The Brazilian popular in cinematographic audiovisual cultureⁱ

O popular brasileiro na cultura audiovisual cinematográfica

Abstract

This paper’s object consists of the problematizations regarding the popular which are internal to the expressive formats (in this case, the feature film) specific to the audiovisual culture in Brazil. The goals of correlating the Brazilian popular with audiovisual culture result from these two crossed intuitions: a) we understand that the popular, when defined as an object, participates in the constitution of epistemological and artistic fields in the country, mediating them to some extent; b) the popular also becomes subsidies to the designations of the socio-technical audiovisual system in the country. From the cinematographic authorial tradition that emerged between the 1950s and 1960s, we understand that the examination of the historical-empirical resumptions of the problematization regarding the popular, in the interrelationships of the audiovisual system with the other systems that make up the cultural sphere in Brazil, offers an opportunity to reflect on how this system is inserted in the modes of perception and cognition in the arrangement of the modern societal complex, when it offers an alternative of meaning attributions based on its optical, graphic and oral code.

Keywords:
Problematizations of the popular; Audiovisual system; Expressive formats; Cultural sphere; Brazil

Resumo

Neste artigo, o objeto de conhecimento consiste nas problematizações do popular internas aos formatos expressivos (no caso, o filme de longa metragem) próprios à cultura audiovisual no Brasil. As metas relacionadas à correlação entre popular brasileiro e cultura audiovisual vêm a reboque das duas seguintes intuições cruzadas que informam o nosso ponto de partida: a) de um lado, entendemos que, ao ser definido como objeto, o popular participa da constituição de campos epistemológicos e artísticos no país, em alguma medida, mediando-os; b) o popular, igualmente, torna-se subsídios às designações do sistema sociotécnico audiovisual no país. A partir da tradição autoral cinematográfica que emerge entre as décadas de 1950 e 1960, entendemos que o exame das retomadas histórico-empíricas da problematização sobre o popular, nas inter-relações do sistema audiovisual com os demais sistemas que compõem a esfera cultural no Brasil, oferece uma oportunidade para a reflexão de como este sistema se insere nos modos de percepção e cognição no arranjo do complexo societário moderno, quando oferece uma alternativa de atribuições de sentido calcadas no seu código ótico, gráfico e oral.

Palavras-chave:
Problematizações do popular; Sistema audiovisual; Formatos expressivos; Esfera cultural; Brasil

Due to its direct and profound relationship with the debate on the issue of the national in Brazil - in line with other Latin American socio-discursive contexts -, the theme of the popular already displays a considerable accumulation of knowledge produced in the field of Humanities. In this paper, the aim is not to retake this considerable ballast, which is discursively stocked with knowledge, but to selectively return to some of its aspects with the expectation of examining the contribution of the same popular theme to the constitution of the audiovisual’s socio-symbolic space in the country. As it is referred to the nation-people figure, the use of the idea of the Brazilian popular responds to the scope of Humanities’ literary and analytical-conceptual transfigurations of what is understood, in its many modulations, as the semantic reserve of mentalities, signs and emblems, in addition to behavioral typification of conduct and ways of living related to subaltern segments in Brazil. Therefore, the Brazilian popular consists of a chaining of compositions of concepts, images and intellectual-artistic imaginaries that develops in the rhythm of the secular cultural sphere’s formation and unfolding. On the other side of the coin, but in the course of this same dynamic, this chaining has been established as a structuring resource for new assemblages and artistic-intellectual designations.

From this perspective, the goals of correlating the Brazilian popular and audiovisual culture result from these two crossed intuitions that inform this paper:

• i. on the one hand, we understand that the popular, when defined as an object, participates in the constitution of epistemological and artistic fields in the country, mediating them to some extent;

• ii. therefore, if the popular also composes the assembly of the audiovisual culture’s symbolic and institutional space in Brazil, something like this requires considering this presence in the light of other proble­matizations regarding this same theme in other socio-symbolic spaces that integrate the secular cultural sphere¹.

This is because, due to its later insertion in this broad symbolic and institutional arrangement, we believe that the audiovisual culture’s perspectives are synthetic of the problematizations that preceded them.

Therefore, this paper’s object consists of the problematizations regarding the popular which are internal to the expressive format of feature film², typical of the audiovisual culture in Brazil between the 1950s and 1960s and which circulated in cinema and television. The notion of problematization retakes Michel Foucault’s concerns about what he calls an “ontology of the present”, that is, the questioning about the actuality of an event which manifests the “philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historic-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (Foucault, 1984: 47). The philosophical enunciative context in which the author evokes the notion of problematization refers to the “relations of powers, of the truth and of the subject” (Foucault, 1981: 48-78, translated by us). For the purposes pursued here, the emphasis is withdrawn on the ethical dimension, but maintains the practices; thus, the same notion is used in reference to the presentation/reflection on the popular which interrogates a certain actuality. It is worth mentioning that questioning does not concern the enunciation of questions; but the thought that emerges from these presentations/reflections, understood as entanglement of practices. From the analytical-interpretative perspective adopted, the interest lies in the different artistic and institutional-systemic figurations acquired by the formal specificity of organizing the expressive materiality of this presentation, which we call audiovisual culture (Ramos, 2004; Ramos & Bueno, 2001: 10-17).

Although, in the sociological exercise concerned with the relations between artistic-cultural forms and social structures, we recognize the importance of paying attention either to the producing agents’ socio-biographical paths, or to immersing in the works’ internalist plane, throughout this paper we leave both planes as complementary to the incidence of the analytical focus on the problem regarding the nexus established between expressive formats and institutionalization. Expressive formats comprise conventions with implications for communicative processes; largely tacit, such conventions govern the agreements established between production and reception regarding the uses of significant signs in the composition of messages in the control of the flow of discourses, images, audiolitues, as they are modulated by normatizations, moralities, arrangements of interests (ideal and material ones) and socio-technical bases. The choice for artistic expressive formats means that we neglect those oriented to the practices of reporting the episodes, nodal to many journalistic genres. The mimetic key in the definition of the artistic, in turn, emphasizes the function of transmuting experiences into images, but these are not limited to mere duplication, but rather comprise the formal re-elaboration of the historical-real contents according to the dialectic between tradition and authorial creation. Although we are aware of the controversies surrounding the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction (Menezes, 1996: 83-104), the option for focusing on the analysis of fictional expressive formats in audiovisual culture is due, on the one hand, to the categorization specific to the context of the study that supports this paper, in which there is great volume of works defined as being “imaginative creation”. On the other hand, due to the fictional’s characteristic way of portraying the world - that is, the transposition of the barriers among the imagined, the imaginary and the empirical (Saer, 2012: 320-325) -, we believe it is the best means to assess the significant intertextual and intermedia complex of the Brazilian popular.

