The Retomada and Beyond: Female Narrative Agency in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (1997-2006)
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The Retomada and Beyond: Female Narrative Agency in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (1997-2006) Miranda Kate Shaw Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Queen Mary, University of London, 2009 1 Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to Marcos Alexandre and Andrea Moraes at Agencia O Globo for permission to reproduce ‘Exilados’, to Bruna Dantas of LC Barreto Filmes who allowed the reproduction of stills from O que é isso companheiro, to Olga Futemma, Gláucia and William J. Santos at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, and to Ismail Xavier for supervising my research trip to Brazil in 2006/7. Also thanks to Rita Buzzar, Lúcia Murat, Helena Solberg, Laís Bodansky and Aluizio Abranches for their important insights and for permission to document these in this thesis. Finally a special thanks to my parents, Ann and Trevor Shaw and to my supervisors Else Vieira and Peter Evans for their patience, understanding, and years of help and support. 2 Abstract Since the inception of film production in Brazil, women have been involved in all capacities including directing, acting and a variety of other roles behind the camera. During the 1990s and into the new millennium (a period sometimes termed the Retomada or re-birth of Brazilian cinema), there has been a large increase in films which feature notable female characters in prominent narrative positions and in the number of women directors successfully making their feature-length debut. Despite this, critical attention to such characters and directors, beyond a merely descriptive or numerical focus, is lacking and the established class-oriented social tradition remains the dominant language in criticism. With a view to addressing this relative critical neglect, as well as inadequacies in still embryonic studies, this study suggests new critical approaches relevant to the specificity of women’s experience in Brazil and analyses the representation of female characters in five representative films of the Retomada period. The study further aligns its predominant focus on female characters with the socio-political critical orientation that has established certain films as important cultural markers in Brazil, for example Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol /Black God, White Devil and Cidade de Deus /City of God . For this purpose, it again departs from the traditional emphasis on class and brings, rather, the specificity of the women’s movement in Brazil to bear. In order to critically assess how these specific contextual developments are reflected in the films analysed, it further distances itself from mainstream gender criticism in film and advances the use of the construct of agency, bridging Paul Smith’s notion of subject dis-cerning and Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration. It also opens perspectives for future work by briefly engaging with the subject of female directors. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 3 Chapter One - The Retomada and the Critical Neglect of Women in 5 Brazilian Cinema Chapter Two - The Brazilian Woman: Political, Narrative and 23 Professional Agency Chapter Three - The Brazilian Women’s Movement and Political 66 Agency Chapter Four - O que é isso companheiro? The Removal of Narrative 97 Agency from the Militant Woman Chapter Five - Initiating a Critical History: Cabra Cega , Zuzu Angel and 132 the Militant Woman as Successful Agent Chapter Six - Suggestions for a Critical Discussion: Olga , Agency and 165 the Telenovela Chapter Seven - Another Critical Angle: As três Marias and The 197 Revenge Genre as Compromising Agency Chapter Eight - Conclusion - Women in Brazilian Cinema: Hope for the 235 Future Glossary of Terms 240 Works Cited 244 List of Photographs/Stills Figure One - Maria instructs the MR8 how to fire a gun 107 Figure Two - Comer sua comida é prova verdadeira de coragem 108 revolucionária Figure Three - Final still from O que é isso companheiro? 113 Figure Four - ‘Exilados’ 114 4 Chapter One The Retomada and the Critical Neglect of Women in Brazilian Cinema Introduction Despite Brazilian film making its definitive mark on both the national and international scenes during recent years (most commonly termed the ‘ Retomada ’ of Brazilian cinema), and the marked increase of women within this context (both in terms of remarkable female protagonists and female directors), the critical neglect of women in Retomada cinema is pervasive. The situation is exacerbated due to the model primarily used to analyse cinema in Brazil which has a mainly social, class-based focus particularly developed by the Cinema Novo filmmakers and their critics. This has established a tradition that appears to bypass discussions of women’s subjectivity.1 Added to this, emphasis on the inherent connection between film and its socio-political context, reflected in the narrative choices made by Brazilian directors over the years is often teased out by critics. This is seen in the overtly political films of Cinema Novo , epitomised in Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol (Glauber Rocha, 1964) which generated a wealth of material, 2 and in aesthetically innovative and politically pertinent films of the Retomada such as Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002), which caused a critical storm. 