Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Introduction

Ask any English-speaking moviegoer which film they think most typifies contemporary Brazilian cinema (and, indeed, contemporary Brazil) and the chances are that they will say Cidade de Deus (City of God) (Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, 2002). One or two might have fond memories of Central do Brasil (Central Station) (Walter Salles, 1998), but as far as Western perceptions of Brazil and Brazilian cinema go, Cidade de Deus has the lot. Favela life, drug gangs, samba music, violence, colour, corruption, racial mixing, police brutality, sex, poverty and the familiar Rio landscape, all bound together in a stylistically flashy film sufficiently like a Hollywood product to be instantly accessible to the international audience. It is therefore not surprising that audiences abroad should see the film as emblematic of the society from whence it came. But what about audiences at home? Cidade de Deus was certainly a commercial success in Brazil, with a domestic audience estimated at 3.3 million, but by no means the most successful at the box office. 2 filhos de Francisco (Two Sons of Francisco) (Breno Silveira, 2005) far exceeded it, as did Tropa de elite (Elite Squad) (José Padilha, 2007) and its sequel, Tropa de elite 2 (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within) (José Padilha, 2010). In fact, the recent period in Brazilian cinema is best characterized by the success of films that are diverse both in topic and style, so if we are to view Brazil through the lens provided by its cinema – and that is the intent of this book – then we must move beyond the easy generalities that have been attendant upon the international success of Cidade de Deus. We must ask instead how it is that conceptions of Brazilian identity are reflected and refracted through a cinema which has certainly come into its own in the years since 1995. And to do that we need first to reflect upon the whole question of cinema and national identity.

Cinema is one of the means through which nations are created and reproduced in the collective imaginary. Films articulate ideas of national identity by representing national spaces and the distinctive culture which shapes the way people live, speak, appear and behave. This study explores different constructions of national identity in contemporary Brazilian films, paying particular attention to questions of racial difference, ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, gender. Films are understood here as cultural products situated in specific socio-historical contexts which provide important information about the ways in which we make sense of ourselves as having a particular identity. Whether documentary or fiction, films do not simply reproduce a pre-existing national identity, just as they do not straightforwardly reflect a given social reality. Rather, they draw upon dominant discourses and commonly held ideas about the nation to affirm, reconstruct, renegotiate or contest these discourses and ideas.

As Duncan Green has argued, the mass media are a ‘permanent battleground’ in the struggle to define national identity in Latin American countries.¹ In the case of Brazil, radio, cinema and television have been major sites for the construction of a hegemonic discourse on brasilidade or ‘Brazilian-ness’, a term that encompasses the qualities that are thought to define the nation and distinguish Brazilians from other people. While radio played a central role in the 1930s and 1940s, in subsequent decades cinema and television took over as the preferred media for representations of national identity.² Cinema is of particular importance because, historically, this is the site where dominant discourses have found their most critical contestations, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s when a group of politically engaged filmmakers associated with the Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal movements set out to make radical films exposing the problems and contradictions of Brazilian society.

The existing literature about filmic constructions of Brazilian national identity tends to focus on certain periods of Brazilian film history which coincide with key moments of nation building, such as Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship (1930–45) and the military dictatorship of 1964–85.³ While much has been written about the uses of cinema for nationalist purposes in the Vargas era, and about the later counter-narratives of nation in the Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal movements, less attention has been paid to filmic constructions of national identity from the mid 1990s onward. What makes this period particularly interesting is the re-emergence of film production after a five-year hiatus, as I discuss in chapter 5, and the development of a new, democratic social order. Brazil had been dominated by antidemocratic political regimes for most of the twentieth century. With the growing opposition to military rule in the 1970s, the country started a gradual process of redemocratization which encouraged larger numbers of Brazilians to challenge the state’s construction of national identity by drawing attention to experiences of oppression, cultural marginalization and social exclusion. By the late 1990s, the black movement, the women’s movement and the indigenous movement were well-established actors on the political and cultural stage. With a new constitution recognizing many of their claims and a stable democratic environment which allowed their ideas to be spread and popularized, these movements introduced new challenges to well-established concepts of Brazilian national identity, notably to the belief that racial interaction is less conflicted and more amicable in Brazil than in other countries.

