Space and Subjectivity in Contemporany Brazilian Cinema

S PA C E A N D
SUBJECTIVITY IN
CONTEMPORARY
BRAZILIAN CINEMA
E D I T E D B Y A N T Ô N I O M Á R C I O D A S I LVA
AND MARIANA CUNHA
Screening Spaces
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Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Department of Film, Television, and Theatre
University of Notre Dame
Chicago, IL, USA
Screening Spaces is a series dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary
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Antônio Márcio da Silva · Mariana Cunha
Editors
Space and Subjectivity

in Contemporary
Brazilian Cinema
Editors
Antônio Márcio da Silva Mariana Cunha
University of Surrey Federal University of Rio Grande do
Guildford, UK Norte
Natal, Rio Grande do Norte
Brazil
Screening Spaces
ISBN 978-3-319-48266-8 ISBN 978-3-319-48267-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48267-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936331
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Contents
1 Introduction 1
Antônio Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha
Part I Territorialization and Marginal Subjectivities
2 Tikmũ’ũn’s Caterpillar-Cinema: Off-Screen Space and

Cosmopolitics in Amerindian Film 23
André Brasil
3 The Reterritorializations of Urban Space in Brazilian

Cinema 41
Eduardo de Jesus
4 Mapping from the Margins: The Films of Beto Brant 59

Maurício Sellmann Oliveira
Part II Intensive Space, Landscape, and Spatial Experience
5 Bodies in Landscape: The Scientist’s Presence in Viajo

Porque Preciso, Volto Porque Te Amo and Ventos De Agosto 77
Mariana Cunha
v
vi Contents
6 Intensive Spatium and the Construction of Child

Subjectivities in Brazilian Cinema 97
Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim and
Marcus Pereira Novaes
Part III Utopia, Memory, and Urban Architecture
7 Insolação: Subjective Perception of an Urban Utopia

Through the Lens of Love and Loss 117
Leticia Colnago
8 Astral Cities, New Selves: Utopian Subjectivities

in Nosso Lar and Branco Sai, Preto Fica 133
Antonio Cordoba
9 Underneath the Surface, Embodied on Screen: Memory

and Social Conflict in São Paulo’s Cityscape 149
Marília Goulart
Part IV Queering Spaces
10 The Space of Queer Masculinities in Karim Aïnouz’s

Praia Do Futuro 169
Simone Cavalcante da Silva
11 Water and Queer Intimacy 185

Fernando G. Pagnoni Berns
Part V Domestic Spaces and Social Differences
12 ‘Casa Grande & Senzala’: Domestic Space and Class

Conflict in Casa Grande and Que Horas Ela Volta? 203
Tiago de Luca
Contents vii
13 O Som Ao Redor: Aural Space, Surveillance, and Class

Struggle 221
Patricia Sequeira Brás
Filmography 235
Index 239
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Antônio Márcio da Silva currently teaches at the University of Surrey.

He completed his PhD at University of Bristol (2013). His publica-
tions include the monograph The “Femme” Fatale in Brazilian Cinema:
Challenging Hollywood Norms (Palgrave, 2014), contributions to the
edited collections Directory of World Cinema: Brazil (Intellect, 2013)
and World Film Locations: São Paulo (Intellect, 2013), and a number of
articles.
Mariana Cunha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Federal
University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where she is currently
developing a research project on the relationship between landscape
and embodiment in contemporary world cinema. She holds a PhD
(2005–2010) from Birkbeck, University of London, and she has taught
Brazilian studies at Queen Mary, University of London and at the
University of Oxford.
Contributors
André Brasil Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim University of Campinas,
Campinas, Brazil
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Antonio Cordoba Manhattan College, New York, USA

Eduardo de Jesus Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte,
Brazil
Fernando G. Pagnoni Berns Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Leticia Colnago Vila Velha, Brazil
Marcus Pereira Novaes University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
Marília Goulart City Hall, São Paulo, Brazil
Maurício Sellmann Oliveira Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Patricia Sequeira Brás School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of
London, London, UK
Simone Cavalcante da Silva University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
Tiago de Luca Department of Film and Television Studies, University
of Warwick, Coventry, England, UK
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Tatakox (2007) 27

Fig. 2.2 Tatakux Vila Nova (2009) 28
Fig. 2.3 Kakxop pit hãmkoxuk xop te yũmũgãhã (2015) 30
Fig. 2.4 Kakxop pit hãmkoxuk xop te yũmũgãhã (2015) 30
Fig. 2.5 Tatakox (2007) 34
Fig. 3.1 Brasília: Contradições de uma cidade nova (1967) 49
Fig. 3.2 Branco sai, preto fica (2014) 51
Fig. 3.3 A cidade é uma só? (2011) 52
Fig. 5.1 Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (2009) 84
Fig. 5.2 Ventos de agosto (2014) 87
Fig. 6.1 Bilu e João (2005) 100
Fig. 6.2 Meu pé de laranja lima (2012) 107
Fig. 6.3 Território do brincar (2015) 110
Fig. 7.1 Insolação (2009) 120
Fig. 9.1 Obra (2014) 159
Fig. 9.2 Obra (2014) 159
Fig. 9.3 Obra (2014) 160
Fig. 10.1 Praia do Futuro (2014) 173
Fig. 10.2 Praia do Futuro (2014) 178
Fig. 11.1 Do começo ao fim (2009) 189
Fig. 11.2 Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho (2014) 193
Fig. 12.1 Casa grande (2014) 208
Fig. 12.2 Que horas ela volta? (2015) 214
Fig. 12.3 Que horas ela volta? (2015) 216
Fig. 13.1 O som ao redor (2012) 224
Fig. 13.2 O som ao redor (2012) 228
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Antônio Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha
Brazilian film production has gained momentum after its crisis in the
early 1990s, when hardly any films were produced in the country. In
the past twenty or so years, well over 1000 films have been released
(Observatório Brasileiro), and unlike the previous decades when produc-
tion was mostly centered in São Paulo and to a lesser extent in Rio de
Janeiro, there has been a gradual increase in the number of films made
in the many regions and states of this continent-sized nation. This geo-
graphically dispersed production came about as a result of the decentrali-
zation of funding mechanisms brought in with the incentive laws for the
film sector, such as the Lei de Incentivo à Cultura and Fundo Setorial do
Audiovisual. Such changes are reflected in the narrative choices of con-
temporary films, which bring new landscapes and subjects to the screen
in a variety of ways. Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian
Cinema explores this diversity by offering different approaches to con-
sider space and subjectivity in films produced from the 1990s onwards,
a period that became known as the retomada (literally “retake”), and
A.M. da Silva (*) 
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
M. Cunha 
Federal University of Rio Grande Do Norte, Natal, Brazil
© The Author(s) 2017 1

A.M. da Silva and M. Cunha (eds.), Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary
Brazilian Cinema, Screening Spaces, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48267-5_1
2 A.M. da Silva and M. Cunha
which marked the beginning of a steady increase in contemporary film

production in the country.
In its engagement with this heterogeneous cinema production, this
collection examines recent cinema produced in Brazil, thereby fleshing
out the themes of space and subjectivity from the rich cross-fertilization
of different theories and disciplines, which has developed since the
so-called “spatial turn”1 in film studies and has paved the way for the
emergence of new questions concerning cinema’s spatiality, as well as
providing new models and tools for film analysis. The chapters in this
collection explore the emergence of these new spatialities and subjec-
tivities in recent films, and also offer new perspectives on writing about
these topics which go beyond that of representation. Indeed, these stud-
ies move beyond the study of representations of spaces, which broaden
the set of spatial practices and experiences in cinema, and the roles of
cinematic spaces in the construction of subjectivities in films. To do so,
this volume takes spatiality as a powerful tool of cinema that can reveal
aesthetic, political, social, and historical meanings of the cinematographic
image instead of considering space as just a formal element of a film,
whose roles are limited to situating stories and providing a representation
of reality. Alongside this, the volume explores the connection between
space and subjectivity but shows that the latter is beyond a single defi-
nition for various reasons, one of them being its very relation to space.
Hence, the discussion about subjectivity will not offer a definitive answer
nor a definition of the subject but problematize it within each spatial
context.
Present in various areas of research (politics, geography, the visual and
performing arts, among others), space has been a productive concept
for problematizing the relationship between individuals and their sur-
roundings, and the meanings that arise from this connection. As Michel
Foucault professed in his conference “Of Other Spaces”, space has
become a concern of late twentieth-century theories and, in this epoch
of simultaneities, space takes “the form of relations among sites” (23).
Hence, Foucault’s idea of spatiality is directly related to the question of
positioning: “We do not live inside a void that could be colored with
diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites
which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable
on one another” (23). However, as Doreen Massey remarks, space has
often come to signify, in its most basic understanding, “an expanse we
travel across”, making it “seem like a surface” (4). These assumptions,
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Massey argues, result in a lack of problematizing space. In line with this

idea, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift write that the term space “is used
with such abandon that its meanings run into each other before they
have been properly interrogated” (1). Henri Lefebvre and Irit Rogoff
both make a similar point. Rogoff states that space has been an “over-
used metaphor which runs the danger of being evacuated of all mean-
ing” (15).
As such, Crang and Thrift call for a cautious consideration of the con-
cept of space, one that goes beyond the assumptions that consider space
as “a representational strategy” (1). In fact, Massey’s concern is with the
relationship between spatiality and our being in the world. Her discus-
sion of space is based on three propositions: that space is a “product of
interrelations; as constituted through interactions”; that it is a “sphere in
which distinct trajectories coexist […] therefore of coexisting heteroge-
neity”; and that it is “always under construction” (9). Mindful of the dif-
ferent conceptualizations of space, our understanding of the concept, in
relation to cinema and subjectivity, is in line with Massey’s propositions,
because it considers the subjective and lived aspects of space.
Cinema theorists have often categorized space as an element which,
although essential, is subordinate to the demands of the narrative.
For most, the role of space is limited to situating the story geographi-
cally and to giving the audience an impression of reality. Film scholars’
approaches to cinematic space have emphasized its role in achieving this
illusion of reality by taking into consideration cinema’s action space in
relation to its screen space, as well as the relationship between framed
space and the space out of frame, as in Stephen Heath’s seminal essay
“Narrative Space” and the work of Alexander Sesonske, Noël Burch, and
Haig Khatchadourian.
However, as the chapters in this volume assure us, when examin-
ing cinema’s spatiality it is crucial to go beyond the subordinate posi-
tion of space in relation to the narrative, and look at cinematic space
as a meaningful element in a film. Cinema, thus, plays a crucial role in
the understanding of an individual’s place in the world and in the con-
struction of social, historical, ethnic, and gendered subjectivities. In
this sense, geography and cinema have in common “the search for our
sense of place and self”, and as such it is a “practice of looking” (Aitken
and Zonn 7). The approximation between looking and space in cinema
reflects John Berger’s view that “it is seeing that establishes our place in
the surrounding world” (Berger 7). It puts forward the idea, shared by
some geographers and philosophers, that vision and space are intrinsically
linked in the production of subjectivities. According to Massey, “Space
does not exist prior to identities/entities and their relations. More gener-
ally I would argue that identities/entities, the relations ‘between’ them,
and the spatiality which is part of them, are all constitutive” (10).
The relationship between subject and space cannot be discussed with-
out mentioning Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, in which he sought
“a rapprochement between physical space (nature), mental space (formal
abstractions about space), and social space (the space of human interac-
tion)” (Merrifield 104). Lefebvre’s famous “spatial triad” of representa-
tions of space (conceived spaces), spaces of representation, and spatial
practices “trace[s] out the actual dynamics and complex interplay of
space” (108). Lefebvre’s further interest in urban space opens a field of
different possibilities for the investigation of cinematic cities, which has
attracted a multitude of scholars (Clark; Mennel; Shiel and Fitzmaurice;
Bruno, Atlas of Emotion).
In order to make this relationship more explicit, it is important to
consider discussions about the theme of subjectivity, which has mostly
been theorized as a subject in its own right. Theoretical discussions
about subjectivity and selfhood have had a long history in various disci-
plines, particularly in philosophy (Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger)
and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigary, to cite a few).2 It has
witnessed moments of centrality in theories but also of rejection alto-
gether. Nonetheless, discussions on subjectivity have persisted into the
twenty-first century and the theme continues to be a cause of conten-
tion in various disciplines. Rather than taking a specific approach to sub-
ject and subjectivity, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian
Cinema looks at the relationship between subjectivity and spatial prac-
tices in cinema by developing a theoretical framework that is interdis-
ciplinary and varied. The different avenues taken in the chapters share
the basic premise that the relationship between individuals and their
surroundings is both subjective and symbolic: it is imbued with histori-
cal, social, and individual values. This focus is due to the importance we
place on looking at the subject from different perspectives, given its mul-
tiplicity rather than singularity.
Nick Mansfield has argued that an attempt at defining the subject
“must remain speculative and incomplete” (5). He contends that sub-
jectivity “is primarily an experience, and remains permanently open to
inconsistency, contradiction and unself-consciousness” (6). This becomes
1 INTRODUCTION 5
particularly evident in the postmodern context, an era in which it is even

more challenging to arrive at absolute truths or indeed to keep grand
narratives in place, because of what Jean-François Lyotard has claimed
to be the incredulity toward metanarratives. This perhaps explains the
impossibility—probably the best word here—of “defining” selfhood. We
are living in a time of even more rapid changes than ever before, and
the subject has to reinvent him/herself over and over again; it is an era
of instability, or even “panic” and “fear” (Mansfield 168–170), which
impacts our perception of who we are, and of our being in the world. In
this respect, we agree with Edward Casey, for whom a subject is a “geo-
graphical self”, by which he means that the “human subject is oriented
and situated in place” (683).
Therefore, it is not surprising that so much developed in terms of
discussions on subjectivity in the twentieth century, and indeed in the
twenty-first, in order to understand the fast-changing, postmodern con-
text in which we live. Even less surprising is Derrida’s view that the sub-
ject is “at the heart of the most pressing concerns of modern societies”
(115), which again explains the centrality of discussions of subjectivity
in the twenty-first century. For instance, attention to the issue of sub-
jection, as Mansfield has informed us, has intensified in cultural studies,
especially those focusing on the fin-de-siècle of the nineteenth century.
This is significant because that was indeed a period of much “redefini-
tion” of subjects and their relation to the world. Marginalized subjects
such as homosexuals, femmes fatales, and criminals became objects of
intensive scrutiny and vigilance, and these represent just some examples
of the “challenges”, in our view, to the idea of a fixed subjectivity. In
fact, such types of subjects and others that represent ‘abject’ subjectivities
disrupt the notions of the perfect citizen that various societies aim for,
and this has an impact on their relation to spatiality. They also indicate
how being an “I” can disrupt the social world and show its relationship
and question, at the same time, whether one is exactly who s/he is.3 This
is a constant challenge in the postmodern context, which again lays bare
the impossibility of defining subjectivity as a unique overarching model
that can be applied to any subject in any context. Bearing this in mind,
this collection of essays aims to show the Brazilian contemporary sub-
ject in its plurality, rather than reducing it to a representation of unified
national identity; a plurality that can translate the country’s varied spaces
and multiculturalism.
Brazilian Landscapes and Subjects in Cinema

and Culture
Space and landscape have featured in Brazilian artistic production

ever since the early official written documents after the arrival of the
Portuguese discoverers. Evidence of this can be traced back to the
description of the country’s land, written by Pero Vaz de Caminha in
his foundational letter to the Portuguese Crown in 1500, which is con-
sidered to be the first Brazilian literary text. Besides the depiction of the
newly “discovered” land, the letter also documents its indigenous inhab-
itants. A clear rejection of their subjectivity transpires, particularly in the
minute description of their habits and their bodies.4
Similarly, Brazilian landscapes have been a point of interest in cinema
since its origin.5 This curious “foreign look”6 is revealed in films such
as Vista da Baía da Guanabara/View of Guanabara Bay (1897–1898)
by the Italian immigrant Alfonso Segretto, which puts the city of Rio
de Janeiro’s landscape in evidence.7 Indeed, Rio de Janeiro has attained
notoriety in Brazilian cinema, as have other cities in international cin-
ema, such as New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, to cite a
few. In fact, as other cultural representations of the nineteenth century in
Brazil show, there was a shift from a focus on the rural to the urban envi-
ronment in line with the new development of cities in the country.
Therefore, the city became a privileged space in Brazilian cinema in
the first decades of the twentieth century. The city also defined the the-
matic focus of the films, especially those related to the Brazilian belle
époque—a new era of frenzy that dominated these early decades. As
such, a number of films explore the city in connection to the themes
of murder, sexual violence, corruption, religion, and national identity,
which were prevalent at the time. Indeed, in the early twentieth century,
Brazilian society went through a drastic redefinition, when the country
experienced the shift from a black-slave rural-centered economic produc-
tion to a new bourgeois and urban economy due to the industrialization
and development of the cities. However, this also brought its maladies,
such as the expansion of slums, diseases, and the exploitation of immi-
grant labor. With all these changes, “national identity” thus became
increasingly challengeable and unstable, and cinema added much to the
debate throughout the century through its engagement with a diver-
sity of cultural representations from different geographical areas as well
as a variety of subjects. This recalls Alfredo Bosi’s claim that Brazilian
1 INTRODUCTION 7
cultures should be used in the plural to truly represent the country’s

diversity (Cultura brasileña), which is particularly relevant to the debate
about brasilidade (“Brazilianness”). Bosi uses the image of a jelly as a
metaphor to describe “national identity”—when one thinks s/he has
grabbed that concept it slips from the hands (“Brasil 500 anos”).
Brazil’s cinematic production has over the decades been testimony to
Bosi’s claim that the search for a national identity has been an issue to
which filmmakers have constantly turned. However, as various films have
shown, it is rather difficult to talk about a single national identity because
of the plethora of historical, social, and economic diversity, not to men-
tion Brazil’s multiculturalism. Symbolic and allegorical representations
have been frequent in these explorations, while others have been rejected
as representations of brasilidade in specific periods by certain groups,
such as samba, capoeira, (hyper)sexuality, and more recently funk cari-
oca, sertanejo music, to cite a few examples. Such expressions, however,
have been crucial to show the country’s diversity and, most importantly,
to place it within the spectrum of cultural representations, and to give
visibility to its subjects and spatial practices. Hence, there is an evident
connection between Brazilian spaces and representations of subjectivi-
ties, especially in the depictions of the Guanabara Bay itself, the favelas
(slums) and the sertão (backlands), throughout Brazilian film history.
Historically, the decade of the 1920s was a landmark in portraying the
variety of the country’s landscapes and subjects in cinema, as evidenced
in the cycles of regional cinema whose enthusiastic cinematographic pro-
duction was concentrated in different cities and states: Minas Gerais, São
Paulo, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio Grande do Sul. However, despite
the variation of geographical and social spaces, the characters in these
films were often played by light-skinned actors that mirrored those found
in Hollywood cinema, which was already dominating the Brazilian exhi-
bition market by then. In parallel, the Modernist movement, prompted
by the Modern Arts Week of 1922 in São Paulo, was the turning point
in the artists’ engagement with the production of a “truly Brazilian art”,
and indeed a more organized attempt to understand brasilidade. This
was a clear concern of the anthropophagic movement headed by Oswald
de Andrade later in the decade.8 This debate about brasilidade in fact
permeated intellectual and artistic spheres and was an inspiration for
modernist filmmakers. One theme that derives from the anthropophagic
movement is the idea of cultural cannibalism, which is connected to this
redefinition of what it meant to be Brazilian.9
Indeed, the impossibility of a single definition of the Brazilian sub-

ject and of a national identity is reflected in the audiovisual production
of the following decades. From the 1930s, when popular cinema began
to take off, a variety of Brazilian types were depicted; types that some
would see as stereotypes, such as those of the period of teatro de revista,
as Dennison and Shaw (Popular Cinema) have argued. These ranged
from “the uneducated migrant to the indolent civil servant, from the
wily mulata (mixed-race woman of African and white European descent)
and wide-boy malandro or spiv, to the Portuguese immigrant” (12).
Besides these, the baiana attained huge importance. She was “the cari-
cature of the Afro-Brazilian female street vendors of the city of Salvador”
who would become “synonymous with Carmen Miranda’s screen per-
sona and later with that of Eliana Macedo in the chanchadas of the
1950s” (Popular Cinema 12). The appearance of Carmen Miranda in the
1930s is worth noting because, not only did she become a symbol of the
newly introduced chanchadas,10 but she was also linked to discussions
about national identity.11 In fact, she would become a representation for
“Latino-American identity” in Hollywood’s construction of her persona
on screen, especially in the character of the baiana.
Moreover, Carmen Miranda was also related to carnival, the theme of
some chanchadas in which she starred. To put it simply, although up to
the 1930s carnival was considered an expression of “low” popular cul-
ture linked to the lower social classes, it became one of the main symbols
of national identity during Getúlio Vargas’s government (1930–1945).
Related to the spaces and cultures of the morros (now defined as comu-
nidades, including the favelas of Rio), carnival then was arguably seen
as funk carioca would be seen later on: as a representation of “a social
group” that was nevertheless rejected by some segments of Brazilian
society. In fact, the morros or favelas,12 were already featured in films
such as Favela dos meus amores/Favela of My Loves (Humberto Mauro
1935). In the 1950s, these spaces were often depicted in cinema and
became one of the main landscapes shown on screen in the following
decades. The subjects depicted in the chanchadas thus brought to the
screen representations of social groups that were linked to the peripher-
ies of the urban spaces, namely Rio, and later of São Paulo, during the
boom in urban development, thus attracting many migrants, especially
from the Northeast of Brazil.13
This interconnection between the sertão and the favela then flour-
ished, despite not necessarily being portrayed in direct connection to
1 INTRODUCTION 9
each other. Regardless, the relationship between the two is still pervasive.
The periphery of the big urban centers became central for the precur-
sors of the Cinema Novo movement that would take off in the 1960s,
such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio 40 graus/Rio 40 Degrees (1955)
and Rio Zona Norte/Rio North Zone (1957). The favela and its relation
to music and carnival also appeared in French director Marcel Camus’s
Orfeu Negro/Black Orpheus (1959), a film that is well-known outside
Brazil.14 Although the urban center is in a way the basis of the beginning
of Cinema Novo in the 1960s, the sertão was the chosen territory for
filmmakers to renew cinema’s language through artistic representation.
This dry northeastern region and the class exploitation that takes place
in it are the preponderant themes in the films made by directors such as
Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. This social space becomes
a place for political discussion with the aim of raising political conscious-
ness, which shows its “acute social tendency” that is “deeply rooted in
the sociological and literary work produced in the country in the first
half of the twentieth century” (Cunha 83). Hence, the sertão is turned
into a revolutionary space in films such as dos Santos’s Vidas secas/
Barren Lives (1963), Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God,
White Devil (1964) and O dragão da maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro/
Antonio das Mortes (1969), and Ruy Guerra’s Os fuzis/The Guns (1964),
where there is an attempt to provoke a sense of social justice and a reac-
tion against the exploitation to which the sertanejos were subjected.
By the end of the 1960s, Cinema Novo ‘came to an end’, mainly
due to the severe censorship imposed by the military dictatorship that
was installed in 1964 and would last until 1985. As a result, there was
a proliferation of other genres and movements that renewed the treat-
ment of spaces and subjectivities, in particularly Cinema Marginal and
the sexploitation cinema, so-called pornochanchadas. These films brought
urban themes back to the screen between the end of the 1960s and the
1970s. Like the chanchadas, this new urban cinema portrayed characters
that did not fit the idea of brasilidade because many challenged the val-
ues connected to national identity. As for Cinema Marginal, it refused to
perpetuate the dualistic distinction between the sertão and the city as the
place where one finds authenticity and the place where invasions distort
a culture’s originality, respectively (Xavier). In particular, the cinematic
landscapes are constituted in relation to the subjects they portray: desert
beaches, farms, rivers, prisons—all become spaces for “abject subjects”,
in particular the sexual subjects and “gender deviants”.
Moreover, and indeed importantly, the urban space is shown as a men-

acing place to traditional Brazilian families. The depiction of homosex-
ual characters in the films, for instance, recalls Julie Abraham’s view that
there is a “hostile identification of homosexuality with the city” (xiv).
Most are depicted in the urban environment, but in areas that are nor-
mally related to prostitution or drugs, or constitute the red light zones. It
is thus an inclusion that is really an exclusion, a refusal to integrate homo-
sexuals into society, which mostly reveals a reinforcement of boundaries
for these subjects, who face the consequences of trespassing over them.
If this more commercial type of cinema had gained much popularity by
the late 1970s and early 1980s, films that focused on urbanization and
industrialization within the context of the trade union struggles and the
social situation of the worker in urban Brazil went against the naturalism
of cinematographic language. These films include Crônica de um indus-
trial/Chronicle of an Industrialist (Luiz Rosemberg Filho 1978) and A
queda/The Fall (Nelson Xavier and Ruy Guerra 1976), which incorporate
the filmmaker’s commentary in the films (Xavier).
This period also saw the foregrounding of the relation between the
sertão and the urban space in a more explicit way. A number of films
focus on the northeastern migrant in the urban space, the cultural
clashes, and the challenges they face in their search for a sense of belong-
ing in the urban environment. The big city is depicted as a hostile land-
scape that engulfs the northeastern migrants who have to “reshape” their
subjectivities in order to survive, as in O homem que virou suco/The Man
Who Turned into Juice (João Batista de Andrade 1980) and A hora da
estrela/The Hour of the Star (Suzana Amaral 1985). The former reflects
on the condition of the rural migrant and his adaptation to the city and
to heavy factory work. A hora da estrela depicts a female migrant’s sub-
jectivity through an exploration of urban desire, corporeal experience,
and interior places.15 It shows her struggle in the big urban space and
her alienation from the environment. Nevertheless, the migrants are
subjects that despite their apparent invisibility—if not being a mysteri-
ous Other in that environment—still manage to disrupt “the city from
within” (Lehan 8). They are a part of the urban crowd, which is, in
Lehan’s view, unstable and volatile.
Dispersed around different urban centers, the most important produc-
tion of the 1980s was in São Paulo where new genres and films more
in tune with market demands were being produced. This was a period
of fast urbanization and economic crisis in Brazil. Not surprisingly, films
1 INTRODUCTION 11
of that decade represented modernization as a global process. Indeed,

according to Xavier, cinema translated this modernization by highlight-
ing the archaic alongside modern elements. For the author, the second
half of the 1980s loses the dynamism of the previous years and charac-
terizes the decline of the “modern constellation” of Brazilian cinema,
which coincides with the transition from the military regime to democ-
racy. Signs of a crisis in Brazilian film production were becoming evi-
dent by the second half of the 1980s. In 1990, after winning the first
election through direct vote since the 1960s, President Fernando
Collor came to power. Faced with a severe economic crisis and amidst
a number of drastic policies, the closure of Embrafilme and the down-
grading of the Ministry of Culture characterized a rupture in the pro-
cess of Brazilian filmmaking. For example, only two feature films were
released in the country in 1992 (Nagib). Only after his impeachment,
and with new cultural policies in place, was Brazilian cinema revived and
new films produced, attracting international attention; this characterized
the period that was termed retomada. Nagib states that cinema’s revival
only happened in the years during President Fernando Henrique’s two
mandates (1994–2002) and with the creation of the Brazilian Cinema
Rescue Award and the Audiovisual Law in 1993. According to Nagib,
the number of films produced between 1994 and 2000—nearly 200
feature-length films—was an exceptional amount considering the almost
non-existent production of the previous years.
A diverse range of film genres, which reflected a variety of spaces
and subjects, emerged during the retomada. Brazilian cinema’s concern
with the urban space is evident in this period. The city has indeed been
through the stages proposed by Lehan: “a commercial, industrial, and
‘world stage’ city” (3). The latter case becomes even more evident at the
end of the twentieth century and indeed in the twenty-first. However,
despite the visible diversity in the first decade of retomada, this cinema
was still much attached to the themes of Cinema Novo’s films. As Ivana
Bentes suggests, filmmakers from the 1990s established a dialogue with
the cinema of the 1960s by privileging the spaces of the sertão and the
favelas in the urban peripheries. She contends that the films of the 1990s
reappropriate the same territories that had become a symbolic space
for a revolutionary aesthetic from the 1960s. In Bentes’s account, this
is the case in the film Central do Brasil/Central Station (Walter Salles
1998), in which the sertão is “glamorized”. Her critique, however, stems
from the fact that the sertão became a stage for innocent encounters and
reconciliation, unlike the unbearable sertão found in Glauber Rocha’s

films, for example.
In line with the production of the first years of retomada, but expand-
ing the range of spaces, themes, and characters, a number of films from
diverse genres and styles were released in the 2000s. In fact, the new
millennium has been marked by a diversity of productions in different
regions of the country, as the chapters in this collection show. Alessandra
Brandão and Ramayana Sousa argue that the films made by this younger
generation of Brazilian filmmakers, which circumvent “traditional themes
like urban violence and historical revisionism, do not seem to be con-
cerned with ‘images of Brazil’” and instead point to “post-identity poli-
tics that go beyond narratives of nation, class and gender” (161). Thus,
questions of national identity and allegorical representation cease to be
a major concern for film directors. At stake now is the multiplicity of
spaces and subjectivities that arise from the films, as Space and Subjective
in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema aims to demonstrate.
Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian

Cinema
Through diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, the con-
tributions discuss the themes of space and subjectivity in their connec-
tion to various topics and concepts, which include: territorializations
and marginalized subjectivities; landscape, affect, and spatial experience;
utopia, memory, and urban architecture; gendered and queer spaces;
domestic spaces, social differences, and class struggle. The chapters have
been organized into five parts which group them under these common
themes.
Part I, Territorialization and Marginal Subjectivities, opens with
André Brasil’s chapter that focuses on a series of three Amerindian films
by the Tikmũ’ũn people from the state of Minas Gerais. Despite a con-
siderable number of films having been produced since the start of the
Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages) in the 1980s, scholarly work in
English on Amerindian film is limited. Brasil discusses three films that
portray the ritual of child initiation ceremonies. By analyzing the aes-
thetic dynamics of the films, which share the movement of populating
and emptying the frame, hence problematizing the relationship between
cinematic screen and off-screen spaces, Brasil proposes that these films
1 INTRODUCTION 13
verge on what Bruce Albert has defined as a “shamanic critique of the

political economy of the image” and are inevitably related to the cosmol-
ogy of the Tikmũ’ũn.
In Chap. 3, Eduardo de Jesus examines two films by Adirley Queirós,
A cidade é uma só?/Is the City One Only? (2011) and Branco sai, preto
fica/White Out, Black In (2014), that take place in the peripheries of
Brazil’s capital, Brasília. The author argues that Queirós’s portrayal
of the city offers a complex spatiality that produces new subjectiviz-
ing processes which are often rendered invisible by neoliberal urban-
ism. He provides a historical contextualization of the moving images of
Brasília since its construction in the 1950s and points to the contradic-
tions of this urban utopia since its origins. In this way, he argues that
both analyzed films, each in their own way, provide a reterritorialization
of Brasília through the spaces of Ceilândia (one of Brasília’s satellite cit-
ies), thus showing new articulations of visibility and memory, and new
modes of engaging with urban spaces and the complex power relations
within them. Closing this part, Chap. 4 explores the notion of border in
six films by Beto Brant, a director who has been making films since the
late 1980s, and whose steady production has been known for portray-
ing outcast, marginal, and lone characters. Maurício Sellmann Oliveira
argues that Brant’s career as a filmmaker shows an interest in characters
that live on the margins of social space. Through the mapping of Brant’s
marginal characters and places, Oliveira contends that the filmmaker uses
different spatial strategies to articulate effects of alienation, repression,
and resistance.
In Part II, Intensive Space, Landscape, and Spatial Experience, the
focus moves to the experience of space. In Chap. 5, Mariana Cunha
examines the relationship between the characters’ bodies and the land-
scapes of the sertão and the sea in Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te
amo/I Travel because I Have to, I Come Back because I Love You (Karim
Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009) and Ventos de agosto/August Winds
(Gabriel Mascaro, 2014), respectively. Cunha contends that through
the portrayal of the character of a scientist (a geologist and a meteor-
ologist), the films are able to provide a material and embodied depiction
of these spaces—which were often linked to the symbolic construction
of national identity. By looking at the connection between landscape,
materiality, and subjectivity, the author argues that the two films are part
of a recent trend in contemporary Brazilian cinema that is concerned
with a new cinematic experience of the spaces of the sertão and the sea.
Following this, Chap. 6 focuses on the construction of childhood sub-

jectivities in three films: the short film Bilu e João/Bilu and João (Kátia
Lund, 2005), the feature film Meu pé de laranja lima/My Sweet Orange
Tree (Marcos Bernstein, 2012), and the documentary Território do
brincar/Territory of Play (David Reeks and Renata Meirelles, 2015).
By problematizing the concept of intensive spatium, Antonio Carlos
Amorim and Marcus Novaes argue that in these films, cinematic space
modulates different perspectives of childhood. Moreover, the authors
coin the expression “child-image” to describe the types of images that
articulate the intensive qualities of the cinematic space, which opens pos-
sibilities for a heterogeneous subjectivity of the Brazilian children por-
trayed in the films.
Part III, Utopia, Memory, and Urban Architecture, is composed of
three chapters that explore the urban spaces of Brasília and São Paulo.
In Chap. 7, Leticia Colnago analyzes the extent to which spaces and
the built environment visually translate the characters’ intimate feel-
ings in Insolação/Sunstroke (Daniela Thomas and Felipe Hirsch, 2009).
Although set in Brasília, the film chooses to conceal spaces that would
make the city recognizable, with its monuments and public landmarks,
opting instead to depict barren landscapes and empty urban places
that intensify feelings of detachment and displacement. Colnago con-
tends that the film’s architectural space serves as a catalyst for the empty
encounters between different groups of characters, whose stories and
paths cross in the narrative. From the representations of spaces and
depictions of the urban architecture, sensitive and subjective perceptions
of the city emerge.
Antonio Cordoba explores Wagner de Assis’s Nosso Lar/Astral City:
A Spiritual Journey (2010) and Adirley Queirós’s Branco sai, preto fica/
White Out, Black In (2014) in Chap. 8, and contends that the two films
appropriate the trope of the science fiction genre to construct utopian
subjectivities in the way they depict urban spaces. However, as Cordoba
argues, while Nosso Lar depicts a retro-futuristic extraterrestrial city in
the Spiritist tradition where the protagonist is able to transform him-
self in line with a neoliberal ideology, the apocalyptical city of Branco
sai, preto fica is the place of catastrophic destruction which functions as
a space for revenge for the traumatic injustice endured by the charac-
ters. Cordoba contends that Queirós’s film refuses to adopt a utopian
discourse. In Chap. 9, Marília-Marie Goulart discusses the articulation
of cinema, memory, and urban life through the analysis of Obra/The
1 INTRODUCTION 15
Construction (Gregorio Graziosi, 2014). As Goulart demonstrates, the

depiction of São Paulo’s architecture and its spatial construction—shot
completely in black and white—reveals a sophisticated plasticity of a city
in which the characters’ moral dilemmas are analogous to those of the
city. The author analyzes the relationship between cinematic space and
the construction of memory and history, and contends that the depiction
of urban architecture can offer a powerful tool to reveal the gaps in the
official history.
Part IV, Queering Spaces, deals with the spaces of queer subjec-
tivities taking as cases in point three recent films. In Chap. 10, Simone
Cavalcante devotes her attention to Praia do Futuro/Futuro Beach (Karim
Aïnouz, 2014), a film that had a controversial reception when released
in Brazil, due to its exploration of homosexuality. Cavalcante questions
how queer spaces are reclaimed and frame male bodies, and argues that,
while new representations of homosexual male subjects challenge the
general marginalization of the queer community, they may not necessar-
ily, or openly, create and legitimize the expression of queer identities out-
side of the limitations of a politics of the closet. In Chap. 11, Fernando
Pagnoni Berns focuses on the trope of water—specifically on the spaces of
the swimming pool, showers, baths, and the beach—to examine its rela-
tion to the construction of the Brazilian male homosexual in Do começo
ao fim/From Beginning to End (Aluizio Abranches, 2009), Hoje eu quero
voltar sozinho/The Way He Looks (Daniel Ribeiro, 2014), and Praia do
Futuro. Furthermore, Berns discusses the role of these spaces in con-
nection to desire, identity, and intimacy, thus arguing that contempo-
rary Brazilian queer cinema uses these spaces for negotiating homoerotic
subjectivities.
The final part of this book, Part V, Domestic Spaces and Social
Differences, shifts the focus to spaces of social inequality and class strug-
gle in Brazilian cinema. Tiago de Luca’s chapter analyzes two films that
reflect the social changes undergone in Brazilian society after the gov-
ernments of Presidents Lula and Dilma: Casa grande/Casa Grande,
or The Ballad of Poor Jean (Fellipe Barbosa, 2014) and Que horas ela
volta?/The Second Mother (Anna Muylaert, 2015). Both films portray the
social dynamics in upper-middle-class households, where cleaning maids
live in the back rooms, which according to de Luca reflects the colonial
past of the slave-owning families. The author contends that the films
make use of specific spatial strategies to convey social and class conflict,
thereby revealing new subjectivities that trespass across invisible spatial
barriers and contest the rigid identities of class that have been in place
in Brazilian society. Chap. 13, the last in the book, offers a different per-
spective on class conflict through the analysis of the articulation of sound
and framing in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s O som ao redor/Neighboring
Sounds (2012). Patricia Sequeira Brás investigates the film’s aural space
as an element that conveys fear and paranoia, while also announcing
class antagonism. Brás contends that sound can suspend the narrative
and deterritorialize the image, thus shifting the viewer’s attention to the
off-screen, which often suggests an invisible but present violence. This
is emphasized by the use of surveillance cameras, which, according to
the author, gives only a false sense of security to the neighborhood. The
author concludes that the strategies used to create this atmosphere her-
ald social conflict.16
Notes
1. For a discussion about uses of the term, see Bruno (“Visual Studies”) and
Hallam and Roberts.
2. For a comprehensive discussion about the main theorists of subjectivity
and selfhood, from the Enlightenment to postmodernity, see Mansfield.
3. For instance, although the homosexual subject has secured some rights in
western societies, there are currently more than 70 countries where being
a homosexual subject is punishable, including by death, again suggesting
the impact of space on the subject.
4. This is explicit, for instance, when the document mentions in detail that
they walked showing their “shame” because they did not cover their sex-
ual organs.
5. The focus in this section is mainly on the topics of space and its relation
to subjectivity. For more detailed information on Brazilian cinema pro-
duction more broadly over the decades, see Dennison and Shaw (Popular
Cinema; Brazilian National Cinema), Johnson and Stam, Xavier, and
Nagib.
6. This idea of the foreign look towards Brazil is the theme of a more recent
Brazilian film, Um olhar estrangeiro/A Foreign Look (Lúcia Murat, 2006).
7. Another early cinematographic work in Brazilian cinema history also
showed shots of Guanabara Bay: José Roberto da Cunha Salles’s
Ancoradouro de Pescadores na Baía de Guanabara/Fishing Pier at
Guanabara Bay (1897).
8. It is crucial to note that other writings had engaged with the question
of national identity, which has its origins in the nineteenth century, par-
ticularly since the proclamation of the Republic in 1889. Indeed, the
1 INTRODUCTION 17
pursuit of a national identity finds its unparalleled expression in Euclides

da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902).
9. It is worth considering the idea of cultural cannibalism: combining the
strength of the (“devoured” foreign) enemy with one’s own (Brazilian)
to become something stronger. There are, however, two points of conten-
tion in this proposition: What foreigner would this be? And what Brazilian
subject would be the “best” representative for this cultural cannibalism to
actualize? A good example of this is Mário de Andrade’s well-known char-
acter Macunaíma, which defies the notions of Brazilians being a result of
the three foundational races: European, Indigenous, and Black Africans.
Indeed, Macunaíma is a Brazilian subject that challenges the notion of a
singular Brazilian “I”. In fact, such racial plurality in the constitution of
Macunaíma just keeps circulating the question of “Who am I?” in such a
multicultural context that is impacted by many external factors, including
globalization. Thus, Macunaíma’s journey across different places in Brazil,
each with diverse cultural expressions, points to a connection between
landscapes and subjectivities, as the character goes in search of his own.
10. The comedy films resulted from a mix between carnival and musicals in
the style of American musicals.
11. For a thorough discussion about Carmen Miranda, see Shaw.
12. It is important to note that in the early twentieth century, these spaces did
not carry the same meaning that they do today, which associates them
with strong cultural significance.
13. Many of these migrants were escaping the severe droughts in the north-
east of the country, especially in the sertão—a problem that had already
been portrayed in other artistic representations such as literature and
painting.
14. For a critical analysis of Rio Zona Norte and Orfeu Negro in relation to the
depiction of the favela, see Bentes.
15. For an analysis of the relationship between migration and urban spaces in
these two films, see Cunha.
16. The translations of the film titles are in italics if they have previously been
translated. Otherwise they are the authors’ own translations.
References
Abraham, Julie. Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print.
Aitken, Stuart C. and Leo E. Zonn, eds. Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle.
London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994. Print.
Bentes, Ivana. “The sertão and the favela.” The New Brazilian Cinema. Ed.
Lúcia Nagib. London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2003. 121–37. Print.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and

Penguin Books, 1972. Print.
Bosi, Alfredo. Cultura brasileña: una dialéctica de la colonización. Salamanca:
Ediciones Universidad, 2005. Print.
Bosi, Alfredo. “Brasil 500 anos.” Part II of III. Interview. n.d. Video.
Brandão, Alessandra and Ramayana Sousa. “The Performative Force of Bodies:
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(2015): 161–70. Periódicos UFSC. Web. 10 Sep. 2016.
Bruno, Giuliana. “Visual Studies: Four Takes on Spatial Turns.” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 65.1 (2006): 23–4. Web.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film.
London: Verso, 2002. Print.
Burch, Noël. Theory of Film Practice. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. Print.
Casey, Edward. “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be
in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91.4
(2001): 683–93. Print.
Clark, David B. The Cinematic City. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Crang, Mike and Nigel Thrift, eds. Thinking Space. London and New York:
Routledge, 2000. Print.
Cunha, Euclides da. Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos). São Paulo: Ateliê
Editorial, 2001. Print.
Cunha, Mariana A.C. “Framing Landscapes in Brazilian Cinema: Journeys
between Rural and Urban Spaces (1963–2006).” PhD Thesis. Birkbeck
University of London, 2010. Print.
Dennison, Stephanie and Lisa Shaw. Brazilian National Cinema. London and
New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Dennison, Stephanie and Lisa Shaw. Popular Cinema in Brazil. Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida.” Who Comes after the Subject? Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991. 96–119. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27. Print.
Hallam, Julia and Les Roberts. Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to
Film and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Print.
Heath, Stephen. “Narrative Space.” Screen 17.3 (1976): 68–112. Print.
Johnson, Randal and Robert Stam, eds. Brazilian Cinema, expanded edition.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Print.
Khatchadourian, Haig. “Space and Time in Film.” British Journal of Aesthetics
27.2 (1987): 169–77. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell,
1991. Print.
Lehan, Richard Daniel. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural
History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.
1 INTRODUCTION 19
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984. Print.
Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New
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Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Print.
Mennel, Barbara Caroline. Cities and Cinema. Abingdon; New York: Routledge,
2008. Print.
Merrifield, Andy. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. London and New
York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Nagib, Lúcia, ed. The New Brazilian Cinema. London and New York:
I.B.Tauris, 2003. Print.
Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual, ANCINE. “Listagem de
filmes lançados 1995 a 2015.” n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.
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Routledge, 2000. Print.
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Carr and Edward S. Casey. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. 399–409.
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Authors’ Biography
Antônio Márcio da Silva currently teaches at the University of Surrey. He com-
pleted his PhD at the University of Bristol (2013). His publications include the
monograph The “Femme” Fatale in Brazilian Cinema: Challenging Hollywood
Norms (Palgrave, 2014), contributions to the edited collections Directory of
World Cinema: Brazil (Intellect, 2013), and World Film Locations: São Paulo
(Intellect, 2013), and a number of articles.
Mariana Cunha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Federal University

of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where she is currently developing a research
project on the relationship between landscape and embodiment in contempo-
rary world cinema. She holds a PhD (2005–2010) from Birkbeck, University
of London, and she has taught Brazilian studies at Queen Mary, University of
London and at the University of Oxford.
PART I
Territorialization and Marginal Subjectivities

CHAPTER 2
Tikmũ’ũn’s Caterpillar-Cinema:
Off-Screen Space and Cosmopolitics
in Amerindian Film
André Brasil
In 2007, the Festival Internacional do Filme Documentário e

Etnográfico (International Festival of Documentary and Ethnographic
Film) showcased a film that was as incisive as it was enigmatic. Made by
Isael Maxakali from the Tikmũ’ũn1 community of Aldeia Verde (Apné
Iyxux), Tatakox follows the ritual of child initiation through long shots
with commentary, from time to time, by the filmmaker. Two years later,
another film about the same ritual was made. Produced by members of
the community of Vila Nova do Pradinho and also composed of long
shots and an emphatic soundscape, this film was as disconcerting as the
first one. The release of a third work by Isael Maxakali about the same
ritual in 2015 has led us to consider whether the films made up a sort
of “series”, in which one rebounded on the other, sheltering reitera-
tions, variations, and refractions. Among the various intriguing aspects
of these films is a direct dialogue with the themes of space and subjectiv-
ity: the dynamics of a sudden populating and emptying of the space that
A. Brasil (*) 
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

24 A. Brasil
acquires a relational and transformational hue. This aspect has its filmic
translation in the interchanges between the screen and the off-screen
spaces. This chapter aims to demonstrate how this dynamic is linked to
other aesthetic and cosmological manifestations of the Tikmũ’ũn peo-
ple. As characterized by Rosângela Tugny, while delineating a space—of
a house, a village, a body, or a river—the Tikmũ’ũn trace nothing more
than a thin and delicate line: “Something that could witness, from the
encounter, its movement: its proximity and its distance. Above all, the
limits must be permeable. They must be just contours”2 (“Um fio para o
ĩnmõxã” 65).
The Hypothesis of a “Shamanic Critique”

My interest in this set of films by the Tikmũ’ũn people is part of wider
comparative research dedicated to Amerindian cinema in Brazil. This
prolific and stimulating production imposes a difficulty: having begun
in 1986, the work of Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages) has con-
tributed to an extraordinary increase in the number of films by indig-
enous filmmakers and collectives. Currently, there are filmographies
closely linked to the specific demands of each ethnic group. Some of
the filmmakers and collectives have acquired more and more autonomy
to produce films which are increasingly making their way into festivals
and showcases in Brazil and abroad (for example, Divino Tserewahú,
Zezinho Yube, Ariel Ortega and Patrícia Ferreira, Takuma Kuikuro, Isael
and Sueli Maxakali, among many others).3 Recently, the production of
films by Amerindian groups has proliferated, either connected with or
moving beyond the experience of Vídeo nas Aldeias. Ritual-films, fictions
created from mythic narratives, activist documentaries, and records of
situations of vulnerability: all of those images compose a diffuse and het-
erogeneous collection that contributes to the affirmation of the historical
and cultural experience of Amerindians in Brazil.
This research is based on the hypothesis that, each one in its own
manner, the films open a space for a “shamanic critique of the politi-
cal economy of images”.4 This hypothesis derived from the formulation
put forward by the anthropologist Bruce Albert whose experience of
research, militancy, and translation with the Yanomami people—particu-
larly with the shaman Davi Kopenawa—has led him to develop the pro-
posal of a “shamanic critique of the political economy of nature” (Albert,
“O ouro canibal”).
2 TIKMŨ’ŨN’S CATERPILLAR-CINEMA: OFF-SCREEN SPACE … 25
For this reason, a dialogue with the larger ethnological tradition dedi-
cated to Amerindian art has been maintained. Based on the authors’ the-
sis, it could be argued that shamanism manifests itself in images through
its indexical dimension, constituting what Alfred Gell calls “abduction
of agency”. Participating in cosmologies in which the transformational
and relational dynamics hold centrality, the images (graphisms, chants, or
statuettes) not only represent objects, events, and experiences, but also
act in intricate interspecific relations. Within this inconstant system, the
images are a complex mnemonicapparatus (Severi) that is able to expose,
not facts or objects, but mainly relations (Déléage); they manage the pas-
sage between human and spirit worlds; they function as traps that cap-
ture the gaze and the thinking, insinuating the paths of the shamanic
experience (Lagrou; Fausto). More widely, the images integrate pro-
cesses of sociality and personhood in cosmologies that are not founded
on the distinction between being and appearing.5
In this context, cinema appears in a very peculiar mode. Maybe,
it would be far-fetched to claim that cinema—quite a recent practice
among the indigenous groups—would have been incorporated into the
intersemiotic devices of shamanism, in such a way that, similarly to the
chants and the graphisms, one could find there formal actualizations
of a “virtual and mythological system” (Manglier, qtd. in Cesarino 2).
In any case, as indigenous peoples produce their films, cinema starts to
mingle and combine itself with other practices, not only with the aim
of recording or preserving them, but also participating, to a greater or
lesser extent, as an agency, in their constitution.
What happens when the phenomenological machine of cinema meets
the shamanic machine of specific Amerindian groups? In the face of this
wide and abstract question, we should turn our attention not only to
what is framed, becoming visible, but also to what keeps the relationship
with an invisible outside that also constitutes the image. Still considering
the phenomenological dimension of cinema, we should risk the hypoth-
esis that it is also a cosmological machine, whose matter is, to a great
extent, invisible: cognitive maps, mythical gradients; sociability relations
between human beings, animals, and spirits; crossings of the historical
experience.
The encounter between phenomenology and cosmology is portrayed
by the filmic relation between screen and off-screen space, between
what is concretely visible in the scene and what is invisible but affects
and operates within the scene. In a kind of cinematic translation of
26 A. Brasil
“multinaturalism” (Viveiros de Castro), the relationship with the off-

screen space will be precisely what allows the passage, in the films,
between contiguous worlds, but also disparate and incommensurable
ones. If the framed (screen) space is mainly phenomenological—where
the visible inscribes itself in its duration—the off-screen is thus a cosmo-
logical space, or even a cosmopolitical one, in which interspecific rela-
tions—not always visible (or barely glimpsed) in the scene (between
humans, animals, and spirits)—are established.
The Tatakox Series: From One Opacity to Another

Participating obliquely in the aesthetic manifestations and cultural prac-
tices of the Tikmũ’ũn people, the films in the Tatakox series are prolific
and unsettling. With increasing prominence, the films are linked with the
experience of a multiple shamanism, thereby integrating its protocols and
virtualities: within the filmmaking practice, the Tikmũ’ũn find an impor-
tant space of affirmation, habitation, and experience.
As is the case with other Amerindian films, Tatakox (2007), Tatakux
Vila Nova (2009), and Kakxop pit hãmkoxuk xop te yũmũgãhã (Iniciação
dos filhos dos espíritos da terra/Initiation of the Sons of Earth’s Spirits,
2015) were directed by members of the villages with the collaboration
of non-native researchers and technicians in a context of sharing, alli-
ance, negotiation, and also conflict.6 The films are economic and con-
cise, opaque and dense: they do not allow the visible domain to move
onto the invisible one. At the same time, their precariousness and open-
ness lead us to an unheard-of region of the sensory. Each film, in its own
manner, portrays the ritual and participates in its constitution. The films
are composed of long shots that follow the events in a kind of “inter-
nal gaze” in which the filmmaker alternates between participating in the
experience and distancing himself in order to record it.
The initial sequence of Tatakox (2007) shows a group of four children
painted in red, their faces covered with white cloths and cotton flakes,
lying on a straw bed. Also body-painted and covered with leaves and
masks made from cloth, the yãmĩyxop carry the children to the village. The
yãmĩyxop are spirit-people or human-animals with which the Tikmũ’ũn
maintain relations of alliance and reciprocal adoption. Often, they visit the
village participating in extensive rituals or in brief healing sessions.
Haphazardly crossing the frame and jumping in front of the cam-
era, the spirits of the caterpillar—tatakox—play their aerophones: one
Fig. 2.1 Tatakox
(2007)
producing a shrill and intermittent sound and another bass, rough, and
continuous, as they make their way across the village. The voice-over
commentary by Isael Maxakali seems to have been recorded at the same
time as the shot, in a partial and intimate description. In the beginning
of his narration, the filmmaker stops and moves a slight distance from
the group, the collective of children and spirits, that enters the village
(see Fig. 2.1).
In the background of the courtyard, the women wait for the chil-
dren to be brought in by the yãmĩyxop; they will cry while touching
the youngsters. Another group of children will be taken to the kuxex,
the house of the chants, to learn and to be initiated into adult life. Isael
Maxakali comments in regard to his relatives: “Tatakox have taken my
nephew Xauã…they’ve also taken Mariano… and Caíque, Mariano’s
brother.” The group takes shelter in the kuxex, but the film will not
show what happens inside. The camera films the empty village, plunged
again into silence (a soft sound of flutes is heard far away). A pan shot
shows people resuming, slowly, their daily activities. The sequence
returns to the kuxex and lasts a few more moments while framing the
empty forest in the background: at a distance, we can only glimpse the
tatakox, until they are finally lost from sight.
Not fully satisfied with the ritual-film made in the Aldeia Verde, the
community of Aldeia Nova do Pradinho decided to make their own
version. Like the first one, this is a concise and opaque film. Inside the
scene, the shamans and the leaders vary between conducting the ritual
and commenting on it for the film and for the community. As Manuel
Damasio explains, the audience will be able to see where the Tatakox
bring the children from; they will unearth them from a hole dug near the
28 A. Brasil
village. The long sequence that discloses a dimension of the myth that
was concealed in the previous film paradoxically contributes to making
this one yet more enigmatic.
In both works, the frame seems to be overtaken and destabilized by
the intensity of the ritual: moved by a centrifugal force, the frame is not
able to contain subjects and agencies within its own limits. According
to the accurate characterization by Bernard Belisário (As cosmologias de
invenção 12), it is a “swarm-becoming of the tatakox spirits”, consider-
ing both its sound and visual dimensions. The ritual crosses the filmic
space that becomes saturated and entropic. In the second version, the
frame seems to be even more unstable, almost untenable, because of
the profusion of bodies, movements, and sounds. The gaze of the cam-
era is submitted to rapid shifts from the wider shots to closer ones (see
Fig. 2.2). Constantly engulfed by the event, by its configuration that is
at the same time intense and diffuse, the point of view is destabilized and
the presentation loses its anchorage.
The third film, also made by Isael Maxakali, is broader and particularly
interested in showing other aspects of the initiation of the children. At
first, the filmmaker hails the children, their bodies painted in red with
little adornments, while waiting with anxiety and curiosity for the arrival
of the yãmĩyxop. The images reaffirm, not without differences, the phases
of the ritual shown in the first version. But this particular sequence will
be condensed because the film is interested in presenting other experi-
ences, carrying on beyond the moments of the arrival and departure of
the tatakox. Along with the children, we watch the conscientious work
of painting the religion bar; a long shot lingers on the kuxex that has
now been expanded to shelter more children: in the background, we
Fig. 2.2 Tatakux Vila

Nova (2009)
hear the spirits’ chants. We also witness the night-time tour into the for-
est and, finally, another visit by the yãmĩyxop: hidden in the woods, they
bring little loincloths made of straw that will be worn by the children on
their return from their period of seclusion. Then, the women welcome
the children and make a statement to the camera.
Iniciação dos filhos do espírito da terra also preserves a certain opac-
ity. Although it is initially driven by a “didactic” purpose, the camera
holds on, approaches, gets involved in the filmed experience, and often
lets itself be enmeshed in it. In this sense, there is a remarkable quality
to the nocturnal scene that opens with a shot of a tree frog while the
chant of the yãmĩyxop can be subtly heard in the background. The lit-
tle amphibian will be the object of the lingering gaze of the camera that
demands us to look at its body, its transparency and design, its motion-
lessness or its minimal movements. The name of the animal, says the
narrator, is derived from the sound the tree frog emits: “It seems it will
rain. That’s why they are all singing.” A young tree frog jumps over the
camera and sticks on the lens. The jump indicates a rupture, as if the
distance and the asymmetry between the camera and what it films are
being erased. Another tree frog is captured, its small heart is observed;
the film suggests similarities to other things—the meow of a cat, the tiny
hands similar to a goalkeeper’s gloves. Yet, the camera will also be cap-
tured by the nightly world in which it is now immersed. While observ-
ing the little animal, we find ourselves immersed in a visual and sound
landscape inhabited by other animals, hidden in the dark, whose pres-
ence is nonetheless perceived. Once again, the pervasive chant is heard.
It helps to take the scene—indeed, a “lesson” about nocturnal animals—
into a mythic space, inhabited by ancestral animal-spirits: the darkness,
the silence punctuated by the sounds of the forest, the fixed and impas-
sive gaze of the little amphibian, the chant that emerges across the scene.
Isael Maxakali’s narration seems to relate to this world, in affinity with
it: “It [the frog] is free now and is going to meet its relatives. There will
be a big party among them. All the relatives will sing much together”
(see Fig. 2.3). In a sharp cut from night to day, the next image will once
again depict the house of the chants. It conveys a switch from one opac-
ity to another: from the impassive and hermetic image of the animal to
the intense image of the house of the chants (see Fig. 2.4).
The relationship between the aesthetic manifestations of the Tikmũ’ũn
(the chants, the graphisms, the films) and the architecture of the house
that shelters the spirits is remarkable.7 The kuxex is a straw construction
30 A. Brasil
Fig. 2.3 Kakxop
pit hãmkoxuk xop te
yũmũgãhã (2015)
Fig. 2.4 Kakxop
pit hãmkoxuk xop te
yũmũgãhã (2015)
precariously lifted at the center of a semicircle in front of the other

houses. Turned toward the center of the courtyard, its façade is closed
and its back is open to the forest. In the Tikmũ’ũn films, this architecture
seems to be echoed in the cinematic frame. As in the house of the chants,
what is visible—its “façade”—is opaque and thick, while what is invis-
ible—the background, the off-screen space—is turned toward the out-
side. This architecture brings to the image a double implication. On the
one hand, the visible domain struggles to invade the invisible and, on the
other, the visible becomes vulnerable to the invisible, ensuring its power
of affect and agency.
Chants and Films, Films-Chants

