Cannibalizing Queer

Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015

João Nemi Neto

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780814346112
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Arte general

Puts forward a new, provocative history of queer cinema in Brazil.

Through an analysis of contemporary Brazilian cinematic production, Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015 discusses which queer representations are erased and which are acknowledged in the complex processes of cultural translation, adaptation, and "devouring" that defines the Brazilian understanding of sexual dissidents and minorities. João Nemi Neto argues for Brazilian cinema studies to acknowledge the importance of 1920s modernism and of antropografia, a conceptual mode of cannibalism, to adopt and extrapolate a perverse form of absorption and raise the stakes on queer theory and postcolonialism, and to demonstrate how they are crucial to the development of a queer tradition in Brazilian cinema.

In five chapters and two "trailers, " Nemi Neto understands the term "queer" through its political dimensions because the films he analyzes represent characters that conform neither to American coming-out politics nor to Brazilian identity politics. Nonetheless, the films are queer precisely because the queer experiences and affection explored in these films do not necessarily insist on identifying characters as a particular sexuality or gender identity. Therefore, attention to characters within a unique cinematic world raises the stakes on several issues that hinge on cinematic form, narrative, and representation. Nemi Neto interviews and examines the work of João Silvério Trevisan and provides readings of films such as AIDS o furor do sexo explícito (AIDS the Furor of Explicit Sex, 1986), and Dzi Croquetes (Dzi Croquetes, 2009) to theorize a productive overlap between queer and antropofagia. Moreover, the films analyzed here depict queer alternative representations to both homonormativity and heteronormativity as forms of resistance, at the same time as prejudice and heteronormativity remain present in contemporary Brazilian social practices.

Graduate students and scholars of cinema and media studies, queer studies, Brazilian modernism, and Latin American studies will value what one early reader called "a point of departure for all future research on Brazilian queer cinema."

1

Devouring Cinema

Queering Antropofagia

According to Vicente de Paula Araújo (1985), a modest golden age of Brazilian early cinema occurred between 1896 and 1912. By 1912, however, American cinema started to dominate the national market. During the first decades of the twentieth century, only a small number of films were produced in Brazil, although there are notable exceptions that merit attention, including Mario Peixoto’s avant-garde film Limite (Boundary, 1931), which today is considered the most important Brazilian film made, or São Paulo, a sinfonia da metrópole (São Paulo, symphony of a metropolis, Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolph Rex Lustig, 1929).1 Peixoto’s film in particular exemplifies the avant-gardist ideas that directly influenced the emergence of a Brazilian style in filmmaking. Peixoto lived and studied in Europe, and his film appropriated the techniques and sensibilities of the European avant-garde gaze while effectively turning it toward Brazilian narratives and landscapes.

Maite Conde explains that cinema in Brazil was an important cultural reference for the modernist movement in the 1920s. In Consuming Visions: Cinema Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro (2011) and Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2018), she presents an in-depth analysis of the movement’s fascination and enthusiasm for this then new technological language and art form. Oswald de Andrade (1928a), the creator and developer of the Antropofagia movement, proclaimed in the Manifesto antropófago (Anthropophagous manifesto) that American cinema could be a source of inspiration and innovation for Brazilian art. The ideas embraced by Antropofagia would become a persistent trope in Brazilian modern cinema in the 1960s and the decades that followed. For instance, Antônio Castilho de Alcântara Machado’s 1926 novel Pathé-Baby (the title itself a reference to cinema) is formally conceived as a cinema journal log. The idea for the novel formed after he met Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars during the latter’s visit to Brazil in 1928.2 Oswald de Andrade, aware of cinema’s importance to modernity, wrote the preface to Alcântara Machado’s book. Even though the modernist era produced no coherent body of film, cinema was a clear reference for their writing.

The often overlooked centrality of cinema to Antropofagia is not without importance for how we might evaluate the movement’s recurrent impact throughout the twentieth century until present time. Several authors and scholars have discussed its endurance (e.g., Cândido 1970; Bosi 1994; Campos 1975; Stam 1997; Helena 1983; Nagib 2003; Guiomar Ramos 2008). Antropofagia is not only a literary movement but also a critical aspect of Brazilian culture more generally (Helena 1983). The impact of Antropofagia can be seen in various artistic manifestations in Brazil and throughout Latin America3 even today.4 As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2011, 289) explains, the manifesto has created a cult among intellectuals and writers in the past century who have been stimulated by the movement’s ideas and language, and I follow a number of researchers who argue that this is also apparent in Brazilian cinema. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (1995), for instance, point out that 1960s Cinema Novo is marked by a “cannibal-tropicalist” (37) phase. Throughout the 1970s, a series of films dealt with Antropofagia, often by thematizing cannibalistic practices. Two of that era’s most famous examples are Como era gostoso meu francês (How tasty was my little Frenchman, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971) and Macunaíma (Macunaíma, Joaquim Pedro Andrade, 1969). Luís Madureira explains that “while How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman ostensibly subscribes to the antropofagista recuperation of the anthropophagic act as a strategy of cultural and economic resistance, it ultimately exposes the ‘rhetoricity’ of this allegorical solution to the dilemma of development” (17)—a critical dimension, I will argue further on, that João Silvério Trevisan also exploits in Orgia ou o homem que deu cria.

