Brazilian Cinema: Filmmaker Analysis, Essay Example

Interest on specific nationalist cinema is an evolving process; different cultures engage in film at different times and in different ways, and other cultures respond to this cinema in equally varied forms.  Complicating this cultural/national factor further is how directors inevitably create their own impacts, and often as a response to how film has traditionally been made in their culture.  An example of this exponential process is certainly seen in the work of Walter Salles, acknowledged as a leader in Brazilian film.  Latin American cinema emerged in the 20^th century as largely lacking in distinction; an exception such as 1933’s Ganga Bruta would occur, but low budgets and derivative content were more the norm (Bergan, 2011, p. 164).  Decades later, however, saw the rise of filmmakers intent on challenging norms, and powerfully addressing issues of gender, politics, and social perspectives. These pioneers in turn brought Latin American cinema international recognition as a unique artistic force, and by the 1990s Salles would be recognized as revitalizing and reconstructing Brazilian film.  As the following explores, writer/director Walter Salles, in films such as Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, was and is highly instrumental in the social and political dynamism today associated with Brazilian cinema.

Background

Interestingly, early Brazilian cinema reflects a quality of early American film; namely, the simple translation of stage musicals and comedies to the screen.  Brazil’s teatro de revista tradition may be compared to the British music hall and American Vaudeville, and early Brazilian films provided this theatrical entertainment.  The music and comedy notwithstanding, however, these films of the 1930s and 1940s offered something more to audiences: satire directed at political and governmental figures.  After the Vargas government took power in 1930, it was ordinary for films to directly mock the President; 1940’s Musica, Maestro!, for example, featured an actor in a Vargas mask (Dennison, 2004, p. 11).  The Vargas regime, so autocratic and modeled on Mussolini’s rule of Italy, vastly changed the political and social realities of the nation.  To promote these changes, the government relied on propaganda in the form of film’s celebrating “Brazilness” and often featuring Carnival celebrations (Dennison, p. 31).  The satire persisted, however, and it is argued this this gave to the new “lower classes” in the newly industrialized nation the opportunity to vent frustration.  Even in its initial and entertainment-based form, then, Brazilian film expressed a political component and reflected a social need.

With the 1960s came the famous Cinema Novo movement in Brazil, categorized by an “aesthetic of hunger” (Dennison, p. 133).  Documentary in style, these were the films determined to present, as had the Italian Neo-realist movement, stark reality of life in the nation.  Professional actors were rarely used and the films focused on the oppressed poor, but a second phase of the movement would seek a more artistic expression.  This is likely due to the impact of the seizing of power by the military in 1964; dreams of a revolution were, in plain terms, utterly unrealistic. Consequently, it is generally regarded that Cinema Novo was a failed era and ambition (Stock, p. 41).  By the 1980s, however, Brazilian filmmakers began to again express something of a unified vision.  The increasing controls of the government and the national emphasis on “integrating” the nation into a cohesive whole generated resistance.  More exactly, filmmakers made movies reinforcing a need to leave Brazil, and as a means of recapturing the country as inherently and rightly too diverse to be integrated.  The cinema began focusing on Brazil as a distanced scene, as in Furtado’s documentary, Ilha das Flores, which mocks the “good” society of a Brazil that saves a rotten tomato to feed the poor.  Similarly, Bezerra’s Brazil Avenuecriticizes the cycles within the cities, in which poverty breeds violence which is in turn repressed by violence (Stock, 1997, p. 35).  After the emptiness of decades of Brazilian cinema, documentaries, and not the documentary style of Cinema Novo, undertook to expose truths.  The stage was then set for modern Brazilian filmmakers to more powerfully confront the issues within the nation.