Tikmũ’ũn’s shamanic chants seem to lend their structure and their
dynamics to the films.8 This hypothesis can be demonstrated in at least
three aspects. The first one is related to the constitution of the series
itself. The chants reveal a reiterative and parallelistic design: a repetitive
background is modulated by sound events, in a series of intensive differ-

ences, some of them very minor. In a similar way, in the series, the same
ritual will be taken up and this repetition of the “theme” goes through
variations and differences film by film. Eduardo Rosse’s statement about
the Tikmũ’ũn chants is also valid for the films: they “embody a tireless
search for repetition, but at the same time they make sure that this is
never achieved” (94).
The dynamic of the chants also reverberates in the films’ spatiality. As
Tugny has demonstrated, the chants are sensory blocks modulated by
“coagulation, densification and dilution” (Cantos e histórias do Morcego-
Espírito 33). This same movement can be perceived within the filmic
space that undergoes processes of sudden populating and emptying: the
scene repeatedly shows the meeting of bodies and sounds; it lives its den-
sification and subsequent dispersion, until the frame becomes rarefied.
Finally, both in the chants and in the films the movement and course
of the bodies through the territory are emphasized. According to
Roberto Romero, the Tikmũ’ũn stories are like vestiges of the permanent
displacements of these people: in a kind of “chanted landscape”, from
each passage, from each course, from each spot, they extract a chant,
which is a description of the events in close-up, “like moving images or
actions performing themselves” (97). Constituted by ritual-journeys of
diffuse contours, movements that densify and disperse themselves over
the territory, these films are “on the act”: they are created as the event in
which they take part unfolds, following the route of arrival and approxi-
mation; the encounter, the dispersion, and the emptying.
In this sense, the films are close to the portrayal of a “happening”: the
event emerges and its emergence constitutes (and is constituted by) the
aesthetic forms that are engendered. The films not only record the emer-
gence of the event—its course over the space—but also intervene and
take part in it. The camera is a participant in these three films. To show
this, it is important to first focus on some aspects of that participation,
as the following section does by presenting brief comparisons with other
films.
Incompossible Spaces, Peoples to Become

Let us start with Tourou et Bitti, les tambours d’avant/Tourou and Bitti,
the Drums of the Past (Jean Rouch, 1971). In a long take, the filmmaker
enters the central court of the Simiri village in Niger, where he starts
32 A. Brasil
shooting a possession rite that is already underway. As the narration tells

us, the elder Sambou Albeidou had danced for hours to the sound of the
archaic drums and the possession had not yet been unleashed. Rouch’s
camera steps into the ritual scene. At a given moment, the drums are
interrupted. Shrewdly, the cameraman keeps on shooting, which encour-
ages the musicians to resume the performance, thus helping to pre-
cipitate the trance. As characterized by Mateus Araújo (“Jean Rouch e
Glauber Rocha”), Rouch creates a kind of “ethnographic happening”: if,
on the one hand, the pro-filmic elements already appear in their theatri-
cal configuration (for instance, the straight division between the partici-
pants of the rite and the community of spectators), on the other hand,
the filmmaker will be the one who enters the scene, moving through it in
a more or less consensual way.
Notwithstanding the differences of context, the definition of the rit-
ual-film (as given above) would also fit the Tatakox series. Some distinc-
tions, however, grab our attention. In the case of the Tikmũ’ũn’s ritual,
the scene is diffuse and the place of the participants (spectators, actors,
and the film crew) is mobile and interchangeable: shamans and leaders
conduct the ritual while simultaneously directing the camera, suggesting
this or that shot. The ones who would be spectators, in their turn, move
among the yãmĩyxop.
The way in which the filmmaker participates in the scene being shot
seems different: in Tourou et Bitti, Rouch is a foreigner with a camera
attempting to get in tune with the trance whereas the Tikmũ’ũn film-
makers share the ritualistic scene with the filmed characters, thus main-
taining a relation of familiarity with it. Even if Rouch can aesthetically
revive the trance (becoming Other through the film), he will not get rid
of the external perspective to the world he is filming. The opposite could
be said about the Tikmũ’ũn films. Although they strive to stand at some
distance from the event, the filmmakers will not abandon the internal
perspective of their camera which, besides registering the ritual, strongly
participates in it, perhaps as one of its agencies.
If we halted our argument at this point, the defense of an internal per-
spective could seem contradictory after the demonstration of this diffuse,
open, and relational scene. In fact, this might not be a contradiction for
the Tikmũ’ũn people. After all, among them, an internal perspective is
defined and survives by dint of its openness to the outside through the
relations, as attentive as they are innumerable, they maintain with the
spirits-people. For that reason, what seems opaque to us, closed in its
visible form (the image of a tree frog, the thick front of the house of
the chants, the black hole from which the children are taken), under the
gaze of the Tikmũ’ũn people opens itself as a very concrete web of social-
ity. It is a kind of settlement of the visible world by beings, events, and
agencies coming from other worlds (virtual and invisible ones).
What is the meaning of this populating process? In other words, what
is the meaning of “people” that is at stake here? Another comparison can
be productive to the discussion of this broad issue. Once again based
on Araújo’s meticulous work (“Glauber Rocha e os Straub”), we are
reminded of the sequence of a “short voyage to the land of the people”,9
as it appears in Claro (Glauber Rocha, 1975). At the end of this stunning
film, Glauber and Juliet Berto visit a Roman slum, whose inhabitants
had been threatened of eviction by the police. As a result, the characters
launch themselves into an uncontrolled situation with unpredictable con-
sequences unfolding. They are received with a mixture of curiosity, mis-
trust, and revolt, which is revealed by the way the participants face the
camera and call out to it.
Again, it is a happening (a “barbarous” one, according to Araújo,
“Glauber Rocha e os Straub”) established by the provocative presence
of Glauber and Juliet. Then, a disturbing scene unfolds, which is later
intensified by the experimental superposition of layers. The Glauberian
trance is thus a cinematic one: his visit to the settlement, the distur-
bance it produces, all of this happens with a kind of aesthetic intensi-
fication that can be seen, for instance, in the soundtrack added to the
sequence or in the overlapping of the images, both procedures that stress
the disconcerting tone of the scene, as well as its disruptive and dissonant
aspect. That is, after all, the aesthetic form of a criticism addressed to
capitalism: the past (the Roman Empire) is revisited to question the pre-
sent (Araújo, “Glauber Rocha e os Straub”).
To some extent, the ritual scene of the Tikmũ’ũn also resembles a
happening, given its unstable and disturbing character. However, and in
a perhaps more pronounced way than in Claro, the film formalization is
inseparable from the aesthetic configuration of the filmed event itself: the
music will not be added a posteriori, since the rough modulation of the
aerophones is an aesthetic material constitutive of the ritual. In addition,
the centrifugal frame, attracted by the borders, seems also to derive from
the ritualistic scene with its frayed margins.
These nuances lead us to another one: the sequence is inverted if
compared to Claro. Complementarily inverted, we could say. Claro is
34 A. Brasil
Fig. 2.5 Tatakox
(2007)
about foreignness and exile: it is a visit of the filmmaker to another coun-

try, his foreign presence producing the happening whose emergence will
be aesthetically stressed. The Tikmũ’ũn films are about hospitality and
alliance: the filmmakers follow, or even bring, the visitants—the spirits-
people—who arrive at the village. Often, the camera will wait for them
there, in the bordering region itself where the invisible precipitates itself
into the visible field, as seen in Tatakox (see Fig. 2.5). Or, instead, when
the camera follows the spirits departing from the village, we lose sight of
them disappearing into the forest.
This is also a virtual forest, home of the yãmĩyxop. In cinematic terms,
it can be defined as the off-screen space (where the spirits-people head
when they leave our visual field). A nuance should be stressed. If usu-
ally in cinema the off-screen space is contiguous to the screen space (its
non-visible continuity), here the phenomenological contiguity (from the
village to the forest) shelters an ontological discontinuity, since it is the
passage from one world to another.10 The shot enables the coexistence
of discontinuous, incompossible11 and “equivocal” spaces (Viveiros de
Castro). In this sense, the empty courtyard should not deceive us: the
numerous peoples with whom the Tikmũ’ũn are allied left our view, but
they will be back soon to wander the territory, to chant, dance, hunt,
and eat with men, women, and children.
Claro could perhaps be approached in the continuity of the
Glauberian work of a critical resumption of the myth, as suggested by
Gilles Deleuze in his well-known formulation: it is a matter of “con-
necting the archaic myth to the state of the drives in an absolutely con-
temporary society: hunger, thirst, sexuality, power, death, worship”
(Cinema 2 219). In this specific sequence, Glauber—the foreigner, the
exiled—disrupts a given reality in order to actualize the myth, while

inventing an anachronistic form to this actualization. In the case of the
Tikmũ’ũn films, we would venture to say that it has less to do with find-
ing a critical formalization than with looking through or even from the
myth; indeed, in certain moments, it is as though the constitutive dis-
tance of the gaze has been undone and the camera has been dragged into
the mythical scene, materializing through the bodies, clothes, props, and
paintings, like the chants and journeys through the territory. And then,
cinema has to struggle to take some distance from the event again.
Flock of Swallows
All of this would lead us to suggest that the Tikmũ’ũn cinema constitutes
itself as a cosmopolitical “dispositive”12: beyond humanity, it participates
in an intensive and relational space, which also shelters spirits-people or
humans-animals, and which is altered by their agencies and subjectiva-
tions. Suddenly populated and depopulated, the space hence shelters a
subjectivation mode (a mode of personhood making) in which each
person is a people and each people is a “body formed by multiples”.13
In this cosmopolitical space, “men, women and children speak for each
other” and “the spirits chant by the mouth of the humans” (Tugny,
“Filhos-imagens” 174–175). Within the Tatakox series, peoples seem to
proliferate: among others, countless. It is through the alliance with them
that the Tikmũ’ũn form of life seems to be constituted. Perhaps this is
why the powerful ensemble of the Tikmũ’ũn aesthetic forms are marked
by this permanent change of places, by this continuous interchange of
the subjects of the presentation, in a kind of free indirect discourse14
turned into a form of sociality. Rituals, chants, and cinema are constitu-
tive, according to their openness to the outside, as dispositives of affecta-
tion and alteration.
These brief comparisons have the purpose of emphasizing the conti-
nuities as well as the differences between modern and “native” cinematic
strategies. In doing so, the intention is to avoid a purist definition of
“indigenous cinema” (while recognizing that it has been directly or indi-
rectly influenced by a certain modern heritage), not without consider-
ing some differences that, in our view, characterize a relative specificity in
this cinema. Finally, we hope to have demonstrated some aspects of this
specificity, above all cinema’s participation in a cosmopolitical space, in
which it assumes an agentive and mediating role.
36 A. Brasil
In 2015, the filmmakers Isael and Sueli Maxakali were invited to teach
undergraduate students at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.15
They showed their films, chants, and narratives, intertwining history
and myth and bringing another temporality to the sensitive scene of
the class. In the beginning, faced with the silence of the students, they
started singing the Chant of Xamoka (the chant of the swallow). After
the chant, the equivocal encounter unfolded into a rich conversation (as
if the students’ thoughts had been agitated like a flock of birds). The stu-
dents were impressed by the simplicity and strength of the chant that, as
the Maxakalis explained, is usually intoned by the Tikmũ’ũn until dawn
in healing rituals. Hearing those narratives, chants, and images, touched
by their capacity for acting and altering the sensory experience, César
Guimarães would ask if an image could come as a dream comes: “Could
an image come within a dream and intervene in the real, act upon it,
without remaining merely as a residue of the imaginary, kept and culti-
vated apart; a passing or recurrent fantasy concealed in somebody’s inte-
riority as his own little secret?”
The Tikmũ’ũn cinema shows that an image could indeed come as
and within a dream. It has the capacity to bring and shelter images com-
ing from distant lands. The films enable the coexistence of images from
ontologically distinct worlds. In this sense, they seem to share the func-
tion of the tatakox (tata, to carry, and kox, hole). They carry images and
produce alliances between the visible and the invisible. If our hypothesis
is plausible, if the films suggest a “shamanic critique of the political econ-
omy of images”, it is because they assume an important agency within
the transitions and interchanges between the visible and the invisible
dimensions, contributing to ensuring the multiplicity of the space and its
population.
I wish to thank Ana Siqueira for proofreading the chapter.
Notes
1. The Tikmũ’ũn people, who speak the language Maxakali (macro-jê),
constituted in 2013 a population of about 2000 inhabitants who live in
indigenous lands at the extreme northeast of the State of Minas Gerais
(Brazil). The Tikmũ’ũn people live in a precarious socioenvironmental sit-
uation, characterized by diarrhea epidemics, and high levels of child mal-
nutrition, in a devastated territory without potable water.
2. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
3. Nowadays, Vídeo nas Aldeias amounts to more than 80 films made by sev-
eral groups: Ashaninka, Hunikui, Ikpeng, Kijêdgê, Kuikuro, Maxaxali,
Mbyá-Guarani, Nambiquara, Panará, Waiãpi, Waimiri Atroari, Xavante,
Yanomami, Zo’é, and many others.
4. The discussion about this topic is based on previous research by Brasil. I
take the opportunity to thank my fellow academics and students from the
Research Group Poéticas da Experiência (Poetics of the Experience) at the
Federal University of Minas Gerais, with whom I maintain a permanent
interchange. I also thank Faye Ginsburg and Margaret Vail for welcoming
me as visiting scholar at the Center for Media, Culture and History (New
York University).
This article is part of a research project developed with the support
of CNPq (Bolsa de Produtividade em Pesquisa) and CAPES (Pós-
doutorado no Exterior).
5. In his fundamental thesis about the Yanomami, Bruce Albert has sug-
gested, from a detailed characterization, the relations between the images
and the making of the personhood. See Albert (“Constituants de la per-
sone”).
6. Together with other researchers, ethnomusicologist Rosângela de Tugny
has been doing translation and other work with the Tikmũ’ũn people.
Aside from the publication of books that provide the translations of
chants (with CDs and illustrations), the audiovisual workshops, during
which these and other films were created, stand out.
7. Álvares (“Yãmiy, os espíritos do canto”) and Tugny (“Um fio para o
ĩnmõxã”) previously suggested this relation in their ethnographic works.
For a development of this idea in Film Studies, see Belisário (As hipermul-
heres), Guimarães (“A estética por vir”).
8. About the relation between Tikmũ’ũn’s chants and the films, see also
Brasil (Caçando a capivara).
9. The expression is lifted from Jacques Rancière’s book Courts voyages au
pays du peuple.
10. Bernard Belisário has put forward this hypothesis in another ethnographic
context in his examination of the film As hipermulheres/The Hyperwomen
(Takumã Kuikuro, Carlos Fausto and Leonardo Sette 2011).
11. As Gilles Deleuze (The Fold) would say in his critical reading of Leibniz,
the divergent series that belong to two possible worlds are incompossible
ones. In this sense, it is a relation that is distinct from the impossibility or
from the contradiction.
12. Here we decided to keep the term “dispositive” (instead of “apparatus” or
“device”) to maintain its philosophical meaning.
13. Tugny (“Filhos-imagens”) found the expression “body formed by multi-
ples” in Davoine and Gaudilliere.
38 A. Brasil
14. I am well aware of the risk of bringing in the concept of the free indi-
rect discourse. We know that it has raised numerous discussions in cin-
ema studies since its redefinition by Pasolini. I use the concept because it
seems extremely pertinent to note the constant creation and transforma-
tion from one expression to another, from one perspective to another.
15. The classes were part of the “Programa de Formação Transversal em
Saberes Tradicionais” that, since 2014, has invited masters from popular
and traditional communities (indigenous and Afro-descendants) to teach
undergraduate students.
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Araújo, Mateus. “Jean Rouch e Glauber Rocha: de um transe a outro.” Devires—
Cinema e Humanidades 6.1 (2009): 40–73. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Belisário, Bernard. “As cosmologias de invenção no cinema-ritual indígena.”
Thesis project, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, 2015. Print.
Belisário, Bernard. “As hipermulheres: cinema e ritual entre mulheres, homens e
espíritos.” Diss. UFMG, 2014. Print.
Brasil, André. “Caçando a capivara: com o cinema-morcego dos Tikmũ’ũn.”
Revista Eco-Pós 19.2 (2016): 140–153. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.
Cesarino, Pedro. “Entre la parole et l’image: Le système mythopoétique
marubo.” Journal de la société des américanistes 97.1 (2011): 223–57. Web.
20 Jul. 2016.
Davoine, Françoise; Gaudilliere, Jean-Marc. Histoire et trauma. La folie des
guerres. Paris: Éditions Stock, 2006. Print.
Déléage, Pierre. “Les répertoires graphiques amazoniens.” Jounal de la société des
américanistes 93.1 (2007): 97–126. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1997. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1993. Print.
Fausto, Carlos. “A máscara do animista: quimeras e bonecas russas na América

animista.” Quimeras em diálogo: grafismo e figuração nas artes indígenas. Ed.
Els Lagrou and Carlos Severi. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2013. 305–31. Print.
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford
Guimarães, César. “A estética por vir.” Seminário Internacional: Por uma estética
do século XXI. Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte do Rio, Sept. 2015. Lecture.
Lagrou, Els. “Podem os grafismos ameríndios ser considerados quimeras abstra-
tas? Uma reflexão sobre uma arte perspectivista.” Quimeras em diálogo:
grafismo e figuração nas artes indígenas. Ed. Els Lagrou and Carlos Severi. Rio
de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2013. 67–109. Print.
Rancière, Jacques. Courts voyages au pays du peuple. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Print.
Romero, Roberto. “A errática tikmũ’ũn_maxakali: imagens da guerra contra o
Estado.” Diss. UFRJ, 2015. Print.
Rosse, Eduardo Pires. “Dinamismo de objetos musicais ameríndios: notas a partir
de cantos yamĩy entre os Maxakali (Tikmũ’ũn).” Per Musi, 32 (2015): 53–96.
Scielo Brazil. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Severi, Carlo. Cosmologia, crise e paradoxo: da imagem de homens e mulheres
brancos na tradição xamânica kuna. In: Mana, Rio de Janeiro, n.6, v. 1, 2000,
p. 121-155.
Tugny, Rosângela. “Filhos-imagens: cinema e ritual entre os Tikmũ’ũn.”
Devires—Cinema e Humanidades 11.2 (2014): 154–79. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Tugny, Rosângela. “Um fio para o ĩnmõxã: aproximações de uma estética max-
akali.” Colóquio de Etnomusicologia da Unespar/FAP: Etnomusicologia,
Universidade e Políticas do Comum. Anais, 2013. 58–76. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Tugny, Rosângela, Narradores, escritores e ilustradores tikmu'un da Terra
Indígena do Pradinho, eds. Cantos e histórias do Morcego-Espírito e do Hemex/
Yãmĩyxop Xũnĩm yõg Kutex xi Ãgtux xi Hemex yõg Kutex. Rio de Janeiro:
Beco do Azougue Editorial, 2009. Print.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of
Controlled Equivocation.” Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of
Lowland South America 2.1 (2004): 3–22. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.
Author Biography
André Brasil is Professor at the Department of Media and Communication at

the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, where he is part of the Graduate
Program and participates in the Poetics of Experience Research Group. He was a visit-
ing scholar at the Center for Media, History and Culture (New York University). He
is a researcher at the National Board for Scientific and Technological Development
(CNPq) and one of the editors of the journal Devires.
CHAPTER 3
The Reterritorializations of Urban Space

in Brazilian Cinema
Eduardo de Jesus
In recent years, Brazilian cinema has produced a collection of films that

take space, territories, and life in the city as constituent elements and
often a leitmotif of films. Space takes on a protagonist role, no longer
being just the backdrop or scenery where narrative actions take place.
The usual tensions of territorial disputes in the city, as well as the dynam-
ics of space, are strongly evoked in contemporary films such as Gabriel
Mascaro’s Um lugar ao sol/High-Rise (2009) and Avenida Brasília
Formosa/Defiant Brasília (2010), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Recife frio/
Cold Tropics (2009) and O som ao redor/Neighboring Sounds (2012),
Sérgio Borges’s O céu sobre os ombros/The Sky Above (2011), Adirley
Queirós’s A cidade é uma só?/Is the City One Only? (2011) and Branco
sai, preto fica/White Out, Black In (2014). These films, among others,
reveal the city and its spatialities as constructing a potent group of social,
political, and cultural relations that are very distant from presentations
that portray the city as a place for shopping or happy and appealing
encounters. The city in these films is represented as a complex field of
tension between diverse forces and powers that vie not only for visibility
E. de Jesus (*) 
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

42 E. de Jesus
but also for the production of meaning and subjectivities creating forms
of resistance to the gestures of contemporary capitalism which try to
turn the urban space into a target for manipulation.
This chapter reflects upon films whose approach to space and the city
makes them protagonists. As the main focus of the image composition
and the narrative forms, they reveal contradictions, tensions, and para-
doxes that are typical of the urban experience. To do so, the matrix pro-
posed by David Harvey will be used to analyze Queirós’s films A cidade
é uma só? and Branco sai, preto fica. Queirós’s films develop potent repre-
sentations of space with a vigorous portrayal that reflects important polit-
ical, historical, and cultural aspects of contemporary social life, taking as
a starting point the complexities that characterize Brasília.
If historically the city has been celebrated in countless films with
approaches that may or may not be critical, today we can see, as Jean-
Louis Comolli does, that:
We are at the moment in which the real cities prefer this exaltation, this
cinegenesis, and begin to look like their filmed version. The triumph of
spectacle is also perceivable in the mutation of daily scenes, each more con-
forming to the typology that cinema proposes of them, to the image, as we
say, that was established by the films.1 (179)
Going beyond the accurate inference by Comolli, today the city multi-
plies itself in innumerable other images. The screens have multiplied and
cinema has amplified its scope beyond the screening room. The moving
image has invaded our lives through the use of mobile devices with access
to the internet, populating and redimensioning the experiences of the
urban and daily life, that besiege us intensively in the production of sub-
jectivity. The image dwells within and reconfigures the modes of being
in urban territories, triggering our reactions to the enormous profusion
of signs, starting with everyday images to artistic interventions in all
their vibrancy, developments, and scale of artworks, monuments, graffiti,
among others. Hence, image and city plot multiple relations of approxi-
mation, contamination, and recreation. As the forces of contemporary
capitalism over-manage the production of images, as well as experiences,
cities and their images become an important source of diffusion for ways
of life standardized and aligned by the experiences of consumption.
As a consequence, the combination of tourism, consumption, and
images helps to produce and shape an urban experience that is progressively
3 THE RETERRITORIALIZATIONS OF URBAN SPACE IN BRAZILIAN CINEMA 43
more standardized by the commercial actions that make the city a strongly
controlled territory which attempts at all costs to narrow experiences—
a kind of neoliberal urbanism devoted to gentrification. In this context,
tourism is positioned as a line of force in the production of subjectivity in
contemporaneity, generating an experience that is typical of a control-
ling society. The city, as a whole, harbors subjects that move globally on
the tracks of control, producing new and innovative forms of subjectivity
that are guided and mediated by the experience of capital, as Félix Guattari
asserts:
It can be said that the city-world of contemporary capitalism has deterrito-

rialized itself, that its diverse constituents have been sprayed over the entire
surface of a multipolar urban rhizome that engulfs the planet. (171)
In all the dynamics of urban spaces reconfiguring the city, it is pos-

sible to see, as Harvey does, that almost all of the global economic cri-
ses in the course of the twentieth century and in the first decades of the
twenty-first century had their origin in the less than responsible manner
with which capitalism handles urbanization, that is, as a form of accu-
mulation. For Harvey, “The reproduction of capital passes through pro-
cesses of urbanization in myriad ways. But the urbanization of capital
presupposes the capacity of capitalist class powers to dominate the urban
process” (66).
Knowing the dominating forces with which capitalism handles the
urban space, it is important to acknowledge how cinema, the audiovis-
ual production, and the very dynamics of globalized communication as
a whole, reinforce and shape the image and discourse of the city that it
attempts to build and maintain. Far from inventing another city or point-
ing to other forms of experience, cinema and the audiovisual production
often celebrate the production of space that is exclusively associated with
consumption and entertainment. This is the case with highly commercial
films such as Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2010), to cite an
example from the Hollywood context, and the romantic comedies from
Globo Filmes in the case of Brazil. These are forms of engagement that
are excessively controlled and planned in creating the aesthetic experi-
ence that the urban may allow us.
As such, the city conveys not the intensity of the desire of its inhab-
itants, but what economic forces believe to be most profitable. In his
trip to North America in the mid-1980s, Jean Baudrillard alerted us
44 E. de Jesus
to this kind of city experience. Nowadays, following his thought, we

are able to witness this scheme of urbanism and its peculiar ways of life
around the globe. Perhaps it is possible to define these spaces, depleted
by the exhaustive repetition of a formal aesthetic pattern—which leads
to a certain standardized production of subjectivity—as a kind of
“Disneyfication” of the contemporary urban experience or the creation
of a global “junkspace”, to use Rem Koolhaas’s term. Cultural pathways
in big cities, restored historical centers filled with elegant stores and res-
taurants, and other revitalization processes of intervention in spaces that
are still poorly valued, gain visibility in the media, building the image of
a city which elicits a tourist-becoming, even if it means moving through
a landscape that always repeats itself. In this variation, borrowing the
term from Gilles Deleuze, tourism becomes not a form of discovery, but
a standardized experience of insertion that is controlled and sterile in the
territory of the Other, as Guattari contends:
Tourists, for example, make journeys almost immobile, being deposited

in the same types of airplanes, Pullman hotel rooms, and watch, moving
before their eyes, landscapes that they have seen 100 times on their televi-
sion screens, or in tourist brochures. (169)
In the international audiovisual industry of films, series, soap operas,

as well as music video, among others, there is a construction of images
of the city which celebrates exactly this kind of neoliberal urbanism, inte-
grating strongly, once again, with tourism.
Contemporary Brazilian cinema seems to have noticed these forms
of domination directed toward space and shows us other visions of the
city, induced by more vigorous and libertarian representations that take
into account the numerous social, political, cultural, and historical ten-
sions that exist in the urban space. As such, unlike traditional editing,
which uses cinematic language to hide the intense conflicts and disputes
of space, some films summon lines of flight and processes of deterritori-
alization in their representations. These materialize in the language and
the typical cinema discourse to contrast as much as possible the symbolic
disputes of spaces and territories in contemporary Brazil. Deleuze and
Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are use-
ful for understanding the ways in which cinema can build spatial repre-
sentations. Some films deterritorialize because they seek other forms
of space representation that reveal the political and social issues that
permeate social life. Unlike films that use cinematic language to simulate
a space without conflict, these films seek new representations whereby
images are reterritorialized with new “machinic assemblages” of bodies
and collective expression.
If we have experienced a “spatial turn” in film theory, as happened
in the social sciences and the humanities as some authors claim,2
when reflecting upon the relations between cinema, city, and space,
it is crucial to understand the construction of spaces and territories
and how we experience and perceive them. For this purpose, Michel
Foucault suggests that we experience a heterogeneous and relational
space:
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the
erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws
and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space […] we live inside
a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another
and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (414)
Foucault argues that space prompts, activates, reverberates, and

also produces positionings and ways of life, thus revealing its relational
dimension. This vision of a heterogeneous and relational space is present
in many of the founding reflections of Henri Lefebvre who constructed
a tripartition of the relations of space that may help us comprehend the
contemporary relations between the city and cinema. We shall seek, in
Lefebvre, his tripartition proposal, but not before looking at the synthe-
sis developed by Harvey:
It is out of this tradition of spatialized thought that Lefebvre (almost cer-

tainly drawing upon Cassirer) constructs his own distinctive tripartite divi-
sion of material space (the space of experience and of perception open to
physical touch and sensation); the representation of space (space as con-
ceived and represented); and spaces of representation (the lived space of
sensations, the imagination, emotions and meanings incorporated into
how we live day by day). (“Space as a Key Word” 279)
The precise synthesis of Lefebvre’s thinking produced by Harvey

indicates that when space is seen in heterogeneous and relational ways
it allows for several theoretical conceptions of the relations between the
real and its representations. When reclaiming Lefebvre, Harvey updates
46 E. de Jesus
and amplifies into new dialogues and contexts his potent theoretical con-
structions about space and proposes an approximation with another tri-
partition, emphasizing the relational notion of space:
The relational notion of space–time implies the idea of internal relations;

external influences get internalized in specific processes or things through
time […]. An event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by
appeal to what exists only at that point. It depends upon everything else
going on around it (much as all those who enter a room to discuss bring
with them a vast array of experiential data accumulated from the world).
(“Space as a Key Word” 273)
The relational and heterogeneous space is where we establish our forms

of interaction, we build diverse representations and manage political
forms of being in the world. Harvey advances and amplifies Lefebvre’s
tripartition by blending it with the division developed previously, encom-
passing absolute, relative, and relational space.
I propose, therefore, a speculative leap in which we place the threefold

division of absolute, relative and relational space-time up against the tri-
partite division of experienced, conceptualized and lived space identified
by Lefebvre. The result is a three-by-three matrix within which points of
intersection suggest different modalities of understanding the meanings of
space and space-time. (Harvey, “Space as a Key Word” 281)
Harvey’s expansion of Lefebvre’s tripartition results in an understand-

ing of space as complex and dialectical in character, and reveals space’s
potency and multiplicity, which makes for a productive reading of the
relations between cinema and the city. It can be argued that the cross-
ing proposed by Harvey of absolute, relative, and relational space with
Lefevre’s material space, space representation, and representation of
space, put in the field of cinema, can be translated into a deterritoriali-
zation process that puts editing and the typical features of audiovisual
language as lines of flight for politically engaged representations, thus
revealing the ways in which capitalism historically touches the urban
space. A considerable number of films and audiovisual works bring views
that are compromised by instituted powers and the forms of socio-spatial
segregation that are typical manifestations of neoliberal urbanism. Our
interest is precisely the opposite.
After these explanations about how we associate the thought com-

ing from geography in relation to space, while applying Lefebvre’s and
Harvey’s contributions, we will first explore some Brazilian films that
have also taken Brasília as a protagonist, showing that Queirós’s film pro-
duction paradoxically creates ruptures and continuities in the relations
between Brasília and cinema.
Brasília and Cinema
Brasília may be considered as a cinematographic city in the sense that
Giuliana Bruno has conceptualized it. However, when it was built—at
the emergence of a mediatization process—some of its images differed
strongly from the ways in which the urban space had traditionally been
characterized in Brazilian cinema. Far from celebrating the seductive
image compositions of the city, the way cinema has gazed at Brasília
over the years has been characterized by a tension of very critical views—
revealing complex political and social contexts—and also celebratory
views of the great utopia that characterized the city and its construction.
The films about Brasília are expressive and appear to initiate a kind of
matrix in the critical cinematographic approaches that depict space as a
protagonist.
One of these films is Conterrâneos velhos de guerra/Old-Time Veteran
Countrymen (Waldimir Carvalho, 1990) which was shot over almost
20 years. It draws the lines that demonstrate the social failure of the
architectonic-urbanistic project of Brasília. The prevalent voice is that
of northeastern migrants who provided the workforce to build the city,
attracted by the dream of prosperity in a new land, distant from the
poverty caused by droughts in the northeastern states. With cinemato-
graphic recordings of Brasília still under construction and surprising
stories of the arrival of migrants in the “Eldorado”, the city that was a
dream had become reality, as sung by one of the characters. The docu-
mentary is a kind of critical landmark for the depictions of this unique
city in cinema.
Even before its inauguration in April 1960, the city under construc-
tion, along with many promises of prosperity, was shown all over Brazil
in newsreels3 financed by NOVACAP4, which were exhibited before
regular screenings in movie theaters. Institutionally compromised, these
newsreels, which became research material for historians, helped produce
48 E. de Jesus
a potent imaginary vision of the new capital and its countless opportuni-
ties for work and prosperity.
Overall, Brasília constitutes a huge landmark because of its architec-
tonic aspects and its urbanistic planning, as the various reflections of the-
orists and critics show. One example is the essay by Adrián Gorelik:
There is no doubt that Brasília was a limit experiment for Brazilian archi-
tecture and for the international urban thinking. […] But also a limit
experiment because it stands at the edge of an era: like few accomplish-
ments of the modernist program around the world, Brasília came to fulfill
a long series of expectations that dissipated—reverting to opposite appre-
ciations—in the very moment of its completion. (213)
It is interesting to notice that this limit experiment generated a his-

toric and social tensioning in Brasília that seems to be reflected in the
cinematographic coverage that, since before its inauguration, was geared
toward producing images showing the dream of the future city, for exam-
ple, the cinematic newsreel As primeiras imagens de Brasília/The First
Images of Brasília (Jean Manzon, 1956/57).5 Manzon uses cinema as a
way to anticipate the dream, thereby enhancing a typical dash of moder-
nity to glimpse the future, as a plan of redemption. The assertive narra-
tion says: “The furnishings were still being installed, when classes began.
Because culture cannot wait. There is no waste of time in Brasília.” This
tone of extreme progress and development was recurrent in almost all
newsreels of the time; the idea of a new era, which would begin with the
new capital: the Brazil of the future. In Manzon’s productions and oth-
ers, cinema foreshadows, shows, and, somehow, builds the future through
images. With Luiz Jatobá’s6 remarkable narration, this film begins with
a very strange warning on the screen: “This documentary has as its sole
purpose to record for history the first months of life of Brasília.” The ini-
tial images suggest a subjective camera, emulating the view of President
Juscelino Kubitschek flying over the future capital. Long open shots of
Brasília show a gigantic plain barely inhabited, accompanied by Jatobá’s
narration: “The Brazilian man no longer scratches the beaches like crabs;
Brasília, a magnetic pole in Goiás, is the answer to this two-century-old
criticism.” The images that follow get closer and closer to the city, little
by little, coming to show people’s way of life, and the visits by President
Kubitschek and the chairman of NOVACAP, Israel Pinheiro. At that
time, Brasília provided optimistic pictures of a dream that would come
true to display Brazil’s rejuvenating power to build a new era. All of this
is the exact opposite of what we see in Carvalho’s film, with the dusty
desert spaces of the new capital shown in wide open shots denouncing
the policy of segregation and the almost uncontrolled spread of suburbs
that would end up housing the migrant builders and the poor, becoming,
years later, the focus of Adirley Queirós’s productions.
Another important film worth mentioning, one that was involved
in a complex story of censorship by its sponsors, is Joaquim Pedro
de Andrade’s Brasília: contradições de uma cidade nova/Brasília:
Contradictions of a New City (1967)7, for which Andrade wrote the
script with Jean-Claude Bernardet and Luís Saia. In its stunning first
part, it presents a kind of ode to the heroic construction of Brasília,
showing magnificent images of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture to the
sound of Erik Satie’s music and the narration by poet Ferreira Gullar
(see Fig. 3.1). Suddenly, as in other films by Andrade, the record turns
to a different context. Giving voice to workers, mostly northeastern-
ers, it shows the other side of Brasília, which, contrary to what had been
planned, became a Brazilian city like any other, divided and socially seg-
regated by the ways space was occupied. As the narration highlights:
“For most of its inhabitants, Brasília is a city like all others. Two-thirds of
those that work in Brasília, including the workers who built it, live out-
side the limits of the Plan.” From this moment on, the photography by
Affonso Beato abandons the extreme aesthetic rigor of the initial images
to construct a new (much dirtier) strategy, distant from any aestheticism.
It shows incisive images of the day to day of Brasília’s inhabitants in their
long commutes between their work and home. During the military gov-
ernment, the numerous suburbs, composed essentially of workers who
built the city, were placed on the outskirts of the Pilot-Plan. Ceilândia is
one of these places.
The film and the whole debacle around its censoring by the execu-
tives of Olivetti who had sponsored it became the subject of another,
Fig. 3.1 Brasília:
Contradições de uma
cidade nova (1967)
50 E. de Jesus
more recent film: “Plano B/Plan B” (Getsamane Silva, 2014). Plano B

takes Andrade’s film as a starting point to consider the contradictions of
Brasília today, which certainly evolved from the context depicted in the
1967 short film. The drastic contrast between the ideologically compro-
mised newsreels of the federal government and the films by Carvalho and
Andrade harks back to Gorelik’s remarks. Brasília’s contradictions and its
social and historical paradoxes in the fields of architecture and urbanism,
pointed out by the author, become the thematic matrix of films with a
critical tone, which would later be recreated from a new and more com-
plex perspective in Queirós’s films.
Starting his career with the short film Rap, o canto da Ceilândia/Rap,
the Song of Ceilândia (2005),8 developed as a piece of coursework dur-
ing his bachelor’s degree in cinema, Queirós produced a poignant doc-
umentary about Ceilândia with archive images showing the settlement
and construction of homes, as well as the arrival of the first families
in the area. The film is critical, engaged, and political in the construc-
tion of identity tensions that radicalize the memory, not of the work-
ers that would build Brasília as in the films by Carvalho and Andrade,
but of the second generation that had already been born in the city. “I
am from Ceilândia, not from the Federal District, not from Brasília, I
am Ceilandian,” asserts Japão, one of the rappers of the group Viela
17, who appears in the movie. Along with this, there are many images
of Ceilândia and accounts of racism that animate the political tone of
denouncement in the interviews and the radical rap performances and
their lyrics. Winner of several awards, among them Best Short Film by
the official and popular juries at the Brasília Film Festival in 2005, the
film does not show any images of the city. The capital is made present
only in verbal discourse through its rejection, as in one of Marquim’s
statements: “Brasília? Brasília I see it like this… It is a wall that has sepa-
rated the poor from the rich.”
In A cidade é uma só? Queirós portrays the history of Ceilândia in a
complex play between fiction and documentary (a defining trait of the
director’s work that was established from this film). The film shows the
development of an institutional propaganda campaign by the CEI—
Comissão de Erradicação das Invasões (Commission for the Eradication
of Invasions)—broadcast through TV ads (among other communica-
tion strategies), that depicted children singing and asking for donations
in order to move families to Ceilândia during the military dictatorship.
Almost 8000 people were displaced. The name Ceilândia comes from the
abbreviation CEI and this is the theme of Queirós’s film, which focuses
on Nancy, one of the children who sang in the TV ad. She is the force
that guides the film and the history of the Administrative Region. In
parallel to this, in a fictional context, Nancy’s nephew Dildu (Dilmar
Durães) tries to establish his candidacy as a councilor, having as one of
his platforms the payment of reparations to the original settlers for the
compulsory transportation (or “eviction”, as Nancy emphasizes in one of
her statements) to Ceilândia. The ones helping Dildu in his campaign are
the real estate agent Zé Antônio, who tries to sell irregular plots of land
in the outskirts of the Plan, and Marquim (Marquim do Tropa), who
composes songs for the campaign.
In Branco sai, preto fica the ambiguous gesture between fiction and
documentary is even more complex, handling questions tied to traumatic
memories and the science fiction genre. Cravalanças is the character who
comes from the year 2037 in search of evidence to indict the Brazilian
State for the tragic events of a popular ball, during which a police raid
wrecked the lives of two black boys in 1986. There is a shift from fiction
to documentary as the characters play themselves in a complex reflexive
mise-en-scène. One of them, Marquim (Marquim do Tropa) becomes
paraplegic in the incident and later, as a DJ in the film, makes a kind
of music bomb to blow up the Plan with the help of collaborators. The
other character is Sartana (Cláudio Irineu da Silva, aka Chokito), who,
in real life, had his leg amputated after the police raid (see Fig. 3.2). The
title of the movie comes from the phrase shouted by the police when
breaking into the ball.
Fig. 3.2 Branco sai,

preto fica (2014)
52 E. de Jesus
Relational Space, Cinema, and Deterritorialization

In an interview for Negativo magazine, Queirós remarked:
My problem with Brasília is not its people; it is its history, the way things
are set up in Brasília. […] I think that, somewhat because of that, up to “A
Cidade é Uma Só?” there were no scenes of Brasília in my films: because
Brasília was the negation, we could only see it as the negative. (Queirós
interviewed by Mena, Imanishi and Reis 40)
Added to this statement, the initial scene from A cidade é uma só? reveal
the places that the city and the urban space occupy in Queirós’s films—
both within the recollection of important historical events and within the
contemporary frame of reference (see Fig. 3.3). In the film, while the ini-
tial credits are still being shown, we see an animation presenting the Pilot-
Plan of Brasília that was developed by Lúcio Costa. We see the drawing
taking shape, little by little, in fragments at the edges of the screen, to
eventually occupy the entire space of the frame. As soon as it is complete,
it catches fire and disappears from the screen. The project—“the space of
all manner of cadastral mapping and engineering practices” (Harvey, Space
as a Key Word 272)—is burned. The drawing of what today is the Pilot-
Plan vacates the screen, and the lines of the Pilot-Plan in the shape of an
airplane make room for a hollow space, an enigmatic texture. The abso-
lute space proposed by the project of the Pilot-Plan did not predict its sur-
rounding areas, much less the growth of the city, where Ceilândia belongs.
Outside absolute space and outside the Plan, Ceilândia is at the margin,
excluded from the imagination that invented Brasília. The capital itself is
present in the films, but always in the out-of-field. The potent portrayals of
Ceilândia are in constant tension with Brasília, which is always a significant
absence. Ceilândia is the protagonist and the Pilot-Plan, a constant infer-
ence that pervades and motivates the films, in a rhizomatic contentious
relationship that involves history, politics, subjectivities, power plays, and
Fig. 3.3 A cidade é
uma só? (2011)
forms of representation. In both of Queirós’s feature films, the city’s rep-

resentations of space are produced in a manner that is structured in rela-
tion to this gesture: absolute space is not considered, everything is relative
and relational. There is no absolute space because, in the images and filmic
constructions, it is highlighted radically from the relative and relational
dimensions of the matrix proposed by Harvey.
Guided by the utopian dream of a more egalitarian society, Brasília
ended up becoming its extreme opposite. If the urban planning was, at
the time of its inception, innovative and bold, what was built outside
the Plan replicated, and made worse, the traditional, misguided housing
construction schemes for low-income populations. Ceilândia clipped the
space and the absolute form of the Pilot-Plan with its exponential growth
and its seldom-told story. Queirós’s films produce a line of force which
reclaims this story and approximates inventive fabulations of the city,
subjectivization processes, memories, as well as social and political issues
connected to the urban space and Modernist architecture.
The connection between Queirós’s and the inaugural films that crit-
icized Brasília is paradoxical: continuity and rupture. Carvalho and
Andrade use the Plan to define the periphery that is constituted there,
while Queirós’s films engage with the negative aspects of the city. The
film starts by acknowledging Ceilândia, the problems and setbacks of the
Plan project, and by seeing Brasília as a phantom. Because of this, per-
haps the few images of the city in the films are always shown at a distance
in wide open shots, breaking away from the territorialized images by the
mass media that exalt the absolute space of Oscar Niemeyer’s architec-
ture. In Queirós’s films there is always a portrayal that deterritorializes
the city’s image because it looks at its reverse side, explaining all forms of
relations that are developed in Brasília’s urban space.
Contradictions between the present time expressed in the represen-
tations of space and the spaces of representation can be seen through
Harvey’s matrix in the relational and relative spaces. Queirós seems
to coincide the spaces of representation, which are the lived spaces of
sensations—the ones whose meanings are assimilated through the daily
ways we live by—and space as it is conceived and represented, labeled by
Lefebvre as the representation of space.
This can be noticed in one of the first images of A cidade é uma só?
With a subjective camera inside a car we see a dusty and pothole-ridden
unpaved street in Ceilândia at dawn, with its precarious dwellings and a
few people who appear to be going to work. Meanwhile, we hear from
54 E. de Jesus
the radio of the car a kind of collage of various audios, prompted as if

by someone outside the field of vision, tuning the device and search-
ing for a specific station. Speeches by Niemeyer (“there is Brasília, after
many years having gone by, the city that Juscelino Kubitschek has built
so enthusiastically. A city that lives like a big metropolis”) are mixed
with evangelic preaching, radio noise, and ancient fragments of opti-
mistic utopian proclamations (“From this plateau, the solitude that
will be transformed into the brain of key national decisions, I throw
one more look, to the tomorrow of my country and foresee the dawn
with unbreakable faith and boundless certainty of its grand destiny”).
This scene shows us that space–time wavers between what we see in the
images, the present time, and the layers of the past: promises of a future
from the past that did not come true for everyone.
The image makes us go into space so that we may come to know the
territory. Rather than working as an establishing shot as in classic cin-
ema, here Queirós asserts that the spatial arrangements proposed by the
photography do not allow for absolute space. In addition, space, where
people live, is the same concept that has been conceived and represented
as negative by the absence of the Pilot-Plan. As the relative space, the
observer’s point of view and that of the observed are the same. The
film is not about an aerial shot, as in the newsreels, or an aesthetically
composed image of a Niemeyer building; it is a street, from the point of
view of someone who is in it. As a relational space, the passages of time
coming from the audio, which originates out of sight with the prom-
ises for the future, work to substantiate Brasília’s complexities and fail-
ures. This sequence is notable because there is no direct continuity. The
street scene is followed by a night scene of a rap gathering, which shows
Dildu and his girlfriend, then by archive images of Brasília in a celebra-
tory advertisement of its twelfth anniversary.
After all this, the film shows a daytime scene, using a different angle,
with Zé Maria driving and Dildu on the back seat. They move through
the wide streets of the Pilot-Plan as if lost, looking for an exit. Dildu
asserts, in a nearly prophetic tone: “A lot of people died here; this place
is cursed. We can’t leave, no one is fortunate here. We have to get out of
here. Our business is away from here. North wing, north, death, death.”9
The absence of continuity in the first scene seems to make even clearer
its aim of introducing us to the visual space of the film, and reveals the
nature of the spatial relations that will be established. Space is the entry
point for us to comprehend the way the film casts its gaze on the city.
When it comes to Branco sai, preto fica, the superposition of differ-

ent time frames becomes even more evident because one of the char-
acters, Cravalanças, comes from the future. Around him, other images
orbit, some from the future and some from the past like Sartana’s state-
ment projected inside the container-craft of the emissary. The elements
of science fiction make the time frames cross and tension the relative
and relational aspects of the spaces in the film with even more inten-
sity. Once more, the archive images bring up the past, but this time
they are amateur photographs from personal collections showing the
dance, the dance steps, and the feelings of carefree enjoyment. These
images are shown at the very beginning of the film, in the rap sung by
Marquim, and contextualize the events of that night. The same strat-
egy is repeated in another elaborated part of the film, in a moment of
recollection by Sartana while he is flipping an old wedding album to
the sound of Chris de Burgh’s “Flying”, which was a popular hit in
Brazil in the 1970s. In another moment, Cravalanças hangs up amateur
photographs and newspaper clips on the wall of his container-craft. The
craft from the future tries to make sense of the past, having the images
affixed on its walls, looking at them closely. The historic dimension of
the facts re-emerges in the images of personal files recreating the sub-
jective dimension of the entire ordeal that motivates and pervades the
film through the various expositions by Marquim and Sartana about
the 1986 event. It is the recording of a history of social segregation
and racism recovered and summoned by subjective statements in the
documentary.
In Harvey’s conceptual framework, the relational space connected
with the spaces of representation configures “universal rights; utopian
dreams; multitude; empathy with others” (“Space as a Key Word” 283).
The relational dimension in representations of space refers to “value
as socially necessary labor time; as congealed human labor in relation
to the world market; laws of value in motion and the social power of
money (globalization); revolutionary hopes and fears; strategies for
change” (Harvey 283). Queirós fuses these two forms of space repre-
sentation when creating a contraposition between images of the claus-
trophobic spaces of Marquim’s bunker, Sartana’s house, and the various
spaces enclosed with grids and many long shots showing Cravalança’s
container-craft in vast empty spaces, in large residential areas or amidst
enormous buildings under construction. The superposition of represen-
tational spaces and of representations of space provides a structure to the
56 E. de Jesus
images which, even if in a science fiction narrative, do not shy away from
addressing the political, historical, and social issues that built those con-
texts, as well as their subjective views. The superposition becomes dis-
turbing because of the way the real Ceilândia presents an image of the
future unchanged from what it is in the present. The conceptual space is
the same as the lived space in Queirós’s film. Thus, space becomes even
more relational with images that are in transition between times, confus-
ing present and future.
It is noteworthy that in both A cidade é uma só? and Branco sai, preto
fica (and even in his first short film), Queirós uncovers deterritorializa-
tions, employing devices of filmic language, as the images represent spa-
tialities that are radically distant from an absolute vision and cohabit the
dimensions of lived and conceived space. The vision of Ceilândia is built
with equal intensity as an experience that moves in the density of history
as well as within the potential of cinema to put spatialities at play to reveal
the city through the power of its critical and fabulating proposition.
Manzon’s film As primeiras imagens de Brasília/The First Images of
Brasília (mentioned at the beginning of this chapter) starts by claiming
that it is a documentary with the sole purpose of making a historic record
of Brasília through images. However, it was, in fact, ideological propa-
ganda about the construction of the city to appease the critics of that
time. By contrast, at the end of Branco sai, preto fica the following sen-
tence comes up: “About our history, we fabulate ourselves.” The expres-
sion, initially circumscribed, became a sort of reference to belonging to
a collective in the slums. Here, Queirós takes on the expression to place
himself in the position of fabulating, by means of a contemporary docu-
mentary, which makes the borders between object and subject porous. In
his films, fiction and documentary, representations of space and spaces of
representation deterritorialize images and confront the city’s imaginary,
its origins and historical heritage. It is a portrayal, always dense, which has
as its horizon not just the revelation of what is real, but which also reveals
its line of force to rescue those who have always been left out. With a ges-
ture Queirós reterritorializes the image of the slums creating rhizomatic
relations and diverse tensionings with the city and its complexities. We see
the city, as well as the outskirts on a different scale, drawing with images
far more complex relationships, re-dimensioning pairs such as presence–
visibility, absence–erasure, and memory–history. Hence, other forms
of imaging and other representations of spaces become consolidated in
Brazilian cinema, somehow, truly beginning a new era.
Notes
1. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
2. Stephen Heath’s 1976 essay “Narrative Space” is an important text in the
context of film theories about space in cinema, but it only deals with spa-
tial relations created within the narrative.
3. Available at: http://video.rnp.br/portal/video/video.action?idItem=4374,
accessed on April 9, 2016.
4. The company responsible for the construction of the city, which had ties to
the Juscelino Kubitschek government.
5. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXQQeU5nIk, accessed
on April 9, 2016.
6. Jatobá is also the narrator for Canal 100, the most popular reel devoted to
news about football, and of Voz do Brazil (the Federal Government’s offi-
cial newscast, still broadcast daily on all radio stations in Brazil).
7. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ony7axA-CE, accessed
on April 9, 2016.
8. Available at: https://vimeo.com/68374066, accessed on April 9, 2016.
9. In Portuguese, the words “north” and “death” rhyme.
References
Bruno, Giuliana. “City Views: the Voyage of Film Images.” The Cinematic City.
Ed. David Clarke. New York: Routledge, 1997. 46–58. Print.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Ver e poder: a inocência perdida: o cinema, televisão, ficção,
documentário. Trans. Augustin de Tugny, Oswaldo Teixeira, Ruben Caixeta.
Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Mil Platôs: Capitalismo e esquizofrenia. Vol. 1.
São Paulo: Editora 34, 1995. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. Print.
Gorelik, Adrián. “Sobre a impossibilidade de (pensar) Brasília.” Revista Serrote
10 (2012): 213–251. Print.
Guattari, Félix. Caosmose: um novo paradigma estético. Rio de Janeiro, 34 Letras,
1992. Print.
Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: from the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
New York: Verso Books, 2012. Print.
Harvey, David. “Space as a Key Word.” David Harvey: a Critical Reader. Ed.
Noel Castree and Derek Gregory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 270–
293. Print.
Heath, Stephen. “The Narrative Space.” Screen 17.3 (1976): 68–112. Print.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” Domus Jan. (2001): 33–39. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Print.
58 E. de Jesus
Queirós, Adirley. Interview by Maurício Campos Mena, Raquel Imanishi, and

Cláudio Reis. Revista Negativo 1.1 (2015): 18–69. Print.
Author Biography
Eduardo de Jesus is Professor of the Department of Social Communication

of Federal University of Minas Gerais.
CHAPTER 4
Mapping from the Margins:

The Films of Beto Brant
Maurício Sellmann Oliveira
Since his debut, Brazilian filmmaker Beto Brant has chosen to highlight
the gaze of the outsider. In his second short film, Dov’è Meneghetti?/
Where is Meneghetti? (1988), the Italian-Brazilian character of the title
leaps from rooftop to rooftop in the immigrant districts of 1930s São
Paulo, which would soon turn into a megalopolis. It is a perfect intro-
duction to someone whose pathways diverge from those of the average
citizen. It is also an alternate view of the ghetto: instead of an estab-
lishing shot of narrow alleys and streets, the place is introduced from
above—from a bird’s eye view that is also the perspective of the misfit.
Brant was born in São Paulo in 1964.1 He belongs to the generation
of filmmakers that started their careers during the retomada.2 When he
started shooting short films and video clips, he was a sort of outsider
himself in the Brazilian cultural panorama. In his following feature-
length films, Brant would expand his canvas. Alongside producer and
eventual co-director Renato Ciasca, and novelist and screenwriter Marçal
Aquino, he has outlined many types of borders that shape spaces of
conflict in the country. Ultimately, he created a new cinematic map of
M. Sellmann Oliveira (*) 
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
e-mail: mssdo@outlook.com

Brazilian Cinema, Screening Spaces,DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48267-5_4
60 M. Sellmann Oliveira
Brazil, which is more discernible in a sequence of six films: Os matado-

res/Belly up (1997), Ação entre amigos/Friendly Fire (1998), O invasor/
The Trespasser (2002), Crime delicado/Delicate Crime (2005), Cão sem
dono/Stray Dog (Brant and Ciasca, 2007), Eu receberia as piores notí-
cias dos teus lindos lábios/I’d Receive the Worst News from Your Beautiful
Lips (Brant and Ciasca, 2011). The ambition of these works makes their
plots very important for this analysis. Therefore, they will be described in
some detail in the next two sections.
As this chapter will show, the way the characters in Brant’s films inter-
act with space reinforces spatial limits. Tensions among them create mul-
tiple borders on the personal, social, and historical levels. In turn, these
borders conflict with the official borders that force them into ghettos or
margins. These characters live on the edges of Brazilian social space. Still,
by dwelling outside—or along—the borders, they help to make divi-
sion lines visible through their interactions with and within social space.
Brant’s protagonists are killers and individualistic outsiders who refuse
to connect. They are torturers and guerrilla fighters who do not fit into
more contemporary urban spaces. They are city dwellers that cannot
quite connect with the city that sprawls outside their cocoon apartments.
They are dreamers who escape to the jungle in search of new beginnings
but cannot escape from themselves. In all these cases, social and histori-
cal boundaries are laid before the characters. In these films, both visible
and invisible lines (such as the boundaries that modernity has built)
consistently shape Brant’s map of Brazil.
Those invisible social borders are as important as the cartographic
lines that outline the country. As Georg Simmel argues, social interac-
tion among people “is also experienced as realization space” (“Space and
the Spatial Ordering” 545). In his Doctrine of Right, Kant defined space
as the possibility of being together. Brant shows the potential of being
apart as well. His characters more often than not see space as a source
of tension. In Brant’s films, conflict develops in the opposition between
what Henri Lefebvre formulated as “conceived” and “perceived” spaces.
The former notion refers to the planning and organization of space by
cartographers, urban planners, and those who, in one manner or another,
control a given territory. The latter represents the experiences of people
as they use organized space in their everyday lives (Lefebvre). Those who
own the means to control spatial configurations decisively shape the ways
in which people perceive and occupy places. Thus, by setting his narra-
tives in different areas of the country, the director highlights the ways
4 MAPPING FROM THE MARGINS: THE FILMS OF BETO BRANT 61
in which this system affects and defines people through space. Brant’s
Brazil displays new connections for old orders. Modernity widens social
gaps and triggers conflicts all around while people—the damaged, the
outcasts, the oppressed from different strata—try to negotiate their way
around these cracks.
The films discussed in this chapter explore these processes of conflict
and negotiation, which take place on the edges of social space. To do so,
the narratives tackle their subjects and their spatial interactions from two
distinct perspectives, which split Brant’s oeuvre into two blocks of three
films: one dealing with conflict and the other with connection. Even
though their plots have no immediate connection, this chapter will refer
to these blocks as trilogies due to their overall thematic similarities.
The Trilogy of Conflict