The focus given on the issue of problematizations regarding the Brazilian popular in fictional expressive formats responds to the ultimate goal of examining and reflecting on the different stages in the institutionalization of the audiovisual system in Brazil. When we refer to institutionalization here, what is at issue is the process of statutory organization by which, at the same time, the differential of a body of principles aimed at coordinating/normalizing the behaviors of a given socio-symbolic space, in relation to other social systems, is affirmed and updated. Thus, we use Niklas Luhmann’s concept that social systems are operations and procedures admits communicational processes (Luhmann, 1997a: 77). In his view, social systems are able to face the multiple experiential possibilities placed on the horizon of modernity, as they are “polycontextual” systems, that is, capable of enabling multiple descriptions of the world and of themselves (Luhmann, 1997b: 46). The term audiovisual sociotechnical systems is used to highlight the design of procedural units whose operations are guided by the annulment of extraneous interference on their decision-making capacity to manage their referrals. Something like this occurs as the selection of possibilities intrinsic to the self-adaptive dynamics of these systems concerns the operability by which the margins of their variations are selectively limited, in the light of the optical, graphic and oral synthetic code, with which aspects chosen to compose its systemic closure are selected and valued.

Given this analytical description of what we call audiovisual sociotechnical systems, our sociological postulate is that, in societal arrangements, marked by the complex and diversified polychromy of social forms, in the relationship between form and surroundings, it is possible to suggest the existence of systems characterized by the operations of making visible/legitimating/designating the means of signification or, in the Eliasian repertoire, mimetic artifacts (Elias & Dunning, 1992). The audiovisual sociotechnical system is inscribed in this same institutional territory. If, since then, the mediations of the secular cultural sphere with other societal domains are integrated to the problem of social differentiation, simultaneously, it brings up the problem of the adjustments, cleavages, mergers and adhesions among the internal systems of the cultural sphere. The examination of the historical-empirical resumptions of the problematizations regarding the popular, in the interrelationships of the audiovisual system with the other systems that make up the cultural sphere in Brazil, offers an opportunity to reflect on how this system fits into the modes of perception and cognition about the Brazilian popular, when it offers an alternative of meaning designation based on its operational code.

As figurations, the expressive formats - the feature film, here - are apprehended as plasmas of sociotechnical interdependencies in the differentiation dynamics of the audiovisual social system in Brazil, but in specific socio-historical stages. Thus, this paper is divided into two argumentative parts. The first one focuses on the establishment of the structural tension between aesthetic-critique and entertainment in the path of the feature film’s recognition as an aesthetic-cultural asset linked to the artistic authorship problem. Later, this paper discusses how this same problem takes shape in the foundation of a Brazilian cinematographic authorial tradition that recycles and recodes the Brazilian popular aiming to artistically intervene in the country’s sociopolitical context in the 1960s.

Between art/critique and entertainment, polar axis of a sociogenesis sketch

A phenomenon of the 20th century, the audiovisual sector comes in tow with the consequences of intertwining visual and audiovisual symbolic forms with media that are typical of industrialization (Benjamin, 2012: 9-40), a convergence that achieved a very wide reach. The systemic and historical setting of the audiovisual resulted from the synthesis aggregating the intermedia weave (graphic-printed, radiophonic/phonographic, cinematic and televisual ones) with the inter-institutional register of the modalities of symbolization (literary, dramaturgical, journalistic, plastic-visual, choreographic ones etc.), with the popularization of screens. Since the middle of the last century, audiovisual imagery flows have moved from the collective scenarios of movie theaters, through the advent of television, to immersing in people’s intimacy with the use of mobile phones, supporting important interpenetrations between private and public life, but also of the symbolic and of commodification (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009).

In the scope of this historical dynamics, in the European context the struggles in favor of the consensus building regarding granting the status of art to cinema were opposed by the ideological platform that arised with romanticism, that is, the range of narratives having as their object the opposition of the singular subjective unities and collective-community bases to the systemic expansion of the socio-technical articulation, in particular with the scale expansion of bureaucratic control by mass industrial states. In other words, the problem regarding technological replication is established as the nucleus for an agenda that is both political and intellectual at the same time, because technical reproduction would confront the requirement of identity singularity, leaving in question the authenticity of the self and of reality itself (Farias, 2020).

Some of Benjamin’s inferences about a philosophy of the modern metropolitan everyday life are opportune to speculate on the basis on which the advocacy of the aesthetic and artistic nature of cinematography is built. It is worth noting that Benjamin’s proposal is closely linked to his critique of the epistemic lineage that has unfolded since Descartes. In his view, this entire lineage has left a consciousness devoid of history, memory and experiential context. In his doctoral thesis (Benjamin, 1999), he turns to the German romantic literary critique in order to draw attention to the way in which the symbolic conception of art, evoking transcendence, devalued the aesthetic experience as a mundane experience. The project of his theory of history was founded on the motion of an allegorical critique, which would take place as it examined the means by which the contents of life are transformed into philosophical categories (of thought) through literary intervention. Culture documents would then be “documents of barbarism” and the deconstruction of their exemplary monumentality would form the core of the project of a salvific critique that, by rescuing the “shards” of history, would correlate languages and memory with the purpose of dismantling a history conceived as the victory of the dominant and the defeat and oppression of the losers (Kang, 2009: 215-233).

Marked by the theme of random reminiscences in Proust, Benjamin sets himself the task of a philosophy incarnated in the world and nourished by bodily sensations. Thus, he asks about the feasibility of rescuing the experience in the “barbaric” conditions imposed by modernity. One of the alternatives would be the intensification of the oblivion to which people are subjected. It would not be the return to a totalizing identity, but the exercise of recognizing the identity plurality underlying the disintegration itself. He is not very clear about which are, concretely, the instruments for the recomposition of the coordinate axis combining past, present and future, but in his writings, the detailed illations referring to technique stand out, precisely, with its consequences that uproot experience (Benjamin, 1986: 36-49). The author understands, as it could not be otherwise, that the human psychic-physical materiality is embodied in the modern condition and in it, intertwined with the rationality of the expansion of the economic surplus (both without historical precedents); therefore, if the technical structuring confronts human perception, at the same time, it reveals another sensibility whose agency would be that of the “aesthetic man” (Bolz, 1992: 92-98).

