Contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema

Palácio da Alvorada, Brasília, Brazil, mid-March 2020:“You are understanding, I’m speaking Brazilian. Bolsonaro, it’s over. You are receiving a message on your cell phone. Everyone, every Brazilian is receiving messages on their cell phones. You are not president anymore. You need to give up.”1These words were spoken by an unknown Haitian man to the country’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, on an ordinary Monday night, as Bolsonaro listened to his supporters outside the presidential residence as he used to do every day. Surrounded by the fans of the so-called “myth” (mito)2 and by many cell phone cameras, the man articulates the sentences calmly and with an accent that denounces his condition as a foreigner. There is a brief exchange of words between the two, intercut by the legion of Bolsonaro admirers—but there is no dialogue. The man’s tone is not one of asking or waiting for an answer. His words sound almost like a prophecy uttered by someone arriving from a future where Bolsonaro would no longer be the country’s president.The man’s phrases took over Brazilian social media, as the video recording of the moment went viral. While the identity of the Haitian remained a mystery, “Bolsonaro acabou” (Bolsonaro it is over/Bolsonaro is over) became at the same time the vocalization of a deep desire (that I shared), a prophecy, and/or a collective delirium cried out in the nights of quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic; a cry accompanied by pots being banged and horns beeping in protest against the then-president. The phrase became a refrain: in the sense that it summarized and triggered an atmosphere, shared sensations, and a state of suspension that inundated our political, health, and economic crises during that first half of 2020.This delirium and the prophecy of this refrain (now just a memory of the recent Brazilian political scenario) echoes in the images and sounds of the film República (2020, directed by Grace Passô). The film was released during the pandemic, in the “Programa Convida” initiative of the Moreira Salles Institute, which subsidized works by 171 artists and collectives between April and October 2020. In the short film, the act of speaking (and the impossibility of speaking) combines the prophetic and the delirium, desire and haunting, with its own refrain: “Your Brazil is over, and mine never existed!”At the beginning of the film, we seem to be in a dream: the images are blurry, shaky, and the sounds are confusing; we hear a crackling fire. Then we wake up together with the main character to answer a phone call. A voice we do not hear announces a surprising discovery: Brazil does not exist, it is a shaman’s dream. When the shaman awakes, Brazil will have ended—but the world will continue because the world does exist. But we soon discover that it is not a dream; it is a film within the film. The shooting stops: the actress and the cinematographer talk about the script, the lighting, and other details of the scene that has just been recorded. They agree to take a break before trying again. But suddenly, what seems to be either a stuntman, a ghost, an unhoused person, or a delusional person steps into the scene to shout the refrain: “Your Brazil is over, and mine never existed.” It’s a movie, but it’s not a dream. It’s a nightmare.The refrain, saved for the end of the film, poetically evokes the complexities of inhabiting Brazil—it might end for some, without ever having existed for others. In a film that is obviously an Afrosurrealist fiction, the hyper-imagined real becomes a possible way to access paradoxes of political, social, and racial contexts marked by the absurd as foundational. As Terri Francis argues, “While Afrosurrealist works may signify on magical or hallucinatory levels, their sense of heightened reality often arcs toward current or familiar political, cultural, and ethnic contexts and references.”3 In other words, the reality of the absurd becomes more real than reality. For now, let us keep these refrains as off-screen echoes that will resonate in our ensuing considerations about contemporary Black Brazilian cinema.…But this can’t bea black movie. This can’t be a black movie. This movie can’t be dismissedbecause of its cast or its audience. This movie can’t be metaphorfor black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race.This movie can’t be about black pain or cause black pain.This movie can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt.This movie can’t be about race. Nobody can say nigga in this moviewho can’t say it to my face in public. No chicken jokes in this movie.No bullet holes in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy.&no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy.4In “The Dinosaurs in the Hood” (2018), the poet and performer Danez Smith proposes that we imagine a scene from a film in which a little Black boy is inside a bus playing with a plastic dinosaur. In this scene, for an instant, the little boy looks out the window, dreamy and full of possibilities. To ensure that this scene exists and is preserved in its magical fullness, in the rest of the poem Smith lists the countless ways in which this innocent possibility of Black dreaming is co-opted by a cinematographic industrial system that turns our audiovisual production into a series of stereotypes or limiting themes and approaches. This scene cannot be from a Black film, Smith claims, lest it be limited to the imaginative prisons or extra-diegetic demands that usually fall on Black cinema. At the same time, the scene and everything that Smith proposes to us is a Black film. This film, therefore, imagined by Smith and desired by us, seems to emanate what I previously called the “powers of infinite expansion,” in dialogue with Franz Fanon as we contemplate “Black artistic achievements [that are] full of themselves and in themselves,” films that are “self-referential, affirmative (quasi or fully celebratory) and proponents of a non-oppositional/non-responsive gaze” on anti-Blackness.5To speak of Black cinema is therefore also to deal with the contradictions and ambivalences that permeate the field. For example, along with the image of the little boy who dreams of his toy