Brazil

Cinema of Brazil

The film industry of Brazil is one of the largest in Latin America (and possibly the world) and what’s most fascinating to me is the Brazilian knack for creating new genres.

Brazilians were quick to take a liking to filmmaking after the Lumiere brothers first released their innovative technology. The first public film screening in Brazil took place in Rio de Janeiro on July 8, 1896, after which film cameras soon arrived to Brazil.

On May 1, 1897, Vittorio di Maio’s “The Arrival of a Train in Petrópolis” was shown at the Cassino Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, considered the first Brazilian film. Though many site Italian immigrant Alfonso Segreto’s 1898 film, “Vista da baia da Guanabara” filmed on a boat crossing from Italy, as the first Brazilian film. June 19th, the day that Segreto’s film was first screened in Rio, was declared as “Brazilian Cinema Day.”

In the early 1900s, Brazilians were making a unique genre of movies, called “posed films,” recollections of crimes that made the news, which became very popular. The first being, “Os Estranguladores” by Francisco Marzullo, released in 1906.

By 1908, Brazil was already entering a “Golden Age” of cinema with a plethora of silent short films being made. Especially popular were singing movies. Even though the films were silent, an actor stood behind the screen to sing along to the movie. Also popular were literary adaptations.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Brazil created Chanchada, which parodied the old Hollywood musical revue style mixing it with their own comedy and carnival-esque-ness. As a spin off, Brazil has a period of cinema that was almost entirely devoted to producing sex comedy films: Porno Chanchada, which spanned from the late 1960s into the early 1980s, its climax being in the late 1970s.

In more serious areas of the industry, the Cinema Novo movement during the late 1950s to early 1970s coincided with the French New Wave, but the New Wave films of Brazil tackled much heavier subjects than the romantics of France. A prelude to Cinema Novo is “Rio, 40 Degrees” (1955) directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who went on to direct one of the highlights of Cinema Novo, “Barren Lives” (1963). Cinema Novo films represented a realism that the Chanchada films lacked, and tackled themes such as class struggles, and a so-called “aesthetic of hunger.” Filmmakers from this period include, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, Ruy Guerra, Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

The cinema of Brazil seems to be either a direct product of the government or a direct reaction to the political upheaval throughout Brazil’s rocky history of military dictatorships and multiple coups, which often resulted in censorship, even recently. For example, the Cinema Novo filmmakers were forced into exile in the 1970’s during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas.

Brazilian films tended to be dark, thematically heavy, with periods of allegory, irony and parodies, often violent, and the comedies are extra dark. Like in Turkey and many of the other countries we later visited, the film industry of Brazil ebbed and flowed with the political strife of the country’s history, and in times of democracy, the output of productions significantly slumped.

The first internationally acclaimed film to come out of Brazil, is “Black Orpheus,” a 1959 French-co-production, controversial in Brazil for being directed by a foreign French man, Marcel Camus, while being touted as a “Brazilian film.”
By watching Marcel Camu’s 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” set in Rio de Janeiro during carnival, it’s easy to get swept up in the magic of the festivities and look past the true poverty of the favelas that the movie takes place in.

“Black Orpheus” elevates the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to operatic status, as much of the film is sung rather than spoken, presenting us with a tragi-romance on the scale of Greek mythology. “Black Orpheus,” after all, borrows its plot from the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, previously adapted by the likes of Virgil and Ovid.

In the myth, Orpheus, the son of Apollo, falls in love with the beautiful Eurydice but their love is not meant to be. She dies on their wedding night and Orpheus manages to visit the underworld and convinces the gods to bring her back to life. The gods, moved by his love for Eurydice, grant him this wish on the condition that he does not look back at her until she is safely returned to the living. His love is so strong that he cannot resist looking back at her, and she is returned to the underworld for all eternity.

By watching Camu’s film, where a cacophony of characters are consistently smiling, you would think that everyone in Brazil perpetually sings, dances, plays music and fornicates.

The costumes and art design are colorful with the finest details; reds and golds dominate. It is a musical fantasy which introduced the world to Bossa Nova, and the score composed by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim is hypnotic. It is easy to fall in love with the cinematic and musical elements of “Black Orpheus.”

From the very opening scene, which follows a young boy playing on a hill as he flies a bright yellow kite high over the Rio de Janeiro valley, you cannot look away: it is a feast for the eyes and heaven on the ears. Kids play with goats and chickens in the backdrop, while Orpheus strums his guitar, sings a love ballad; a gentle melody that will be stuck in your head for days.

When “Black Orpheus” first came out, it mesmerized movie-goers around the world, earning a Palm d’or from Cannes and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, but looking back, the production of this film leaves a lot to reflect on.