' emphasis was on heavy percussion and singing in which “one or two dancers dressed as Indians sang the copla, and the choir repeated the chorus in unison”, sometimes accompanied only by cavaquinho and guitar. They sang a song with their strong drums and snares. The ranchos, on the other hand, sang in harmony with light percussion, strings, and wind instruments. The ranchos paraded with a predefined theme and had singing masters, who conducted a large presence of women, the pastoras. The larger societies were suspicious of these groups and did not differentiate between them, considering them all too numerous and threatening in their overt precariousness (2001: 152). However, in the first decade of the twentieth century a division was established: the ranchos began to be valued by the press for their poetic, musical, and organizational qualities, while the cordões received negative judgments that condemned their appearance of violence, miseducation, and marginality.  

Returning to O que foi o Carnaval de 1920, we can now explore the origins of the Democráticos and Fenianos. Their members were immigrants and merchants who founded clubs to have familiar spaces to socialize and enjoy their Carnaval, and also, crucially, to be valued by the local elite. They housed reading rooms, lectures, games, and promoted balls and Carnaval parades, in addition to producing their own newspapers, which were distributed to the public during the parades. The Club dos Democráticos was created on August 16, 1866, when a group of bohemian merchants chose as their senior partner the Portuguese José Alves da Silva, who contributed most of the money to the club’s activities. This club accepted small employees and various bohemians. The Club dos Fenianos, founded in 1869, adopted its name from the Irish rebellion against the English Kingdom. Cunha explains that the founding of the club took place at a meeting on Rua da Assembleia, at the residence of Mr. Chuck, "a disgusted British subject of Irish nationality, who imported and sold costume jewelry, with an establishment in Rio de Janeiro”. His presence may explain the name adopted by the society, which included on its board many immigrants, mainly Italians and Spaniards (2001: 110-111).

There is a whole complex history of relationships between Carnaval associations and the press, seen as a source of legitimization and publicity at a time when radio did not yet exist in Brazil. Representatives of cordões and ranchos visited the editorial offices of newspapers bringing their banners and part of the bands to be featured and commented on in their articles about the Carnaval. Illustrated magazines would write about what was to come before each Carnaval. In the case of O que foi o Carnaval de 1920, the close relationship between the societies and the press can be seen in the issue of the Fon-Fon magazine of February 21, 1920, published soon after the festivities. There is a clear connection between the angles of the filming of each car of the Fenianos and Democráticos parades and the photos of that same parade published in the magazine. While the film has few intertitles and doesn't say much about each car that is shown, the magazine shows photos of almost all the cars, explaining in the captions the theme and meaning of each one (see Figures 2.,3., 4., and 5.), which helps us better understand Botelho’s shots.
Figure 2: Fon-Fon Magazine, issue 8, February 21, 1920, page 24.
Figure 3: Fon-Fon Magazine, issue 8, February 21, 1920, page 25.
Figure 4: Fon-Fon Magazine, issue 8, February 21, 1920, page 26.
Figure 5: Fon-Fon Magazine, issue 8, February 21, 1920, page 27.
It is likely that the available viewing copy of O que foi o Carnaval de 1920 has lost, in addition to some intertitles, some scenes as well. Although at one point an intertitle announces images of the "three beloved societies: Tenentes! Fenianos! And Democráticos!", you do not see any images of the Tenentes' parade. Another possibility is that the Tenentes were not part of those who commissioned the film.

With the help of Fon-Fon magazine we can better understand the allegorical and critique cars that are featured in the parade. In the promenade of the Fenianos the following appears in succession after the riders of the front committee: lead float Festa do Jubileu no Olimpo (winner of the Sudan cup that was awarded to the best float), float of criticism A mão, Beef float, Rapto de Psiché, float Pra cima de moá criticizing the price of coffee and with two men dramatizing a comic scene, float O obelisco de Luxor, Lohengrin float, Pela Moral float criticizing the "almofadinhas" and "melindrosas"5, showing white men dressed as women, float Cruzeiro do Sul, an unidentified float where some members appear in performance, and float A cadeirinha de 1820. The floats are filmed here at an angle very similar to the magazine's photos, parked before the parade begins. The Democráticos' cars are shown in the following shots, in which we see: the leading float Águia Excelsa, the float Regresso Primaveril, the float O Auri-Verde Pendão, the float Execução da Paz, the float Os Dois Pecegos: almofadinhas e melindrosas (repeating a subject of the Fenianos and which probably refers to a popular debate of the time), the Reino dos Ratos critique float (which won the Phenix Cup for best critique), the Fecho do Amor float, and lastly the critique car Por um óculo. Finally three Fenianos' floats that we have already seen parked reappear. They now enter Rio Branco Avenue, and there is noticeable effort by the cameraman to isolate these floats from the view of the public. 

Even if they look precarious, films like O que foi o Carnaval de 1920 clearly reflect the spirit of their time. Within the classic description made by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes about the "themes" of silent Brazilian documentaries, which he divided between "rituals of power" and "splendid cradle", it is possible to say that the images of this carnaval film are curiously close to the "rituals of power" films, which showed public events where the movement of elites and authorities is observed. The Carnaval appears here in a complicated manner because it displays images of an old and widespread celebration in the country, however only showing its most elitist aspects.
1. Cariocas are citizens of Rio de Janeiro

2. In a Carnaval context, a Peirrot is someone dressed as a clown.

3. Information provided by newspaper articles collected by Jean-Claude Bernardet in Filmografia do Cinema Brasileiro 1900-1935, Jornal O Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Comissão Estadual de Cinema, 1979.

4. Pulverized mercury sulfate

5. Pejorative terms to refer to young modern men and women of the time, their fashion and attitude.
References:

‍Bernardet, Jean-Claude (1979). Filmografia do Cinema Brasileiro 1900-1935, Jornal O Estado de São Paulo. São Paulo, Comissão Estadual de Cinema.

Carvalho, Bruno (2019). Cidade Porosa: dois séculos de história cultural do Rio de Janeiro. 1ª ed, Rio de Janeiro, Objetiva.

Cunha, Maria Clementina Pereira (2001). Ecos da folia: uma história social do Carnaval carioca entre 1880 e 1920. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras.

Gomes, Paulo Emílio Salles (1986). A expressão social dos filmes documentais no cinema mudo brasileiro (1898-1930). In: C.A. Calil e M.T. Machado (eds.), Paulo Emílio: um intelectual na linha de frente. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, Brasiliense/Embrafilme.

Morettin, Eduardo Victorio (2005). Dimensões históricas do documentário brasileiro no período silencioso. Revista Brasileira de História. São Paulo, vol.25, número 49, pp.125-152.
Ao assistir O que foi o Carnaval de 1920, filme documentário silencioso filmado por Alberto Botelho no Rio de Janeiro, a primeira reação é de perplexidade. A alegria normalmente associada ao povo que celebra a festa nas ruas parece estranhamente ausente. O filme possui três partes. Na primeira, vemos cenas do corso, um desfile de automóveis dos cariocas ricos, guiados por motoristas uniformizados e ocupados por homens fantasiados que encaram seguidamente a câmera e posam para ela. Por mulheres um pouco tímidas que, ao contrário dos homens, não estão fantasiadas com roupas do sexo oposto. Chama a atenção a branquitude dos ocupantes e um certo ar de superioridade. Em seguida, vários planos tomados num baile de Carnaval infantil, mostram crianças fantasiadas posando ou dançando para a câmera, algumas bastante sérias e outras com cara assustada e à beira do choro, todas muito desconfortáveis e obedecendo às ordens de gente fora de campo. A mais desinibida das crianças, a menina Hilda, que um letreiro descreve como “pequena Feniana”, aparece em planos próximos ladeada por dois pequenos pierrots, e ficamos sabendo que ela ganhou algum prêmio. Na terceira parte, um letreiro anuncia o desfile das Sociedades Carnavalescas dos Tenentes, Fenianos e Democráticos. Diferentes carros alegóricos e seus ocupantes são filmados, primeiro esperando para entrar no desfile, depois avançando pelas ruas do centro da cidade. 

Quem são estes cariocas elegantes que ostentam seus carros no corso? O que são estes imensos carros alegóricos? Por que os rostos populares irrompem apenas na borda dos quadros e não vemos a multidão que se divertia no Carnaval? Para responder a estas perguntas buscaremos alguns detalhes sobre o trabalho de Botelho no contexto do cinema brasileiro da época e comentaremos as transformações sofridas pelo Carnaval carioca desde a criação das Sociedades Carnavalescas no século XIX.

Alberto Botelho foi um produtivo cinegrafista nas primeiras décadas do século 20, quando filmou diversos “filmes cantantes” para a empresa de Francisco Serrador, além de inúmeras vistas documentais produzidas no esquema de “cavação”: filmes de encomenda que documentavam diversas atividades políticas, culturais ou esportivas das elites e de autoridades. Botelho filmou uma infinidade de festas, corridas de carro e motocicleta, inaugurações, eventos cívicos, excursões pitorescas e jogos de futebol. Em 1911, foi contratado por Serrador para registrar nos prados da Moóca, em São Paulo, os vôos do aviador Ruggerone, noivo da filha do empresário têxtil Rodolfo Crespi, que encomendou os filmes, e em 1914, documentou a chegada de Santos Dumont ao Rio de Janeiro. Botelho filmou os cinejornais da Pathé Jornal no Brasil durante mais de uma década e também participou de ficções: em 1912 produziu e filmou no Rio de Janeiro uma reconstituição do famoso “crime dos 400 contos”, em 1918 fotografou duas produções de Luiz de Barros, e em 1920 fez a fotografia de uma das inúmeras versões de O guarani, esta dirigida por João de Deus.

No século XIX o Carnaval carioca, seja em suas versões mais domésticas, seja em suas manifestações de rua, estruturou-se como uma diversão plural e não controlada, de origem cultural múltipla, da qual todos participavam. Mas desde sua fundação, nos anos 1860, as Sociedades Carnavalescas se juntaram àqueles que há tempos vinham lutando por um maior controle público sobre o Carnaval, que eliminasse a anarquia das comemorações e os “perigos” das versões mais populares da festa, como o entrudo, os zé-pereiras, os cucumbis, os cordões e os ranchos – formas que descreveremos mais à frente. As sociedades carnavalescas queriam oferecer-se como uma leitura da festa que recuperasse as características europeias do evento e suas origens “venezianas” e eliminasse assim a confusão selvagem de batuques e multidões populares. Estas sociedades instituíram para seus desfiles dois tipos de carros alegóricos, os de “crítica” à situação do momento, e os carros de “alegorias” ou “ideias”, que produziam com intenção de reforçar a impressão de luxo e as referências a elementos da cultura clássica, para se diferenciar do carnaval das classes baixas. Botelho era seguidamente contratado por estas sociedades, de maneira que as imagens que ele oferecia em seus filmes estavam sempre dentro destas diretrizes: dar destaque para seus carros e foliões. Assim, o que se vê não é a festa em sua pluralidade, mas apenas a folia organizada de Fenianos e Democráticos em seus desfiles de carros alegóricos, nos bailes infantis de suas crianças e na ostentação pública de carros particulares, muitas vezes alugados, que desfilavam no corso da Avenida Rio Branco. Anúncios na imprensa (ver Figura 1.) ofereciam fantasias e brinquedos para festas para a ocasião. Vemos nestes planos alguns populares vendendo bebidas aos ocupantes dos automóveis.
Figura 1: Anúncio de fantasias para o corso na revista Fon-Fon (14 de fevereiro de 1920, página 5).
A atividade de Botelho como fotógrafo nos filmes de Carnaval por encomenda parece ter se iniciado quando foi contratado pela Empresa Serrador para filmar O Carnaval do Rio em 1911. O filme desapareceu, mas informações na ficha do filme existente na Cinemateca Brasileira1 indicam que as imagens exibiam crianças fantasiadas e a saída do Clube dos Fenianos. Em 1913 Botelho filmou novamente o corso na Avenida Rio Branco e alguns carros do Clube dos Democráticos, e no ano seguinte produziu imagens do corso na Avenida Paulista, onde morava a elite de São Paulo. Há, portanto, no filme de 1920, que sobreviveu para nosso olhar, uma repetição dos mesmos assuntos e financiadores dos filmes anteriores sobre o Carnaval. 

Há que notar que estes filmes eram exibidos na região central do Rio, que tinha sido reformada na primeira década do século pelo prefeito Pereira Passos para expulsar os antigos cortiços e moradias populares e substituí-los por largas avenidas onde se construiu novas salas de exibição, junto a símbolos de modernidade como o Teatro Municipal e a Biblioteca Nacional. Uma imagem higienizada do Carnaval era, portanto, exigida pela imprensa, pela elite e pelos poderes públicos (Morettin, 2005: 136) para ser exibida nesses cinemas elegantes da região. Segundo Bruno Carvalho, com estas alterações urbanas o Carnaval da cidade “se dividiu ao longo de linhas socio-geográficas”: havia de um lado os corsos e os bailes de máscaras particulares, que aconteciam em elegantes locais fechados e os desfiles das Grandes Sociedades, que eram mostrados nos filmes. E de outro lado havia a efervescência invisível ao cinema, das animadas e anárquicas festas das classes baixas, “expressões espontâneas e autênticas das populações africanas do Brasil” que se concentravam nas cercanias da Praça Onze (2019: 202). Segundo Carvalho, será apenas em 1932, após a ascensão do presidente Getúlio Vargas e sua defesa do samba e da miscigenação como um dos elementos de construção de uma identidade nacional, uma musicalidade e uma filmografia que representasse o país, que se iniciará a era das chamadas escolas de samba (desfiles de agremiações carnavalescas oriundas dos cordões e dos ranchos), quando o recém criado jornal O Mundo Sportivo, dirigido pelo jornalista Mário Filho, criou “a prática até então esporádica de tratar os desfiles de carnaval como competições”. Pedro Ernesto, prefeito do Rio de Janeiro nomeado por Vargas em setembro de 1931 apoiou as escolas, tornando os desfiles oficiais e dando-lhes a garantia de ajuda financeira (Carvalho, 2019: 211). Assim, é importante entendermos o que eram as formas deste Carnaval que se pretendeu deixar de fora das imagens cinematográficas na década de 1920.

Como explica Maria Clementina Cunha em seu detalhado estudo histórico do carnaval carioca entre 1880 e 1920 (2001), o entrudo era, para a população do Rio de Janeiro no século XIX, sinônimo de carnaval, uma prática vinda de Portugal que liberava, nos três dias de folia, brincadeiras permitidas a todos: jovens e velhos, escravos e senhores, mulheres e homens:
(...) Era o costume de molhar-se e sujar-se uns aos outros com limões ou laranjinhas de cera recheadas com água perfumada, com recurso a seringas, gamelas, bisnagas e até banheiras – todo e qualquer recipiente que pudesse comportar água a ser arremessada. Incluía também, em determinadas situações, o uso de polvilho, “vermelhão”, tintas, farinhas, ovos e mesmo lama, piche e líquidos fétidos, entre os quais urina e “águas-servidas” (Cunha, 2001: 54).
No espaço privado, os senhores praticavam um entrudo doméstico, e muitas vezes os moradores de casas em lados opostos da rua alvejavam-se mutuamente, usando limões de cheiro que iam retirando de gamelas sustentadas por escravos. Na rua, estes escravos participavam mais ativamente das brincadeiras. Na década de 1880 estes comportamentos passam a ser largamente condenados pela imprensa do Rio de Janeiro, pela polícia e pelas Sociedades Carnavalescas, e os folguedos meio rudes do entrudo chegam ao final do século como algo considerado o oposto de Carnaval, associado por muitos, inclusive, à própria monarquia, já que o imperador Pedro II adorava brincar o entrudo em seu palácio. 

O Carnaval do Rio de Janeiro englobava também outras práticas populares. Os cucumbis, por exemplo, eram desfiles de negros que nos últimos anos do século XIX dramatizavam em línguas da África o drama de um príncipe negro que morre aos ser atacado por uma tribo que se veste de penas, mas é ressucitado por um feiticeiro e se festeja sua volta. As fantasias de índios traziam muitas plumas e colares de dentes, enquanto a corte africana vinha com seus tambores e trazia animais vivos ou empalhados, tais como cobras, tartarugas, lagartos e outros. Cunha explica que estes desfiles, apesar de criticados, eram tolerados por sua aparência humilde, primitiva e até “pitoresca”. Mas após a abolição em 1888 estes cucumbis passaram a ser afastados do que se considerava o autêntico Carnaval, que não deveria incluir tanta desigualdade racial, social e cultural. Tachados de “bandos de negros desordeiros”, fantasiados de índios, eles foram literalmente explsos dessas festas.

