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Copyright by Cory A. Hahn 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Cory A. Hahn certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: News on Film: Cinematic Historiography in Cuba and Brazil Committee: Cesar Salgado, Co-Supervisor Charles Ramirez-Berg, Co-Supervisor Jason Borge Lorraine Leu Moore Sonia Roncador News on Film: Cinematic Historiography in Cuba and Brazil by Cory A. Hahn, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2016 News on Film: Cinematic Historiography in Cuba and Brazil Cory A. Hahn, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Cesar Salgado, Charles Ramirez-Berg This dissertation is a comparative project that traces the co-evolution of film realism and communications media in Cuba and Brazil. Beginning with the end of Italian Neorealist-inspired movements in both countries in the late 1950s, I examine the ways in which filmmakers from each tradition incorporate radio, print, and televisual journalism into their cinematic narratives. Foundational directors whose bodies of work span and connect the popular filmmaking booms of the 1960s and 1990s—such as Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Eduardo Coutinho— expose the political and technological systems that form public knowledge and guide civic debate. My research dilates on two internationally celebrated periods of film production concurrent with two shifts in news media paradigms: from radio and print journalism to television and from television to the internet. I argue that the renewed interest in news technologies within Cuban and Brazilian films at the beginning of the twenty-first century orients the viewer not to material fact as it is captured on film or coded by digital cameras, but by laying bare the systems of power that control news media content. iv Table of Contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Overview .........................................................................................................1 Theory and Lit Review ...................................................................................5 Praxis: Citizen Kane as Precedent .................................................................17 Chapter 1: Cuba, Media, Revolution .....................................................................25 Overview .......................................................................................................25 Old Fidel’s Almanac: Mediation at its Rational Limit .................................28 Impenetrable Fastnesses: Radio and Print media from Cuba’s Sierra ..........32 Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano: News Marching Toward History .........46 Summary Analysis: Founding Memorias .....................................................83 Chapter 2: News and its Interloping Subjects in 1960s Brazilian Cinema ............91 Overview .......................................................................................................91 Contrasting Cuba and Brazil: Diez millones meets Bla bla bla ....................94 Authenticity in the Airwaves: Invisibility as Essential to the National Self Image ............................................................................................................100 Media Discourse State ...............................................................116 1968: From Crime in the Media to Media Criminality ...............................140 Chapter 3 – Figurative Factography in New Millennial Brazilian Cinema ........152 Overview .....................................................................................................152 1970s -1990s: A Trail of Thematic Continuities ........................................154 Fact and Figure in the 21st Century .............................................................166 Cidade de Deus as a Photojournalistic Hermeneutic ..................................188 Tropa de Elite: Padilha’s Dialectic Conclusion ..........................................194 Tropa 2 ........................................................................................................201 v Chapter 4 – Photojournalistic Retrospection in Recent Cuban Film ...................209 Overview .....................................................................................................209 Filmography Unbound and Digitized: Memorias de memorias de memorias… ............................................................................................................213 Facts Remain: Photojournalistic Memoria(s) in the 21st Century ...............217 Memory of the World: Noticiero ICAIC in the Digital Age ......................229 INA.fr as Modern Film Pastiche .................................................................239 The Redemption of the Irrational: Nicolás Guillén Landrián .....................244 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................252 Bibliography ........................................................................................................256 vi Introduction OVERVIEW This comparative dissertation examines the evolution of the emplotment of news media—such as radio, television, and print journalism—within the national cinematic traditions of Cuba and Brazil. I divide my analysis into two distinct but mutually informative periods corresponding with two moments of considerable advancements in media technologies: from radio and print journalism to television in the 1960s and from television to the internet in the 2000s. In the former, principally spanning the decade of the 1960s, I theorize the impact of the news media as they appear with increasing regularity in the national cinemas of both countries. Cuban films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), Santiago Álvarez’s newsreels, and Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s documentary shorts and the Brazilian Cidade ameaçada (1960, Roberto Farias), Pagador de promessas (1962, Anselmo Duarte), and Terra em transe (1967, Glauber Rocha) create cinematic narratives in which the presence of the news media problematizes the notion of truth in representation—especially as it pertains to national identity in the face of official, vertically organized state media. The Cold War political turmoil in both countries coincided with the advent and popularization of television and raised this admixture to a level of tremendous factographical importance. In the post-Cold War period spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s, cinematic revivals in both countries carry on the issues of mass communication put forth by their predecessors in the 1960s. In Cuba, Álvarez’s Noticiero ICAIC archive provides a vast record of photographic material which provides for a network of renewed cinematic historiography for filmmakers such as Rebeca Chávez (Ciudad en rojo (2009), El día más largo(2011)), Manuel Zayas (Café con leche (2003)), and Alice de Andrade (Memoria 1 cubana(2010)). In Brazil, the movement is less archival but no less bound to the multi- media impulse that would seek to determine a set of historical meanings to a series of violent outbursts indicative of a nation in crisis: João Moreira Salles and Katia Lund (Noticias de uma guerra particular (1999)), Lund and Fernando Mereilles (Cidade de Deus (2002)), and José Padilha (Ônibus 174 (2002), Tropa de elite (2007)) tightly bind their films within communicative news media networks and, in so doing, carry the concerns of their tradition into the new millennium. The filmmakers from both countries operate within an arena that has pit the simplistic material/phenomenological mediatic claims to truth against a view of truth as an ongoing, dialectical process. And they do so at a time when their respective national histories demonstrate the futility, even the impossibility, of severing ties from their former, more ideologically univocal political regimes. In Cuba, the post-Soviet era called for an economic restructuring that impacted all areas of life—including national cinema. Young directors studying at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, for instance, were left to literally and figuratively double-back on the works of their 1960s predecessors by again making films with whatever sparse material they could find. In some cases this led to a reimagining of former films through the repurposing of their film stock and thus re-writing a certain kind of cinematic history that was already over-reliant on photojournalistic pretenses. At roughly the same time in Brazil, during a slow return to democracy and slower return to financial stability in the 1990s, the theme of journalism retained a central place within national films that sought to expose the remnant violence against marginalized and voiceless communities. In these films the news media come under attack once again for condoning and/or misrepresenting the behavior of repressive governmental strategies to 2 wage war against its own people. In the face of overwhelming injustice perpetrated against the poor, and the criminals that all too often are taken to be their spokesmen, Noticias de uma guerra particular, Cidade de Deus, Ônibus 174, and Tropa de elite redraw the relationship between news media and national imaginary as a stark continuity