For some authors, any rise of such ‘subnational’ or ‘transnational’ identities based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality disrupts the capacity of the nation to confer a sense of belonging and collective affiliation. Accordingly, one of the questions explored in this book is whether the significance of Brazilian national identity is indeed in decline and giving way to alternative social identities or if, on the contrary, national consciousness and the sentiments of belonging to the nation prevail despite (or even because of) these new processes of collective identification.

Race and Brazilian national identity

In recent decades the question of racial difference and inequality has been placed at the centre of the debate about Brazilian national identity. For this reason, race is a key reference point in this book, whether in the context of Brazil’s authoritarian nation-building, the history of Brazilian social movements, or contemporary Brazilian film production. By foregrounding questions of race and by emphasizing the role of blackness in constructions of Brazilian national identity, I draw upon recent scholarship that problematizes long standing beliefs that Brazil is a country where race and racism are not salient issues. Race is understood for my purposes as a socially and historically constructed concept whose meanings are not fixed, but constantly shifting. The ‘essentialist’ interpretation of race which prevailed in the nineteenth century, and which led to the spread of Social Darwinism in Europe and elsewhere, had become less significant in the post-war period as a series of UNESCO-promoted studies carried out by geneticists, biologists and social scientists began to undermine the biological account of race.⁴ This encouraged a new understanding of race as a cultural and discursive construct, as suggested in the work of such thinkers as Franz Fanon, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and more recently Stuart Hall. As argued by Hall, ‘race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted’. Under the cultural-sociological definition of race, its meaning is not based on essentialist properties, but is flexible and relational; hence Hall’s view of race as a ‘floating signifier’.⁵

Given that the meanings of race are constantly shifting, in order to understand racial dynamics in contemporary Brazil we need first to examine changing definitions of race and the patterns of racial relations that have arisen from these definitions. Up until the 1970s, the creation of racially defined organizations in Brazil was repressed by the state and discouraged by the ‘assimilationist’ character of national culture, which favoured racial ambiguity. Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil has never had legal segregation or legally enforced classification of persons into racial group membership. The decision by Brazilian elites to promote ‘whitening’ through miscegenation precluded the need for formal classification. As a result, the system of classification in Brazil is more complex, ambiguous and fluid than in countries where segregation was official.⁶ This has been further complicated by the use of different systems: the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) census which uses the categories branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (Asian) and indígena (indigenous); popular discourse, which uses an indefinite number of categories, including the widespread and particularly ambiguous moreno (brown or tanned) and mulato; and the system advanced by the black movement, which adopts the same categories as the census except for its strategic decision to include pardos and pretos in the same group: negro (another term for black). Asians and indigenous peoples constitute less than one per cent of the Brazilian population; the black-to-white continuum thus covers ninety-nine per cent of Brazilians.

The celebration of mestiçagem (racial miscegenation) as a positive value from the 1920s onwards gave rise to mulato or pardo being seen as an intermediate category, superior to blacks in the racial hierarchy. As Telles observes, it has been in the interest of lighter-skinned Afro-Brazilians not to identify as blacks since this might disrupt the advantages and opportunities they enjoy as members of the intermediate category.⁷ By separating Afrodescendents in different colour groups and placing distinct value on those groups according to their proximity to ‘white’, this form of racial classification has encouraged Afro-Brazilians to avoid the stigma of blackness by identifying themselves as close to the white–brown boundary as possible. For this and other reasons, despite the large percentage of Afrodescendents in the Brazilian population, the valorization of ‘black’ identity is a relatively recent phenomenon. It gained force in the 1970s when the Brazilian black movement started to combat the adverse effects of the ideology of miscegenation by encouraging Afro-descendents to build a collective identity based on their shared experiences of racial discrimination. More recently, the black movement has demanded that the Brazilian census drop the term pardo and adopt its system of classification, whereby all persons self-defined as Afro-descendent are grouped in the category negro. Although the census continues to divide blacks and pardos, the state has accepted the black movement’s suggestion and adopted the term negro or Afro-descendente in many of its discourses, laws and policies addressing racial issues.