Outra forma de Carnaval eram os barulhentos zé-pereiras, que invariavelmente apareciam e se misturavam às multidões. Eram desfiles criados nos cortiços, nos quais desfilavam por negros, brancos pobres, prostitutas, trabalhadores braçais e desocupados que ridicularizavam as classes altas vestindo roupas esfarrapadas do avesso, batendo tambores de lata e exibindo sempre um estandarte feito com material barato. Esta modalidade foi criada em 1852 no Rio de Janeiro por um sapateiro português que sentia saudades do entrudo da sua terra (Cunha, 2001: 45-48).

Outras importantes formas de Carnaval popular eram os cordões e os ranchos, cujos integrantes vinham dos morros ou dos bairros afastados, e também eram considerados grosseiros e antiquados pelas sociedades carnavalescas, mas que no curso da história se multiplicaram e conseguiram negociar sua sobrevivência diante do projeto disciplinador do Carnaval promovido pelas Sociedades Carnavalescas e parte da imprensa, que perdia força no início do século XX. Muitas dessas pequenas sociedades carnavalescas populares requisitavam licenças públicas para poder sair no carnaval e visitavam as redações dos jornais para adquirirem visibilidade.

Havia diferenças importantes entre os cordões e os ranchos. Cunha explica que enquanto os integrantes dos cordões caminhavam a pé, os ranchos usavam alegorias montadas sobre carroças. O forte dos cordões era uma pesada percussão e um canto no qual “um ou dois dançarinos vestidos de índios entoavam a copla, e o coro em uníssono repetia o estribilho”, por vezes acompanhados apenas de cavaquinho e violão. Cantavam uma cantiga com seus fortes bumbos e tambores. Já os ranchos exibiam um canto harmonizado com percussão leve e com instrumentos que incluíam cordas e sopros. Os ranchos desfilavam com enredo fixo e tinham mestres de canto, que conduziam uma numerosa presença de mulheres, as pastoras. As grandes sociedades suspeitavam desses grupos e não os diferenciavam, considerando todos demasiadamente numerosos e bastante ameaçadores em sua precariedade explícita (2001: 152). Entretanto, na primeira década do século XX estabeleceu-se uma divisão: os ranchos começaram a ser valorizados pela imprensa devido às suas qualidades poéticas, musicais e de organização, enquanto os cordões recebiam juízos negativos que condenavam a sua aparência de violência, deseducação e marginalidade. 

De volta às imagens de O que foi o Carnaval de 1920, podemos agora nos indagar sobre as origens de Democráticos e Fenianos. Seus integrantes eram imigrantes e comerciantes que fundaram estes clubes para terem espaços familiares para socializar e brincar seu carnaval, e aproveitando também, o que era fundamental, para serem também valorizados pela elite local. Abrigavam salas de leitura, palestras, jogos e promoviam bailes e desfiles de Carnaval, além de produzir seus próprios jornais, que eram distribuídos ao público durante os desfiles. O Club dos Democráticos nasceu em 16 de agosto de 1866, quando um grupo de comerciantes boêmios escolheu como sócio principal o português José Alves da Silva, que entrou com a maior parte do dinheiro. A agremiação aceitava pequenos empregados e boêmios variados. Já o Club dos Fenianos, fundado em 1869, adotou este nome porque seus fundadores tomaram como referência a rebelião dos irlandeses contra o Reino Inglês. Cunha explica que a fundação do clube aconteceu em reunião na Rua da Assembleia, na residência de Mr. Chuck, “um desgostoso súdito britânico de nacionalidade irlandesa, que importava e comercializava bijuterias, com estabelecimento no Rio de Janeiro”. Sua presença talvez explique o nome adotado pela sociedade, que incluía em sua diretoria muitos imigrantes, principalmente italianos e espanhóis (2001: 110-111).

Há toda uma complexa história de relacionamento entre as agremiações carnavalescas e a imprensa, tida como fonte de legitimação e publicização, num momento em que o rádio ainda não existia no Brasil. Representantes dos cordões e ranchos visitavam as redações dos jornais trazendo seus estandartes e parte das bandas, para receberem destaque e comentários em suas matérias sobre o carnaval. Revistas ilustradas comentavam o que estava por vir antes de cada Carnaval. No caso de O que foi o Carnaval de 1920 a estreita relação entre Sociedades e a imprensa pode ser constatada na edição da revista Fon-Fon de 21 de fevereiro de 1920, publicada logo após as festividades. Há uma clara coincidência entre os ângulos das filmagens de cada carro dos desfiles de Fenianos e Democráticos e as fotos desse mesmo desfile publicadas na revista. Enquanto o filme possui poucos letreiros e não informa muito sobre cada carro que é mostrado, a revista exibe fotos de quase todos os carros, explicando nas legendas o tema e o sentido de cada um (ver Figuras 2.,3., 4., e 5.), o que nos ajudou a melhor entender estas filmagens.
Figura 2: Revista Fon-Fon, número 8, 21 de fevereiro de 1920, página 24.
Figura 3: Revista Fon-Fon, número 8, 21 de fevereiro de 1920, página 25.
Figura 4: Revista Fon-Fon, número 8, 21 de fevereiro de 1920, página 26.
Figura 5: Revista Fon-Fon, número 8, 21 de fevereiro de 1920, página 27.
É provável que a cópia em questão tenha perdido, além de alguns letreiros, também algumas cenas. Embora a certa altura um letreiro anuncie imagens das “trez sociedades queridas: Tenentes! Fenianos! E Democráticos!”, não se verá nenhuma imagem do desfile dos Tenentes. Outra possibilidade é a de que os Tenentes não tenham sido parte dos que encomendaram o filme.

Com a ajuda da Fon-Fon podemos entender melhor os carros de crítica e de alegorias que desfilam. No préstito dos Fenianos aparece a seguinte sucessão após os cavaleiros da comissão de frente: carro-chefe Festa do Jubileu no Olimpo (vencedor da taça Sudan conferida à melhor alegoria), carro de crítica A mão, carro do Beef, carro alegórico Rapto de Psiché, carro Pra cima de moá de crítica ao preço do café e com dois homens dramatizando uma cena cômica, carro alegórico O obelisco de Luxor, carro alegórico Lohengrin, carro Pela Moral de crítica aos almofadinhas e melindrosas exibindo homens brancos fantasiados de mulher, carro alegórico Cruzeiro do Sul, carro não identificado onde alguns sócios aparecem em performance, e carro alegórico A cadeirinha de 1820. Os carros são aqui filmados sob ângulo muito parecido às fotos da revista, estacionados antes de começar o desfile. Os carros dos Democráticos são mostrados nos planos seguintes, em que vemos: o carro-chefe Águia Excelsa, o carro alegórico Regresso Primaveril, o carro alegórico O Auri-Verde Pendão, o carro de crítica Execução da Paz, o carro de crítica Os Dois Pecegos: almofadinhas e melindrosas (repetindo um assunto dos fenianos e que deve refletir uma discussão da época), o carro de crítica Reino dos Ratos (que obteve a taça Phenix para a melhor crítica), o carro alegórico Fecho do Amor e por último o carro de crítica Por um óculo. Por último reaparecem três carros dos Fenianos que já vimos estacionados, mas agora entrando na Avenida Rio Branco, com visível esforço do cinegrafista em isolar os carros da visão do público presente. 

Ainda que tenham aparência precária, filmes como este refletem o espírito de seu tempo com clareza. Dentro da clássica descrição feita por Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes sobre os “assuntos” dos documentários silenciosos brasileiros, que ele dividia entre “rituais do poder” e “berço esplêndido”, é possível dizer que as imagens desse filme de carnaval aproximam-se curiosamente dos filmes de “ritual do poder”, que exibiam eventos públicos onde se observa a movimentação das elites e de autoridades. O carnaval aparece aqui de maneira complexa, porque exibe imagens de uma festa antiga e generalizada no país, mas mostrando apenas sua faceta mais elitista.
1. Informação fornecida por matéria de jornal coletada por Jean-Claude Bernardet em Filmografia do Cinema Brasileiro 1900-1935, Jornal O Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Comissão Estadual de Cinema, 1979.
Referências

‍Bernardet, Jean-Claude (1979). Filmografia do Cinema Brasileiro 1900-1935, Jornal O Estado de São Paulo. São Paulo, Comissão Estadual de Cinema.

Carvalho, Bruno (2019). Cidade Porosa: dois séculos de história cultural do Rio de Janeiro. 1ª ed, Rio de Janeiro, Objetiva.

Cunha, Maria Clementina Pereira (2001). Ecos da folia: uma história social do Carnaval carioca entre 1880 e 1920. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras.

Gomes, Paulo Emílio Salles (1986). A expressão social dos filmes documentais no cinema mudo brasileiro (1898-1930). In: C.A. Calil e M.T. Machado (eds.), Paulo Emílio: um intelectual na linha de frente. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, Brasiliense/Embrafilme.

Morettin, Eduardo Victorio (2005). Dimensões históricas do documentário brasileiro no período silencioso. Revista Brasileira de História. São Paulo, vol.25, número 49, pp.125-152.
Writing about Carnaval no Fogo today, given the material conditions of the available digital copy - mutilated, and at times impossible to see or hear - calls for an initial consideration. What is the subject here? Is it the film released on the eve of Carnaval 1949, celebrated at the time by even some of the hastiest enemies of Brazilian cinema? Is it the film that would later be considered the "model chanchada" by Sérgio Augusto? Or is it this painfully pale vision of a lost splendor, this obviously partial restitution of an imaginary object that perhaps still persists, silently, in a film archive basement?

How can one write about a work that no longer contains what may be the single most commented upon scene in the history of film criticism on carioca chanchadas? Namely, Grande Otelo and Oscarito parodying Romeo and Juliet on the balcony. It would be possible, of course, to find a version of the missing sequence on the internet and artificially reinsert it in the film. But wouldn't that then be to perform a senseless prosthesis in a vain attempt to restore an already lost integrity, further compromised each time an image jumps or there is a sudden silence on the soundtrack? Wouldn't that then transform the film into a mere source of information and annul the materiality that presents itself, here and now, to our senses?

Perhaps an alternative approach is in order: what if we were to start from this corrupted surface, from these shreds of image and sound? What if we were to find in them, perhaps, a new opportunity to reexamine the chanchada? Writing about Brazilian cinema of the past is almost always a process of describing something that cannot be seen or heard. But what if, rather than starting from a hypothetical lost film in need of restoration, we begin by considering the visual distortion and sonic turbidity, the blurred temporal flow to which the body is forced to get used to when viewing the only existing digital copy of Carnaval no Fogo?
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A frame darkened at its edges barely allows us to read a poster that says: "Teatro Municipal - Concerto Sinfônico", while showing the blurred silhouette of a conductor in front of his musicians. In the next shot, Oscarito, wearing a tuxedo, conducts an invisible orchestra in a slight low-angle shot. The image is barely perceptible - scratches cross the surface of the screen, random blurs and whitish blotches suddenly appear to obscure its texture. The sound that can be distinguished is a distracting noise reminiscent of a film passing through a projector. We can barely make out the sound of instruments while we guess the melody amidst the chaos of cracks and hums. The editing alternates between a medium frontal shot - which doesn't let us see the darkened background of the theater - and the rear view of the comedian, who continues to furiously brandish his baton in front of a closed curtain, preventing us from identifying even the slightest shadow of a musician. Until, with his maddened expression and disheveled hair, Oscarito suddenly turns to the antechamber. Now staring at the audience, he delivers a sharp blow to the spectator, shattering the illusion of transparency.
The delightful joke ends by giving up the charade: the opening shot shows us a room in the Copacabana Palace hotel. The curtain of the imaginary theater is revealed as a lavish bed, a closet the place where this individual, who turns out to be a valet, returns the tuxedo he momentarily stole from a rich guest. As with the best reflexive moments of chanchadas (such as the carnaval staging proposed by Othello to Helen of Troy in the 1952 Carnaval Atlântida, the high-voltage political satire that stresses the relations between social classes, the highbrow and lowbrow culture, nobility and vulgarity), here, Carnaval no Fogo self-consciously mocks the neocolonial cinematographic framework as an object of interrogation and scorn. The slow pull-back of the camera to reveal, little by little, the true environment of the impossible maestro is what impresses us most, despite the distorted image and sound, of Watson Macedo's powerful mise-en-scène. But everything else that clouds the eye and the ear - the blurred visuals, the choppy sound - instead of softening the reflexivity of Carnaval no Fogo, further underscores it. It is as if the underdeveloped, parodic, anarchic fury of the chanchada gains relief and substance in the exacerbated superficiality of the degraded image and in the chaos of the distorted sound. Amidst the sudden scratches and explosions, submerged in this uncomfortable and inescapable noise, Oscarito is the conductor of a visual and sonic battle for the imminent destruction of mainstream cinema. He is the commander-in-chief of the violent dissolution of any colonized good taste.

At this point, perhaps it is important to say that arguing in defense of the poor image - as Hito Steyerl would call it - does not amount to an argument against restorations of Brazilian films, or anything like that. It is considering, in a materialistic way, the integrity of Carnaval no Fogo as it now presents itself to us, trying to find something in it that allows us to reevaluate the legacy and the potency of the chanchada in the form in which it has survived to this day. But it is also important to point out something that has become commonplace in many recent restorations: a near obsession with total cleanliness, an elimination of whatever is dirty in the image and sound, which perhaps makes us doubt the acuity of Glauber's aesthetics of hunger or Sganzerla's defense of the avacalho1. Perhaps there might be an argument that restoration projects should materially preserve some of this fury, this filth, this disorganization that is so characteristic of our cinema, and that tends to lose much of its force in certain recent restorations obsessed with adjustment and perfection.
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One wonders what the lifelong conservative Moniz Vianna, who called on the Censors to "put an end to the celluloid pornography that infests our screens" (apud AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 21) in the same year of 1949, would say about this digitized copy of a shabby chanchada. How would he react to the fact that celluloid is now no more than a faint memory? One wonders what the cinemanovista David Neves, who in 1966 still condemned "the old opportunistic and improvised practice of 'chanchadas'" (NEVES, 1966, p. 6) would think if he today came across this copy of a copy of a copy. In a way, it is as if the sheer precariousness of this plastic and musical matter highlights that which both the contemporary critics of the chanchada and the Cinema Novo condemned so much - improvisation, vulgarity, haste, sloppiness, anarchy - and that which Sganzerla and the Cinema Marginal filmmakers would recover with a new breath, inverting the bourgeois values of condemnation and transforming them into the ultimate vocation of Brazilian cinema.

If the chanchada revisited by the Cinema Marginal filmmakers had already been transformed into a powerful anti-colonial weapon for its frequent attacks on quality cinema, for assuming from the start underdevelopment as an inescapable paradigm, the poor quality digital version of Carnaval no Fogo turbocharges this arsenal with a demolition of technicist hygiene, with an open confrontation with the hegemony of the ultra high-resolution image. If the chanchada in its time waged a cinematographic battle in which the guerrilla tactic consisted of corrupting and disfiguring the Hollywood model to the point of exhaustion - and Carlos Manga's parodies Matar ou Correr (1954) or Nem Sansão, Nem Dalila (1955) are perfect examples of that - the impact of this gesture today is amplified by its decisive incursion in a "class struggle of images", as Maria Bogado proposes, in which the hierarchy of resolutions has become a new battleground. In an audiovisual ecosystem where Hito Steyerl tells us, "resolution has been fetishized to the point that its absence is equivalent to the castration of the author" (STEYERL, 2009, p. 188), Macedo's genius is - paradoxically - underscored by the extreme compression of the file. Strangely enough, seeing poorly and hearing worse here does not lessen Macedo's authorship, but accentuates his most prominent aesthetic gestures.
Following the opening sequence, Grande Otelo's character - also a hotel employee - arrives with a message for Serafim (Oscarito). "A telegram from Uncle Sam," he says. "But I don't have an uncle," replies Serafim. The jokes in profusion spoken in English are a conscious mockery of the imperialist language, to the point where the poorly copied imitations extends to the performances: Otelo and Oscarito, broom in hand, improvise a very Brazilian version of dance steps to an American rhythm, mimicking Hollywood musicals with a smile on their faces. But it is not only the cinematographic metropolis that is parodied to exhaustion. Serafim's explanation about his family tree that branched off to produce a brother from the United States is a delightful parody of the famous poem "Quadrilha" (1930), by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, transforming the lyrical text into a profusion of chaotic and entirely illogical arrangements, to the point where Oscarito's words become pure unintelligible noise - accentuated, of course, by the extra noise coming from the poor sound of the copy.