Conflict shapes a trilogy of Brant’s early feature films. The fragmented
narrative of Os matadores follows petty thief Toninho (Murilo Benício) as
he arrives from Rio de Janeiro at a small town in Mato Grosso do Sul, a
central-western state that borders Bolivia and Paraguay. There, he starts
working as a hitman for a cattle baron, the Boss (Adriano Stuart), who
ruthlessly controls the area. He joins veteran Alfredão (Wolney de Assis)
for his first job as a professional killer. While they wait for their next hit
job in a seedy nightclub, Alfredão tells Toninho about Múcio (Chico
Diaz), his previous partner and the lover of Helena (Maria Padilha), the
Boss’s wife. The viewer soon learns from flashbacks that the hitman’s
actual target is Alfredão himself, whom the Boss considers too old for
the job.
In Ação entre amigos, longtime friends Miguel (Zecarlos Machado),
Elói (Cacá Amaral), Paulo (Carlos Meceni) and Osvaldo (Genésio
de Barros) leave São Paulo for a fishing trip in the countryside. In the
1970s, they took part in a guerrilla against the repressive military regime.
In 1972, the police ambushed them during a bank robbery attempt in
São Paulo. For weeks, the friends faced torture to reveal the names of
other guerrilla fighters. During one of these interrogation sessions,
Correia (Leonardo Vilar), the officer in charge, told Miguel that he had
killed the young man’s pregnant girlfriend, Lúcia (Melina Anthís). In
1998, Miguel discloses to his friends that there is a secret agenda behind
their fishing trip: finding Correia, who was presumably dead, and aveng-
ing Lúcia.
Another murder prompts the plot of O invasor. Giba (Alexandre

Borges) and Ivan (Marco Ricca), partners in a São Paulo construction
company, hire Anísio (singer and first-time actor Paulo Miklos), a loud-
mouthed hitman from the periphery, to dispatch their partner, who is
suspicious of Giba’s dealings with government officials. Instead of disap-
pearing after the killing, Anísio decides to stay around, appointing him-
self to be the new security advisor of the company. The partners have
no choice but to play along while Anísio starts an affair with Marina
(Mariana Ximenes), the dead partner’s daughter, who does not know
that her lover killed her parents. Meanwhile, Giba has to decide how to
deal with a guilt-ridden Ivan, who is becoming increasingly paranoid.
The Trilogy of Connection

Crime delicado, an adaptation of the novel by Sérgio Sant’Anna, delves
into big city alienation. Antonio Martins (Marco Ricca), an influential
theater critic, sees Inês (Lilian Taublib) at a bar in São Paulo and devel-
ops an obsession with her. Her impairment—an amputated leg—seems
to add to his fascination. Inês sends him an invitation to a gallery exhi-
bition, where he learns that she is a nude model for famous artist José
Torres Campana (Felipe Ehrenberg). She is not there to meet Antonio,
which infuriates him. Some days later, after a few more drinks, Antonio
unexpectedly returns to Inês’s apartment and confesses his love for her.
She reveals that the place is Campana’s studio, which ignites a fit of jeal-
ousy. Frustrated, Antonio rapes her. She takes him to court—a plot line
that the film depicts in black and white. His lawyer manages to soften her
version. In the end, Inês arrives at a large exhibit hall and silently appre-
ciates Campana’s works on the wall. Suddenly, she ditches her prosthetic
leg below the paintings and walks away. The film does not disclose the
trial result.
In Cão sem dono, Ciro (Júlio Andrade) is an unemployed Russian
translator in Porto Alegre, the capital of the southernmost Brazilian
state, Rio Grande do Sul. He lives in his own apartment but depends
on the financial support of his parents (played by Roberto Oliveira and
Sandra Possani). Spending most of his days at home with his nameless
dog, he tries to engage with the outside world as little as possible. A
chance encounter with Marcela (Tainá Müller), a fashion model, forces
him to change habits. Marcela begins to take him out of his shell to
enjoy the world outside. Then, everything seems to fall apart at once.
Marcela reveals that she has a lymphoma and disappears. Ciro tries to
track her, but he does not even know where she lives. Finally, her
absence affects him deeply. His parents and the doorman, Seu Elomar
(Luiz Carlos V. Coelho), find him lying semiconscious on the floor of
his living room. His father takes him home for recovery. The dog follows
him around until its death. The day Ciro buries the dog in his father’s
backyard, he receives a phone call from Marcela: she is fine again and
wants him to leave with her for Barcelona.
Finally, the director goes to the far north in Eu receberia. Cauby
(Gustavo Machado), a photographer, moves from the big city to a
booming town along Arapiuns River, part of the Amazonian basin,
in Pará, a state in northern Brazil. There, he falls in love with Lavínia
(Camila Pitanga), the wife of Ernani (Zecarlos Machado), a preacher
who challenges timber traffickers and land grabbers with his fiery ser-
mons. Lavínia was a drug-addicted prostitute and suffers from bipolar
disorder, as the audience learns from flashbacks: after a chance encoun-
ter on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Ernani starts taking care of Lavínia.
Soon, they are together, and she follows him when his congregation
sends him to northern Brazil. Back in the present day, Ernani is mur-
dered. The police initially arrest Cauby, but he is freed when they find
the actual killer, who was hired by landowners. Now, all Cauby wants is
to find Lavínia.
The Killers: Living in Borrowed Space

Land and the people who inhabit it seem to be indistinct in Os mata-
dores. It displays stories within stories of killers, people who interrupt
life cycles, in a place that appears to be in a perpetually dry season. No
matter which timeline the audience is following, the landscape does
not change. Sameness soon turns the place into a void. Ultimately, the
images create the effect of empty space surrounding—or engulfing—
empty characters. They do not differ much from the primary economic
product of this area: cattle. The Boss treats them all as commodities, just
like the endless plains of Mato Grosso do Sul, of which he can dispose
whenever their usage cycle comes to an end. Alfredão’s story shows this.
Brant never films Alfredão inside his house, for instance, even though
the veteran killer is the only one who is properly settled with a family
and a modest farm. The hitmen’s lives are shown in transitional places
(roads, nightclubs, cheap hotels) as if they were in different stages of
their consumption cycle. A killer shall never settle, therefore he needs to

live in these transitory spaces that Marc Augé defined as non-places: “a
world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the tem-
porary and ephemeral” (78). Toninho, the big-city animal, is far away
from his environment here. Alfredão, who dared to raise a family and
settle, had to flee to survive. Múcio developed his forbidden relationship
with Helena in shady Paraguayan hotel rooms. The western frontier is
man-made and a no man’s land at the same time, a place that these char-
acters cannot properly inhabit.
The frontier land was an appropriate place for Brant to start his
exploration of tensions in modern Brazil. Even the blending of genres
here signals the shock and blurring of boundaries: Os matadores brings
together elements of the Western and film noir genres to capture the
atmosphere of the borderland. This aspect of the film echoes the idea
of “crossing and dialogue” that anthropological studies detect in these
spaces: border regions—and especially the American South Cone—are
ripe with conflict (Grimson 202). Tension heightens through several
diegetic elements in this cinematic frontier: cattle theft, the disposal of a
politician, the expelling and killing of sem-terra rural workers3 in squat-
ters’ settlements. All these elements function as a sort of characteriza-
tion of the Boss, who is mostly silent or off-screen. Despite his physical
absence, he looms throughout the film in the form of a suffocating
space, despairing in its apparent endlessness. Effectively, the Boss appears
much more threatening than his hitmen.
It soon becomes clear that the hitmen along with everyone else are as
disposable as the land. Due to a lack of recognizable landmarks, Brant
uses human faces to frame the action in the frontier. Early on, there is
a particularly striking example. In the foreground, Helena hands a
glass of scotch to the Boss. Then, she sits down, and they start chat-
ting. Movement in the background calls their attention: the lights of an
approaching car. The background action is the most important element
of the scene in terms of the narrative. Even so, Brant lingers on Helena’s
face in profile as the Boss walks away to meet Toninho and Alfredão in
the distance. Her face functions as a prop. Later on, introducing a night-
club setting, Brant avoids the traditional panoramic shot or a quick
showing of the façade and starts from the close-up of a female crooner.
From this establishing shot, the camera pans around to show the bar,
the dance floor, and finally Toninho and Alfredão, who have just entered
the room. Once more, faces frame the action. The director strips these
characters of their humanity and turns them into commodified spaces

themselves.
The countryside from Ação entre amigos poses as a different no man’s
land. It is a mythical, spectral space: the place in which the past is bound
to be buried even though it is not dead yet. This indefinite condition
highlights the cogs that make the system work. Instead of mechanisms of
healing, the system employs one of forgetfulness. The empty, vast rural
settings provide the proverbial rug under which a violent history—in the
form of Correia—will be swept. Since the former torturer is officially a
non-existent person, it is only fitting that Miguel chooses to mete out his
personal justice in this blanket space, as it were. Here, the countryside
appears as a never-ending purgatory, the perfect limbo.
In the present-day scenes, conflict under the military regime resur-
faces in the deceptively expansive space of the countryside—the moun-
tainous southeastern area between the states of São Paulo and Minas
Gerais. The catalyst of the renewed brutality is the unresolved case of
Lúcia, the pregnant woman that Correia beat and killed. For the former
torturer, the bucolic countryside brings the promise of a new begin-
ning under a secret identity. Also, it allows him the opportunity to exer-
cise his taste for unchecked violence in the shape of illegal cockfights.
Miguel’s quest for revenge gives him the scenario to unleash his violent
desires. The apparent quietness of the rural environment accommodates
and liberates these urges. In the countryside, the respectful city friends
become vigilantes. With the reversal, Brant shows that the savagery of
the dictatorial regime—the disregard for human rights, police b rutality,
and the curtailing of civil liberties—has contaminated everything. The
regime aimed at establishing strictly controlled order in the territory,
but such order violated individual experience on every level, not least on
the level of spatial experience. Brant translates this visually in the flash-
back scenes. As the film stages them, the guerrilla fighters live in a claus-
trophobic space that mirrors the basement in which the military police
will torture and keep them after a failed bank robbery. Their lives are
lived underground in an unspoken war that ends without catharsis.4 So,
Brant never shows his guerrilla fighters leaving prison or making the
transition to ordinary civil lives—even though he introduces the char-
acters going on with their affairs in the present. The effect is that of a
repressive dynamic of social space, which these people have never actu-
ally left behind. One could argue that the revenge also contains a certain
irony. In 1964, General Olympio Mourão Filho rallied his troops in Juiz
de Fora, a major city in Minas Gerais, to march to neighboring Rio de

Janeiro. In traveling to the border between Minas Gerais and São Paulo
to kill Correia, the 1972 victims take the road toward the spatial begin-
nings of the military coup to symbolically undo it. It seems that borders
can hardly contain the truculence of History.
In O invasor, Anísio’s development slowly reveals another fundamen-
tal spatial dynamic. The São Paulo hitman refuses to remain (literally)
out of the picture. Anísio shares his point of view (POV) with the audi-
ence in the opening sequence, in which he (and the viewers) observe
Giba and Ivan like a warden at a penitentiary. In analyzing this first-per-
son sequence, Lucia Sá argues that this choice makes the viewer “fear
being misidentified with the camera” since Giba and Ivan are look-
ing straight at us. With our identities confused with that of this faceless
voice, she proceeds, Brant forces us into a paranoid mode that “mim-
ics the fearful, often paranoid relationship between social classes in São
Paulo” (42–43). Given that the same kind of first-person perspective
with a handheld camera appears in connection to both Giba and Marina
later in the film, a different interpretation may emerge. Brant only con-
nects this POV to Anísio until a critical diegetic moment. Thirty min-
utes into the film, Anísio enters the offices of the construction company.
Once he ascends the staircase toward Giba’s office, the POV changes to
the conventional mode, that is, the viewer finally sees Anísio together
with the other characters in the frame. This lower-class character had
been invisible until then.
Some characters even elaborate on this theme of difference and strug-
gle during another crucial shot. In a similar way to Os matadores, Brant
uses two human faces to frame a conversation scene. Ivan and Giba talk
on a sidewalk in a middle-class district. Giba tries to soothe Ivan’s fears
by explaining why killing their partner was the right move. To illustrate
his argument, Giba points to their construction supervisor, who is stand-
ing across the street: “Take a look at Cícero […] Deep inside, these peo-
ple want your car, your job, your money, your clothes […] They wanna
fuck your wife! Just give’em a chance…” It is a Darwinian view of São
Paulo’s social structure: either you reach the top, or you are nothing at
all. Anísio, it turns out, illustrates these cynical dynamics.
To comment more effectively on this process, Brant chooses to por-
tray his anti-hero through a warped, comical register. Subversive humor
comes from the fact that Anísio, an “invisible man”, goes from rags to
riches while Ivan, someone who conceives space, turns into a threatening
foreign body in the city. Near the end of the film, Anísio—and then, a
police commissioner—repeats Giba’s argument when the engineer asks
him to kill Ivan. The hitman ascended in the system by overcoming his
commodity condition. Anísio has transformed into a player according to
the city rules. Ivan does not fully grasp them. Brant foreshadows his fall
from grace by constantly filming Marco Ricca in front of gates and walls.
In his final scene, Ivan sits in the caged back seat of a police car. His
plight travels the lines of segregation in the big city.
By developing the narrative as a satire, Brant outlines the mechanisms
of exclusion and alienation in the ever-growing megalopolis. He creates
the city borders with visual cues: tunnels and long, sterile avenues sur-
rounded by nothing except shambling constructions and shacks. In a
car crash sequence, a single but imposing skyscraper in the background
may function as a reminder that gentrification is slowly closing in, and
these shoddy homes and businesses will soon disappear. As a matter of
fact, that is precisely what happened in real life. The location for the car
crash scene is Avenida Água Espraiada.5 That exact spot would display
tall buildings and modern constructions for the upper classes just a few
years after the shooting of O invasor. The previous dwellers at the ave-
nue would be moved further away from the city center as they usually
are. Tellingly, the film’s opening shot shows a black man in rags walking
down a suburban street, followed by a fancy car, which parks in the mid-
dle of the frame, providing a cunning visual translation for the centuries-
old Brazilian social inequality.
Anísio, a subversive self-made man, successfully pushes his way
through the centuries-old social barriers and manages to be admitted
into the upper-middle-class districts. It is a caricature that only stresses
the exclusionary mechanics of the big city. Giba’s “survival of the fit-
test” quote inevitably underscores Enrique Dussel’s comments on the
rationalization process of European conquerors when they came to the
Americas: “Such is the Modernity myth, victimizing the Other by plac-
ing them at fault for their own victimization whereas the Modern Man
remains ostensibly innocent regarding his victims” (70). The Other lives
out of sight and far from the high walls and high rises that Giba and Ivan
build in the middle-class neighborhoods.
These brutal social borders are conveyed more explicitly when the film
takes its audience on a tour across Anísio’s original place in a long mon-
tage sequence: Anísio brings Marina along to visit the lower-class suburbs.
It is shot from Marina’s POV inside their car as if they were driving across
a wildlife park. This is another example of the subjective camera being used
to reinforce invisibility, if only from a reverse angle this time: Marina, the
invisible one, is having an adventure in an “exotic” place from the safety of
their vehicle. “Exotic” seems fitting here: it comes from the Greek word
exotikos, which means alien, or out of the city, exactly as Brant films the
suburbs. Unlike Brant’s previous hitmen, Anísio manages to escape from
the margins of otherness by turning into a “savage capitalist” himself. With
him, Brant closes his exploration of the killer as the archetypal outcast of
Brazilian social space to focus on another type in his following films.
Nihilists and Outcasts: The World as Delusion

What do the protagonists of Brant’s trilogy of connection have in com-
mon? They have made their lives around representational spaces, those
spaces that are experienced by their users as a complex network of sym-
bolisms, which are “linked to the clandestine or underground side of
social life, as also to art” (Lefebvre 33). These are the artists that, as
Lefebvre argues, try to change and appropriate space through their imag-
ination. Ultimately, they build new walls around themselves.
In Crime delicado, Antonio Martins is both a theater critic and the sole
spectator of the play of his life. In this condition, he represents the audi-
ence as part and parcel of theater itself—the “point of the real by which
a spectacle comes into being” (Badiou 30). He perceives his surround-
ings as if they were framed by a big proscenium. The audience adopts
his perspective throughout most of the film since Brant refuses to shoot
his characters closer than in medium shots: following the character, the
viewer is forced to keep a certain distance. Antonio chooses to erect per-
sonal borders in order to escape the unstable nature of the urban beast.
Suddenly, Inês offers the tempting—and terrifying—prospect of interac-
tion with all its unexpected consequences. “I’m a man who’s always lived
life in the third person”, he writes to Inês to explain his pathological
detachment. In his urban alienation, he lives through the plays he sees.
That said, Antonio’s São Paulo is an artificial place that mirrors his
dilemmas. Scenes from stage plays that deal with male dominance com-
ment on the narrative: Confraria libertina, a collage of different texts;
Woyzeck by Georg Büchner; and Leonor de Mendonça by Gonçalves Dias.
In these works, the leading male characters kill their wives less out of
jealousy than out of humiliation in their patriarchal societies. Similarly,
Antonio does not know what to make of Inês—or independent women

in general. His city looks like the setting of his own theatrical produc-
tion about jealousy. Brant makes the artifice visible when Maria Luiza,
an actress, mocks Antonio in front of a theater audience. Instead of pre-
senting his reviews through voice-over, a more cinematic trope, Brant
has Antonio read them out loud as if he were on a stage. The bar at
which he meets Inês for the first time appears as a set for brief slices-
of-life sketches that seem to reflect the ordeal of the critic/protagonist.
In the last one of these, a couple see their audience of one (Antonio)
and interact with him (“What do I do now?”, the woman asks him after
her partner leaves for a moment) as if he could write up a solution for
their problems. However, being spectator and chorus at the same time,
Antonio struggles to find his own lines.
The character is trapped in the cocoon that he designed for himself.
Here is a middle-class man who cannot engage with the urban space
around him unless it falls into one of the representational categories that
he knows so well. His life takes place in colored indoor settings while
everything else—the newsroom of the newspaper for which he works,
the courtroom, all things that do not belong or respond to his gaze—
fade into black and white. Antonio is not interested in being part of a
world other than his own. Furthermore, his theatrical space seems anach-
ronistic in a place that suffers greater influence from more contemporary
spatial representations in cinema and television. Antonio aims to be out-
side these ever-changing frontiers of new spatial symbols. In doing so, he
turns into an outdated and extreme version of Simmel’s “modern man”,
who used dissociation as a form of socialization at the beginning of the
twentieth century (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” 323).
Ciro, the protagonist of Cão sem dono, takes dissociation almost to
the point of numbness. Actor Júlio Andrade delivers his dialogue in a
flat tone that matches the bare walls, few pieces of furniture, and dark
rooms of his apartment in a Porto Alegre middle-class district. His home
is “no longer aware of the storms of the outside universe”, in the words
that Gaston Bachelard used to describe the strangeness of vertical life in
modern Paris (68). Neither is Ciro. Brant and Ciasca shoot his apart-
ment under dim light. Brightness from the intruding sunlight seems to
annoy him. Ciro wants to experience urban space in as empty a manner
as he lives in his apartment. He mostly leaves it to walk the dog down
empty and dark streets at night. Differently from a flâneur, though, he
has no interest in exploring these places during his regular outings. “I

travel here from my bed,” he tells Marcela. Again, like Simmel’s type,
his mind “creates a protective organ for itself against the profound dis-
ruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external
milieu threaten it” (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” 326). Ciro does
not wish to connect with the world; hence the director’s option for long
fades to black to stitch the narrative together. His lived city is even more
radically alienating than Antonio’s. It is made of fragments and desert
spaces, even emptier than the vast plains of the frontier in Os matadores.
Contrasting with Antonio, Ciro is trying to escape from any possibility of
a narrative at all. Marcela pierces through his detachment by stubbornly
offering a sense of continuity. He also detects a possibility of narrative,
which he cannot articulate himself, in the paintings by Seu Elomar, one
of his few friends. Not surprisingly, Ciro needs to be drunk to connect
with Lárcio (Márcio Contreras), a courier who accidentally hit Marcela
with his motorbike.
This cinematic Porto Alegre starts as a metropolis of empty buildings,
but signs of human connection come from houses, such as Lárcio’s or
the father’s, with spacious rooms and backyards shot under brighter and
warmer lighting. These places evoke permanence and connection amidst
an isolating urban space of high rises and technology (which Ciro does
not use). Even Guaíba Lake, which runs through the city, represents the
opportunity for connection in a place that induces detachment. Thus, in
one scene, Ciro longingly observes its placid waters from behind a bus
window after returning from a disappointing job interview. Later on,
when his father opens up about past sins, love, and hope, father and son
are sitting by the lake. Cão sem dono uses Guaíba Lake as a metaphorical
bridge between Ciro and Porto Alegre: it is a liminal space between the
ongoing fragmentation of modernity and the resistance of stable lived
experiences.
Brant’s following film takes place in an entirely liminal space: the
Amazonian territory, between nature and intruding modernity. This
shifting space mirrors the narrative itself. Much as in Crime delicado,
there is a shift of focus halfway through Eu receberia: Lavínia, the main
female character, becomes the second protagonist. However, conflict
evolves into communion. Even so, Cauby starts as Brant and Ciasca’s
prototypical nihilist. He never discloses what took him to the middle of
the jungle, but his characterization as a well-traveled man leads the audi-
ence to infer that he is an urban type, the “fish out of water”. For both
Cauby and Lavínia, the filmmakers construct this Amazonian space as

paradise found. The film opens with a naked dark-skinned woman lying
on the shore of a placid river, then it cuts to another river margin at the
moment in which a barge arrives at the docks of a small town. Cauby
emerges from the disembarking crowd carrying his camera equipment.
In the film’s second half, these two motifs—the virgin territory and new
beginnings—blend in another scene: Cauby and Lavínia bathe naked in
the distant banks of the river as the sun sets. The place is as idyllic as the
one in the opening scenes. Here, Brant and Ciasca show their Adam and
Eve apparently fulfilling their dreams of a new start. It pointedly con-
trasts with the despairing plains of the southwestern frontier from Os
matadores: life overcomes death.
Dualism is at the heart of Eu receberia, though. The luscious Amazon
area offers both life and death to the characters and its inhabitants. On
their way back to the town, Cauby and Lavínia sail past a large barge
filled with bulldozers. They arrive at a local gathering further up the
river. Cauby starts filming community leaders as they rally the crowd,
families with their elders and children, against land grabbers, illegal farm-
ers. “It’s all because of a government that, in fact, is kinder to big land-
owners than to the loggers. And today they have no pity for the people
who live there,” one of the leaders says. Segregation as a form of con-
structing space does not belong solely to São Paulo or Mato Grosso do
Sul. It follows the protagonists even here in the jungle for, in Brant’s
map of Brazil, paradise found is also paradise lost.
In this context, for the first time in Brant’s work, a female character
offers a significant connection with the space surrounding the male pro-
tagonist. Lavínia does not merely shatter the male protagonist’s world
in the same way that Inês and Marcela do in Crime delicado and Cão
sem dono, respectively. She shares his pain for not belonging, even more
acutely because she suffers from bipolar disorder. Through her inner
demons, Brant and Ciasca provide an emotional translation of space and
its limits. Her past of drugs and self-inflicted pain function as a metaphor
for the destructive progress that big business and the state are bringing
to this northern corner of the country. However, like Marcela, Lavínia
will help the male protagonist out of alienation. Cauby is forced to adjust
his perception of space to hers, not the other way around as it happened
with Antonio and Inês. Because of how he develops, Brant and Ciasca
close the trilogy with love as the ultimate act of resistance in a cartogra-
phy that favors separation, exclusion, and isolation. The strain of Ernani’s
death proves too much for Lavínia, who loses her memories and lives
under care in a local mental hospital now. Cauby spends his days visiting
and eventually taking her out for walks along the river. Finally, after an
afternoon stroll, Cauby takes Lavínia back to the gates of the hospital.
She tells the taxi driver that Cauby is her boyfriend and, for the first time
since Ernani’s death, she smiles. Thus, the luminous close-up of Camila
Pitanga provides a coda for the six films that this chapter has explored. It
is a female face that bursts through a territory of male-driven violence.
Conclusion: The Map of Normalization and Resistance
Brant reveals a country in which lived and conceived spaces are not
only different spatial experiences but stand in constant opposition. If
one looks back at the first and last titles that this chapter analyzed, this
dynamic becomes clear. In Eu receberia, the plans of the state and busi-
nessmen for the Amazon area comprise the transformation—and even-
tual destruction—of the paradise for which the characters yearn. In Os
matadores, the planned space excludes people altogether. The main goal
of these spatial transformations is to accommodate large-scale economic
activity in spite of everything else. Brant’s portrayal of Brazilian space
leaves people scrambling to live on the margins.
The other titles in both trilogies elaborate on this dynamic. In O inv-
asor, planning does not even spare the planners themselves, as the fate of
Ivan exemplifies. The engineer realizes that the system can only be main-
tained through its expansion in space, the reproduction of violence, and
further alienation of those on the margins. Once Ivan rejects this sys-
tem, he becomes a stranger in it. Ação entre amigos identifies the bursts
of violence that these spatial transformations provoke by not account-
ing for old conflicts at the same time as they create new ones. This film
pictures the margins to which history and the shifting economic system
relegate their exhausted paeans. State and business form what Lefebvre
establishes as forces of homogenization. As such, they create a space of
normality and seek to destroy everything that transgresses it, including
historical actors that fail to integrate: the non-repenting torturer and the
unrelenting tortured from Ação entre amigos are among them.
For the trilogy of connection, with the exception of Eu receberia,
Brant focuses mostly on the effects of alienation and repression in the
lived spaces of big cities. To mitigate these effects, bonding is presented
as a plausible strategy but the main characters use it with varied degrees
of success. In Crime delicado, Antonio wants to make the outside world
conform to his own perceived space. This way, he tries to appropriate
and turn the planning of space into an experience of his own but he soon
realizes that this is impossible. Since he is oblivious to the fact that his
experience of space is purely representational, he is not able to connect
with Inês, someone who wants to experience a space of her own. Unlike
Antonio, Ciro slowly accepts that Marcela’s experience mingles with his
own in Cão sem dono. In the process, he challenges the isolation to which
the construction of urban space had confined him.
Eu receberia brings the threads of conflict and connection together,
along with the opposition between planned and lived spaces. With
Lavínia and Cauby, it emphasizes the processes of normalization and
resistance—and the limits of the latter—that Brant had portrayed on
different levels since Os matadores. One might argue that the process of
appropriation of planning that can be found in the favelas, for example,
is absent from Brant’s sprawling cinematic map. Still, this appropriation
only achieves a precarious balance amidst the normality of homogeniza-
tion, and such a balance emerges very clearly from Brant’s exploration of
Brazil along its marginal lines.
Notes
1. This is the year when a coup d’état took the military to power in Brazil.
Their repressive regime would last 21 years.
2. The period in the mid-1990s that saw the resurgence of Brazilian cinema
after almost a decade of inactivity. Under President Fernando Collor de
Mello (1990–1992), enormous cuts in state funding caused film pro-
duction to come to a halt. This trend was reversed when newly elected
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) introduced new
incentive laws that led to a boom in film production.
3. Landless workers who often occupy and farm unused private land.
4. The 1979 Amnesty Bill freed all involved in illegal torture and killings dur-
ing the military regime from criminal prosecution.
5. Renamed Avenida Jornalista Roberto Marinho, in 2003, to celebrate
the mogul who owned the largest media conglomerate in Brazil, Grupo
Globo, and the second largest television network in the world, Rede
Globo.
References
Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.
Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995. Print.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin,
2014. E-book.
Badiou, Alain. Rhapsody for the Theatre. Trans. Bruno Bosteels and Martin
Puchner. New York: Verso, 2013. E-book.
Dussel, Enrique D. El Encubrimiento del Otro: hacia el origen del “mito de la
Modernidad”. Bogota: Ediciones Antropos, 1992. Print.
Grimson, Alejandro. “Nations, Nationalism and ‘Borderization’ in the Southern
Cone.” A Companion to Border Studies. Eds. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings
Donnan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012. 194–213. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.
Sá, Lucia. “Flânerie and Invasion in the Monstrous City: São Paulo in Recent
Cinema.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 20.1 (2011): 35–48.
Taylor and Francis. Web. 26 Apr. 2013.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Georg Simmel on
Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1971. Print.
Simmel, Georg. “Space and the Spatial Ordering of Society.” Simmel, Georg.
Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms. Eds. Anthony J. Biasi,
Anton K. Jacobs and Mathew Kanjirathinkal. Trans. Anthony J. Biasi, Anton
K. Jacobs and Mathew Kanjirathinkal. Vol. 2. Boston: Brill, 2009. Print.
Author Biography
Maurício. Sellmann Oliveira obtained a PhD in Latin American Cultural
Studies from the University of Manchester. He taught Portuguese and Brazilian
Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College, University of California and the
University of Manchester.
PART II
Intensive Space, Landscape,

and Spatial Experience
CHAPTER 5
Bodies in Landscape: The Scientist’s

Presence in Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto
Porque Te Amo and Ventos De Agosto
Mariana Cunha
Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo/I Travel because I Have to, I
Come Back because I Love You (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes,
2009) and Ventos de agosto/August Winds (Gabriel Mascaro, 2014) are
part of a recent and prolific collection of films by Brazilian filmmak-
ers from the country’s Northeast, who have come to recognition after
Brazilian cinema’s retomada (mid-1990s to early 2000s). Noted for the
diversity of its films—be it in terms of aesthetics, genre, or subject-mat-
ter—this “brand new Brazilian cinema” (Brandão and Sousa)1 engages
with social, political, and everyday life issues while also renewing aes-
thetic and narrative strategies because they often expand on preconceived
notions of regional cinema in Brazil. Indeed, both Viajo porque preciso
and Ventos de agosto depict the complex overlapping of archaic and mod-
ern aspects of the contemporary Brazilian Northeast through a cinemat-
ographic language that makes innovative use of fiction and documentary
strategies. They narrate their characters’ stories of isolation and the
M. Cunha (*) 
Federal University of Rio Grande Do Norte, Natal, Brazil

78 M. Cunha
changing landscape of their surroundings; thus, spatiality plays a crucial

role in the depiction of the characters’ subjectivities.
Whereas Viajo porque preciso is a road movie that takes us through the
sertão (backlands), small rural towns‚ and arid landscapes, Ventos de ago-
sto is set in a fishing village by the sea, isolated from larger urban centers.
This choice of settings leads us to a comparison with previous film move-
ments that have provided symbolic meanings to these spaces, especially
from the 1950s to the 1970s, but also later in the 1990s.2 In the lat-
ter cases, the sertão and its inhabitants were constructed as symbols of
national identity while evoking the sea as a symbol of utopia. The two
films analyzed here are representative of a new trend that moves beyond
these depictions, whereby the filmmakers commit to the emergence of
new subjectivities in cinema rather than attempting to represent the
essence of Brazilianness.
Viajo porque preciso and Ventos de agosto have two common aspects
that will guide the present analysis. First, both films are set in places that
are “disappearing”—either as a result of political issues or of forces of
nature—which suggests social and spatial transformations. Second, both
narratives are anchored on the character of a scientist (geologist and
meteorologist, respectively), whose presence in the films—either through
their voice-off or images of their bodies—offers a shift from a symbolic
to a material3 presentation of natural spaces and landscapes, while evok-
ing a new relationship between the characters (and, therefore, specta-
tors) and space. Hence, this chapter analyzes the extent to which the
presence of the scientist and the “scientific” gaze at the spaces and land-
scapes reveal a renewed approach to cinematic spatiality in contemporary
Brazilian cinema. These landscapes and iconic images are transformed by
the way the spaces’ allegorical characteristics are replaced with a senso-
rial, material, and affective power represented by forms of inscription of
the body in the films. In other words, it examines the aesthetic and nar-
rative strategies used to portray landscapes and natural spaces through
the presence of an “outsider” character. The chapter thus argues that it is
in the relationship between the body and the landscape that new subjec-
tivities arise.
Based on the concepts of smooth space, cinematic landscape, and
haptic visuality, this chapter contends that Viajo porque preciso and

Ventos de agosto are significant examples of a new trend in contemporary
Brazilian cinema that provides a sensorial experience and gives rise to
new cinematic ethics.4 This concept presupposes an immanent notion of
5 BODIES IN LANDSCAPE: THE SCIENTIST’S PRESENCE … 79
ethics, one that is concerned more with discovering “new ways to regis-
ter our link to this world” than “to imagine a utopian world to come”
(King 60).
Landscape, Scale, and Absent Bodies: Viajo Porque

Preciso, Volto Porque Te Amo
Viajo porque preciso had a long and intermittent creative process. Most
of the footage was shot in 1999 during a road trip Aïnouz and Gomes
made with the aim of portraying street markets in small, country-
side towns of the Northeast’s interior.5 According to the directors, the
subject was chosen because these markets represented a juxtaposition
of different temporalities.6 Ten years on, they would return to the vis-
ual material and create a fictional narrative based on their trip’s affec-
tive experience, which came to be Viajo porque preciso. The film follows
a geologist, José Renato (Irandhir Santos), who narrates his journey
in first-person voice-off but never appears on screen. He embarks on a
30-day scientific mission to carry out a survey on a stretch of the desert
to which the São Francisco river is to be diverted. Not long after the
beginning of the film, the audience realizes that José Renato is also
going through a marital crisis, which makes the trip all the more bit-
ter. Between the description of the geological assessment of the land, of
the families that will be relocated due to the river diversion, and of the
towns that will disappear to make way for it, José Renato reveals his sor-
row for the breakdown of his relationship. He intersperses the findings of
his geological survey with a series of unsent letters to his wife, and snip-
pets of his intimate travel diary. The turning point takes place when he
decides to stop grieving for his failed marriage and to enjoy himself; he
travels deep into the sertão, where he goes to bars, dance clubs, and to
motels7 to meet prostitutes.
José Renato’s narrative helps to create a complex character, whose
moods, emotions, and flaws are modulated by the montage of landscapes
and places.8 Because his body is never present in the frame, the archive
images and original sound afford a perfectly calculated visual storytelling.
According to Jens Andermann, while visually absent, the narrator is com-
pletely subjected to the narrative he creates, which arguably jeopardizes
the truth of the image. Andermann also argues that the travelogue struc-
ture of the film causes an ambiguity “between the experience of place
80 M. Cunha
offered up by the image’s photographic indexicality and the performance

of space opening up in the interplay of mise-en-scène, acting, shot com-
position, and editing sequence” (57). As a result, the spectator alternates
his viewing of the filmic space from a narrative to a “spectacular” mode
or from a film setting to a landscape (Lefebvre).9 However, aside from
the attempt to identify the moments when landscapes emerge, that is,
when the natural space in the frame ceases to be a setting of the narra-
tive sequence and acquires full aesthetic weight and purpose, this chapter
contends that it is in the elusiveness of the film space that the open natu-
ral space acquires a materiality that inscribes a sensorial viewing quality to
the filmic experience.10
According to Lefebvre, landscapes and settings differ in that the for-
mer is not subordinated to the demands of narrative action, but halts
narrative progression, enabling the spectator to contemplate space
through a spectacular mode of viewing. He argues that “the interrup-
tion of the narrative by contemplation has the effect of isolating the
object of the gaze, of momentarily freeing it from its narrative function”
(29). Coupled with the filmic temporality, landscapes emerge from these
images. P. Adams Sitney highlights the temporal element of cinematic
landscapes and traces a historical comparison between the representa-
tion of natural beauty in narrative and avant-garde cinema. He states
that “landscape entered cinema as one of the arenas of human action. At
its most spectacular it was an exotic enhancement to foreground move-
ment” (107). This was the case for films that depict meteorological phe-
nomena and natural disasters, as will be discussed in the second part of
this chapter. Nevertheless, narrative films make use of the “optical inten-
sification” (Sitney 106) of avant-garde cinema thereby innovating the
manipulation of temporal rhythm. Indeed, narrative cinema uses tempo-
rality to control movement. In addition, Sitney contends that, by remov-
ing the character, subject, or even the narrating voice from the frame
in favor of the emergence of landscape, there is “a sacrifice of both the
dramatic and the epistemological organization of the film” (106), which
opens a space for the experience of different emotions. In Viajo porque
preciso, the very absence of the protagonist’s body from the screen ena-
bles the emergence of landscapes. They surface through the juxtaposition
of images of the open spaces of the sertão that more often than not sus-
pend the narrative to allow for moments of contemplation. Despite the
protagonist’s lack of visual presence, his position in relation to space is
evident and expressive.
In the first half of the film, the character is clearly committed to the
primary purpose of his trip. The development of the narrative is punctu-
ated by his systematic recording of the day in his schedule, location, and
its geological description. Subjective opinions are seldom expressed and,
when they are, José Renato quickly dismisses them. For instance, he nar-
rates: “Day 7. Region located 100 km from Jupira da Serra. The region
has a tall hill that will hinder the passage of the duct. The most economi-
cal option would be to build the canal around the hill, hence avoiding
the implosion of the mountain.” Then, after a few moments: “Why do
they insist in doing this work here? Well, this is not my problem.”11 This
narration provides an objective account that reveals a distance from the
space the geologist is describing, which is reflected in the images. These
are mostly shots from the road, which frame the landscape as the car is
in motion—through the windscreen or the side windows—and reveal
the rural countryside by the road. The film is flooded with images of the
arid landscape and the very exploration of the scientific materiality of the
land leads the spectator to a fleeting immersion in the desert. Despite the
repeated juxtaposition of these images, the camera (and thus the char-
acter) is always situated on the highway, looking out from the road, and
therefore not lost in the desert space depicted.12
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have defined the space of the
desert, along with the sea, the ice, and the steppe, as smooth spaces. In
essence, the smooth and the striated are described as nomad and sed-
entary spaces, respectively. From a complex analysis of a series of mod-
els—technological, mathematical, artistic, and musical—Deleuze and
Guattari outline the distinction between these spaces, while keeping in
mind that smooth and striated are not just spaces, but as Ronald Bogue
explains, they “imply different modes of inhabiting space” (129). As
such, smooth spaces are nonmetric, open, acentered, heterogeneous, in
continuous variation, while striated spaces are metric, limited, centered,
homogenous, fixed. Furthermore, the former encompasses a space of
close vision, which the authors define as haptic (discussed later in this
chapter), while the latter is a space of distanced vision, that is optic. The
philosophers make a significant connection between smooth space and
the nomad because the spatial practices of nomadic peoples are in a “pro-
cess of continuing movement” (Bogue 129), unlike migrants who travel
from one point to another.
Laura Marks points out that smooth spaces “must be moved through
by constant reference to the immediate environment […] Close-range
82 M. Cunha
spaces are navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps

and compasses, but by haptic perception” (Touch xii). Yet, despite their
opposing elements and functions, they mix and transverse each other:
smooth space cannot exist without the presence of striating forces.
Therefore, these are not essentialist spaces. For Marks, “smooth space
seems always to be elsewhere […] the desert is never really smooth, for
that is death” (“Asphalt Nomadism” 126). An interesting parallel can
be drawn here, given the dissonance between the visual and the narra-
tive aspects of Viajo porque preciso. On the narrative level, the rural space
is constantly in the process of being striated. As geologist, the protago-
nist organizes the space. Conversely, the portrayal of the desert on the
aesthetic level works in the opposite direction. The juxtaposition of the
images taken from different locations provides neither a clear sense of
direction nor a geographical linearity. To a certain extent, the production
process of the film, which from its conception carries a division between
the narrative and the visual levels, is constantly moving the spectator’s
perception between the smooth and the striated; hence the lack of a
sense of continuity and direction.
However, at some point in the film, the protagonist moves from being
on the edge of the desert—that is, placed on the asphalt—to immersing
himself in the rural countryside. This happens when José Renato decides
to face the reality of his marriage and “to lose himself in a labyrinth”.
From that moment, he strays into the rural space. Footage of the famous
Caruaru13 street market with its cacophony of sounds illustrates his nar-
ration. The tone of the film also takes a turn at this point: the geological
analysis is replaced by an ethnographic mode concerned with people and
their places. If the protagonist was previously intent on mapping or stri-
ating the space, he is now inhabiting it, losing his bearings, presenting a
new “mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for
space” (Deleuze and Guattari 482).
This change is also reflected in the aesthetic character of Viajo
porque preciso. In the first half, its recourse to an objective visuality in
the examination of space sparks the emergence of landscapes. From a
subjective point of view that simulates the protagonist’s gaze, the cam-
era frames the natural space in long takes that could be interpreted as
idle moments. However, the gaze toward the outside space reveals cin-
ematic landscapes. In fact, landscapes convey an ambiguous character in
the film: while frames of the open natural expanses of land intensify the
emotions narrated by José Renato and symbolically present distance and
detachment, they also emphasize the visual potency of the film’s mate-
riality whereby the embodied subjective camera expresses a “sense of
becoming immanent in landscapes” (Sitney 117).
This materiality is also achieved through the scientific vision of Viajo
porque preciso. In an early sequence, the camera matches José Renato’s
subjective view as he drives along a straight highway that extends to the
horizon, while he describes a list of his technical tools and materials.
His narration takes on a technical register from the outset and the film
quickly turns its attention to the geological constitution of the region.
From the expanded views of the landscape presented in long shots, the
camera then reveals details of the soil and rock formations in close-ups
and extreme close-ups, as if through a magnifying glass. Shot after shot,
the spectator sees different textures while José Renato’s voice is describ-
ing the angles and measurements of the fractures, and explaining some of
his findings: “The folded vein texture indicates a state of plasticity during
its genesis.” These shots are photographs edited with the video footage
that provide abrupt juxtaposition of extreme cinematic scales, close-ups
against long shots.14 Irene Chauvín states that “scale is not merely a
methodological tool or a given fact, rather its ‘plasticity’ presupposes the
actors’ changing relation in space and gives rise to a haptic aspect where
surfaces come into contact” (6). Hence, the combination of extreme
scales contributes to a haptic perception of space.15
In addition to contributing to a constant oscillation between move-
ment and stillness, the use of still photographs showing geological details
plays with the effects of extreme scale, bringing the subject very close to
the rawness of the natural world portrayed. Moving from long shots of
the natural space to the almost abstract close-ups breaks with the idea
of a sublime and symbolic landscape, and demonstrates an intention to
show nature’s materiality (see Fig. 5.1). This aesthetic strategy reinforces
the hybrid spatial presentations in the film. On one level, the landscapes
are a recognizable, commonplace representation of the sertão that refers
to earlier films. On another, the images of the desert in its geographic,
geologic (sometimes botanic) objective details present a new way of
grasping that space, bringing the spectator closer to it, to a more embod-
ied and physical apprehension of it.
The presence of the geologist allows for this new spatial construc-
tion. Like the meteorologist in Ventos de agosto, the scientist is an out-
sider who enters the region to imprint a new way of looking at space and
being in space. Curiously, his presence is marked by the absence of his
84 M. Cunha
Fig. 5.1 Viajo porque

preciso, volto porque te
amo (2009)
physical body in the frame and only anchored to his voice. According
to Mary Ann Doane, the use of voice-off in narrative cinema is the evi-
dence of the character’s presence in the space of the scene when he or
she is not visible: “the traditional use of voice-off constitutes a denial of
the frame as a limit and an affirmation of the unity and homogeneity of
the depicted space” (Doane, “The Voice” 37–38). This strategy “deep-
ens the diegesis, gives it an extent which exceeds that of the image […]
it accounts for lost space” (40, emphasis in original). In classical cinema,
the voice-off gives the film a sense of unity and homogeneity, and pro-
vides the body with a sustained identity in which “synchronization binds
the voice to a body in a unity whose immediacy can only be perceived as
a given; the voice-off holds the spectacle to a space—extended but still
coherent” (47). However, the voice-off in Viajo porque preciso, unan-
chored to a visible body, produces an uncanny effect, because the body
is never framed. Rather than providing a stable identity, the absence of
the body sidetracks the viewer and denies the idea of a single subjectivity.
The oneness is not preserved.16
José Renato’s journey ends at the mouth of a river—the starting point
of the canal. The images of the small town of Piranhas evoke an aura of
abandonment. His narration points to a transformation: “This is why I
made this trip. To move […] My desire is to dive into life. A dive full of
courage, the same courage as that of those men in Acapulco who jump
from the cliffs. I’m not in Acapulco, but I feel as if I were.” Suddenly,
the film cuts to show scenes of Acapulco cliff divers, in beautifully death-
defying choreographies. This final scene is the most telling example of
the fictionalizations of archive material that composes the film. However,
these images are not just a metaphor for the character’s feeling through
showing the completely opposite landscape from that of the sertão. They
translate the emergence of a new subjectivity that comes into being. This
final sequence not only evokes the idea of smooth space, a “space of
affects” (Deleuze and Guattari 479), but also that of open images, which
rather than closing down the narrative, “open it out to the viewer’s con-
sideration, to ‘live on’ after the film itself has finished” (Chaudhuri and
Finn 52). These images show the transformative effect of the journey in
the construction of a new subjectivity.
Open Spaces, Sound, and the Presence of the Body:

Ventos de Agosto
Natural spaces are depicted differently in Mascaro’s first fictional feature
Ventos de agosto.17 The strong documental tone reveals Mascaro’s singu-
lar approach to fiction. Set in the northeastern state of Alagoas, the film
depicts a fishing village isolated from urban areas and somewhat unaf-
fected by property speculation.18 The village, though, is under threat
from the rising level of the ocean; an example of which can be seen when
the tide washes into the cemetery unearthing bones from some of the
graves. As in Viajo porque preciso, Mascaro’s film shows a place in the
process of disappearing; in this case, due to climate change. It centers
on two main characters: Shirley (Dandara de Morais) and her boyfriend,
Jeison (Geová Manoel dos Santos). Shirley used to live in a big city but
moved back to the village to care for her aging grandmother. She works
as a truck driver at a coconut farm where Jeison is a coconut picker.
Shirley wants to be a tattoo artist and Jeison spends his free time practic-
ing underwater fishing. The everyday life of the characters is disrupted
by the arrival of a meteorologist (or a wind researcher, as the final credits
describe him—played by the director himself) who arrives in the village
to study the sounds of the winds. An accident befalls the researcher and
Jeison finds him drowned at sea. As his body is never claimed, Jeison
becomes determined to notify the authorities, despite the difficulties he
encounters in the process.
In terms of structure, Ventos de agosto can be divided into three parts.
The first is an observation of the daily lives of Shirley, Jeison, and the vil-
lagers. The second centers on the meteorologist, his work methods, and
rapport with the village inhabitants. The third follows Jeison’s attempts
to dispose of the corpse. The start of the film prioritizes long takes
with little or no dialogue, which gives a sense of the village’s natural
86 M. Cunha
environment and how it privileges the space. The opening sequence

shows a dinghy slowly descending a narrow river surrounded by thick
mangrove vegetation. Attached to the stern, the camera frames Shirley
seated on the bow looking forward; an image that evokes the composi-
tional trope of the rückenfigur. As the dinghy moves to a larger stretch
of river, the vegetation thins out, allowing light to enter the frame. In
the subsequent shot, Shirley is sat in the same position facing the hori-
zon before her, with the boat sailing on the open sea. By drawing our
gaze toward and onto the sea’s expanses, the shot can be interpreted as
a movement away from terra firma—directly opposite to the movement
undertaken by many Brazilian films, which have turned to the country-
side as a setting for their narratives, as is the case in Viajo porque preciso.19
Likewise, the opening sequence is an invitation to look at the open space.
If in Viajo porque preciso the invitation to look at the outside space
is partly prompted by José Renato’s subjective focalization and nar-
ration, Ventos de agosto captures glimpses of the village’s natural sur-
roundings and its connection to the sea by depicting the characters’
everyday gestures. In fact, dialogue is sparse, contained, and in many
cases unscripted. Given the film’s tendency for spatial description, the
coastal village is an ideal setting. It concentrates on the inhabitants’
artisanal mode of work and their apparent isolation. For instance, the
village’s remoteness is evoked when Jeison tries to contact the police sta-
tion after discovering the meteorologist’s dead body. In a short scene,
Jeison appears near the top of a hill making a phone call to the police,
which is shown in a long shot that frames the lush tropical forest. He fin-
ishes by explaining where he lives, but his house has no number or street
name, and the address is defined by its location in relation to the river
and dirt roads.
This remoteness lends itself to the visual style adopted, which
immerses the spectator in the film experience. At times, the film becomes
an observation of people and their surroundings, swaying between an
ethnographic and a contemplative style. For instance, this happens in a
scene that focuses on the coconut farm workers. With a tilted long shot
of coconut trees against the blue sky, the coconut pickers quickly climb
the trees to collect the fruit. Next, the camera pans over large masses of
coconut husks, followed by a series of shots of a group of workers peel-
ing coconuts with steel speared tools driven into the ground. The camera
draws nearer to Jeison as he opens the coconuts in repetitive movements.
What is at stake in the scene is not just the presentation of the natu-
ral setting, but, more importantly, the juxtaposition of different textures
composed by the bodies and the landscape. While in Viajo porque preciso
the tendency toward the materiality of the image was achieved through
the contrasting scale between the long shots of the landscape and the
geological details in close-up, in Ventos de agosto it is attained through
the continuity between the images of natural spaces and the proximity
of the characters’ bodies. The shot of Jeison and Shirley lying naked in
the back of the loaded coconut truck attests to the film’s careful atten-
tion to sensorial aesthetics, or a haptic mode of visuality (see Fig. 5.2).
In fact, both films offer moments when a haptic perception prevails
over a distanced and purely optical mode of perception. Haptic visuality
stems, among other aspects, from a “close range” vision, in which the
eye is embodied and “may fulfil this nonoptical function” (Deleuze and
Guattari 492). As Osmar Reis Filho explains:
haptic visuality would be responsible for restoring—in a predominantly her-

meneutic and Cartesian culture such as ours—forms of communication that
are more corporeal and unmediated (non-mediated), experiences in which
we can come into contact with not only the domain of representation and
the symbolic, but the very presence of things, the materiality of objects and
environments, the creative power of the non-figurative representation. (78)
Hence, the spatial construction in Ventos de agosto, through its com-

position of bodies and natural spaces, emphasizes the physical and mate-
rial construction, moving away from an entirely optical scopic regime.
As for the film’s natural open spaces, Ventos de agosto depicts them
both as evidence of a space and mode of life that still persists, and as
an invitation to contemplate the landscape. Frames of the characters
Fig. 5.2 Ventos de
agosto (2014)
88 M. Cunha
looking at the landscape before them—usually the sea—are a commonly

used strategy. However, the film adds to the complexity of its spatiality
when the meteorologist is introduced. His first appearance occurs on a
pitch black night when only a flashlight can be seen. We hear the roar of
the sea and wind, as well as the sound of an anemometer. The next shot
depicts the researcher collecting data on the beach. As he makes slight
movements with his microphone, the howling sound of the wind oscil-
lates. At this point, the spectator realizes that not only does nature takes
center stage, but also that Mascaro’s character becomes the mediator
between the spectator and the physical and phenomenological world.
It is not surprising that Mascaro chose to make himself visibly present
in the film as a character who attempts to register what is not visible. In
previous films, the director had already shown a preoccupation with the
decentralization of authorship and the power relations between director
and dramaturgy (the one who films and the one filmed).20 Furthermore,
in creating an outsider character who comes to study the sound of the
wind, there is an inversion of the supremacy of vision over sound. It is
as though the director has opted to make a statement about the ambiva-
lent place of the filmmaker in his cinematography, especially when one
looks at films that are shot on location and made with non-professional
actors. Rather than placing himself at a distance, there is an attempt to
move closer to the profilmic. Indeed, there is a certain honesty in the
scenes when Mascaro interacts with the local inhabitants while capturing
the sound of the wind, whereby he places himself as the odd one out, an
outsider, a stranger.
The choice of the meteorologist as an agent that interrupts the eve-
ryday life of the villagers also reinforces the significance of nature and
its relationship to the cinematographic medium. Sitney argues that film
and meteorology have had a connection since the origin of cinema. He
writes that “the use of sublime landscapes often coincides with spectacu-
lar meteorological displays. Cinema was the first art that could represent
the temporality and rhythm of a storm” (112). Yet, the precedence of
photography—a technology 50 years ahead of the invention of the mov-
ing image—had moved from an interest in static objects and vistas to
that of human and animal movement at the moment of the emergence
of cinema, thereby paving the way to making cinema “a form of drama”
(105). The prevalence of dramatic actions did not prevent filmmakers
from narrative and avant-garde traditions, from Eisenstein to Brakhage,
from using meteorological phenomena in innovative ways.
Ventos de agosto introduces the theme of meteorology in a sequence

that depicts Jeison watching a TV news report about strong tides that
are reshaping the map of the Brazilian coast. Later, the meteorologist
appears to register the phenomenon of the trade winds. He looks at a
video of the globe showing the movement of winds and a caption that
reads “intertropical convergence zone” on a computer screen. By juxta-
posing thirteen sequences that depict him on duty listening to the wind
in different places and weather conditions, the film shifts from Jeison and
Shirley’s relationship with their spaces to images of the meteorologist.
In only one of these sequences do Mascaro’s character and Jeison appear
together, on the top of a reef staring down toward a blowhole. Jeison
tells the meteorologist that the reef has lungs and breathes. Though
short and with a slightly comic tone, this dialogue brings together two
opposing stances: the mystical belief of a fisherman and the skepti-
cal curiosity of the scientist. Together, they create a sense of the imma-
nent presence of nature and reinforce the film’s concern with nature’s
materiality. Moreover, this scene confirms the uncertain position of the
director, who makes a—possibly unconscious—move from being a per-
forming character to acting as a director interviewing his documentary
subject.
Cecilia Sayad proposes the notion of “performing authorship” to
discuss the physical on-screen presence of film directors, which she
describes as “an element of disruption” (13). For her, “the author’s
presence sometimes prevents the film’s existence as autonomous and
self-contained universe; the author’s body potentially extends the
boundaries of the diegesis […] and of the frame itself” (27). Crucially,
as Sayad explains, the frame ceases to be a fenced-off limit for the diege-
sis and becomes a porous space through which the director is “a link-
age positioning film and outside world in a relation of contiguity” (27).
Notwithstanding the fact that the general audience will not be aware that
the meteorologist is actually the director until the final credits, Mascaro’s
decision to act as the outsider character that disrupts the narrative and
changes the course of the events in the diegesis reflects Sayad’s argu-
ment. In her words, “the director’s corporeality is as much about sub-
stantiating an impalpable or decentered subject as it is about stressing the
director’s use of their bodies to assert their presence in the struggle to
communicate” (142).
Mascaro’s character leaves the film as he entered it: abruptly and with
little explanation. In a night scene, he stands on a reef while holding
90 M. Cunha
his microphone during a strong thunderstorm. As we hear thunder and

gusty winds, a sudden sound of air being released underwater and heavy
gasps announce the drowning of the meteorologist. His presence is
replaced by his dead body. As no one claims it, Jeison attempts to find
somewhere to send the corpse, but failing to do so, decides to take it
to the police station. Moving its attention back to the villagers, the final
scene of Ventos de agosto provides a simple gesture of collective resist-
ance: after a failed attempt to build a barrier to stop the sea water invad-
ing his father’s house, Jeison joins other inhabitants in building a stone
wall around the cemetery on the beach, in an attempt to preserve it. The
final shot frames the cemetery, the sea, and the stone barrier that Jeison
continues to arrange. He then sits on the sand looking out toward the
horizon. This last shot resembles the very first one of Shirley looking at
the sea from the fishing boat. They attest to the power of the landscape
and allow the spectator the experience of time unfolding while evoking
a sense of sameness, that nothing has really changed, while also giving a
sense of open-endedness.
Conclusion
Brandão and Sousa wrote that a new generation of directors has been
producing films with “new forms and themes” that are less concerned
with providing “a sociological ‘truth’ about Brazilian society” (162).
Specifically discussing the “brand new Brazilian cinema”, the authors
believe that such recent work by Brazilian filmmakers “do not carry out
totalizing discourses about individual or groups nor do they seem to
reach any encompassing interpretation of the nation, opting for singular
configurations, not allegorical ones” (164). This is certainly the case of
the two films discussed in this chapter. Despite choosing locations that
carry historical and iconographic meanings, the sertão and the sea in
Viajo porque preciso and Ventos de agosto are landscapes through which
new subjectivities are explored, rather than places where national identi-
ties are represented.
Both films depict stories about a way of life and landscapes that are
radically changing through the trope of disappearance and absence.
These themes are imprinted, for instance, on the geologist’s narration
in Viajo porque preciso, especially when he discusses the repossession of
land and the consequent relocation of the local inhabitants. Clearly, the
importance of the region’s economic growth supersedes the preservation
of a way of life. In Ventos de agosto, the themes are evoked in the absence
of life through images of the bones found on the beach, or when the sea
advances toward the small town. Both the disappearance of the village by
the advancing tides and the remains being washed away evoke ideas of
impermanence and death.
Each film, in its own way, is concerned with landscapes as open
images where different subjectivities emerge through a depiction of the
immanent and material character of spaces made possible by the pres-
ence of a scientist. In Ventos de agosto, materiality is explored by a focus
on sound and meteorology. The appearance of the filmmaker as mete-
orologist makes his authorial performance evident, thereby disrupting
not only narrative continuity but also the image of the director as a cen-
tralizing subject. In addition, the film carefully depicts the characters’
bodies in landscape and their looks that frame the landscape, allowing
time to unfold. This is visible in the scenes where the characters are wit-
nesses, thereby suggesting a film composed of (often unrehearsed) situ-
ations and gestures, and not as a series of actions and reactions. Hence,
Mascaro’s film not only offers an aesthetic renewal but also a new cin-
ematic ethic.
This cinematic ethic is also evoked in Viajo porque preciso. Aïnouz and
Gomes’s choice to detach the character from standard vestiges of moral-
ity and to produce affective images that suggest a new becoming are evi-
dence of this. Viajo porque preciso radically inverts a cinema of the body
through a complete visual absence of the protagonist’s body. The expres-
sion of the geologist’s textured and nuanced narration combined with
the presentation of the spaces of the sertão in contrasting cinematic scales
conveys embodied and affective landscapes. By means of different strate-
gies that renew the relationships between bodies and spaces, both films
reconfigure cinematic spatiality in contemporary Brazilian cinema.21
Notes
1. The authors used the expression in 2015 to refer to the very recent pro-
duction of films in the country.
2. The sertão occupies a special place in Brazilian cinema, particularly since
Cinema Novo filmmakers, such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Leon
Hirszman, Ruy Guerra, and Glauber Rocha, among others, chose it as
a place for them to put forward their social critique and revolutionary
discourse. As Lúcia Nagib points out, since the famous refrain sung by
92 M. Cunha
the narrator in Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God, White

Devil (1964)—“The sertão will turn into sea, the sea will turn into the
sertão”—these two opposite poles have acquired consistent allegorical
and symbolic meanings that have been revisited by later directors. Nagib
analyzes the return to the sertão and the images of the sea in the films of
retomada. For an in-depth account of the political and aesthetic meanings
of the sertão and the sea in Glauber Rocha’s oeuvre, see Xavier.
3. The notion of materiality used in the analysis is in line with Laura Marks’s
formulation. She draws attention to the aspects of images “that escape
our symbolic recognition”. For Marks, “To appreciate the materiality of
our media pulls us away from a symbolic understanding and towards a
shared physical existence” (Touch xi–xii).
4. Based on Alasdair King’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s concept. According
to King, Deleuze’s cinematic ethics “initiates an understanding of how
the body registers affects within a particular landscape” (63).
5. The directors gathered 40 h of footage plus up to 3 h of interviews with
local people, from which they made the 26-min documentary Sertão de
acrílico azul piscina/Hinterland in Swimming Pool Blue Acrylic (2004).
6. The directors explain that, more than just documenting town markets,
their project fulfilled a curiosity about the sertão, which made them
consciously decide, from the outset of their trip, to film everything that
moved them (Bernardet).
7. In Brazil, motels are a type of hotel for sexual encounters.
8. For a discussion of the poetic construction of the geographical space in
Viajo porque preciso, see Costa.
9. The shift between narrative and spectacular modes of viewing, and
between setting and landscape has been proposed by Martin Lefebvre in
his work on cinematic landscape.
10. Based on their study of nomadic practices, Deleuze and Guattari describe
smooth spaces as open spaces which adjust their life to the exterior
space—“to the open smooth space in which the body moves” (476).
This chapter understands open spaces and open images as spatial expanses
which have an ambiguous character (Chaudhuri and Finn), that is, when
their grasp is not absolutely tied to the comprehension of the narrative,
but belongs to the level of aesthetic contemplation and embodied affect.
11. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
12. It should be noted that the term “desert” here is used to refer to the arid
aspect of the sertão, as well as the visual iconography developed of the
area. The interior area of the Northeast region is a harsh, water-scarce
space, characterized by a semi-arid climate and specific vegetation.
Prominently rural, the area has large desert expanses, whose images have
been captured in cinema and have since become iconic landscapes.
13. A city in the semi-arid area of the state of Pernambuco, located 140 km
from the capital, Recife.
14. For a theoretical account of cinematic scale, see Doane (“Scale”).
15. Chauvín argues that Viajo porque preciso offers an intimate experience
of space that is evoked in the relationship between space and affectivity,
which is mediated by what she terms a “plasticity of scale” (2).
16. Lack of unity is also felt in the visual presentation of the film. Despite the
attempt to construct a linear narrative, the juxtaposition of images of dif-
ferent media purposely creates a sense of difference, dispersal, and hetero-
geneity.
17. Mascaro previously directed the critically successful feature-length
documentaries Um lugar ao sol/High-Rise (2009), Avenida Brasília
Formosa/Defiant Brasília (2010), and Doméstica/Housemaids (2012).
18. In previous decades, the area had suffered from aggressive property and
land speculation for tourism.
19. There are many examples of this inward look towards the Brazilian interior,
which provide allegorical and aesthetic devices to filmic narratives and, in
more ways than one, make reference to the film production of the 1960s,
which chose the sertão as one of its most expressive territories. Amongst
them are Baile perfumado/Perfumed Ball (Paulo Caldas and Lírio
Ferreira, 1997), Central do Brasil/Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998),
Cinema, aspirinas e urubus/Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures (Marcelo
Gomes, 2005), Árido movie/Arid Movie (Lírio Ferreira, 2006), O céu de
Suely/Suely in the Sky (Karim Aïnouz, 2006), and more recently, A história
da eternidade/The History of Eternity (Camilo Cavalcante, 2014).
20. Andrade makes this point about Mascaro’s documentary Doméstica.
In this film, seven teenagers record their maids, mixing interviews with
images of their daily lives at work. In a poignant review, Andrade writes
that, in this film, “there is no place more fragile than that of the director”
(n. pag.).
21. This research is funded by the Brazilian Programa Nacional de Pós-
Doutorado (National Postdoctoral Program)/Capes.
References
Andermann, Jens. “Exhausted Landscapes: Reframing the Rural in Recent
Argentine and Brazilian Films.” Cinema Journal 53.2 (2014): 50–70. Print.
Andrade, Fábio. “Dramaturgia imponderável.” Review of Doméstica, by Gabriel
Mascaro. Revista Cinética 16 May 2013. Web. 10 Sep. 2016.
Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Interview with Marcelo Gomes and Karim Aïnouz.
Entrevista Marcelo Gomes e Karim Aïnouz—Primeira parte. Blog de Jean-
Claude Bernardet, 08 May 2010. Web. 22 Dec. 2016.
94 M. Cunha
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics.