dinosaur, it is necessary to repeat over and over again the warning that in this film no one will kill the black boy. We know that Black death is often used as a precondition “to communicate some type of empathy that the audience can walk away with.”6 What I wish to think about here is about moving beyond these tropes of stereotyped Black representation of hegemonic cinema.I understand the expression Black cinema to refer to a political movement traversed by lines of aesthetic creation that cross-contaminate and transform each other. Historically, Black cinemas (in their plurality) arise from social, cultural, and geographic perspectives associated with the struggles of Black movements for inclusion, representation, civil rights, national and cultural autonomy, etc. In this text, I propose to speak of Black Brazilian cinema not as a critical or academic classification that seals itself off, but I will speak rather from the perspective of the possibilities of creation that emerge out of it (refrains that linger in our minds and off-screen phenomena that put pressure on the meaning of the images). I propose therefore a brief contextualization of this contemporary panorama in order to then think together with some films by director André Novais Oliveira.I approach the field of Black cinema from what extends past or leaks through its defining edges, such as the discussion of authorship, themes, and economic structure. After all, is a film like Ôrí: a reconstrução da identidade negra no Brasil (The Reconstruction of Black Identity in Brazil, 1989, directed by Raquel Gerber) Black cinema or not? The work was directed by a non-Black woman but is driven by the thought of Black intellectual Beatriz Nascimento. Or how do we think of the films directed by José Rodrigues Cajado Filho in the 1940s and ’50s? Cajado Filho (as far as is known from film research) was the first Black Brazilian man to direct a film, but in addition to many of his works having been lost in fires, and others having deteriorated, what is known from the available scripts and materials leads to the assumption that they are not films that deal with any aspect of Black experience. And how do we talk about the films of Adélia Sampaio? In 1980, Sampaio was the producer of Parceiros da Aventura (directed by José Medeiros), a film that brought together most of the Black actors active in Brazilian cinema at the time through both the main cast and in special appearances. Four years later she became the first Black Brazilian woman to release a feature film when she directed Amor Maldito (1984), a film that deals with lesbophobia and criminalization suffered by a white woman and is not centered on the presence of or a debate about race. Or what about a film like Novais Oliveira’s Fantasmas (Ghosts, 2010), in which what we see are the images of a street, where the presence of the characters is solely concentrated in the film’s soundtrack? Each of these questions opens up a path for discussion and affective production that interest us more than the simple “this is (or is not) Black cinema.” As Michael Gillespie argues in Film Blackness, I believe that it is less about imposing “prescriptions” and more about assuming potentiality as a question of Black films.7 In other words, it is about diving into the tangle of aesthetic and political discussions that are at stake when we evoke the denomination Black cinema.After all, starting from the “race movies” of the segregated United States film industry in the late 1910s to the contemporary moment of increasingly intersectional and decolonial Black cinemas, the term has been subject to many definitions. There is the marking of authorship: Black cinema is made (directed? scripted?) by Black people. Or the thematic definition: is it a cinema that deals with “Black issues” (ancestry? racism? enslavement? life in the periphery? samba or funk? After all, what would these issues be?). And even the most structural marking: the refusal, for example, of a Black industrial cinema, since the industrial structure is financed by the capital of white people (would Black cinema then be synonymous with artisanal cinema? precarious cinema?). As we can see, each of these definitions opens onto another set of questions, which, when answered, pull us to others. I believe, therefore, that the most powerful gravitational field for an attempt at a definition lies at the intersection between these elements: authorship, theme, and structure. To reflect on contemporary Black Brazilian cinema is to look at the contexts that surround this production, as well as the lines of creation that arise from these contexts.Based on the research of Janaína Oliveira, I highlight four characteristics that traverse contemporary Black Brazilian cinema: filmmakers who have a university education or who have taken technical education in cinema (the consequence of public policies of affirmative action in universities, in public grants, in workshops, and in public mini-courses); a reference to pioneering directors such as Zózimo Bulbul and Sampaio; the increase in the presence of Black women in the direction, scripting, and production of films; and the short film as the most frequently used format.8Another observation we can make about Brazilian cinema made by Black people is the growth of a trend of narratives that mix science fiction, fantasy, and/or supernatural horror, with Black protagonism—something that can be thought of under the umbrella of Afrofuturism. Regarding the axes of creation of this contemporary Black filmography, I perceive three lines (that are separate but also converge): performativity, fugitivity, and futurity. In the first case, the performative and often Afrofabular presence of Black bodies becomes a striking element of the films. In the second, we have films that escape the conventions and expectations of representation and narratives made by Black people. And in the third, we find films that negotiate and forge spaces of intimacy between those who film and those who are filmed.We notice these characteristics in Elekô (2015, directed by Mulheres de Pedra); Kbela (2015, directed by Yasmin Thayná); Quintal (Backyard, 2015, directed by André Novais Oliveira); Rapsódia para um Homem Negro (Rhapsody for the Black Men, 2015, directed by Gabriel