It would be tempting to invoke Tom Zé's "plagiarism/combination" [plagiocombinação] as the core of the construction of Carnaval no Fogo, from the script by Macedo and Alinor Azevedo to the performances by Oscarito and Grande Otelo; from the treatment of the scenery to the choreography. In an interview for Carta Maior magazine in 2006, the tropicalist musician comments on his compositional strategy: "I assume plagiarism/combination. I can say, for example, that something from pop or classical music influences me. Do you know why? Because when I lean into this influence, I can create an abyss between what influences me and the work I present". Also, in this "model chanchada", there is a conscious assumption of the model and the reflexive interposition of a distance between the model and the copy (the audience knows very well that it is an imitation, and their laughter comes precisely from the enjoyment of that distance). But what Macedo and the other creators of the chanchada - especially José Carlos Burle, Carlos Manga and José Cajado Filho - accomplish is a kind plagiarism/mockery, which, by making the defective copy, corrupts the reference to the model until it becomes unrecognizable. The copy made by chanchadas is a ridicule of the model, to the point of complete disfigurement.

The economy of exchange - the "paramount twist of the chanchada" according to Sérgio Augusto (AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 15) - permeates every layer of the film. Serafim needs to pretend to be an artist to impress his gringo brother; Ricardo needs to pretend to be a villain until he can reveal a crime to the police; the whole dramatic structure of Carnaval no Fogo is based on this endless barter. But the exchanges are also present in the frequent breaking of expectations in relation to the classical model: the seemingly defenseless girl suddenly punches the good guy in the face, and then suddenly kisses him with the same rebellious impetus. The imitation starts from a self-conscious motivation and then completely dissolves the reference point into chaos and anarchy. In an otherwise unimportant scene, the heroine's friend asks, as if it were possible to summarize the destruction of the American model carried out by the chanchada in a single line: "Marina, is it true that Americans are made of plastic matter?"

What also happens to the spectator when faced with these ruined images and sounds is that initially, we are tempted to see in spite of the visual static, to hear in spite of the sound distortion. As if there is an integrity somehow still recoverable, beyond or behind the copy of the copy. As if it is possible to separate the supplementary defect of the version in front of us from the original manufacturing defect of the film. But soon we get used to the ruin, soon we are forced to accept the defect as the first surface of the image and sound, until the pleasure comes to reside precisely in engaging in this total disarray, this hyper-enhanced anarchy and chaos, this impossibility of referring to any original. The plastic, vagrant, precarious, inorganic matter of this version of Carnaval no Fogo is, in a certain sense, the ultimate realization of its aesthetic-political vocation.
Serafim, in distress over his brother Johnny's impending visit, goes to young Marina (Eliana) to ask her to convince artistic director Ricardo (Anselmo Duarte) to include him in the Copacabana Palace show. Leaning back in the Director's vacant chair, he exclaims, "Ah, Ms. Marina, I am an artist!". In a masterful cut - Macedo had been an editor at Atlântida for years - the next shot jumps to a performance by the Aqualoucos, a troupe of acrobatic clowns, poolside at the luxury hotel, demonstrating their wacky skills to the good guy Ricardo while unraveling his well-ironed suit. The cut between the ironic vindication of Art with a capital A - in the colonial mold - and the generalized mess of the Aqualoucos is a seed of what would be, three years later, the fundamental gesture of Carnaval Atlântida: the defense of total carnavalization as a fundamental underdeveloped artistic gesture, instantly destroying the hierarchies between high and low culture, between the noble forms of opera and concert music and the popular forms of the circus and vaudeville theater. But if the cut between the shots is precise in its formulation, no less important is the startle of the image that, as in a superimposed defect or a visual glitch, shuffles the overall shot and the general shot and syncopates the rhythm, injecting even more vulgarity into the sloppiness assumed as power.

The sympathy for the devil of this chanchada concludes some time later, when the Aqualoucos throw the righteous director into the pool of the luxury hotel, messing up his outfit. But the distorted image itself - which barely allows us to distinguish in the scene who is crazy and who is not - intensifies the chaos. We no longer know if what we see is water in the pool or a defect on the image, if what we hear is the sound of water or the noise left by the multiple conversions from celluloid to digital. If a critic from A Cena Muda magazine at the time of Carnaval no Fogo's release considered "the scenes 'rushed', the situations 'illogical', the cuts 'careless', and the characters 'poorly developed'" (apud AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 117) - revealing, of course, his conception of cinema based on reactionary good taste - in our shabby copy we see today it is exactly haste, illogicality, carelessness, and underdevelopment that gain even more importance.
There is a visual economy of the copy that constantly underlines the aesthetic-political gesture of Macedo's chanchada. If the dance performances on the stage of the Copacabana Palace were already produced cheaply - the Eiffel Tower hastily painted in the background - the surface of the image triples the stakes: the contrast exacerbated by poor quality, the faulty textures, the accentuated white areas, the sudden explosions of light within the frame, the populated background always rendered an indistinct blur, the sudden silences of the image in which a black screen comes into view while the dialogue continues.

But there is something very significant also happening with sound. An animal impersonator visits the hotel, seeking to demonstrate his skills to director Ricardo. If, for Sérgio Augusto, Watson Macedo is the "master of the exchange" (AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 116) - a precise formulation that synthesizes the director's taste for exchanging identities, objects, and social positions - this sequence from Carnaval no Fogo makes that operation literal, transferring it from the screenplay to the film's sound. In this exchange-joke-trick-special effect, the gag here is entirely cinematic, since the joke is based on the comparison between the impersonation - performed by the hard-working hotel employee - and the pure and simple replacement, on the soundtrack, by the noise captured from chickens, horses, and machine guns. Today, the sound that has been obscured by the poor copy of the film intensifies the gesture, since everything appears to our ears as more mechanical, more over-processed, even more distant from any natural sounds.
But nothing compares to what happens in the final sequence, where the mayhem settles once and for all in the hotel corridors. The good guys team up with the comical employees to unravel their confusion and reveal the villains to the police, while the bad guys regroup to get away with their crime. As if the mad dash and hilarious punching and kicking were not enough - the young lady in the ballerina costume is the most skilled fighter - there is also a bomb about to explode. But it is precisely at this point that the deterioration of the copy becomes exponentially worse: floating scratches, uncontrollable dimming, and sudden flashes of light ruin the picture, while nothing can be heard on the soundtrack except the wild noise of the copy's faulty processing. Dialogue is smothered by a renitent hum that is now at maximum volume (and even subtitling has become impossible). The imminence of the explosion ignites the rhythm of the film, while the material texture of the copy seems about to tear itself apart entirely, consumed by an invisible fire. The images and sounds take on the final appearance of an object found in the trash. But this garbage burns, it is alive in its inner fire. And it is precisely in this self-incineration of the film that the spectator is fully immersed, surrendered to this inextinguishable fire.
Oscarito, with the suitcase-bomb in hand, sets off dashing towards the spectator, as if his task now was to set fire to the film, to the screen - and take us along. The ending explosion of Carnaval no Fogo is an implosion of cinema, a final fire that leaves no image intact, no sound intact. Converted into an abstract blur, vision is shattered into a thousand pieces. Absorbed by noise, hearing has become impossible. Magically resurging from the ashes, amidst the smoke and the scratches on the image's surface, the actors stare at us once again, their expression somewhere between astonishment and uncontrollable laughter. Their work is done.

Instead of focusing here on the extreme precariousness of this film that we can barely see and hear, a trail that is about to be erased, what we propose is to see precisely in this abyssal poverty an elevation to the ultimate power of this “screwed up underdeveloped roguish democratic nationalistic anarchistic and freeing scumvulgarity chanchada” (ROCHA, 2004, p. 316), which Glauber famously defined with precision, and so begrudgingly, after decades of merciless condemnations against the genius of Macedo, Manga, Burle, and Cajado Filho. Seen today, in this deteriorated and shabby copy, the chanchada obliges us to reevaluate, once again, the depth of its incendiary fury. At a moment in which Brazilian cinema is literally under the constant risk of total fire, perhaps Carnaval no Fogo can teach us something about the power of these other flames. Flames that are still capable of setting our eyes and ears on fire. May our memory be a memory of fire.
1. Speaking about The Red Light Bandit , Sganzerla said: ”Quando a gente não pode fazer nada a gente avacalha” ("When we can't do anything, we should mess around/mock everything.")
References:

AUGUSTO, Sérgio. Estemundo é um pandeiro: a chanchada de Getúlio a JK. São Paulo: CinematecaBrasileira; Companhia das Letras, 1989.

BOGADO, Maria. “Na lutade classes das imagens”. Série de textos publicada na revista Cinética,2021. Disponível em: http://revistacinetica.com.br/nova/tag/nalutadeclassesdasimagens/ Acesso em 01/03/2022.

NEVES, David. Cinema Novo no Brasil.Petrópolis: Vozes, 1966

STEYERL, Hito. “Em defesada imagem ruim”. Serrote, Rio de Janeiro, IMS, nº19 mar, 2015, p.185-199.

VIEIRA, João Luiz. “Chanchadae a Estética do Lixo”. Contracampo, Niterói, n. 5, 2º. sem. 2000, p.169-182.

ZÉ, Tom. VILELA, Sávio. “Primeira parte daentrevista exclusiva com Tom Zé”. Carta Maior, 11/04/2006. Disponívelem: https://www.cartamaior.com.br/?/Editoria/Midia/Primeira-parte-da-entrevista-exclusiva-com-Tom-Ze/12/9546.
Escrever sobre Carnaval no Fogo hoje, diante das condições materiais da cópia digital que se nos apresenta – precária, mutilada, por momentos invisível e inaudível –, requer uma ponderação inicial. Qual é o objeto disparador da escrita aqui? É o filme lançado às vésperas do Carnaval de 1949, celebrado à época até por alguns dos inimigos mais apressados do cinema brasileiro, posteriormente convertido em “chanchada-modelo” por Sérgio Augusto, ou é essa visão dolorosamente pálida de um esplendor perdido, essa restituição eminentemente parcial de um objeto imaginário que talvez ainda resista, silenciosamente, à espera da ressurreição gloriosa num porão de cinemateca, mas que aqui não vemos nem ouvimos?

Os problemas começam com um detalhe dos mais reveladores. Como escrever sobre uma obra à qual sabemos que falta um pedaço crucial, aquela que talvez seja a sequência mais comentada de toda a fortuna crítica da chanchada carioca (Otelo e Oscarito parodiando Romeu e Julieta na sacada)? Seria possível, claro, recuperar uma versão da sequência ausente nalgum outro recôndito da internet e restituí-la artificialmente ao filme. Mas isso não seria, então, realizar uma prótese insensata, numa tentativa vã de recuperar uma integridade desde já impossível, desde já dilacerada a cada sobressalto da imagem, a cada silêncio súbito na banda sonora? Não seria então, novamente, transformar o filme em mera fonte de informação, anulando uma vez mais a materialidade que se apresenta, aqui e agora, aos nossos sentidos?

Talvez caiba aqui uma inversão do método habitual: e se partíssemos justamente dessa superfície corrompida, desses frangalhos de imagem e som, para encontrar neles, quiçá, uma chance outra de reexaminar a chanchada? Quando se lida com o cinema brasileiro do passado, quase sempre se escreve sobre algo que não se vê e não se ouve. Mas e se começássemos não de um hipotético filme perdido a restituir, mas dessa gagueira visual e dessa turbidez sonora que se impõe diante dos nossos olhos e ouvidos, desse fluxo temporal esburacado ao qual o corpo é obrigado a se acostumar?
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Um quadro escurecido nas bordas mal nos deixa ler um cartaz que diz: “Teatro Municipal – Concerto Sinfônico”, enquanto exibe a silhueta turva de um maestro diante dos seus músicos. No plano seguinte, Oscarito, de fraque, rege uma orquestra invisível em leve contra-plongée. A nitidez da imagem mal se sustenta, listras estrangeiras cruzam a superfície da tela, desfoques aleatórios e manchas embranquecidas surgem de repente para esburacar a textura, a vibração eletrônica enxerta instabilidade em tudo, enquanto o som primordial que se distingue é um ruído incômodo que faz lembrar o da película atravessando o projetor. Mal distinguimos o som dos instrumentos enquanto adivinhamos uma melodia sustentada pelos sopros em meio ao caos de estalos e zumbidos. A montagem alterna entre o plano médio frontal – que não nos deixa ver o fundo escurecido do tal teatro – e a visão das costas do cômico, que continua a brandir raivosamente a batuta defronte a uma cortina fechada, que também nos impede de entrever a menor sombra de um músico. Até que, com a expressão tresloucada e os cabelos desgrenhados, Oscarito se vira subitamente para o antecampo, nos encara violentamente e desfere um golpe certeiro no espectador, desfazendo a ilusão de transparência e intimando-o ao sobressalto.
A deliciosa piada terminará com a revelação da farsa: o plano aberto nos mostra o quarto do hotel Copacabana Palace, a cortinado teatro imaginário convertida em signo da cama luxuosa, o guarda-roupas onde esse que agora se revela camareiro irá guardar o fraque surrupiado por um momento ao hóspede rico. Como nos melhores momentos reflexivos da chanchada – a encenação carnavalesca proposta por Otelo para Helena de Tróia em Carnaval Atlântida (José Carlos Burle & Carlos Manga, 1952) –, a sátira política em alta voltagem – que tensiona as relações entre classes sociais, alta e baixa cultura, nobreza e vulgaridade – caminha lado a lado com uma avacalhação autoconsciente que toma a matriz cinematográfica neocolonial como objeto de interrogação e esculacho. O recuo paciente da câmera para revelar, pouco a pouco, o ambiente no qual o maestro impossível se instalara é a marca que ainda resta, apesar de todos os ruídos, da mise-en-scène poderosa de Watson Macedo. Mas todo o resto, tudo o que nubla a vista e a escuta – a visualidade esburacada, o som acidentado –, ao invés de atenuar o golpe reflexivo da chanchada, o ressalta. É como se a fúria subdesenvolvida, paródica e anárquica da chanchada ganhasse relevo e substância nessa superficialidade exacerbada da imagem e nesse caos sonoro. Em meio aos arranhões e explosões súbitas, submerso nessa ruidagem incômoda e inescapável, Oscarito é o regente de uma batalha visual e sonora a favor da destruição iminente do cinema normal. É o comandante-em-chefe da dissolução violenta de qualquer bom gosto colonizado.

A essa altura, talvez seja importante dizer que fazer aqui uma defesa da imagem ruim – como diria Hito Steyerl – não equivale a um argumento contra as restaurações de filmes brasileiros, ou qualquer coisa que o valha. Trata-se apenas de encarar de forma materialista a integridade do filme tal como ela se apresenta a nós, hoje, e tentar encontrar aí algo que nos permita reavaliar o legado e a potência atual da chanchada nessa forma em que ela sobreviveu até nós. Mas seria importante também pontuar algo sobre o que se tornou praxe em algumas restaurações recentes: uma espécie de obsessão pela higiene total, uma limpeza obsessiva do que há de sujeira na imagem e no som, e que nos faz porventura duvidar da acuidade da estética da fome glauberiana ou da defesa sganzerliana do avacalho. Talvez haja aqui um argumento a favor de que os projetos de restauração possam conservar materialmente algo dessa fúria, dessa sujeira, dessa avacalhação tão própria do nosso cinema, e que tende a perder muito de sua força em certos restauros recentes obcecados pelo ajuste e pela perfeição.

É de se imaginar o que o eterno conservador Moniz Vianna, que naquele mesmo ano de 1949 invocava a Censura para “pôr um paradeiro às pornografias celuloidificadas que infestam nossas telas” (apud AUGUSTO,1989, p. 21) diria sobre esta versão digitalizada provavelmente a partir de uma fita VHS, mutilada e decrépita, do desleixo chanchadeiro, em que o celuloide já não é mais do que uma pálida lembrança. Ou o que pensaria o cinemanovista David Neves, que em 1966 ainda condenava “a antiga prática oportunista e improvisada das ‘chanchadas’” (NEVES, 1966, p. 6), se tivesse de se deparar hoje com esta cópia da cópia da cópia. De certa maneira, é como se a precariedade exponencial dessa matéria plástica e musical ressaltasse aquilo que tanto a crítica contemporânea à chanchada quanto o Cinema Novo tanto condenaram – o improviso, a vulgaridade, a pressa, o desleixo, a anarquia – e que Sganzerla e os marginais recuperariam com um fôlego novo, invertendo os valores aburguesados da condenação e transformando-os em vocação última do cinema brasileiro.