London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Print.
Brandão, Alessandra, and Ramayana Sousa. “The Performative Force of Bodies:
Affective Realism in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema.” Ilha do Desterro 68.3
(2015): 161–170. Periódicos UFSC. Web. 10 Sep. 2016.
Chaudhuri, Shohini, and Howard Finn. “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and
the New Iranian Cinema.” Screen 44.1 (2003): 38–57. Print.
Chauvín, Irene Deprevis. “Geographies of Love(lessness), Space and Affectivity
in Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (I Travel Because I Need to, I
Come Back Because I Love You) (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009)
and Turistas (Tourists) (Alicia Scherson, 2009).” Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies 25.3 (2016): 1–17. Taylor & Francis. Web. 10 Sep. 2016.
Costa, Maria Helena B. e V. “Percursos poéticos e poéticas geográficas em Viajo
porque preciso, volto porque te amo.” Revista Geografares Special Issue
(2014): 133–146. Periódicos UFES. Web. 10 Sep 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1987. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Scale and the Negotiation of ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Space in
Cinema.” Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Eds. Lucia Nagib and Cecília
Mello. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 63–81. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33–50. Print.
King, Alasdair. “Fault Lines: Deleuze, Cinema, and the Ethical Landscape.”
Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship.
Eds. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
57–75. Print.
Lefebvre, Martin. “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema.” Landscape
and Film. Ed. Martin Lefebvre. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
19–59. Print.
Marks, Laura U. “Asphalt Nomadism: The New Desert in Arab Independent
Cinema.” Landscape and Film. Ed. Martin Lefebvre. London and New York:
Routledge, 2006. 125–147. Print.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.
Nagib, Lúcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London:
I.B.Tauris, 2007. Print.
Reis Filho, Osmar G. “Reconfigurações do olhar: o háptico na cultura visual con-
temporânea.” Visualidades 10.2 (2012): 75–89. Revistas UFG. Web. 10 Sep.
2016.
Sayad, Cecilia. Performing Authorship: Self-inscription and Corporeality in the
Cinema. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Print.
Sitney, P. Adams. “Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the
Camera.” Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan
Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 103–126. Print.
Xavier, Ismail. Sertão Mar. Glauber Rocha e a estética da fome. São Paulo: Cosac
Naify, 2007. Print.
Author Biography
Mariana Cunha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Federal University
of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where she is currently developing a research
project on the relationship between landscape and embodiment in contempo-
rary world cinema. She holds a PhD (2005–2010) from Birkbeck, University
of London, and she has taught Brazilian studies at Queen Mary, University of
London and at the University of Oxford.
CHAPTER 6
Intensive Spatium and the Construction

of Child Subjectivities in Brazilian Cinema
Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim

and Marcus Pereira Novaes
Frequently, Brazilian cinematographic productions focus on the child

as a character through which the country’s contradictions are exposed
and alternatives are sought, especially to violence. In the process of ques-
tioning the Brazilian experience within its specificities and peculiar to its
time, the child is a character who embodies the coalescence of two ten-
dencies—ethical and aesthetic—appearing in recent filmography either
as affirmative potency (Marcello), or as the observer (Martin-Jones) of
a story while accepting the impossibility of narrating certain experiences.
This chapter describes and discusses the ways in which cinema uses
images connected to the idea of childhood to give visibility to and prob-
lematize a possible other child subjectivity; that of the Brazilian child.
It is also related to the assumption that these images, particular to
Brazilian childhood, cannot be considered universally or, indeed, disso-
ciated from the filmic space that modulates them. In other words, the
filmic space is comprehended as both the place where the narratives
A.C.R. de Amorim (*) · M.P. Novaes 

University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

98 A.C.R. de Amorim and M.P. Novaes
develop and the expression of cinematic time in relation to the charac-

ters, objects, and the audience’s memory. Instead of approaching the
characters as being a result of a social, cultural, political, or historical
production (Vieira), this chapter discusses the different meanings of the
Brazilian child’s subjectivities that arise, emerge, and place themselves
in the filmic images. It is argued that the actualization or emergence of
these images will depend on numerous changes in the milieu, taken here
as a place with different historical, sociological, and geographical per-
spectives that vary through cinematic time and in its occasional ruptures,
cuts, editing, and montage. In the relation between the child and the
time dimension, the subjectivities express themselves as the urgency of
the present that also has basic implications in terms of the future. This
sense of urgency concerns, most of all, the symbolic survival of child-
hood in the Brazilian context.
This chapter examines three Brazilian audiovisual productions: the
short film Bilu e João/Bilu and João (Kátia Lund, 2005), the feature
film Meu pé de laranja lima/My Sweet Orange Tree (Marcos Bernstein,
2012), and the documentary Território do brincar/Territory of Play
(Renata Meirelles and David Reeks, 2015). The different perspectives of
childhood represented in these films are not conditioned exclusively by
external and contextual factors. The filmic space acts as the modulator of
the meanings of these images. This allows different perspectives of child-
hood to be organized from a range of sensations, affects, and percep-
tions of the movies’ narratives as well as from the intrinsic qualities of the
image, and that are related to its color, texture, movement, and speed;
features that Martine Beugnet points out as being essential for a cinema
of sensation.
In this sense, this chapter focuses on the intensification of a child
subjectivity, considering the space as a means for the production of
encounters and stories, open to different possibilities of coexistence, not
previously coordinated or structured. Mirroring Doreen Massey’s affir-
mation, space “can never be that completed simultaneity in which all
interconnections have been established, in which everywhere is already
(and at that moment unchangingly) linked to everywhere else” (For
Space 107).
The paradoxical condition of the films’ images that we analyze is asso-
ciated with the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, espe-
cially the concept of intensive spatium, which he explores in many of his
6 INTENSIVE SPATIUM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHILD … 99
works (Difference and Repetition; Dialogues; Desert Islands; A Thousand

Plateaus). Intensive spatium is the convergence of the spatial and temporal
dimensions of the filmic images: if, on the one hand, it is the character-
istic of the depth of field that allows the perception of the image, on the
other, this is only possible if a degradation of the intensity is felt, which is
an effect of the distance that the time of cinema brings about between the
visible image and the understanding of it. In other words, the acknowl-
edgment or otherwise of representations of childhood in the images of the
chosen films will work in a successive order, relying on the synthesis of time
that is exerted in depth. Analytically, what is of interest here is the action
of cinematographic time in the space where the images come to life. The
focus of the analysis will be the images of the three films per se rather than
talking about them, isolating them as empirical objects or data. The images
of the three movies are agents that disrupt, force, and provoke thought.
Dialogues Between Child Subjectivities and Cinema

Cinema often leads to thinking about child subjectivities that modern
institutions have tried to produce, thus reinforcing the framing of chil-
dren within models that society considers ideal. However, some film-
makers problematize the complexity in the construction of subjectivities
based on a universal model of the human being, emphasizing the flaws,
oscillations, and false judgments in relation to perceptions of child
groups, proposing different views. This is the case for the three films
discussed in this chapter. From the point of view of the production of
subjectivities, they are in line with the discussions proposed by Simon
O’Sullivan, who points out that “the subject operates as a kind of cap-
ture, and, it must be said, as a cohering mechanism. Indeed, the subject,
in this sense, is itself a kind of operating fiction” (183). In these films
child subjectivities are presented as differing potencies; in other words,
the children’s actions can always differ from a supposed structural model.
From the invention of the child-subject, the analyzed films share
one of the greatest potentialities of childhood: the will and openness to
experiment. Bilu e João and Meu pé de laranja lima demonstrate a con-
nection between aesthetic experimentation and childhood imagination.
In Território do brincar, images of Brazilian children are constructed spe-
cifically through the act of playing. They point out the need to think of
the child subjectively. This is done by representing children in moments
of invention during play, such as when they start to use toys (that have
different meanings in different cultures) in order to set up a tent, dem-
onstrating the child’s capacity for invention.
One of the challenges of this analysis will be to construct a framework
in which the image’s extensive qualities do not fall on the logic of recog-
nition about childhood. For this, based on the discussions of Massey and
Deleuze, this chapter proposes the concept of child-image, which offers
a notion of childhood in a permanent process of becoming, closer to the
effects of modulation.
As the following sections demonstrate, the three films compose
images of childhood subjectivities modulated in the filmic space, while
considering the existing polarization between movable and mutable
identities, and an already known model of subject that is unique, essen-
tial, “in itself” (or Cartesian). Crucially, the movement of searching for
meanings for subjectivities leads to a return to the pairing of subject and
object, which is necessary for the discussion of the concept of spatium.
Bilu E João: Childhood in Heterogeneity

Bilu e João is one of seven short films in the Italian–French production
All the Invisible Children (Mehdi Charef, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee,
Kátia Lund, Jordan Scott, Ridley Scott, Stefano Veneruso, and John
Woo, 2005). It portrays two siblings on a journey around the city of São
Paulo as they pull a small rented cart which will be loaded with tin cans,
cardboard, among other recyclable materials to be sold at a storehouse
(see Fig. 6.1). The siblings live in extreme poverty and are depicted as
subjects of resistance to the stark environment of the city. They expe-
rience great difficulties until they get to complete their journey as they
try to make some money (a few reais) to buy bricks. Begging or stealing
Fig. 6.1 Bilu e João

(2005)
are not given as a possibility. The brother and sister are placed within
the complex movement of the city and within a chain of production and
economic exchange. Although they can partially complete their task, the
final scene of the film shows an image that contrasts the poverty of the
slums where they live with the modern buildings of contiguous regions
of São Paulo city in the background, suggesting that it might be impos-
sible to reverse the social inequality merely through labor. This image
is composed by the presentation of two tenuously outlined spaces. The
contrast is evident because these recurring and well-known images carry
traces of social and cultural differences. Yet, it is worth exploring this
image’s flaws, the gap, and the interruption that cinema entails in order
to think about Brazilian childhood subjectivities, which break with his-
torical linearity.
Recent Brazilian cinema has constructed a tension between differ-
ent kinds of utopian and dystopian images of the country’s history and
its sociocultural context. According to Nagib, and Shaw and Dennison,
the phenomenon of a dystopian Brazil rendered in such films stands out.
Yet the phenomenon of an “interrupted utopia” as it has been astutely
observed by these scholars, can be said to produce a figuration of the
Brazilian people as an anomaly of pure forms, as though a “deformation”
of what was wished or expected to constitute Brazil and Brazilian iden-
tity. The child’s life on the streets of a Brazilian city is picked out as one
of the exemplar characteristics for cinema to deal with the condition of
“a present and a future dystopia […], which is plagued by extreme lev-
els of social injustice and one of the worst wealth distribution rates any-
where in the world” (Vieira 226).
This has been emphasized by the director in an interview. She stated
that children like Bilu and João share an environment of poverty in their
search for a breadline existence; as an example, they need to buy bricks
and help to “build a part of the shack”. Betting on the fact that, while
they still have a small space to “grow” and are able to “make something
sprout” there, “they will keep trying”, Lund highlights the inventive
capacity of the children, but also asks: “To sell tin cans, Bilu and João
are being creative and resistant. But how about the day they notice it
is useless? Where does all this energy go to when the shack disappears?
How will it be when they do not have anything to build?” (Migliorin n.
pag.). Hence, the image that contrasts the poverty in the slums in the
foreground and the modern buildings in the background at the end of
the film could be understood as Bilu and João’s vision toward the future,
which is expressed in its depth, in its spatial extensive quality. It places

them before their limits, demanding them to reappropriate the senses of
(not-)belonging and the impossibility of the historical narrative’s conti-
nuity.
In this film, time could be expressed in relation to the space in which
the subjects (the children) are faced with ruptures with the historical
narratives, which is considered an important aspect in the production of
subjectivities, not linked to a logical result of the actions and reactions
suffered as a consequence of displacement in space.
Therefore, the production of child subjectivities in a filmic space that
is marked by an open or interconnected simultaneity is necessarily associ-
ated with temporal or intensive dimensions, that is to say, with the insen-
sible (as something new, that still does not have a previous signification
that is already known) and, at the same time, with what could only be
felt. From this, two questions could be asked. How could the image be
felt by itself, regardless of its qualities and the extension (depth) in which
it partitions itself? How would the image be something else other than
“felt”, given that it is exactly what makes us feel and defines the very
limit of sensibility?
In Lund’s movie, not only does one notice the movement of the sib-
lings in a space that continuously emphasizes breaks and challenges that
they have to manage in order to complete their task, which intensifies the
dramatic tone of the narrative, but also the children’s necessary creativity
to find unexpected solutions to the problems that appear. This happens
in the cuts between scenes, in which two simultaneous narratives, that
are also in conflict, occupy the filmic space. By composing this montage,
Lund therefore creates intervals of time that open up the extensive depth
to sensory perception. The reality of the siblings in the city appears as
developing a homogenous extension but with an immanent center, in
which the slums and other areas of the city are symmetric and divisible
homologous parts with reversible relationships. It could then be said that
the politics of images in this film acts critically upon the production of
child subjectivities through the State’s modus operandi, which acts in an
arithmetic and geometric way.
In the ethical and aesthetic context, the images, sounds, and
rhythm of this short movie (which was initially associated with a video
game) portray the children within a logic that is linked to the dynam-
ics of capitalist production. It exposes ethical issues about working chil-
dren and stolen childhood, an effect of the Brazilian identity dystopia.
Also important are the cuts between scenes because they point to the
possibility of what is not expected yet, since both the subject and the
world are part of a nature that is simultaneously extensive and inten-
sive. This recalls O’Sullivan’s argument concerning the subject as a radi-
cal cut, as defined precisely by its distance from the world. For example,
the initial scenes of Bilu e João show shots of João playing a Formula
One video game, alternating with shots of Bilu riding a bike down the
alleys of a slum with other children, which suggest a certain coincidence
between these activities. Soon after this, João and Bilu rent the cart that
they will pull for a whole day around the city, and the images will alter-
nate between the Ferrari in the video game and the cart, thus announc-
ing that a game has started.
At first, the depth of the filmic space seems to return to the logic of
representation, referring to the narrative continuity and, in this way, to
cruelty, to the pragmatism and the usefulness of life for capitalism and
for the State that are expressed through Bilu’s and João’s subjectivities,
drifting away from the new and the different. Nevertheless, the distances
implied by this spatial depth are, simultaneously, explanations for the
extensive development and are fundamentally connected to the intensity
of sensation. In this sense, the perception of childhood through spatial
depth and the sensory experiences of being a child in the city demon-
strate the close relationship of the experimentation between images to
express something new.
It is true that the video game and its temporal actualization in the
relationship between reality and imagination bring some polarizations to
the film that are marked by individuality–networks of solidarity, playful-
ness–crudeness, common to economic and exploitative relations. This
game invents the real and simultaneously dislocates it into lines of flight,
which help to bring to the fore concepts of childhood that have not yet
been established, for example, the friendship and solidarity that alleviate
the struggle and poverty faced every day. Between working on the streets
and the everyday life in the slums, the desire to eat French fries is an
excuse to soften the next day.
Hence, this short movie arguably brings back the question of child-
hood invisibility, or of its “disappearance”—conjectures that stress the
historic image of childhood in the sense that the film points to the loss
of its specificity. Such conjectures are constituted by three elements that
have been intensifying from the mid-twentieth century: the close rela-
tion between children and the means of communication, the immersion
of childhood into the world of consumption, and the centrality of the

child in present-day society. The association with the video game in this
context is indeed very significant.
Let us return to the image that started this chapter subsection: the
appearance of an emblematic space that has the slums in the foreground
and mirrored buildings in the background. The expression of childhood
invisibility through imagery converges to a non-mimetic one between
the child and the slums that are being swallowed up by the buildings;
that is, this works as a synthesis of class and economic social division.
This double composition of image-clichés is not about reproducing the
visible, or bringing it to light from the invisible. The power of the action
against the cliché is the act of bringing the image back to the visible.
Thus, the anomaly of the pure forms, the dystopia, that the Brazilian
childhood “would represent” in this short film, returns as lines of flight1
and resignification of the cultural differences in relation to the centrality
of identities.
When the two children disappear in a cinematographic shot of the
social inequality of cities, the ethical dimensions of this image trace pul-
sating lines toward the wish to create something finite that restores the
infinite; an encounter of forces without beginning or end that never
returns to itself. It would mean dealing with tragedy, horror, and death,
from which, according to Nadine Boljkovac, “the basic human perspec-
tive and a static interpretation of the time flow lose themselves” (27). In
this way, the aesthetic experience of the difference perforates the dysto-
pian degradation of the representation of childhood in Brazil, as a result
of the distance that cinematic time creates between the visible image and
what no longer can be recognized in it.
Meu Pé De Laranja Lima: The Liquid Fold

Meu pé de laranja lima is an adaptation of José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s
homonymous novel published in 1968. In this movie, Zezé, the child
of a poor family from the state of Minas Gerais, faces with his family
severe financial problems and is mistreated by his father and older sis-
ter. A number of scenes show Zezé dealing with physical and/or emo-
tional pain, and the director Marcos Bernstein experiments with and
creates in the images an environment where the child survives in the
harsh reality by imagining and inventing other ways to live. The boy talks
to and shares his wishes, fears, and escapes with his little orange tree.
He imagines himself riding a horse or being on an island, which gives a

poetic tone to the story and indeed contrasts with its violent scenes.
The director, who is also the scriptwriter, emphasizes the satisfaction
of writing a script that provides the “possibility of playing with fantasy”,
in which there are “subjective moments where the character projects
himself into other situations” (Aouad n. pag.). Regarding the inven-
tion of images that project the child’s fantasy, Bernstein says that he uses
scenes where fantasy is interspersed with the dramatic situation, which is
a “way of breaking” the linearity of the film. According to the director,
It did not make sense to keep that exaggeration of violence. The idea is
rather to create a universe where you feel the weight of what is happening,
without showing it. On the other hand, Zezé fantasizes everything, includ-
ing this. His way of surviving is through believing he is somewhere else
while being beaten. (Aouad n. pag.)
Therefore, this section will initially emphasize the role of such cuts
in the interplay between imagination and reality, as an attempt to con-
ceive them as a spatium, a temporal interval in the filmic space where
the differences are still capable of variations in the extensive qualities that
become visible in the images. Childhood emerges as a subjectivity that is
open to space–time dynamisms which will imply that there is a field out
of which they would not be produced. Deleuze proposes that such a field
would be intensive, that is, “it implies differences of intensity distributed
at different depths” (Desert Islands 97). He further argues that
Though experience always shows us intensities already developed in exten-

sions, already covered over by qualities, we must conceive, precisely as a
condition of experience, of pure intensities enveloped in a depth, in an
intensive spatium that preexists every quality and every extension. (97)
In the film, the childhood subjectivities are constituted in movements

that transversalize space/time and problematize reality, departing from
fantasy and imagination.
According to Massey (“Some Times” 108), “if movement is reality
itself then what we think of as space is a cut through all those trajecto-
ries; a simultaneity of unfinished stories.” Thus, the representations of
childhood comprehended in this way would always be varying and dif-
fering from the way that once was predominantly accepted as the truth.
Nevertheless, it is not enough to discover a difference of nature between

imagination and reality, if persisting on the duality between the emer-
gence of new subjectivities and their specifications and partitions. This
occurs because, as previously noted, spatium is being visualized concep-
tually in relation to the cinema images, focusing on perceiving how the
extensive and the intensive are mutual conditions in order to operate
inside a system composed of representation and the sensory, or between
the insensible and that which can only be felt. In other words, the pure
intensity, which is still potential, can only express itself when the play of
forces between qualitative and quantitative characteristics is evidenced.
In this way, cinema could show the spatium, the space as pure intuition,
when it creates images in which intensive qualities and extensive charac-
teristics suffer actions and reactions, as well as pauses and deviations, pos-
sibly influencing the constitution of a subjectivity, in this case, childhood.
The child-image presents itself as an image that promotes encounters
not yet certified or legitimized within a dominant language, and which
will not often express its creations in agreement with what is habitually
recognized and validated. As such, the child-image will always present
childhood as a cut that will be constituted in a non-static space, given that
space “has time/times within it” (Massey, “Some Times” 108), in which
a field characterized by movements is anachronically constituted, “outside
of which they would not be produced” (Deleuze, Desert Islands 96–97).
In Meu pé de laranja lima, the proposed movements for a child-image
would also present implications for the differential uses of the forms of
language validated in cinema. By bringing them back as a kind of ritor-
nello, they would release new flows of creations and composition. It is
through such flows that a child-image is expressed, in more harmonic
variations or subject to disagreements and misunderstandings of repre-
sentation.
The emergence of the child-image in the film can be observed in one
particular sequence. It starts with a shot of a moving train at night, then
shows a character’s relieved face when realizing that there is no one else
in that place. Next, the camera gradually shows a child’s feet and a bam-
boo grove in the background to slowly reveal Zezé lying down under his
orange tree, entertaining himself with a lantern through the dark night,
thus making evident that the boy did not commit suicide, as announced
in the narrative. The transition between the two scenes is also accompa-
nied by Alban Sautor’s song Sunny Day, which brings some relief and
tranquillity to the audience.
The following scene presents a new transition in which the camera,

moving through the dark background, shows Zezé opening a door
which, once entirely opened, allows the light from outside to illuminate
the room and reveal smoke that takes up the whole frame. The camera
shows that the boy brings a fish with him, and he then looks to the side
where his father is smoking in the dark. A few minutes later, another
scene starts with quick cuts showing the boy singing while his father
thrashes him. After that, the father stops. The soundtrack is reintroduced
slowly at the same time as the camera shows only fragments of the faces
and bodies, in an image that increasingly blurs between the alternations
of the father’s and the child’s faces, until the transition to the next scene,
where the blurring appears as a background and an outline of the father’s
face, as if the father were seen through the child’s tears. The image
shows the father’s face, eyes closed, filled with water and, slowly, there is
a transition to the boy floating on the river in a frame that is filled with
light (see Fig. 6.2). Concomitantly, a piano tune starts and suggests that
the boy has finally encountered some peace.
It can be argued that a sort of liquid image is established in the con-
trast between the boy’s tears, the father’s, and later the boy floating on
the water of the river. This liquidity works in what Deleuze and Guattari
define as smooth space: opposed to a geometrically structured space,
distributed point to point in distances, marked by a kind of arithme-
tic of the real, which characterizes striated space. What is perceived is
the intensive action of spatium, a space that is more about affects than
about properties. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “Whereas in the stri-
ated [space] forms organize a matter, in the smooth [space] materials
signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather
than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties.”
(A Thousand Plateaus 479) Hence, Bernstein arguably seems to
Fig. 6.2 Meu pé de
laranja lima (2012)
approach the inventive and experimental conception of childhood. In

his film, the concept of child-image takes as references the film images
that are an inside and an outside, a past (memory) and a present (sub-
jectivity); they are the two faces of a single surface that folds over itself.
The distances between the significance of the child’s active and creative
potential and its iconic role as a seer of a history that violates, mistreats,
and immobilizes it are decreased.
Tom Conley formulates a synthesis of the concept of subjectiva-
tion fold that Deleuze uses in his unique reading of Foucault’s work.
Firstly, it is important to indicate that the fold could be thought of as
an image from which subjectivities are processed, highlighting the fre-
quent and innermost contact between what is external or internal to the
subject. Four folds affect the relation of the subject with itself, and it is
from them that the text will extend the thought about image and child-
hood. The first is the fold of the body, the one that is spatiotemporally
circumscribed by the body folds; the second is the “fold of the relation
between forces, or social conflict”; the third is the “fold of the knowl-
edge, or the fold of truth in so far as it constitutes a relation of truth to
our being” and the other way around; and the fourth is the fold of “the
outside itself, the ultimate fold of the limit of life and death” (qtd. in
Conley 115).
If, for the politics of representation and identity affirmation, the
first and second folds to which Conley refers would reaffirm their vital-
ity and urgency for the theorizations of childhood that has been previ-
ously rooted in identities that were already known. The other two folds
are an invitation to the radical dislocation that the images incite. In
other words, the first two folds reaffirm the supremacy of the depth of
the extensive space in the constitution of subjectivities. Yet the last two
move toward the sensitive intensive spatium, which allows an association
to what Guattari has called “resingularization”, or “the constitution of
complexes of subjectivation” that offers people “different possibilities for
composing their existential corporeality” (qtd. in O’Sullivan 188).
The relation between childhood and the image that fold themselves
in the character of Zezé, makes him as much an archive as a set of sub-
jectivations in a mental map traced in relation to the past, extracting the
events and the elements of the experienced reality in a present time that
does not let childhood disappear. This occurs because, once an adult, the
narrator of the film gradually allows the temporal gap to open and pre-
sents a rip in the subjectivity fold of childhood that continues its process
of differentiation. The role of imagination is noticed and constitutes the

fold outside the narrator subject in himself, the death of the previous sig-
nification that the film narrator’s reminiscence tries to grab, the depth of
his childhood experience that spreads out in the cinematographic shot.
The child-image is produced in contact with an “I” that contemplates
and contrasts with a world that repeats itself for this contemplation, from
successive and distinct elements. It cannot be said that the difference that
emerges belongs to one of the sides of the encounter exclusively, be it
the real, the imaginary, the fantastic, or the witness.
Território Do Brincar: Intensive Object

Território do brincar is a production of documentary nature that seeks
to synthesize, through Brazilian regional and cultural diversity, plays
and games that are common to children. Over 21 months, the direc-
tors filmed in rural, indigenous, and Quilombola communities, big cities,
the backlands, and the coast. The film depicts, in the action of playing,
something that is common during childhood which, at the same time,
could approach and mark differences between such distinct children.
The film images arguably lead one to thinking that play presents itself
as something that will necessarily germinate from childhood. However,
childhood is an “egg”, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s idea: “not regres-
sive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary” (A Thousand Plateaus
164). According to the philosophers: “You always carry it with you as
your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg
is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as
principle of production.” (164)
Therefore, childhood is not out of the milieu that produces it as a
pure transcendence that will actualize continuously in the same way. It
would be in an intensive depth supposed by several possible extensions
and parts, as the action of playing, which could coincide, or not, with
the actualization of childhood on the being, that is, the child. Childhood
in its quality of differing would be located in a spatium susceptible to be
filled by events, still far from having forms and perceptible actualizations.
In the same way as in Meu pé de laranja lima, it would be in a “space of
affects, more than one of properties” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus 479); in other words, childhood is still in a zone of indiscern-
ibility that could actualize it differently from what could be expected as
regular characteristics.
The child-image is implied in Território do brincar in a nonlinear

time that is still populated by virtualities in which the play itself works
as one way to actualize childhood, but cannot necessarily be assumed as
an attribute of child subjectivities prior to their possible actualization.
In other words, the child-image perforates the distance between playing
and being a child. It is also important to highlight that the play oper-
ates from the depletion of the pre-signified field of possibilities that are
related to the premise of the identification of the child as a being who
plays. There are references in the film that emphasize a return to time
and space in the relationship between the children and the toys and
plays, that is, a recapture of the relationships between subject, object,
and time to understand significations about subjectivity (see Fig. 6.3).
Nevertheless, it is important to note that the film makes this move-
ment as per Deleuze’s (Difference and Repetition) view about chronologi-
cal time, which should be negated. By doing so, a break with the past,
present, and future continuity line would occur. It is from this continuity
timeline that we habitually think about what we could materialize, visually
and narratively, from our perception of the world. Território do brincar
takes another direction, relating the events of play as a trigger of the vir-
tualities of child subjectivities that cannot be represented or (re)cognized
yet. This often occurs because it is not possible to resort to an explanation
based on knowledge and experiences from the past or the present.
Unlike the other two films analyzed, Território do brincar relies
on contiguous zones between children of different cultures, present-
ing through the games something that is common, a link of identi-
tary belonging of the children and a universal expression of childhood.
It is in this context that the subjectivities of Brazilian and other coun-
tries’ children are outlined. The children’s cultural characteristics appear
Fig. 6.3 Território do
brincar (2015)
imagetically as backgrounds, landscapes, sceneries, or as natural elements.

The cultures are commonly expressed in the film as indicative of classes,
ethnicities, geographies, or through aspects of the idyllic and of the holy.
The territory, as a passage, weaves a double game of ambivalent significa-
tion between the scenes that actualizes through differences such as gen-
der and age. Therefore, they are images that operate strongly in the logic
of representation.
However, this chapter seeks the lines that sketch childhood in images
that, for operating in the circuit of representations and causing some
perforations in them, provide us with hints to enter territories that are
concentrated by virtuality, whose marks, still evident in the field of vis-
ibilities, are indiscernibility, abstraction, and continuous variation. These
are the qualities of the process of the singularization of childhood that
will be emphasized. For example, in several passages of the film it is
implied that the manufacturing of toys is a type of imitation or tracing
of what already exists in nature, such as the flight of birds, or humans’
extractive work. Some of the film’s images, due to its cuts, framings, and
compositions, allow one to think that what is being transformed is not
the differences (as if there were several differences) that repeat in order
to acquire a new identity.
Meirelles and Reeks present the toy as an object that always repeats
itself in the identification of what is to be a child, but this is inseparable
from the virtualities and differences that children can actualize in its use.
As Deleuze and Parnet claim, “It is by virtue of their mutual inextricabil-
ity that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects” (149). When
entering a game or giving another signification to an object, children can
create functions and uses other than those that this object would nor-
mally represent as a result of cultural patterns, pushing the difference out
of a closed identitary circle. The time to play is an inventive time that
allows a set of circles of virtual images about the object to be launched,
thus releasing its current image in a spatium that will be determined by a
maximum amount of imaginable time. Taking into account the concept
of spatium, Território do brincar does the expected in the play between
the sensory and the cognoscible qualities of the images. Nevertheless,
variations are created in circles of virtual images, which are more or less
extensive, corresponding to varying dense layers of the actual object.
Moreover, Deleuze and Parnet relate this maximum of imaginable
time with the image to an impetus upon the object whose interest is
to become virtual. In other words, the variation of the object between
its actual state (visible, cognoscible) and virtual state (or undetectable)
traces a plane of immanence of the intensive spatium of child subjectivi-
ties through the toys. Hence, Território do brincar relies more on the
extensive quality of the space, that is to say, in the depth that would
bring back child identities through their play. This occurs because there
is contiguity of the film images, rather than it being cut. A specific scene
of the film illustrates this. Children from different regions are portrayed
as having in common the habit of building shelters in their games, but
some of them differ from this generalization when covering a shelter dis-
tinctively, as previously described in this chapter. The objects gain other
virtual layers that actualize in them and exhaust their original function,
which would refer to strong cultural values. In turn, the objects become
virtual and, for that reason, they turn into surfaces for other child subjec-
tivities to be sketched with them. As a result, childhood would then con-
stitute an intensifier of the differences within an intensive spatium.
Conclusion: Child-Image and Filmic Crossings

This chapter sought to demonstrate how child subjectivities are articu-
lated by resorting to the images of three Brazilian audiovisual produc-
tions. It highlighted the production of images that not only differ but
also approximate in extensive qualities in relation to space, particularly
how they constitute what has been denominated as child-image. This is
marked by its intensive quality which is open to experimentation, to the
new and difference.
Some images evoke a thought resingularization when consider-
ing that the change has as its target the “same”, the idea of unit. The
unit would need to be fractured and the intensive spatium is the pos-
sible mechanism for universality to achieve its differentiation. The filmic
space and time are the conductors of the perception of the intensive spa-
tium acting upon this differentiation of child subjectivities. Such a pro-
cess is evident in the cinematographic montage and editing, as well as in
the imagination and inventive creation originated during the imagetic
experimentation.
At certain times, the child-image penetrates the blocks of childhood,
composed by children-becomings that would express possible subjec-
tivation effects, notably the openings, fissures, and deviations to which
the youngsters would be connected. At other times, the child-image’s
modes of effectuation are presented through modulatory movements of
singularization of an image, constituted from the experimentation in the

audiovisual image, as effects that would express the complexity that takes
the invention and creation of effectuations as a way of asserting reality: as
the potency of fantasy.
For this propose, the “radical enigmatic presence” of the child
(Marcello) is accepted and restored. This means viewing the child in
its complete heterogeneity. Therefore, the child would always be some-
thing different from what we can foresee, know, want, and/or expect.
Childhood is not the expression of an array of anomalous plans for the
future, in the context of the loss of pure or utopian forms. Its diversity
resists the perception, still persistent and desired, of a homogeneous fig-
ure that is stable and recognizable. They are fragments of this “unitary”
and “total” part of the cinematographic space that represents and is rep-
resented culturally and socially.
Note
1.
For a discussion on this theme, see Deleuze (Desert Islands; The Logic
of Sense); Deleuze and Parnet; and Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand
Plateaus; What is Philosophy?).
References
Aouad, Amanda. “Pré-estreia de Meu pé de laranja lima (com entrevista).” Cine
Pipoca Cult (2013): n. pag. Web. 06 Sept. 2016.
Beugnet, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of
Transgression. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2007. Print.
Boljkovac, Nadine. Untimely Affects. Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print.
Conley, Tom. “Foucault + Fold.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Ed. Adrian Parr.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 114–117. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
2005. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2001. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Print.
Marcello, Fabiana de Amorim. “Cinema e educação: da criança que nos convoca
à imagem que nos afronta.” Revista Brasileira de Educação 13.38 (2008):
343–413. Print.
Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinema. London: Continuum, 2011.
Print.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Print.
Massey, Doreen. “Some Times of Space.” Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project.
Ed. Susan May. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Publishing, 2003. 107–
118. Print.
Migliorin, Cezar. “Bilú e João, de Kátia Lund.” Revista Cinética (2006): n. pag.
Web. 06 Sept. 2016.
Nagib, Lúcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London:
I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print.
O’Sullivan, Simon. On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-
Infinite Relation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Shaw, Lisa and Stephanie Dennison. Brazilian National Cinema. London and
New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Vieira, João Luiz. “The Transnational Other: Street Kids in Contemporary
Brazilian Cinema.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Eds. Natasa
Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. New York: Routledge, 2010. 226–243.
Print.
Authors’ Biography
Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim is Professor in the Faculty of Education at

the University of Campinas, Brazil, and a researcher in its Laboratory of Audiovisual
Studies and in the Philosophy Studio at University of Porto, Portugal.
Marcus Pereira Novaes is a PhD candidate at the University of Campinas

(UNICAMP) in Brazil. He is a board member of the Brazilian Reading Association
(2016–2018). He is a researcher at OLHO (Laboratory of Audiovisual Studies) at
UNICAMP and did his exchange studies at the University of Glasgow.
PART III
Utopia, Memory, and Urban Architecture

CHAPTER 7
Insolação: Subjective Perception of an Urban

Utopia Through the Lens of Love and Loss
Leticia Colnago
I believe that the Canaletto’s and Piranesi’s of our time are the directors, the people
of the cinema: they describe the modern city, its centre and its outskirts. […]
The outskirts of Pasolini’s Rome or of Antonioni’s Milan, were discovered first
in the cinema, rather than by architects.
(Rossi 7–8)
Aldo Rossi’s statement rings true in more ways than one. In an age
that is dedicated to spectacle it is often up to the artists to focus their
sensory perception on areas that might otherwise have never been
given a second thought and to highlight them to the general audi-
ence. Due to the medium they employ, film directors are specially
equipped to do this in relation to cities and urban environments because
every film takes place in space. Therefore, the spatial presence and rel-
evance should be acknowledged, although some directors may choose
to devote more attention to it than others. Directors Daniela Thomas
and Felipe Hirsch take on this task in their film Insolação/Sunstroke
(2009),1 predominantly shot in the Modernist utopian2 city of Brasília
and its surroundings—though an inattentive viewer would be forgiven
for not recognizing it.3 Because they chose to conceal its most iconic
L. Colnago (*) 
Vila Velha, Brazil

118 L. Colnago
architectural and urban landmarks they managed to reveal a facet of the

city that is somehow more faithful to its spirit than its more well-known
Monumental Axis.4 To paraphrase Aldo Rossi, the directors (re)discover
Brasília and then present it to the audience through their eyes.
This chapter proposes to analyze how the presentation of spaces and
the built environment in the film Insolação simultaneously influences
and visually translates the characters’ intimate emotional disposition.
Much like the way in which Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni por-
trayed the outskirts of Milan (an influence that is clearly recognizable
in this film), Thomas and Hirsch enlist the outskirts of the (unnamed)
Modernist city of Brasília as the barren landscape where the characters’
tales of love and loss unfold. Although the film is set in real locations,
the almost total absence of life—apart from the presence of the main
characters—combined with feelings of sterility accentuated by the bare
materials common to Modern architecture, acts to intensify feelings of
emotional detachment and displacement, turning this postcard city into
an ascetic non-place. As will be discussed, the directors of Insolação
take advantage of these preconceptions and mental associations regard-
ing Modern architecture when they choose one of the greatest Modern
urbanistic efforts to set the film’s narrative. (Brasília is a city that, not by
chance, has a far different pace from most other contemporary cities due
to its characteristic design.)
This chapter’s discussion of Insolação is twofold. It considers the
importance of architecture in films as a contextualizing device meant to
give the plot a physical environment in which to unfold while also pro-
viding visual stimuli that can be used to trigger individual or shared sym-
bolisms that complement the plot. It also examines the ways in which
cinema’s visual media can provide a prism through which to gain deeper
insight into the built environment by providing some relative analytical
distancing from it. This distancing allows us to consider the significance
of the visual cues provided by such an environment in creating our own
subjective versions of them in a more objective and less immersive man-
ner than we experience in our day-to-day lives. These discussions are
inspired and will be based on previous research conducted by authors
such as Mitchell Schwarzer and Leonardo Name, as well as practicing
professionals such as Wim Wenders and Aldo Rossi.
7 INSOLAÇÃO: SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION OF AN URBAN UTOPIA … 119
Cinematic Space and the Built Environment

For the purposes of this discussion, architectonic experience (be it real
or virtual) will be regarded as the accumulation of perceptions and feel-
ings experienced while moving through space. In cinema, while the film
camera moves through space we relinquish control over the architectonic
experience and, by doing so, we allow the directors to steer our gaze
toward the elements they deem relevant. The way a director chooses to
portray certain spaces can also work to create an imaginary or almost
psychological architecture, influenced by how the characters experience
such a space, filling it with emotion and memories. This manipulation of
space can take many technical forms including the use of camera angles,
framing, different shot lengths, montage, and other cinematic techniques
that will in turn have different effects on how a space is perceived and
interpreted by the audience. Moreover, each viewer may end up inter-
preting cinematic spaces differently, based on previous personal experi-
ences that may bias their perceptions. Even so, the power of the medium
of cinema is undeniable in its ability to shape and influence our percep-
tion of architectural spaces and urban landscapes through their juxtapo-
sition with the emotional weight carried by the actions that take place
within them.
In Insolação Thomas and Hirsch choose to portray Brasília’s Modern
architecture and its surrounding urban environment in a manner that
simultaneously allows them to reflect each character’s feelings of disillu-
sionment with love and detachment from contemporary life, while at the
same time suggesting that the city itself could trigger these feelings.
The depiction of the city as mostly barren, deserted, and sometimes
utterly inhospitable forms the visual and emotional background against
which the sometimes thin plot unfolds. These settings translate the char-
acters’ feelings of lack of belonging and produce in the audience a simi-
lar emotional (and geographic) detachment from the environment. This
happens by constantly portraying the characters in spaces that have no
distinct personality but, at the same time, have a strong material and
sculptural presence, visually translating their own numbness mixed with
occasional intense bursts of feelings. Additionally, the directors make
frequent use of extreme wide shots (both internally and externally) that
emphasize spatial emptiness, proportionally reducing the human charac-
ters to a mere vestigial presence (see Fig. 7.1). Through this deliberate
reduction of the human presence in the frame and the presentation of
120 L. Colnago
Fig. 7.1 Insolação
(2009)
these cinematic non-places5 the directors highlight the characters’ (and

the audience’s) feelings of lack of belonging and alienation, while also
reiterating their shared desire for human connection through the tenor
of their encounters.
This emotionally detached condition is also underlined in the film’s
composition: short scenes that slowly introduce the audience to the
characters, interweaving their scenes and their stories. Furthermore, the
urban environment itself is shown to the audience in a fragmented man-
ner through short takes shot from the characters’ viewpoints, which keeps
the viewers from fully contemplating and grasping the spaces shown on
screen. Because of this the viewer is forced into the characters’ deterrito-
rialized position of strangers in their own environment, unable to identify
with the spaces they are temporarily inhabiting. Little by little it becomes
clear that, one way or another, all the characters have trouble relating to
others; some because of unrequited love, and others because of deeper
psychological conditions that manifest themselves in this manner.
Lucia (Simone Spoladore) is a nymphomaniac who seeks some form
of connection in sexual encounters with random men; her brother
Vladimir (Antonio Medeiros) is infatuated with his parents’ new ten-
ant Liuba (Leandra Leal), who is also his father’s patient (and it is
implied that she is very sick); Leo (Leonardo Medeiros), Zoyka (Daniela
Piepszyk), Ana (Maria Luísa Mendonça) and the architect (Eduardo
Tornaghi) form a complicated love entanglement that because of age,
distance, or different expectations will never be consummated at a sat-
isfactory level for any of the parties; finally, Ricardo (André Frateschi) is
shown as a loner without any meaningful human connections. The one
notable incongruous character is Andrei (Paulo José), who displays a
more self-aware condition and tries to use his experience to guide the
rest of the characters. This difference in his behavior is marked from the
very beginning of the film by the way he is theatrically introduced recit-
ing a monologue on the meaning of life, love, and loss while looking
straight at the camera and speaking directly to the audience. All of this
relational turmoil is aggravated by the sun’s unrelenting and suffocating
heat that beats down on the city and its characters, producing feelings
of sunstroke (which they easily confuse with the feverish beginnings of
love). Given the background of the plot, what follows is a discussion of
cinema space and architecture.
Compared with other forms of perceiving architectonic space, cinema
can be considered as an intermediary medium. It is not as objective as
technical representations (blueprints and scale models, for example) but
more focused than our day-to-day experience of it (Schwarzer, “The
consuming Landscape”). The camera lens allows us a new and more sen-
sitive perception of even (or perhaps especially) the most banal and com-
mon spaces. The filmic apparatus distances the viewer from the spaces
it portrays, directing its focus to aspects of reality that were previously
taken for granted (Penna) due to learned visual predispositions. Like
photography had done before, cinema displaces architecture from its
context and allows it to be perceived as an element in itself instead of the
overwhelming whole we inhabit.
One notable example of this is the directors’ technique of purposely
cropping out many scenes’ surroundings, which has the interesting effect
of forcing the audience to focus more intently on what is left on screen.
Unlike the frequently overwhelming sensation people experience daily
when walking through an urban setting, this type of framing offers even
someone who is familiar with the spaces depicted on screen the chance
to notice details that would have otherwise been overlooked. Wenders
agrees with this when he says that:
When there’s too much to see, when an image is too crowded, or there
are too many images, we don’t see anything. “Too much” very quickly
becomes “absolutely nothing”. All of you know this. You also know the
opposite effect: when an image is almost empty, too bare, it’s capable of
making so much appear that it can become overwhelming to the viewer,
changing nothing into “everything”. (185)
This focused, yet detached, examination of such spaces allows for a

more objective analysis of the symbolism and preconceptions that can be
attached to them, not only by the directors (through the plot and the
characters) but also by our previous individual and collective experiences
with similar environments. This gives film the intrinsic ability to reveal
122 L. Colnago
the “aberrant within the familiar” (Schwarzer, Zoomscape 237). But for
this to happen we must first let go of our familiar references and dive
into the world the directors are creating on screen.
[In this way,] cinema can always instigate the city to see itself through
someone else’s eyes – not looking at cinema as a mirror but as a prism, not
seeing the object reflected in the film but to use film to see through the
city its urban drive. (Duarte n. pag)6
It is because of this prismatic ability (capable of refracting reality and

highlighting its various composing parts) that film should not be taken as a
“mere mirror of reality” or as “a neutral place for entertainment or for an
objective documentation” (Name n. pag). Settings are never impartial; they
are imbued with historical and social meanings, and this provides the filmic
space with multifaceted characteristics that should not be taken for granted.
Duarte’s argument touches on the discussion of realism in cinema (by
far its most contentious point), and although it is not the main focus of
this chapter, it is important to acknowledge its relevance, even if only
briefly. The theoretical position of cinema as the direct heir to photog-
raphy’s claim to be the perfect reproduction of reality (unlike painting
before it, which produced just a resemblance of the reality it portrayed)—
a view Duarte’s assertion questioned—was once defended notably by
André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. These authors argued for cinema’s
realistic tendency, favoring for example many post-war Italian filmmak-
ers’ focus on the day-to-day reality of “common people” than on the lav-
ish lives being spotlighted by American filmmakers in Hollywood at the
time. Realist directors and theorists favored the use of amateur actors,
location shooting, deep camera focus, and minimal editing, among other
techniques to try and reproduce as faithfully as possible the real-world
experience on screen. Later, however, this position was put into ques-
tion by French film theorist Christian Metz (“A respeito da impressão”)
who argued that, while cinema could produce the impression of real-
ity, it in fact created a much more complicated representation in which
reality ended up mirrored and distorted by both the director’s and the
audience’s own ability to understand the codes and conventions being
presented on screen.7 While this position carries its own implications it
is the one that allows the acknowledgment that different presentations of
the same scene/object could have different subjective meanings based on
the intentions of the director and the audience’s perception.
That said, it is important to consider that, conversely, the built envi-

ronment can also impact on our perception of films. Much has been
written about the relationship between cinema and the built environ-
ment.8 Primarily, it is there to function as a backdrop for the narrative
played out by the characters. However, when its presence gains impor-
tance it becomes part of the narrative itself as a silent character and even
extrapolates its diegetic function to influence the perception/consump-
tion of real architecture.9 In a cycle that feeds back into itself, space—
through the medium of film and the eye of the director—is constantly
reinventing itself to the point that:
If the experience of space—as a social and material practice—is perceived

and represented visually and culturally through the filmic apparatus, filmic
space is at the same time agent and consequence of the production of new
forms of perceiving space. (Da Costa n. pag)
In some cases, film scenes composed entirely of static elements (such

as natural landscapes, buildings, or sometimes entire cities) may take the
lead and be used by the director to set the scene, to create an atmos-
phere and to contextualize the narrative in the desired time–space sce-
nario (Schwarzer, Zoomscape). In fact, French architect and set designer
Robert Mallet-Stevens argues that, in order to be good, the set “must
act. Whether realistic, expressionistic, modern, or historical, it must play
its role” (qtd. in Neumann 8). These sets (either real or constructed)
also enrich the narrative through nonverbal means by helping to clarify a
character’s social, economic, or even emotional condition through men-
tal associations that are unconsciously made by the viewer.10 Thomas
and Hirsch take advantage of this possibility in their film by making the
cinematic architecture sometimes more important than the actors in the
development of the plot and in conveying meaning, which is clear in
the frequent use of wide shots in which the characters are reduced to a
mere vestigial presence. German director Wim Wenders has argued this
precise point by saying that:
A street, the façade of a house, a mountain, a bridge, a river or whatever,

are more than a ‘backdrop’. They also have a history, a personality, an
identity that must be taken seriously. They influence the human characters
that live in this backdrop, they create an atmosphere, a sense of time, an
emotion. (185)
124 L. Colnago
In these cases, when architecture transcends the role of mere

scenography, when it is no longer a simple backdrop but becomes an
integral part of the story, it offers up the possibility to act as a critic of
the environments portrayed. Given Insolação’s Modern urban setting it is
relevant to note that films rarely portray the inhabitants of such Modern
architectural spaces as happy and well-balanced characters. This seems
to be influenced by a perception of such styles as sometimes oppressive
and homogenizing. In removing the possibility for individual identifying
traits, this homogenization causes feelings of helplessness and of a loss
of self.11 These perceptions as portrayed through film12 seem to signal a
certain prejudice against the Modernist movement that associated it with
an emotionally unhealthy environment—and its continued representa-
tion as such in popular culture only works to reinforce those same feel-
ings and prejudices in a vicious cycle.13
Modern Architecture Under Brazil’s Midwestern Sun

