CULTURE: CINEMA

At the beginning of the century. XX dates back not only to the first Brazilian producers and films (due to the Portuguese immigrant Antonio Gomes Leal) but also the very first attempts in the world to overcome the “silent” with talking actors and singers behind the screen. The initiatives were often decentralized inland, so that in addition to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo there was an artisanal and anarchic production in various states and cities, which gave rise to cyclos regionais but, shattering the experiences, it then presented itself defenseless in the face of Hollywood, whose industry for many decades monopolized between 80 and 90% of the programs. Among the pioneers must be mentioned Luis de Barros (Vivo ou morte, 1915), the actress Carmen Santos (Sofrer para gozar, 1924), who finished in 1948, as a director, a film about a failed revolt of miners, and above all Humberto Mauro, who between the 1920s and 1930s established himself as the true father of Brazilian cinema. According to naturegnosis, the “silent” period, with artistic affirmations and the birth of film clubs and magazines, ended in 1930 with the avant-garde film Limite, by eighteen-year-old Mario Peixoto. With sound, the production, lacking adequate means, almost came to a halt; from an average of a dozen films a year, it dropped to three or four, even to just one for almost two decades, with carnival-like films. Only around 1950 A. Cavalcanti back home, he launched the slogan of “a Brazilian cinema for Brazilians”; but his experiment at Vera Cruz in São Paulo failed; filmmakers and technicians were foreigners. The only internationally successful film, O cangaçeiro, was used by distributor Columbia Pictures. In the mid-1950s, the nóvo cinema began to take hold. Mauro had been its inspiration, Nelson Pereira Dos Santos was its first teacher and Italian neorealism was no stranger to its growth. And even if Anselmo Duarte won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, in 1962, with a theatrical film, O pagador de promessas, the Sixties saw the world triumph of this anthropological and revolutionary “hunger” cinema, of the “new wave” of Glauber Rocha and his young friends, whose lesson was however interrupted by the changing political conditions in the country. Rocha’s return to Venice in 1980 with an ambitious but confused film (The Age of the Earth) testified to the involutionary crisis of the 1970s. But starting from 1980 a relative opening (consecrated by the end of the dictatorship in 1985) allows the return to a prestigious production. Exit Pixote, the Law of the weakest (awarded in Biarritz, San Sebastian and Locarno) of H. Babenco, juvenile delinquency; Brazil ahead by R. Farias begins to talk about the disappeared; in Cubatão the valley of death R. Feith denounces the tragic consequences of an industrial “accident”; in Memórias do cárcere Pereira dos Santos recalls the writer-patriot Graciliano Ramos; Ganga Zumba by C. Diegues, speaking of the black communities of the seventeenth century, indicates the use that can be made of the freedom regained after slavery; Central Do Brasil (1998; Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) by W. Salles, a journey through the country of a child, orphaned of a mother, in search of his never known father, and his companion, who through him he rediscovers feelings and sensations that have remained dormant for a long time. Somehow heirs of the “retomada”, the rebirth of Brazilian cinema at the end of the last century, are many of the directors who rose to prominence in the 2000s, such as Daniel Filho (Se eueve você, 2006), Sérgio Machado (Cidade Baixa, 2005), Marcelo Gomes, Sandra Werneck (awarded for the documentary Meninas, 2006), Roberto Moreira, Fernando Meirelles (Cidade de Deus, 2002; The Constant Gardener, 2005), João Falcão (A máquina), Eliana Fonseca (Coisa de mulher, 2005), Cao Hamburger (The year my parents went on vacation, 2006). Salles himself confirmed himself with I diari della motocicli (2004) and with Linha de Passe (2008). Of considerable and growing importance is the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival, an annual event which, in addition to being one of the main engines of support and promotion of the Brazilian movement, together with the other cinematographic center of the country represented by São Paulo, has become an appointment of attraction for many films from abroad. A mention should also be made of the work of Afro-Brazilian directors, fully committed to the recovery of the black component of Brazilian culture (such as W. Onofre, 1934-2015).