Se a chanchada revisitada pelos marginais já fora convertida em poderosa arma anticolonial, por seus ataques frequentes ao cinema de qualidade, por assumir desde já o subdesenvolvimento como matriz inescapável, a ruindade dessa versão digital do filme turbina esse arsenal com uma demolição da higiene tecnicista, com uma confrontação aberta à ditadura da altíssima resolução. Se a chanchada em sua época travava uma batalha cinematográfica em que a tática de guerrilha consistia em corromper e avacalhar a matriz hollywoodiana até a exaustão – cuja expressão cabal são as paródias de Carlos Manga, Matar ou Correr (1954) ou Nem Sansão, Nem Dalila (1955), em que o dado da cópia vulgarizante já nos é indicado no título dos filmes –, o impacto desse gesto hoje é amplificado por sua incursão decisiva em uma “luta de classes das imagens” – como propõe Maria Bogado – em que a hierarquia das resoluções tornou-se um novo terreno de luta. Num ecossistema audiovisual em que, como nos diz Hito Steyerl, “a resolução foi fetichizada a ponto de sua ausência equivaler à castração do autor” (STEYERL, 2009, p. 188), o gênio de Macedo é – paradoxalmente – sublinhado pela extrema compressão do arquivo. Estranhamente, ver mal e ouvir pior, aqui, não representa um demérito da autoria de Macedo, e sim uma acentuação de seu gesto estético mais proeminente.
Na sequência seguinte à abertura, o personagem de Grande Otelo – também funcionário do hotel –chega com uma mensagem para Serafim (Oscarito). “Um telegrama do Tio Sam”, diz ele. “Mas eu não tenho nenhum tio”, responde Serafim. As piadas em profusão se fazem a partir da avacalhação consciente do idioma imperialista, até o momento em que a invenção a partir da cópia malfeita atinge também as performances: Otelo e Oscarito, vassoura na mão, improvisam uma brasileiríssima versão de passos de dança a partir de um ritmo norte-americano, mimetizando comum sorriso nos lábios os musicais de Hollywood. Mas não é apenas a metrópole cinematográfica que é parodiada à exaustão: a explicação de Serafim sobre sua árvore genealógica que ramificou até gerar um irmão estadunidense é uma deliciosa paródia do célebre poema “Quadrilha” (1930), de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, que transforma o texto lírico numa profusão de combinações caótica e inteiramente ilógica, até o ponto em que as palavras de Oscarito se convertem em puro ruído ininteligível – acentuado, claro, pelo ruído extra advindo da má qualidade da cópia.

Seria tentador invocar a “plagiocombinação”, de Tom Zé, como o cerne de toda a construção de Carnaval no Fogo, dos diálogos de Macedo e Alinor Azevedo às interpretações de Oscarito e Grande Otelo; do tratamento dos cenários às coreografias. Em entrevista à revista Carta Maior em 2006, o músico tropicalista comenta sua estratégia composicional: “Eu assumo a plagiocombinação. Eu posso dizer, por exemplo, que determinada coisa do pop ou da música clássica me influencia. Sabe por quê? Porque quando eu trabalho essa influência eu consigo fazer um abismo entre o que me influencia e o trabalho que eu apresento”. Também na chanchada-modelo há essa assunção consciente da matriz e a interposição reflexiva de uma distância entre o modelo e a cópia (o espectador sabe bem que se trata de uma imitação, e o riso nasce justamente da curtição dessa distância). Mas o que Macedo e os outros criadores da chanchada – sobretudo José Carlos Burle, Carlos Manga e José Cajado Filho – realizam é uma espécie de plagioesculhambação, que, ao fazer a cópia defeituosa, corrompe a referência ao modelo até torná-la irreconhecível. A cópia chanchadeira é uma avacalhação do modelo, até ponto da esculhambação completa.

A economia da troca – o “macete medular da chanchada” segundo Sérgio Augusto (AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 15) – impregna todas as camadas do filme. Serafim precisa se fingir de artista para impressionar o irmão gringo; Ricardo precisa se fingir de vilão até conseguir revelar o crime à polícia; toda a estrutura dramática de Carnaval no Fogo se assenta nesse escambo permanente. Mas a troca também diz respeito à frequente quebra de expectativas em relação ao modelo clássico: a mocinha que parecia indefesa desfere um socão repentino na cara do mocinho, para depois tascar-lhe um beijo súbito com o mesmo ímpeto insurreto. A imitação parte de uma jogada autoconsciente para depois converter-se em dissolução completa do ponto de referência, rumo ao caos e à anarquia. Numa cena quase desimportante, a amiga da mocinha pergunta, como se numa linha de diálogo fosse possível realizar uma síntese teórica da destruição da matriz efetuada pela chanchada: “Marina, é verdade que os americanos são feitos de matéria plástica?”

É o que também acontece ao espectador diante dessas imagens e desses sons arruinados: inicialmente, somos tentados a ver apesar dos ruídos visuais, a ouvir apesar dos acidentes sonoros, como se houvesse em algum lugar uma integridade ainda recuperável, além ou aquém da cópia da cópia, como se fosse possível separar o que é o defeito suplementar da versão do defeito de fabricação original do filme. Mas logo nos acostumamos à ruína, logo somos obrigados a assumir o defeito convertido em superfície primeira da imagem e do som, até que o prazer passe a residir justamente em se engajar nessa esculhambação total, nessa anarquia e nesse caos hiper aumentados, nessa impossibilidade de remeter a qualquer original. A matéria plástica, vagabunda, precária, inorgânica dessa versão de Carnaval no Fogo é, em certo sentido, a realização última de sua vocação estético-política.
Serafim, em apuros com a iminente visita do irmão Johnny, vai até a mocinha Marina (Eliana) para pedir que ela convença o diretor artístico Ricardo (Anselmo Duarte) a incluí-lo no show do Copacabana Palace. Meticulosamente recostado na cadeira vaga do Diretor, ele exclama: “Ah, dona Marina, eu sou um artista!”. Num corte magistral – Macedo fora montador na Atlântida durante anos –, o plano seguinte salta para uma apresentação dos Aqualoucos, uma trupe de palhaços acrobatas, à beira da piscina do hotel de luxo, demonstrando suas habilidades malucas ao mocinho Ricardo enquanto desgrenham seu terno bem engomado. O corte seco entre a reivindicação irônica da Arte com A maiúsculo – nos moldes coloniais – e a avacalhação geral dos Aqualoucos é um germe do que seria, três anos depois, o gesto fundamental de Carnaval Atlântida: a defesa da carnavalização total como fundamental gesto artístico subdesenvolvido, que destrói num átimo as hierarquias entre alta e baixa cultura, entre as formas nobres da ópera e da música de concerto e as formas populares do circo e do teatro de revista. Mas se o corte entre os blocos efetuado pela montagem é preciso em sua formulação, não é menos importante o sobressalto da imagem que, como num defeito sobreposto, como numa gagueira visual, embaralha o plano de conjunto e o plano geral e sincopa o ritmo, injetando ainda mais vulgaridade no desleixo assumido como potência.

A simpatia pelo diabo da chanchada se conclui algum tempo depois, quando os Aqualoucos arremessam o corretíssimo diretor na piscina do hotel de luxo, desalinhando-lhe de uma vez o figurino. Mas toda visualidade defeituosa da imagem – que mal nos permite distinguir, na cena, quem é louco e quem não é – intensifica o caos. Já não sabemos se o que vemos é água da piscina ou mancha na imagem, se o que escutamos é o barulho da água ou o ruído deixado pelas múltiplas conversões do celuloide até o digital. Se um crítico da revista A Cena Muda à época do lançamento de Carnaval no Fogo considerou “os cenários‘ apressados’, as situações ‘ilógicas’, os cortes ‘descuidados’ e os personagens 'mal desenvolvidos’” (apud AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 117) – revelando, claro, sua concepção de cinema assentada no bom gosto reacionário –, na cópia vagabunda que vemos hoje são justamente a pressa, a ilogicidade, o descuido e o subdesenvolvimento que ganham ainda mais relevo.
Há uma economia geral da visualidade da cópia que constantemente sublinha o gesto estético-político da chanchada de Macedo. Se os números no palco do Copacabana Palace já assumiam decididamente a vulgaridade – a Torre Eiffel pintada apressadamente no fundo –, a superfície da imagem triplica a aposta: o contraste exacerbado pela má qualidade, as texturas defeituosas, as zonas de branco acentuadas, as explosões súbitas de luz no interior do quadro, o fundo do plano populoso sempre convertido em borrão indistinto, os silêncios súbitos da imagem em que uma tela preta se interpõe à vista enquanto o diálogo continua.

Mas há algo muito significativo também acontecendo no som. Um imitador de animais visita o hotel, em busca de demonstrar suas habilidades ao diretor Ricardo. Se, para Sérgio Augusto, Watson Macedo é o “mestre do troca-troca” (AUGUSTO, 1989, p. 116) – formulação precisa que sintetiza o gosto do diretor pelas trocas de identidades, de objetos, de posições sociais –, essa sequência de Carnaval no Fogo literaliza a operação, trasladando-a do roteiro para a materialidade sonora do filme. Nessa troca-troça-truque-trucagem, a gag aqui é inteiramente cinematográfica, já que o riso está assentado na comparação entre a imitação orgânica – efetuada pelo esforçado funcionário do hotel – e a substituição pura e simples, na banda sonora, pelo ruído captado de galinhas, cavalos e metralhadoras. Hoje, o som turvado pelas sucessivas conversões intensifica o gesto, já que tudo se apresenta aos nossos ouvidos como mais mecânico, mais superprocessado, mais distante ainda de qualquer organicidade original.
Mas nada se compara ao que acontece na sequência final, em que a confusão se instala de uma vez por todas nos corredores do hotel: os mocinhos se aliam aos cômicos funcionários para desfazer a troca e revelar os vilões à polícia, enquanto os bandidos se reorganizam para se safar. Como se não bastasse a correria desembestada, os hilários socos e pontapés – a mocinha com roupa de bailarina é a mais hábil lutadora –, há ainda uma bomba prestes a explodir. Só que é justamente nesse momento em que o deterioro da cópia se acentua exponencialmente: os arranhões flutuantes, os escurecimentos incontroláveis e os clarões súbitos arruínam a visão, enquanto já não se ouve mais nada na banda sonora a não ser o ruído selvagem do processamento defeituoso da cópia. Os diálogos já foram há muito sufocados por um zumbido renitente que agora está no volume máximo (e até a legendagem tornou-se impossível). A iminência da explosão incendeia o ritmo do filme, enquanto a textura material da cópia parece prestes a se dilacerar inteiramente, consumida por um fogo invisível. As imagens e sons adquirem o derradeiro aspecto de um objeto encontrado no lixo. Mas esse lixo queima, está vivo em seu incêndio interior. E é justamente nessa autoincineração do filme que o espectador mergulha de corpo inteiro, entregue a essa fogueira inextinguível.
Oscarito, com a maleta-bomba na mão, parte em corrida decidida em direção ao espectador, como sua tarefa agora fosse a de tacar fogo no filme, na tela – e nos levar junto, claro. A explosão derradeira de Carnaval no Fogo é uma implosão do cinema, um incêndio derradeiro que já não deixa nenhuma imagem intacta, nenhum som íntegro. Convertida em borrão abstrato, a visão se estilhaça em mil pedaços. Absorvida pelo ruído, a escuta se tornou impossível. Magicamente ressurgidos das cinzas, em meio à fumaça e aos arranhões na superfície da imagem, os atores nos olham frontalmente uma vez mais, com a expressão entre o espanto e o riso incontrolável. Seu trabalho está feito.

Ao invés de ver aqui, na precariedade extrema desse filme que mal vemos e mal ouvimos, um rastro prestes a se apagar, o que propomos é enxergar justamente nessa pobreza abissal uma elevação à última potência dessa “vulgaridadescrota escrachada subdesenvolvida canalha democrática nacionalista anárquica e liberatória da chanchada” (ROCHA, 2004, p. 316), que Glauber definiu tão bem, e tão a contragosto, depois de décadas de condenações impiedosas ao gênio de Macedo, Manga, Burle e Cajado Filho. Vista hoje, nessa cópia vagabunda e deteriorada, a chanchada nos obriga a reavaliar, uma vez mais, a espessura de sua fúria incendiária. Num momento em que o cinema brasileiro está literalmente sob o risco constante do incêndio total, talvez Carnaval no Fogo possa ainda nos ensinar algo sobre o poder dessas outras labaredas, capazes ainda de incendiar nossos olhos e ouvidos. Que nossa memória seja uma memória do fogo.
Referências:

AUGUSTO, Sérgio. Estemundo é um pandeiro: a chanchada de Getúlio a JK. São Paulo: CinematecaBrasileira; Companhia das Letras, 1989.

BOGADO, Maria. “Na lutade classes das imagens”. Série de textos publicada na revista Cinética,2021. Disponível em: http://revistacinetica.com.br/nova/tag/nalutadeclassesdasimagens/ Acesso em 01/03/2022.

NEVES, David. Cinema Novo no Brasil.Petrópolis: Vozes, 1966

STEYERL, Hito. “Em defesada imagem ruim”. Serrote, Rio de Janeiro, IMS, nº19 mar, 2015, p.185-199.

VIEIRA, João Luiz. “Chanchadae a Estética do Lixo”. Contracampo, Niterói, n. 5, 2º. sem. 2000, p.169-182.

ZÉ, Tom. VILELA, Sávio. “Primeira parte daentrevista exclusiva com Tom Zé”. Carta Maior, 11/04/2006. Disponívelem: https://www.cartamaior.com.br/?/Editoria/Midia/Primeira-parte-da-entrevista-exclusiva-com-Tom-Ze/12/9546.
Anselmo Duarte is a unique figure in the history of Brazilian cinema. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, he rose to fame as an actor for Atlântida Cinematográfica and Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz. Duarte played the typical good guy in films from both studios and soon became a common character in Brazilian gossip magazines. Ultimately, he played the heartthrob in chanchadas and melodramas that drew a large share of audiences who were attending theaters to watch Brazilian films. His marriage to Ilka Soares was published in dozens of magazines, making them one of the most famous couples in Brazil.1
Duarte's career in film is not most discussed for his run as an actor, but for his work as a director. As early as the 1950s, he had directed his first feature film: Absolutamente Certo (1957). Duarte’s second feature film, O Pagador de Promessas (1962), made him an internationally recognized filmmaker. Duarte won several awards, including the only Palme d'Or in Brazilian cinema to date.

Anselmo Duarte claimed to be the inventor of Cinema Novo - this despite the fact that the members of the group to be called Cinema Novo, such as Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Cacá Diegues, Paulo César Saraceni, among others, were not admirers of his work and did not consider him to be connected to the movement.2 In a way, Anselmo Duarte’s third feature film, Vereda da Salvação (1965), was the director's response to the criticism he had received after the production of O Pagador de Promessas, especially from the filmmakers of Cinema Novo.3

It could be said that Vereda da Salvação is the first major fiasco in Anselmo Duarte’s career. Poorly rated by audiences and critics, the film has been forgotten for many years – even though it was the film the director was most proud of. Bankrupt on account of Vereda da Salvação, he joined a project that was already under development: Quelé do Pajeú (1969). It is worth noting that, between Vereda da Salvação and Quelé do Pajeú, Anselmo Duarte acted in the film O Caso dos Irmãos Naves (Person, 1967), one of the most praised performances of his career. 

Anselmo Duarte distinguished himself as an actor in chanchadas and for his role in the renewal of Brazilian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. But the end of the (latter) decade associated him with another important period of Brazilian production: Ciclo do Cangaço.
What is the Ciclo do Cangaço?
The Ciclo do Cangaço (The Cangaço Cycle) was a cycle of films that were produced in Brazil between the 1950s and 1980s. These productions were shot in the northeastern sertão, or at least tried to represent the geographic environment where the cangaceiros once stood. The starting point for the Ciclo do Cangaço is O Cangaceiro (Barreto, 1953). Developed by Vera Cruz, and one of the company’s major box-office hits, the film was awarded the best adventure film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953. This was the first prize given to a Brazilian film at Cannes. O Cangaceiro was shot in the countryside of the state of São Paulo and several productions have taken place in the region in the wake of its success. Cangaço films had a similar tone as North American Westerns, although they also incorporated elements that were distinctly Brazilian.