Insolação’s opening shot sets the tone of the film. Andrei, who conducts
the film, a narrator of sorts, is framed sitting alone on a rooftop among
several antennas and other technical installations. Behind him lies an end-
less horizon that gives no indication of any other human presence. As
he closes a notebook, he gets up and turns to contemplate the deserted
landscape. The next shot shows the silhouettes of buildings that start to
appear out of focus, indicating that a city is situated ahead. The feeling
of loneliness permeates the scene through the quietness of the landscape,
which is echoed by Andrei’s scribbling of the word “tristeza” (sadness)
in his notebook. The following scene frames Andrei looking straight at
the camera and directly at the viewer, now in an indoor location. Before
starting his monologue, he calls for quietness and our attention (at which
point even the background noise grows even quieter than before), shat-
tering the fourth wall. He starts by reinforcing the word “sadness” and
how it is sad that sadness is the theme of “our conversation”. He goes on
to say that “birds are singing” and that “the sun outside hides the cold-
ness of our beautiful city” (already an indication of how the city will be
portrayed in the film)—“but I’m not here to talk about the city, I’m here
to talk about… love”. The camera angle then reverses to show him stand-
ing at the far end of a large, empty, and seemingly abandoned presenta-
tion hall that appears to be located inside one of Brasília’s many Modern
buildings due to the vertical brise-soleils covering the exterior façade.
This opening sequence highlights the feelings that will haunt every space
(and consequently every character) throughout the film: loneliness, sad-
ness, emptiness, and a certain degree of neglect. Andrei’s monologue is
interrupted by a person who appears at the other end of the hall and tells
him that he can no longer use the room. This strategy halts the trance we
had been in and verbally conveys what we already knew visually, that we
were intruders in a space where we did not belong.
The next scene opens with a shot of the wheel of a bicycle being rid-
den on the gray, cracked asphalt and then shifts to show that it is a boy,
Vladimir, who is riding it, exploring the empty city. He rides it through
an empty parking lot showing only a concrete, bunker-like building—
while purposely cut just out of the frame lies one of Brasília’s most
famous landmarks: the city’s sculptural Metropolitan Cathedral designed
by Oscar Niemeyer. Vladimir rides to a derelict kiosk where we are first
introduced to many of the other characters. They are shown sitting
around the kiosk while the narrator approaches them mumbling some-
thing about the nature of time. He pontificates on a number of subjects,
including time, sadness, life, evolution, “involution”, at which point
one of the characters says that he does not understand. Andrei replies,
“remember this: love… it’s the only thing. Love… and loss. Well, loss
mostly. Love wasn’t made to make us happy, but to make us feel alive.”
The melancholy that permeates the scene is reinforced by the barren
landscape we see framed by the windows of the kiosk. Although there are
other buildings in the distance they seem to be uninhabited, which pro-
duces an overwhelming feeling of bleakness. Andrei’s monologue is the
only thing that shows signs of life in this otherwise emotional wasteland.
After these initial scenes, the film focuses on the different groups of
characters. Through a brief conversation we find out that Vladimir and
the young woman, Lucia, are siblings who have moved out of their
father’s apartment, which has new tenants. Ricardo is framed sitting
silently at a remote bus stop while the background remains completely
motionless and deserted; Andrei cries on that same rooftop. Vladimir is
shown standing alone, removed, gazing at the empty apartment where
he then meets the new tenant: a beautiful young woman, Liuba, with
whom he immediately connects. This connection is the first of a series
that will provide relief from the loneliness and grounding from the deter-
ritorialization that permeates the film.
At a different location Ricardo silently walks up and enters an empty
glassed office; he then reads something that is pinned to a filing cabinet
126 L. Colnago
and quietly sits down. All the while the camera remains in a fixed posi-
tion, neither allowing us closer into the office nor panning out to offer
us a view of the surroundings, thereby reinforcing a voyeuristic feeling
by slightly focusing on the character and keeping the urban context from
the audience—which prevents a familiarization with the environment.
Yet, this fixed position and the relatively minimal action allows the audi-
ence to thoroughly inspect the scene in the frame, searching for some-
thing that will give it meaning to identify with. Another scene depicts
Lucia walking into a building, up the stairs, and suddenly a man appears
behind her, following her. The building is shown in a fragmented man-
ner—it has some reflection pools up front, brise-soleils on the façade, an
open-air staircase tower—which sculpturally complements the scene but
once again keeps the audience from identifying the building and situ-
ating it in their own mental cartography of the film’s landscape. The
geometry of the building, the play of light and shadow caused by the
unrelenting sun draw much more of our focus than the relatively small
and insignificant characters moving through it.
Leo is shown driving to the airport to pick up the journalist who has
come to interview his boss, the architect, but the entire scene focuses
on him, smoking a cigarette, inside the car. At no point is the landscape
shown, our subjective perception of Leo is all that matters. Lucia sits in
a generic corridor next to an equally generic stranger and tells him she
has “never done anything like this before”. The scene cuts back to Leo,
slowly walking up to the journalist, Ana, in a polished concrete corridor
with round windows, through which she looks out. However, the cam-
era frames her on the left side of the frame, looking out of the building
and beyond the frame, privileging the empty space (whatever she is so
intently looking at is kept from us). After a quick cut back to Lucia that
implies she had sex with the stranger and is having her name called by
a secretary, Leo and Ana are shown driving through a wide avenue that
seems completely deserted. She asks him a lot of trivial questions, about
the trees, about whether he is married (he is not), about what people
do in that city, and it is implied that they are going to be emotionally
involved even though they have very different views about life.
Halfway through the film and now well into the night, most of the
characters seem to be on the path to materializing the human relation-
ships brought about by these encounters. But as soon as the sun comes
up and the heat resumes, this fleeting happiness starts to fall apart and
they are forced to confront the reality of their lives, which they had been
avoiding. Heading into the final act the narrator is once again shown
crying on the rooftop when rain starts pouring down to mark the climax
and the beginning of the cooling off of the heated desires that perme-
ated the entire narrative. Lucia finds in a psychiatrist someone she can
confide in and admits her desire for human connection, love, which she
tries to fulfill with meaningless casual sex. Later she is shown meeting a
young boy at a playground and smiling the first genuine smile, which
implies that she may have finally figured out what can fill the void she
had been feeling. Vladimir confronts his father about his relationship
with Liuba and is forced to accept it must end. They are shown leaving
the city on the bonding road trip his father had suggested before (the
road is, as it is by now considered usual, completely deserted). Ricardo
is stabbed at the kiosk by a man that had previously threatened him just
as he seems to finally be achieving happiness, tainting this previously safe
space. Leo commits suicide in his car, unable to handle another failed
emotional connection, while Ana is waiting for him in the same hallway
where they originally met. This time the beautiful sculptural quality of
the space works as a stark contrast to the tragically failed human relation-
ship. For the last time the narrator arrives at the kiosk and finds Ricardo
leaning over, dead. He sighs and says: “Oh, youth!” And this is where
we part for the last time from all the characters: back where the film first
introduced them, where one by one we lost them.
All of these stories take place simultaneously in very distinct and indis-
tinct architectural settings, whose sculptural and material characteristics
accentuate the film’s mise-en-scène.14 In turn, the landscapes offer no
remarkable qualities other than their appearance of aridness. The modern
buildings and urban landscapes used as both indoor and outdoor settings
show no signs of life (there is never anyone present apart from the char-
acters on the scene),15 the colors are muted, light and shadow are highly
contrasted, the materials are bare, and yet they lend a noticeable aura
to the narrative. Their quiet presence reflects and enhances the charac-
ters’ feelings of loneliness, detachment, and displacement while allowing
the viewer to subjectively consider their own aesthetic interpretation of
them.
The fragmented way in which these spaces are portrayed prevents the
audience from creating any kind of connection to the filmic space other
than what the directors allow them to feel through the characters. An
attentive viewer who is exceptionally familiar with the city of Brasília may
be able to identify a specific building or two, but part of the Modern
128 L. Colnago
plan for the city implied that any distinctiveness and individuality would
be limited to a few monumental buildings on the primary axis. Almost
every other building in the city was planned to follow certain architec-
tural directives that, while interesting in themselves, were bound to yield
a repeating pattern through the rest of the city. The directors take advan-
tage of this urban and architectonic characteristic monotony to reinforce
in the audience the feelings of displacement and numbness displayed by
the characters.
It is also interesting to consider the choice of portraying so many
Modern buildings in such a decadent manner, leaving us to wonder
whether this is not also meant as a criticism of the Modernist movement
itself. The movement wanted to offer a clean break from historic tradi-
tions in order to build a city for a new age, which is now shown aging,
having become a part of the very history it disregarded. Furthermore,
through the constant parallel created between the characters’ emotional
state and the architecture portrayed, we could also argue that it is a criti-
cism of the human condition in our contemporary society. The charac-
ters are shown behaving in a decadent manner which is in turn reflected
in the decaying structures they are forced to inhabit, presenting this
failed utopia much like the failed passions experienced by the characters.
At the same time as the characters are each in their way trying to find
an emotional connection with each other, the audience is left trying to
weave not only the different strands of the emotional narrative but also
to piece the filmic space together into a coherent whole. The one space
that is constantly recurring is the kiosk where the characters repeatedly
meet to discuss their feelings about life, love, and loss. This architectural
space, while completely banal in morphology compared to the other
spaces of the film, has by far the most important presence and acts as the
central unifying locus for the narrative. What many would have consid-
ered to be almost a non-place is transformed by the subjective presence
of the characters which turns it into the most important place in the film.
As a space, it performs much the same function as the narrator, it gives
both the audience and the characters a stable, familiar place to retreat to
while we gather our thoughts and absorb what has happened.
This transformation of the kiosk, one of the simplest, blandest loca-
tions, into the emotional heart of the film proves the power of the
medium (through its narrative and technical qualities) over the percep-
tion of architectonic space. Similarly, although in the opposite direction,
there is the “dulling” of what could have been far more aesthetically rich
scenes (as in the beginning of the film where they purposely cut Brasília’s
cathedral out of the frame) to help symbolize the characters’ own emo-
tional numbness and lack of identity.
These representations of space prove that it is possible for architecture
to provide simultaneously physical/visual context for the development of
the narrative but also help to translate sensitive and subjective percep-
tions into visual imagery to be viewed and interpreted by the audience.
Their portrayal transforms the architecture shown on screen into visual
poetry that both enhances and complements the verbal poetry enacted
by the actors, elevating it to the status of a constant and silent character.
Finally, Insolação offers a critical interpretation of the city of Brasília
by focusing on its more mundane spaces and incisively negating the
monumental architecture for which it is famous. This demonstrates how
film offers a remarkable opportunity to act as a prism for the architec-
tural field to engage in creative self-examination, feeding back into the
urban development process what it has learned from popular representa-
tion.
Notes
1. Having previously worked together in theater productions, Thomas and
Hirsch bring their experience from the stages to the big screen after
almost a decade of previous collaborations. Their partnership landed
Insolação a nomination for Venice’s 2009 Horizons Award and a nomina-
tion for Leandra Leal as Best Supporting Actress in Cinema Brazil’s 2011
Grand Prize.
2. Designed with Modern urbanistic zoning principles in mind, Brasília was
conceived as a perfectly organized utopian city with sectors dedicated to
bureaucracy, leisure, commerce, and private life (among others) which
were to be connected by wide avenues allowing for easy mechanical travel
between these zones. While on some level this basic organizing system
persists to this day, it is a method of zoning that is considered outdated
and utopian due to its disproportionate focus on the monumental scale
as opposed to society’s requirements for life on a daily human scale. As
Robert Hughes perfectly defines the problem in his 1980 documentary
television series The Shock of the New (David Lewis Richardson): “It’s
what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real
human needs.”
3. This portrayal of the city is noteworthy given the widely recognized sculp-
tural presence of Oscar Niemeyer’s many buildings along its central axis.
130 L. Colnago
Their strong visual aura has recently captivated other directors such as
Antonio Carlos de Fontoura with his 2013 film Somos tão jovens/We’re
so Young and acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles’s more recent
mini-series (with Rede Globo) Felizes para sempre?/Happily Ever After?
(2015), in which he takes advantage of drone technology to capture pre-
viously unexplored angles of the city.
4. Brasília’s Monumental Axis is the central avenue of the city’s design along
which most of the capital’s main administrative buildings lie (such as
the Presidential office, the National Congress and the Supreme Federal
Court) as well as other landmarks such as the National Cathedral, the
Television Tower, and the JK Memorial. Widely recognized due to Oscar
Niemeyer’s signature style, this central axis maintains not only a practical
importance but also an aesthetic coherence.
5. This term is used as an interpretation of Marc Augé’s theory of non-
places, which he defines as spaces that lack the anthropological signifi-
cance to be considered “places” and deny their users the possibility of
empowering their own identity by providing social connections.
6. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
7. For further reading on the subject of Realism in cinema, see Bazin;
Kracauer; and Metz (Film Language).
8. For a more in-depth discussion on the relationship between cinema and
the city, refer to Barber; Bruno; Mennel.
9. This may happen, for instance, when architectonic and urban landmarks
are employed repeatedly in films and associated with certain types of
emotions and settings. Through this repetition it is possible to trans-
form a building into an icon or a symbol for something else (as the Eiffel
Tower and the Empire State Building have become synonymous with
Paris and New York, respectively).
10. These associations can occur through the use of more basic qualities such
as color, texture, or lighting, but also through more complex indicators
such as scale and architectural styles (Mitry).
11. It is interesting to note that these strands of the Modernist movement
were heavily adopted by oppressive regimes, such as those in Italy and
Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. The focus on the
monumental rather than on the human scale of these buildings caused
them to be simultaneously impressive and, to a degree, oppressive—much
like the Gothic architecture of so many cathedrals.
12. Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) is a classic example. Also, Karyn Kusama’s
Aeon Flux (2005) and Alejandro Agresti’s The Lake House (2006) are
worth mentioning. Incidentally, Kusama originally considered shooting
Aeon Flux in Brasília because of the city’s monumental and structured
architecture, which fitted her view of what the settings should look like.
Unfortunately, this idea was eventually abandoned due to the city’s lack
of infrastructure to shoot a major film production.
13. At the same time, the portrayal of a certain type of architecture in popular
films can, through possible positive associations, spark the debate regard-
ing the relevance and impact of this architecture and start a discussion
that could reverse the negative trend.
14. The one notable exception being Vladimir’s nocturnal bike ride across
Brasília’s famous cable-stayed bridge, which is shown in its full splendor
and not just through fragments as most of the other buildings.
15. Again with one exception: in the scene right before the silent man meets
his mysterious woman he first walks around the building, which seems to
be hosting some sort of underground party.
References
Barber, Stephen. Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space. London: Reaktion,
2002. Print.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema?
Vol. 1. Selected and Translated by Hugo Gray. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967. Print.
Bruno, Giuliana. “Site-Seeing: The Cine City.” In Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art,
Architecture, and Film. Giuliana Bruno. London: Verso, 2002. 15–54. Print.
Da Costa, Maria Helena Braga e Vaz. “Articulações fílmicas da percepção do
espaço e da realidade.” RUA: Revista Universitária do Audiovisual (2010):
n. pag. Web. 15 April 2016.
Duarte, Fábio. “Cinemacidades.” Arquitextos 053.00 (2004): n. pag. Web. 18
April 2016.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London:
Oxford University Press, 1960. Print.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. Routledge Critical Introductions to
Urbanism and the City. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Metz, Christian. “A respeito da impressão de realidade no cinema.” A signifi-
cação no Cinema. By Christian Metz. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1977. 15–28.
Print.
Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. New York: Oxford
Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
Name, Leonardo dos Passos Miranda. “Apontamentos sobre a relação entre cin-
ema e cidade.” Arquitextos 037.02 (2003): n. pag. Web. 16 April 2016.
Neumann, Dietrich ed. Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade
Runner. Munich: Pretel, 1999. Print.
132 L. Colnago
Penna, Tiago. “O cinema e a percepção sensível.” Cadernos Walter Benjamin

2 (2009): n.p. Web. 10 June 2016.
Rossi, Aldo. “Venice: Its Real and Imaginary Place.” Process: Architecture
75 (1987): 7–8. Print.
Schwarzer, Mitchell. “The Consuming Landscape: Architecture in the Films
of Michelangelo Antonioni.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. 197–215. Print.
Schwarzer, Mitchell. Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Print.
Wenders, Wim. “A paisagem urbana.” Trans. Maurício Santana Dias. Revista do
Iphan 23 (1994): 181–189. Print.
Author Biography
Leticia Colnago is a licenced architect in Brazil and received a Master of Science
in Architectural Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. She is inter-
ested in how perception of the built environment through direct or mediated
means can affect experience.
CHAPTER 8
Astral Cities, New Selves: Utopian

Subjectivities in Nosso Lar and Branco Sai,
Preto Fica
Antonio Cordoba
As Elizabeth Ginway and Alfredo Suppia explain, “Science-Fiction (SF)

film in Brazil is indeed rare” (203). The purpose of this chapter is to
pay attention to the cultural and ideological potential of a usually over-
looked, underpracticed film modality. In particular, it explores how
Wagner de Assis’s Nosso Lar/Astral City: A Spiritual Journey (2010)
and Adirley Queirós’s Branco sai, preto fica/White out, Black In (2014)
appropriate tropes belonging to the visual and narrative traditions of
science fiction cinema to present urban spaces that construct utopian
subjectivities along Spiritist and Afrofuturistic lines, respectively.1 As a
materialist genre, science fiction offers a particularly fruitful site to ana-
lyze the relationship between the realities, possibilities, and constraints of
specific urban spaces and twenty-first century subjectivities.
Nosso Lar portrays an extraterrestrial city in which all citizens focus on
the never-stopping growth of their spiritual powers, thus expanding the
potential of humanity and transcending modern definitions of the self.
A. Cordoba (*) 
Manhattan College, New York, USA
e-mail: antoniocordoba@gmail.com

134 A. Cordoba
The protagonist comes to embody the new paradigms of Nosso Lar, and
his return to Earth feels like time travel, as if he returned to a past inhab-
ited by less developed beings. The retro-futuristic presentation of after-
life space and the subjectivities it fashions ultimately constructs Spiritism
as a religion that purposefully and effectively takes believers to new levels
of human development. In Branco sai, preto fica, an Afro-Brazilian detec-
tive travels from the future to what looks like present-day Ceilândia, out-
side Brasília. Queirós documents an untimely residue of Brazilian utopian
dreams, a satellite city originally created as a temporary location for the
nordestino (northeastern) workers that built Brasília. The other two black
protagonists are disabled as a result of police brutality, and they have
planned their revenge against the State: they will “detonate” a “bomba
sônica” (sonic bomb) in Brasília. The film shows them living in peripheral
urban areas and getting ready to revolt and transcend the urban environ-
ments of decay and industrial junk in which they are forced to live. The
alliance between present-day and future Afro-Brazilian characters makes
it an example of Afrofuturism, the futurity of contemporary configura-
tions of black selves being at the center of the film.2 In these two movies
a utopian science fiction cinematic discourse reconstructs city spaces and
urban subjectivities in order to critique the Brazilian national project.
From a production point of view, these two films cannot be more dif-
ferent. Nosso Lar is an example of a recent phenomenon in the global
film market: local-language productions (LLPs) in which Hollywood stu-
dios coproduce movies with local companies and distribute these films
locally. As Courtney Donoghue explains, Nosso Lar is a result of Fox
International Productions’ involvement in the Brazilian market; films
that are part of the Hollywood LLPs strategy command high budgets,
open on 400–450 screens, and may be seen by a large audience of three
to four million people. Assis’s movie became one of the highest-grossing
films in the history of Brazilian cinema. This global strategy is a two-way
street: released under the title of Astral City: A Spiritual Journey, Nosso
Lar, it is now available in the United States in DVD format or as a film
that can be rented or purchased on a number of digital platforms. On the
other hand, Branco sai, preto fica was funded by the director and peo-
ple working on the film and shot with a budget of R$221,000 (around
$70,000) (Lopes). The film has been shown at a number of festivals in
Latin America, Europe, and the United States.3 It has been screened
in academic circles, such as university campuses and conferences.4
8 ASTRAL CITIES, NEW SELVES: UTOPIAN SUBJECTIVITIES … 135
However, as of August of 2016, it was not available as a DVD, and it had

not been licenced for commercial streaming.
The very different financial underpinnings of each film play a cru-
cial role in establishing their relationship to the genre of science fiction.
In a text on global science fiction film, Jennifer Feely and Sarah Ann
Wells identify special effects as one of science fiction cinema’s most pro-
nounced features, and invite us to consider how it
shifts when we traverse borders. Because many film industries exist in more
precarious conditions than their Hollywood counterparts, filmmakers often
invent imaginative, strategic solutions to these material limitations. […]
The association of SF cinema with technological spectacle and a cinema of
attractions therefore might be rethought through a consideration of strategic
“minor” practices in poorer film industries, often with compelling results. (xii)
It is precisely here, in terms of the presence/absence of Hollywood-

quality visual spectacle, that one needs to locate a crucial formal differ-
ence between these films. Nosso Lar is not a science fiction movie, but
an exposition of Spiritist doctrine that is fully realistic once we accept
that system of belief. However, thanks to its relatively big budget, it can
afford to look decidedly futuristic. Nosso Lar does feel like a science fic-
tion film. This affinity is more than just an attempt to domesticate sci-
ence fiction iconography in favor of religious indoctrination and the
quest for box office success, as Alfredo Suppia puts it (“The Quest”).
On the contrary, it is fully coherent with a retro-futuristic ideology and a
forward-looking desire to transcend Enlightenment humanism. This is a
desire that, in 2010, seemed particularly in tune with neoliberal transhu-
manism. Meanwhile, special effects are conspicuously absent in Branco
sai, preto fica, the time machine the detective uses being nothing but an
empty cargo container. Queirós transforms the reality of Ceilândia into
the setting of a science fiction film by simply introducing the time trave-
ler and the apocalyptic plot. These two supplements activate an archive
of visual representations of catastrophe that brings about the transfig-
uration of the satellite city and everybody rooted in that urban space.
Ultimately, a comparison of Nosso Lar and Branco sai, preto fica shows
that the protagonists of each film re-create themselves after a traumatic
event in ways that are fundamentally linked to the kind of city in which
they find themselves.
136 A. Cordoba
Retrofuturism and Transhumanism in Nosso Lar

This chapter focuses on the specific religious and ideological interven-
tions that Assis made in 2010 as the director and sole scriptwriter. It is
important to emphasize that everything in the movie can be understood
in strictly Spiritist terms. At the same time, Assis’s use of science fiction
iconography and the words his characters speak in the ideological con-
text of 2010 allow his audience to engage in a double reading of the
film. This double reading links Spiritism to neoliberalism, and Spiritist
emphasis on perfectibility to transhumanist utopian desires to transcend
the human condition. One can conclude that the scriptwriter-director
makes an effort to refer to other contemporary discourses to endow his
film with a more complex resonance in the audience.
Assis adapts a book of the same title published by the most famous
Brazilian medium, Chico Xavier, in 1944. Xavier claims that he is just
channeling the doctor André Luiz, whose spirit travels to the extrater-
restrial city of Nosso Lar after his death. There Luiz (Renato Prieto in
the film) “recovers” from the spiritual scars that a less-than-perfect life
has left on his soul, and learns to embrace the values of Nosso Lar until
it is finally time to reincarnate.5 In Xavier’s text, one of the most funda-
mental values that Luiz needs to learn is obedience: “We are only free
when we learn to obey. It seems paradoxical and yet it is true”6 (170).
This defense of the paradox that underlies Xavier’s Spiritist beliefs lies at
the core of Assis’s retro-futuristic iconography as well. The Nosso Lar
of 2010 reproduces the city of 1944 and at the same time cannot help
creating its own temporal paradoxes. The film’s electromagnetic technol-
ogy that produces artifacts such as floating beds and the shiny stream-
lined architecture that is visible everywhere are more a throwback to
the early twentieth century than a reference to the twenty-first century,
in which we may well find ourselves without a future.7 Therefore, it is
instructive to compare Assis’s Nosso Lar and the faith he instills in and
demands from his viewers to Walt Disney’s theme park, Tomorrowland,
which, according to Sherryl Vint, “quickly became a kind of retrofuture-
land, an archive of past visions of the gleaming future that allowed visi-
tors to escape from the nonutopian present” (3). Assis’s Nosso Lar shares
with Disney’s Tomorrowland a visual language of iconic allusion that
recovers a utopian vision of the future that actually belongs to the past.
Temporal disruption is displaced by a smooth integration of the past,
present, and future. As a result, in Assis’s (and Xavier’s) Spiritist project
of historical synthesis, modernity and belief, technology and spiritual-

ity come together in what Edward King has described as a “fantasy of a
harmonious process of modernization”, a fantasy that “provides a magic
resolution to the contradictions of modernity in Brazil” (60).
In solving the conflict between the new and the old, Xavier and Assis
follow the French founder of Spiritism, Allan Kardec: “Spiritism suc-
ceeded […] because it placed consoling dialogue with the souls of the
deceased in a philosophical and ritual context that struck believers as
familiar, modern, and serious” (Monroe 12–13). At its very origin,
Spiritists could embrace nineteenth-century ideas of the future “without
renouncing the older-seeming consolations of belief” (Monroe 109). It
is precisely the power of belief that Assis’s Nosso Lar explicitly highlights
for a twenty-first-century audience. For example, Luiz’s counselor tells
him at the beginning of his stay: “Skepticism ends when you wake up in
the spirit world.”8
Critique and conflict are programmatically erased in this futuristic
vision that has no room for politics and dissent. Although we never hear
a fully worded defense of the need to obey that can be found in Xavier’s
text, the authoritarian nature of the original is not gone. As in the city
of the text, the city of the film is under the rule of one governor whose
powers seem to be unchallenged in the absence of any kind of checks and
balances. In the film as in the text, the only option to get access to Nosso
Lar is to show “genuine remorse”, because, as Jonas Staal explains, genu-
ine remorse is “needed to assure that the souls will not rebel against the
political order imposed by the Governor” (30). Nosso Lar is an exten-
sion of historical hierarchies: the city was founded in the sixteenth cen-
tury, coinciding with the imperialist arrival of the Portuguese to what
would become Brazil, and, “entry into the colony seems to be granted
only to the well-educated” (Staal 33). The racist structure of Brazilian
society is reproduced in the film: the majority of the people we see look
European, and the only two non-white characters that speak get hardly
any lines at all. Neither of them occupies a position of authority, and the
only one who appears regularly is a light-skinned Afro-Brazilian young
man. Therefore, we see that social ills are quite obviously transferred
from the earthly to the celestial.
And yet, despite the strong resemblance between earth and the extra-
terrestrial city, Luiz feels that he is in a completely different place. As he
tells us after a few days in Nosso Lar, “I lived a new paradigm.” What
is this new paradigm that this bourgeois doctor of European descent
138 A. Cordoba
finds so revelatory? After Luiz recovers and starts working, his counselor
explains to him the logic that rules the city: “This isn’t Earth, you know.
You can’t just accumulate, you need to deserve it, remember?” By the
end of the film, after embracing a process of self-transformation guided
by the need to deserve in this futuristic urban space, Luiz concludes: “A
new André was born.” The new paradigm of the extraterrestrial city has
produced a new self. How can we understand this idea of “deserving,”
of constant self-actualization, and of transcendental renewal in the con-
text of 2010? How can we relate it to the historical context in which
Assis adapts Xavier’s text? One can argue that, while the text is under-
lined by a statist understanding of society and the self, the film presents
Spiritist beliefs in neoliberal cyberutopian terms, thereby offering one
more iteration of the Spiritist paradoxical, yet harmonious, integration
of past beliefs and contemporary understandings of modernity. As Wendy
Brown puts it, “[n]eoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the
production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct,’ and a scheme of valua-
tion. It names … a more generalized practice of ‘economizing’ spheres
and activities heretofore governed by other tables of value” (21). Now,
according to Brown, “both persons and states are expected to comport
themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and
enhance their future value”; as a result, the individual becomes “a project
of management” (22).
Luiz’s constant transformation, his constant care and management of
his own self according to the rules of Nosso Lar, has a very specific goal:
to turn himself into a deserving creature, and actually achieve something
(a trip to Earth to see his family) once he deserves it. The final object
of the economic and social practices of the citizens of Nosso Lar is not
to accumulate physical goods, but to invest in intangibles, to enhance
their own present and future value, to become more and more deserv-
ing of the rewards granted by the invisible hand of a system that is never
fully explained but still manages every aspect of the characters’ lives and
selves. And the successful culmination of Luiz’s endeavors as a 24/7
Spiritist and neoliberal homo economicus is not only his visit to those who
shared his previous life. The climax of the film is Luiz’s charitable use of
his supernatural powers of healing. But Assis makes sure that the audi-
ence does not miss the productivity of charity and its value-creating role
in the Spiritist economy. We see how the seemingly disinterested use of
his powers and the deep feelings of allegiance to the system of Nosso
Lar that they reveal only make him even more deserving and, therefore,
worthy of more rewards. Being invited to dictate his experiences and

thoughts to Chico Xavier book after book will be the ultimate prize that
this exemplary citizen receives from the rulers of Nosso Lar.
Of course, in the context of a Spiritist work, there is nothing particu-
larly surprising about this transformation. However, it is necessary to
emphasize that the film invites a constant double reading, thus creating a
harmonious hybridity between supernaturalism and modern technology,
and between past and present. Given the science fiction iconography of
Assis’s film, and the archive that he is tapping into in order to flesh out
his Spiritist vision, it is not difficult to connect Luiz’s actions while on
Earth to certain well-known characters: the time traveler from the future
and the benevolent alien endowed with superpowers, for example. Above
all, Luiz can be understood in futuristic transhumanist terms because his
ability to heal after his recovery and transformation is based on the same
Enlightenment concepts of perfectibility, rationality, and agency that
transhumanism embraces in order to produce new, carefully engineered
subjectivities whose basic human capacities transcend anything humans
can achieve now. When Luiz first arrives at his old family home, he finds
his former wife married to another man, who happens to be very sick.
Luiz feels jealous and decides to return to Nosso Lar, but as he crosses
the Purgatory-like swamps that surround the astral city, he realizes that
he is reverting to his older self. Luiz goes back to Earth to heal his ex-
wife’s new husband, Ernesto (Nicola Siri), who wakes up fully recovered
after spending the night drinking from a jug of water that Luiz has trans-
formed into medicine. As Ernesto tells his wife, “I had a dream about a
man, a friend, who asked me to drink water.” Luiz’s benevolence is not
only emphasized, but presented as his real achievement; the powers he
now has being nothing but byproducts of his new Spiritist but also neo-
liberal self that is based on deserving, on constantly reactualizing itself to
endow himself with value.
We can see how Assis’s retrofuturist city full of transhumanist citi-
zens marries Spiritism and neoliberalism in a powerful, paradoxical con-
stellation that includes the revival of earlier avatars of the myth of the
future. Images of the astral city point to a well-known archive of past
utopian dreams, and the selves it shapes are nothing but the extension
of some modern concepts that have been purged of the poison of skep-
ticism. The present in which Assis adapts Xavier’s text and his viewers
consume it is the repository of past configurations of the future, in a
non-disrupted temporal continuum that mirrors the ideals of self-care,
140 A. Cordoba
rational decision-making, and individual agency that allegedly underlie

both Spiritist belief and neoliberalism. The only thing that Nosso Lar
produces is uncritical subjects that endlessly endeavor to increase their
capabilities, the practical skills that allow them to intervene in the physi-
cal world of Earth, healing sick people and dictating books to mediums.
Our nonutopian present in which the future is over is abolished in this
Spiritist film. In fact, the conflicting realities of the Brazilian divergent,
incomplete modernity are not only implicitly criticized, but explicitly
substituted with a utopian reality. The solution to all national problems
is the unquestioning adoption of a technology-friendly paradigm of neo-
liberal perfectibility. In the end, Assis’s science fiction iconography is not
merely a tool for indoctrination, but a way to actualize a 1944 text and
integrate it into the same paradigms of global capitalism that finance his
film and his vision.
Salvagepunk and the Apocalypse in Branco Sai,

Preto Fica
Queirós’s original project was to document the past police abuse that
left the two protagonists of the film disabled. In 1986 they were at
“a black dance”, or Quarentão, when the police came and told whites
to leave while blacks were forced to stay (hence the title of the film).
Marquim (Marquim do Tropa) was shot and became a paraplegic, while
Sartana (Cláudio Irineu da Silva, aka Chokito) lost one leg in a cavalry
charge. However, when Queirós introduced the idea to the protagonists,
Marquim do Tropa refused to make a standard documentary about his
life; what he wanted was to make a film of action and adventure (Lopes).
The resulting mix of documentary and science fiction turns the protag-
onists into characters who plot their revenge against the State, while a
detective visits from the future to gather evidence to prosecute crimes
committed against Afro-Brazilians. According to Queirós, this hybrid-
ity is in part a coping mechanism for the two protagonists, a way to
allow them to tell their stories.9 Moreover, the science fiction element,
the apocalyptic vengeance that they plan and (most probably) success-
fully execute against the Brazilian capital, allows them to reclaim their
agency. We never see any actual explosions, but Sartana draws images
of the destruction of the city. Given that he had previously drawn the
face and actions of the detective traveling from the future, we may assign
some truth value to those representations of catastrophic destruction

with which the film ends. As they accomplish their plan and detonate an
innovative device, the film shows how the two Afro-Brazilian protago-
nists make use of futuristic technology to take revenge and demand repa-
rations for the racist history of Brazil.
Their story is clearly traumatic, and both characters give their tes-
timonies in a way that emphasizes the extent to which they have been
brutalized and marginalized by Brazilian authorities. And yet, the film
refrains from becoming a standard supercrip narrative. As Sami Schalk
explains, in these narratives people with disabilities are sometimes turned
into tragic figures for whom the audience feels pity, and sometimes they
bravely overcome obstacles to either do “normal things” or achieve the
extraordinary (74). However, even if most times these representations of
disability are condescending and dehumanizing, supercrip narratives can
also be empowering from the perspective of this population. The chal-
lenge is to understand “[h]ow people with disabilities take up, claim, dis-
identify with, resist, and adapt supercrip representations of themselves”
(76). The intense collaboration between Queirós and the protagonists of
his film is an example of the involvement of people with disabilities in
the crafting of these empowering representations. As the protagonists of
a revenge film, Marquim and Chokito stand against “the depoliticizing
of disability through a focus on individuality” that takes place in super-
crip narratives (Schalk 78). There is an intense politicization of disability
when the protagonists give testimony about the long history of oppres-
sion that causes their condition. Their story is further politicized when
we see that a future Brazilian state sends police officers back in time to
gather evidence so that the families of the victims of crimes against black
and marginalized people can be compensated. One should also mention
that their plan is part of a collective fight. After all, as Brodwyn Fischer
reminds us, Latin American informal cities are not only sites of dys-
functionality, violence, and exploitation, but they are also places where
we can find “expressions of community solidarity” (2). Marquim and
Sartana recruit other inhabitants of the satellite city to record the sounds
and music that will go into the sonic bomb that will destroy Brasília, and
to physically carry out the plan. Although focused on two individuals,
the film documents a collective struggle that transcends the present and
imagines a future in which punishment and reparation will take place.
142 A. Cordoba
The disempowering moves of standard supercrip narratives are

avoided because Queirós’s camerawork eschews tropes that emphasize
both tragedy and superlative achievement. At the very beginning of the
film, a long take follows Marquim as he slowly descends in a clunky ele-
vator to the entrance of his home, gets out of the elevator, and smoothly
slides down a ramp. His face while on the elevator suggests boredom,
his going down the ramp is not particularly graceful. Both impairment
and empowerment are shown under a quotidian light in which they
are intricately mixed (as Queirós’s continuous take shows) and never
enter the sphere of the emotionally extraordinary.10 Similarly, we spend
quite some time with Sartana until we find out that he has a mechani-
cal leg, so that it is not the first thing that defines him in the eyes of
the audience. Queirós explains that they wanted to invoke the figure of
the Cyborg (Garrett), but Sartana never becomes a supercrip with tech-
nological superpowers, an Oscar Pistorius of sorts. Pistorious, in David
Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s words, was presented “as embodying the
hypercapacity of a field-and-track machine, a postorganismic cyborg biol-
ogy enabled to surpass the limits of even the most athletically capacitated
among us” (56). Sartana has a prosthetic leg, but nothing in him evokes
this transhumanist cyborg biology. Queirós and his collaborators refuse
to participate in discourses of neoliberal perfectibility and individualistic
transcendence. The protagonists are neither abject nor superhuman.
This refusal to incorporate neoliberal utopian discourses in this hybrid
film can be also seen in the way in which science fiction tropes transform
the documentary portrayal of the urban reality of Ceilândia. The time-
travel elements of the plot and the apocalyptic plan to destroy Brasília
work as supplements that invoke the whole archive of science fiction dys-
topian cinema. The image of Ceilândia presented in the movie gets fil-
tered by all those tropes, conventions, and clichés, and now the degraded
reality of the satellite city and the junk yards that Sartana visits allow us to
invoke the subgenre of salvagepunk in which, according to Zak Bronson,
“we witness the utter exhaustion of the world; its desolate lands are the
definitive images of a wheezing capitalism with nowhere left to go. […]
In salvagepunk, the world does not end with a bang, but slowly decays”
(84). More importantly, salvagepunk is “not the answer to late capitalism,
but rather an attempt to think through it” (84). The now post-apocalyptic
satellite city gives testimony to the many problems and shortcomings of
the Brazilian modernization project, of which the capital was the most vis-
ible example.11 Today, in urban planning circles, Brasília is considered a
dystopian place, “a fundamentally bad place” (Williams 254). However,

the real and symbolic power of Brasília over the surrounding urban ter-
ritory still remains, and the cities that appeared around it during its con-
struction, and which have grown to surpass it in population, are still
treated as satellite towns (Spink et al.).12 It is important to remember that,
when we are first introduced to the detective, we are told that his mission
is to gather evidence about crimes committed against “populações perifé-
ricas” (peripheral populations). The film emphasizes the spatial dimen-
sion of the racist, classist marginalization of certain demographic groups
in Brazilian society. Symbolic exclusion is alive and well, something that
Queirós, in a typical science fiction fashion, literalizes by introducing the
need to have a passport to enter Brasília from Ceilândia.13 However, the
success of their plan to detonate the bomba sônica shows how it is possible
to combat racism and exclusion precisely by working from an excluded
position. In the end, it is by embracing salvagepunk tactics of thinking
and working through, and with the junk left by the failed dream that is
Brasília, that they are able to intervene in the nightmare of the present.
The other way in which the film shows Afro-Brazilians taking con-
trol of the course of history is through time travel. Using the conven-
tions of time travel to document historical trauma is a common element
in Brazilian fantastic or speculative cinema, according to Suppia (“Acessos
restritos”). The distortion of a straight temporal sequence is one of the
results of traumatic experiences, and time travel is a useful device to rep-
resent them (Chu). But producing a mimetic account of the suspension
and disruption of linear time is not the only possible use of this science
fiction trope. Time travel to the past, to a traumatic past, also implies a
future time in which these traumatic events can be addressed. There is
a reparative dimension to time travel that is made explicit in the movie.
Although we are never given a detailed account of that future, the fact
that these crimes are being prosecuted gives a utopian dimension to
the film. It is true that salvagepunk offers apocalypse without redemp-
tion, and that Marquim and Sartana’s plan is to destroy Brasília’s Pilot-
Plan without putting anything else in place. However, this is a political
act, an example of collective action that, from the salvagepunk reality of
decadence and technological junk that is shown in the movie, proceeds
to reassert the agency and ability of the victimized characters, who now
intervene in history and change the national reality of Brazil in excep-
tional ways. Their actions are both individual and collective, which even-
tually makes Branco sai, preto fica an empowering Afrofuturist narrative.
144 A. Cordoba
Conclusion
David Harvey reframes Henri Lefebvre’s original idea of “the right to
the city” so that it becomes a collective right “to change and re-invent
the city more after our heart’s desire” (4). This right is fundamentally
linked to the idea of subjectification in Harvey’s mind, because “[t]he
freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is […] one of the
most precious and yet most neglected of our human rights” (4). Each
“astral city” analyzed in this chapter produces new selves, but these
selves do not always have this “right to the city.” As a result of Assis’s
handling of science fiction motifs, the story of Luiz’s spirit’s recovery
from the slow-moving trauma of an anxiety-ridden life and the sudden
trauma of death ends up producing a neoliberal, transhumanist, utopian
self that has no right to the city of Nosso Lar. Luiz’s acceptance in the
city is facilitated by his class and race and eventually guaranteed by his
submission. He cannot change or reinvent Nosso Lar, and he hands all
power over to those in charge of the processes that determine whether
he has become a deserving citizen or not. Rewards come from renounc-
ing all rights to this astral city and the new self it creates, a self that is
not new, but the result of a subjectification process that places the high-
est value in returning to an idealized authoritarian place, “Our Home”.
The “new paradigm” of Nosso Lar is nothing but the reproduction of
the hierarchical structures of Brazilian society. The future is the present
and the past, and the astral is oppressively earthly. Queirós, on the other
hand, uses science fiction to work through trauma in order to reclaim
the right to the city of Brasília and Ceilândia, even if that new right is the
right to take revenge and destroy. In the end, the selves produced by the
Afrofuturist urban environment of Branco sai, preto fica are the ones who
are able to transcend the contemporary reality of Brasília’s satellite cities.
Excluded because of their race and class, living in a residue of Brazilian
past dreams of modernization, they find ways to demand historical repa-
rations, take over the city, and, by radically disrupting the present, make
possible a real future for all.
Notes
1. Assis started working for Rede Globo and wrote four films starred by the
TV personality Xuxa. His first film was A cartomante/The Fortune Teller
(2004), an adaptation of a short story by Machado de Assis. Queirós’s
parents migrated to Ceilândia when he was three years old. He still lives
there. He produced, wrote, and directed the award-winning documen-

tary A cidade é uma só?/Is the City One Only? (2011).
2. Afrofuturism operates around three basic assumptions: people of the
African diaspora will be present in the future, they will benefit from tech-
nology in that future, and “the cultural meaning of blackness will contin-
ually change as generations advance” (Kilgore 569). According to André
Carrington, the term is both deconstructive “and reparative” (23).
3. Among others, it was shown at film festivals in Brasília, Mar del Plata,
Vienna, and New York.
4. For example, it was screened at Brown University, University of Michigan,
and UCLA, and the annual conference of the Latin American Studies
Association in 2015.
5. For a description of the sessions of psychography through which the book
was produced, see Staal.
6. All translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise.
7. In After the Future, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the future is over.
By “future” “Bifo” means “the psychological perception, which emerged
in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expecta-
tions that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization,
reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War” (18). It is this
idea of the “future” that Assis revives in a Spiritist note in his film.
8. Here and elsewhere, I am quoting the English subtitles included in the DVD.
9. See Garrett for more information on this.
10. A later sequence of stationary shots shows the laborious process through
which Marquim needs to go every time he gets out of his car. Once
again, the effect that Queirós’s camera instills in his audience is not awe
in the face of a heroic struggle against adversity, but everyday annoyance
at the need to do tedious small tasks.
11. Brasília was imagined and built as a promise of future excellence finally
fulfilled. The incarnation of the future in the urban fabric (or the fail-
ure to do so) is an element that is impossible to ignore when considering
the city: “[u]nlike most cities, Brasília existed as a promise before it took
shape as an actual place”; as a result, “[t]he promise of a transformative
capital inevitably informed any visit to the actual city” (Beal 79).
12. Created as alternatives for evicted squatters, these quickly-designed cities
are examples of extremely poor urban planning: “These projects resulted
in towns weakened by redundant patterns in the street network, the sub-
division, and the buildings, as well as by substantial sprawl” (Kohlsdorf
et al. 54). The whole complex of urban settlements has not been inte-
grated yet, and new areas are added at random.
13. Fake passports to enter the city become very important at one moment in
the movie, which highlights the idea of exclusion.
146 A. Cordoba
References
Beal, Sophie. Brazil Under Construction: Fiction and Public Works. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. After the Future. Chico: AK Press, 2011. Print.
Bronson, Zak. “Reproduce, Reuse, Recycle: The End of the Future, Salvage,
and China Miéville’s Railsea.” SF Now. Eds. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams.
Vashon Island: Paradoxa, 2014. 81–96. Print.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New
York: Zone Books, 2015. Print.
Carrington, André M. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science
Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Print.
Chu, Seo Young-Chu. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional
Theory of Representation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.
Donoghue, Courtney Brannon. “Sony and Local-Language Productions:
Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global
Film Market.” Cinema Journal 53.4 (2014): 3–27. Print.
Feely, Jennifer L., and Sarah Ann Wells. Introduction. Simultaneous Worlds:
Global Science Fiction Cinema. Eds. Feely and Wells. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015. ix–xxviii. Print.
Fischer, Brodwyn. Introduction. Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in
Urban Latin America. Eds. Fischer et al. Durham: Duke University Press,
2014. 1–7. Print.
Garrett, Adriano. “É um film de vingança declarada, diz diretor de Branco Sai,
Preto Fica.” Cine Festivais, 3 Mar. 2014. Web. 4 Jun. 2016.
Ginway, M. Elizabeth, and Alfredo Suppia. “Science Fiction and Metafiction in
the Cinematic Works of Brazilian Director Jorge Furtado.” Latin American
Science Fiction: Theory and Practice. Eds. Ginway and J. Andrew Brown. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 203–23. Print.
Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
New York: Verso, 2012. Print.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. “Afrofuturism.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction.
Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 561–72. Print.
King, Edward. Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and
Brazilian Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Kohlsdorf, Maria Elaine et al. “Brasília: Permanence and Transformations.”
Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasília. Eds. Vicente del Rio and
William Siamieda. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. 42–64. Print.
Lopes, Débora. “Branco Sai, Preto Fica é puro apocalipse.” Vice, 27 Mar. 2015.
Web. 4 Jun. 2016.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability:

Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015. Print.
Monroe, John Warne. Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism
in Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Print.
Schalk, Sami. “Reevaluating the Supercrip.” Journal of Literary & Cultural
Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 71–86. Print.
Spink Peter K., et  al. “Metropolitan Governance in Brazil: Institutions,
Organizations, and Lessons from Intermunicipal Consortia.” Metropolitan
Governance in the Federalist Americas: Strategies for Equitable and Integrated
Development. Eds. Spink et al. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2012. 100–40. Print.
Staal, Jonas. Nosso Lar, Brasília: Spiritism, Modernism, Architecture. Rio de
Janeiro: Capacete & Jap Sam Books, 2014. Print.
Suppia, Alfredo. “Acessos restritos: Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014), de Adirley
Queirós, e o cinema brasileiro de ficção científica contemporâneo.” Revista
Hélice II.5 (2015): 21–7. Web. 4 Jun. 2016.
Suppia, Alfredo. “The Quest for Latin American Science Fiction and Fantasy
Cinema.” Frames 6 (2014): n.p. Web. 4 Jun. 2016.
Vint, Sherryl. “Semiotic Ghosts and Broken Dreams: Science Fiction and
Cultural Theory.” Introduction. Science Fiction and Cultural Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Vint. New York: Routledge, 2016. 1–13. Print.
Williams, Richard J. Brazil: Modern Architectures in History. London: Reaktion
Books, 2009. Print.
Xavier, Francisco Cândido. Nosso Lar. Brasília: International Spiritist Council,
2006. Print.
Author Biography
Antonio Cordoba is Assistant Professor at Manhattan College. His research

focuses on Latin American science fiction, and the relationship between won-
der, the sacred, and modernity. He has co-edited the volume The Sacred and
Modernity in Spain: Beyond the Secular City (Palgrave, 2016), and authored
¿Extranjero en tierra extraña? El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2011).
CHAPTER 9
Underneath the Surface, Embodied

on Screen: Memory and Social Conflict
in São Paulo’s Cityscape
Marília Goulart
Cinema and urban life have been connected since the production of
the first moving images, and the depiction of urban spaces is recurrent
throughout film history. With different narratives and aesthetic strate-
gies, Latin American movies have used the trope of the metropolis in the
first decade of the twenty-first century to shed light on a number of con-
temporary conflicts and dilemmas common to life in the city, especially
those prevalent in the so-called “Third World”. In these productions, the
city becomes more than a film location and often appears as the main
dramatic element.1
Gregorio Graziosi’s Obra/The Construction (2014) is a good exam-
ple of such movies and an emblematic case where architecture and the
city’s spatiality are deeply related to memory. Shot in black and white
and composed of a sophisticated plasticity, Graziosi’s debut feature
offers an unusual approach to the city whose tensions are reflected in the
film’s architectural and spatial construction. With modest dialogues and
M. Goulart (*) 
City Hall, São Paulo, Brazil
e-mail: mmarie.goulart@gmail.com

150 M. Goulart
occasional music soundtrack, the film’s depiction of São Paulo’s land-

scape is crucial to its dramatic atmosphere, which connects the narrative
to an archeology of the city’s history.
This chapter offers a close analysis of Obra in order to discuss the
ways in which the themes of memory and history are explored in its nar-
rative of contemporary São Paulo. It also looks at the framing of the
city’s spaces as an effective tool that evokes a conflictive past and helps to
create an emotional and dramatic atmosphere that permeates the charac-
ters’ inner and social conflict.
São Paulo’s History: Hidden Lines of the Urban

Palimpsest Through Space and Cinema
The foundation of the city of São Paulo is marked by a series of episodes
of violence perpetrated by colonizers. Strategically located on a flat area
surrounded by mountains, the city was in a privileged position for the
bandeirantes’ advance toward Brazil’s countryside in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries (Prado).2 Along with the colonization project, the
consequence of the Jesuits and the bandeirantes’ ventures was the geno-
cide of native indigenous people and also of Africans, the latter brought
to Brazil as slaves (Ribeiro).3
As a continuation of the inaugural acts, violence carried on marking
the city’s constitution through the modern and contemporary eras. It is
of significance that, despite the intense modernization and development
of São Paulo across the first half of the twentieth century, the descend-
ants of African, native indigenous, and also migrant populations who
were attracted by the urban development became an excluded urban
group who did not benefit from the urban improvement, but instead
faced extremely hard conditions in the city that they helped to build.4
In the 1960s the violence always faced by the socially excluded pop-
ulation became widespread. The military dictatorship that lasted for
21 years left hundreds of dead and missing people from all social classes.
At the structural level, the dictatorship was instrumental in the nefari-
ous increase in systematic repression that still strongly affects specific
social groups—as demonstrated by recurrent chacinas (massacres) and
figures that indicate that black males are more likely to be murdered by
the police than white males.5 Thus, the perpetrators of the chacinas kill
socially disadvantaged groups. Many massacres were carried out after
democratization (mid-1980s), and some had international repercussions,
9 UNDERNEATH THE SURFACE, EMBODIED ON SCREEN … 151
such as Massacre do Carandiru (Carandiru Massacre), when police forces

killed more than 100 unarmed prison inmates, and Crimes de Maio (May
Crimes) when police and paramilitary forces randomly killed 90 people
in 7 days.
The historical violence summarized above and also the intense
struggle against it, as described in Walter Benjamin’s writing on his-
tory, are hidden in the main narratives of São Paulo’s development. In
an effort to bring the official narrative into material space, the images
of bandeirantes, Jesuits, and also the military authorities responsible for
human rights violations are evident around the city in the form of statues
and public spaces named after some of their notorious representatives.
As Benjamin puts it, history was written by the victors “and all rulers
are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with
the victor invariably benefits the rulers” (256). In this catastrophe, as
Benjamin defines history, “whoever has emerged victorious participates
to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rules step
over those who are lying prostrate” (256).
Besides the “official history”—and the intention of the “victors” to
“brush history against the grain” (Benjamin 257)—more spontaneously
the city’s spatiality, explicitly or not, also expresses its past and memories.
Differing from the universal authority and scientific rigor that crystallizes
the past in “official history”, “memory is life, borne by living societies
founded in its name” (Nora 8). Hence, the urban space is impregnated
with lived experience and memory.6 Broadening the notion of lieux de
mémoire developed by Pierre Nora,7 the city can be read as a place where
memory is rooted in space, gestures, images, and objects; a memory that
is neither complete nor finished, but is in a constant construction. As
Pablo Sztulwark argues:
Memory is not the representation of the past, the objectification of

occurred facts, nor is it a finished construction. Memory is the set of het-
erogeneous, undefined forces, which affects a space, an object, and turns
it into a PLACE. […] Memory, thus, which becomes immanent, is made
of many traits and affections (deliberated or not, contradictory or not,
programmed or not); traits and affections that make a city. In this sense,
memory is the city. (13, emphasis in original)8
Thus, the city is not only the space where historical facts take place;
the city is in fact transformed into a place by memory (or memories).
152 M. Goulart
As a battlefield for the inscription of meaning,9 the city can be consid-

ered a palimpsest whose significances are constantly being rewritten.
Concomitant with the idea of the palimpsest, architecture is of great
importance in the physical building and rebuilding of urban spaces.
Architecture also plays a crucial role in the construction of memory; to
evoke Ruskin, we may live without architecture, but we cannot remem-
ber without it (178). Not only that, but it is through architecture that
we can read the many voices that created complex societies across time:
joining the system of objects produced by a culture, architecture is the
expression of social life, the will of a society turned into action (Xavier).
The palimpsest city is also a concern of cinema. As with architecture,
cinema operates in the building and rebuilding of a city’s views and
images. However, more than offering sights and images of a city, cinema
creates sites and cartographies. Cinema’s tactile way of site-seeing turns
pictures into architecture, transforming them into a geography of lived,
and living, space (Bruno).10 As spectators, we tour through filmic sites,
in a promenade that is inscribed into and interacts with architecture’s
peripatetic narrative (Bruno). In the cinematic site-seeing, the city con-
structed by cinema can be a powerful tool to reveal the erased layers of
the urban palimpsest.
In the cinematic (re)construction of São Paulo, there are interesting
works that confront the enthusiastic official discourses about the city,
as can be seen in São Paulo SA/São Paulo SA (Sérgio Person, 1965),
O bandido da luz vermelha/The Red Light Bandit (Rogério Sganzerla,
1968), Cidade oculta/Hidden City (Chico Botelho, 1986), O invasor/
The Trespasser (Beto Brant, 2002) and Os inquilinos/The Tenants (Sérgio
Bianchi, 2009).11 From classical narrative to the underground Cinema
Marginal (underground cinema), all these movies reveal urban tensions
and conflicts that were hidden in the mainstream narratives about São
Paulo. Joining this filmography, Obra seeks the hidden lines of the urban
palimpsest. Entering into the cinematic city constructed by Obra, we will
meet in actual city spaces the lacunas of “official history”.
The Making of Obra

Director Gregorio Graziosi, who graduated in fine arts and film stud-
ies, showed his interest in the city as a theme in his previous films. Mira
(2009) is a short fiction film in which a photographer seeks traces of
Antonioni in the acclaimed Brazilian Modern architect Oscar Niemeyer’s
buildings, and Monumento/Monument (2012) is an experimental short

movie about Brecheret’s Monumento às Bandeiras (Monument to the
Bandeiras). In his first feature film Obra, Graziosi refines his cinematic
gaze toward the city.
The movie begins with a blurred image created by the silhouette of
a stretch of mountains and the outline of a few buildings that delicately
stand out in the landscape. As a visual rhyme, the buildings multiply on
screen, replacing the mountains. Accompanied by increasing noise, the
buildings soon dominate the frame, forming complex urban scenery in
which the audience sees neither the horizon, nor the sky. The scene is
followed by a shot of the famous Edifício Copan. From the outside of
the building, João Carlos Ribeiro de Almeida Neto (Irandhir Santos) is
framed, staring at the city from a window. Closing the city view, from
the inside, João Carlos pulls the curtains together and begins his class by
projecting a video of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.12 The demolition—
which is also projected over João Carlos’s body—expresses what Charles
Jencks called the death of Modern architecture. It embodied the collapse
of Modern architecture’s utopia, a concept that is evoked in the film.
As announced during the first minutes of Obra, and also by its title,
which could be translated as “building” or “construction”, the city’s
spatiality—and its architecture—have a central role in the filmic narra-
tive. While building an important project for his career, the young archi-
tect João Carlos finds a graveyard at the construction site that actually
belongs to his family. As an inherited curse, the discovery of the bones
buried at his grandfather’s property will extremely affect João Carlos,
who is also awaiting the birth of his first son and is involved with the
restoration of a historic church in São Paulo. This drama is also reflected
by the movie’s sophisticated aesthetic. Through sparse actions and long
takes, Obra creates a contemplative atmosphere with a slow temporal-
ity that allows the spectator to linger on the monumental plasticity of
the movie’s photography. The cinematography also presents a menac-
ing city, whose tensions are developed by the soundscape, composed
mainly by urban noises, mastered in a way that resembles horror movie
soundtracks.
The film is structured through the conflict between future and past,
or between the will to go forward, building new places, and the will to
investigate and reveal the history lying under the city’s ground. This his-
torical tension provokes a moral dilemma in the protagonist, who also
faces a family clash. Although not desired, the discovery of the grave
154 M. Goulart
prevents João Carlos from moving in the same direction as his father
(Marku Ribas) and grandfather (Turíbio Ruiz), forcing him to face what
the men of his family want to forget.
The conflict between past and future—or conservation and erasure—
is expressed by many terms and strategies. At the most explicit level, the
different characters’ relationship to the past makes the conflict surface.
João Carlos finds in his father, who is also an architect, major opposi-
tion to his attempt to reveal the past. Against João Carlos’s enthusi-
asm for restoring the cathedral, his father states that it is not worth it
because São Paulo will not lose anything with the cathedral’s deteriora-
tion. Making every effort to pretend that the graveyard does not exist,
the father tries to erase all memories and facts that would put the con-
struction project at risk. After rejecting João Carlos’s warning about
the bones that were found in the site, the old architect sings Trastevere,
a song by Milton Nascimento that criticizes the modern city imagina-
tion. The song reflects the dramatic situation: in its verses, a blind father
describes the city to his son as a modern place.
The tension between memory and forgetfulness is also expressed by
the contrast between the search conducted by João Carlos and the one
that his wife (Lola Peploe), a foreign archeologist, is working on. While
João Carlos’s attempt to reveal the past is censured, his wife’s search for
the vestiges of Jesuits in the city is very much admired by her parents-in-
law. The contrast between the search for unknown corpses found at the
family’s land and for Jesuits at an archeological level suggests the ques-
tions: What past should be revealed? What bodies deserve to be identi-
fied? Through the places selected by the film to compose its spatiality,
and also through the careful plastic composition of these spaces, the
city’s body has a main role in the construction of the tension in this tem-
poral conflict—a conflict that also afflicts São Paulo from its very origin.
São Paulo: The Building of a Modern City