Therefore, the aesthetic and technical nexus enjoys centrality insofar as Benjamin chooses the technicism of the surrealists’ “collage art” to unfurl his theses. But it is in his conception of cinematographic art that we can notice the dialectical combination of violence, aesthetics and emancipation (Benjamin, 1975: 9-34). Thus, the author becomes the first to question the statute of reproducibility in industrial society and to insert it in discussions about aesthetics. He recalls that, if art has always coexisted with its reproduction, what the 20th century inaugurated was the autonomization of the reproduction technique itself, to the point of being recognized as art as well. By developing the concept of “aura”, which is central to understand the process of technical desacralization of art, in the essay The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, he returns to the problem of symbolic art as he conceives the work of art’s “aura” as what gives it distance and ensures its cultic value. The exemplary case of cinematography would imply the dissolution of the “aura” - in this art - by concatenating the ecstatic-corporeal anonymity of the metropolitan masses to the machinery in counterpart to the advance of capitalist relations of production and reproduction of material life, now also engendering the spiritual plane (Rochlitz, 2003: 69-303). If the concept of experience he proposes is inseparable from the combination of human feelings, woven in the course of a reciprocally shared time, and from the externalization they achieve in such significant objects and formats, Benjamin notes in modernity the affirmation of a highly aesthetic experience, placed in the playful and sensual content of the random game of perceptions. Thus, Benjamin finds in the “evasive” situation of fun another locus for the reaffirmation of the experience.

Benjamin’s formulations anticipate many tensions and dilemmas that later composed the agenda of the aesthetic debate focused on the cinematographic object that, at first, would hurt the prerogative of the transcendence of art, of the artistic and of the artist, as prescribed by the Western canon of history of art (Belting, 2006). How to grant the status of art to a technical work devoid of transcendence, when it is confined in the condition of an instrument at the service of utility? Would there be a possible conciliation between the collective trait of filmmaking with the primacy of the artistic exercise whose efforts result in pleasure extracted from the activity performed, which would make this agency impermeable to the imperatives of the interest driven by the fulfillment of external needs?

On the obverse of the process of technical reproducibility, different equations are also fostered to the feeling of ontological instability that is instigated by the wide penetrability of the industrialized duplication in ways of life and, thus, with repercussions in the frameworks of human perceptions. The discussions focused on the effects of the multiplication of technological doubles as they affected the statute of reality founded on the disjunction between the representation and the referent. Some concluded: ultimately, the cognitive divisions that ensured the limits of the genuine and of otherness are compromised, insofar there is the absorption of experience and history by models whose bases are in applying means of quantitative control of the inconstancies and uncertainties of the real. In the world that unfolds after the Second World War, interpreters increasingly pay attention to the dizzying mobility of the aestheticizing modernist ethos’ traces to social organization scopes, political-bureaucratic spheres and everyday life. The intersection of audiovisual reproduction techniques with mass media, backed by the institutional discursive dynamics of advertising, grants the image the condition of an inorganic double that, as autonomous, subverts and submits the living referent. Interpreters strive to elucidate what is identified as the idolatrous secular cult of images. In the light of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s (1985) critique of the technical-enlightened totalitarianism of mass industrial society, Eduardo Subirats notices an aesthetic domain with the quotidianization of art in all planes of human existence. It was an unprecedented situation enabled by the aggressive escalation of audiovisual reproduction techniques. Thus, what he calls “culture as spectacle” consists in the metamorphosis of the world into a representation and, therefore, in the dilution of any individual experience as a source that generates value and transformation (Subirats, 1989: 31). Baudrillard’s interpretation is no different; autonomous from the real-referent, in the flow of the technical-scientific project of total transparency, the representation is the narcissistic and circumferential self-reference. After all, he concludes, it would be

[...] unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. [...] The circumference starts from the [...] sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference [...]. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994: 6).

When considered as items - which are already manifested in Benjamin’s pioneering essay on the technical reproducibility of the symbolic and which are updated in later discussions -, similarly to the tensions between the creation or manipulation of realities with the proliferation of simulacra, likewise the debates regarding “serious art” in the face of entertainment and/or, even, the favorable or contrary positions to the appeal to aestheticization as spectacularization as a totalizing project, the properties that accompany the assembly of the audiovisual as a sociotechnical system with an extraordinary presence in contemporary cultures and societies stand out.

For now, it is important to underline the incisive favorable position to recognizing cinema as an artistic and critical artifact taken by intellectual circles (directors, screenwriters, photographers and critics) concerned with the problem of the rise of the technical image, but positioned as representatives of different national cinematographies, in particular from Europe. Something like this happened in time with the centrality obtained by the fictional expressive format of the feature film³, which was established as the flagship of the dizzying expansion of the Hollywood audio imaging industry. Resulting from the compilation of literary genres (drama, epic, comedy) from the romantic one (Mira, 2003: 13-38; Rossi, 2014), the Hollywood “feature film” uses the marketing strategy of ratifying certain typifications of themes and characters to attract, mainly for the purpose of setting up audiences/ticket sales. Already sound and colorful, especially from the 1930s onwards, this production reflected the transformation of some of the American studios into business corporations, soon establishing themselves as labels with broad and growing global dominance in film distribution, which was expanded in the 1950s with the production of television series. The flow in the circulation of these products was later extended with the advent of television. Criticisms regarding this North American audiovisual hegemony were mostly associated with the Marxist Left’s beliefs; it was understood that the Hollywood production was responsible for the pejorative label of “entertainment” (Adorno, 1986: 100-107; 2020: 121).

At the same time, what is striking in the same critical positions is the following: the interpreters reclassify as positive many of the objections - as we have seen - to cinema. In particular, through the ideology of socio-cultural transformation, they made what used to consist of accusations of image manipulation of the real aiming at domination strategic for the formation of new consciences. The formulations about the film montage resulting from the innovative experiments of the Russian Sergei Eisenstein, in communion with the interventionist aspirations of the aesthetic-artistic avant-gardes in the historical-real, in favor of the revolutionary acceleration⁴, gave support to conceptions about the establishment of a gaze non-trained by naturalized conventionalisms, through the lens of the cameras. Therefore, to the detriment of mimetic illusionism, the focus of the camera shots, the cuts, the montages, the use of tones of light and sound modulations, the choices of location, the costumes and the scenery, among other artifices, are summoned in the name of the production of audio images that circumvent the verisimilar realism of Hollywood filmography (Xavier, 2021: 46-51 e 99-171; Francastel, 1983: 191-206). The rebuke of serving as an alibi for the status quo of the bourgeois society, as it would offer a mere portrait of capitalist ideals, weighed heavily on it. Among the artistic circles against the large US industry, the key proposal was to make the intellectual and emotional dimensions accomplices, resuming Kracauer’s (2009: 192) illation.

An important inflection point in the affirmation of this filmography committed to the artistic-critical exercise is the advent of the so-called Italian Neorealism, whose landmark is the release of the film Roma Città Aperta (by Rossellini, 1944). The decision to film when Nazi troops were being expelled from the city by Allied soldiers highlights a certain neorealist cinematography’s affinity with a documentary perspective, that is, the employment of historical-real aspects in the composition of its fictional ambiences. However, such employment responds to the aim of proposing an interpretive look at the Italian socioeconomic situation during the post-World War II. Thus, in the neorealist cinematographic poetics, in the unfolding of the narrative plots, multiple stories are linked together, making use of the switch of camera shots. That is, at the end of a drama, with the camera remaining motionless or its slight movement, the focus on one character is replaced by that on another, who emerges from the background and takes over the frame.