Martins); Experimentando o Vermelho Em Dilúvio (Experiencing the Flooding Red, 2016, directed by Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi); Arco do Medo (The Arch of Fear, 2017, directed by Juan Rodrigues); Chico (2016, directed by Irmãos Carvalho); HIC (2017, directed by Alexander S. Buck); NoirBLUE—Deslocamentos de uma dança (Noirblue, 2017, directed by Ana Pi); Carne (2018, directed by Mariana Jaspe); Cartuchos de Super Nintendo em Anéis de Saturno (Super Nintendo’s Cartridge in Saturn Rings, 2018, directed by Leon Reis); Negrum3 (Blackn3Ss, 2018, directed by Diego Paulino); Brooklin (2019, directed by Coletivo Cine Leblon); Pattaki (2018, directed by Everlane Moraes); Egum (2020, directed by Yuri Costa); Inabitável (Unliveable, 2020, directed by Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias); Morde & Assopra (2020, directed by Stanley Albano); Preces Precipitadas de um Lugar Sagrado que não Existe Mais (2020, directed by Rafael Luan and Mike Dutra); República (Republic, 2020, directed by Grace Passô); “Blackness = Time ÷ Media = ∞” directed by and de directed by and just a films with which I have more direct through in and/or critical fugitivity, and in Diego The short film is in three the and that up the the of a in and an is the with the of and in the act we also have the of a on to the for the simple possibility of We to beyond the and But also to in its most for the of our bodies and the of our when the of not your into our Or the that and Black and bodies are than we the in of our We the of those who before us and we the future for those who are to dialogue with I this in my it as that is between & that is In Film Blackness, Gillespie a series of questions to what Black film might and black film be other than What black film was and What black film be or just three questions the possibility of about a Black cinema not by the presence (and even less by the of Black and by the presence of spaces that are and marked by the of Black and/or Black through is one of the of this cinema in the no in the directed by Zózimo to the and the more no less de directed by to just three each from a For José the is first to be and a of between the of the most axes of the same time, I also agree with that of be that of its escape that of from the of the as and of is the of away in the in the of a And we think about the of the field (in its white one of its is the representation of the Black as it is and I then how to think of the Black presence as an escape or and not a hegemonic of the of the of In what ways is contemporary Black cinema the of of (and that are the of an answer to these questions, I to some films by Novais Oliveira, on how he that which is off-screen and to put pressure on what on in some of his is a short film a a that is on a on a In addition to the the what to be the of an by on the in of the the of a on the the a on the a on these in the the that a on a We hear the sounds of and other from the is off-screen the film, and we along with one of that the other is the of the to the image of an The the but the The person his how the in and in an attempt to the of his When the in even and we can see through the When the has been and image the what are to do that what are to A little the one who has been recording the scene just to make it was I’m to A of a We see the images and then we and hear again the moment when is almost the end of the film’s we the of the character who films and who not his action to be by his the having and over the would be a way of But the of of the moment of the us that the is an by someone in The of the through images does not the possibility of the it is the that seems to have taken over the one who see and see it again The by the is more than the it is is this image that and the by the film, with its and infinite Fantasmas is in this between the and a toward the image a of the What we see is what us de um a a a and of the beginning of a by the At the beginning of the film, set in the the man by Novais to the the where his and the talk about the which at this moment we know through their (the inside the in This when his to the and in order to to a in the the turns into a that the images of the onto the of the The becomes a moment of exchange of and between the As we the of the off-screen that the of the the are and the it us into a of possibilities in the intimacy and of a a about the feature film I that in André Novais Oliveira’s films is not its the element that the and the but an almost on its potentiality as a cinema of and In a what the of the of these films are the of life and not those of leaks in from off-screen and at from a In this in the presence that from to the a in because of a and also from the of the film voice by phone message almost at the end of the film and the message is at the moment he trying to his the off-screen to the it as a on the is the short film by Novais that most Afrosurrealist in its when a opens in the of the of an from the and who then seem to have a life without In a the film with a of appearances. what seems to be an to in the of turns out to be research for a on films; and in addition to being a is also someone active on the political scene and a active person who is about to a this film, off-screen is not at the but the field. The film’s as this or this of the field by an to when he the that the film does not with the of the of the as the of the the as is a debate as to which of the will it does not cause or it been In a life marked by many and a in the as just another element of this of films by Novais us at the of and futurity. they escape conventions in the field of Black cinema for example, not to their in Fantasmas and our of what would be an ordinary for an on the in in the ways in which films are by and affective spaces that are and at the same between on the becomes a for the image of their a their first exchange of and by a than of or of a what with the is the desire to continue asking with the what to do with the image of the the does the of the to up the of They are questions that the each can to the refrains that this text, we find again the of the complexities of inhabiting Brazil as Black in the of a political or but with and and can be in an pressure on in a movement between the of the cinematographic field the