3 Partly as a consequence of this critical emphasis, these 1 This is discussed in more detail in ‘The Political Voice of Rosa in Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol ’ (Shaw, 2005b). 2 Including Rocha’s own Revisão crítica de cinema brasileira (1963), and the eponymous Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol (1965), Sertão mar: Glauber Rocha e a estética da fome (Xavier, 1983), Cinema Novo X5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film (Johnson, 1984) and more recently Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (Xavier, 1995), Brazilian Cinema (Johnson and Stam, 1995), Cinema brasileiro três olhares (Marcos da Silva Graça, Sérgio Botelho do Amaral and Sônia Goulart, 1997), and A poética polytica de Glauber Rocha (Ventura, 2000), as well as The New Brazilian Cinema (Nagib, 2003). This list is far from exhaustive. 3 Perhaps best illustrated in Else Vieira’s volume City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action (2005). 5 films are now recognised as important examples of Brazilian cinema, in the form of cultural markers that can comment upon the country’s social and political mood. Prominent female characters within these films, or films themselves which feature female narratives, are also important cultural markers. However, because the critical focus does not concentrate on such narratives, or on specific terminology relating to women (something which will be analysed in more depth in the following chapters), women’s filmic contribution to Brazil’s cultural and social history, or how social and political history has shaped how women are presented in films, has been obscured. This fragmented approach seems to challenge the idea that critically acclaimed cinematic waves such as the Retomada are innovative, revolutionary or politically representative. Therefore, taking on board the limited work that has already been done on women in Brazilian film, this study proposes that the marked presence of notable female characters in prominent narrative positions in Retomada film, and the increase in the visibility of female directors, has not been sufficiently addressed by critics. Through the theory of agency, it will analyse where criticism has ignored female narratives altogether, or where criticism is totally absent, suggest critical approaches to be adopted. This will reveal the fundamental contribution women have made to the Retomada with a view to increasing critical attention to women in Brazilian cinema in general. Keeping in mind the inherent connection between film and its socio-political context, the study will identify this link by looking at the representation of women in film within the context of the activities of the Brazilian women’s movement. A broad spectrum of filmic agencies will be discussed in order to bring female characters the attention they have been lacking over the years. Women directors will also be briefly discussed in this study in order to highlight how, despite making a fundamental 6 contribution to the Retomada , their critical appraisal remains descriptive rather than analytical. This, it is hoped, may generate more detailed future studies on women directors in Brazil. As well as addressing the relative critical neglect of women in general in Brazilian film, the originality of this study also lies in addressing the critical position of the militant woman. Despite revealing herself as a fundamental part of Brazil’s political and social history (addressed in other disciplines such as the Social Sciences), the militant woman has not had her representation in film sufficiently discussed. Another element of originality is found in the use of the critical idiom of agency to discuss women’s political contribution in Brazil. As will be revealed in the next chapter, my use of the term, based on Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration and Paul Smith’s idea of ‘dis-cerning the subject’, avoids the myriad problems associated with a ‘feminist’ discourse and allows room for a more culturally specific discussion of the socially and ideologically varied activity of women in Brazil. Furthermore, my conception of agency also resolves the problems associated with certain Anglo- American/European studies of agency, which are over-reliant on a theory-rich model that risks removing women from their socio-political realities. Details of my critical approach lie in selecting characters that begin their narrative lives in central positions, and in order to illustrate degrees of agency, studying characters using in-depth character analyses, concentrating on dialogue, costume, facial expression and body movement. This approach reveals that, although there are many examples of female narrative agency in Brazilian films, female characters are discussed merely as symbols or as an Other to the main male protagonist, rather than subjects in their own right.