Throughout the book I adopt the terminology suggested by the Brazilian black movement, whereby the terms black, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-descendent are used interchangeably to refer to persons of African descent. The terms ‘brown’, mulato and mulata are used sparingly and only in those specific contexts where I refer to the ideology of miscegenation and mulatismo.

National identity, brasilidade and contemporary cinema

As argued by Shaw and Dennison, an abiding concern with ‘the national’ is one of the distinctive features of Brazilian cinema.⁸ To fully appreciate contemporary Brazilian films and to understand how they articulate ideas about national identity, it is therefore essential to consider the different ways of theorizing ‘the national’ and to understand how dominant discourses of Brazilian identity came into being. This is what I seek to do in part I of this book. In the first chapter I discuss the contributions of social theory to our understanding of how national consciousness is generated and reproduced, and whether or not processes of ethnic and cultural difference challenge the nation as a social and cultural formation. At this stage, my interest is in nations and national identity in general; the specific case of Brazil will be explored in the following chapters. In the second chapter, the ‘socially constructed’ aspect of national identity is examined in the context of Latin America and then more specifically in the context of Brazil. I will make use of the theoretical considerations of chapter 1 to discuss the importance of the modernist paradigm of nation-building for the creation of a hegemonic discourse of Brazilian national identity. Following on from this account, I then discuss how certain concepts derived from theories of globalization and postcolonial theory help us to understand resistance to this hegemonic discourse and the rise of new social identities based on experiences of exclusion and marginalization. Rather than attempt to give a full historical account of the construction of Brazilian national identity from Independence to the present, I shall focus on some key historical periods in which the question of ‘who we are’ as a people and as a nation was particularly prominent: the Modernist Movement (1920s); the Vargas regime (1930–45); the military dictatorship (1964–85); and the return to democracy (1985 onwards). In chapter 3 I describe Brazil’s nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an aristocratic project carried out by elites at the expense of the more vulnerable segments of society, notably Afro-descendents and the poor. I also examine processes of ‘selective cultural inclusiveness’ whereby certain elements of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture have been incorporated into the nationalist discourse. Particular attention is paid to the ideology of mestiçagem, which undermines racial difference and promotes the idea of a homogeneous ‘Brazilian race’, the product of racial mixture between indigenous, African and European peoples. In addition, I discuss the consequences of the ideology of racial democracy which, alongside mestiçagem, has helped to shape the discourse of Brazilian national identity for most of the twentieth century. In chapter 4 I then describe the several attempts made by different social groups to resist the nation-building project of the state and to create new discourses of national identity which foreground experiences of oppression and marginalization.

In part II, five chapters explore the ways in which these historical processes shape cinematic understandings of Brazilian national identity in the contemporary period. I examine the construction of rival discourses of national identity in Brazilian films released from 1995 to 2010, a period which has been defined by a diversity of cinematic themes and styles and a persistent concern with representing the nation. I have included in this study any film considered ‘Brazilian’ by economic and cultural criteria, that is, films funded by Brazilian sources, made in Brazil and with a predominantly Brazilian cast and crew, set in Brazilian territory, spoken in Portuguese and featuring Brazilian characters, places and themes. All the films discussed here have been released in Brazilian cinemas, whether in festivals or on the commercial circuit, and/or broadcast on Brazilian television.

As several authors have observed, it is fair to argue that the majority of Brazilian films released in this period address some aspect of Brazilian culture and society.⁹ Nevertheless, I have narrowed my focus to those films which explicitly thematize a sense of Brazilian nationhood and evoke the symbolic apparatus of national identity by representing certain images, symbols, stories, landscapes, characters and cultural practices associated with the nation. It is therefore not coincidental that many of the films discussed here make reference to carnival, samba and football, cultural practices which are understood in terms of brasilidade and which, in Brazil, are constantly associated with feelings of pride and love for the nation.