The conflict between past and future that guides Obra can be taken as
a metaphor for the city’s dynamics, a commentary on the projects that
took place in São Paulo and the implications of these projects in the pre-
sent. The conflict between preservation and suppression, or memory
and its erasing, that torments João Carlos is a familiar one in São Paulo,
an amnesic city which, since its foundation, has been reinventing itself.
Although any city inevitably faces change in its structure along the years,
in São Paulo the transformations are constant and drastic. As a savage

city that is always hungry for novelty, in São Paulo, history and memory
have been neglected throughout the centuries, as can be noted in the
intense property speculation that results in a constant rebuilding of the
city. According to Rubens Machado Jr., “the furious vigor that modern-
izes, razing what is traditional, was the tradition that has been conse-
crated” (“Plano em grande angular” 193).
Against São Paulo’s secular amnesia, historical conflicts are expressed
throughout the movie in different ways which also affect João Carlos in
his personal drama. In presenting the city’s history, the narrative takes
place in iconic Modern architecture projects, built around the time of
São Paulo’s 400th anniversary, which was celebrated in 1954. Pictured
from unusual points of view, buildings such as Edifício Copan, 14 Bis,
Eiffel, Conjunto Nacional, and Hotel Jaraguá—all featured in Obra—
are examples of São Paulo’s architecture that displays the intention of
being a modern city, and the desire to imprint a modern-day image on
the city’s spatiality. This desire has marked the city from the beginning
of the twentieth century and has become stronger in the subsequent
decades.
The celebration of São Paulo’s 400th anniversary occurred during a
crucial period of Brazilian history, the 1950s. That decade was marked
by slogans such as “fifty years in five,”13 claimed by President Juscelino
Kubitschek when the country was going through major changes. With
the rapid growth of its manufacturing industry, São Paulo was one of the
main focuses of the Kubitschek government’s goals. Marked by intense
regional acclamation, the celebration was preceded by several urban pro-
jects that were intended to transform and modernize São Paulo’s image.
In order to give enough time to prepare the city’s image for the anniver-
sary, a commission was installed 3 years before the official celebration. At
the urban level, the anniversary commission’s recommendations sought
to erase provincial traces in the city, which implied the building of mod-
ern structures, such as hotels and sports centers.
The intense modernization was closely connected with the city’s
desire for modernity. In accordance with Henri Lefebvre’s statement
that a city is a social projection in a place, the 1950s was a period when
São Paulo’s society evidently projected its self-image of metropolis onto
the physical apparatus (Xavier). Coherent with the Modern project, the
will to imprint the city’s image and a sense of its progress meant the
156 M. Goulart
destruction of traditional sites,14 and in São Paulo the battle against the
city’s original geography continued.
With slogans such as “the city with the greatest growth on earth”,
“Brazil’s locomotive”, “the city that cannot stop”, or “won’t sleep”,15
São Paulo attracted many workers, especially from the poorer Northeast.
In São Paulo, the migrants who built the modern city did not enjoy the
promises announced in the slogans. Instead, they faced a difficult future
in the megacity because most were condemned to live in informal settle-
ments with no infrastructure or social assistance in the peripheral areas
that were growing rapidly.16 Soon, the collapse of the Modern project
and the many urban and social consequences of the intense growth con-
cealed under the images and slogans became clear.17
It is particularly revealing that, among the acclamation slogans, São
Paulo was also hallowed by descriptions such as “a city of dizzy growth”,
“fumigant urban renewal” and “a febrile capital of bandeirantes”
(Xavier). Massively present in the media, from official and journalistic
texts to propaganda, these sentences were also adopted by the popula-
tion and marked the city’s imaginary essence (Xavier). These sympto-
matic slogans showed something close to the concern expressed by many
philosophers, such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Weber, who warned
about the severe implications of modernity after the Second World War
(Harvey).
Despite a great deal of discussion about the problematic impacts of
the Modern project, the image of São Paulo as a “locomotive” is still
alive in the city’s psyche—as evidenced by the perpetual careless destruc-
tion of São Paulo’s historical heritage. Making the project’s failure vis-
ible, Obra also expresses how the project affects people: not only the
architect João Carlos, but also the workers who are responsible for the
building. Employed on the construction site, Pedro (Júlio Andrade)
is the antagonist who confronts João Carlos about the moral issues of
going ahead with the construction after the graveyard is found. Although
working at the same project and living in the central area, as does João,
the employee’s fate strongly diverges from the employer’s. Pedro’s des-
tiny also represents a chain of historical oppression.
The audacious worker who provokes his boss will have a tragic end:
like many construction workers, Pedro dies at the construction site.
Although not due to the lack of security or reasonable working condi-
tion,18 his death (or murder) reinforces the vulnerability of these work-
ers who risk their lives in order to survive in the city. The death scene
is pictured in a low-angle shot that reinforces the hierarchy established,

showing João Carlos’s father watching the corpse with satisfaction,
while João desperately digs the ground, but does not find any trace of
the grave, which suggests that Pedro was murdered in order to conceal
the truth about the site’s history. The dramatic scene ends with frames
that present the landscape of São Paulo with different buildings. At this
point, the image of the skyline full of skyscrapers suggests some ques-
tions: How many bodies may be resting under these buildings? What is
buried under the foundations of all these constructions? What remains to
be discovered under the image of this modern city?
Having seen what is under the construction site, João Carlos is
hunted by a difficult past, which triggers personal and family conflicts,
as well as physical problems—he finds himself facing a spinal disease that
temporarily immobilizes him. The discovery of some bones in the inher-
ited land interrupts the perverse cycle of the city’s regeneration. Until
the characters face the past, it is not possible to move forward. In build-
ing these situations, the city’s spaces are visually articulated as dramatic
elements that are intensely connected with João Carlos’s body.
The Expression of the City

As mentioned earlier, the city’s spatiality plays a crucial role in the film’s
narrative. More than the locus where the story takes place, the city’s spa-
tiality is evoked as a powerful dramatic element, which can draw con-
flictive dynamics and memories. The cinemascope format emphasizes the
landscape, while also strengthening the relationship between characters
and the environment. In many scenes, architecture is the main focus,
providing an enclosed composition in which the building covers most of
the space of the frame, giving the spectator no sense of its surroundings
or depth of field. Along with the urban noise, these compositions sug-
gest a hostile and frightening city.
On the narrative and symbolic levels, the city’s spaces and buildings
are intimately connected with the characters and the tension constructed.
Portrayed as sophisticated, João Carlos is depicted in buildings such as
Edifício Copan and Edifício Eiffel—both designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
His antagonist, the worker who forces João’s encounter with the grave-
yard, is associated with another emblematic building of São Paulo’s
Modern architecture: Edifício 14 Bis. Whereas both Edifício Copan
and Edifício Eiffel are buildings of touristic interest that symbolize São
158 M. Goulart
Paulo’s modern and avant-garde image, 14 Bis represents a negative

development of this project. Like the North American case of Pruitt-
Igoe, 14 Bis houses drug dealers and there are social conflicts related to
poverty. Similarly to Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction, the demolition of 14 Bis
has been put forward by some urbanists; a possibility that is also men-
tioned by João Carlos.
In fact, the film’s visual composition is punctuated by unusual framings
of the city’s architecture. Some shots depict historic places with their mon-
uments and buildings. This type of framing reveals the paramount place
of the city in Obra as a central element in the drama that presents history
through architecture and narrative through space. The antagonistic relation
between João Carlos and Pedro is also suggested by visual composition
that contrasts the characters’ bodies and their position in the frame. At the
height of their conflict, João Carlos receives an envelope with the remain-
ing body fragments found at the grave; when he realizes its content, João
Carlos immediately has an acute hernia crisis. After recovering from it, he
decides to meet Pedro (undoubtedly the sender of the envelope). During
João’s journey to the employee’s apartment, the structure of Edifício 14
Bis is pictured with acute lines, framed as a kind of monster with tentacles
standing over João Carlos, who moves inside it (see Fig. 9.1). In the build-
ing’s corridor, the unexpected visitor is repelled by Pedro, a withdrawal
that is plastically enhanced by the long corridor’s contour, whose shape
seems to oppress João Carlos. Both compositions—of the corridor and of
the façade of 14 Bis—express a sense of enclosure created through frame
composition; an enclosure that is projected over João Carlos.
The encounter with his family’s violent past strongly affects João
Carlos. At the end of this scene, Pedro throws João a wallet he found in
the graveyard. He also shouts that he counted at least 12 bodies there.
As João drives away, the audience sees a damaged picture inside the wal-
let. The picture shows a man sleeping, holding a baby in his arms. Inside
the car, João Carlos has a kind of trance with the vision of human bodies
lying on the ground, followed by an image of his head projected over an
old tower that resembles São Paulo’s traditional industrial constructions.
After that, the film portrays João Carlos walking in the narrow cor-
ridor of the Memorial of Resistance (see Fig. 9.2). This site symbolizes
the politics of memory developed in São Paulo. The Memorial is housed
in the building of the very repressive and violent DOPS (Department of
Political and Social Order), where the military carried out many execu-
tions and other kinds of human rights violations. After the end of the
Fig. 9.1 Obra (2014)
Fig. 9.2 Obra (2014)
dictatorship, the DOPS building underwent changes, probably with the

intention of destroying the evidence of the military’s actions. After much
controversy the Memorial was finally inaugurated in 2009.19
Created 20 years after democratization, the Memorial is a singular
effort to give shape to a difficult history and, until the present time, it
has been the only one dedicated to the dictatorship in São Paulo—a city
that had a protagonist role in the repression committed.20 The lack of
other memorials of this kind and the destruction of buildings and the
city’s spaces are perversely close to the intention of erasing or hiding a
past that would convict the State’s forces and other powerful groups for
their criminal actions. The erasing operation is still in progress, as the
demolition of Carandiru prison suggests.21
In this context, the choice of the former DOPS as a setting for the
film is of great significance. There, the audience sees João insistently
moving from one side to another, banging his shoes and head against
the wall. His gestures are enhanced by strong square lines whose shades
crisscross João’s body as he walks. The location is a powerful site of
memory, “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (Nora 7), and
even when not aware of the location’s history, the scene creates a spa-
tial prison, translating visually and architecturally the conflict that afflicts
João—and also the city.
160 M. Goulart
The choice to end the trance at a place that represents the intense dif-
ficulty of building memory in the city reinforces the connection between
the city’s history and the narrative drama. As faced by João, who cannot
go ahead with building his project over the graveyard, the metaphor for
the city reminds us of contradictions such as the construction of democ-
racy and the battle for equality over a territory where many crimes are
hidden, and whose past we still know little about. The trance also rep-
resents the powerful force of a subjectivity strain, which João Carlos will
have to face in a kind of final consciousness development, as he realizes
that he is an agent and also a prisoner in this violent chain. After the
trance, João Carlos, who vacillated in the beginning and did not face his
father, will act more assertively.
The intense connection between the city’s spatiality and the narrative is
also drawn over João Carlos’s body. Aligned in many takes with the build-
ings’ columns or positioned as an extension of its structure, João Carlos is
represented as a kind of human-building, a representation that is benefited
by the actor’s physique (see Fig. 9.3). Pressuring or oppressing the pro-
tagonist, the landscape of São Paulo is deeply connected with João Carlos’
own body, which seems to merge with the architectural structures.
An expressive example of this is seen at a specialist architecture book-
shop, where the comparison between bodies and buildings becomes
evident. After depicting a Classic-style column drawing in a book, the
audience sees João Carlos’s spine covering the screen. A fade-out situ-
ates his body at the bookshop where, among many books, a huge pho-
tograph of Greek columns is shown aligned with João Carlos’s body.
The fade-out also places the store in a corner, where a structure around
its strong columns suggests the restoration of the building. Moreover,
the scene has a meaningful soundtrack: while the cadence of all columns
(from the book, body, photograph, and building) is displayed, the audi-
ence hears the loud noise of demolition. The noise of heavy material and
Fig. 9.3 Obra (2014)

the image of all these structures create a tactile sense, and the character’s
physical pain and mental distress is presented. The scene also reinforces
the film’s argument that a column, as a spine, cannot stand over this vio-
lent and hidden past.
The alignment of the characters’ bodies as an urban element, as part
of the city’s body, creates a tactile, visual, and metaphoric correspond-
ence between the body and the city. Embodying those “difficult mem-
ories”, through the city’s and characters’ bodies, Obra creates a haptic
narrative. As in the Greek etymology, this hapitikos narrative enables the
audience to come into contact with the city’s conflictive past and mem-
ories. Merging personal drama with history, the consequences of the
city’s growth over a “sick tissue”, at a ground that hides many historic
wounds, is linked to João Carlos’s health and body.
Immobilized by a hereditary spinal hernia, the sickness reflects a cycli-
cal history of violence buried under São Paulo’s modern image. Unlike
the surgical treatment chosen by his father and grandfather (the surgery
is suggested by huge scars on their backs), João Carlos’s bodily recovery
is done through the act of facing the past, the attempt to find the iden-
tity of the human remains found in the graveyard.
In preventing the continuation of a perverse inheritance, with a mod-
est reconciliation with the past, a new generation is allowed to come
into existence: his son is born and the audience finally sees the horizon
over the city’s landscape. The modest “happy ending” encourages the
movement through the past, as a way to reveal the city’s history and to
deconstruct the violence that has been seen as if it were normal over the
centuries. Although a small act of facing the past, which does not really
deal with the father and grandfather, the film’s ending suggests that we
can only go through a future project after dealing with the past and fac-
ing what remains under the “official history”.
Conclusion
Through camera position, frame composition, montage, plot, and other
cinematic strategies, Obra makes visible a past which lies under the
“official history”. On the narrative level, the film evokes a social issue
through a personal and subjective drama. In this sense, João Carlos rep-
resents a figure who is supposed to support the cyclical violence but he
is haunted by the past, and aware of his part in this history, he discreetly
breaks the chain. Through the character’s dilemma and the contrast
162 M. Goulart
between the modern image of the city and the history that it hides, the
movie strongly recalls Benjamin’s concept of history. His premise is that
history is a chain of catastrophes, the succession of massacres against the
oppressed that are presented by the “official history” as glory and pro-
gress. Against the heroic narrative of the victors, the philosopher pro-
poses a new history that recognizes the violence that marks the past, an
essential condition for the rendition and transformation in the present.
The new history is illustrated by the figure of an angel, the Angel of
History, who faces the past and “where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin 257).
The metaphor with the Angel of History is reflected in João Carlos’s
immobilization: both are halted by a tragic past that prevents them from
going further into the future. As in Benjamin’s thesis that compares pro-
gress to a disturbance, Obra also depicts the symptoms of the febrile
growth implied in the acclamation of São Paulo’s progress. Against the
official narrative of the city’s modernity and development, Obra presents,
embodied on screen, a difficult and hidden memory.
Activating architecture as a powerful historical and social tool, Obra
also illustrates cinema’s connection with memory, the old art of archi-
tectonic recollection that has been absorbed in our own time by motion
pictures (Bruno 7). Connecting memory and architecture, Obra treats
film as a modern cartography whose “haptic way of site-seeing turns pic-
ture into architecture, transforming them into a geography of lived, and
living, space” (Bruno 8).
Enhancing the architecture’s ability to make memory visible and tac-
tile, Obra also inscribes history in the present, operating a kind of rec-
onciliation between the two times—the one devoted to the past and the
other to a future of erasure. Encouraging the audience to read this com-
plex palimpsest that is composed of the many layers that form the city,
the film reminds us that if the city is a place marked by violence, it is also
where resistance and countermovements occur. Without dealing with the
gaps in the “official history” it is not possible to move on from the past
atrocities and avoid repeating them. At a time when a tragic past of polit-
ical and human rights violations is threatening Brazil’s democracy with
the intense support of mass media, the urgency of memory is doubtless.
As Patricio Guzmán poetically recalls in Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for
the Light (2010), “those who have memory are able to live in the fragile
present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere”.
Notes
1. Brazilian movies such as A cidade é uma só?/Is the City Only One?
(Ardiley Queirós, 2011), O som ao redor/Neighboring Sounds (Kleber
Mendonça Filho, 2012), Que horas ela volta?/The Second Mother (Anna
Muylaerte, 2015); the Argentine Cuerpo de letra/Embodied Letters (Julián
D’Angiolillo, 2015), AU3 (Autopista central)/AU3 (Central Highway)
(Alejandro Hartmann, 2010), Medianeras/Sidewalls (Gustavo Taretto,
2011); the Mexican En el hoyo/In the Pit (Juan Carlos Julfo, 2006); and
the Venezuelan Pelo malo/Bad Hair (Mariana Rondón, 2013) are exam-
ples of contemporary Latin American productions’ concerns with urban
issues.
2. Hunting for gold, silver, diamonds and also seeking to capture native
indigenous people, the bandeirantes led expeditions called bandeiras
(flags). Venturing into unmapped regions, the bandeiras had a crucial
role in the demarcation of Brazilian borders (Prado; Ribeiro).
3. A detailed analysis of the historical chain of violence imposed through the
colonization, by which Brazilian culture, people, and nation were formed,
can be found in Ribeiro.
4. The situation faced by the construction workforce is portrayed in the doc-
umentary Viramundo/Viramundo (Geraldo Sarno, 1965). This film was
produced in the context of the Caravana Farkas, a project undertaken
in the 1960s, in which a group of filmmakers traveled to the Northeast of
Brazil to document popular culture. This resulted in the production of a
number of documentaries. Viramundo shows the intense and continuous
migration to São Paulo in the 1960s and the harsh life conditions faced
by the migrants in the city.
5. In 2014 police forces killed 353 civilians, 64% of whom were black males,
mainly dwellers of low-income peripheries (Prefeitura de São Paulo).
6. An expressive example in São Paulo’s urban space is the former Elevado
Costa e Silva. Named after the dictator responsible for the most severe
institutional act (the AI-5), this viaduct was built during the most vio-
lent years of dictatorship as a giant monument that divided neighbor-
hoods. The intention to imprint a dictatorship landmark in the city space
was later re-signified by the citizens. Popularly known as Minhocão, the
viaduct became a place of democratic meetings: partly closed to traffic,
Minhocão was occupied by different social classes and was finally renamed
after João Goulart, the President overthrown by the military forces.
7. The concept of lieux de mémoire is developed by Nora as a phenomenon
related to a drastic change in the French tradition of history by which his-
tory became reflexive and the “real environment of memory” (7) disap-
peared.
164 M. Goulart
8. All translations are mine, unless stated otherwise.

9. Memory is also a question of power: from Aztecs to Europeans, the con-
quering of a people is also an appropriation of its culture, tradition and
memory. This aspect of domination underwent an unimaginable develop-
ment with the suppression of memory imposed by authoritarian regimes
during the twentieth century (Todorov).
10. Proposing a shift from the “ocularcentrism” of cinema theory, Giuliana
Bruno argues that, as spatiovisual arts, cinema and architecture are haptic
experiences that “[develop] their spatial bond along a path that is tactile”
(6). In this shift, moving away from the voyeur’s fixed gaze, the mobile
spectator, conceived as voyageur, tours in the filmic space, entering the
cinematic city.
11. For an account of São Paulo’s historic development, see Machado (“São
Paulo”). A discussion of movies shot in the 1950s and 1960s can be
found in Salvadore. Film production during the 1980s is analyzed by
Barbosa. The edited collection by Pinazza and Bayman also offers an
overview of São Paulo’s spaces in various movies shot in the city.
12. Designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki in the city of St. Louis (USA),
Pruitt-Igoe was a large urban housing project of the 1950s that soon
became known for its decline, with poverty, segregation, and crime. The
Project was demolished in the 1970s and has become an icon of urban
renewal. The death of Modern architecture is developed in Jencks.
13. This was the main slogan of President Kubitschek’s government.
14. The Modernist architecture movement defended the renunciation of clas-
sical and historical models in order to give place to the expression of its
time. An example of the destruction of traditional construction by a mod-
ern project is found with the audacious Conjunto Nacional. At that time
the biggest commercial center in Latin America, Conjunto Nacional was
built in the place of a traditional Art Nouveau mansion (Xavier). It also
instigated a major change to Avenida Paulista: in the following decades
the residential avenue turned into the main financial center of the city.
15. A discussion on these popular slogans and their meanings can be found in
Xavier and Machado.
16. The harsh condition of the migrant worker in São Paulo is not limited to
the 1950s, as can be seen in the interesting portrayal of the protagonist
in O homem que virou suco/The Man Who Turned as it was in the original
into Juice (João Batista de Andrade, 1980).
17. For an account of the Modern history of São Paulo through architecture,
see Xavier. For a close reading of a Modern project through cinema, see
Salvadore.
18. Deaths at building sites are extremely frequent in Brazil. For example, it
was the second biggest cause of workers’ fatal accidents in 2013 (Baroni).
19. One of the main polemics found within the Memorial project is the choice
to prioritize resistance over the memory of the violence committed in the
prison—a choice that is reinforced by the faint reconstruction of the cells
and prison structure that have at last erased historical marks found on the
walls.
20. In São Paulo, a number of torture and repression organizations were
established, such as DOPS, DOI-CODI and Sítio 31 de Março. As a main
cell of the dictatorship violence, it is estimated that 25% of all deaths
committed by the military took place in the city of São Paulo.
21. In an effort to erase the memory of the 1992 massacre and the violence
that took place in the building, Carandiru prison was demolished in
2002. Despite the intention to destroy the traces of human rights vio-
lation, the massacre and the history of the prison and inmates are the
subject of many songs (e.g. Manifest, by the Brazilian heavy metal band
Sepultura; Rebellion, by Asian Dub Foundation; and Haiti, by Gilberto
Gil), movies such as Carandiru/Carandiru (Hector Babenco, 2001)
and O prisioneiro da grade de ferro/The Prisoner of the Iron Bars (Paulo
Sacramento, 2003), and also a TV series: Carandiru, outras histórias/
Carandiru: The Series (Hector Babenco, 2005) produced for Rede
Globo. For an account of representations of the Carandiru massacre, see
Stam.
References
Barbosa, Andréa. São Paulo: cidade azul – ensaios sobre as imagens da cidade no
cinema paulista dos anos 1980. São Paulo: Alameda, 2012. Print.
Baroni, Larissa Leiros. “Construção é o 2º setor com o maior número de mortes
em acidentes de trabalho no país.” Uol Notícias 06 Dec. 2013. Web. 28 Aug
2016.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968. Print.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New
York: Verso, 2011. Print.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity – An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Print.
Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli,
1981. Print.
Machado, Rubens L.R., Jr. “São Paulo, uma imagem que não pára.” Revista
D’Art (2002): 59–66. Print.
Machado, Rubens L.R., Jr. “Plano em grande angular de uma São Paulo
fugidia.” Comunicação & Informação (UFG) 11. São Paulo no cinema
(2008): 192–196. Print.
166 M. Goulart
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.”

Representations. 26 Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989):
7–24. Web.
Pinazza, Natália and Louis Bayman, eds. World Film Locations: São Paulo.
Bristol: Intellect Books, 2013. Print.
Prado, Caio. A cidade de São Paulo: geografia e história. São Paulo: Brasiliense,
1983. Print.
Prefeitura de São Paulo. “Conheça os dados do seminário “Juventude, segurança
Pública e Direitos Humanos.” Portal da Juventude 11 Dec. 2015. Web. 24
Aug. 2016.
Ribeiro, Darcy. O povo brasileiro: a formação e o sentido do Brasil. São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2014. Print.
Ruskin, John. “The Lamp of Memory.” The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
Berkeley: University of California, 1889. Print.
Salvadore, Waldir. São Paulo em preto e branco: cinema e sociedade nos anos 50.
São Paulo: Annablume, 2005. Print.
Stam, Robert. “The Carandiru Massacre: Across the Mediatic Spectrum.” New
Argentine and Brazilian Cinema – Reality Effects. Eds. Jens Andermann and
Álvaro Bravo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 139–156. Print.
Sztulwark, Pablo. “Memoria y ciudad: La transformación de los espacios urba-
nos.” Arquitectura y Memoria. 31 Aug. (2009): 11–15. Print.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “La Memoria Amenazada.” Los Abusos de La Memoria.
Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica, 2000. Print.
Xavier, Denise. Arquitetura metropolitana. São Paulo: Annablume, FAPESP,
2007. Print.
Author Biography
Marília Goulart holds an MA from the University of São Paulo. She works in
the City Hall of São Paulo with cultural and education actions for promoting
awareness and discussion of the memory surrounding the military dictatorship
that held power in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
PART IV
Queering Spaces
CHAPTER 10
The Space of Queer Masculinities

in Karim Aïnouz’s Praia Do Futuro
Simone Cavalcante da Silva
The homoerotic motif and the portrayal of same-sex relations are not
new themes in Karim Aïnouz’s cinematic productions. In 2002, he
released his first feature film Madame Satã, which challenged the stereo-
types associated with homosexuals in patriarchal Brazilian society.1 More
recently, his film Praia do Futuro/Futuro Beach (2014), described as a
“visually hypnotic journey from a sun blasted Brazilian beach to wintry
Berlin and centered on men with mesmerizing bodies in their search
for identity and belonging” (Rooney n. pag.), brought more to the big
screen than just a fine mix of landscapes and male sensuality; it brought
an innovative way of representing masculinity and same-sex relations in
contemporary Brazilian cinema.
Praia do Futuro revolves around the relationship between three central
male characters: Donato (Wagner Moura), Konrad (Clemens Schick), and
Ayrton (Savio Ygor Ramos/Jesuíta Barbosa) as they confront themes such
as love, loss, abandonment, self-discovery, and self-acceptance. Divided
into three parts and an epilogue (“The Drowner’s Embrace”, “A Hero
Cut in Half”, “A German-Speaking Ghost”, and the epilogue “Heroes”),
S.C. da Silva (*) 
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA

170 S.C. da Silva
the film tells the story of Donato, a lifeguard in the Brazilian Military
Firefighter Corps. Donato is only able to save one of two German tour-
ists from drowning in the treacherous waters of Praia do Futuro, a famous
beach in Fortaleza, the capital city of the state of Ceará in northeastern
Brazil. The experience of facing death for the first time has a strong impact
on Donato and will trigger a quest for his identity, his place in the world,
and what he wants from life.2 Quite unexpectedly, Donato becomes
romantically involved with the surviving German tourist, Konrad, an
Afghanistan War veteran. The relationship grows strong and Donato will
be questioned, by Konrad, about his relationship with the world around
him.3 As a result, Donato decides to abandon his life in Praia do Futuro,
his younger brother Ayrton, and his mother to join Konrad in Berlin.
Despite starting a pleasant new life, Donato eventually isolates himself
from Konrad and lives a somewhat solitary life in Berlin, which will only
change once he comes face to face with his brother again. Donato finally
begins the journey of self-acceptance that is necessary to move beyond the
fears that have held him back from experiencing a full life. As described by
the actor Wagner Moura, who plays the protagonist Donato: “The film is
about identity, courage and cowardice. It is about the courage to be what
you want to be”4 (n. pag.).
This chapter examines Praia do Futuro, paying attention to the rela-
tionship between queer5 male subjectivities in regard to their expressions
of masculinity vis-à-vis the way they are framed within different spatial
realms.6 While Praia do Futuro never explicitly discusses its characters’
sexual identities, it explores the theme beyond stereotypical representa-
tions of gay males repeatedly seen in Brazilian cinema and television. It
looks at questions of queer sexuality, or what may be considered deviant
sexualities within a heteronormative Brazilian society, in relation to other
themes such as displacement and exile. This analysis thus intends to offer
a differing point of view on the state and space of queer masculinities in
Brazilian contemporary film.
Male Bodies, Queer Masculinities

Praia do Futuro’s three male characters share many of the common
markers of what is characterized as hegemonic masculine performance.
They are independent, risk takers, and aggressive men who—with the
exception of homosexuality—represent, without a glitch, the model of
the macho that is constructed, recognized, and accepted in the Brazilian
10 THE SPACE OF QUEER MASCULINITIES … 171
patriarchal cultural milieu.7 An important aspect of the film narrative that

reaffirms these men’s masculinities is the presentation and representa-
tion of their bodies, which are key vehicles for understanding the rela-
tionships between machismo, masculinity, and homosexuality in Brazilian
society.
Throughout the first part of the film, Donato’s half-naked body is
shown various times, either in the ocean or exercising with his fellow
lifeguards at Praia do Futuro. As the camera unashamedly frames mus-
cles, butts, and crotches in close-up shots, the spectators watch the well-
rehearsed military brigade training, a performance carried out within an
institution constructed on the basis of hegemonic masculinity and male
power. Such exploration of the male physique recalls Yann Roblou’s
point when he notes that “the [muscular] body, as an external signifier,
has come to represent all the conventions traditionally linked to assump-
tions of male power and masculinity” (77–78). Likewise, David Bell
et al. maintain that, as a site of identity, morality, work, play, and pleas-
ure, the materiality of the body constitutes itself within place and dis-
course. In this way, the body’s relation to social space vis-à-vis public and
private spaces is also determined and mediated by the specific cultural
frameworks of a given society.
This key relationship between the representation of male identity and
social space is stressed throughout the film as Donato alternates between
his work as a military lifeguard, the provider for his family, and the super-
hero Aquaman, as he is called by his brother Ayrton. The structure of all
three roles is based on hegemonic and normative practices that will shape
and influence Donato’s performance of masculinity within the private
and public realms, and its social perception and categorization.
Henri Lefebvre proposes that space is a social product and that every
society produces a space of its own. While mediated through language,
these spaces carry symbols with powerful meanings and values that artic-
ulate the communication of special groups. To create a place is then a
way to “discipline” a space, since this “disciplining” imposes limitations
on its access by structuring codes based on gender, ethnicity, economic
status, and even style. Along these lines, Michel Foucault suggests that
discourses and practices create subjects and construct particular ways to
understand the body (Foucault).8 Specifically, in The History of Sexuality,
Foucault pays attention to the ways in which bodies are disciplined
through various social and political regimes. Similarly, Lefebvre’s under-
standing of social space is also founded on degrees of “prohibition”.
172 S.C. da Silva
Within this framework, social space is created by specific ideological dis-

courses which are materialized through walls, fences, enclosures, and
borders that shape and regulate the limits of the public and the private.
With regard to Praia do Futuro, as long as Donato keeps his non-nor-
mative sexuality closeted9 and performs his identity according to the
Brazilian patriarchal imaginary, his masculine identity is not challenged.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler contends that gender categories
such as female/male are acts shaped through discourse and brought
into existence “performatively”, which entails the repetition of specific
acts within a “highly rigid regulatory frame that over time produces the
appearance of a natural sort of being” (33). In her analysis of Butler’s
Gender Trouble, Sara Salih describes gender as “an act that brings into
being what it names: a ‘masculine’ man or a ‘feminine’ woman” (64). In
regard to gender performativity, Subero also characterizes it as “a tool
to highlight or conceal sexuality [actions that may occur at the same
time], to guarantee that the individual passes as either ‘normal’ in society
or challenges existing sexual paradigms” (xvi). Based on these authors’
assumptions, it can be argued that, in Praia do Futuro, “performing” the
military lifeguard, the superhero character, and the archetypical north-
eastern male provides Donato with the security of gender heteronorma-
tivity veiled by uniforms, costumes, and machismo.
As a significant aspect in the construction of masculinity, machismo
has been theorized “as the masculine force which, to one degree or the
other, drives all male behavior in Latin American societies” (Subero 10).
According to Richard Parker (“Changing Sexualities”), Latin American
men’s sexual identity is determined not by the biological sex of the
sexual partner but rather by the culturally defined roles of active versus
passive that are adopted by the sexual actors. Furthermore, as Parker
indicates, a considerable contradiction in relation to patriarchal Brazilian
society is stated by the cultural construction of masculinity, which is
much more connected to the subject’s public performativity of gender
rather than the sexual acts per se (“Changing Sexualities”).10 If the male
homosexual subjects’ sexual behavior in private is never revealed, these
men are still safe under patriarchal law. As is the case in Praia do Futuro,
Donato can easily “pass” as heterosexual, as long as he does not express
his same-sex desire in public.
While Praia do Futuro could eventually perpetuate the stereotype
of the “straight-acting” gay male for stressing the Olympian nature of
the male bodies and their virility, the film still sheds some light on the
Fig. 10.1 Praia do
Futuro (2014)
limitations of a uniform representation of gay males and masculinities in

Brazilian mainstream media.11 In various sequences of the film, Aïnouz
depicts Donato’s and Konrad’s naked bodies in intimate and sex scenes.
The same bodies are presented earlier, with the same virility, gestures,
and expressions, but in private spaces, free from surveillance, they move
comfortably in the space of a hotel room, while gazing at or touching
each other’s physique with desire (see Fig. 10.1).
These scenes not only interrogate the traditional binary gender frame-
work that prevails within Brazilian patriarchal society, but also connect
Donato and Konrad to the stereotypical male role that is synonymous
with “force and power, violence and aggression, virility and sexual
potency” (Parker, Bodies, Pleasures and Passions 49). Also important in
this regard is the fact that in the scenes of sexual intercourse between
Donato and Konrad both shift from active to passive roles rather than
embracing one role as per the Brazilian image of same-sex relations.
Liquid Imagination and Spaces of Protection

The coastal landscape and the ocean carry a strong symbolism to the con-
struction of the film narrative as well as a significant connection between
all three major characters of Praia do Futuro. In the first part of the film,
the presence of the sea is cinematically evoked through the wide-angle
shots of Praia do Futuro, or metaphorically through the characters’
actions, thoughts, and representations. All three characters have a con-
nection to the ocean on different levels: Donato is a lifeguard, Konrad’s
friend drowns at Praia do Futuro, and Ayrton is afraid of the ocean.
Donato, though, is the character most strongly connected to the ocean.
The sea is where he finds shelter, and a space for him to be his true self.
The ocean landscape also plays an important part in the construction
of a “space of imagination”, to use Bachelard’s concept, or fantasy play
in Praia do Futuro. The subplot is marked by the evocation and creation
174 S.C. da Silva
of a storyline based on the DC Comics’ superhero Aquaman, along-

side the Japanese manga character Speed Racer and the Marvel Comics’
Ghost Rider. In one important passage of the movie Ayrton states: “You
are Aquaman. How can Aquaman disappear into the sea? He’s from the
sea.” Aquaman, the superhero and protector of the seas and oceans, is
part of a group of contemporary mythological icons that started to
appear during the 1930s and which became a fictional phenomenon of
contemporary mass media as well as an embodiment of hegemonic con-
figurations of masculinity. Hence, besides serving as mediator to the
relationship of Donato and Ayrton, this subplot works as a “protective
device” for both brothers: as an archetypal masculine role for Donato’s
unmarked sexual “deviance”, and as a coping mechanism for young
Ayrton to deal with the real danger and fear of losing his brother to the
waters of Praia do Futuro. Sheltered by the “unmarked”, “unquestiona-
ble” or “unmentioned” nature of superheroes’ sexuality, Donato’s secret
is safe in this imaginary space of fixed performances, which were collec-
tively co-created by young Ayrton.
Richard Reynolds points out that every superhero’s narrative presents
some sort of weakness or taboo, and that most heroes embrace a life of
secret identities, or split personalities, or wear some kind of disguise.
Reynolds explains how some superheroes pay for their great powers
“by the observance of this taboo of secrecy […] by abstaining from sex,
eating special foods, and other taboos designed to isolate and protect
the ‘masculine’ in their characters” (15). Consequently, in mainstream
superhero tales there is usually no significant depth to the hero’s sexual-
ity. Mostly, the physical appearance and physique are promoted in male
superheroes as a characteristic of the ideal masculinity and are viewed as
markers to identify and verify their sexuality.
While these cultural (fictional) productions exploit images of hegem-
onic masculinity, superheroes may also communicate about a more com-
plex set of issues entailed within their own representation. In regard to
Praia do Futuro, the creation of the superhero subtheme produces an
imaginary space that allows for the performance of a type of mainstream
masculinity supported by the media and aligned with the expectations
of northeastern Brazilian imaginary.12 Along these lines, the paradoxical
nature of the expression of masculinity which, due to the focus on the
demonstration and exhibition of physical attributes of often exaggerated
and exemplary masculinity, provides the audience with space to question
and possibly uncover the anxieties and fantasies that are part of society’s
understanding of traditional masculinity. Donato and Ayrton perform a

superhero narrative that sets out to secure and stabilize Donato’s gen-
der performance and expression of masculinity. Nevertheless, problems
arise once Donato is not able to keep up with the standards of the super-
hero performance, and is unmasked by not being able to save one of
the German tourists at Praia do Futuro. This is suggested in a sequence
set in the locker room of the firefighter brigade: at the end of that day’s
work, Donato’s silently stares at his name imprinted on his red lifeguard
shirt and his blank expression signals his profound disappointment with
himself. Donato is not Aquaman, after all, neither a good lifeguard, nor
a good northeastern family man. He is a fallible human being faced with
the reality of death for the first time.
A Place to Be Who You Want to Be

Despite Praia do Futuro’s extraordinarily framed sequences, the com-
plexity of this male melodrama is not clearly articulated through its
dialogues, eventually leaving the audience to question some of its char-
acters’ choices and actions. According to critic David Rooney, Aïnouz
“has always been more attentive to the creation of an atmospheric and
emotional texture than to story or character” (n. pag.). As a result, spec-
tators have to dive as deep as the characters do and follow the movie’s
signs and symbols in order to understand the narrative and characters’
motivations. For example, in regard to the motivations behind Donato’s
eventual departure to Germany, one could possibly speculate that he
flees his native country to be with Konrad, with whom he has started
to build a physical and emotional connection. On the other hand, given
the high statistics of homophobic crimes in Brazil,13 Donato’s decision
to leave could have also been driven by his awareness of homophobia,
together with feelings of displacement. This suggestion parallels Aïnouz’s
statement that Donato “would not have disappeared if he were not gay.
There would not have been any reason to make this movie if he was het-
erosexual” (Pécora n. pag.). Hence, Donato’s decision to go to Berlin
eventually represents a step toward liberation and freedom.
Aïnouz guides the spectators to experience Donato’s struggle to set-
tle into his new environment by using synesthetic symbols—images of
cold, damp, and colorless Berlin landscape. The use of wide-angle shots
framing Berlin as an almost black-and-white city with pale shades of
green and blue also makes a strong distinctive appeal in relation to the
176 S.C. da Silva
geographical locations in Brazil. As Corine Rootger notes, the colors and

the weather conditions “emphasize the different representation of the
contrasting countries, yet indicate the opposite of what the elements may
stand for” (n. pag.). If Praia do Futuro was initially thought as a utopian
paradise for its breathtaking geography and coastal landscape, it turns
out to be very much the opposite (Martin and Hu). For example, Praia
do Futuro’s urban plan of the 1970s never materialized as the futuris-
tic coastal metropolis for the city of Fortaleza; rather, it turned into a
place where things and people stagnated—a desert made of salty water.
According to Aïnouz, “what was supposed to be a utopia [the futuristic
costal metropolis] became a dystopia” (Martin and Hu n. pag.), a place
where nothing really grows. This idea is supported by the various long-
shot frames of a degraded landscape surrounding Donato’s firefighter’s
station, as well as by the protagonist’s statement that “it is impossible to
build anything around Praia do Futuro due to the high density of salt in
the air”. As Rootger points out, “[o]nly far away from home the main
character pursues love and the dream to live according to his beliefs” (n.
pag.). Donato’s journey to Berlin will then encompass broader implica-
tions in terms of not only achieving a sense of belonging but also con-
necting past and present in mythical and somewhat contradictory
heterotopic spaces.14
Carefully picked as the location for the first scene of the second part
of the film, Oberbaum Bridge, which used to divide East and West
Germany, may be seen as a metaphor for the protagonist’s new life then
divided between his past and his present. This bridge, more than just a
physical structure, may also be interpreted as a symbolic pathway toward
transformation, experimentation, and the possibility of reinventing one-
self. Likewise, Berlin’s unique sites will help in shaping the social rela-
tional discourses that will support Donato’s path toward reaching a sense
of belonging. Furthermore, it is worth observing that a full sense of
belonging extrapolates the limits of material spatiality, “claiming instead
a membership based on the egalitarian society whether based in ethnicity,
religion, class or sexual orientation” (Lovell 1).
Notwithstanding his initial struggle, Donato gradually settles into his
new life in Berlin. Since he cannot be by the tropical ocean and saving
lives at Praia do Futuro, the protagonist turns a swimming pool into his
shrine or protective space. In Berlin, he also works as a diver at the Berlin
AquaDom. All these new spatial experiences will allow the protagonist
to experiment with new political discourses of sex, gender, and sexuality,
unlike in Praia do Futuro and at his former workplace (the firefighter

military brigade) where he was surrounded by strict disciplinary technol-
ogies of the self, regulated by fixed expressions of gender identity.
From Aquaman to Speed Racer

The third and last part of Praia do Futuro brings Donato’s brother
Ayrton back to the center of the narrative as a young adult. The slow
and foggy establishing shot of the iconic Berlin TV tower guides the
spectators’ attention to an atmosphere of mystery surrounding Ayrton’s
arrival in Berlin. Reintroduced to the narrative as if he were invading
the scene setting of Alexanderplatz, Ayrton’s determined and serious
profile takes over the frame in a close-up shot. Ayrton’s presence back
in Donato’s life will force the protagonist to review his past and con-
front his fears and identity. Highly symbolic to the narrative, the scene in
which Ayrton sees Donato for the first time is framed as if both charac-
ters were in a bluish liquid dream or subaquatic experience. Ayrton’s visit
to the Berlin AquaDom parallels several mythical narratives of heroes
entering the underworld. Despite his fear of water, Ayrton/Speed Racer
descends to the deepest oceans to save and rescue his long-lost brother
Donato/Aquaman. Aïnouz guides the spectators to enter the aquarium
setting, a sort of dream-like space made of water, memories and medi-
ated by a thick glass wall. Ayrton watches the divers underwater, as if
in a movie theater or presented on a big plasma TV screen, which is a
potential reference to the cartoon Aquaman. It is possible to argue that
Ayrton’s image of Donato is still the frozen memory of a young boy who
idolizes his brother who was taken away by sea creatures or lost in the
ocean. Ayrton’s serious and decisive expression will set the tone for the
next encounter.
The first confrontation between Ayrton and Donato occurs in the
enclosed space of an elevator. A hooded Ayrton follows the protagonist
home and out of the blue confronts him by saying in German: “Brother.
Don’t you remember me?” The mastery of Aïnouz’s cinematography
constructs a scene in which, through the artifice of a mirror reflection,
the spectators are able to feel the intensity of Donato’s experience when
seeing his brother for the first time after years of separation. Juxtaposed
to a medium shot, the spectators see the image of three people: Ayrton,
his mirror image, and Donato, who appears in the background, framed
right in the middle of the two images of Ayrton (see Fig. 10.2).
178 S.C. da Silva
Fig. 10.2 Praia do
Futuro (2014)
Donato is then looking at a grown-up Ayrton, rather than at the

young brother he abandoned in Brazil. By duplicating the image of
Ayrton, Aïnouz arguably gives the audience a way into disrupting mem-
ories of his past. This scene will lead to the real confrontation between
the two brothers when Donato is finally questioned about his motives for
fleeing Brazil and about his sexuality.
Donato is confronted by his brother Ayrton inside an empty cafe,
which is shown in a shot-reverse-shot sequence. Ayrton determinedly
interrogates him, while emotionally staring back at his older brother with
watery eyes, and then asking: “Why did you leave? Answer me? Why did
you vanish? You are a selfish fag. Taking it up the ass here at the North
Pole!” However, Donato is still not able to openly discuss or disclose his
sexual identity or explain the reasons behind his disappearance. Donato’s
silence to his brother’s questions may be interpreted as the shame he
feels for having abandoned his family, as well as for having his sexuality
exposed and being confronted about “coming out” as a gay man.
While Praia do Futuro validates and parallels recent studies that have
acknowledged the idea of masculine-acting homosexuals who break the
binary active/passive, this scene represents, and may well reinforce, the
inability to openly discuss issues regarding non-heteronormative sexuali-
ties vis-à-vis a Brazilian context (D’Clark). Furthermore, it also recalls
the “metaphor of the closet”, suggested through Donato’s migration
to Berlin as a way out to hide his non-normative sexuality within the
Brazilian patriarchal society.15 Finally, this scene corroborates the patri-
archal idea of viados (“fags”) being sexually passive and feminine homo-
sexuals who usually play the role of being penetrated during sexual
intercourse.16
The film ends with all three men riding motorcycles together through
a foggy expressway to the beach of the future, as professed by the film’s
title. Materialized as Sankt Peter-Ording, a popular seaside site in north-
ern Germany, the beach of the future is the mythic “beach without
water” as promised by Donato to young Ayrton at Praia do Futuro. In

this heterotopia,17 reinscribed in the present by Donato, Ayrton, and
Konrad through the use of their imagination and memories of the past,
these three men are able to commune and build new relationships and
new subjectivities. Sankt Peter-Ording, a real landscape reinterpreted
through the collective memory of the characters, thus allows for a recon-
struction or retelling of the past in the present. In a poetic voice-over
monologue describing his evolution “from Aquaman to Speed Racer”
the protagonist finally comes to terms with his fears, moving forward
into the future as the film so openly suggests.
Conclusion: Is There a “Space”

for Queer Masculinities in Brazilian Cinema?
While Praia do Futuro does not openly discuss the themes of homosexu-
ality or queer identities, Aïnouz states that the homosexual theme is a
fundamental part of the film, which also defines Donato’s displacement.
While the landscape of Praia do Futuro may be gifted with vivid colors
and welcoming northeastern weather, it is only after Donato moves to
the gray and damp Berlin, that he finds a place “to be who he wants to
be”. Despite his love and connection to his native landscape “Donato
doesn’t feel alive but rather trapped since he can’t openly embrace his
sexuality.” (Rootger n. pag.) Moreover, the director reinforces his
awareness about the theme of masculinities by expressing his intention
to craft characters that would “represent different facets of masculinity
[…] propelled by a strong passion for one another” (“Masculinity” n.
pag.). Instead of the usual action film formula, “fights and death and
loss”, Aïnouz “wanted to use action as a trigger for life” (“Masculinity”
n. pag.). However, it is relevant to acknowledge that a lot of the film’s
appeal to a more general audience came from the casting of Wagner
Moura, who is one of the most famous Brazilian actors and became
nationally revered for his role as the stereotypical heterosexual tough
male police officer Capitão Nascimento in Tropa de Elite/Elite Squad
(José Padilha, 2007). Not surprisingly, and as anticipated by Moura, the
movie caused some commotion because of the theme of homosexuality,
particularly the sexual scenes between Donato and Konrad (“Não vim
aqui assistir”), since the average spectator did not relate to Moura’s role
of a gay male, not to mention watching him shifting sexual roles from
active to passive (Martins).
180 S.C. da Silva
Hence, one can argue that the average cinema audience has not yet
been trained to watch anything beyond the flamboyant, effeminate, and
asexual homosexual characters that appear on screen in the usual com-
edies and soap operas. Beyond these repetitive and frozen representa-
tions, Karim Aïnouz’s Praia do Futuro brings new queer subjectivities to
contemporary Brazilian cinema and a different way of looking at identi-
ties and sexualities. Indeed, by removing the stereotypical elements com-
monly found in cinematic representations of gay males, Praia do Futuro
guides its audience to look at queer characters through a different lens.
It deconstructs the understanding of active and passive roles within
Brazilian and indeed Latin American same-sex relationships that still pre-
vails in the popular imagery.
Finally, while the characters’ conventional masculinity fits well within
the Brazilian patriarchy imagery, their queer subjectivity goes against
this, which is evident in the voicing of their fears, vulnerabilities, and in
expressing their sexual desire toward other men. The film then opens a
space for rethinking preconceived beliefs regarding gender roles and sex-
ualities in contemporary Brazil. Therefore, it is crucial to look critically at
what kind of queer visibility contemporary Brazilian film and the general
media portray, and at the instances of how it may truly seek liberation,
equality, and raise consciousness about human rights.
Notes
1. For an in-depth analysis of Madame Satã, see Da Silva.
2. In the scene that follows his action of trying to save the drowning men,
Donato, now back at his lifeguard post, says to his young brother Ayrton:
“Can I ask you something? What would you do if one day I were to dis-
appear in this water?” (This and subsequent English translations of the
film are mine.)
3. During the first part of the movie, Konrad confronts Donato: “You have
been trained to find everything normal. You get used to people dying.”
4. Moura’s statement appears in the article “Mais que um filme gay.”
5. Drawing on David William Foster’s study, the use of the term “queer” in
this chapter aims to give visibility to a variety of non-conforming heter-
onormative identities and gender expressions outside the usual stereotypi-
cal effeminate gay male or masculinized lesbian so prevalent in Brazilian
mainstream media. It also refers to Gustavo Subero’s study, which calls
attention to the fact that “the use of the word queer is in itself problem-
atic, since in the Latin American milieu there is no such clearly defined
identity as there is in the West for the Anglo reader”. He establishes that
the word queer is “the closest definition to many non-heteronormative
identities, not limited to characters that are openly gay or even closeted,
but an array of characters” (xiii).
6. Spatial realms include landscapes, spaces, and places as well as the phe-
nomenological dimensions of space, as noted by Henri Lefebvre and
Gaston Bachelard.
7. See Durval Muniz Albuquerque Jr for an original study on the invention
of the “macho nordestino” (northeastern macho)—the always brave, virile,
and honored-based northeastern man—as produced by the Brazilian elite
around the 1920s.
8. For a full account on the deployment of the body, see Foucault.
9. The use of “closeted” here refers to Eve Sedgwick’s seminal text
Epistemology of the Closet. As defined by Michael Brown, “the closet” is
used “to describe the denial, concealment, erasure, or ignorance of les-
bians and gay men […] in a society that, in countless interlocking ways,
subtly and blatantly dictates that heterosexuality is the only way to be”
(1).
10. For an in-depth analysis on the construction of masculinity in Brazilian
society see Parker (“Changing Sexualities”).
11. According to Moreno, it was not until the 1970s that homosexual char-
acters became noticeable in Brazilian cinema. Despite the comic and cer-
tainly queer appeal of the characters of the chanchadas of the 1950s, these
characters were looked at simply as funny but would not necessarily be
connected to a gay aesthetic. From the 1980s onwards, more attention
and visibility has been given to the LGBTTQ community in the main-
stream media, although stereotypes of the feminine male and the mascu-
line female are still very much present.
12. However, Donato states in the final scene of the film: “I don’t need to
hide in the sea to find peace, neither do I need to dive in to feel.”
13. Brazil’s homophobia and transphobia kills on average one gay, trans, or
bisexual person every 28 h (McLoughlin).
14. For an in-depth analysis of the concepts of utopia and heterotopia see
Foucault (“Of other Spaces”).
15. This is an informal variation of the word veado, which means deer. For
further discussion on stereotypical representations of male homosexuals
in Brazil, see Chap. 3 in Parker (Bodies, Pleasures and Passions).
16. Bart Keunen notes that the concept of heterotopia, coined by Foucault,
“was intended to designate those spaces ‘that make the difference’, spaces
that elevate themselves above the indifferent places with which we are
confronted daily, and which hold a strong affective appeal for members of
the culture in question” (73).
182 S.C. da Silva
17. Although Brazil seems to be working to bring equality to all citizens inde-

pendently of their gender or sexual orientation, because same-sex mar-
riage being a reality acquired through the Federal Court, resistance to the
government’s progressive attitude still remains, predominantly from reli-
gious groups. Since May 14, 2013, civil partnership has been a right for
all same-sex couples.
References
Albuquerque, Durval Muniz Jr. Nordestino uma invenção do falo – uma história
do gênero masculino: Nordeste, 1920–1940. Maceió: Edições Catavento, 2003.
Print.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994. Print.
Bell, David et al. Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces. Syracuse: Syracuse
Brown, Michael P. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the
Globe. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Da Silva, Antônio Márcio. The ‘Femme’ Fatale in Brazilian Cinema: Challenging
Hollywood Norms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
D’Clark, Rayvenn Shaleigha. Futuro Beach (12A) Close-Up Film Review.
Close-Up Film. 27 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 May 2017.
Foster, David William. Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.
Austin: University of Texas, 2003. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated
by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Of other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Translated by Jay
Miskowieck. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (1984): 46–49. Web.
July 15 2016.
Keunen, Bart. “Urban Imagery between Enchantment and Disenchantment.”
Imagining Spaces and Places. Eds. Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi
Saarikangas, and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 57–84. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-
Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.
Lovell, Nadia, ed. Locality and Belonging. London: Routledge, 1998. Print.
“Mais que um filme gay.” O Tempo 16 May 2014. Web. 15 July 2016.
Martin, Jenna and Marcus Hu. “Interview with Director Karim Aïnouz.” Strand
Releasing n.d. Jan. 2015. Web. 1 Sept. 2016.
Martins, Felipe. “‘Profecia’ de Wagner Moura se cumpre: espectadores aban-

donam sessões de Praia do Futuro.” Blogs O Dia LGBT. O Dia 22 May 2014.
Web. 15 July 2016.
“Masculinity, Love and Superheroes in Futuro Beach.” Peccadillo Pictures.
Peccadillo Pictures Ltd. n. d. Web. 15 July 2016.
McLoughlin, Beth. “Brutal Killing of a Samba ‘Queen’ Exposes Dark World
behind the Glitter of Carnival.” The Guardian 8 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
Moreno, Antônio. A personagem homossexual no cinema brasileiro. Rio de
Janeiro: FUNARTE/EDUFF, 2001. Print.
“Não vim aqui assistir filme gay: Reações conservadoras a cenas de Praia do
Futuro.” O Globo 22 May 2014. Web. 15 July 2016.
Parker, Richard G. Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in
Contemporary Brazil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Print.
Parker, Richard G. “Changing Sexualities: Masculinity and Male Homosexuality
in Brazil.” Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. Ed. Matthew
C. Gutmann. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 307–332. Print.
Pécora, Luisa. “Cineasta Karim Aïnouz: Por que uma pessoa beijar outra é algo
polêmico?” Último Segundo Cinema. IG 19 May 2014. Web. 31 May 2016.
Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1994. Print.
Roblou, Yann. “Complex Masculinities: The Superhero in Modern American
Movies.” Culture, Society and Masculinities 4.1 (2012): 76–91. Web.
Rooney, David. “Praia do Futuro: Berlin Review.” The Hollywood Reporter.
Lynne Segall, 2 Nov. 2014. Web. 15 July 2016.
Rootger, Corine. “Berlin Review: Praia do Futuro (2014).” Next Projection 14
Feb. 2014. Web. 1 Sept. 2016.
Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Oakland: University of
California Press, 1990. Print.
Subero, Gustavo. Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies
and Narrative Representations. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Print.
Author Biography
Simone C. da Silva is an adjunct instructor in the Latin American Studies

Department at the University of Oregon. She is currently developing her the-
sis on the “Representation of Gays and Lesbians in Contemporary Brazilian
Cinema.” Her academic interests include: questions of gender and sexuality in
contemporary Brazil, film theory, Brazilian cinema and human rights in Latin
America.
CHAPTER 11
Water and Queer Intimacy
Fernando G. Pagnoni Berns
On a global scale, Brazil’s coast is commonly associated with crystal clear

waters and fantastic blue seas. Imagery of sensuality has been dissemi-
nated both by Brazilian and international media through depictions of
scantily clad women and men, from tourism advertisements to popu-
lar culture. As a Brazilian interviewee in Richard Parker’s study states,
“Clothes become a key for the exhibitionism and display of the body, of
the gifts of nature. Everything is very seminude, especially in cities where
there are beaches” (164). In most international popular culture and tour-
ism imagery, Brazilian men wear sungas (Speedos)—small, tight-fitting
swimming trunks—on the beach, accentuating the lines of their bodies.
Recently, sensual male bodies and the “sea and water imagery”
(Nagib 5) have been interlinked in Brazilian queer cinema. In this
regard, films such as Do começo ao fim/From Beginning to End (Aluizio
Abranches, 2009), O melhor amigo/The Best Friend (Allan Deberton,
2013), Praia do Futuro/Futuro Beach (Karim Aïnouz, 2014), Hoje eu
quero voltar sozinho/The Way He Looks (Daniel Ribeiro, 2014), Beira-
mar/Seashore (Filipe Matzembacher and Márcio Reolon, 2015) and
Sangue azul/Blue Blood (Lírio Ferreira, 2015) use the trope of water,
F.G.P. Berns (*) 
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA),
Buenos Aires, Argentina
e-mail: citeron05@yahoo.com