The film Dioguinho (Coimbra, 1957), produced by Sonofilms, illustrates such an interface between Brazilian history and North American cinema. The character Dioguinho was a real figure who lived in the countryside of the state of São Paulo in the 19th century and became famous for having carried out more than fifty murders. The film synopsis singles out this famous character: “The story of Diogo da Rocha Figueira, famous murderer from the interior of São Paulo: his cruelties, the beginning of his criminal career, the ambushes against the colonels, his love affair with a mistress, the persecution of Lieutenant França Pinto, and the great final fight”.4 Even though the film is impossible to access today, its synopsis clearly presents a close reference to the western by valorizing a "great final fight.". In addition to Dioguinho being the focus of Carlos Coimbra’s film, tales from his life were the subject of the 1916 film As aventuras de Dioguinho5 (Andaló). Also outstanding and worth mentioning is the film Lampião, o rei do cangaço (Abrahão, 1937), a work that features actual images of Lampião, the most famous cangaceiro in the country. Although the film ended up censored – and therefore was never publicly screened – it anticipated the interest of the Cangaço Cycle in the iconic figure Lampião. It is thus necessary to emphasize that O Cangaceiro did not jump-start Brazilian cinema’s approach towards either the Western genre or the mythology of the sertão. However, it was a significant work in the Ciclo do Cangaço as it achieved major commercial success and an international award at the Cannes Film Festival. As a result of this, a new wave of Cangaço films would be produced in Brazil. 

Director Carlos Coimbra will be a fundamental name for the development of the production of the Cangaço Cycle in northeastern Brazil. He was invited by actress and producer Aurora Duarte to direct the film A Morte Comanda o Cangaço (Coimbra, 1961). The film was a huge success with audiences and demonstrated that the production of cangaço films could be financially viable.6
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Rocha, 1964) is mistakenly referred to as a fundamental work in the Ciclo do Cangaço, or even as the film that launched the production of films in the cycle. Although Glauber Rocha's film is important, Carlos Coimbra's work predated it and achieved greater public success, thus being more crucial in the continuous production of films in the Ciclo do Cangaço. Coimbra himself later directed Lampião, o rei do cangaço (1965) and Corisco, o Diabo Loiro (1969), two other key works work tied to the cycle. The eventual recognition of Glauber Rocha as a key figure in Ciclo do Cangaço might be linked to the well-known sentence by Jean-Claude Bernardet: “For three, four decades we have been used to thinking of cinema from the 60s to the 70s in terms of cinema novo and cinema marginal – that is, cultured cinema, because it was non-commercial; we didn't think much in ciclo do cangaço etc., which was what the public saw” (Bernadet, 2001).7 Without carefully investigating the Cangaço Cycle, we may overestimate the work of Glauber Rocha, for he is the Brazilian filmmaker most acclaimed today by critics. Glauber undoubtedly made an international impact with Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, but the intellectual circle in which Glauber Rocha was most influential had little dialogue with the films of the Ciclo do Cangaço.

Considering that the Cangaço Cycle was most relevant in the 1960s, it is not difficult to imagine that producers would be interested in creating a super production linked to the genre. Quelé do Pajeú is this super production, and Anselmo Duarte was hired to direct the film. Duarte was already considered to be an experienced filmmaker and one of the main figures capable of carrying out a super-production in the country. Picking him as the director, then, was an obvious choice.
Quelé do Pajeú
Vereda da Salvação, Anselmo Duarte's third film, was a failure of public and critical acclaim in Brazil, although it was well received at the Berlin film festival. Nevertheless,  Duarte maintained a strong reputation in the country on account of the international success of O Pagador de Promessas. Thus, when it came to a large-scale production in Brazil such as would be the case for Quelé do Pajeú, it was imperative for producers to count on the direction of an experienced filmmaker, internationally relevant and with an awareness of the classical-narrative language. It is no coincidence that O Cangaceiro’s Lima Barreto was the first pick for Quelé do Pajeú, and as soon as Barreto abandoned the project Anselmo Duarte was signed on to direct the production.
As already mentioned, Anselmo Duarte had a conflicting relationship with the members of Cinema Novo. He was the primary film director in Brazil in line with classical cinema – which was contested by the cinemanovistas. On the other hand, Anselmo had become a key figure for a group of critics and thinkers who, overall, were unenthusiastic about the Cinema Novo movement. Not by chance, Jurandyr Noronha's feature film Panorama do Cinema Brasileiro (1968), which was produced by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE) (National Institute of Educational Cinema) – and which widely showcased Brazilian cinematographic production up to that time — concluded with a scene from the ending of O Pagador de Promessas. Moniz Vianna, one of the leading critics of that period and a challenger to the cinemanovistas, served as a consultant on the documentary.

Carlos Fonseca, the producer of Quelé do Pajeú, was a disciple of Moniz Vianna. Precisely for this reason, he had a vision of Brazilian cinema far removed from the cinemanovistas. One might notice the excitement for a large-scale production such as Quelé do Pajeú at that point in time, especially considering the fact that the film was released in 70mm, a film format perfect for highlighting the magnificence of the landscape in the northeastern sertão. Although the film had been shot in 35mm, it was converted to 70mm during post-production, therefore becoming the first Brazilian film to be released in this format.

Following the wish to engage with a wider audience, Quelé do Pajeú’s narrative structure is simpler than that of films such as O Pagador de Promessas and Vereda da Salvação. The work awarded in Cannes depicts the Via Crucis of a man from the interior of Brazil, intent to make amends in a church in the capital of Bahia. Based on this structure, Pagador discusses countless issues of 1960s Brazil, from religious intolerance to agrarian reform. Likewise, Vereda da Salvação addresses an extremely poor rural population who come to believe in Christ’s return to Earth. Within this context, topics like homosexuality and the social position of women are dealt with.

Quelé do Pajeú, on the other hand, does not dwell on the psychological issues of its characters. There is a simplification of the film's central conflict that is wedded to the brutality of the space it portrays. It all starts when Clemente Celidônio (Tarcísio Meira), also known as Quelé, finds out that his sister has been raped by an outlander. From then on, he journeys through the Brazilian sertão to find the rapist. There is no deep dive into the his character’s psyche. Quelé’s sense of justice and the need to find the rapist, out of his code of honor, is the driving force behind the hunt that runs through much of the film.
Nonetheless, is it clear that Anselmo is interested in nurturing a far-fetched achievement with Quelé do Pajeú, even though critics of the time questioned the excessiveness of Vereda da Salvação. The opening sequence reveals this characteristic. The rapist finds Quelé’s mother and sister and assaults them. Throughout the scene, the camera takes his point of view. Henceforth, an increasing tension arises on the shaken image while the character’s face remains unseen, and the feeling of anguish is reinforced. Thus, there is no possibility for the viewer to anticipate the encounter between Quelé and the rapist that awaits throughout much of the narrative.

There is another moment that highlights Anselmo Duarte's effort to create an elaborate stylistic composition that evidences an authorial mark – the shooting sequence at the end of the film, when Anselmo positions the camera facing up. The same attitude of “flipping over the world” takes place both in O Pagador de Promessas – before Zé do Burro is taken into the church – and in Vereda da Salvação, during the chase of a child.

Anselmo Duarte's ability to establish a stylistic proposal in dialogue with his previous films is not completely solidified in Quelé do Pajeú. With Quelé, the director creates a bodily cinema, in contrast with his previous works. Basic human feelings constantly surface, violence usually prevailing among them. First and foremost, it is worth commenting on a single crucial sequence of Quelé do Pajeú. In the middle of Quelé's journey across the sertão, he meets Maria do Carmo (Rossana Ghessa). The girl craves a relationship with the sertanejo, but is constantly rejected. During one of her come-ons, Quelé is rude and sternly pushes her away. She frees herself from sexual desire riding an horse intensely, dashing with it adrift. This is the opposite of Quelé’s journey, which is precise, relentless and timeless. On the other hand, Maria do Carmo rides for as long as her breath allows her. Anselmo Duarte captures this impulse with inspiration, by fixing the camera close to the horse, allowing the spectator to feel the same as the character.
This sensorial condition is essential in Quelé do Pajeú. After all, anger is the character’s drive and the film makes a point of reminding us of this throughout its run-time. Furthermore, this anger rests on a cangaço code of ethics in which one violence has to be traded for another. However, as the crime in question is of a sexual nature, Quelé understands the need for marriage, for a divine rapport to bind the aggressor and his sister, before taking his life. These sertanejo ethics will resonate among Lampião’s own gang, who frequently reveal themselves during Quelé’s journey.

The amusement park sequence is revealing. There, Quelé establishes himself as a hero, a guy who bravely stands up for others in critical situations. In this case, he stands up for Maria do Carmo, who is being harassed by Lampião’s gang. The figure of the cangaceiro, in this sense, is essential for Quelé’s heroic rise. It is the first confrontation with the gang, and Lampião states that he sees courage in the figure of Quelé. Not just any character, but the mythical figure of Lampião himself now blesses the protagonist of the story.
Lampião comes to be a recurrent character in the films of the Ciclo do Cangaço. Carlos Coimbra’s Lampião, o rei do cangaço (1964) is built upon this mythical figure of the cangaceiro. In one sequence, the character hands money out to starving people and is regarded as a hero, the population thanking him as if he were a messiah. Even in O Cangaceiro, Galdino (Milton Ribeiro), clearly modeled after Lampião, makes his subordinates give money away to a lady who has lost her only source of income – a goat that used to give milk. Since it was Lampião’s own gang that had the goat killed, he demands that the lady be rewarded.

This very persona, mythically approached in several of the Ciclo do Cangaço films, is the same one that appreciates Quelé's courage. It wasn’t the first time Lampião’s gang crossed the protagonist’s path. At a certain city where Quelé starts his hunt, the gang arrives to loot the place. They pass through like grasshoppers destroying everything around them. In Quelé do Pajeú, the gang represents social violence in an economically precarious environment.

This setting of violence turns out to be critical in establishing the universe in which Quelé stands, whether in his relentless search for his sister’s rapist, or through the social connections he builds along the way. His bond with Maria do Carmo is the best example. There are no conversations without friction, and no looks without confrontation between the two. The love relationship that is gradually built exists in tandem with a clear hostility between them. It is as if relationships, even love affairs, could not develop in any other way.
The Homecoming
In a typical hero's journey, there is a home-bound voyage. Therefore, of course, Quelé returns home with the man against whom he sought vengeance. The criminal Cesídio da Costa is recognized by the scar on his face and for lacking a finger on his hand, offering the protagonist the certainty that this is the man to be detained. It is a decisive factor that actor Jece Valadão was chosen to play Cesídio. Like Anselmo Duarte, he also claimed to be the founder of the Cinema Novo movement.8 The film he referred to as the Cinema Novo forerunner was Ruy Guerra’s Os Cafajestes (1962), a film that he produced and played a role in. The character he plays in Os Cafajestes is Jandir, a playboy who, without consent, photographs a naked woman in order to extort money from her wealthy uncle. Valadão’s image was thereafter branded as a villain type, a persona that he went on to explore in numerous films.
Jece Valadão's villainous persona is further exaggerated by the scar on his face. It is during the meeting between Quelé and Cesídio, when Quelé interrupts Cesídio's wedding, that Quelé do Pajeú becomes a different kind of film. From that moment on, Quelé do Pajeú ceases to be a film focused on a hunt and becomes a typical western of betrayal. After arresting Cesídio and a priest, Quelé returns home with the two of them and his new lover, Maria do Carmo. Similarly, just as in films like Greed (Stroheim, 1924) or Ride the High Country (Peckinpah, 1962), a growing fear of betrayal builds up a tension to be eventually released in a violent episode. Quelé always treats Cesídio coarsely. The film could bring about a narrative shift, yet it maintains the violent explosiveness that manifests itself from the beginning. 

Quelé returns to marry Cesídio to his sister – who we find out to be pregnant – before challenging him to a deadly duel. However, everything changes when the police arrive at Quelé's house on an arrest warrant for the murder of a fellow police officer. Lampião's gang is soon to follow behind the police, and a long shootout sequence begins once they arrive.

Quelé and Cesídio fight together during the shootout, but Cesídio dies - like the classic villain who redeems himself but has no right to forgiveness in life. Quelé, on the other hand, survives, and realizes that joining Lampião’s gang might be his best call to get on with his life. The whole universe of violence the film itself foregrounds is epitomized by Quelé and Maria do Carmo’s admission to the group of cangaceiros, along with the final scream that conveys all the anger seemingly ingrained in those lands.            

Quelé do Pajeú closely examines a social environment of tension, lacking any state intervention beyond police repression. In this sense, Lampião’s gang, continuously crossing the protagonist, ends up working as the primary index of social power in those surroundings. The work does not romanticize Lampião’s figure like other films from Ciclo do Cangaço, instead apprehending this mythical space through the lens of violence as the basis of society.

1. As Ilka Soares’ biographer Wagner de Assis points out: “Her marriage to director Anselmo Duarte had as much repercussion in the press as that of any American star.” (Assis, 2005, p.21).
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2. “Filmmakers from Cinema Novo (and copywriters sympathetic to them) shortly made the effort to point out that the two most internationally well-known Brazilian films so far (O pagador de promessas and O cangaceiro), despite being part of a period of renewal Brazilian cinema aesthetics, were not ‘Cinema Novo’ films. It is even most striking to note to what extent Anselmo Duarte's dialogue with them was constantly ruled by the intransigence of those young people, who never got to recognize him as one of them, despite all the efforts the former heartthrob of chanchadas put into getting closer to them. This bias helps us read his ‘glauberian’ film Vereda da salvação (1965), which was rejected by the ‘cinemanovistas’.” (Nuñes, 2012, p.78)

3. “When it comes to art, Vereda is arguably the best film I have ever directed. One of the core moments of Brazilian cult movies. (...) It evidently wasn’t a film made for the ordinary audience, which wouldn't understand the reason for that grouping of human creatures in a forest clearing straightway. I elaborated the script inspired by the national criticism of O pagador de promessas, which some blamed for being a ‘linear’, ‘academic’ film, and Dias Gomes’ ‘subliterature’. Vereda, by Jorge Andrade, a most highly regarded playwright in the intellectual world at that time, seemed to provide potential for a more artistic result, one without commonplaces.” (Singh, 1993, p.105)

4. Cinemateca Brasileira’s website: http://bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah/iah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID=014042&format=detailed.pft

5.  Synopsis: “Adventures of the outlaw Dioguinho, whose area of activity was São Paulo’s sertão”. Cinemateca Brasileira’s website: http://bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah/iah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID=001519&format=detailed.pft

6. As producer Aurora Duarte points out in a statement for her biography: “I tried to get acquainted with the major cinematographic centers and, in 1959, without fully understanding the meaning of being precocious, I started a company to debut in production with the film A Morte Comanda o Cangaço. The film won dozens of awards, was a box office milestone, and caused an upheaval and change in my life.” (Duarte, 2010, p.30)

7.  Bernadet, Jean-Claude. Cinema Marginal? Folha de São Paulo. São Paulo. 10 jun. 2001.

8. Screened at the international Film Festival in Berlin and in San Francisco, Os Cafajestes had a far international reach and made substantial profits for its producer. Further to the film’s release, the term cinema novo has begun to be used more often. Years later, in an interview, Valadão stated he was the one to have actually coined the name of the most important film movement in Brazilian cinema: “I wanted a film that would make me money. When I saw the film completed, I got astonished. It wasn't Swedish cinema [as he called the cosmopolitan Vera Cruz productions], or a chanchada. I assumed I had to find a slogan. So I called it: Cinema novo brasileiro [New Brazilian film]. I put it on the trailer.” (Valadão apud Freire, 2017, p. 169)
REFERENCES
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Assis, Wagner de. Ilka Soares: a Bela da Tela. Cultura, Fundação Padre Anchieta, 2005. 

Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Cinema Marginal? Folha de São Paulo. São Paulo. 10 jun. 2001. Disponível em: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/mais/fs1006200107.htm. Acesso em: 25 jan. 2021.

De Luna Freire, Rafael. “Jece Valadão, the ‘Charming Crook’: A Star Image between Tradition and Modernity.” in Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema, edited by Tim Bergfelder et al., 1st ed., Berghahn Books, NEW YORK; OXFORD, 2018, pp. 162–177. DIOGUINHO. Available at:<bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah%2Fiah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID&format=detailed.pft.>

Ramos, Fernão. Schvarzman, Sheila (Org.). Nova História do Cinema Brasileiro, vol. 1. Edições Sesc São Paulo. 2018.

Nuñes, Fabian. “Roberto Farias Em Ritmo De Cinema Novo.” Os Múltiplos Lugares De Roberto Farias, editado por Silva Hadija Chalupe Da and Neto Simplício, Jurubeba Produções, 2012, pp. 66–79. 

Singh Jr., Oséas. Adeus Cinema: Vida e Obra De Anselmo Duarte ; Ator e Cineasta Mais Premiado Do Cinema Brasileiro. Massao Ohno, 1993.