Rather than provide a comprehensive overview of the approximately 600 Brazilian films that were released in this period, I will focus my attention on a smaller number, of which eight receive special attention. This selective case study approach allows me to engage in more detailed analyses of how different representations of brasilidade are constructed. It also enables me to ask a range of questions in relation to each case. What kinds of cinematic strategies are used to evoke a sense of national belonging? How closely does the narrative draw upon traditional ideas of Brazilian national identity originated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the belief that Brazilians are inherently ‘amiable’ and more tolerant of racial difference than other people? Does the film reaffirm or contest these ideas? In the case of those films which oppose long-standing views of Brazilianness, what arguments are presented to justify this opposition, and do they undermine national identity as a whole or just propose a readjustment? This question is particularly pertinent to the large number of contemporary films which foreground problems of urban violence, racial conflict and social inequality. As we shall see, their critique may be, but is not always, accompanied by the suggestion that the tenets of Brazilian national identity no longer correspond to the experiences of large parts of the population.

To better distinguish different approaches to representing the nation I have divided the films into four groups, three of them according to their degree of conformity or opposition to the hegemonic discourse. The first category includes those films which operate within the dominant code of Brazilian national identity and thus reproduce conventional definitions of brasilidade. Because these films foreground positive features of the national identity, that is to say they celebrate it, I have used the term celebratory to refer to this category. The second category, reformist, includes films containing a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements. These films acknowledge the legitimacy of the dominant discourse while introducing some new, possibly conflicting elements into that discourse. They suggest that certain changes are required in order for the nation to accommodate the needs and interests of its different social groups and thus realize the ideals of racial democracy, solidarity and equality. Hence reformist films destabilize the nationalist principles of racial democracy and cordiality by drawing attention to the problems of Brazilian society, notably its socio-economic and racial divisions. This social criticism is radicalized in the third category, oppositional. Films in this group insistently position themselves outside the hegemonic code or contrary to it. Finally, and standing significantly outside this continuum, is a fourth category, the alternative, which introduces a new element into the discourse of national identity by foregrounding forms of collective identification based on race, ethnicity and gender.

It is important to note that this categorization is heuristic; it is neither rigid nor an end in itself. By classifying films in this way I hope to reveal the different means through which the nation can be cinematically imagined and represented. I also aim to demonstrate that the contestation of hegemonic discourses expresses itself in different forms and degrees, whether a bland social criticism, a discourse that valorizes racial and ethnic difference, or a frontal attack on all ideologies that sustain the traditional concept of national identity.

Part I

Constructions of Brazilian National Identity

Chapter 1

Forging the Nation

The debate on the emergence of nations and the ideological movements that accompany it can be broadly divided into two main camps: the modernist paradigm and the ‘anti-modernist’ critiques. The modernist paradigm emerged in the 1960s when a new body of theories for understanding the rise of nations and nationalism established a contrast with a number of assumptions which had prevailed until then, mainly in the field of history. While previous theories tended to assume that nations were ageless and persisted over immemorial time, the new approach claimed that nations were a product of the specific historical conditions associated with modernity. Modernists also attacked the tendency of earlier works to conceive of the nation as a community of common ancestry, rooted in a historic homeland. In their view, the nation was a civic community based in a particular territory, consciously and deliberately built by its members. Yet another idea contested by modernists was that of the nation as a seamless whole with a single national character. Instead, modernists suggested that nations were divided into various social groups (linked to region, class, gender and religion), each of which maintained its own interests and needs. Finally, the modernist paradigm rejected the concepts of ‘ancestral ties’ and ‘authentic cultures’ as the underlying principles of the nation, asserting instead the significance of ties of solidarity, citizenship and social communication.

