Brazil helped pioneer filmmaking in the Americas, screening its first film in Rio de Janeiro all the way back in 1897. Its film industry, along with Mexico and Argentina’s, is one of the oldest and most prolific in Latin America.
San Francisco’s film lovers will be able to get a taste of it over the next three months through a series entitled “Voices of Brazilian Cinema,” presented by a film collective based in the Mission called Colectivo Cinema Errante.
Agustín Caballero, a member of the collective, said, “The approach for this series is to strike a balance between art house and commercial film and, by covering different eras, genres and styles, touch upon various cornerstones of Brazilian cinema.”
The series opens March 18 with Karim Ainouz’s “Mademe Sata” (2002), based in the legendary figure of Joao Francisco dos Santos and set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s. It will be preceded by the documentary short “Ebony Goddess: Queen of Ilê Aiyê” (2009) made by Carolina Moraes-Liu, a Brazilian voice who resides in the Bay Area who will introduce her film to the audience.
“We want to showcase the work of local filmmakers, Brazilians who live in the Bay Area, and invite them to the screenings” said Ariel Soto, from Cinema Errante. “Each program is accompanied by a short, three of which are made by emerging local voices: Carolina Moraes-Liu, Rita Piffer and Savana Vagueiro, along with shorts by renowned Brazilian names like Jorge Furtado, Dennison Ramalho and Carlos Vergara.”
The series is composed of a total of seven programs that run until the month of June and stretch back in history until the silent era.
Film production began in Brazil with Antônio Leal’s thriller “Os Estranguladores” (1906), followed by landmarks like Humberto Mauro’s “Brasa Dormida” (1928) and “Ganga Bruta” (1933), Adalbert Kememy’s experimental “Sao Paulo: Sinfonia de una Metropoli” (1929), and the avant-garde “Limite” (1931), Mario Peixoto’s only film which will be shown on June 10.
During the ‘30s the quantity of Brazilian film production suffered a great decline. To reach the country’s millions of illiterates, studios equipped early to make sound films, which caused production costs to soar, and forced many companies to suspend production.
As a result of this collapse in production due to the advent of sound, Brazilian cinema became overrun by Hollywood films. Companhia Cinematografica de Veracruz, a replica of the American studio system, was founded to produce melodramas like Adolfo Celi’s “Tico-Tico No Fubá” (1952) and, most notably, Lima Barreto’s “O Cangaceiro” (1953), a western that obtained critical and financial success which will be shown on May 6.
The influence of the French Nouvelle Vague and Italian Neorrealism in the ‘60s played an important part in unleashing a wave of young filmmakers in what came to be known as Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal, the coming-of-age of Brazilian cinema.
Glauber Rocha’s (1931–81) films and theoretical writings laid the foundation for a new Latin American cinema that would acknowledge the political and social realities of a land half of whose people were unemployed and half of whom where illiterate.
These films were extraordinarily successful on the international festival circuit, five of them winning major awards in 1962.
Cinema Novo sought new approaches to the realities of underdevelopment, poverty and exploitation that had gone unacknowledged in Brazilian films to date, decrying the colonization of Brazilian cinema by Hollywood and subverting classical narrative codes.
“Marginal Cinema is a pure cinema, a real cinema, purity and truth summarize everything … made with ardor, creativity, wanting to make movies,” stated José Mojica Marins, a marginais on his own whose Zé do Caixao (Coffin Joe) horror b-movies would become cult classics, and whose “A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma” (1964) will be part of the series.
Unfortunately a lot of marginal films couldn’t participate of festivals because of the lack of technical conditions. So they organized parallel exhibitions in Brasilia.
The establishment of the Instituto Nacional do Cinema (INC) in 1966 increased government attention to the needs of the industry. It initiated government subsidies and special bonuses to encourage production.
Ozualdo Candeias’ “A Margem” (1967) and Rogério Sganzerla’s “Bandido da Luz Vermelha” (1968) are two of the most representative films of the model proposed by ‘marginais’: a counterculture of poor film that questioned the whole film policy and its standard model.
Responding to a repressive military dictatorship in the late ‘60s, Cinema Novo filmmakers turned to symbolism to circumvent censors, with mythological allegories like Rocha’s “Antonio das Mortes” (1969) and Ruy Guerra’s “Os Deuses E Os Mortos” (1969), anthropological documents like Nelson Pereira Dos Santos’ “Como Era Gostoso Meu Frances” (1970) or grotesque celebrations of Brazil as a tropical paradise like Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s “Macunaima” (1969).
Despite the repressiveness, however, the military regimes of the 1960s supported the expansion of Brazilian film production by creating the State’s film Trust Embrafilme in 1969.
Distinguished Cinema Novo directors like Diegues and Pereira Dos Santos returned from exile to enter mainstream production. Over the course of the 1970s and ‘80s, Brazil produced at least a dozen international hits, many based on indigenous folklore, history, or literature, including Diegues’ “Bye Bye Brasil” (1980) and Bruno Barreto’s “Dona Flor E Seus Dois Maridos” (1976), both part of the series.
By 1985, when democracy was restored and the country elected its first civilian President in 20 years, Embrafilme captured foreign attention for Brazilian cinema and an unprecedented 50 percent share of its own market. From producing only 12 films in 1963, Brazil had become the largest film producer in the world with an average output of a hundred features per year since 1983.
In 1990, however, the new Sarney Government withdrew all funds from Embrafilme, and the industry comes to a near stand still with only six features completed in 1992.
Definitely not to miss, this Brazilian film series will shed light upon a long tradition of filmmaking in the Americas that US audiences may not be aware of.
Films will be shown March–June at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia St., Sundays at 8 p.m.
More info http://cinemaerrante.wordpress.com