186 F.G.P. Berns
including swimming pools, the sea, and even aquariums, as expressive fea-
tures of their n
arratives.
This chapter examines three films that depict in compelling ways the
connection between desire, identity, and intimacy in relation to spaces
shaped by the presence of water. In Do começo ao fim, the two incestuous
brothers who are in love with each other share intimacy within spaces
containing water (e.g. bathtub and swimming pools). In Hoje eu quero
voltar sozinho, the swimming pool represents a complex space of open-
ness and retreat concerning the subjectivity of the different characters
sunbathing around it. Yet, water is not only depicted as a space for inti-
macy with other people. For example, in Praia do Futuro, water is the
place chosen by Donato (Wagner Moura) to “flee” from his Self.
In the films analyzed here there are no fixed identities but, mostly,
subjectivities that continuously locate and dislocate desire against a
background containing water. Since water favors nakedness (or at least,
semi-nakedness), relaxation, and playful attitudes, queer desires can be
tested outside the boundaries of the “dry” socially regulated world with-
out fear of reprisal. Social condemnation is still there monitoring, but
slightly relaxed. Therefore, a queer subjectivity that departs from heter-
onormativity reveals itself. At the same time, these particular spaces offer
the opportunity to retire (e.g. under the excuse of “we are only fool-
ing around”) and safeguard one’s subjectivity from any potential harm if
the desired response is not achieved. A place containing water is arguably
a “laboratory”, a site with flexible boundaries where situations can be
manipulated to engage with, look at and touch others, and probe their
feelings. Moreover, if the outcome is not what the swimmers expect,
immersion can provide an escape from intimacy. In other words, water is
a space that, contradictorily, provides intimacy but also the possibility of
fleeing from it, as shown in the films analyzed in this chapter.
Water, Intimacy, and the Self

Water has been given a special and symbolic significance throughout
history in the arts, religion, and mythology. Antoine Frérot argues that
“every civilization, every culture, every tradition talks about water and
weaves an intricate web of meanings and symbols around it” (11). From
this, some shared meanings surface. For example, according to Gaston
Bachelard, water becomes a reflection, a mirror for human beings to
look and recognize themselves. Water is the transitory element, the
11 WATER AND QUEER INTIMACY 187
embodiment of fluidity; it demonstrates the incessantly changing mat-

ter of our own essential being, of an identity in constant becoming. Yet,
because water can be shared with other people, the symbolic recognition
of the Self and the construction of our identities associated with water
can be actualized through the engagement with others. Subjectivity
may be related to a growing awareness of the Self in relation to others,
which is especially acute in intimate situations such as sharing nakedness
and water. Water as an intimate place allows self-determinacy, either for
the proximity of semi-naked objects of desire, or for introspection and
reflection.
Sharing water thus decreases the containing of the Self, which may
blend and connect with others, shaping new intimate social connections
prone to openness. Sharing water is sharing intimacy when making con-
tact with another body—within a material, tangible communal space—
without really touching it. If a person moves within water, such as in
a swimming pool, there are chances that others sharing the water will
feel the effects upon and around their bodies, in the form of ripples and
waves. There is more material connection in sharing water than air, for
example.
Such a potential openness of the Self is given not only by the shared
material medium. Spaces with water such as lagoons, swimming pools,
and even showers invite the display of the human body in different forms
of nakedness. Jeff Wiltse, for instance, contends that the swimming pool
is an “intimate” place where swimmers “are in a state of partial undress”
all the while they share the same body of water (124). Yet, perhaps even
more important is the fact that, in these shared spaces, those getting
undressed are both women and men, the latter producing a rupture of
the hegemonic patriarchal gaze, the one that Laura Mulvey sees as con-
stitutive of the woman as being the bearer of the gaze and the man as the
bearer of the look. Historically, the male body, always kept “hidden and
protected” (Lehman 5), has been subject and producer of the gaze, not
an object of to-be-looked-at desire. This established view is challenged
by the presentation of the male characters in the films analyzed here.
Both the main male characters and the audience (male or female) share,
like accomplices, the wet male body turned into an erotic object, thus
disrupting the normative gaze.
As stated before, sharing water is an act of intimacy, here understood as
“a specific modality of sexuality” (Sandberg 15), which has links with rela-
tionships, feelings of love, and emotional commitment. The act of sharing
188 F.G.P. Berns
water is more complex within a queer perspective because, together, the

nakedness and the outlawed desire come from two people of the same sex.
To add another layer of complexity, water sites are some of the few spaces
in which there exists, to some extent, flexibility in the regulation of the
borders that control desire and the politics of (homo)eroticism. Hence,
it is not uncommon that global queer cinema1 uses swimming pools,
beaches or, more generally, water, as backdrops to narrate its stories of
same-sex love and desire. Mostly, these spaces are indicative of repressed
desire as the “curious” men can enjoy watching the male body and the
proximity to it without compromising their “heterosexual” identity. These
particular spaces enable a potential slip from homosocial2 intimacy to
homosexuality (Howard). If male-male relations sustained on a homoe-
rotic intimacy “must be actively disavowed in favor of a shared embrace
of violence and domination” (Greven, Manhood in Hollywood 75), the
relaxing nature of the act of two men sharing water disables this premise.
Places with water as spaces for intimacy and sexual tension are a com-
mon trope in the narrative of contemporary Brazilian queer cinema, as
aforementioned. Swimming pools, the sea or school/club showers shape
a moment of intimacy, relaxation and (literal) naked vulnerability that
allow the main characters to experience with their feelings, or even run
away from them. Beaches and swimming pools in Brazilian cinema form
spaces of national identification and global recognition. Still, as global
mainstream cinema mostly uses these places as excuses for beautiful
views, Brazilian queer cinema utilizes the act of sharing water as a place
for manifestations of complex subjectivities. In this case, queer subjec-
tivities are not understood as a set of signs, symbols, or “life style” that
are immediately readable as queer, but as “straight-acting” masculinities
engaging with sex and love outside heteronormativity.
The main male characters “dessentialize” the traditional notion of
masculinity. They create a border space that helps the audience to think
of masculinity as vulnerability and transformation, that is, something that
requires changes. Because water is a material and liminal thing between
nature and culture, the male characters sharing and immersing in water
find their sexuality at a crossroads between the embrace of normative sex
and outlawed forms of love. The characters pivot between heterosexu-
ality and homosexuality, normative or incestuous love, underlining the
ephemeral nature of sexuality and identity, a refusal to signify monolithi-
cally in relation to gender and sexuality. For that, water is an ideal space:
only within it can they show and see, probe and hide, without the risk of
being punished. To some extent, in water they are free from severe regu-
lation of their masculinities. They taint their objects of desire, but also
their own feelings, constantly negotiating their identities in spaces that
inhabit the private/public realm of civil society.
Moreover, it is possible to understand water and the spaces that con-
tain it as “‘subjective’ or ‘egocentric’ space, just in so far as it is a space
that is tied to some feature of the creature’s own awareness or experi-
ence” (Malpas 50); in other words, a space in which one experiences new
forms of involvement with the world and with the Self. As will be seen,
water is, in these films, a subjective space that gives the male characters
space “for action” (Malpas 51), in regard to others or themselves.
Queer Desire and the Swimming Pool: Do Começo Ao

Fim and Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho
Aluizio Abranches’s Do começo ao fim narrates the homosexual and
incestuous relationship of two half-brothers, Francisco (João Gabriel
Vasconcellos) and Thomas (Rafael Cardoso), at different stages of their
lives.3 The siblings have a very close relationship of mutual affection, so
intimate that it starts to worry Pedro (Jean Pierre Noher), Francisco’s
father, who feels that they are closer than they are supposed to be. Pedro
raises the issue with the boys’ mother Julieta (Julia Lemmertz) and only
then does she try to get something out of Francisco4 but, eventually, she
seems to let it rest (see Fig. 11.1). Even if neither parent ever arrives at
any course of action to confront the true nature of the boys’ closeness,
the brothers’ incestuous desire is repressed until a more mature age when
it can no longer be contained within infantile games. Swimming pools
and water, as a material element of intimacy, will play an important role
in the expression of their sexual attraction over the years.
Fig. 11.1 Do começo ao
fim (2009)
190 F.G.P. Berns
The first scene after the opening credits shows Francisco (Lucas Cotrin)
as a boy swimming in a public pool, while being intensely observed by
his brother Thomas (Gabriel Kaufmann) and their nanny, Rosa (Louise
Cardoso). Both Rosa and a smiling Thomas share a gaze charged with
admiration as Francisco emerges and dives into the water. Thomas watches
Francisco with joy on his face. When Francisco leaves the water, the first
thing he does is to kiss Thomas on the head, to which Thomas responds
by playfully touching Francisco’s face, confirming their mutual fondness.
Thomas thus grows up in an environment in which it is permitted to
look at the male body, encouraging a gaze that is not easily distinguished
between admiration for personal feats and sexual desire.
In the next scene, the two siblings are at home, bathing together and
playing in the water. Again, water and intimacy intermingle. While shar-
ing the bathtub, Thomas tells Francisco about his desire to be a profes-
sional swimmer when he grows up, a swimmer as talented as his brother.
So intimate are these encounters in the water that Rosa complains
that the two siblings spend too much time in the bathtub. However,
only after becoming adults and with Julieta’s death does Francisco and
Thomas’s desire culminate in a sexual act, now that the prohibition of
incest, embodied in the figure of the mother, no longer exists.
Water and swimming pools maintain the brothers’ intimacy to the
point where the characters begin to visually overlap in the eyes of the
audience. For instance, immediately after the scene of the first sexual
encounter between the now-adult brothers, we see a man swimming in
a pool. The swimmer’s cap and goggles do not allow the audience to
identify who the swimmer is, but it can be presumed that it is Francisco.
However, when the man leaves the water, the swimmer is, in fact,
Thomas, now turned professional swimmer. Hence, if “the process of
becoming related and attuned better to another involves, in part, becom-
ing more similar” (Fosha 149), the brothers’ intersubjectivity (their
shared affective states) is foregrounded in the film with the overlapping
of one into another—in images and professions, as observed above. It
can be argued that in the act of sharing water, the brothers reach a space
where cultural and societal boundaries loosen up and they can express, to
some extent, their feelings for each other openly.
Their connection through water is reinforced when the siblings are
separated for the first time in their lives, when Thomas goes to Russia
to train for the Olympics. In one scene, Francisco looks at the sea
with sadness, as though searching for his brother in the water. This is
immediately followed by a scene showing Thomas swimming profes-

sionally. Both brothers try to make a life of their own as single men, but
without success. When they both come to recognize their failure, an
inserted shot of the two brothers as boys swimming in a pool indicates
the intimacy that has been lost. The film closes with them together again.
If in the context of Olympic swimming pools it is considered “nor-
mal” for male spectators to watch semi-naked male bodies, as the broth-
ers do throughout Do começo ao fim, the private swimming pool, unlike
the one suited for professional practices, offers other potential read-
ings, as is evident in Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho.5 The emphasis is on
relaxation—always inviting intimate openness—as well as the proxim-

ity of semi-naked bodies, and on the sharing of a moment and space
detached from everyday life, rather than on competiveness. In this sense,
the main characters of Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho cope with their inter-
nal anxieties, desire, and fears of rejection against the backdrop of a
swimming pool.
Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) is a blind teenager facing the psychologi-
cal changes brought by adolescence. He struggles to find freedom from
his overprotective parents, and he is yearning for acceptance by his class-
mates. He is well adjusted to his life as a blind teenager, but his equally
super-protective best friend Giovana (Tess Amorim) never leaves his side.
While looking for peace and a normal life, everything that happens to
him—the bullying inflicted by his peers, his lack of freedom—is seen by
Leonardo as common problems of growing up, and he recognizes the
need to accept them. This happens until the handsome new boy Gabriel
(Fabio Audi) arrives at the school and Leonardo falls in love for the very
first time.
The first scene of the film is a shot with a swimming pool as the main
focal reference. Both Giovana and Leonardo lazily lie on the edge of the
swimming pool in the backyard of the girl’s house. The teenagers are
wet. They had been swimming just minutes before and are now sun-
bathing. These are the last days of summer and their casual conversa-
tion reveals deep anxieties about the current state of their lives. They are
achingly eager to get romantically involved with someone “special”. If
disabled people living with overprotective parents face the risk of being
considered “perpetual children” (Block et al. 163), Leonardo’s need to
find someone special is more than just the need for love. The boy could
leave his parents’ shadow if he demonstrated that he was “resourceful”
enough to find a partner, as every teenager does. Like the brothers of
192 F.G.P. Berns
Do começo ao fim, Leonardo is trying to escape from the law that parents
represent so that he can find a space of his own.
At some stage, Giovana pushes Leonardo to kiss any random girl just
for fun and experience, but the boy wants his first time to be truly spe-
cial. Yet, he is doubtful that someone can be interested in him, blind as
he is. The scene serves to anchor the subjectivities of the two teenag-
ers. The relaxing moment at the edge of the swimming pool offers an
opportunity to share inner, intimate feelings, through the disguise of
a casual conversation. It is also important to note that both teenagers
share another space of intimacy: the bed. However, in bed, they share
plans for their individual futures rather than their intimate feelings. It
can be argued that the bed is a place charged with sexuality, and thus,
one in which the barriers must be clearly established to avoid subjective
misunderstandings. Swimming pools, on the other hand, offer the right
mixture of eroticization, relaxation, and intimacy, all in the open.
Relaxed, Giovana dares to drive the conversation through the path
that interests her most: Leonardo’s feelings. The way she looks at him—
from the safe zone of her capacity to see while her object of desire is
blind—underlines her desire for the teenager. The chat seems casual
and Giovana’s ego, as a young woman on the brink of potential rejec-
tion, is safe. The swimming pool is not, however, just the perfect space
for Giovana to poke Leonardo with hints of her love for him, but also
a place for her to hide away from casual hurtful truths. As already men-
tioned, she pushes Leonardo to kiss just any girl; but he says that if the
girl can be anybody, and kissing is just for the sake of doing it, then why
not simply kiss her, Giovana. By saying this, he seems to suggest that
Giovana, for him, is not special enough. The girl, who triggered the
conversation, quickly immerses into the water, leaving Leonardo speak-
ing alone. She is not able to hear him underwater and her self-esteem
(an affective component of subjective well-being) is preserved.
As in Do começo ao fim, the presence of water is essential for allow-
ing intimacy to take place. This is underscored after Gabriel, who has
befriended Leonardo, accompanies him to his house for the first time.
After arriving at home, Leonardo undresses and goes to the shower.
There, while showering, the teenager practices how to kiss using the wet
glass walls of his bathroom as an imaginary partner. Since Gabriel has
left Leonardo at the door just minutes before, it is clear that this need to
connect with his sexuality has been triggered by the presence and prox-
imity of the new student. The relationship between water and intimacy is
also evident in another scene depicting the swimming pool, which nev-
ertheless works as the reverse of the one analyzed above. There are three
bodies sunbathing: Giovana, Leonardo, and Gabriel. Unlike the first
scene, they are lying on their backs facing the sky, implying more open-
ness since they are not hiding their faces (see Fig. 11.2). Giovana, once
again, starts an intimate conversation. She asks Gabriel about his life and
family. However, this time, it is Leonardo who is interested in keeping
the conversation going so that he can get to know his new friend better.
Soon Giovana is cut off from the conversation and only the two boys
continue talking. Hence, fooling around the swimming pool and casual
conversation in Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho are safe devices that they are
using to probe into their intimacies.
Furthermore, the swimming pool as a space of negotiation of
intimacy6 and eroticism is particularly noticeable in a nightmare that
Leonardo has soon after. Leonardo dreams about Giovana inviting
Gabriel to swim with her. Gabriel explains to her that he has no briefs to
wear. Her answer is erotically charged: he does not need any. Leonardo
fears what can happen between Giovana and his object of desire, Gabriel,
and channels his fears through the space of the swimming pool, this
being their subjective space par excellence for intimate interrelations. It
seems that the three of them are eager to share those moments by the
swimming pool, but are also afraid of those and what could come to the
surface between them.
The film’s climax begins in another space framed with intimacy and
water. First, Leonardo and Gabriel share the school’s swimming pool.
Gabriel rubs sunscreen on Leonardo’s body by the edge of the pool.
Nevertheless, the homoerotic contact is here condemned through the
mockery of their peers, who see the act as a homosexual “hot scene”.
The boys learn that their behavior in a swimming pool, especially a
public one, has social (heterosexual) boundaries that mark the slippery
passage from homosociality to homosexuality. As Jarrod Hayes argues,
Fig. 11.2 Hoje eu
quero voltar sozinho
(2014)
194 F.G.P. Berns
“male bonding (the homosocial) must constantly distinguish itself from

the homosexual” (209) to avoid condemnation. In the next scene, both
boys share the school’s shower. Leonardo takes off his clothes. Within
the protection conferred by Leonardo’s blindness, Gabriel is free to look
at his friend’s naked body. However, Gabriel abruptly runs away, leaving
behind a surprised Leonardo. Gabriel simply cannot hold his desire and
since he has no reason to keep his gaze surreptitious, he prefers to escape
from the intimacy of the shower rather than give the ultimate step to a
new kind of subjectivity, one of full acceptance of his sexuality.
In what could be seen as its most complicated perspective, the movie
sheds light on a love triangle. Giovana has deep feelings for Leonardo,
and she keeps sending hints of her love to him, but the boy cannot quite
make sense of them. Leonardo is in love with Gabriel, and Giovana also
finds the new classmate attractive. Yet, Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho’s big-
gest concern is not a problematic love triangle. It is about Leonardo’s
journey to self-acceptance, his escape from the confines of the small
world he lives in, his gaining of empowerment and independence. In the
climax, both Leonardo and Gabriel acknowledge the love they share for
each other and the film ends with them together. Throughout the film,
the spaces with water are the signposts marking the progression of their
relationship. This happens from the first brief shy exchange of intimacy
to the erotically charged scene of the shower, which suggests that the
development of their relationship is actualized through spaces containing
water.
Running Away from the Self in Praia Do Futuro

Beaches are important spaces in touristic Brazil. Images of Rio de Janeiro
or Bahia, for example, circulate through the globe, many times working
as signifiers of Brazil as a whole. After all, Brazil hosts “the world’s most
mythical beach” (Labaki 102), which is Copacabana. However, Brazilian
queer cinema mostly prefers deserted beaches during the winter as a nar-
rative device through which to contrast the joy of festive days of summer
with a time for introspection. Karim Aïnouz’s7 Praia do Futuro makes
use of both: beaches as colorful tourist sites but also frozen beaches as
metaphors for incomplete identities.
Donato (Wagner Moura) is a lifeguard at an urban Brazilian beach
(the Futuro Beach of the title), in Fortaleza, who is only able to save
one of two German tourists from drowning. Shaken by his inability to
save both, he befriends Konrad (Clemens Schick), the surviving tourist,

and soon falls in love with him. The relationship leads him to question
who he is, what he wants from life, and where his place in the world
is. Faced with making difficult choices, including the decision to aban-
don his younger brother Ayrton (Jesuíta Barbosa) and mother to relo-
cate to Germany with Konrad, Donato finds that his fears have followed
him. Eventually isolating himself and still unable to deal with his now
open homosexuality, he comes face to face with his past when his brother
pays him an unexpected visit in Germany. Only then can he finally set in
motion the journey of self-acceptance necessary to move away from the
fears that have held him back from embracing his identity.
The title credits are shown over the image of the Brazilian sea and
the film opens with the rescue of Konrad and the death of his friend
(and maybe lover) Heiko (Fred Lima). Water is highlighted as a space in
which Eros and Thanatos—love and death—intermingled. In the case of
the film, the sea and the beach are portrayed in two different, sometimes
opposite ways: on the one hand, the beach and the sea are both spaces of
joy, fun, and adventure. The beach is also a space for romance. After all,
Konrad and Donato will meet by the sea. On the other hand, it is a space
that separates and kills. From the moment of Konrad’s rescue, the beach
and the sea will both work as illustrations of the inner turmoil shaping
Donato’s subjectivity.
After the initial sequence, Donato is shown looking at the sea, reflect-
ing the possibility of his own death in the water. Even if he has been a
lifeguard for many years, after being so close to death, Donato under-
stood, maybe for the very first time, that the sea is not just a place for
summer fun. As one of his friends says, “The sea is treacherous.” Still,
Donato—or “Aquaman”, as his younger brother calls him—is attached
to the sea. He loves beaches and water (hence his nickname). However,
as the film progresses, it is revealed that his engagement with the sea is
sustained by water’s capacity to cloak Donato from pain. He feels com-
fortable around water since he has constructed a safe identity as the
manly lifeguard sure of himself and of his surroundings.
The subsequent shots of the beach display an increasingly empty
coast. This marks a time of transition between seasons that runs parallel
to Donato abandoning his previous life as lifeguard to follow Konrad to
Germany, a truly hard decision since his “previous” identity resides on
that beach in Brazil. Furthermore, the relationship is slowly constructed
through the absence of an unrecovered body and Donato’s suspicions
196 F.G.P. Berns
about the true nature of Konrad and Heiko’s relationship. Donato is

unable to fully believe Konrad when the latter insists that Heiko was just
a friend and nothing else. “You have so many tattoos. Are any of those
for your friend?” asks Donato, while scrutinizing Konrad’s tattooed
body; a not-so-subtle way of asking if Heiko occupied an important place
in Konrad’s life. The unsuccessful search for the body concludes after 10
days and Donato and Konrad fly to Germany. Soon, both men are liv-
ing together. However, the relationship never fully develops. To embrace
his queer identity, a new part on his life, Donato has left another part of
himself behind. Thus, he remains incomplete.
Years later, Donato is shown working in an aquarium, a poor substi-
tute for the beach and life that he had left behind. The main conflict
begins when Donato’s brother, Ayrton, comes to visit him in Germany,
bringing with him many reproaches. Here, audiences understand that
Donato has been using water as a space to run away from his own queer
identity. Since there are no beaches where he lives in Germany (Berlin),
he has no place to run to. Running away as an escape from himself was
emphasized in a previous scene on Futuro Beach, where Konrad accused
Donato of immersing himself under water to forget everything, implying
that the latter had used his profession and water as a medium to escape
from problems and, maybe, from his own queer subjectivity.8 His profes-
sion as a lifeguard was linked to water but also to hypermasculinity.9 As a
newly displaced man with no nation, no sea and no water to hide in, he
must accept the consequences of his decision and face his family; this fear
being the only obstacle preventing him from feeling complete.
However, Donato still uses water as a mean to escape. When Ayrton
visits him in Germany, the two brothers have an argument and Konrad
tries to calm things down between the brothers. He comes to Donato,
who is swimming in a pool. There, Donato expresses his desire to be
left alone. It is clear, then, that Donato utilizes water as a hiding place, a
subjective space where he can escape from fully accepting himself.
A cinematic elaboration on the issue of fear, Aïnouz’s Praia do
Futuro manages to cover many fears that are common to the human
condition. There is fear of serious commitment, rejection, death, and,
especially, fear of change. The reconciliation between the two brothers—
and, by extension, of Donato with his own self—takes place on a fro-
zen beach in Germany. Walking on frozen water, the three men come
to a mutual understanding. The frozen beach totally covered in white
condenses the film’s themes. First, it contrasts the two nations of Brazil
and Germany. While Donato is a closeted homosexual in homophobic

Brazil, he is more open in Europe. Whereas Brazil is regarded by some
as “the world’s champion of homophobic crimes” (Encarnación 157),
Europe, on the other hand, is depicted, at least in popular culture, as
open-minded in respect to civil rights to the LGBTTQ community. In a
contradictory movement, Donato finds a place where he can “come out
of the closet”, but, to do so, he must geographically displace himself.
He has embraced his identity as a male homosexual, but has lost his geo-
graphical sense of belonging. Second, the frozen beach also condenses
two seasons: summer and winter. Donato has discovered that Germany
actually has a beach, but it is frozen. Thus, water is not available as an
escape device. He must face his own demons. Finally, and more impor-
tant, the beach condenses split subjectivities: the fear of commitment
symbolized by Donato as a frozen man who cannot properly live and,
on the other hand, his final self-acceptance. Donato will perhaps have no
need to use water as a hiding place any more after facing his family and
fully accepting himself as a queer subject.
Conclusion
Public swimming pools and beaches are the only socially regulated spaces
that allow contemplation and admiration of semi-naked male bodies,
so the use of these particular spaces to tell stories of male bonding in
queer cinema configures a logical connection. If the newfound interest
in the male body and the queer gaze is a global phenomenon (Greven,
Ghost Faces), Latin American queer cinema has been especially fond of
using swimming pools and water. This is probably because swimming
pools are one of the few places where the “cartography of desire for the
male form can be displayed without generating homophobic reproach”
(Pagnoni Berns 229), in a continent saturated with machismo.
The corpus of Brazilian films with queer characters in the twenty-first
century is still small. This makes the recurrence of spaces with water the
preferred landscapes to illustrate these tales of homoerotic love and loss
even more strikingly. This preference can be linked to Brazil’s image as a
country associated with beautiful beaches, sunbathing, sensuality, summer,
and semi-naked men and women. The queer characters in these films take
this seemingly unproblematic imagery to point to the fact that, beneath the
surface, swimming pools and beaches hide and shape complicated spaces
where politics of intimacy and subjectivities are constantly negotiated.
198 F.G.P. Berns
Water shapes a space for eroticism, but also serves as a medium to

escape from desire and/or potential pain. Serving as a space that pro-
motes skin-against-skin encounters or introspection, water shapes inti-
macy and self-recognition. However, not everyone sees sharing water as
a place for intimacy. Perhaps only queer subjects, those who must hide
their sexual identity—especially if incestuous, as in Do começo ao fim—can
truly appreciate this space as a liberating one. Beaches in cold weather,
on the other hand, illustrate the overlapping of opposite images: beach
(summer) with winter. This contradictory image illustrates the passage
from inhibition to a full exploration of sexuality and life. The frozen
beach in Praia do Futuro is a projected landscape of Donato’s congealed
subjectivity.
Against the cliché of Brazil as a landscape of beaches and fun in which
water is the main backdrop and excuse for the display of the erotized
spectacle of the semi-naked female body, queer cinema utilizes these
same tropes to disclose other possibilities of water. It contains but also
produces intimacy. Therefore, water can be a space of belonging; a space
to tell stories of queer love.
Notes
1. See, for example, the Portuguese film O fantasma/Phantom (João Pedro
Rodrigues, 2000), the Argentinian Ausente/Absent (Marco Berger, 2011),
the German/Israeli/French coproduction Einayim petukhoth/Eyes Wide
Open (Haim Tabakman, 2009), the Peruvian/Colombian/French/
German coproduction Contracorriente/Undertow (Javier Fuentes-León,
2009). Additionally, Dutch TV film Jongens/Boys (Mischa Kamp, 2014)
even has two men sharing water depicted in the official poster.
2. Homosocial is understood here as social interactions without sex that are
exclusive to single genders.
3. Abranches was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and graduated in filmmak-
ing at the London Film School, in 1984. Do começo ao fim was his third
feature film and, as the director explained, it was controversial from the
very beginning. It took him two years just to raise the money because the
subject of the film was taboo. See Ventura for more information on this.
4. For example, she asks him: “Is there anything you would like to tell me?”
5. Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho was born as a short film in 2010, titled Eu
não quero voltar sozinho. The feature film won many awards, including the
Teddy in the Berlin International Film Festival (2014) and the Audience
Award in Cinema Brazil Grand Prize (2015).
6. The teenagers can smoothly shift from serious conversation to casual chat
depending on what the others say. Their openness and sexual/romantic
interest are negotiated according to what the others reveal.
7. Aïnouz obtained public recognition worldwide with his first feature film,
Madame Satã (2002). His interest in characters facing introspection can
be seen in Alice (2008), a 13-episode fiction series made for HBO Latin
America.
8. This is similar to Giovana avoiding Leonardo’s harmful words by going
under the water in Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho.
9. It is also important that Donato is sexually passive with Konrad, which
challenges the popular images associated with his work: lifeguard as a form
of hypermasculinity. After the drowning, Donato has to face many changes
in his life and concretize an identity against the fluid nature of water.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. El agua y los sueños: ensayo sobre la imaginación de la materia.
Trans. Ida Vítale. Mexico: Fondo De Cultura Económica, 2003. Print.
Block, Pamela et al. “Disability, Sexuality, Intimacy.” Politics of Occupation-
Centred Practice: Reflections on Occupational Engagement across Cultures.
Eds. Nick Pollard and Dikaios Sakellariou. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
162–79. Print.
Encarnación, Omar. Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Print.
Fosha, Diana. The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change.
New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
Frérot, Antoine. Water: Toward a Culture of Responsibility. Durham: University
of New Hampshire Press, 2011. Print.
Greven, David. Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2016. Print.
Greven, David. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2009. Print.
Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Chicago:
Howard, John. Men like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The
Labaki, Amir. “It’s all Brazil.” The New Brazilian Cinema. Ed. Lúcia Nagib.
London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. 97–104. Print.
Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male
Body. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Print.
Malpas, Jeff. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.
200 F.G.P. Berns
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 833–44. Print.
Nagib, Lúcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema and Utopia. New
York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print.
Pagnoni Berns, Fernando Gabriel. “Cartographies of Desire: Swimming Pools
and the Queer Gaze.” The Cinema of the Swimming Pool. Eds. Christopher
Brown and Pam Hirsch. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 229–37. Print.
Parker, Richard. Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary
Brazil. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Print.
Sandberg, Linn. Getting Intimate: A Feminist Analysis of Old Age, Masculinity
and Sexuality. Linköping: Linköping University, 2011. Print.
Ventura, Mauro. “‘Do começo ao fim’, de Aluizio Abranches, causa polêmica
antes mesmo da estreia.” O Globo 13 May 2009. Web. 23 June 2016.
Wiltse, Jeff. Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Print.
Author Biography
Fernando G.P. Berns is a PhD candidate and works at Universidad de Buenos
Aires. He teaches seminars on international horror film and has published chap-
ters in the books Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (ed. Cynthia
Miller), To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror
(ed. John Wallis), For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond (ed. Lisa
Funnell), among others.
PART V
Domestic Spaces and Social Differences

CHAPTER 12
‘Casa Grande & Senzala’: Domestic Space

and Class Conflict in Casa Grande
and Que Horas Ela Volta?
Tiago de Luca
Not long before Fernando Meirelles hit the international scene with his
Cidade de Deus/City of God (2002) he had directed, with Nando Olival,
Domésticas, o filme/Maids (2001). Given that Brazil has the largest
population of maids in the world (eight per cent of its total workforce
at the time) (Gallas), Domésticas had the merit of throwing light on an
underrepresented profession, interweaving the stories of five maids liv-
ing and working in São Paulo. Yet the film’s realism turned out to be
a flimsy affair, explicitly veering away from social conflict by erasing the
maids’ employers from view. As Luiz Zanin Oricchio points out, “[In
Domésticas], the maids live in a world seemingly without bosses, that
is, the opposing side is absent, which is an excellent recourse to avoid
conflict” (176).1 In fact, the film hardly ventures into the middle-class
households it depicts, remaining in the domestic spaces in which the
maids are often found, that is, the kitchen where they work and the
T. de Luca (*) 
Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry,
England, UK
e-mail: t.de-luca@warwick.ac.uk

204 T. de Luca
adjoining “maid’s rooms” where they live. These spaces, it seems, condi-
tion the construction of subjectivities a priori, because all the maids in
the film appear as flat stereotypes, rather than psychologically nuanced
characters. In this respect, as Oricchio further notes, the film not only
misses the opportunity to explore the contours of class struggle in Brazil,
it also fails to explore a universal theme that, from Jean Renoir’s La règle
du jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) through to the British TV sensa-
tion Downton Abbey (2010–2015), has an illustrious audiovisual tradi-
tion: the relationship between “people separated by a social abyss living
under the same roof” (172).
Yet, in hindsight, it becomes clear that Domésticas was also a prod-
uct of its time, when the foundations underpinning Brazil’s abysmal
social gap remained relatively unscathed. As Brazil made its way into
the twenty-first century, class struggle could no longer be ignored and
accordingly emerged as a favorite theme in the country’s cinematic
production, as will be discussed in this chapter. Thanks to a booming
economy, allied with governmental social programs aimed at reducing
inequality, a group of more than 30 million people entered the consumer
market during President Lula’s two terms in office from 2003 to 2010.
This represented not only the greatest redistribution of income and priv-
ilege in Brazilian history, with the middle class making up 52% of the
population (Pezzini), but also a seismic shift that shook the structures
buttressing Brazil’s social divide, which fueled class conflict.
Firstly, the marketplace, historically targeted at the upper and middle
classes in the country (or A and B classes, as they are known in Brazil),
had to come to terms with a new reality wherein the tastes and interests
of lower middle-class consumers (the C class) now accounted for a sizable
share of the market. Secondly, public spaces previously enjoyed only by
the elites started to lose their exclusive status. As Alfredo Saad-Filho notes:
For the first time, the poor could access education as well as income and
bank loans. They proceeded to study, earn, and borrow, and to occupy
spaces, literally, previously the preserve of the upper-middle class: airports,
shopping malls, banks, private health facilities, and roads, with the latter
clogged up by cheap cars purchased on seventy-two easy payments. (n. pag.)
And so it is that, according to a poll carried out by Data Popular in

2010 as a response to complaints about crowded airports, Brazil’s A and
B classes had no qualms about hiding their discontent regarding this
12 ‘CASA GRANDE & SENZALA’: DOMESTIC SPACE … 205
situation. Forty-eight per cent stated that “the quality of services [in the
country] had worsened as access increased” and 50 per cent believed that
“badly dressed people should not be allowed into certain places” (Cabral
n. pag.).
Significantly, the places mentioned in the polls and widely heard in
complaints about the “invasion” by Brazil’s new middle class—airports,
highways, shopping malls—are those which French anthropologist Marc
Augé has famously conceptualized as “non-places”. These, notes Augé,
are fleeting, public, and anonymous “spaces of circulation, consumption
and communication” that sit in contrast with “anthropological places”,
in which, conversely, “the most visible, the most institutionalized signs,
those most recognized by the social order” can be glimpsed in terms of
a “concrete and symbolic construction of space” (viii, 42). Yet Brazil’s
“anthropological places” also had their foundations shaken as a result of
social change, not least domestic spaces, where the long-standing tradi-
tion of having a cheap, often informally hired maid living in the back
room became unsustainable. As the economy flourished, maids left
domestic service to gain other skills and work in better-paid jobs in
industry and shops; their wages became higher and, increasingly, their
services were hired by the day. This situation was ratified in April 2013,
during Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, when domestic work was finally for-
malized in Brazil with the promulgation of a constitutional amendment
that regulated weekly working hours, a minimum wage, social security,
and severance pay—all basic entitlements previously denied to a work-
force that had historically survived largely within the informal market.
Although Brazil’s success story has been dramatically interrupted, a
situation that falls outside the scope of this chapter, a quick glance at
the audiovisual content produced in the country since the late-2000s
shows that the economic and societal changes mentioned above did
not go unnoticed. Whether consciously or unconsciously, class conflict
emerged as a veritable theme in the country’s cinematic and televisual
productions, with maids accordingly featuring as central characters.
In fact, such was the ubiquity of this figure in 2012 that, as TV critic
Mauricio Stycer noted, all telenovelas (soap operas) on air on Brazil’s
biggest broadcast network Rede Globo had maids not in marginal sup-
porting roles, as had historically been the case, but as the main protago-
nists. An unprecedented situation in the channel’s history, and one that
could not be overestimated given the genre’s colossal popularity in the
country, this trend was evidence of Globo’s efforts to cater to Brazil’s
206 T. de Luca
emerging middle class. Although without the typical escapist register of

Brazilian TV soaps, maids and class conflict also proliferated in the cin-
ema within a variety of modes and genres. Trabalhar cansa/Hard Labor
(Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, 2011), for example, examines class ten-
sions within an apartment in São Paulo while appropriating tropes associ-
ated with the horror genre. O som ao redor/Neighboring Sounds (Kleber
Mendonça Filho, 2012) similarly explores the relationship between
bosses and servants in a middle-class neighborhood in Recife, while in
Doméstica/Housemaids (Gabriel Mascaro, 2012), seven adolescents were
asked to film their family housemaids for one week.
This chapter has specifically selected two films that lend themselves to
a meaningful comparison in terms of their reflection on a period of dra-
matic social change in the country: Casa grande/Casa Grande, or The
Ballad of Poor Jean (Fellipe Barbosa, 2014) and Que horas ela volta?/The
Second Mother (Anna Muylaert, 2015). Although the former film takes
place in Rio de Janeiro and the latter in São Paulo, they both focus on an
upper middle-class household and deploy comparable narrative and aes-
thetic strategies to convey class conflict. Similarly, as characters in both
films refuse to stay in the spaces assigned by their social position, they
throw into disarray the invisible relations governed by visible spatial sec-
tioning, thus pointing to the ways in which subjectivities may be rein-
vented as spaces are crossed, contested, and reappropriated.
Casa Grande
Barbosa’s debut film, Casa grande, focuses on an upper middle-class
family living in an affluent condominium in Rio de Janeiro. On the brink
of bankruptcy, the family has to come to terms with the gradual disap-
pearance of its privileges and servants. Partly autobiographical (Barbosa’s
affluent family went bankrupt when he was a teenager), the film was con-
ceived at the Sundance Screenwriter’s and Director’s Lab and premiered
at the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam, receiving interna-
tional acclaim thereafter.
The film lifts its title from Gilberto Freyre’s Casa grande & senzala
(The Masters and the Slaves), an essential, if controversial, book that
alludes in its title to the configuration that has historically defined domes-
tic space in Brazil’s slave-holding society, dating back to the first sugar
plantations in the 1600s: the casa grande (big or manor house) where
the Portuguese master lived with his family and close servants, and the
adjoining senzala (the slave quarters). For Freyre, this spatial proxim-
ity explained the high degree of interbreeding between the two groups
in Brazil, with masters allowing male and female slaves into the private
space of their home and allegedly establishing a more humane relation-
ship than the ones observed in other slave-holding societies. Of course, as
many commentators have noted, Freyre’s book put forward a somewhat
rosy view on miscegenation that failed to account for the power relations
subtending Brazilian slavery. Nevertheless, as Estela Vieira points out, his
writings, “albeit controversial, do effectively disclose the architecture that
sustains some of Brazil’s social, economic and political traditions” (176).
In particular, Freyre’s book is essential reading for a deeper understand-
ing of the modern configuration of the country’s upper- and middle-class
households, whose ubiquitous “maid’s room”, a uniquely Brazilian archi-
tectural creation, harks directly back to the senzala, as alluded to by Casa
grande and Que horas ela volta? Let us look at the former film.
Casa grande opens with a static long take showing the back garden of
a three-story mansion entirely lit in the background. In the foreground,
to the right of the frame, Hugo (Marcello Novaes) is inside a Jacuzzi,
next to a swimming pool on the left. Hugo gets up, puts on his robe and
makes his way to the house. Then, as he walks in, no longer in sight, the
lights in the house are turned off sequentially on all three stories. With
the house now in complete darkness, the room on the far right at the
top (presumably Hugo’s) is then lit up and the title of the film appears in
big letters at the image’s center. Cut. Inside the house, Hugo’s son Jean
(Thales Cavalcanti) leaves his room in the middle of the night and makes
his way down to the house’s garage and into the adjoining room where
the cleaning maid Rita (Clarissa Pinheiro) lives. As they watch television
on the sofa, Rita fills Jean in on her sexual adventures while rejecting his
advances. Cut. It is the morning of the next day, and the house’s other
two servants, the chauffeur Severino (Gentil Cordeiro) and the black
cook Noemia (Marília Coelho) wait outside the mansion until Rita lets
them both into the house.
These three consecutive scenes provide an instructive beginning to
Casa grande. The opening long take, lasting exactly 3:12 min, lends vis-
ual form to the film’s title (which is literally superimposed on the image)
by preserving the actual duration needed to traverse the house’s facilities,
thus effectively conveying its superlative spatial dimensions. Yet, as the
following two scenes indicate, even though the senzala is absent from
the title, and from view in the first shot, it will be a fundamental aesthetic
208 T. de Luca
and narrative device against which the upper middle class is focalized
in Casa grande. Although the film aligns its perspective to that of the
17-year old Jean, and to a lesser extent to his parents Hugo and Sônia
(Suzana Pires), the rich in the film are depicted in terms of their relation-
ship with, and reliance on, their servants. Visually, this is often expressed
through a deep-focus spatial strategy by which the casa grande members
are framed in the foreground, while the servants are seen engaged in
domestic activities in the background. We see, for example, Sônia and
her friend selling cosmetics while sitting on the living room sofa, with
Rita visible as a mirror reflection behind them cleaning the house; Sônia
teaching French to her friend Lia (Georgiana Goés) on the veranda on
the house’s top floor while Severino cleans the pool beds down below;
Sônia speaking with a lawyer at the kitchen table while Rita and Noemia
cook behind them (see Fig. 12.1).
As the film unfolds, however, each of the servants disappears from
sight. The first is Severino, the family’s chauffeur from Brazil’s north-
east who drives Jean to and from school every day. This daily time
spent together, it seems, enables both characters to form bonds that go
beyond their roles of employer and servant, with Jean asking Severino,
not his father, for advice on how to seduce a woman. Yet Severino’s
job is the first to go as Hugo and Sônia struggle to manage their dwin-
dling finances. The second is that of the saucy live-in housekeeper Rita,
as Sônia finds pictures of the maid in sexy poses and naked all over the
house, including Sônia’s own bedroom. Rita’s dismissal, in turn, leads
the cook Noemia to resign: having accumulated the former’s duties and
received no pay from her employers for three months, she decides to
work by the hour in another house in the same condominium.
Adopting a tragicomic tone, newcomer director and scriptwriter
Barbosa furnishes this upper middle-class universe and its characters
Fig. 12.1 Casa grande

(2014)
with perceptive touches that, though exaggerated for comic effect, will
ring true for Brazilian viewers. An example is when Sônia is seen cor-
recting Rita for mispronouncing Jean without a French accent, or when
she claims, patronizingly, that she treated Rita like a daughter before fir-
ing her. The film’s focus, however, is on Jean. As the family descends
into economic hardship and has to deal with the gradual disappearance
of servants in the house, the adolescent is forced out of his comfort zone
and into spaces dissociated from his class position.
As Jean is gradually confronted with new social situations, the con-
struction of his subjectivity undergoes a series of changes that will culmi-
nate in his liberation from the identitarian shackles of his class. Whereas
his contact with the lower class was previously restricted to familiar and
domestic places (such as the family’s car and Rita’s room), he is suddenly
required to commute daily to his school by bus: a new environment in
which his “rich face”, as he is referred to in one scene, certainly stands
out.2 Not all is animosity, however, as the bus journeys also give Jean the
opportunity to meet Luiza (Bruna Amaya). A stunning mixed-raced girl
for whom he immediately falls, Luiza even manages to convince Jean to
meet her in a forró house.3
Luiza’s appearance also allows Casa grande to dig deeper into the
complex question of race in Brazil, a topic the film had already broached
through reference to the contemporary bill that implemented a system
of quotas based on racial background in the Brazilian federal university
system. Yet the film confounds the viewer by having characters whose
opinions on the topic may appear to be surprising. Their subjectivities,
it seems at first, are not predetermined by class affiliation and/or racial
identity. For example, early in the film, when the topic comes up at din-
nertime, the otherwise conservative Hugo declares he agrees with the
bill, reasoning that such “affirmative action”, a term he pronounces
in English, is also present in economic powerhouses like the United
States—although he hastens to add that “in reality, really, the right thing
to do would be to fix the problem at its basis, starting with the state
schools”. In the following scene, the topic is introduced for discussion in
Jean’s classroom and differing views are presented. One student remarks
that the bill aims to address Brazil’s “historical debt” to its “slave-hold-
ing past”. Another student, of black ancestry himself (there are only two
in the classroom), thinks that merit alone should count for university
entry. Later in the film, during a barbecue at Jean’s house, Luiza passion-
ately defends the racial quota system, yet this time Hugo has dropped
210 T. de Luca
his sympathy for it. Whether or not this is triggered by his hostility
toward Luiza’s firm opinions remains uncertain but he now boasts of his
achievements solely on the basis of merit, and even disputes Luiza’s racial
identity as black, to which she discloses, to some guests’ amusement, that
her father is Japanese and her mother of black ancestry.
Unlike the first two scenes, this scene leaves no doubt as to where
Casa grande stands in relation to the racial quota system, yet in order to
do this the film has to sacrifice nuance and wit for a certain didacticism,
as Luiza delivers a crafted, if contrived, speech on the history of racial
injustice in the country. That said, the film cleverly exploits her striking
physique in order to explore the question of miscegenation in Brazil.
Luiza’s unusual racial make-up, even if slightly implausible when checked
against the actress’s physical appearance (although Brazil does have the
largest population of Japanese immigrants in the world living in São
Paulo), encapsulates what Freyre defined as the “synthetic principle” ani-
mating Brazilian society. In his view, this entailed “a democratization of
interhuman relationships, of interpersonal relations, of relations between
groups and between regions” (The Master and the Slaves xiv).
Such democratization, however, has not translated into social and
economic inclusion, since black and mixed-race Brazilians are much like-
lier to be poor, and that is not to mention the insidious racism that is
still present in Brazil, questions from which Casa grande does not shy
away—on the contrary. Thus, in the scene where Jean and his friends are
driven home after a night out, one of the boys is ridiculed for spend-
ing his night with a black girl. Later in the film, Luiza confronts Jean by
asking whether it was her skin color that made him think that she lives
in a favela, as he (and the viewer) sees her getting off the bus next to a
shantytown. Yet, in tune with the film’s quest to confound the viewer,
it turns out that Luiza does not live in the favela but in a middle-class
apartment block facing it: we see the girl and Jean on her bed while a
sprawling favela is visible through the window in the background.
This being a film set in Rio, it is worth noting that its favelas, one of
the favorite locations in the country’s cinematic history, are on view only
through the windows of buses and apartments—although this is certainly
in line with the film’s aesthetic choice to frame class division from the
perspective of Jean. On a visual level, moreover, the image mentioned
above reinforces a formal dialectic between foreground and background,
but it does so in relation to the proximity of contrasting city spaces.
Highly symbolic of Rio’s social segregation, because the city’s peculiar
topography allows the poor to live on the hillsides cutting across its
upper- and middle-class quarters, the favela in the background not only
reminds the viewer that this is indeed a “divided city”.4 It also brings
into view that the casa-grande-e-senzala spatial structure simply repro-
duces within domestic confines a geographical division that is material-
ized across the city in the form of Mansions and Shanties, to cite the title
of another book by Freyre.5
In narrative terms, the fact that Jean is seen closer to a favela—even if
the latter is literally framed by a window in a modest middle-class apart-
ment—can be read as the midway point in the construction of his self,
a coming-of-age journey which will be completed at the film’s end with
his arrival in the favela where Severino, Noêmia, and Rita live. Jean finds
out that Severino did not leave the job of his own accord but that he
was fired. On finding the chauffeur, Jean bursts into tears and learns with
surprise (as probably does the viewer) that he lives with Noêmia and her
three daughters, the youngest one being Severino’s.6 In this respect, it
has been noted that one of Casa grande’s shortcomings is that the poor
appear as thinly developed characters when set against the more nuanced
rich ones,7 yet in my view this is one of the film’s most original aesthetic
and narrative choices. Often visible only in the background and as tan-
gential characters who dwindle in number as the film unfolds, the fact
that these servants reappear at the film’s end in their hitherto unseen vis-
ibility while inhabiting their own space gain in significance. Moreover, if
these are characters whose subjectivities are not fully developed through-
out the film, this is because the film refuses to leave Jean’s side as a self-
conscious strategy of focalization. His surprise at the fact that Severino
and Noemia are married, live in the same house, and even have a daugh-
ter discloses his previous disinterest in the lives of people who had always
been spatially close to him or in the background, yet never fully visible as
subjects in their own right.
In Jean’s coming-of-age story, then, the subjective and the social
become inextricably entwined: the formation of his self is mirrored by
a growing awareness of his own class in the context of Brazil’s inequali-
ties and contradictions. Yet this does not mean that Casa grande adopts
a moralist tone in its closure, as proved by its potentially controversial
ending. As Jean runs into Rita in an improvised forró in the community,
he approaches her with a newfound confidence. In the final shot, as Rita
lies sleeping naked in bed, Jean gets up at dawn, lights a cigarette, sits
on the windowsill and takes in the sprawling favela before him. It could
212 T. de Luca
thus be argued that this ending symbolically reaffirms the power rela-
tions famously overlooked by Freyre in his account of the intersubjective
encounters between masters and slaves, in the sense that Jean is finally
able to seduce Rita, his former servant. This however would not do jus-
tice to the character of Rita, whose refreshing non-conformity to gender
and class norms is highlighted from the very beginning. Rita is not only
in full and proud control of her sexual agency as a woman, telling Jean of
her adventures and preferences while rejecting his advances, but she also
disobeys spatial demarcations by having her sensual poses photographed
all over the house (by Jean?), thus upsetting the unspoken social contract
informing class division, which results in her dismissal.
If anything, then, Jean’s escape from the spaces and expectations asso-
ciated with his class, as he ventures into a favela for the first time in his
life, means that he has become the equal of Rita in their active construc-
tion of subjectivities that refuse to be spatially fixed or predetermined, an
aspect that is visually underlined in the final shot. No longer in the epon-
ymous casa grande, the stationary camera takes in Rita’s humble flat in a
composition that reinforces the film’s use of depth of field as a means to
comment on class disparity. However, this time around, for the first time
in the film, it is the former servant who appears in the foreground and
Jean in the background. In this light, their sexual encounter is perhaps
more profitably understood not as power subjugation but as an affirma-
tion of the ways in which subjectivities dictated through social position
may be reinvented as spaces are reappropriated.
Que Horas Ela Volta?