The techno-artistic solutions in the materialization of the aesthetic-political stance of the circuits taken over by the Italian Neorealism had repercussions in other European cinematographic niches. The launch of Cahiers du Cinéma, in March 1951, is perhaps the most significant emblem of the confluences of interests, ideas and aspirations related to the making of functional interdependencies on which a social space was built, with a strong impact on the visibility and recognition of the artistic status of film making on an international scale. Published in Paris, with the intervention of the critics Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, André Bazin and Lo Duca, the publication hoisted the flag of the “authors’ policy”, that is, it defended the idea of a production in which individualized authorship is central (Bazin, 1985). In order to ensure cinema the status of art, in 1948, Alexandre Astruc - later a contributor to the magazine - even mentioned a specific writing, when he reflected on the emergence of an avant-garde that would have its “pen” in the camera:

To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. This art, although blessed with an enormous potential, is an easy prey to prejudice; it cannot go on for ever ploughing the same field of realism and social fantasy which has been bequeathed to it by the popular novel. It can tackle any subject, any genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions lie well within its province. I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes lived today, he would write novels.” With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Methods would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily (Astruc, 2009 [1948]).

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Cahiers du Cinéma had among their collaborators names like Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, who moved from the role of screenwriters to that of directors. If all of them stood out as representatives of auteur cinema, echoing one of the axes of art history that is supported by Kantian formulations on the post-Renaissance figure of the genius, the requirement of authorial individuality concatenates, in the aesthetic-artistic exercise, the work of thought with the critical-political stance, more frontally against the reduction of art to commercial purposes (Bernadet, 1989). The resumption of an auratic seal paves the way for the conjunction of these artistic circles and critics with representatives of the branches of French language sciences, at that time based on structuralism, reinforcing research and formal experimentalism in the establishment of this filmic tradition named nouvelle vague. Gilles Deleuze’s (1997: 9-36) thesis, which recognizes in cinema its own type of thinking, seems to give a philosophical finish to the postulations of this artistic-intellectual plot, when the author identifies precisely at the turn of the 1950s to the 1960s the emergence in European cinematography of “modern cinema” works. In his view, with these works the “movement-image” (or “action-image”) was abandoned in favor of the “time-image”. What Deleuze calls “mental-image” comprises the enterprise of going beyond a finished real that is only up to being shown; it would be about deciphering that real in its relations. Defined as a creative act, the modern cinema’s singularity would be to establish something in the world and this would correspond to reasoning; according to Deleuze, forged by sounds and visual images, audiovisual thinking proposes on screen the search for relationships that intercept, whilst penetrating, the actions, making them “symbolic acts” through the effort of reasoning.

The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma achieved prestige among many other circles of filmmakers, consumers and thinkers/researchers of cinema around the world. The extension of film festival circuits was one of the main factors that contributed to this circulation. They emerged in the 1930s with the holding of the Venice Film Festival, whose initial purpose was to publicize laudatory films of Mussolini’s fascist regime; gradually, the ideological orientation of many of these events’ curations shifted to the Left (Mazdon, 2007). Denunciations against cultural imperialism on the obverse of calls for attention to the situation of peoples subjected to underdevelopment, allied to the focus on the life of oppressed groups and, recently, the support to cultural diversity and post-colonial agendas have been making up the promotion of causes supported by the decisions of these film shows’ curators and have been considered at the time of awarding the competing works (De Valck, 2007; De Valck; Kredell & Loist, 2016).

If, throughout its existence, the Cannes Festival (1939) in France consecrated the cinematographic avant-garde movements (Italian neorealism, Nouvelle Vague and Cinema Novo, for example), it also inspired the creation of a cosmopolitan space in which, in addition to making names and works visible by legitimizing them, such international meetings imposed themselves as plasmas of transit of ideas, techniques, production and projection tools and equipment, ideologies, languages, among other aspects validated as resources of reflection and motivations inputs to practices in the cinematographic universe. Thus, festivals would later constitute essential subsidies for the reflexive monitoring of situations by people and institutions, triggering similar regularities of conduct in places in countries of different continents, increasingly intertwined with the interdependencies of the film production, dissemination and consumption chain.

Tensions regarding a common topic

Likewise literature, also made possible by the circulation of culture and knowledge increased with the Atlantic routes established with the expansion of European colonial empires, but already in a phase in which the international system took the lead in the regulation of planetary life, the use of image production and consumption techniques in Brazil took place at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, in the wake of international exhibitions and fairs publicizing the technoscientific wonders of industrial modernity (Morettin, 2019: 85-103). The operation of the first cinematographers in the then national capital - Rio de Janeiro - meant the initial interference of the problem regarding technical reproducibility of cinematic images in the subjective and collective planes in the country, following the paths of photography use by individuals and institutions to record themselves and the episodes that made up their daily lives (Süssekind, 1987). In the following decades, in the same rhythm in which new production and projection tools were imported from Europe and from the United States, there was a dizzying expansion of the audience interested in attending the then nascent movie theaters. Both aspects animated the first ventures that culminated, during the 1930s, in the founding of the studios Cinédia and Atlântida, aimed at the production of colored and sounded tapes identified with the burlesque genre of chanchadas - a musical genre inspired by musical theater, initially supported by the already ostensible audience success of combining samba and carnival promoted by the commercial radio system with the phonographic industry (Augusto, 1989; Hirano, 2008: 153-168). Around the 1940s, when other regional musical genres were added, the chanchada formula, based on carnivalization, was solidified by the complexification of the plots, but always reiterating the satire to Hollywood cinema in the midst of the unfolding of the comedy of manners related to the social issues of Brazilian urban daily life. The use of catchphrases and stereotyped traits in the characters’ characterization contributed to making these fictional productions popular (Johnson & Stam, 1995; Hirano, 2009).

