Nelson Pereira dos Santos on Who Is Beta?: and Such Other Dauntingly Brazilian Maladies

• Published in: Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives 2016-04, Vol.7 (2), p.11-36
• Main Author: Martin, Michael T
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Actors; Comedians; Communism; Culture; dos Santos, Nelson Pereira; Historical text analysis; Motion picture directors & producers; Motion pictures; National identity; Neocolonialism; Popular culture
• ISSN: 1536-3155; 1947-4237; 1947-4237
• DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.7.2.01

Consider that his cinematic interventions predate, as they anticipate, Cinema Novo with Rio, 40 graus / Rio, 100 Degrees (1956), an unflinching neorealist take on the black underclass in Rio de Janeiro, which Glauber Rocha was later to describe as "revolutionary in and for Brazilian cinema" and the "first really committed Brazilian film," (See figures 9, 10, and 11)3 and Rio, zona Norte / Rio, Northern Zone (1957), a drama about the music recording industry's appropriation of popular culture told largely in flashbacks by Espirito da Luz Soares, a samba composer from the favela (slum or ghetto). [...]during Cinema Novo's first phase (1960-1964), and exemplary of the most important films of this early period, dos Santos made Vidas secas / Barren Lives (1963), a haunting chronicle of an itinerant peasant family in the sert o of the Brazilian Northeast.4 Later, in the third and closing phase (1968-1972) of the movement, he would make Azyllo muito louco / The Alienist or A Very Crazy Asylum (1971), his first color film, an allegorical critique of a particularly repressive period during military rule in Brazil; and the highly popular and critically acclaimed Como era gostoso o meu francés / How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1972), a captivity narrative and counter-historical reading-what Robert Stam refers to as an "anthropophagic" critique-based on several sixteenth-century texts about exploration and colonization in Brazil.5 Consider, too, that a signature and organizing feature of dos Santos's practice, derived from the model of Italian neorealism, engaged in the Brazilian specificity. Neorealism taught us, in sum, that it was possible to make films in the streets; that we did not need studios; that we could film using average people rather than known actors; that the technique could be imperfect, as long as the film was truly linked to its national culture and expressed that culture.6 In the interview that follows, dos Santos distinguishes between "production system" and a realist approach: "I have a different way with each film, but my approach is still quite realist in the sense of what the film means and wants to say" Such comparison foregrounds a film's significations, not its genre or formal features, and marks dos Santos's sustained commitment to his subject-the class and racial determinations in the Brazilian social formation, and no less important, reconstituting in the cinematic a Brazilian national identity. [...]black actors, such as Grande Otelo