Hambre, revolución y derrota: El Cinema Novo y los desencuentros de la modernidad latinoamericana

Abstract

This essay analyzes several films from the 1960s Cinema Novo movement in Brazil. These observations are focused on the concepts of hunger, revolution and defeat, and evaluate what I describe as the last great clash of modernity in Latin America, namely, the end of redemptive left-wing utopia. As I argue it is possible to identify signs of profound cultural change in Brazil in certain films made in that decade, in which the violence present in Castro Rocha's "dialectics of marginality" was overcome by the playfulness of Antonio Candido's "dialectics of roguery". However, this time, "roguery" brought along the "cordial" mediation of the market. This analysis, focused primarily on the films by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glauber Rocha, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, seeks to point out the changes portrayed in the 1960s Cinema Novo as a synecdoche of similar cultural transformations in the rest of Latin America.