Although the premiere screening of Limite, an experimentaxl film with existentialist pretensions, conceived and directed by Mário Peixoto, occured in the Cinelândia square in downtown Rio de Janeiro in 1931, it was only in the mid-1950s that the debates regarding the recognition of cinema’s artistic status emerged. A turning point for it was the inauguration of Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, in 1949. Within the same context in which important cultural facilities emerged in the city of São Paulo, such as the Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, based on the prestige obtained by Companhia do Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, the purpose of the entrepreneur Franco Zampari was to enable great productions, with notorious inspiration in the American film industry, guided by the production model obedient to conventions (genres) capable of being recognized by the audience and of promoting its identification with the plots and characters. Regarding the content, the aspects were guided, in their sources, by the canons of the history of Brazilian literature. The aim of forging an operational base suitable for the scale of large productions motivated the hiring of foreign technicians to work in the immense studio occupying an area of 100 thousand meters in the municipality of São Bernardo do Campo. When it ceased its activities in 1954, Vera Cruz left as a legacy twenty-two works, including short, medium and feature films, some with audience success in Brazil and even in international circuits - the most famous case was that of O Cangaceiro, written and directed by Lima Barreto, awarded in Cannes (1954). The company’s rapid decline combined the author of the project’s business inexperience in the field with the structural insufficiencies of cinema in Brazil, in terms of distribution, inexistence of internal production of equipment necessary for filming and projections, besides the lack of state and private funding, to face the competition of the imported product, especially the one produced in Hollywood.

The circles of technicians (screenwriters, directors, photographers, cameramen, gaffers, sound designers, scenographers, among others), alongside the increasingly active circles of critics (Altman, 2010) mainly located on the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis, in their debates took the sum of the reasons that precipitated the failure of Zampari’s project as emblematic of more general issues that afflicted not only cinema and the other arts in the country. These discussions were inserted in an atmosphere in which the questions about national identities and cultures were equated by the duet established between the evocation of a national developmental project and the fight against cultural imperialism of great military economic powerhouses such as the United States. Thus, together with the diagnosis of the infrastructural deficiencies for the implementation of an integrated industrial park, the possibility of implementing the cinematographic industry in Brazil raised questions about the existence of an aesthetics specific to Brazilian cinema and its relationship with socioeconomic underdevelopment, which would leave its marks in most areas of society (Salles Gomes, 1980; 2021; Ramos, 1983).

The aesthetic-political equation proposed with Cinema Novo carries the consequences of these discussions in many ways. On the one hand, the movement updated some of the legacies of literary modernism and of the visual arts aimed at historical-anthropological research on the “deep” Brazil. It is worth reminding that such aesthetic-cultural proposals are aligned with revolutionary aspirations, but that does not mean they turned their backs on the colonial legacy with its many traditions. The Brazilian modernists, in general, understood that they could only make critique viable when they based it on popular manifestations, which were detracted from by the orthodoxy of the country’s intellectual elite in the period within the establishment of the republican regime and the 1920s. On the other hand, because they were inserted in the networks of international cinema circulation, as they participated in festival circuits, they adapted the solutions of the European cinematographic vanguards in the consolidation of a Brazilian authorial cinema. Directors, screenwriters, photographers, producers, actors, critics, among others, set themselves the task of studying artistic alternatives to express the socio-economic contradictions of urban and rural life in the country, but in accordance with the initiative to diversify the range of voices and faces presented on the cinematographic screen, thus making other versions about the same national contradictions expressive⁵.

Because of its pioneering nature, let us summarize the film Rio 40 Graus, just to illustrate some few points. Released in 1955, written and directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, celebrated as the inspiring work of Cinema Novo, this film stands out for its proposal of leading the camera across the favela in Morro do Cabuçú, tourist attractions such as the Sugar Loaf, Maracanã football stadium, Quinta da Boa Vista Park, among other places in Rio de Janeiro. The goal was much more than portraying the residents’ daily lives; by interspersing professional and non-professional actors/actresses, the motivation was to encourage anonymous voices and gestures to express joys and dramas, thus building the staging. Bold for the time, the execution of the project responded to the goal of artistically exposing the disparities among social classes that ferment the contradictions and conflicts in the daily life of the carioca metropolis. Football fans and players, washerwomen with cans on their heads going up the favela, members of samba schools during rehearsals in the terreiro, boys selling peanuts on the streets, the lives of northeastern migrants, among others, make up the mosaic of this tense urban plurality. Inspired by both thematic and aesthetic solutions in Italian neorealism, without the melodramatic summoning of feelings, the film’s direction opts for a tone that intersperses lyricism and a certain rawness consistent with the experience riddled with suffering in the narrative conduction.

Investments committed to Cinema Novo took place on a board of interdependent positions in which the political-ideological fermentation in the country affected the redefinitions underway in the secular cultural sphere. Loyalty to the revolutionary beliefs supported the motivation to implement a popularly mobilized agenda. The effort to overcome the national “backwardness” and, thereby, the stage of colonial subservience and socioeconomic underdevelopment, was obedient to the task of de-alienating the masses. To a certain extent, the intellectual circles inscribed in the Cinema Novo movement ratified the conceptions for culture supported, among others, by the Popular Center for Culture of the National Union of Students (CPC/UNE - Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes) (Ridenti, 2016). Therefore, the thoughts of Carlos Estevan Martins, the ideologue of CPC/UNE’s cultural production experiences at that same period, resonated in these circles. Against the premise of considering, for example, popular manifestations as “alienated”, the awareness-raising work of the political and intellectual vanguards with the masses urged, thereby reiterating the image of the revolutionary elites as agents of emancipation and almost naturally assigned to command (Berlinck, 1984). An unquestionable emblem regarding this posture is the carrying out of the proposal Cinco vezes favela (1962)⁶. The de-alienation and the subaltern situation, for popular mobilization, occurs throughout the film’s narrative, which is distributed in five episodes, in charge of young directors: Um favelado (Marcos Farias); Zé da Cachorra (Miguel Borges); Couro de gato (Carlos Diegues); Escola de samba, alegria de viver (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade) and Pedreira de São Diogo (Leon Hirszman).

Certainly Glauber Rocha’s filmography contains the neuralgic points of Cinema Novo’s critical aesthetic-political stance. Manifesto da estética da fome vocalizes the updating of the modernist posture of attuning the local to the cosmopolitan, of reciprocating the temporality of the machinic civilization with the structural temporality of the colony formed on contradictions and mixtures (Farias & Mira, 2014: 11), so as not to lose sight of the value attributed to the genuine trait of the Brazilian social being, but in line with a critical attitude towards colonialism, whether the one exercised by imperialism or the one referring to the collaboration of social strata whose privilege maintenance was responsible for the ratification of national underdevelopment. The fight against alienation in the construction of a popular national identity lies in the motivation to use baroque elements in the composition of its visual language allied to the cinematography’s narrative axis articulating the Marxist revolutionary promise with the Jewish-Christian messianism. Therefore, the emphasis placed by different modernist trends in the identification of the most elementary forms of Brazilian culture referring to the colonial period is echoed (Xavier, 2019: 209-226). The adoption, however, would be a consequence of the insurgency of an “aesthetics of violence”, as the filmmaker assures. This last statement is a revolutionary gesture: “an aesthetics of violence, instead of being primitive, is revolutionary, here is the starting point for the colonizer to understand the existence of the colonized; only by becoming aware of his/her sole possibility, violence, can the colonizer understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he/she exploits. As long as the colonized does not raise his/her weapons, he/she is a slave” (apud Portal Vermelho, 2019, translated by us).