Salles

Although too young to have been a part of the Cinema Novo movement, Walter Salles, returning to his native Brazil while in his teens, began his career making documentaries.  The impact of Brazil’s economic freeze in the first half of the 1990s hindered Salles’s work, but he made a great impression with his first feature film, 1995’s Foreign Land, which actually focused on the economic issues plaguing Brazil.  It would be 1998’s Central Station, however, that would make Salles an internationally respected writer/director (New York Times).  The film is a romanticized story of a young boy’s coming together with a woman who is initially his antithesis, and it is simultaneously gritty and realistic, and dreamy and lyrical.  Salles employs different techniques of mise-en-scene as he exposes both city and country.  The Rio scenes involve close-ups of the urban elements and an emphasis on the jarring sounds of the city; horns honk, cars screech, bodies are pressed together on the trains and crowd the streets.  There is a consistent quality of the frantic and the impersonal here, whereas the rural scenes are “gentle,” with the nattural sounds of the wind and the crickets merging with sweet music from the soundtrack.

Within these contexts, however, the film says a great deal about social, gender, and political realities of Brazil.  If the film in fact makes any most significant statement in regard to the conditions of Brazil, it is that the cities must be left behind for there to be value to life, and because the cities represent poverty, injustice, and despair (Shaw, 2003, p. 169). Dora and Josue, woman and boy, actually reflect the intense differences between the urban and rural of Brazil as perceived by Salles; she can be redeemed only by embracing the boy, who himself can only survive away from the city, and the symbolic maternal/filial relationship they develop represents how Brazilians must leave the urban behind in order to find their true and best selves. Without question, the city is heartless and unforgiving; early on, it “kills” Josue’s mother as he leaves her hand to retrieve his fallen toy, and a bus mows her down.

Linked to this urban cruelty is an implied attack on Brazilian authority, which is of course most manifested in Rio and the cities.  Whatever regime currently holds sway will promote the artificial and that which is destructive to the spirit, because politics relies on the greatest concentrations of the people in the urban environments.  Central Station also – and powerfully – criticizes the force of religion in the nation, which equates to the enormous impact of Christianity.  The character of Cesar is important in this regard, and from when he firsts offers a lift to Dora and Josue.  He is intensely religious and uncomfortable with how Josue describes the loose women of the city.  Then, Dora’s seduction of him, or his desire for that seduction, throws him into something of a panic; he actually abandons the two when Dora stops at a bathroom to apply make-up.  In this Salles is making a strong and critical point, in that he deeply mistrusts what he sees as a pervasive and topical embracing of religion in Brazil.  In the 1990s, evangelists were increasingly prominent in Brazilian society and Salles had no patience for them (Shaw, p. 171). With Cesar, then, he is able to expose the weakness and hypocrisy of Christians who overtly demonstrate faith, but are incapable of being truly understanding, human, and good.

Similarly, there is a more oblique criticism of religion through the absent Jesus, Josue’s father.  The name alone implies the Christian savior, but the reality is that this Jesus is far from holy.  His letter to Ana never even mentions the son he knows he has and has never seen (Shaw, p. 171).  Jesus is also highly symbolic of the traditional and paternal gender role, and in a way indicating mistrust.  As he never appears in the film, it is as though Salles is challenging the ultimate masculine ideal of the father figure.  He does not, in plain terms, exist as such, so there is reason to perceive a criticism of the Brazilian emphasis on the “natural” role of the male.  Similarly, Salles challenges Brazilian gender roles in the character of Dora.  For most of the film, she is cold and non-maternal but, interestingly, it is clear that the audience is expected to care for her.  Dora eventually becomes more traditionally feminine as she develops a real connection to Josue (Dennison, p. 216), but her earlier nature then reveals an interesting dichotomy.  In a sense,  Salles uses Dora to convey that a woman’s nature is more complex than may be typically perceived in the culture, even if she will finally express the woman’s role of caring.