Anselmo Duarte é uma figura singular no cinema brasileiro. Entre o final da década de 1940 e o início da década de 1950, alçou a fama como ator da Atlântida Cinematográfica e da Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz. Em ambos os estúdios, Anselmo Duarte era o mocinho dos filmes, salvo raras exceções. Assim, na década de 1950, também se tornou personagem comum das revistas de fofocas do Brasil. Afinal, era o galã de chanchadas e melodramas que angariavam boa parcela do público que ia aos cinemas assistir filmes nacionais. Seu casamento com Ilka Soares foi assunto de dezenas de revistas, os tornando àquela altura um dos casais mais famosos do Brasil.1
A grande lembrança sobre a carreira de Anselmo não é como ator, mas como diretor. Já na década de 1950, dirigiu seu primeiro longa-metragem como realizador: Absolutamente Certo (1957). Entretanto, foi com seu segundo longa-metragem, O Pagador de Promessas (1962), que Anselmo Duarte alcançou reconhecimento internacional. O cineasta venceu diversos prêmios, inclusive a única Palma de Ouro do cinema brasileiro  - a maior premiação do Festival de Cannes - até hoje. 

Anselmo Duarte defendia para si a invenção do Cinema Novo. No entanto, os integrantes do grupo que se convencionou chamar de Cinema Novo, como Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Cacá Diegues, Paulo César Saraceni, dentre outros, não admiravam a obra de Anselmo e não o viam como uma figura ligada ao movimento.2 De certa maneira, o terceiro longa-metragem de Anselmo Duarte, Vereda da Salvação (1965), foi uma resposta do diretor às críticas que recebeu após a produção de O pagador de promessas, especialmente pelo grupo cinemanovista.3

É possível afirmar que Vereda da Salvação é o primeiro grande fracasso da carreira de Anselmo Duarte. Desvalorizado pelo público e pela crítica, o filme ficou esquecido por muitos anos - embora fosse o filme predileto do próprio diretor. Falido por conta de Vereda da Salvação, ingressou em um projeto que já vinha em desenvolvimento: Quelé do Pajeú (1969). Cabe destacar que, entre Vereda da Salvação e Quelé do Pajeú, Anselmo Duarte teve uma das atuações mais elogiadas de sua carreira, no filme O Caso dos Irmãos Naves (Person, 1967).  

Se Anselmo Duarte já tinha se destacado pelas chanchadas, pelos melodramas e pelo rejuvenescimento do cinema brasileiro nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, o final dessa década crava seu nome em outra fase da produção brasileira de extrema importância: o Ciclo do Cangaço.
O Que é o Ciclo do Cangaço?
O Ciclo do Cangaço ficou marcado no cinema brasileiro, especialmente, entre as décadas de 1950 e 1980. Eram produções realizadas no sertão nordestino ou, ao menos, ambientadas cenograficamente no espaço geográfico em que os cangaceiros se situavam. O marco de início da produção do Ciclo do Cangaço é O Cangaceiro (Barreto, 1953). Produção da Vera Cruz e um dos grandes sucessos de público da empresa, foi laureado como melhor filme de aventura no festival de Cannes de 1953. Foi a primeira premiação para um filme brasileiro (a segunda foi justamente a Palma de Ouro para O Pagador de Promessas). O filme de Lima Barreto foi realizado no interior do estado de São Paulo e, na esteira de seu sucesso, vários filmes do gênero foram produzidos na região. Havia um diálogo com o western norte-americano, embora os filmes trouxessem elementos tipicamente brasileiros. 

O filme Dioguinho (Coimbra, 1957), produzido pela Sonofilms, é um exemplo dessa relação da história brasileira com o cinema norte-americano. O personagem Dioguinho foi uma figura real que viveu no interior do estado de São Paulo no século XIX e ficou famoso por ter realizado mais de cinquenta assassinatos. A sinopse do filme destaca o famoso personagem: “A trajetória de Diogo da Rocha Figueira, famoso assassino do interior de São Paulo: suas crueldades, o início de sua carreira criminal, as tocaias contra os coronéis, o caso amoroso com uma amante, a perseguição do tenente França Pinto, e a grande luta final.”.4 Mesmo com a impossibilidade de acesso ao filme, a sinopse apresenta uma referência próxima ao western, ao valorizar uma “grande luta final”. Além do filme de Carlos Coimbra, suas ações foram tema do filme As aventuras de Dioguinho5  (Andaló, 1916), fruto do enorme interesse que o sujeito causava no público brasileiro no final do século XIX e início do século XX. Outro filme de destaque é Lampião (o rei do cangaço) (Abrahão, 1937), com imagens reais do cangaceiro mais famoso do país. Embora o filme tenha sido censurado - e, por isso, não exibido para o público -, antecipou o interesse do Ciclo do Cangaço na icônica figura. Dessa maneira, é necessário frisar que O Cangaceiro não iniciou a aproximação do cinema brasileiro com o western ou com a mitologia do sertão; mas é um filme importante, pois o sucesso de público e a premiação internacional no Festival de Cannes inauguraram uma produção constante desse tipo de obras.

O diretor Carlos Coimbra vai ser um nome fundamental para o desenvolvimento da produção do Ciclo do Cangaço no nordeste brasileiro. Ele foi convidado pela atriz e produtora Aurora Duarte para dirigir A Morte Comanda o Cangaço (Coimbra, 1961). O filme foi um enorme sucesso de público e demonstrou que a produção de filmes de cangaço como trabalhos financeiramente viáveis.6
Erroneamente, considera-se Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Rocha, 1964) uma obra fundamental para o Ciclo do Cangaço, ou ainda, considera-se que deu início à produção de filmes do ciclo. Embora o filme de Glauber Rocha seja relevante, Carlos Coimbra o antecedeu, fez mais sucesso de público e, portanto, foi mais decisivo na contínua produção dos filmes entendidos como pertencentes ao Ciclo do Cangaço. O próprio Coimbra dirigiu ainda Lampião, o rei do cangaço (1963) e Corisco, o Diabo Loiro (1969), mantendo um trabalho ligado ao ciclo. A atribuição posterior de Glauber Rocha como figura-chave para o Ciclo do Cangaço pode estar ligada à conhecida frase de Jean-Claude Bernardet: “Há três, quatro décadas que nos acostumamos a pensar o cinema dos anos 60-70 em termos de cinema novo e cinema marginal - isto é, o cinema culto, porque não comercial; no ciclo do cangaço etc., que era o que o público via, não pensamos muito” (Bernardet, 2001).7 Um olhar posterior, sem investigar atentamente o Ciclo do Cangaço, pode superestimar a obra de Glauber Rocha, pois ele é o cineasta brasileiro mais valorizado atualmente por parte da crítica. Certamente, Glauber conquistou uma repercussão internacional com Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, porém, o círculo intelectual em que Glauber Rocha representou maior influência mantinha pouco diálogo com os filmes do Ciclo do Cangaço. Cabe ainda destacar que Carlos Coimbra se tornou um cineasta que dialogava com o cinema de gênero, como o filme histórico, com Independência ou Morte (1972) e como o policial, como Madona de Cedro (1968).

Levando em consideração que o Ciclo do Cangaço foi relevante na década de 1960, não era difícil imaginar que haveria uma superprodução, aos moldes brasileiros, de uma obra ligada ao gênero. Essa obra é Quelé do Pajeú, e o diretor contratado para o filme, Anselmo Duarte. Naquele momento, Anselmo Duarte já era considerado um cineasta experiente e uma das principais figuras capazes de levar adiante um projeto de superprodução no país. A escolha, então, foi óbvia.
Quelé do Pajeú
Vereda da Salvação, o filme anterior de Anselmo Duarte, foi um fracasso de público e de crítica no Brasil, embora tenha sido bem recebido no festival de Berlim. De qualquer forma, Anselmo Duarte ainda gozava de prestígio no país por conta do alcance internacional de O Pagador de Promessas. Assim, em uma produção de grandes proporções do cinema brasileiro, contar com a direção de um cineasta experiente, internacionalmente relevante e com consciência da linguagem clássico-narrativa era um imperativo. Não por acaso, outra aposta foi Lima Barreto, diretor de O Cangaceiro. Assim que o diretor abandonou o projeto, Anselmo Duarte foi recrutado para a produção.
Como já comentado, Anselmo Duarte teve uma relação conflituosa com os membros do Cinema Novo. Ele era o diretor fundamental de um cinema aos moldes clássicos, questionado pelos cinemanovistas. Por outro lado, Anselmo se tornou uma figura-chave para um grupo de críticos e pensadores que, de forma geral, não se empolgavam com o movimento. Não por acaso, o longa-metragem de Jurandyr Noronha, Panorama do Cinema Brasileiro (1968), produzido pelo Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE) - um grande painel da produção cinematográfica brasileira até aquele momento -, terminava com o desfecho de O Pagador de Promessas. O documentário teve como consultor Moniz Vianna, um dos principais críticos naquele momento e um contestador dos cinemanovistas. 

Carlos Fonseca, o produtor de Quelé do Pajeú, era um discípulo de Moniz Vianna e, justamente por isso, tinha uma visão do cinema brasileiro distante daquela, a partir da qual os cinemanovistas se consagraram - posteriormente, essa passou a ser considerada a principal visão sobre o cinema brasileiro na década de 19608 Há um desejo por uma produção de grandes proporções que se revela, inclusive, pelo fato de ser um filme lançado em 70mm com o interesse em valorizar a grandiosidade da paisagem do sertão nordestino. Embora o filme tenha sido captado em 35mm, foi convertido para 70mm durante a pós-produção. Sendo assim, é o primeiro filme brasileiro a ser lançado em tal bitola.

Por conta de um interesse em dialogar com um público maior, a estrutura narrativa de Quelé do Pajeú também é mais simples do que a de filmes como O Pagador de Promessas e Vereda da Salvação. Embora estes filmes também sejam aparentemente simples. A obra premiada em Cannes narra a via crúcis de um homem do interior do Brasil a fim de pagar sua promessa em uma igreja da capital baiana. A partir dessa estrutura básica, disserta sobre inúmeras questões do Brasil da década de 1960, da intolerância religiosa à reforma agrária. Da mesma forma, Vereda da Salvação lida com uma população rural paupérrima que passa a acreditar no retorno de Cristo à Terra. Nesse contexto, são debatidos temas como a homossexualidade e a posição social da mulher em um ambiente relegado à força física.

‍Quelé do Pajeú, por outro lado, não se adensa em questões psicológicas dos personagens. Há uma simplificação do conflito que casa com a brutalidade do espaço retratado. Tudo começa quando Clemente Celidônio (Tarcísio Meira), também conhecido como Quelé, descobre que a irmã foi violada por um forasteiro. A partir daí, ele parte em uma caçada pelo sertão brasileiro para encontrar o estuprador. Não há um mergulho profundo na psiquê do personagem. O senso de justiça de Quelé e a necessidade de encontrar o sujeito baseado em seu código de honra são a força motriz da caça que se estende por boa parte do filme.
Como já comentado, Anselmo Duarte teve uma relação conflituosa com os membros do Cinema Novo. Ele era o diretor fundamental de um cinema aos moldes clássicos, questionado pelos cinemanovistas. Por outro lado, Anselmo se tornou uma figura-chave para um grupo de críticos e pensadores que, de forma geral, não se empolgavam com o movimento. Não por acaso, o longa-metragem de Jurandyr Noronha, Panorama do Cinema Brasileiro (1968), produzido pelo Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE) - um grande painel da produção cinematográfica brasileira até aquele momento -, terminava com o desfecho de O Pagador de Promessas. O documentário teve como consultor Moniz Vianna, um dos principais críticos naquele momento e um contestador dos cinemanovistas. 

Carlos Fonseca, o produtor de Quelé do Pajeú, era um discípulo de Moniz Vianna e, justamente por isso, tinha uma visão do cinema brasileiro distante daquela, a partir da qual os cinemanovistas se consagraram - posteriormente, essa passou a ser considerada a principal visão sobre o cinema brasileiro na década de 19608 Há um desejo por uma produção de grandes proporções que se revela, inclusive, pelo fato de ser um filme lançado em 70mm com o interesse em valorizar a grandiosidade da paisagem do sertão nordestino. Embora o filme tenha sido captado em 35mm, foi convertido para 70mm durante a pós-produção. Sendo assim, é o primeiro filme brasileiro a ser lançado em tal bitola.

Por conta de um interesse em dialogar com um público maior, a estrutura narrativa de Quelé do Pajeú também é mais simples do que a de filmes como O Pagador de Promessas e Vereda da Salvação. Embora estes filmes também sejam aparentemente simples. A obra premiada em Cannes narra a via crúcis de um homem do interior do Brasil a fim de pagar sua promessa em uma igreja da capital baiana. A partir dessa estrutura básica, disserta sobre inúmeras questões do Brasil da década de 1960, da intolerância religiosa à reforma agrária. Da mesma forma, Vereda da Salvação lida com uma população rural paupérrima que passa a acreditar no retorno de Cristo à Terra. Nesse contexto, são debatidos temas como a homossexualidade e a posição social da mulher em um ambiente relegado à força física.

‍Quelé do Pajeú, por outro lado, não se adensa em questões psicológicas dos personagens. Há uma simplificação do conflito que casa com a brutalidade do espaço retratado. Tudo começa quando Clemente Celidônio (Tarcísio Meira), também conhecido como Quelé, descobre que a irmã foi violada por um forasteiro. A partir daí, ele parte em uma caçada pelo sertão brasileiro para encontrar o estuprador. Não há um mergulho profundo na psiquê do personagem. O senso de justiça de Quelé e a necessidade de encontrar o sujeito baseado em seu código de honra são a força motriz da caça que se estende por boa parte do filme.
A condição da sensação será essencial em Quelé do Pajeú. Afinal, a raiva é o norte do personagem e o filme faz questão de lembrar isso o tempo inteiro. Mais ainda, essa raiva está alicerçada no código de ética do cangaço, em que uma violência tem de ser sobreposta por outra. Entretanto, por se tratar de um crime sexual, Quelé entende a necessidade do casamento e de uma ligação de Deus entre o agressor e sua irmã antes de tirar a vida do sujeito. Essa ética sertaneja vai se desdobrar no próprio bando de Lampião, que surge e ressurge no caminho de Quelé e funciona como uma ligação umbilical com o universo sertanejo real.

A sequência no parque de diversões é reveladora. Ali, Quelé se estabelece como um herói, um sujeito que se coloca diante de situações críticas para defender os outros com bravura. Ele defende Maria do Carmo do bando de Lampião. A figura do cangaceiro, nesse sentido, é essencial para a fundação heróica de Quelé. É o primeiro confronto com o bando, e Lampião afirma que vê coragem na figura de Quelé. Ou seja, não é um personagem qualquer, é a figura mítica de Lampião que vai abençoar o protagonista da história. 
Lampião vai ser um personagem comum nos filmes do Ciclo do Cangaço. Lampião, o rei do cangaço (1963), de Carlos Coimbra, é construído a partir da figura mítica do cangaceiro. Em uma sequência específica, o personagem oferece dinheiro para pessoas famintas e, em troca, é visto como um herói e a população o agradece como se fosse um messias. Mesmo em O Cangaceiro, Galdino (Milton Ribeiro), claramente inspirado em Lampião, faz com que seus subordinados deem dinheiro para uma senhora que perdeu sua única fonte de renda - uma cabra que dava leite. Como foi o próprio bando de Lampião a matar a cabra, ele exige que a senhora seja recompensada.

Essa persona que o Ciclo do Cangaço avalia como mítica em vários filmes é a mesma que valoriza a coragem de Quelé. Não foi a primeira vez que o bando de Lampião apareceu no caminho do protagonista. Em certo momento, quando Quelé inicia sua caçada, chega em uma cidade e logo depois surge o bando para saquear o local. Passam por ali como gafanhotos, destruindo tudo em volta. O encontro no parque de diversões acontece posteriormente. Em Quelé do Pajeú, o bando funciona como a representação da violência social de um ambiente economicamente precário.