Certainly, the dramaturgical solutions matching the style imposed on the visual narrative in O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (1969) acquired greater notoriety in the illustration of the allegorical form adopted in Glauberian cinematography. In its audiovisual movement, the plot sews cordel to opera, in a textuality in which musical and scenic-choreographic aspects typical of some Northeastern revelries are not a backdrop, but expressive elements that contextualize as they do the meta-reading of the mystical-theological and secular-historical fight between the archetypes of good and evil. But it is in Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) that the filmmaker’s efforts to circumvent the centrality of the action, in favor of examining the relationships that make it possible, gain prominence. The characters are personified concepts, as they shape and objectify in their gestures and speeches the crossing of different conditions that move them and/or make them passive. The film plot translates, in a dramaturgical register, the dubiousness of the dyad coastline versus sertão, which was literarily initiated in Euclides da Cunha’s debate about the nation in Os sertões. By focusing on the conflict in Canudos, Cunha’s willin­gness was to reveal the bowels of the country: the countryside and the coastline would share both “civilization” and “barbarism” in a much more complex way. The Glauberian lens, in turn, scrutinizes the drama of the sertanejo subaltern man who, afflicted by the drought and, above all, being the target of the injustice committed by latifundium owners, lets the revolt to potentiate in hatred, ending in the brutal act. Later, this ordinary man, impelled by a messianic mystical imaginary in the search for salvation in the midst of mundane suffering, surrenders to the solution of employing the use of force against state legality as a means of transforming the unequal and unjust socio-historical reality. In this case, “Manoel” (Geraldo Del Rey) is faced with the farmer’s attempt to deceive him, by imposing on him the loss of the few resources he managed to save from the long drought. In a fury, the small farmer kills the owner of the land on which he and his wife lives. Disillusioned, he joins the followers of Sebastião, a kind of prophet who announces paradise in the afterlife and denounces the landowners’ excesses. The couple comes across one of the members of the horns cangaceiras loyal to Captain Virgulino (“Lampião”), the metaphysical and brutal “Corisco” that evokes the powers of the people to transform the situation of misery in that area of Northeast Brazil.

At the turn of the 1950s to 1960s, when internationally prestigious awards are won by films that are also focused on the popular theme, other facets of cinematography in Brazil raised even more questions about the identity and the function of this same cinematography in the scope of national culture. In 1962 O pagador de promessas, directed by Anselmo Duarte with a script based on Dias Gomes’ play, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival. Before that, Orfeu negro ⁷, released in 1959, was consecrated as the Oscar winner for best foreign language film (1960). In 1959, this film had also won an award at Cannes. This French-Italian and Brazilian film, directed by Marcel Camus, tells the tragedy of the sambista Orfeu da Conceição (Breno Mello), during the days of Momo Revelry in Rio de Janeiro. The action is triggered by his meeting with the northeastern migrant Eurídice (Marpessa Dawn), who had recently arrived in the favela located in Morro da Babilônia and who was staying at her cousin’s, Serafina (Léa Garcia). In the three festive days, they both walk the path that leads them from the discovery of love to death. In the sequence that precedes the end of the plot, the sambista, wearing a costume, returns to the favela with his dead lover in his arms. Moved by the fury of jealousy, Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) - Orfeu’s despised ex-girlfriend - pushes them off the cliff. The background is the same in which three children dance the samba, ending the film: the Sugar Loaf contoured by the waters of the Guanabara Bay, in the Botafogo Beach Cove, in the South Zone of the city.

If the image combining the idyllic city landscape with the popular samba culture anticipates the postcard that dominated the advertisement of Rio de Janeiro, in subsequent years and decades, in turn, the songs by Tom Jobim, Luís Bonfá, Vinícius de Moraes and Antônio Maria for the film’s soundtrack gives prominence to bossa nova, since then one of the most solid trademarks of Brazilian musical identity and the country’s unmistakable international icon. The screenplay by Camus and Jacques Viot adapts the theatrical play Orfeu da Conceição, by Vinícius de Moraes, to cinematography⁸. With a scenario designed by Oscar Niemeyer, this show was put on by TEN - Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater group), led by Abdias do Nascimento, at the municipal theater in Rio in 1956. It was an unprecedented occasion in Brazil: a cast of black actresses and black actors only. There was also the meeting between Vinícius de Moraes and Tom Jobim, who composed the songs accompanied by Luís Bonfá’s guitar.

The triangulation among cinema, theater and popular music in the episode of the film Orfeu do Carnaval evidences the intertextuality⁹ of the mestizo Brazil through which, since the 1960s, the urban popular culture, composed in the duet samba and carnival, occupied the position of true totem of the Brazilian nation. This intertextuality was also anticipated by visual arts and literature (in addition to social thought) which, in the weaving of the different aesthetic modernism strands left as legacy, as we have seen, aesthetic matrices to the figuration of the Brazilianness that gave support to a certain frame of national identity and Brazilian culture throughout the 20th century. As a counterpart to this intertextuality of the mestizo Brazil, different processes of institutional consolidation of these same different socio-symbolic artistic-cultural spaces in the country were taking place. In the mutual intersection in which the silhouette of the Brazilian secular cultural sphere was delineated, something in common crossed and established homologies between such spheres, namely, the problematizations regarding the actuality of the national issue. Apparently, this intersection took place in the different topicalizations of the popular. Thus, considering the two aspects last mentioned, the following developments in the exhibition of Orfeu Negro are emblematic. On the one hand, much more significant than the trend of Franco-Brazilian films that had a certain importance in the 1960s, after the play and the film came the afrosambas of Vinícius de Moraes, and also the parade of the samba school Acadêmicos do Salgueiro and the theatrical production (directed by Augusto Boal) addressing the fights led by Zumbi de Palmares and many other playful-artistic manifestations whose traces have been contouring this same Afro-Brazilian popular culture. Its symbols and practices increasingly made not only the contents complex, but above all, they twisted the founding terms of the miscegenation narrative in the design of the Brazilian self-image. On the other hand, before its release and screening at the Cannes exhibition, Orfeu Negro did not reach full consensus in Brazil¹⁰: Itamaraty diplomats vetoed the film from being included in the Brazilian exhibition, as they feared that the cast consisted of black people who inhabited a favela could damage the country’s image (Fléchet, 2009: 48). Later, there were criticisms denouncing both the illicit attitudes that its director would have had and the film’s mediocrity, which would betray the creative Brazilianness contained in Vinícius de Moraes’ play, in the name of an overwhelming exoticism. In 1966, seven years after the work’s release, Walter da Silveira, a film critic from Bahia, took a vehement stance: for him, Camus’ direction displayed the good intentions of a foreigner whose appeal to stereotypes covered his ignorance regarding Brazilian issues. He particularly disliked the way in which Camus’ camera would suggest a symmetrical country, a vibrant community of equals, devoid of deep social conflicts. The favela would be, in the film, a domain of black people defined by the resistance attitude not to class disparities - which would be important to emphasize - but rather to the otherness condition of the popular to the imperatives of modern civilization.

