by Victória Bárbara Lopes dos Santos*
Translated by Claudia Pires de Castro
Edited and reviewed by Claudia Pires de Castro and Giovanna Imbernon
Organized by Dr. Conrado Pires de Castro
Organized by Dr. Conrado Pries de Castro. Translated by Giovanna Imbernon. Edited and reviewed by Claudia Pires de Castro and Giovanna Imbernon. "We grasp the 20th century by the tail, by the letters of the Latin alphabet. We write to honor our ancestors. We write to determine our own destiny. Self-determination. No more anthropophagic excuses, good intentions, full of tributes, and inspiration. Enough of taking our identities and narratives, turning them into a white’s place of occupation. No more appropriation. We want self-determination! We are the first."
Organized by Dr. Conrado Pries de Castro. Edited and reviewed by Claudia Pires de Castro and Giovanna Imbernon. "Nevertheless, today, the left in general, even in the field of culture, is dejected after the neoliberal shock of the last period and the rise of the far-right. Although not explicitly, it is evident that the “isms” in Brazil and throughout the world resulted from a historical opening that engendered aesthetic and political transformations. The 1920s, worldwide, was a decade of utopias and revolutions (and counter-utopias and counter-revolutions). We need to find a crack in this history that has closed for us, and I think the modernist project can perhaps help us with that."
Organized by Dr. Conrado Pries de Castro. Translated by Claudia Pires de Castro. Edited and reviewed by Claudia Pires de Castro and Giovanna Imbernon. "São Paulo. The way to the sea. Capitania of São Vicente. Port of Santos. Europe. In the comings and goings of the countryside's plateaus. At the continent. At crossing the Atlantic. We will still go to Europe. “In a coffee landfill”! As the samba composer, Noel Rosa says. Reaffirming the sentence. “Happiness is the litmus test”. From the Anthropophagic Manifesto."
Organized by Dr. Conrado Pries de Castro. Edited and reviewed by Claudia Pires de Castro and Giovanna Imbernon. "Disputes, controversies, interpretations, conflicts, contradictions have run deep throughout Brazilian culture, in its social life and material civilization, over the past hundred years. They express Brazil’s fantasies and hopes of having a date with the modern, with modernity. Without even noticing the high levels of modernity hiding inside this land of contrasts, according to Roger Bastide, that is, of contrasts and confrontations, as Euclides da Cunha pointed out in 1907. For those reasons, debates on the Week of Modern Art and the Modernist Movement have a lot to say about Brazil’s past and presents evils."
Organized by Elcio Brasilio. Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "The film's turning point is at the moment when there is the intervention of an interlocutor who, like Fael, is a young black man. He declares: "my story is just like yours". The clash between the traditional documentary interview with the fiction's counter-field removes the margins of support from a purely documentary scene and at the same time shifts the singularity of Fael's testimony to a testimony that is common to so many."
Organized by Elcio Brasilio. Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "Defined as a transcription of the theatrical piece, the movie broadens the play’s original meanings by using audiovisual resources and creating what I dare call spaces of possibility of the play’s language and discourse. The very corporeal performance faced the challenge of transforming itself into a cinematic experience."
Organized by Elcio Brasilio. Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "We must learn from Raulino, who was a digital enthusiast – one of the first filmmakers to accept and realize the power of the medium – and who believed that from the moment we can press the rec button on, using whatever it is, we can make a film with it."
Organized by Elcio Brasilio. Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "Many of the documentaries from this period are directly related to the union movements, often conceived as communication pieces or historical reports. Other films intended to amplify the message of those workers, reaching out the public opinion, although their productions were not involved with the unions. Their social function was oriented by a certain political trend that, in turn, shaped them as oeuvres."
Organized by Elcio Brasilio. Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "Considered one of the most censored movies during the dictatorship, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969) was unwanted by the military censorship not only for the obscenity of some scenes but also for its ideological content. The figure of Macunaima, a black-skinned indigenous, was not exactly the type of hero the military government was looking for; he was a lazy non-European type who had just come out of Brazil's backwoods."