Essa fundação da violência será fundamental para basear o universo em que Quelé está fixado, seja em sua busca implacável pelo violentador de sua irmã, seja pelas relações sociais que vai construindo ao longo da jornada. O vínculo com Maria do Carmo é o maior exemplo. Não há conversas sem fricções, não há olhares sem confrontos entre os dois. A relação amorosa que vai se construindo aos poucos existe em conjunto com uma clara hostilidade entre eles. Como se as relações, mesmo as de amor, não pudessem ser constituídas de outra maneira.
O Retorno para Casa
Seguindo a estrutura da jornada do herói, há em Quelé o retorno para casa. O protagonista regressa trazendo o sujeito que fora buscar. O bandido Cesídio da Costa é reconhecido pela cicatriz no rosto e a falta de um dedo da mão. É um fator decisivo que o ator Jece Valadão tenha sido escolhido para interpretar Cesídio. Assim como Anselmo Duarte, ele também defendia ser o fundador do movimento cinemanovista.9 O filme que Valadão considera fundador do Cinema Novo é Os Cafajestes (1962), dirigido por Ruy Guerra. Jece Valadão foi produtor e protagonista da obra. Seu personagem, Jandir, é um playboy que fotografa uma mulher nua sem seu consentimento para extorquir dinheiro do tio rico da moça. Desde Os Cafajestes, a imagem de vilania se fixou em Valadão, que passou a explorá-la em outros filmes; seja o bicheiro em Boca de Ouro (1963), de Nelson Pereira dos Santos, ou os protagonistas de Paraíba, vida e morte de um bandido (1966), de Victor Lima ou Mineirinho, vivo ou morto (1967), de Aurélio Teixeira. 
A persona vilanesca de Jece Valadão ganha contornos mais exagerados pela cicatriz no rosto do personagem. A vilania é a marca pessoal de Jece Valadão para o cinema brasileiro daqueles tempos. É durante o encontro dos dois personagens que a obra ganha uma nova camada, quando Quelé interrompe o casamento de Cesídio. A partir daí, Quelé do Pajeú deixa de ser uma caçada e se torna um típico faroeste de traição. Quelé prende Cesídio e o padre, e volta para a casa trazendo os dois e Maria do Carmo. Assim como em filmes como Ouro e Maldição (Stroheim, 1924) ou Pistoleiros do Entardecer (Peckinpah, 1962) o medo crescente da traição infla uma tensão que é expelida por meio da violência. Quelé trata Cesídio sempre de forma grosseira. O filme poderia promover uma virada narrativa, porém mantém a explosão violenta que se manifesta desde o princípio.  

Dessa forma, o final não poderia se desenvolver de outra maneira. Quelé retorna para casar Cesídio com sua irmã - que descobrimos estar grávida - antes de chamá-lo para um duelo com a intenção de matá-lo. Entretanto, tudo muda de figura quando a polícia chega na casa de Quelé por conta do rapto, e o bando de Lampião volta a encontrar o protagonista para um confronto com a polícia. Então, a violência que se manifesta durante toda a narrativa eclode em uma longa sequência de tiros e confrontos.

Quelé e Cesídio lutam juntos, porém Cesídio morre - como o clássico vilão que se transforma, mas não tem direito ao perdão em vida. Quelé, por outro lado, sobrevive e enxerga como maior possibilidade de continuar a sua vida o ingresso no bando de Lampião - que já havia elogiado a sua coragem. Todo o universo violento que o próprio filme valoriza com uma aposta corporal, como já comentado, é sintetizado na inserção de Quelé e Maria do Carmo no grupo de cangaceiros, e no grito final que identifica toda a raiva que parece estar entranhada naquelas terras. 

‍Quelé do Pajeú radiografa um espaço social de tensão sem qualquer participação do estado além da repressão policial. Nesse sentido, o bando de Lampião, que tangencia, por diversas vezes, o protagonista, funciona como o maior aspecto de poder social daquele ambiente. A obra não romantiza a figura de Lampião como outros filmes do Ciclo do Cangaço, porém, compreende esse espaço mítico, a partir da violência como base da sociedade.
1. Como destaca o biógrafo de Ilka Soares, Wagner de Assis: “Seu casamento com o diretor Anselmo Duarte teve tanta repercussão na imprensa quanto o de qualquer estrela norte-americana.” (ASSIS, 2005, p.21)
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2. “Os cinemanovistas (e os redatores simpáticos a eles) rapidamente fizeram o esforço de apontar que os dois filmes brasileiros mais conhecidos, até então, no exterior (O pagador de promessas e O cangaceiro), embora estivessem inseridos no seio de um período de renovação estética do cinema brasileiro, não são obras ‘do Cinema novo’. E o mais impressionante é notarmos o quanto o diálogo de Anselmo Duarte com os cinemanovistas sempre foi regido pela intransigência desses jovens, que jamais o reconheceram como um dos seus, apesar de todo o esforço do ex-galã de chanchadas em se aproximar deles. É por esse viés que podemos interpretar o seu ‘glauberiano’ filme Vereda da salvação (1965), repelido pelos cinemanovistas.” (Nuñes, 2012, p.78)

3. “Em matéria de arte, Vereda é, indiscutivelmente, a melhor película que dirigi. Um dosprincipais momentos do cult movies brasileiro. (...) Evidentemente não foi um filme feito parao público comum que de saída não entende a razão daquele agrupamento de criaturashumanas numa clareira de floresta. Elaborei o roteiro inspirado em críticas nacionais a Opagador de promessas, acusado por alguns de ser um filme ‘linear’, ‘acadêmico’ e de‘subliteratura’ de Dias Gomes. Vereda, de Jorge Andrade, um dramaturgo mais conceituadono mundo intelectual àquela época, parecia-me com possibilidades de um resultado maisartístico e sem lugares comuns” (Singh, 1993, p.105)

4. Site da Cinemateca Brasileira: http://bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah/iah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID=014042&format=detailed.pft

5.   Sinopse: “Aventuras do bandido Dioguinho, cuja área de atuação era o sertão paulista”. Site da Cinemateca Brasileira: http://bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah/iah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID=001519&format=detailed.pft

6. Como ressalta a produtora Aurora Duarte em depoimento para a sua biografia: “Procurei conhecer os grandes centros cinematográficos e, em 1959, sem ainda entender direito o significado de precoce, abri uma empresa para estrear em produção com o filme A Morte Comanda o Cangaço. O filme obteve dezenas de prêmios, foi um marco de bilheteria, provocou um tumulto e mudanças na minha vida.” (Duarte, 2010, p.30)

7.  Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Cinema Marginal? Folha de São Paulo. São Paulo. 10 jun. 2001.

8. Em 2018, foi publicado o livro Nova História do cinema brasileiro, organizado porFernão Ramos e Sheila Schvarzman, uma reatualização do livro História do cinemabrasileiro, publicado em 1987, organizado por Fernão Ramos. Assim como o livro publicadona década de 1980 foi referência nos estudos de história do cinema brasileiro, a publicação de2018 funciona como uma referência atualizada para os mesmo estudos, mas a partir de novaspesquisas realizadas nos últimos trinta anos. Algumas características, todavia, permanecem cristalizadas, como por exemplo o texto histórico sobre a produção fílmica do Brasil na década de 1960. Essa fase fica dedicada,basicamente, ao Cinema Novo e, em menor perspectiva, ao Cinema Marginal. “Apesar deexceções marcantes, como é o caso de (Walter Hugo) Khouri, o plano geral do cinemabrasileiro na década de 1960 é a história do Cinema novo e suas evoluções” (RAMOS, 1987,p.393). A ideia de Fernão Ramos sobre o cinema brasileiro na década de 1960 é retomada emNova história do cinema brasileiro, afinal a frase que abre o capítulo referente à década de1960 é: “Puxar o fio do novelo do Cinema Novo" (Ramos, 2018, p. 17).

9. Exhibited at international film festival in Berlin and San francisco, Os Cafajestes exportedwell abroad and returned handsome profits to its producer. Subsequent to the film's release,the term cinema novo began to be used more often. In a interview years later, Valadãodeclared that it was he who actually coined the name of the most important film movement inbrazilian cinema: 'I wanted a film that would make me money. When I saw the finished film Igot scared. It wasn't Swedish cinema [as he called the cosmopolitan Vera Cruz productions],or a chanchada. I thought I had to find a slogan. So I called it: Cinema novo brasileiro [NewBrazilian film]. I put it on the trailer. (Valadão apud Freire, 2017, p. 169)
REFERENCES
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Assis, Wagner de. Ilka Soares: a Bela da Tela. Cultura, Fundação Padre Anchieta, 2005. 

Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Cinema Marginal? Folha de São Paulo. São Paulo. 10 jun. 2001. Disponível em: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/mais/fs1006200107.htm. Acesso em: 25 jan. 2021.

De Luna Freire, Rafael. “Jece Valadão, the ‘Charming Crook’: A Star Image between Tradition and Modernity.” in Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema, edited by Tim Bergfelder et al., 1st ed., Berghahn Books, NEW YORK; OXFORD, 2018, pp. 162–177. DIOGUINHO. Available at:<bases.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah%2Fiah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID&format=detailed.pft.>

Ramos, Fernão. Schvarzman, Sheila (Org.). Nova História do Cinema Brasileiro, vol. 1. Edições Sesc São Paulo. 2018.

Nuñes, Fabian. “Roberto Farias Em Ritmo De Cinema Novo.” Os Múltiplos Lugares De Roberto Farias, editado por Silva Hadija Chalupe Da and Neto Simplício, Jurubeba Produções, 2012, pp. 66–79. 

Singh Jr., Oséas. Adeus Cinema: Vida e Obra De Anselmo Duarte ; Ator e Cineasta Mais Premiado Do Cinema Brasileiro. Massao Ohno, 1993.

Introducing Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu 
Sérgio Ricardo’s debut short film Menino da calça branca (1962) and his first feature-length film Esse mundo é meu (1964) can together be thought of as sensorial film experiences1 for their unusual combination of elaborate soundtracks and experimental cinematography. Despite their striking audiovisual configuration, the two films remain underseen and under evaluated. Looking back at them with recurrent questions about how to disarticulate inequality and discrimination in audiovisual form brings forth suggestive material. 
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Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo composer, singer, actor, and film director Sérgio Ricardo (whose actual name was João Lutfi) wrote and directed Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu. Truly a multifaceted artist, he composed the music for both films and acted in them as well. The films were shot on location in neighboring favelas; the short in Macedo Sobrinho, and the feature in Catacumba. These favelas used to be in proximity to Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas and Humaitá, areas in the affluent neighborhoods of Southern Rio de Janeiro. In the late 1960s, only a few years after the films were shot, both communities were transferred to faraway places with weak infrastructure as part of a government “cleansing” urban policy. Today, the two films offer rare visual documentation of a time when the neighborhood had more diverse populations.
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Sérgio Ricardo collaborated on these films with his younger brother, the cinematographer Dib Lutfi.2 At the time, Lutfi worked as a cameraman for TV Rio. He became well known in Brazil and abroad for his technical and creative ability with handheld 35mm film cameras. Lutfi started as an amateur photographer, and then worked with the heavy studio television cameras of the time, which stood on large rolling tripod-carts. After working with this heavy equipment, Lutfi would leave behind the studio work to experiment with lighter equipment that allowed him to create unexpectedly beautiful 35 mm handheld camera movements, such as the ones that can be seen in Esse mundo é meu.3
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The way that sound and music interplay in Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu makes them stand out from other works of their period. Indeed, a common element between Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu is the sparse dialogue throughout both films. Another notable element in the sound design of Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu is their use of music not as background sound, but as narrative commentary. This approach does connect the films with other works of their time, such as Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (1964), a film for which Sérgio Ricardo composed and sang on the soundtrack (Rocha writing the lyrics himself).4 Moreover, the editing of both films avoids the classic configuration of synchronic sounds and images.
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The production teams behind Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu included participants of the intense artistic atmosphere from the early 1960s, suggesting that even though he was just starting his career in film, Ricardo took part, and in a way, marked an unusual intersection between Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo.5 Modern film pioneer Nelson Pereira dos Santos edited the short while working on Glauber Rocha’s first feature, Barravento (1962). Barravento and Menino da calça branca were both exhibited in the First Bahia Film Festival, an event that gathered the effervescent film community of the time.6 The Mozambique-born Cinema Novo director Ruy Guerra edited Esse mundo é meu.7 Guerra was part of the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura), the cultural arm of the National Student Union that produced Cinco Vezes Favela (1962), a collection of short films that featured some members of the burgeoning Cinema Novo movement as directors. CPC did not accept Ricardo’s film to be a part of the collection, citing issues with its poetic and lyrical qualities that were not in line with their more revolutionary artistic efforts.
Scene Analysis of Menino da calça branca
Menino da calça branca tells the story of a boy who has a friendship with a local doll repairer (played by Sérgio Ricardo). The artisan has an undeclared crush on the boy’s mother, who is single and making her living as a laundry woman. He tenderly sculpts the face of a puppet to resemble that of the boy’s mother, and grants the boy’s one true wish by giving him a pair of white pants as a Christmas present.
The shoeless and shirtless white favela boy in shorts playfully somersaults in the grass until, in an upside-down position, he stops and sees the object of his desire between his open legs – a pair of white pants on a passant man (interpreted by cartoonist Ziraldo8). This peasant man is presented through the boy’s upside-down POV. Cinematographer Dib Lutfi then pans to the sky, only to retrieve the boy on his feet by Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, following after the man in white pants. The vibration of a guitar cord emphasizes the spatial transition provoked by the pan shot. No music is used in this scene, but the unobtrusive noise of the streets can be heard on the soundtrack in an attempt to add a deeper layer of expression to the image.
In Menino da calça branca, white pants signal a dream of growing up and being fully included. It is clear that the young boy desires inclusion because, for instance, he mimics a perfectly synchronized diegetic marching band. However, we learn by the films end that white pants were inadequate for the boys daily playful life in a muddy environment, signalizing the impossibility of this naïve and depoliticized dream.
Scene Analysis of Esse mundo é meu
Esse mundo é meu is a particularly bold work for its willingness to confront cultural taboos. The film begins with a solemn Afro-Brazilian religious hymn. It depicts sexual pleasure. It portrays an illegal non-professional abortion (which was highly controversial at the time, and still would be today). It legitimizes the disrespect for a priest in a largely Catholic country, and it advocates for working class unionization. Bringing such a leftist agenda to a film was possible in Brazil in the pre-military dictatorship era, but after 1968 it was forbidden.
The opening sequence of Esse mundo é meu establishes the outside favela landscape with a series of long whirling shots, including many zoom-ins and pans. On the soundtrack, an orchestrated version of an Umbanda Afro-Brazilian hymn begins the film in a peculiarly solemn way, signaling an engaged attempt to bridge the gap between popular and erudite culture through syncretic non-Christian religion.9 

Differences between Menino da calça branca and Esse mundo é meu are the likely result of Ricardo’s attempt to incorporate some of the criticisms the short initially received for having an only white cast and for not being political enough. In parallel editing style, Esse mundo é meu tells the story of two protagonists, a white steel worker named Pedro played by Sérgio Ricardo, and a black shoe shiner named Toninho played by Antonio Pitanga. The steel worker does not have enough money to marry his beloved girlfriend Luzia. Scenes of work inside an actual small factory with diegetic noise music are one of the elements that make this film particularly distinctive.10 
The credit sequence gives way to the introduction of Toninho, played by Antonio Pitanga. As Toninho wanders through a crowd of daily commuters on their way to work, Ricardo sings their names: “Bento, Zé, Tulão, Benedito…”. The purpose of this is to highlight that many people share the same struggles of Toninho. The song is followed by a voice-over dialogue between two secondary characters who have yet to be introduced, Toninho’s love Zuleica and her more affluent (because he owns a bike) boyfriend. From there, the film moves to the factory. Over images of daily work, a dialogue commences between the second couple, Pedro and Luzia. They discuss commemorating Luzia’s birthday by visiting all the places throughout Rio that she loves.
Both Pedro and Luzia are in love, but due to a shortage of money, they cannot afford getting formally married. Despite Pedro’s visible sadness over their situation, the couple decides to take a lovely journey through a park to commemorate Luzia’s birthday. They ride a carrousel and a Ferris wheel. While on the Ferris wheel, Sergio Ricardo’s melancholic song “A fábrica” [The factory] plays on the soundtrack, the lyrics stating, “How can a woman live with a man who doesn’t have a cent?”. In this scene, the music counteracts the romantic atmosphere. Stunning shots of Pedro and Luzia circling through the air on this Ferris wheel mark the couple’s sensual affection. The camera flows with the motion of the Ferris wheel as if to suggest vertigo, love and sensuality. Placed in the seat above the couple, it moves between their bodies, the sky, and other surrounding seats. Luzia moves into Pedro’s shack, she lies down, he starts to take her clothes off. A medium shot avoids showing whole bodies. The camera fixes on her face as she gets aroused. 
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Even though Luzia initially was the one to propose having kids, when she actually gets pregnant their lack of financial conditions motivates her decision to go through an illegal non-professional abortion. This in turn leads to her death. Pedro, now a resentful widower, leads a workers’ strike for better wages. By talking about abortion, still one of the main causes of female death in Brazil, Esse mundo é meu violates another persistent taboo. Also, it is important to note that this female character detains agency, albeit her decisions lead to her death.
A black shoeshiner, Toninho, saves money to buy a bike in order to win over Zuleica, the woman he loves. Toninho is left without his savings because his mother used them to pay for his stepfather’s funeral, so he ends up stealing a bike from a priest. Despite robbing this priest, his ending is a happy one. Having won Zuleica over, the new energetic couple embraces and turns around and around in an empty lot. The film celebrates the couple’s affection with an amazing 360 degree tracking shot, capturing their long embrace. Mid-shot, the cameraman begins to move around them in the opposite direction, intensifying the feeling of dazzling encounter. 
Favela Situation Films
In his well-known critique of Cinema Novo, French-Brazilian researcher, professor, and filmmaker Jean Claude Bernardet considered Menino da calça branca mushy (“piegas”).11 Bernardet situated the short among what can be thought of as a wave of favela situation films. He considered Menino da calça branca within his broader notion of marginalism, i.e. films made by middle class filmmakers who chose to approach subjects that were not at the center of their contemporary life. Even though these filmmakers attempted to teach viewers about revolution, Bernardet observed that because they were allied with the bourgeoisie in the so-called national popular alliance, they had to avoid the main structural class conflicts. Instead of focusing on the contradictions of daily working-class life, films approached subjects such as different segments of the lumpen proletariat, favela urban inhabitants, and Northeasterner outlaws from the backlands. In doing so, filmmakers remained alienated from the working classes, despite their best intentions.12
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In the early 2000s, Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund's City of God (2002) became part of a transnational wave of what international film festivals were calling favela situation films. Some of these favela films have been immensely popular among viewers and international critics. Others have provoked criticisms for their roles in reinforcing gender, race, and class discriminations. In Brazil, these criticisms have stimulated a debate about how to disarticulate visual expressions of discrimination. Favela films deal with sensitive places and bodies, making discrimination and inequality visible within high-valued public transnational filmic spaces. In doing so, these works provoke multiple sensitive reactions among audiences. 
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National governments do not like what they understand to be negative representations of their beloved countries. Strong reactions to Luís Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950) by the Mexican government, for example, already suggested that making poverty visible to a world-wide audience can incite an explosive reaction from governments. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio 40 graus (1955) was another work that was censored, this time due to its depiction of favela children struggling to survive. Black Orpheus13 (Marcel Camus, 1959), on the other hand, was a popular success in Brazil and abroad, but its artificial mise-en-scene offended the search of realism and improvisation that drove New Cinemas.