When Vincenzo Boccia (2012) identifies the narrative use of analogies between the characters of the Brazilian popular culture and the Olympian gods of Ancient Greek in Orfeu do Carnaval, he sees these different “Orphic” resources in Brazilian culture¹¹ as being in the wake of the profound socio-structural changes that took place in the country after 1930. He understands that, in contrast to the class and ethnic-racial complexification that took over the urban context, this context is established as the stage where the main socio-political and cultural struggles and conquests were incarnated (and performed). In his view, the evocation of music’s mythical structure offered the alternative of dealing with such contradictions that increasingly took shape in everyday life and were translated into dramatic plays, novels, films, songs and even in ludic-sports performances such as football. The sociological emphasis placed on the structure of national society, at that time marked by the cross-increment of industrialization and urbanization processes, is very suggestive. Yet, it is important to point out a neglected aspect in Boccia’s interpretation. In the dialectic proposed in his analytical scheme, the symbolic plane is incited by these transformations and, in responding, it acts on the possible unfoldings of the same socio-structural arrangement. When he argues that the means by which the countless contradictions related to Brazilian modernization found expressive forms - without mutilating it - are in the Orphic ludic-artistic formations, one could extrapolate his reasoning to conclude that the Apollonian and Dionysian notions were defined, at that moment, as categories of thought and, at the same time, mental habits and artistic coding modes enabling communicative situations were affirmed. Finally, the archetypal polarity between both mythical Greek entities fostered artistic languages through which one could express the dilemmas resulting from the complexity of the society-nation.

Conclusion

For this paper’s purposes, it is important to underline how the different problematizations on the popular contributed to equate, both thematically and aesthetically, in the late 20th century, the institutionalization of the different socio-symbolic spaces constituting the secular cultural sphere in Brazil. The cinema, at the same time, was integrated in the scope of these equations, not only complementing it, but solving it in the light of the synthesis it was able to carry out of the already sedimented collective knowledge funds and symbolization records.

From this last point of view, the differentiation of cinema in Brazil imposed a shift in favor of audio-image as a social system and symbolic record of presenting and describing the world, mainly of designating meaning, particularly in relation to literature and journalism, with their printed supports. From the point of view of its institutionalization as a socio-symbolic space, the “big screen”’s attractiveness was manifested in the formation and reach of audiences, but also in the attainment of means of funding, recruiting and engaging staff in the composition and functioning of a labor division of its own. However, the ascending historical trajectory of the audiovisual, when it comes to cinema, needs to be considered taking into account the bifurcation that characterizes it in the Brazilian case. In terms of the restricted dimension of the production and circulation of cultural goods (Bourdieu, 1992), especially with Cinema Novo, cinematography established itself as a symbolic art, gaining prestige to the point of being an important agency in the forums in which the national issue was taken as an object of discussion and reflection. The attainment of relative autonomy from other related domains - literature, theater, journalism - was also shown in the act of not taking direct orders from different sectors of national society, but rather converting them to its own normative and aesthetic criteria. Even more: it proposed questions and elaborated elucidations aiming at integrating agendas with impacts beyond the institutional boundaries of cinematography. Therefore, Cinema Novo and its critical fortune traveled (and continue to circulate) among intellectualized sectors, linked or not to university circuits. They were consecrated in festivals, gained admirers and followers in Brazil and abroad, were taken up in new films and perpetuated in academic theses, parts of a very wide bibliography on this Brazilian cinematographic authorial tradition.

The artistic aura assured by this cinematography was given a distinct status compared, for example, to the entertainment attribute of the chanchada, even though the later was capable of mobilizing an incomparably larger audience and of leaving its traces in the propagation of its characters’ jargons and mannerisms in the everyday life across the country¹². Thus, the mimeses that re-signified the silhouette of the popular in its cinemanovist critical-reflective exercises, guided by revolutionary aspiration, were contrasted with the popular carnivalesque of plots aimed at entertaining low, medium or non-literate consumers. The distinction between entertainment and auteur artistic cinema (committed to an aesthetic-political project of intervention in the socio-historical reality), which structured the socio-symbolic audiovisual system, is exacerbated in the period of the 1960s and 1980s. In the meantime, the disjunction became emblematic of a situation in which a range of factors did not favor the transformation of cinema into an industry focused on popular mass culture. The disproportionate competition with the US imported product and the irregularity in the state and private funding were two major difficulties among others. The obstacles were and remain contemporaneous with the diversification of aesthetic postures manifested in the emergence of strands such as the marginal cinema, the phase of productions financed by Embrafilme, the pornochanchada, the “resumption” phase and the contemporary versions of authorial cinema parallel to the advent of a filmography aimed at being a blockbuster and going on television (Ramos & Autran, 2018; Amancio, 2018; Gamo & Melo, 2018; Ramos, 2018a; 2018b; 2018c; 2018d; Schvarzman, 2018; Eduardo, 2018).

In this same interval, the television, already dissociated from cinema since its advent in the early 1950s, is established as the business arm par excellence of the institutional domain of audiovisual in Brazil. Since then, another chapter in the sociogenesis of the audiovisual sociotechnical system has been written on the modes of presentation/description, therefore, on the problematization of the popular with the consecration of the telenovela (TV soapopera), an expressive format of great audience reach and advertiser catalyst since the 1970s.

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• i. This paper results from the research and teaching activities of the project Triangulação razão neoliberal, financeirização e circulação transnacional da cultura/conhecimento (Triangulation neoliberal reason, financialization and transnational circulation of culture/knowledge), carried out within the Postgraduate Program in Sociology of Universidade Federal do Ceará, funded by Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) with a visiting professor scholarship, with the participation of professors/researchers from UFC, UnB - and IV Paris - Sorbonne.

