Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics Author(S): Ana Del Sarto Source: Chasqui, Vol
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Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics Author(s): Ana del Sarto Source: Chasqui, Vol. 34, Special Issue No. 1: Brazilian and Spanish American Literary and Cultural Encounters (2005), pp. 78-89 Published by: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29742031 Accessed: 05-03-2017 15:36 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Chasqui This content downloaded from 140.233.2.215 on Sun, 05 Mar 2017 15:36:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CINEMA NOVO AND NEW/THIRD CI? NEMA REVISITED: AESTHETICS, CUL? TURE AND POLITICS Ana Del Sarto Bowling Green State University During the 1960s, three dissimilar but interrelated aesthetic projects were conflated under the rubric of what later became known as the New Latin American Cinema: Imperfect Cinema from Cuba, New Cinema and, later, Third Cinema from Argentina and Cinema Novo from Brazil. As the title of my essay states, I will only focus my analysis on a comparison between Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema.1 Both shared a general context of emergence and similar theoretical purposes; however, in practice many differences arose mainly related to the specific characteristics of each local context and the concrete articulations between the aesthetic, the cultural and the political. I intend to ponder those similarities and differences in order to critically and retrospectively map out the complex and paradoxical manifestations of the specific sorts of Latin Americanisms proposed by those cinematic practices so as to shed light on current debates regarding Latin Americanism. With that purpose in mind, I will explore the aesthetic, political and cultural contentions of various texts, some "manifestos" (in the avant-gardist or Modernist sense) and other political texts, that reflected and theorized on their respective filmic productions! The majority of these texts were pamphlets that accompanied the long feature exhibitions or that ruminated a posteriori on the effects of the shows, hence, the political contingency that underscores many of them and, also, their subjection to multiple rewritings according to the context in which they were released. With respect to New/Third Cinema, these texts include: Fernando Birri's "Cinema and Underdevelopment" and "For a Nationalist, Realist, Critical and Popular Cinema"?manifestos that accompanied the argumentative long feature (a social tragic-comedy) Los inundados (1962; Flooded Out)?and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's "Toward a Third Cinema. Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World" (1969) and "La hora de los 'In the case of Argentina, I have decided to enlist both names, New Cinema and Third Cinema, in order to highlight the differences between those two projects. New Cinema is related to the early transformations within Argentine national cinema traditions activated by Fernando Birri, but also, at a more massive level, by Lautaro Mur?a and Leonardo Favio, while Third Cinema is directly connected to the clandestine practice of Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino and the Cinema of Liberation Group. On this subject, see Miguel Couselo, Historia del cine argentino, chapters 4 and 5. 78 This content downloaded from 140.233.2.215 on Sun, 05 Mar 2017 15:36:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ana Del Sarto 79 homos [The Hour of the Furnaces], 1973"?pamphlets that reflect on the production and show experience of The Hour of the Furnaces). With respect to Cinema Novo, I will examine Nelson Pereira dos Santos' "La conciencia del cinema novo, 1955-62" (1963) ["The Conscience of Cinema Novo, 1955-62"] and "Manifesto por um cinema popular" ["Manifest for a Popular Cinema"] (1963), which reflect on Rio, 40 graus (1955) and Vidas secas (1963); Glauber Rocha's "Aesthetics of Hunger" (1965) and "No al populismo" (1969) ["No to Populism"]?pamphlets released with Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (1964), Terra in transe (1967) and Antonio das mortes (1969); and finally, Carlos Diegues' "Cine: arte del presente" (1967) ["Cinema: Art of the Present"], "Cinema novo" (1970) and "Por un cine democr?tico" (1984) ["For a Democratic Cinema"]. Why is it important to invigorate the revision of these cinematic projects today? There could be many answers to this question; I have at least three significant reasons. First, it is important to note that, contrary to today's hegemonic discourses with respect to many cultural practices under scrutiny through so-called Latin American cultural studies?one of their main destructive criticisms being that those practices are constructed from a cultural hegemonic exterior, for instance, US academe, as a mere object of study and discursive apparatus?in the case of the New Latin American Cinema, its existence as a group is directly related to their specific practices within the Latin American countries. Second, one of the aspects of these series of radical practices that strikes my attention the most is, without a doubt, the unfastened union and coexistence of dissimilar leftist political and ideological positions and avant-garde aesthetic orientations in a Latin American movement paradoxically bound through strong cultural, economic and political nationalisms. In Magical Reels, John King asserts that "this cinema can only be understood by examining national situations" (66). I totally agree with this contention; however, I believe it would be more productive to explore the tenuous integument that held and is still today, almost half a century later, holding these heterogeneous practices together under the name of New Latin American Cinema. It is true that the brand of Latin Americanism that amalgamated all those practices, has perhaps undergone opposed and strong contradictory political affiliations and oblique ideological nuances. The important point here is that, in spite of that, the New Latin American Cinema could institutionalize a Latin American imaginary, a Utopian horizon as a project to be realized.2 And finally, the third reason: today there are contradictory feelings mingled with confusing and confused arguments that these projects are either nostalgically glorified by restituting them as the paradisiacal moment of an ingenuous and mythically unified left, or, on the other side, ignominiously annihilated by criticizing them as the infernal moment of their demise or defeat. Neither inferno nor arcadia; only a loose cluster of cultural practices from different cultural and political leftist movements, the majority of which were inspired by sound national and nationalist feelings. Perhaps due to their own ambiguities and 2In La cola del diablo, Jos? Aric? refers specifically to this topic when he reflects on this historical period arguing that: "When we speak about Latin America we evoke a pre constituted reality that is not such, that in the facts it is a 'black hole,' an open problem, an unfinished construction [...]: a project to realize. [...] As an unfulfilled project is always installed in our horizon and it obliges to question ourselves for our destiny, for what we really are or are willing to be" (26). All translations from Spanish and Portuguese texts are mine. This content downloaded from 140.233.2.215 on Sun, 05 Mar 2017 15:36:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 80 Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics contradictions they could radicalize the aesthetic dimension, many times politicizing it ? la Benjamin, very few times mobilizing numerous social sectors and groups. Among their many failures is obvious the impossibility of constructing a market or a massive audience that would allow, first, to reinvest in the film industry by financing their own productions and, second, to politically intervene in the massive mobilization of popular sectors with the concrete purpose of transforming Latin American societies. Sociohistorical Context If in Argentina, after the proscription of Peronism in 1955, several filmmakers were searching for a more inclusive "national cultural integration" (Getino),3 in Brazil, during the Juscelino Kubitschek administration (1956-61), filmmakers intended to "build an authentic national culture" (Pereira dos Santos) by incorporating certain marginal regions (specifically the Northeast after the great drought of 1953). Despite their resounding differences, mainly related to concrete local situations, both heterogeneous projects proposed the task of reviewing their respective national traditions, values, histories and hegemonic cultures in each of those countries. Both New/Third Cinema and Cinema Novo shared not only regional sociohistorical conditions under which they emerged, but also and more important, an impulse of radicalization: aesthetic experimentation, political intervention, cultural reconfiguration and social transformation. These movements were imbued of a generalized optimism: either revolutionary, fed by the Cuban Revolution,