The sentimentality in Sérgio Ricardo’s films might appear to undermine predetermined revolutionary reactions against class and racial discrimination. Nonetheless, both films approach work, women, and religion in ways that were not common at the time. The female characters in Ricardo’s films present a realistic depiction of lower-class women from that period: they face the hardship of an unassisted illegal abortion, or they’re single mothers who have to work hard to support their children. 
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Sérgio Ricardo’s initial films enrich our knowledge about the political and aesthetic debates that animated effervescent filmmakers in early 1960s Brazil. The ways in which transmedia references inform musical choices - including an orchestrated Umbanda hymn, a band play, a song from a Chico de Assis play, atmospheric noise – and collaborations by other fellow artists, and filmmakers suggest the potential of thinking about the complex web of art production, and circulation, within the arts community of that period. 

In the two films, sound and image rhyme in unexpected asynchronism in ways which combine sensuality, complex visual movement, silence, noise, and instrumental/sang explanatory lyrics. This audiovisual sensory quality might disarticulate common sense audiovisual class, race, and gender discrimination, and open horizons for change.

1. Elsaesser, T. a. M. H. (2009). Film Theory: An introduction through the senses. London, Routledge

2. Sérgio Ricardo would go on to collaborate with his brother Dib Lutfi on his next two feature length films, Juliana do Amor Perdido (1970) and A Noite do Espantalho (1974). The two brothers collaborated with Glauber Rocha in Terra em transe (1967). Lutfi would go on to work with Eduardo Coutinho, Domingos de Oliveira, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Walter Lima Jr., among others.

3. Dib Lutfi took Arne Sucksdorff’s 1962-63 film course, which first introduced NAGRA direct sound equipment to filmmakers in Brazil. In 1963-64, besides working on his brother’s films, Lutfi assisted Sucksdorff on his feature Fábula or Mitt hen är Copacabana (1965). The differences between Sucksdorff’s “academic” tripod and lightening and Lutfi’s hand held cinematography and natural lightening techniques are remarkable. The differences suggest the varying ways in which the local appropriation of foreign techniques can result in different aesthetics. Hamburger, E. (2020). "Arne Sucksdorff, professor incômodo no Brasil." https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7287020 (access 11/15/2020)

4. Glauber Rocha created a cordel style song and asked Sérgio Ricardo to listen to his recordings of popular Northeasterner repentistas, who sing, and play the rabeca in popular markets and other public spaces. Their compositions absorbed ongoing events and figures, mixed with old Iberian structures. While this folk style was familiar to Rocha, Ricardo was introduced to cordel to compose the music. The result is a well-known song that managed to bring popular culture to an experimental film. Xavier 1999 [1997], Carvalho 2011, Debs 2014

5. Leal, H. (2008). O Homem da Montanha, Orlando Senna. Carvalho, M. d. S. S. (2003). A nova onda baiana: Cinema na Bahia 1958-1962. Salvador, Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia.

6. Although Guerra is credited for editing the film, and not credited for the song, his dense and detailed biography mentions his friendship with Sérgio Ricardo and authorship of the lyrics of the song “Esse mundo é meu”, but does not mention the editing work on Esse mundo é meu. Even though the film is named after the song, only the main chorus from the original song is there. The song would reverberate as it was recorded by Sergio Ricardo in the film’s album, and later by the very popular singer Elis Regina. Borges, V. P. (2017). Ruy Guerra, paixão escancarada. São Paulo, Boitempo.

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7. An emblematic example of this dynamic occurred in 2008, with the presence of the Executive Director of the Cinemateca Brasileira at the 3rd annual CineOP. The theme of CineOP that year was National Audiovisual Preservation Policy: Needs and challenges. Throughout the event, the Executive Director took a firm stand on opposing the articulation of other audiovisual heritage institutions with the Ministry of Culture’s representatives, and the creation of the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA).
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8. Ziraldo also designed the film’s credits. He also appears in Esse mundo é meu; Visual artist Lygia Pape designed the credits for the feature.

9. This Umbanda hymn says Oxalá / meu pai / Tem pena de nós /Tem dó / A volta do mundo é grande / Seu poder é bem maior (Oxalá/ my father / have pity on us / have mercy /the turning of the world is large /but your power is much larger) Maestro Gaya is credit for the film’s music, therefore this and other orchestrations are his.

10. Esse mundo é meu includes “ Canção do último caminho” from the cordel playAs Aventuras de Ripió Lacraia, written by CPC playwright Chico de Assis. The play is featured in the sound track to indicate that Luzia died: “Neither hunger nor temptation, neither pain nor love, His soul became a little bird, beautiful flight took off, He went far away on his way, He went to heaven to fly there.” (p. 17) https://issuu.com/todoteatrocarioca/docs/as_aventuras_de_ripi___lacraia_-_19 (acess 11/15/2020).
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11. Bernardet, J. C. (2007 [1967]). Brasil em tempo de cinema, São Paulo.
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12. See for example Cardenuto, R. (2008). Discursos de intervenção: o cinema de propaganda ideológica para o CPC e o ipês às vésperas do golpe de 1964. PPGMPA. São Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo. Mestrado. , Cardenuto, R. (2014). O cinema político de Leon Hirzsman (1976-1983): Engajamento e resistência durante o regime militar brasileiroibid. Doutorado.
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13. Based on an original play by Brazilian poet, and diplomat Vinícius de Moraes.
Tocaia no Asfalto é um filme de crime malicioso e baiano, suspenso na história do cinema brasileiro. Seu desalinhamento com o cânone cinemanovista também se associa ao seu caráter de encerramento do Ciclo Baiano, período de movimentação cinematográfica que termina com a lamentada ida de seu grande diretor, Roberto Pires, para o Rio de Janeiro. O terceiro longa do cineasta certamente está na trilha do que ele vinha construindo desde que inaugurou a produção de longas-metragens na Bahia com o veloz e soturno Redenção (1959), mas não há precedentes para o que acontece em Tocaia, como também não há filmografia ulterior que abarque a agilidade e a maldade projetadas por Pires em 1962.
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A abertura de Tocaia no Asfalto é inapresentável. Basta dizer que uma vingança é concretizada em um freeze frame arrepiante, após sermos conduzidos por uma série de planos fechados e sombrios que dão o tom de sua estilização total de cena. O que procede após os créditos iniciais é uma variação concisa de planos muitíssimo preenchidos que sempre estão criando ação em primeiro e segundo plano, e que alternam entre esses o foco de sua intrincada narrativa. Os percalços de um pistoleiro de Alagoas em missão política na cidade de Salvador constituem apenas a espinha dorsal do projeto, que vai sendo tumultuado por uma série de presenças ilustres de figuras detestáveis, sempre entre coronéis e cafetões. Seu ritmo musical não é ditado apenas pela trilha reverberante de Remo Usai, cheia de ecos e espacializações, mas principalmente pelo tom cínico dos diálogos entre esse grupo de personagens criminosos, sendo colocados em cena cheios de más-intenções e dotados de um grande repertório de falácias que aceleram os firmes enquadramentos da câmera.
A crise que oferece à narrativa todo o seu ensejo criminal se dá inteiramente no espaço privado. Das disputas entre os políticos coronéis até as dores de cabeça de seu protagonista pistoleiro, há uma constante ligação dos termos de poder com o espaço familiar, com o mau arranjo de modelos colonialíssimos e acordos íntimos de dominação. São políticos ideologicamente carnais e paternalistas, em um jogo de favores e deveres que não os permitem calar a boca e vão dando à morte sua estrada de lábia. Seus personagens querem se salvar dos conflitos que os castigam, só que essas complicações surgem de um estado tão intransponível, de problemas tão intrínsecos às suas existências, que vai ficando claro como as confusões não têm muito jeito de se resolverem. Diferente dos códigos da máfia italiana ou da ruptura comunitária no faroeste que geralmente dão os termos do tiroteio na essência do cinema criminal, a desarmonia de Tocaia no Asfalto é do profundo terror brasileiro, da continuidade da Casa Grande, de suas linhagens oligárquicas e do cinismo grotesco de suas resoluções informais que se dão entre o sofá da sala do chefão do crime e a estalagem das prostitutas subordinadas à linha de tortura.

Nesse sentido, Tocaia no Asfalto é um filme de uma certa constituição cinefílica, consciente em sua releitura arquetípica das grandes fitas de gênero americanas da década anterior. Há de se citar, sem muita precisão, algo como Os Corruptos (The Big Heat, 1953), de Fritz Lang, ou até, com mais excentricidade, a forte iluminação e a velocidade de um filme como A Morte num Beijo (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955), de Robert Aldrich. Mas a realidade é que os percalços da realidade do filme o colocam em uma distância criativa de referências claras. Não há cineasta americano que tenha filmado a Igreja de São Francisco, os desdobramentos em madeira de sua arquitetura convergente e sua iminência de morte barroca.
Em outros termos, também não existem muitos cineastas brasileiros para além de Roberto Pires que tenham se empenhado no cinema de crime como um espaço cativo de expressão nacional. É mais cabível associar Tocaia no Asfalto com os quadros preto e branco dos gibis de Flávio Colin ou com as linhas de som cortantes das radionovelas da época. O tom grosseiro do longa estancado por sua precisão e concisão formal é o que coloca o legado do cineasta nos termos do “artesanato” (o que também acontece a artistas industriais como Humberto Mauro ou Roberto Farias), pois é o que articula sua visão como sendo incontornável a qualquer espectador. Dos cortes absolutos das sombras aos posicionamentos precisos que tensionam seus atores, qualquer momento de Tocaia no Asfalto é talhado pela impressão do cineasta. Seus enquadramentos ocupados que servem de moradia a todo tipo de pilantra não abrem espaço para contestação, ora são planificados e reduzidos para extrair o susto dos tiros, ora alcançam uma profundidade que faz caber em seus espaços uma dúzia de figuras em movimento. O que é constante é seu concretizado poder de sedução, que atrai pelas vias do perigo as mais finas composições. Do caminhão da primeira cena até o trem da última, não sobra tempo para uma mediação que freie sua natureza ardilosa, o que resta é saber que a salvação não é para todos.
Tocaia no Asfalto is a malicious Bahian crime film, suspended within the history of Brazilian cinema. Its misalignment with the Cinema Novo canon has to do with its position at the end of the Bahian Cycle, a period of cinematic effervescence that ends with the lamented departure of its great director, Roberto Pires, to Rio de Janeiro. This, the filmmaker's third feature, clearly follows the path of what he had been building since he inaugurated the production of feature films in Bahia with the fast and somber Redenção (1959). But there is no precedent for what happens in Tocaia, just as there is no later filmography that encompasses the agility and malice projected by Pires in 1962.
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The opening scene of Tocaia no Asfalto is indescribable. Suffice it to say that a revenge is realized in a chilling freeze frame once we have been led through a series of dark close-ups which sets the tone for the total stylization of Tocaia’s scenes. What follows after the opening credits is a concise variation of shots with busy mise-en-scene where action is continuously created in the foreground and background, shifting its narrative focus between them. The mishaps of a gunman from the state of Alagoas on a political hitjob in the city of Salvador, Bahia constitute the backbone of the narrative, which is tumultuously interrupted by an illustrious cast of detestable figures who live among political colonels1 and pimps. The film’s musical rhythm is not only dictated by Remo Usai's reverberant soundtrack, full of echoes and spaces, but mainly by the cynical tone of the dialog between this group of criminal characters who are full of evil intentions and endowed with a large repertoire of lies. 
The crisis that generates the film’s crime subplot happens entirely in the domestic space. From the disputes between political colonels to the troubles faced by our gunman protagonist, power is constantly linked to the family space (the consequences of an archaic but persistent colonial model), where intimate dealings to maintain the status quo take place. These are ideological politicians who are carnal and paternalistic, playing a game of favors and duties which set them on a path of manipulation and murder. The characters want to save themselves from the conflicts that torment them, but their troubles arise from a situation so insurmountable, from problems so intrinsic to their existences, that it becomes clear their issues can’t be resolved. Unlike the codes of the Italian mafia or the community breakdown in the Western that provide the blueprint for shootouts, the disharmony of Tocaia no Asfalto refers to a deep Brazilian horror, to the permanence of the Casa Grande2 and its oligarchic lineages, and to the grotesque cynicism of the informal resolutions that take place between the crime boss’s living room couch and the brothel where prostitutes are subjected to torture.
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In that sense, Tocaia no Asfalto is a film of a certain cinephilic constitution, conscious in its archetypal retelling of the great American genre films of the previous decade. One could mention, without much thought, a film like Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), or even, the strong lighting and the speed of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). But, actually, the features of Tocaia no Asfalto make the film devoid of obvious creative influences. No American filmmaker has filmed the Church of São Francisco, the wooden unfoldings of its converging architecture and its Baroque air of impending death.
On the other hand, there aren't many Brazilian filmmakers beyond Roberto Pires who have adopted crime cinema as their preferred space of national expression. It is more fitting to associate Tocaia no Asfalto with the black and white images of Flávio Colin's comic books or with the choppy sounds of radio soap operas of the time. The coarse tone of this feature film, stamped by its formal precision and concision, is why the filmmaker is associated with "craftsmanship" (which also applies to studio artists like Humberto Mauro or Roberto Farias), as it articulates his vision as being unavoidable to any spectator. From the decisive cuts of the shadows to the precise positions that intensify the actors, each moment of Tocaia no Asfalto is carved by the filmmaker's imprint. Pires’ busy mise-en-scene encompasses all kinds of villains and leave no room for contestation; at times they are reduced to convey the shock from gunshots, at other times a frame is deep enough to accommodate a dozen moving figures. What is constant is the shots’ concrete power of seduction, which spawns the finest compositions motivated by danger. From the truck in the opening scene to the train at the ending, there is no time to try and curb the film's cunning nature; all that's left is is the knowledge that salvation does not come for everyone. 
1. Coronelismo, literally Coronelism, is a phenomenon in Brazil by which a rich and influential political leader rules over a community.

2. Brazilian plantations in colonial times consisted of a Casa Grande (where the masters lived) and the senzala (the slave quarters). This was theorized in Gilberto Freire's seminal book Casa Grande e Senzala, which was so influential that, to this day, whenever someone mentions "casa grande", "senzala" is always implied, and vice-versa. So "Casa Grande" refers to the colonial elite in that dichotomy.
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