Anthony D. Smith and John Breuilly claim that the modernist paradigm took shape with the accelerated process of decolonization and the rise of new nation states in Africa and Asia.¹ This is the moment when the study of nationalism, previously dominated by historians, opened up to a variety of disciplines, mainly political science and sociology. Smith recalls the climate of optimism surrounding the new theories, inspired by the struggles for independence in former European colonies and by the rise of social movements in the 1960s. Such optimism was coupled with an interventionist politics which aimed to see the Western notion of the ‘civic participant nation’ replicated in the former colonies through such strategies as social communication, mass education, urbanization, political participation and other recipes for national development. Above all, the modernist approach envisaged the nation as the ideal agent and framework for social development, and this is one of the reasons why the nation-building model, which focuses on the political nature of nations and the active role of citizens in their construction, became canonical.² Indeed, and as we shall see in chapter 2, this model has served as the main referent for understanding constructions of national identity in Latin America, although not without contestation. The main arguments of the nation-building model can be summarized as follows: first, nations are territorial political communities of legally equal citizens, conjoined with the modern state to form a ‘nation state’; secondly, all other ties its members may have (for example family, class, religion, region) are subordinate to the overriding loyalty of the citizen to his or her nation state, and this is desirable since it is functional for democratic civic participation; finally, only nationalism (as a sentiment or ideology) can mobilize masses to attain the commitment, dedication and self-sacrifice required by modernization.³

As observed by Breuilly, in the early 1970s there were few theoretical writings on nationalism other than those operating within this nation-building model.⁴ However, from the early 1980s onwards there was a marked shift. Important changes in the world order inspired a whole new debate on nations and nationalism, much of which involved criticism of the modernist paradigm and its canonical formulation. In African and Asian states, the nation-building project proved to be far more problematic than expected and the democratic dream was not realized. Ethnic conflicts emerged even in developed countries in the West, and in the East the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 encouraged new ethno-national formations which escaped the ‘civic’ model proposed by modernists. Furthermore, tides of immigration and the growth of new communication technologies undermined the concepts of homogeneous civic cultures and unified national identities. As a result, new theories and approaches to nationalism have arisen, calling into question some of the main premises of the modernist approach. Part of the critique revolves around the idea that the nation is an invented, imagined and hybrid category, therefore open to dispute and constant renegotiation. Others suggest that nations are far older than modernists suggest, and that they should be understood as a distinctively modern version of pre-existing social and cultural communities. Finally, some theories highlight the ephemeral and contingent character of nations, suggesting that they are currently being replaced by a new, global form of political and cultural organization. These arguments do not necessarily reject the modernist paradigm altogether. Indeed, some of them – for example the work of Ernest Gellner – refine and extend it beyond the ‘nation-building’ model. But they do, nevertheless, constitute a forceful critique.⁵

Although the likes of Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm build constructively on the modernist foundations, it is Smith’s ‘ethno-symbolist’ approach and, above all, Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ which have been most influential upon those concerned with the cultural construction of nations and national identity.⁶ Thus, Smith argues that the language of nationalism is expressed in diverse forms, from flags, anthems, parades, coinage and folklore, to less obvious ones such as architectural styles, popular heroes, educational practices, the countryside, the media and the arts. Symbols and ceremonies such as these constitute the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism, because they are used to express the distinctive mores, customs, styles and ways of acting and feeling that are shared by members of a national community. Above all, they have the capacity to communicate the basic concepts of nationalism in ‘palpable, concrete terms that evoke instant emotional responses from all strata of the community’.⁷ By articulating and making visible such abstract concepts as identity, autonomy, unity and fraternity, the language of nationalism engages members in the life and emotions of the community, assuring its continuity. For Smith, art has played a particularly important role in nationalism, due to its capacity to bring the national ideal to life and disseminate it amongst the people:

Nationalists, intent on celebrating or commemorating the nation, are drawn to the dramatic and creative possibilities of artistic media and genres in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, opera, ballet and film, as well in [sic] the arts and crafts. Through these genres nationalist artists may, directly or evocatively, ‘reconstruct’ the sights, sounds and images of the nation in all its concrete specificity and with ‘archeological’ verisimilitude.⁸

As we shall see in part II of this book, this argument is exemplified by Brazilian film production since the mid 1990s, with film-makers exploring the possibilities of the medium to celebrate or contest dominant views of the nation.

According to