• 1
  In another paper, we proposed an analytical description of this sphere in the following terms: “[...] a social topology (Weber, 1974: 379), that is, a differentiated social form because in it the problem regarding the sense (i.e. meanings, directions, values, etc.) is continuously replenished. However, it takes place in fields whose irreducibility between them concerns the different levels of relative autonomy and professionalization. Mainly, these fields correspond to the different historicities of the sublimations of values shaped in the respective rationalities that underlie the criteria for recruiting and identifying the elements inscribed in their orbits and also in the beliefs that move them (Bourdieu, 2001: 120). Contrary to the functional-structuralist prerogative, however, when we discuss the cultural sphere [...] we are not referring to a pre-established normative arrangement, capable of prescribing the limits of human conduct and, at the same time, of designating deviations from its model and, thus, reiterating its own systemic territoriality. Supported by what Bauman (2001: 43) calls a “matrix of possible permutations”, we understand this sphere as a socio-human dimension always tending towards totalization, but remaining a sketch subject to completion in an endless becoming. Since then the question regarding the differentiation itself is imposed as a drama as it unfolds, as in other spheres of social life, after all, the definition of its contents remains continually precarious, insofar as the very quality of its nature as form and factor of formation of human relationships is in a changing state” (Farias, 2017: 4, translated by us).
• 2
  The corpus that supports this paper belongs to the project Cultura Audiovisual e as Problematizações do Popular na Montagem da Esfera Cultural no Brasil (Audiovisual Culture and the Problematizations of the Popular in the Assembly of the Cultural Sphere in Brazil), funded by CNPq with a Research Productivity Grant. In assembling this corpus, we consulted documents collected from the archives of the Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine) (Brazilian Film Agency) and of Secretaria Federal de Cultura (Brazilian Federal Secretariat of Culture), in Brasília; Centro de Documentação e Arquivamento da Rede Globo de Televisão, Biblioteca Nacional (Brazilian National Library) and the libraries of Banco do Brasil, Instituto Moreira Sales and Escola de Cinema Darcy Ribeiro, in addition to Arquivo Nacional (Brazilian National Archive) and Museu da Imagem e do Som (Museum of Image and Sound), in Rio de Janeiro. Also, Cinemateca Brasileira (the Brazilian Cinematheque) and Museu da Imagem e do Som, in São Paulo. On the other hand, the study consulted videos posted on the YouTube Platform.
• 3
  In terms of length, there are controversies regarding the delimitation of the feature film. While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the American Film Institute share the minimum duration policy of 40 minutes, the Screen Actors Guild imposes 80 minutes. On the other hand, in France, the minimum duration is 58 minutes (Grazinoli, 2014).
• 4
  A representative of the avant-garde in the plastic and visual arts, the Hungarian Lazlo Moholy-Nagy was part of the Bauhaus movement in Berlin in the 1920s. In his view, the “new humanity” would result from new forms of representation. He proposes a formative pedagogy for the masses, to be exercised with the education of the senses, by valuing visuality. Color, figuration, rhythms and direction, he says, are the crucial elements of this revolution against the bourgeois logocentrism (Neiva, 1986: 17).
• 5
  Although devoid of doctrinal guidance, the social criticism stance precedes the landmark of these cinematographic fractions. Directed by Humberto Mauro and written by Humberto Pongeti, Favela dos meu amores, by Atlântida, was released in 1935. The musical narrates the story of two young people who, coming from Paris, at first evoke civilizing ideas, but due to their precarious economic situation, they search for alternatives for surviving, culminating in the opening of a cabaret in Morro da Providência, in downtown Rio de Janeiro. The proposal was to have as clientele foreign tourists attracted by the exotic ways of life in a favela. The film’s images record and bring to the scene, in a pioneering way, the extremely poor situation of the residents of that city zone. Praised by the critics of the time, the film is considered an icon of a national identity construction based on the popular culture of Rio de Janeiro. Later, Humberto Mauro stated that, with this work, he could be recognized as the first to make neorealist cinema (Napolitano, 2009: 137-157).
• 6
  Cinco vezes favela pioneered the series of films focused on the epic of the nation-people’s heroism, but narrated from the “ordinary man’s” point of view; although present, the ethnic-racial issue is just a trait in the formal composition of the works. It is also worth noting that many of the directors of Cinco vezes favela’s episodes are ahead of these later works: Ganga Zumba (Carlos Diegues, 1963), Chica da Silva (Carlos Diegues, 1976), Eles não usam black tie (Leon Hirszman , 1981), Quilombo (Carlos Diegues, 1984), Chico Rei (Walter Lima Júnior, 1985), among others.
• 7
  Another film version of the same play is directed by Carlos Diegues, in 1998: Orfeu.
• 8
  Certainly, Orfeu do Carnaval indirectly cites Cinédia’s cinematographic chanchadas and these, in turn, as we have seen, cites Rio’s musical theater of the first decades of the 20th century. In fact, it is the same theater cited in the musicals starring Carmem Miranda, during the period in which the “good neighbor policy” with Latin America prevailed, carried out by the United States government, interested in preventing the expansion of the German influence in the region during World War II (Dias, 1993).
• 9
  The use of the idea of intertextuality is aligned with Roland Barthes’ conception. As this author says: “[...] any text is an intertext; other texts are present in it, at varying levels, in more or less recognizable forms [...]. Any text is a new tissue of past quotations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it [...]. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences” (Barthes, 1981: 39).
• 10
  Although in a different and lesser degree, the play Orfeu da Conceição faced much criticism, published in Rio de Janeiro’s press at the time. There was a complaint about the “Americanism” of Tom Jobim’s songs, seen as excessively jazzy. There were also objections to Leo Justi’s direction and Niemeyer’s sets. Although praised for its poetics, even Vinícius de Moraes’ text was not spared.
• 11
  It is worth reminding that Vinícius de Moraes was not the only one who used Greek mythology to artistically delineate characters of the Brazilian popular culture. In the same decade (1950s), Nelson Rodrigues, in his football chronicles, started using references either to Apollo or Dionysus to emphasize the combination, in the Brazilian player, of the disconcerting swing improvisation with the ability to materialize fantasy in a beautiful body move; for him, the sportsman’s body would thus be able to achieve a balance between the Dionysian aesthetic of excesses and that of Apollonian self-regulation. Much earlier, in the 1930s, when the newspaper Jornal Mundo Esportivo announced the first samba school competition in Rio de Janeiro, promoted by it, it urged its readers to go to Praça XI (XI Square) to contemplate the Dionysian choir incited by the drums percussions from the slums and outskirts of the city (Farias, 1998).
• 12
  The film Macunaíma (1968), by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, promotes the meeting between these two strands of Brazilian cinematography when it gives the actor Grande Otelo the protagonist role. He, who built his career in the transition from musical theater to the chanchadas, composing a legendary duo with Oscarito, proved himself to be adequate to incorporate the character’s playfulness into the director’s aesthetic-critical project - an exponent of the Cinema Novo tradition. They were both committed to the film translation of the homonymous literary work which was already praised for its author’s, Mario de Andrade, effort in profiling the popular despicable hero, exemplary of the Brazilian nation-people (Hirano, 2019).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Apr 2022
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2022

History

• Received
  31 Jan 2021
• Accepted
  11 Mar 2022