Que horas ela volta? is the fourth feature film of São Paulo-based director
Anna Muylaert. Brazil’s unsuccessful Oscar entry in the foreign-language
category, this 2015 film has nonetheless had a notable international
career, winning a special jury award for acting for its protagonists
Regina Casé and Camila Márdila at Sundance, and the audience award
in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section. Released one year after
Casa grande, Que horas ela volta? shares a number of narrative features
with the former. It depicts an upper middle-class family surrounded by
servants and especially reliant on the housekeeper Val (Regina Casé), a
northeastern migrant from the state of Pernambuco who, like Severino
in Casa grande, cannot resist a good forró at the weekend. The film sim-
ilarly features a male teenager, Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), who is about
to enter university, is unsuccessful at pulling girls and who has the habit
of going into the maid’s room in the middle of the night, although his
tactile relationship with Val is of a maternal rather than a sexual kind.
However, if Fabinho seems to cultivate real feelings toward his “second
mother”, as per the film’s English title, the same cannot be said of his
real mother Bárbara (Karine Teles), whose affection toward Val often
betrays a patronizing attitude. As in Casa grande, close spatial proxim-
ity does not necessarily translate into genuine interest or personal bond
between employers and servants: Bárbara cannot even remember the
name of Val’s daughter, Jéssica (Camila Márdila), despite the fact that
the housekeeper has worked in the house for 13 years.
Yet Que horas ela volta? also differs from Casa grande in significant
ways. The well-to-do, for example, are regrettably less multidimensional,
with the haughty Bárbara, a fashion consultant who gets to be inter-
viewed for TV in her own house, occasionally bordering on caricature.
That said, if the upper middle-class characters are not as nuanced, this
is also because Que horas ela volta?, unlike Casa grande, chooses to lav-
ish most of its attention on the servants by aligning its perspective to
Val’s. This is illustrated in the scene in which the maid, uniformed and
with a plate of canapés in hand, prepares to enter the living room where
Bárbara’s birthday party is taking place. Framing her at a close distance
from behind, the camera smoothly tracks Val as she leaves the kitchen,
walks into the party and serves the guests. Although this is not strictly
speaking Val’s subjective perspective, by approximating the camera’s gaze
to hers, the viewer is made to put herself in Val’s shoes as she zigzags
through the crowd without ever being noticed or looked at. As a subject
within this social milieu, Val is invisible.
Furthermore, by choosing to remain on Val’s side, Que horas ela
volta? reverses Casa grande’s framing strategy by having the rich fam-
ily members as the backdrop against which the maid is depicted. This
is what happens in the recurrent stationary shot, taken from inside the
kitchen, in which Bárbara or her husband Carlos (Lourenço Mutarelli)
can be glimpsed seated at the table in the dining room in the back-
ground through the kitchen’s open door. This visual composition, cou-
pled with off-screen diegetic sound, is often exploited for comic effect,
since Val is seen on the left of the frame within the kitchen eavesdrop-
ping on the conversations taking place at the table in the background
on the right (see Fig. 12.2). It is also loaded with symbolism, not only
because it conveys the clearly demarcated spatial separation between
214 T. de Luca
Fig. 12.2 Que horas

ela volta? (2015)
bosses and servants, but also because it reinforces, through camerawork,

Val’s characterization as a subject without the possibility of social mobil-
ity. As the camera refuses to leave the kitchen and remains in place even
when the maid leaves the frame to serve the meal or collect the dishes
(her bosses never get up to do either of these things), it seems to echo
Val’s own fixed position, her “foot in the kitchen” so to speak8: any
attempt to cross over to “the other side” of the house, as in the scene of
Bárbara’s birthday party, will effectively render her invisible.
However, these spatial boundaries and the regimes of (in)visibility
and subjectivity they entail are thrown into disarray with the arrival of
Jéssica, Val’s estranged daughter who moves to São Paulo in order to
apply for a competitive university. Surprised at the fact that Val lives with
her bosses, Jéssica immediately dislikes the idea of sharing her mother’s
minuscule back room. On being given a tour of the house by Carlos,
during which she chances upon an unused guest room, Jéssica thus casu-
ally asks whether she could stay in that room. When invited by Carlos,
who immediately falls for the girl, to have lunch with him in the dining
room, Jéssica has no qualms in accepting it, to her mother’s incredulity.
Yet it is Jéssica’s partly accidental plunge into the swimming pool, as she
is pushed by Fabinho, that sparks the most outrage and Bárbara’s hostil-
ity, with the latter emptying the pool and sending Jéssica to her mother’s
room as a result. Then, as Jéssica is caught spooning into “Fabinho’s ice-
cream”, previously unspoken rules are finally spelled out: Bárbara pro-
hibits Jéssica from staying in any of the interior premises, only “from the
kitchen door to that side”, causing the girl to leave the house.
As the outsider that brings conflict into the film and disrupts the sta-
tus quo of the house, Jéssica has been taken by many to personify the
“Lula years” in an allusion to the President’s two terms in office, during
which, as previously mentioned, millions of people in Brazil were able to
move up the social ladder. In this respect, if Jéssica’s reactions initially
denote a slightly amused, if nonetheless genuine, unawareness of the

seemingly colonial rules still informing class relations in an upper mid-
dle-class house in São Paulo, her growing realization that this is indeed
the case makes her confront these rules through a subjectivity that boldly
exceeds her class identity. As Paul Willemen writes:
Subjectivity always exceeds identity, since identity formation consists of

trying to pin ‘us’ to a specific, selected sub-set of the many diverse clus-
ters of discoursies we traverse in our lifetimes, and that stick to us to vary-
ing degrees. Subjectivity, then, relates to what we may think and feel to be
the case regarding ‘our’ sexuality, kinship relations, our understanding of
social-historical dynamics acquired through (self)education, work experi-
ence and so on. (30–31)
Through her acquired awareness of the socio-historical dynamics ani-

mating Brazil’s class system, Jéssica is the only character in the film that
refuses to have her subjectivity conditioned by her identitarian class and
pinned to certain spaces, much to the disbelief of her mother, for whom
certain places, such as the pool or the dining room, should not even be
“looked at” because they are simply “not for you”.
Symptomatic in this respect is the fact that Jéssica wants to study
architecture, which is a recurrent theme in the film. On arriving at
Bárbara’s house, Jéssica immediately recognizes it “as being a bit mod-
ernist, but not exactly”. Later in the film, Carlos takes her to visit
the famous Edifício Copan, by Oscar Niemeyer, and then on to the
Modernist pavilion of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the
University of São Paulo. When interrogated as to why architecture,
Jéssica replies that it is because she believes that “it is an instrument of
social change”, and although it is not entirely clear how she wants to
achieve this, one telling shot in the film gives us a glimpse of her attempt
at making Val think spatially by highlighting her mother’s own peripheral
position within Bárbara’s house. Looking at its architectural plant, Jéssica
points at the casa grande on the right to then show how Val’s house is
entirely separated, being located “on the other side, on the lower floor”
(see Fig. 12.3).9
Whether and to what extent Val’s subjectivity changes as the film
unfolds, though, is not entirely clear. Toward the end of the film, she
does begin to question the house’s spatial prohibitions and even enters
the now half-empty pool, spurred by Jéssica’s success in the university
216 T. de Luca
Fig. 12.3 Que horas

ela volta? (2015)
entry test. Speaking with her daughter with her mobile phone in one
hand, and splashing the water around with the other, she cheekily con-
fides her spatial transgression to Jéssica. Shortly after, as Fabinho decides
to travel abroad because he has failed the university entry test, Val real-
izes that she needs to “spend some time with her daughter” and leaves
Bárbara’s house. Like Casa grande, Que horas ela volta? thus finishes in
another part of the city, leaving the upper middle-class neighborhood of
Morumbi for the periphery. Now in Jéssica’s humble flat, from which
a favela is visible through the window, Val discloses another mischie-
vous deed, producing out of her suitcase a coffee set that she had given
to Bárbara and which she had been reprimanded for using during her
boss’s birthday party. Reunited, mother and daughter make plans for
the future, including a massage course on which Val intends to enroll
to become a masseuse, and the decision to have Jéssica’s own estranged
baby brought to São Paulo from Pernambuco.
Leaving aside for a moment some plausibility issues that this happy
ending raises, it is telling that Val never stands up for her daugh-
ter against Bárbara, not even when Jéssica is banned from entering the
house. As the film’s most emblematic image of Val’s rebellion, moreover,
the act of walking into a half-empty pool with the house empty could
not be more timid in its symbolism and pales in comparison to Rita’s
transgressive “nudes” in Casa grande, for example. Not to mention that
Val only decides to leave the house, it seems, when Fabinho decides to
study abroad, which attenuates her own agency regarding this decision.
As such, it is regrettable that her subjectivity is not allowed much room
for change as the film unfolds, with Que horas ela volta? overtly avoiding
conflict in its concluding section. The contrived and rushed happy end-
ing struggles to hide its own implausibility, precisely because the film has
touched on so many wounds that are ultimately casually left aside. That
said, this is still a film that offers a sharp insight into class relations in
present-day Brazil through the character of Jéssica as she defiantly crosses

boundaries and claims her own spaces in the world.
Conclusion
Upon the release of Que horas ela volta? Regina Casé remarked that the
film captured “a moment of change” in Brazil: the end of the era of the
live-in cleaning maid (Cimino). At the time of writing (2016), however,
most of the social and economic changes the country has witnessed in
the last decade hang in uncertainty. In a dramatic reversal of fortune,
Brazil’s success story has given way, vertiginously, to economic reces-
sion and political crisis. Once the sign that the country was finally enter-
ing the ranks of the developed world, the domestic workforce’s steadily
decreasing numbers—from about eight per cent to below six per cent of
Brazil’s total workforce between 2007 and 2015 (Gallas)—have ceased
to be the case, with many of the female workers returning to their for-
mer maid roles out of necessity. In any case, both Casa grande and Que
horas ela volta? should be interpreted as efforts to capture this earlier
“moment of change”. As films that directly express and reflect Brazil’s
recent social experience, they shed light on a period of increasing tension
between classes and might thus be profitably understood as conveying
what Raymond Williams once termed “structures of feeling”, which he
defined as “that particular quality of social experience and relationship,
historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense
of a generation or of a period” (131).
On an aesthetic level, furthermore, it is noteworthy that both films
make use of the same spatial strategy in order to convey class conflict.
They effectively deploy deep focus as a means of visually commenting
on class and social disparity, thus calling to mind André Bazin’s famous
observations on depth of field, which allowed in his view a “represen-
tation of space” whose “necessary modality” of realism opened “to a
universe of analogies, of metaphors, or… of correspondences” (190)—a
universe he incidentally explored with reference to Renoir’s use of this
technique in La règle du jeu. Yet if the position of characters within the
frame discloses the tension between masters and servants, and the rigid
demarcations between them, Casa grande and Que horas ela volta? must
also be understood, on a narrative level, in relation to characters whose
subjectivities are unfettered by the spaces they inhabit and who conse-
quently assert their own ways of being in the world as they cross over
218 T. de Luca
into new spaces. In so doing, both films, to cite Williams once again,
seem to define “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed
not yet recognised as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, even
isolating, but which in analysis […] has its emergent, connecting and
dominant characteristics” (132, emphasis in original). As the charac-
ters’ active construction of subjectivities in the two films points to wider
societal changes in the country, they provide a valuable insight into the
“sense of a period” whose unpredictable and possibly explosive outcomes
are yet to be fully revealed.
Notes
1. All translations are mine, unless stated otherwise.
2. Jean is told he has “cara de playboy” (a playboy face). Although playboy
can have the same meaning as in English, it is also used in other contexts
in Brazil and can convey, as in the expression above, that someone has a
privileged background.
3. Forró is a northeastern musical genre extremely popular among the
migrant community in the south of Brazil. In the film, Jean had previously
dismissed the idea of going to a forró house, as suggested by Severino,
probably because of its association with the lower classes.
4. As per the title of Zuenir Ventura’s book.
5. See Freyre (The Mansions and the Shanties).
6. This scene also stands out in the film in terms of its heightened documen-
tary quality, as observed in the especially self-conscious and untrained,
even awkward, manner in which some of the non-professional actors
behave. This contributes to the sense that, much like Jean, the viewer has
stepped into a noticeably different world.
7. See Miranda for a critique of the film along these lines.
8. “To have a foot in the kitchen” is a pejorative expression in Brazil used to indi-
cate someone has black ancestry, in a historical reference to domestic slavery.
9. That said, as a film that has architecture as a recurrent theme and in which
the house is the predominant setting, it is worth noting that the spatial
organization of the house comes across as confusing. The main rooms are
accessed via a flight of stairs going down, although in one scene the maid
Edna has to climb a ladder outside to spy on Jéssica. Likewise, Bárbara’s
room is located atop the house as she is seen on a balcony overlooking the
pool. There is one shot from the outside of Jéssica leaving the house that
seems to indicate that the house has been constructed on a hill, although
this is arguably not enough to clarify the architectural structure. I thank
Lúcia Nagib for bringing this point to my attention.
References
Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso,
2008. Print.
Bazin, André. Jean Renoir, edited by François Truffaut. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1992 (1973). Print.
Cabral, Paulo. “Brazil Divided over Emerging Middle Class.” BBC News 10 Nov.
2011. Web. 11 May 2016.
Cimino, James. “‘Filme mostra o fim da era da empregada que dorme em casa’, diz
Regina Casé.” UOL Entretenimento: Cinema 02 Feb. 2015. Web. 08 May 2016.
Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of
Brazilian Civilization, translated by Samuel Putnam. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1963 (1946). Print.
Freyre, Gilberto. The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Print.
Gallas, Daniel. “Maid in Brazil: Economy Troubles Push Women Back into Old
Jobs.” BBC News 3 Mar. 2016. Web. 11 May 2016.
Miranda, Marcelo. “Casa grande, de Fellipe Barbosa.” Cinética: Cinema e
Crítica 01 Aug. 2014. Web. 11 May 2016.
Oricchio, Luiz Zanin. Cinema de novo: Um balanço crítico da retomada. São
Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2003. Print.
Pezzini, Mario. “An Emerging Middle-Class.” OECD Observer 2012. Web.
11 May 2016.
Saad-Filho, Alfredo. “A Coup in Brazil?” Jacobin 23 Mar. 2016. Web. 16 May 2016.
Stycer, Mauricio. “De escrava a empreguete.” Folha de São Paulo 23 Sep. 2012.
Web. 11 May 2016.
Ventura, Zuenir. Cidade partida. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Print.
Vieira, Estela. Interiors and Narrative: The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça
de Queirós and Leopoldo Alas. Maryland: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Print.
Willemen, Paul. “The National Revisited.” Theorising National Cinema. Eds.
Paul Willemen and Valentina Vitali. London: British Film Institute, 2006.
29–43. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977. Print.
Author Biography
Tiago de Luca is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick.
He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of
Physical Reality (2014), the editor (with Nuno Barradas Jorge) of Slow Cinema
(2016) and the series editor (with Lúcia Nagib) of Film Thinks: How Cinema
Inspires Writers and Thinkers (I.B. Tauris).
CHAPTER 13
O Som Ao Redor: Aural Space, Surveillance,

and Class Struggle
Patricia Sequeira Brás
The noises of a society are in advance of its images and material conflicts.
Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear.
(Attali 11).
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali argues that music
is prophetic in the sense that it announces “a change in social relations”
(4). For him, “every major social rupture has been preceded by an essen-
tial mutation in the codes of music, in its mode of audition, and in its
economy” (10). Sitting between noise and silence, music is “simultane-
ously a threat and a necessary source of legitimacy” of power (14). It
has always been channeled toward social pacification (Attali). Music, just
as much as noise and sound, simultaneously disperses and concentrates
bodies in space. This capacity means that sound actively contributes to
the disposition of the social body, allocating individuals and attributing
subjectivities. Following this premise, and after a thorough examination
of the deployment of aural space in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s O som ao
redor/Neighbouring Sounds (2012), this chapter will argue that, in this
film, sound heralds social conflict.
P.S. Brás (*) 
School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: patricia.sequeira.braz@gmail.com

222 P.S. Brás
Loud music and noise have the capacity to induce pain; the ear “can
be damaged, and even destroyed when the frequency of a sound exceeds
20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels” (Attali 27).
Exposure to excessive sounds may result in decreased “intellectual capac-
ity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion,
neurosis [and] altered diction” (27). For that reason, music and noise
have been used as a “weapon” to inflict violence or to punish (ibid.).
This is so in the case of the anti-loitering mosquito devices specifically
designed to disperse “anti-social” people1; the deployment of sonic weap-
ons known as sonic cannons that were made available during the London
Olympic Games of 2012 (Ledwith) to prevent potential riots2 and to
mobilize and disperse big crowds; and the use of sound bombs in the
Gaza strip by the Israeli army (Goodman). Sound, however, has also been
used as a form of punishment, as was the case of the listening torture per-
petrated on Iraqi prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib (Stafford
Smith); as well as that of young noise polluters who were forced to listen
to Barry Manilow, Dolly Parton, and Barney, the Dinosaur as their sen-
tence (McCullough). Because sonic devices are utilized as weapons, and
for torture and punishment, it can be argued that they are used to exer-
cise control. Here, this is understood as social control exercised on the
bodies of individuals that constitutes them as subjects.
Although music can be used for the purpose of social appeasement
and noise for the purpose of punishment and/or as a weapon, both also
have the capacity to withstand social and political forms of power as
well as envisage the emergence of new political subjectivities. In other
words, music and noise have the greatest capacity to defy power; an
argument that is better understood in the light of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s characterization of the musical refrain. Accordingly,
the musical refrain can create a stable center; organize and limit space;
or “join with the forces of the future” (Deleuze and Guattari 343). In
this sense, it can be argued that music’s capacity to “join with the forces
of the future” (343) is reminiscent of the abovementioned idea that
“music foretells our future” (Attali 11). In other words, music may well
announce a change in social relations. The musical refrain and/or sound
have arguably the capacity to group things and individuals (stabilize)
within a set of borders (organize and limit space), but they also have the
ability to rupture spatial limitations and disperse things and individuals.
Sound has then a dual capacity; it can simultaneously destroy and create
systems of power.
13 O SOM AO REDOR: AURAL SPACE, SURVEILLANCE … 223
O som ao redor follows the lives of the residents of a middle-class

neighborhood in Recife,3 displaying the altercations between neighbors
and between social classes. The arrival of a group of security guards,
who initially offer their services to guarantee the safety of the neighbor-
hood, progressively disturbs the seeming peaceful everyday life of this
urban community. The film conjures up paranoia and fear through a
combination of sound and frame composition. These devices announce
a menace to the apparent tranquility of the residential neighborhood.
Characters are often double framed by means of placing the camera out-
side the room in which they are enclosed, suggesting that they are being
observed. The aural space implies that something persists outside the
frame, anticipating the waning of a form of power as a consequence of
the social tension depicted in the film. This social tension is made appar-
ent through the interaction between the different social classes repre-
sented in the film, but the aural space alludes to a latent violence that
announces class conflict.
Social antagonism is often understated in contemporary Brazilian cin-
ema.4 The middle and upper classes are still generally underrepresented
in independent cinema, despite being prominently depicted in Globo’s
commercial film production and in adaptations of Nelson Rodrigues’s
plays. In the mid-1990s5 Brazilian cinema yielded filmic representa-
tions of the poorest classes living in sertão (backlands) and in favelas
(slums). These representations were anchored in the cinematic tradition
of Cinema Novo6 but were unfettered from its political engagements.
Instead, contemporary national cinema “turns utopian motifs into an
innocuous, nostalgic play” (Nagib 30). This is the case of Central do
Brasil/Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998) and Cidade de Deus/City
of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) that, among other
films, have gained considerable international and even financial success
by means of recapping “utopian motifs”. Without entirely lacking social
criticism, the nostalgic atmosphere at play in these films appears to rein-
force rather than to question social disparity.
In her critique of Central do Brasil, Lúcia Nagib argues that the film
makes reference to radical examples of Brazilian cinema, in particular, to
Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God, White Devil
(1964), albeit overturning Rocha’s famous utopian prediction that “the
backlands will turn into the sea” (Nagib 28). In Central do Brasil, the
main characters go on a road trip from Rio de Janeiro to the Northeast,
simultaneously reversing the rural exodus and offering a harmless image
224 P.S. Brás
of the utopian return. Social disparity is not overcome through the

return of the protagonist to his original rural area. By contrast, Deus
e o diabo na terra do sol puts forward a critique of the social disparity
between the countryside and the littoral, which is emulated in O som
ao redor because, in the latter, the existing social relations of the sertão
come to haunt the coastal urban community.
O som ao redor opens with black and white photographs depicting a
small rural community, a big house, and people working in the fields of
a sugar mill in a not-too-distant past (see Fig. 13.1). These images are
accompanied by non-diegetic sounds of drums, abundant in Brazilian
music with its strong roots in African percussion rhythms. The sound of
the drums induces suspense and persists through the following traveling
shot, which frames a girl on her roller-skates and a boy on his bicycle
entering a playground where other children play and look out through a
fence. Apartment blocks circle the playground, enhancing the claustro-
phobic environment of this urban landscape.
The black-and-white images are only contextualized when we come
to understand that Francisco (Waldemar José Solha), who once owned
a large number of properties in the area where old buildings are coming
down and new ones are being built, is now selling sections of the urban
area with the help of his grandson João (Gustavo Jahn). Francisco seems
to wish to return to the mansion and land that he owns in Bonito, in the
countryside of Pernambuco state, which he calls his engenho.7 He invites
his grandsons João and Dinho (Yuri Holanda) to visit the property but
neither desire to do so. It is not clear whether Francisco wants to live there
permanently but his wish to return to the engenho suggests a nostalgic
excursion to a moment when Francisco still owned a considerable amount
of land in Recife, and his family was exploiting the region. Hence, the ini-
tial images operate as a recollection of the exploitation, both of labor and
land, that favored Francisco in the past, and which allows him to profit
now from the real estate speculation in progress in the neighborhood.
Fig. 13.1 O som ao
redor (2012)
His grandson João manages the family business by showing flats to

potential tenants and by attending condominium meetings. He also
lives in the same neighborhood, just like his cousin Dinho and his uncle
Anco (Lula Terra). He is infatuated with Sofia (Irma Brown), who he
just met. After their first night together, Sofia’s car radio is stolen from
outside João’s house. Following this theft, Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos)
and his men appear and offer to act as vigilantes. The theft of the car
radio is understood as the moment in the plot when peace is disturbed.
However, we come to realize that the area was never as peaceful as it
seemed when we are introduced to Bia (Maeve Jenkings), a housewife
with two children, who suffers from insomnia because of the constant
barking of her neighbor’s dog. Her husband is often away, so to lessen
her tedium and insomnia, she smokes marijuana and masturbates by sit-
ting on the washing machine.8
Bia’s family is representative of an emergent social class in Brazil
whose aspirations are converted into commodities. For example, they
buy a big screen TV, two cars, video games as well as pay for English and
Chinese private lessons for the children. Their “cultural consumption”9
illustrates how a fraction of the working class has gained purchasing
power, understood here as a consequence of the economic and politi-
cal changes experienced in Brazil during the 2000s. Rather than social
mobility, this emergent social class gained the capacity to acquire the
types of commodities associated with the middle and/or upper classes.
This is further demonstrated when the security guards watch a video on
a smartphone, which shows that social background is not an impediment
to acquire such types of commodities and their consumption is unrelated
to social mobility.
The lack of the same purchasing power for some citizens is problema-
tized in a sequence in which a new TV is delivered to Bia’s house. Her
neighbor Betânia (Mariaangela Valéa) asks the couriers if they will be
delivering a TV to her house. Bia requests them to bring the TV inside
before attending to Betânia’s inquiry but one of the couriers replies to
Betânia that her “smaller TV of only 32 inches” would be delivered
next. A close-up from Betânia’s point of view shows the box of a “40
inches TV” to suggest that Bia’s TV is bigger; rapidly the scene cuts to
Betânia assaulting Bia with a slap. Rather than criticizing pettiness as
the outcome of greed, the sequence problematizes the inability of some
to acquire the commodities that are compatible with the social aspira-
tions of an emergent class, as well as suggesting that social antagonism is
226 P.S. Brás
inherent to social relations. Social antagonism appears again in another

scene, in which a woman carrying shopping bags and talking on her
mobile greets with animosity a man who offers to carry her bags. The
woman brushes him off with a single gesture, to which he replies “I’m
not asking for money.” She ignores him and continues to talk on her
mobile. Without her noticing, the man scratches her Audi A3 with a key.
Throughout the film, we witness these altercations not only between
neighbors but also between social classes, between those who have more
or less purchasing power. These interactions are, however, not always
conflicting; social differences may also take affectionate forms. This is
emphatically illustrated in a conversation between João and his employ-
ee’s oldest son, who has just started working in a supermarket. João tells
him that he also worked in a supermarket while studying in Germany,
thus ignoring the profound social differences between them. Social rela-
tions are, therefore, often conflicting.
The presence of the security guards, for instance, is rapidly accepted,
which means that fear and paranoia were already afflicting this urban
community. The use of CCTV cameras reveals how surveillance was
already put into practice in the neighborhood before the security guards’
appearance. Clodoaldo’s arrival in the neighborhood is first seen through
the small screen of a CCTV camera placed outside Anco’s house. In
another sequence, João attends a condominium meeting in which the
residents discuss the negligence of “Seu Agenor”, the old porter of
the building, after catching him, on camera, sleeping during his duty
hours. After the meeting, the old porter observes João and Sofia kissing,
through CCTV cameras.
CCTV cameras are a method of preventing assaults and robbers, but
in this last sequence, the use of cameras serves to scrutinize the resi-
dents and the porter’s conduct rather than to guarantee the safety of the
residents of the building. Hence, the presence of CCTV cameras in the
neighborhood is a response to the feelings of paranoia and fear of the
residents, who show a predisposition to self-surveillance. Surveillance
is then a mechanism through which social control is exercised and sub-
jectivities are constructed, functioning to allocate individuals within the
social body.
Michel Foucault’s extensive study of places of confinement in disci-
plinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as
the concept of the panopticon as their “model of functioning” (Foucault
205), help us to better understand the predicament of our contemporary
society in which the exercise of control is self-inflicted. According to

Foucault, this disciplinary model is a type of location of bodies in space,
of a distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical
organization, of disposition of centers and channels of power, of defini-
tion of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can
be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.
It can be argued that social relations are also disciplined according
to this model. In Foucault’s words, “it is not that the beautiful totality
of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it
is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a
whole technique of forces and bodies” (216–217). Rather than a soci-
ety of spectacle, we live in a society of surveillance wherein the aware-
ness of our permanent and excessive visibility becomes an instrument of
power (Foucault). Within the panoptical model, bars and chains become
outmoded; the belief that we are scrutinized by others, as much as we
scrutinize them, results in a self-imposed surveillance for the purpose of
power to control.
On the other hand, Deleuze argues that Foucault’s thesis identifies
the transition from the model of “societies of sovereignty” to “discipli-
nary societies” (3). These two models of functioning are dramatically dif-
ferent, since the former consists of taxing the living and ruling the dead.
In societies of sovereignty, the king would rule who lives or dies; but the
disciplinary model consists instead of organizing the productive forces
and administering life (Deleuze). Rather than living in a society of dis-
cipline, Deleuze disputes that we now live in a society of control. Under
the disciplinary model, the factory combines individuals into “a single
body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element
within the mass” (Deleuze 4–5). However, in societies of control, the
corporation replaces the factory, awarding instead the “brashest rivalry as
a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes
individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each
within” (Deleuze 5). But this model is applicable to all social spaces. In
O som ao redor, this premise is verified in the constant divide between
neighbors and between social classes.
In his critique of Foucault, Deleuze also argues that the panoptic
model has been replaced by computerized scrutiny as a consequence
of the crisis of institutions and the emergence of computers and digital
technology; his argument thus provides a more accurate description of
contemporary society. Notwithstanding, it can be argued that the model
228 P.S. Brás
of control is not diametrically opposed to the disciplinary model; both

models coexist, since the former combines with the latter to shape “a
new system of domination” (Deleuze 7). Again, the film follows the
gradual decline of patriarchal power as well as the waning of an old sys-
tem—coronelismo—embodied in the character of Francisco.10 The down-
fall of this system leads to the initiation of a new system of domination.
Surveillance is a consequence of feelings of paranoia and fear, as well
as the means by which subjectivities are allocated and the social body is
controlled. The threat is palpable but not intelligible. Whatever threatens
this urban community persists in the aural space of the film, suggesting
a latent antagonism. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of
a sequence in which both aural and visual elements foreshadow social
conflict.
João and Sofia visit Francisco at the engenho. The camera placed in
the room opposite double frames the characters in the dining room, as
if suggesting that someone is observing them; then João and Sofia wan-
der through the house that appears uninhabited. In one of the rooms,
they stare at the ceiling, in a close-up, then hear someone’s steps—whose
steps they belong to is uncertain. The crossfading of sounds of children
shouting introduces the following scene, in which João and Sofia walk by
a school. Then, they walk through the ruins of a building, wherein extra-
diegetic sounds of shrilling strings and loud screams—typical of hor-
ror films—helps viewers to recognize the place as it used to be: a movie
theater. Afterwards, an abrupt cut takes us to a waterfall, where Francisco
has joined the couple bathing under a stream of water (see Fig. 13.2).
João is shown bathing, in a close-up shot, which is followed by a sharp
cut in which the water turns red, emulating blood. This transition is
assisted by a loud unexpected sound enhancing the abrupt conversion of
water to blood to surprise the viewer.
Despite being a device of the horror genre, the unexpected sound
serves to create a tension, to surprise the viewer. Here, the blood
Fig. 13.2 O som ao
redor (2012)
signifies more than a fantastic feature to scare the audience. The blood is
a sign of the exploitation of the worker’s labor and land at the sugar mill
that continues to plague the coronel and succeeding generations. The old
system of exploitation sanctioned the economic growth of the patriarchal
figure, Francisco, whose profits and privileges, as well as violence and
bloodshed, are passed to the next generation of João and Dinho.
The film presents a plethora of situations in which the past haunts
the present. This happens, for instance, when Lu, who is Francisco’s
employee, has a sexual encounter with Clodoaldo. Before leaving the
house, Lu goes to her room to change her uniform. Here, the camera
stands outside the room, watching her through the open door, giv-
ing a voyeuristic dimension to the scene and emphasizing the practice
of surveillance in the neighborhood (by means of CCTV cameras). In
the street, she meets Clodoaldo before heading to a house in the neigh-
borhood. Inside the house, they go to the master bedroom. Clodoaldo
undresses her while the camera pulls focus to the open door of the bed-
room. At that point, and despite the characters’ unawareness, we sud-
denly see the figure of a young black boy (not perceptible in the first
viewing) walking through the corridor outside the room. His appearance
is supplemented with a jumpy and uncanny sound. The aural space assists
the abrupt introduction of this figure, breaking the continuity of the
narrative as well as reinforcing the impression that something seems to
haunt the residents of this neighborhood.
The young black boy is again seen on top of a tree in a subsequent
scene. Because he is wearing nothing more than outmoded long cotton
shorts, he seems misplaced in the contemporary urban life of this com-
munity. His wandering ghostly presence reminds us again that some-
thing haunts the neighborhood. His figure becomes more meaningful,
bearing in mind Brazil’s history of slave trade. The labor force in sugar
plantations consisted of slaves until the abolition of slavery in 1888. The
reference to slavery reappears in another scene, introduced just after the
sudden appearance of the black boy in the corridor. This time, it is Bia’s
daughter, Fernanda, who wakes up at night to the sound of continuous
clapping.11 Fernanda looks out of the window; numerous men jump the
walls that divide the houses’ backyards until gathering together, which
in the dark becomes evocative of a senzala (slaves quarter).12 The claps
could pass unnoticed as the sound of the impact of the men’s jumps but
these dissonant sounds are strategically used to create a jarring view-
ing experience. The aural space of the film heralds social conflict by
230 P.S. Brás
suggesting that something outside visual space and linear time menaces
the tranquility of the neighborhood.
On the other hand, it is vengeance that characterizes the last sequence
of the film. In this sequence, Francisco asks protection from Clodoaldo
and his brother because his right-hand man, Reginaldo, was killed near
his property in Bonito. The two brothers look at one another, then
Clodoaldo’s brother turns to the old man and says: “27 April 1984.”
Francisco looks puzzled, but the man continues: “You don’t remem-
ber but we do.” Clodoaldo adds: “I was only 6 but I do remember.”
His brother says that they met Reginaldo a few days before, suggesting
that they killed him. It turns out that Reginaldo murdered their father
and uncle under Francisco’s orders, “because of a fence”. The three
men stand up abruptly. The editing cuts to Bia and her family placing an
explosive device next to the neighbor’s dog, then the camera shows the
family in a close-up, followed by several blasts, which could be the device
detonating or a shotgun firing. We can assume that Francisco is killed but
also speculate upon the neighbor’s possible retaliation. The closure of the
film suggests that a war was initiated, understood here as a consequence
of the latent antagonism in the relations between characters and classes.
In conclusion, this latent antagonism is nothing but class conflict.
This conflict is, however, implicit in the film’s aural space. Sound may
serve to add space to existing visible spaces by means of reverberation.
This is the case for the scenes in which the exterior sound invades the
interior of the flats, and the soundtrack offers a realist perception of
space through the layering of aural elements. Nonetheless, according to
the examples in which the aural space provokes suspense or the viewer’s
surprise (e.g. the scene at the waterfall), sound has the capacity to inter-
fere with the visual field to deterritorialize the image. In other words,
sound is capable of suggesting that something else is beyond our vision.
This means that the viewer’s expectation that something is likely to hap-
pen is suggested through the aural landscape of the film. For that rea-
son, this chapter argues that the consequences of social antagonism are
implied, and not necessarily seen.
This is epitomized in a single scene toward the end of the film, in
which the camera zooms in to show the group of security guards coming
together under the exterior tent that shelters them while surveilling the
street. The diegetic soundtrack of cars passing and children playing is lay-
ered with a loud noise similar to the spinning blades of a helicopter. The
sound increases as the camera pulls focus to the group of men now also
joined by Lu. Sound adds an eerie quality to the scene, through which
we, the viewers, speculate whether these characters are conspiring, and
if so, against whom? This is not made apparent until the very end of the
film. However, we can recognize the security guards and the servant as
underprivileged, and as such, identify the latent social antagonism.
Throughout the film, social division is portrayed and enacted through
the dialogues and behaviors of the characters. However, as discussed
above, dissonant and eerie sounds are used strategically to suggest
social antagonism. The deployment of aural space emphasizes the exist-
ing social tension to render latent violence comprehensible. Sound sug-
gests an antagonistic latency that shapes the viewers’ perception of the
relationships between neighbors and also between social classes. If, as
argued, sound has the capacity to destroy old systems of power as well as
creating new ones, it can then be argued that, in this film, sound threat-
ens the system of exploitation upon which social relations are based,
which means that it enables the constitution of new subjectivities.
In contrast, the panoptic machine is a mechanism of control modelled
in the modern idea of sight as a privileged sense. As we have seen in the
film, despite the surveillance of CCTV cameras, sound still threatens the
tranquility of the neighborhood because sound cannot be contained. For
that reason, sound has the potential to endure and overcome a system
of power, which is first and foremost the privileging of sight over all the
other senses. Sound prevents the frame from containment by suggesting
that something else is beyond the limits of our visual field. In O som ao
redor, sound announces the declining of the system of power embodied
in the patriarchal figure of Francisco. It is then the internalized paranoia
among the residents of the neighborhood that leads to self-imposed sur-
veillance, as well as foreseeing the fading of their own social privilege.
O som ao redor envisions then the decline of a certain status quo and
the emergence of new subjectivities that are likely to come through the
mutation of our social contemporary system within late capitalism.
Notes
1. Although designed to disperse the concentration of young people and
teenagers alike, whose hearing sensitivity is higher, new “improved”
devices are aimed at an unrestrictive demographics.
2. In 2011 a series of riot demonstrations occurred in London in response to the
killing of the black young man, Mark Duggan, by the Metropolitan Police.
232 P.S. Brás
3. The film was shot in the borough of Setúbal, a suburban middle-class

neighborhood in Recife, where the director used to live. His previous
short film, Eletrodoméstica/Electrodomestic (2005) was also set there.
Kleber Mendonça Filho was born in Recife in 1968. He was a journal-
ist and a film critic before becoming a film director. After directing short
films, O som ao redor is his first feature film. His film, Aquarius (2016),
was a nominee for the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2016.
4. There are, however, exceptions, such as the documentary Um lugar ao
sol/High-Rise (Gabriel Mascaro, 2009), which offers a glimpse at the
lives of the very privileged in Brazil. This film is particularly relevant
because not only does it suggest that spatial distance emulates social dis-
tinction but also that, in a similar vein to O som ao redor, sound has the
capacity to withstand social privilege.
5. At that time, Brazilian cinema flourished because of the introduction of
a new audiovisual law, generating “fiscal incentives” as well as benefiting
from the “socio-political changes that brought democratic (and neo-lib-
eral) governments to power” (Nagib 26).
6. Brazilian Cinema Novo was a “new wave” film movement influenced
by French Nouvelle Vague and Italian Neo-Realism in the 1960s.
Politically engaged, Cinema Novo attempted to depict the poor and
underdeveloped areas of Brazil as well as to propose a film aesthetic that
could characterize the Brazilian social and political context. Glauber
Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Ruy Guerra are among its most
famous directors.
7. Engenhos were a typical northeastern type of estate, comprising the land,
the sugar-cane plantation, the mill, and the landlord’s manor house.
However, today, they are no longer sugar farms but instead country
properties of upper-class urban families.
8. Bia is highly inspired by the main character of Eletrodoméstica, which
depicts a housewife and her daily routine of house cleaning, prepar-
ing lunch for her children, smoking marijuana, and using her washing
machine to masturbate.
9. In his article, Ribeiro identifies the representation of social classes in
O som ao redor. He does so by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s definition
of class according to his concepts of ‘taste’ and ‘habitus’ and De Souza’s
thesis concerning Brazilian society.
10. Coronelismo was a widespread social and political system in Brazil in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coronel was, and still is today
in some rural areas of the country, an agrarian oligarch who holds local
political power. O som ao redor has also been discussed in relation to the
declining of coronelismo (Ribeiro and Rosa).
11. The claps are actually the sound of numerous men jumping.

12. Senzala was the place where the slaves were confined when they were not
working in the fields or when sleeping.
Works Cited
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postcript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.
JSTOR. Web. 01 April 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. New York, London: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline & Punishment The Birth of the
Prison. Vintage Books, 1995. 195–228. Print.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2010. Print.
Ledwith, Mario. “‘Sonic Cannons’ Emitting Pain-inducing Noise to Be Used
During Olympics to Keep Crowds under Control.” Daily Mail 12 May 2012,
Web. 10 April 2016.
McCullough. “Noise Offenders Forced to Listen to Barry Manilow, Dolly
Parton and Barney the Dinosaur.” Dvorak Uncensored 24 Nov. 2008, Web.
10 April 2016.
Nagib, Lúcia. “Reframing Utopia: Contemporary Brazilian Cinema at the Turn
of the Century.” Portuguese Cultural Studies 0.1 (2006): 25–35. Web.
Ribeiro, Carlos Eduardo and Guilherme da Rosa. “A representação das classes
sociais em O som ao redor.” Academia.edu (2014): 1–32. Web. 05 April 2016.
Stafford Smith, Clive. “Welcome to ‘the Disco’.” The Guardian 19 June 2008,
Web. 10 April 2016.
Author Biography
Patrícia S. Brás concluded her doctoral research, entitled ‘The Political Gesture
in Pedro Costa’s Films’, at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a Lecturer in
Portuguese Modern Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Filmography
Brazilian Films
Note: The translations of the film titles are in italics if they have previously been
translated. Otherwise they are our own translations.
Ação entre amigos (Friendly Fire). Dir. Beto Brant, 1998.

Ancoradouro de pescadores na Baía de Guanabara (Fishing Pier at Guanabara
Bay). Dir. José Roberto da Cunha Salles, 1897.
Aquarius. Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016.
Árido movie (Arid Movie). Dir. Lírio Ferreira, 2006.
Avenida Brasília Formosa (Defiant Brasília). Dir. Gabriel Mascaro, 2010.
Baile perfumado (Perfumed Ball). Dir. Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira, 1997.
O bandido da luz vermelha (The Red Light Bandit). Dir. Rogério Sganzerla,
1968.
Beira-mar (Seashore). Dir. Filipe Matzembacher and Márcio Reolon, 2015.
Bilu e João (Bilu and João). Dir. Kátia Lund, 2005.
Branco sai, preto fica (White Out/Black In). Dir. Adirley Queirós, 2014.
Brasília: contradições de uma cidade nova (Brasília: Contradictions of a New City)
Dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1967.
Caçando capivara (Hunting Capybara). Dir. Derly, Marilton, Janaína, Joanina,
Fernando, João Duro, Juninha, Zé Carlos e Bernardo Maxakali, 2009.
Cão sem dono (Stray Dog). Dir. Beto Brant and Renato Ciasca, 2007.
Carandiru (Carandiru). Dir. Hector Babenco, 2001.
A cartomante (The Fortune-Teller). Dir. Wagner de Assis, 2004.
Casa grande (Casa Grande, or The Ballad of Poor Jean). Dir. Fellipe Barbosa,
2014.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 235

Brazilian Cinema, Screening Spaces, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48267-5
236 Filmography
Central do Brasil (Central Station). Dir. Walter Salles, 1998.

O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky). Dir. Karim Aïnouz, 2006.
O céu sobre os ombros (The Sky Above). Dir. Sérgio Borges, 2011.
Cidade de Deus (City of God). Dir. Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002.
A cidade é uma só? (Is the City One Only?). Dir. Adirley Queirós, 2011.
Cidade oculta (Hidden City). Dir. Chico Botelho, 1986.
Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures). Dir. Marcelo
Gomes, 2005.
Claro. Dir. Glauber Rocha, 1975.
Conterrâneos velhos de guerra (Old-Time Veteran Countrymen). Dir. Waldimir
Carvalho, 1990.
Crime delicado (Delicate Crime). Dir. Beto Brant, 2005.
Crônica de um industrial (Chronicle of an Industrialist). Dir. Luiz Rosemberg
Filho, 1978.
Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil). Dir. Glauber Rocha,
1964.
Do começo ao fim (From Beginning to End). Dir. Aluizio Abranches, 2009.
Doméstica (Housemaids). Dir. Gabriel Mascaro, 2012.
Domésticas, o filme (Maids). Dir. Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival, 2001.
Dov’è Meneghetti? (Where is Meneghetti?). Dir. Beto Brant, 1988.
O dragão da maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes). Dir.
Glauber Rocha, 1969.
Eletrodoméstica (Electrodomestic). Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2005.
Eu não quero voltar sozinho (I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone). Dir. Daniel Ribeiro,
2010.
Eu receberia as piores notícias dos teus lindos lábios (I’d Receive the Worst News
from Your Beautiful Lips). Dir. Beto Brant and Renato Ciasca, 2011.
O fantasma (Phantom). Dir. João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000.
Favela dos meus amores (Favela of My Loves). Dir. Humberto Mauro, 1935.
Os fuzis (The Guns). Dir. Ruy Guerra, 1964.
As hipermulheres (The Hyperwomen). Dir. Takumã Kuikuro, Carlos Fausto and
Leonardo Sette, 2011.
A história da eternidade (The History of Eternity). Dir. Camilo Cavalcante, 2014.
Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho (The Way He Looks). Dir. Daniel Ribeiro, 2014.
O homem que virou suco (The Man Who Turned into Juice). Dir. João Batista de
Andrade, 1980.
A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Dir. Suzana Amaral, 1985.
Os inquilinos (The Tenants). Dir. Sérgio Bianchi, 2009.
Insolação (Sunstroke). Dir. Daniela Thomas and Felipe Hirsch, 2009.
O invasor (The Trespasser). Dir. Beto Brant, 2002.
Kakxop pit hãmkoxuk xop te yũmũgãhã (Iniciação dos filhos dos espíritos da terra/
Initiation of the Sons of Earth’s Spirits). Dir. Isael Maxakali, 2015.
Filmography 237
Um lugar ao sol (High-Rise). Dir. Gabriel Mascaro, 2009.

Madame Satã. Dir. Karim Aïnouz, 2002.
Os matadores (Belly up). Dir. Beto Brant, 1997.
O melhor amigo (The Best Friend). Dir. Allan Deberton, 2013.
Meu pé de laranja lima (My Sweet Orange Tree). Dir. Marcos Bernstein, 2012.
Mira. Dir. Gregorio Graziozi, 2009.
Monumento (Monument). Dir. Gregorio Graziosi, 2012.
Nosso Lar (Astral City: A Spiritual Journey). Dir.Wagner de Assis, 2010.
Obra (The Construction). Dir. Gregorio Graziozi, 2014.
Um olhar estrangeiro (A Foreign Look). Dir. Lúcia Murat, 2006.
Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). Dir. Marcel Camus, 1959.
Plano B (Plan B). Dir. Getsamane Silva, 2014.
Praia do Futuro (Futuro Beach). Dir. Karim Aïnouz, 2014.
As primeiras imagens de Brasília (The First Images of Brasília). Dir. Jean
Manzon, 1956/57.
O prisioneiro da grade de ferro (The Prisoner of the Iron Bars). Dir. Paulo
Sacramento, 2003.
Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother). Dir. Anna Muylaert, 2015.
A queda (The Fall). Dir. Nelson Xavier and Ruy Guerra, 1976.
Rap, o canto da Ceilândia (Rap, the Song of Ceilândia). Dir. Adirley Queirós,
2005.
Recife frio (Cold Tropics). Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2009.
Rio 40 graus (Rio 40 Degrees). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1955.
Rio Zona Norte (Rio North Zone). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1957.
Sangue azul (Blue Blood). Dir. Lírio Ferreira, 2015.
São Paulo SA (São Paulo SA). Dir. Sérgio Person, 1965.
Sertão de acrílico azul piscina (Hinterland in Swimming Pool Blue Acrylic) Dir.
Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2004.
O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds). Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012.
Somos tão jovens (We’re so Young). Dir. Antonio Carlos de Fontoura, 2013.
Tatakox. Dir. Isael Maxakali and Community of Aldeia Verde, 2007.
Tatakux Vila Nova. Dir. Gui Gui Maxakali and Community of Aldeia Nova do
Pradinho, 2009.
Território do brincar (Territory of Play). Dir. David Reeks and Renata Meirelles,
2015.
Trabalhar cansa (Hard Labor). Dir. Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, 2011.
Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). Dir. José Padilha, 2007.
Ventos de agosto (August Winds). Dir. Gabriel Mascaro, 2014.
Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (I Travel because I Have to, I Come Back
because I Love You). Dir. Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009.
Vidas secas (Barren Lives). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963.
Viramundo (Viramundo). Dir. Geraldo Sarno, 1965.
Vista da Baía da Guanabara (View of Guanabara Bay). Dir. Alfonso Segretto,
1897–8.
238 Filmography
International Films
Aeon Flux. Dir. Karyn Kusama, 2005.
All the Invisible Children. Dir. Mehdi Charef, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Kátia
Lund, Jordan Scott, Ridley Scott, Stefano Veneruso and John Woo, 2005.
AU3(Autopista central) (AU3 (Central Highway)). Dir. Alejandro Hartmann,
2010.
Ausente (Absent). Dir. Marco Berge, 2011.
Contracorriente (Undertow). Dir. Javier Fuentes-León, 2009.
Cuerpo de letra (Embodied Letters). Dir. Julián D’Angiolillo, 2015.
Einayim petukhoth (Eyes Wide Open). Dir. Haim Tabakman, 2009.
En el hoyo (In the Pit). Dir. Juan Carlos Julfo, 2006.
Jongens (Boys). Dir. Mischa Kamp, 2014.
The Lake House. Dir. Alejandro Agresti, 2006.
Medianeras (Sidewalls). Dir. Gustavo Taretto, 2011.
Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light). Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 2010.
Pelo malo (Bad Hair). Dir. Mariana Rondón, 2013.
Playtime. Dir. Jacques Tati, 1967.
La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). Dir. Jean Renoir, 1939.
Sex and the City. Dir. Michael Patrick King, 2010.
The Shock of the New. Dir. David Lewis Richardson, 1980.
Tourou et Bitti, les tambours d’avant (Tourou and Bitti, the Drums of the Past).
Dir. Jean Rouch, 1971.
TV Series
Alice. Dir. Karim Aïnouz. Gullane Filmes, HBO, 2008. Television.
Carandiru, outras histórias (Carandiru: The Series). Dir. Hector Babenco, 2005.
Television.
Downton Abbey. ITV, 2010–2015. Television.
Felizes para sempre? (Happily Ever After?). Dir. Fernando Meirelles. Rede Globo
de Televisão, 2015. Television.
Index
A Brasilidade, 7, 9
Abduction of agency, 25 Brazilian patriarchal society, 173, 178
Abolition of slavery, 229 Brazilian queer cinema, 15, 185, 188,
Absent bodies, 79 194
Affonso Beato, 49 Brazilian slavery, 207
African diaspora, 145 Built environment, 14, 118, 123
Afrofuturism, 134
Alienation, 10, 13, 62, 67, 68, 71, 72,
120. See also Urban alienation C
Allan Kardec, 137 Carandiru prison, 159
Amnesty Bill, 73 Caravana Farkas, 163
Anthropological places, 205 Carmen Miranda, 8
Anthropophagic movement, 7. See also Chacinas, 150
Cultural cannibalism Chain of production, 101
Anti-loitering mosquito devices, 222 Chanchadas, 8, 9
Architectonic experience, 119 Chico Xavier, 136, 139
Architectonic space, 121, 128 Childhood invisibility, 103, 104
Audiovisual Law, 11 Child-image, 14, 100, 106, 108, 110,
Aural space, 16, 221, 223, 228–231 112
Authorship, 88, 89 Cinema Marginal, 9, 152
Avant-garde cinema, 80 Cinema Novo, 9, 11, 223
Cinema of attractions, 135
Cinema of sensation, 98
B Cinematic architecture, 123
Bandeirantes, 150, 151, 156 Cinematic ethics, 78, 91
Black selves, 134 Cinematic landscape, 9, 78, 80, 82
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 239

Brazilian Cinema, Screening Spaces, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48267-5
240 Index
Cinematic scale, 83, 91 E

Cinematic space, 2, 3, 14, 15, 119 Economic exchange, 101
Cinematic spatiality, 78, 91 Economy of nature, 24
Cinematic time, 98, 104 Edifício 14 Bis, 157, 158
Claro, 33, 34. See also Glauber Rocha Edifício Copan, 155, 157
Class conflict, 15, 16, 204–206, 217, Electromagnetic technology, 136
223, 230 Embrafilme, 11
Class division, 210, 212 Emergent social class, 225
Class relations, 215, 216 Emerging middle class, 206
Commodities, 63, 225 Engenho, 224, 228
Commodity condition, 67 Enlightenment, 135, 139
Contemporary capitalism, 42, 43 Ethnographic happening, 32
Coronelismo, 228 Eve Sedgwick, 181
Corporeality, 89, 108 Exile, 34, 170
Cosmological space, 26 Extraterrestrial city, 14, 133, 136–138
Cosmology, 13, 25
Cosmopolitical ‘dispositive’, 35
Coup d’état, 73. See also Military F
dictatorship Failed utopia, 128
Crimes de Maio, 151 Fernando Collor de Mello, 73
Cultural cannibalism, 7 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 73
Cultural consumption, 225 Ferreira Gullar, 49
Cyborg, 142 Filmic space, 28, 31, 80, 98, 100, 102,
103, 105, 112, 122, 123, 127,
128
D Film noir, 64
DC Comics, 174 Fiscal incentives, 232
Death of modern architecture, The, Flâneur, 69
153 Forró, 209, 211, 212
Deterritorialization, 44, 46, 52, 56, Fox International Productions, 134
125 Free indirect discourse, 35
Disability, 141
Disciplinary societies, 226, 227
Disneyfication, 44 G
Displacement, 14, 31, 102, 118, 127, Gender heteronormativity, 172
128, 170, 175, 179 Gender performativity, 172
DOI-CODI, 165 Gentrification, 43, 67
Domestic space, 12, 15, 203, 205, 206 Geographical division, 211
DOPS, 158, 159 Geographical self, 5
Doreen Massey, 2, 98 Georg Simmel, 60
Dystopia, 101, 102, 104 Getsamane Silva, 50
Dystopian cinema, 142 Gilberto Freyre, 206
Index 241
Glauber Rocha, 9, 12, 32, 33, 223 Intensive spatium, 14, 98, 105, 108,
Global capitalism, 140 112
Globalized communication, 43 Interbreeding, 207
Global queer cinema, 188 Internal gaze, 26
Globo Filmes, 43 Interrupted utopia, 101
Gothic architecture, 130 Intersubjectivity, 190
H J
Happening, 31, 33, 34, 105 Japanese manga, 174
Haptic narrative, 161 Jean-Claude Bernardet, 49
Haptic perception, 82, 83, 87 Jean Manzon, 48
Haptic visuality, 78, 87 Jean Rouch, 31, 32
Hegemonic masculinity, 171, 174 Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 49
Henri Lefebvre, 3, 4, 45, 60, 144, Judith Butler, 172
155, 171 Junkspace, 44
Heteronormativity, 172, 186, 188 Juscelino Kubitschek, 48, 54, 155
Heterotopias, 176, 179
Heterotopic spaces, 176
Historical debt, 209 K
Historical trauma, 143 Kuxex, 27–29
Homoerotic intimacy, 188
Homophobia, 175
Homophobic crimes, 175, 197 L
Homosexuality, 10, 15, 170, 179, Land of Tomorrow, 136
188, 193, 195 Late capitalism, 142, 231
Homosociality, 193 Latin American queer cinema, 197
Human condition, 128, 136, 196 Laura Marks, 81
Human connection, 70, 120, 127 Leon Hirszman, 91
Human rights, 65, 144, 151, 158, Lieux de mémoire, 151
162, 180 Liminal space, 70
Human rights violation, 165 Liquid fold, The, 104
Hypermasculinity, 196 Liquid image, 107
Local-language productions (LLPs),
134
I Lula years, 214
Ideological propaganda, 56
Incentive laws, 1
Indigenous cinema, 35 M
Intensity of sensation, 103 Machismo, 171, 172, 197
Intensive object, 109 Maid’s room, 204, 207, 213
Mainstream masculinity, 174
242 Index
Male body, 187, 188, 190, 197, 198 Normative gaze, 187
Male power, 171
Male subjectivities, 170
Marçal Aquino, 59 O
Marc Augé, 64, 205 Oberbaum Bridge, 176
Marvel Comics, 174 Oscar Niemeyer, 49, 53, 125, 152,
Massacre do Carandiru, 151 157, 215
Materiality, 13, 80, 81, 83, 87, 89, Oscar Pistorius, 142
91, 171
Memorial of Resistance, 158
Mental space, 4 P
Meteorological phenomena, 80, 88 Palimpsest, 152, 162
Michel Foucault, 2, 45, 171, 226 Panoptic model, 227
Michelangelo Antonioni, 118 Panopticon, 226
Military dictatorship, 9, 51, 150. See Patriarchal gaze, 187
also Military regime; Military Performance of masculinity, 171
government Perpetual children, 191
Miscegenation, 207, 210 Phenomenology, 25
Mnemonic dispositive, 25 Physical space, 4
Mode of spatialization, 82 Political economy of images, 24, 36
Modern Arts Week, 7 Political subjectivities, 222
Modernist movement, 7, 124, 128 Populações periféricas, 143
Modernity myth, 67 Pornochanchadas, 9
Modernization, 11, 137, 142, 144, Possession rite, 32
150, 155 Post-identity politics, 12
Modern man, 67, 69 Poverty, 47, 100, 101, 103, 158
Modulation, 33, 100 Pruitt-Igoe, 153, 158
Multinaturalism, 26 Psychography, 145
Psychological architecture, 119
Public spaces, 151, 204
N
Narrative cinema, 80, 84
Narrative progression, 80 Q
Narrative space, 3 Queer gaze, 197
National identity, 5–9, 12, 13, 78 Queer identity, 196
Natural disasters, 80 Queer masculinities, 170, 179
Natural spaces, 78, 85, 87 Queer subjectivities, 15, 180, 188. See
Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 9 also Queer subjectivity
Neoliberalism, 136, 139, 140
Neoliberal urbanism, 13, 43, 44, 46
New middle class, 205 R
Non-place, 64, 118, 120, 128, 205 Racial identity, 209, 210
Index 243
Racial quota system, The, 209, 210 Social borders, 60, 67

Realism, 122, 203, 217 Social change, 15, 205, 206, 215
Realist directors, 122 Social disparity, 217, 223, 224
Realization space, 60 Social inequality, 15, 67, 101, 104
Rede Globo, 205 Social ladder, 214
Regional cinema, 7, 77 Social mobility, 214, 225
Relational space, 35, 45, 46, 54, 55 Social relations, 221, 222, 224, 226,
Religious indoctrination, 135 227, 231
Representational spaces, 55, 68 Social segregation, 55, 210
Repression, 13, 72, 150, 159 Social space, 4, 7, 9, 13, 60, 61, 65,
Resingularisation, 108, 112 68, 171, 172, 227
Resistance, 13, 42, 70, 71, 73, 100, Social tension, 48, 223, 231
162 Sonic cannons, 222
Reterritorialization, 13, 44 Sonic weapons, 222
Retomada, 2, 11, 59, 77 Sound bombs, 222
Retrofuturism, 136 Space of imagination, 173
Retrofuturistic ideology, 14, 135 Space-time, 46, 54, 105
Retro-futuristic presentation, 134 Spatial demarcations, 212
Revolutionary discourse, 91 Spatial separation, 213
Rhizomatic relations, 56 Spatial triad, 4
Right to the city, 144 Spatial turn, 2, 45
Ritual-films, 24 Spiritism, 134, 136, 137, 139
Ritual-journeys, 31 Spiritist doctrine, 135
Road movie, 78 Spirits-peoples, 26, 32, 34, 35
Ruy Guerra, 10 Stephen Heath, 3
Stolen childhood, 102
Striated space, 81, 107
S Subjectivation fold, 108
Salvagepunk, 142, 143 Sublime landscapes, 88
Satellite city, 134, 135, 141, 142 Supercrip, 141, 142
Savage capitalist, 68 Supercrip narrative, 141, 142
Sem-terra rural workers, 64 Superheroes, 174
Sensorial experience, 78 Superhuman, 142
Senzala, 206, 207, 211, 229 Supernaturalism, 139
Sérgio Sant’Anna, 62 Surveillance, 16, 173, 226, 227, 229,
Sertão, 7–11, 78–80, 84, 90, 223, 224 231
Shamanic critique, 13, 24, 36 Systematic repression, 150
Shamanic experience, 25
Shamanism, 25, 26
Smooth space, 78, 81, 82, 107 T
Social antagonism, 223, 225, 230, 231 Teatro de revista, 8
Social body, 221, 226, 228 Telenovelas, 205
244 Index
Time travel, 134, 135, 143 Vídeo nas Aldeias, 12, 24

Tomorrowland, 136 Voice-off, 78, 79, 84
Tourou et Bitti, les tambours d’avant, Voyageur, 164
31
Trance, 32, 33, 125, 158, 160
Transhumanism, 135, 139 W
Waldimir Carvalho, 47
Walt Disney, 136
U Walter Benjamin, 151
Urban alienation, 68 Working children, 102
Utopian city, 129 Working class, 225
Utopian dreams, 55, 134, 139
Y
V Yãmĩyxop, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34
Vertical life, 69

Space and Subjectivity in Contemporany Brazilian Cinema

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S PA C E A N D

More information about this series at

Space and Subjectivity

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936331

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © proud_natalia

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Part I Territorialization and Marginal Subjectivities

2 Tikmũ’ũn’s Caterpillar-Cinema: Off-Screen Space and

3 The Reterritorializations of Urban Space in Brazilian

4 Mapping from the Margins: The Films of Beto Brant 59

Part II Intensive Space, Landscape, and Spatial Experience

5 Bodies in Landscape: The Scientist’s Presence in Viajo

6 Intensive Spatium and the Construction of Child

Part III Utopia, Memory, and Urban Architecture

7 Insolação: Subjective Perception of an Urban Utopia

8 Astral Cities, New Selves: Utopian Subjectivities

9 Underneath the Surface, Embodied on Screen: Memory

Part IV Queering Spaces

10 The Space of Queer Masculinities in Karim Aïnouz’s

11 Water and Queer Intimacy 185

Part V Domestic Spaces and Social Differences

12 ‘Casa Grande & Senzala’: Domestic Space and Class

13 O Som Ao Redor: Aural Space, Surveillance, and Class

About the Editors

Antônio Márcio da Silva currently teaches at the University of Surrey.

André Brasil Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Antonio Cordoba Manhattan College, New York, USA

Fig. 2.1 Tatakox (2007) 27

Antônio Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha

© The Author(s) 2017 1

which marked the beginning of a steady increase in contemporary film

Massey argues, result in a lack of problematizing space. In line with this

particularly evident in the postmodern context, an era in which it is even

Brazilian Landscapes and Subjects in Cinema

Space and landscape have featured in Brazilian artistic production

cultures should be used in the plural to truly represent the country’s

Indeed, the impossibility of a single definition of the Brazilian sub-

Moreover, and indeed importantly, the urban space is shown as a men-

of that decade represented modernization as a global process. Indeed,

reconciliation, unlike the unbearable sertão found in Glauber Rocha’s

Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian

verge on what Bruce Albert has defined as a “shamanic critique of the

Following this, Chap. 6 focuses on the construction of childhood sub-

Construction (Gregorio Graziosi, 2014). As Goulart demonstrates, the

pursuit of a national identity finds its unparalleled expression in Euclides

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Mariana Cunha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Federal University

Territorialization and Marginal Subjectivities

In 2007, the Festival Internacional do Filme Documentário e

© The Author(s) 2017 23

The Hypothesis of a “Shamanic Critique”

“multinaturalism” (Viveiros de Castro), the relationship with the off-

The Tatakox Series: From One Opacity to Another

Fig. 2.2 Tatakux Vila

precariously lifted at the center of a semicircle in front of the other

Chants and Films, Films-Chants

background is modulated by sound events, in a series of intensive differ-

Incompossible Spaces, Peoples to Become

shooting a possession rite that is already underway. As the narration tells

about foreignness and exile: it is a visit of the filmmaker to another coun-

Fig. 2.1 Tatakox (2007) 27

Brazilian Landscapes and Subjects in Cinema

Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian

The Hypothesis of a “Shamanic Critique”

The Tatakox Series: From One Opacity to Another

Fig. 2.2 Tatakux Vila

Chants and Films, Films-Chants

Incompossible Spaces, Peoples to Become

The Reterritorializations of Urban Space

Fig. 3.2 Branco sai,

Relational Space, Cinema, and Deterritorialization

Mapping from the Margins:

The Trilogy of Conflict

The Trilogy of Connection

The Killers: Living in Borrowed Space

Nihilists and Outcasts: The World as Delusion

Conclusion: The Map of Normalization and Resistance

Bodies in Landscape: The Scientist’s

Landscape, Scale, and Absent Bodies: Viajo Porque

Fig. 5.1 Viajo porque

Open Spaces, Sound, and the Presence of the Body:

Intensive Spatium and the Construction

A.C.R. de Amorim (*) · M.P. Novaes 

Dialogues Between Child Subjectivities and Cinema

Bilu E João: Childhood in Heterogeneity