In a very different way, Salles’s 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries presents a subversive response to Brazilian society and political authority, and largely through its lack of focus on Brazil itself.  As with Central Station, the key motif here is journey; Ernesto Guevara, here 23 years old and years away from his later identity as Che Guevara, undertakes an exploration of South America with his friend, Alberto Granado.  The core emphasis is then on a lack of national borders, and on identifying the true nature of Latin America and its people when parameters are disregarded.  Salles employs the device of marking each actual location reached by the young men; every time they enter a new country, the name is displayed and with how many kilometers they have traveled.  This actually exists as counterpoint, however, because what the men discover is a unity of place that defies any geo-political boundaries. All of their encounters with the native people of each area reinforce displacement, just as the plans for the journey are continually changing (Pinazza, 2014, p. 104); this is the very nature of the journey itself, composed of a series of departures.  At the same time, mise-en-scene is employed in ways also emphasizing connection, as in the deeply intimate and lengthy scene at the garage, with the mechanic, his wife, the boys, and the broken motorcycle  Salles also moves from extended, close shots of personal interaction to revealing the vast landscapes traveled, and the contrasts work to powerfully build the message being learned by Ernesto.  There are threads to be followed within this enormous landscape, and they are the human beings within it. Celebrating his birthday, Ernesto makes a speech in which he overtly declares that the division of Latin American into unstable nations is a “fiction.”  They have discovered that there is a deeper unity within all the people of the continent, and this is the truth Ernesto seeks to celebrate.

Perhaps the most important moment of the film occurs when Ernesto decides to swim the Amazon.  The swim takes place where Columbia, Peru, and Brazil meet, and the symbolism is both apparent and powerful.  On one level, it represents the physical and emotional challenges Ernesto is overcoming as a young man; he has embraced the effort to “lose himself” and be open to whatever this land has to reveal.  On another, there is that revelation in itself, in that the river represents the inherent fluidity of Latin American identity, as well as its varying forms (Pinazza, p. 107).  This is emphasized at the film’s end, when black and white shots of many of the natives encountered are shown.  There are multiple ethnicities, yet the stronger impact is of a collective identity, and one too strong to be divided by governmental or nationalist ambitions.  In a very real sense, then, the film challenges any specific nationalism, including the Brazilian.

Salles makes a few other points in The Motorcycle Diaries that go to gender, if of mild forms.  Alberto’s ambition on the journey is to have sex with as many women as possible, and the far greater meaning of the journey then places this in the context of satire on Latin American masculinity. His ambition is something of a joke, given the enormity of what they undergo.  This is in turn supported by the presence of the motorcycle itself; instead of being the hyper-masculine and powerful transportation men rely upon, it frequently breaks down, forcing the men to go on as best they can.  Criticism here then encompasses both ideas of the male gender as supremely virile and the futility of depending upon any form of industrialization.  Beyond these challenges to norms, however, the point remains that the film most consistently subverts any notion of Latin American nationalism, just as it also consistently affirms the innate value of the land and the people who naturally exist upon it.

Conclusion

From its earliest forms as providing entertainment based on theatrical review, Brazilian cinema has nonetheless also challenged existing social and political norms, as in that entertainment’s mocking the political figures of the day.  The industry then underwent changes, including the ultimately failed Cinema Novo movement.  Then, Brazilian filmmakers have long contended with the economic and governmental forces often blocking any real progress or artistic evolution.  Since the 1990s, however, this is cinema that has gained international recognition, and a leader in this is Walter Salles. While he does not directly challenge issues, Salles nonetheless offers strong criticisms of Brazilian political, social, and gender realities.  Ultimately, writer/director Walter Salles, in films such as Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, was and remains a powerful artistic presence in the social and political dynamism today associated with Brazilian cinema.

References

Bergan, R. (2011). The Film Book.  New York: Penguin.

Dennison, S. (2004). Popular Cinema in Brazil: 1930-2001.  New York: Manchester University Press.

Pinazza, N. (2014). Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Road Films in a Global Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Shaw, D. (2003).  Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten Key Films. New York: Continuum Books.

Stock, A. M. (1997). Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The New York Times. (2010). Walter Salles. Retrieved from          http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/109635/Walter-Salles/biography