This “return to Antropofagia” in Cinema Novo is well documented (e.g., Nagib 2003; Stam 1997; Johnson 1984; Guiomar Ramos 2008). However, in this study I propose that each generation returns to Antropofagia in its own way to “cannibalize,” as it were, the movement’s principal tenets according to the generation’s own needs. This was certainly the case with the 1960s return to Antropofagia, which aimed at a collective consciousness, as Joaquim Pedro Andrade explained in a short statement during the release of his first anthropophagic film, Macunaíma. During this period, censorship imposed by the repressive military dictatorship (1964–84) forced artists to look for metaphors that could describe their desire for liberty. Within the same statement, Andrade included a short piece titled “Cannibalism and Self-Cannibalism,” in which he noted that “the Left, while being devoured by the Right, tries to discipline and purify itself by eating itself” (qtd. in Johnson and Stam 1995, 83). If Oswald de Andrade intended to devour American cinema and its new language(s), forty years later film director Glauber Rocha would turn to Brazilian modernism to tackle contemporary social problems in a manner, as film scholar Ismail Xavier (1993) explains, indebted to the 1920s.

But Antropofagia also resurfaces more recently, inviting us to inquire about contemporary “cannibal” desires. Besides the selected films and documentaries that I will analyze in this book, several examples of contemporary Brazilian cinema (especially with a queer orientation) come to mind. Juliana Rojas and Marcos Dutra’s As boas maneiras (Good manners, 2017), for instance, deals with literal cannibalization, as proposed by Pierre Fédida (1972) in “Le cannibale mélancolique” (The melancholic cannibal), a psychoanalytic reading of anthropophagic rituals. Tatuagem (Tattoo, Hilton Lacerda, 2013) revisits the creative Tropicália movement’s appropriation of the carnivalesque approaches of Antropofagia.

I argue in this book that Antropofagia is crucial to the development of a queer style in Brazilian cinema. This is not obvious in and of itself: while widely discussed, Oswald de Andrade’s literary manifestos are not generally read in a “queer” light. This book, which proposes a queer reading of Antropofagia to trace the persistence of that movement in Brazilian queer cinema, tries to strike a tenuous balancing act in reconciling the study of a Brazilian cultural movement with the aid of Anglophone queer theory. Guided by this proposition, I thus turn to queer theories of abjection to analyze how a specific tradition in Brazil resonates with the ideas behind Antropofagia. I thus join with a number of scholars who use queer theory as a mode of analysis for Brazilian cinema (see, e.g., Subero 2014; Foster 1999, 2010), but I more emphatically turn to Antropofagia as an enduring cultural matrix that lends itself to queer readings. More specifically, I propose an anthropophagic queer reading in order to understand Brazilian queer cinema and the ways filmic language has dealt with questions of sexual identity and orientation, stigma, HIV/AIDS, and narrative.

Why Is Antropofagia Important to Queer Cinema?

Andrade’s manifesto is one of the most original strategies for resisting colonization, and at the same time, it creates forms of critique of the relationship between cultures. Nonetheless, as an underpinning cultural object, it must be read with a double-sided understanding. While the discourse sets out to resists colonization, it is born out of colonial structures of power: the manifesto originated among the white cultural elite from São Paulo who appropriated Indigenous cultures and languages as if Brazil were one mestiço nation.

Still, today the principles of Antropofagia offer a model of cultural translation that remains provocative, having lost, I believe, none of its relevance in the discussion of the adaptation of foreign “traveling theories” (Said 1983) in the Brazilian context. If one considers that a literal translation of queer into Portuguese is impossible, and that the process of translation would doubtless prove unfruitful, one strategy might be to reinterpret and reelaborate the term, engaging in what Haroldo de Campos calls transcriação (transcreation) (see Tapia and Nóbrega 2015). It is also legitimate to question if such words are relevant to Brazilian (or other cultural) practices. The Brazilian cultural discourse on Antropofagia reminds us that there is an intellectual precedent from which to proceed when considering the relevance of the term queer in a Brazilian context; there is a critical methodology to incorporate the exogenous, assimilating the external by devouring it, to afterward produce a meaningful totemized taboo, to invert Freud’s (1918) classic proposition.

This anthropophagic perspective is important not only because it shaped twentieth-century Brazilian culture but also because it informs this book’s project of thinking through the challenging tasks of grasping and translating queer theory and bringing queer bodies into a visible space in Brazilian cinema.5 Moreover, the notion of the abject resonates with the perceived lack of prestige of Portuguese as a peripheral language in relation to a European center, as often expressed by Brazilian writers and critics (e.g., Santiago 2006; Santos 1997; Lugarinho 2002). The Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1997) in Pela mão de Alice: O social e o politico na pós-modernidade (Through Alice’s hands: The social and the political in postmodernity) aptly summarizes the issue as follows: for centuries, Portuguese culture could see itself as a center because it had a periphery represented by its colonies. However, Portugal today is at the periphery because Europe imposes itself as a center. “For a culture that has never been in one space,” Santos concludes, “the cultural identifications originated from that point tend to autocannibalize themselves” (135).6 Interestingly, Santos chooses the notion of cannibalism as a metaphor for the Lusophone world. Geographically speaking, Portugal lies at the periphery of continental Europe, the most western-situated country. In history books, students in Brazil learn from an early age that this peripheral position was one of the advantages that allowed Portugal to be the first and most successful nation in conquering “new” lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Once at the center in relation to its colonies, as a European nation-state, Portugal is now at the periphery in relation to other European countries. If one traces a parallel between this peripheral position and queer theory, an analogous relationship between lusofonia and queer becomes visible. Not incidentally, then, Lugarinho (2010, 107) contends that to simply translate queer into Portuguese is an act of betrayal to the anthropophagic history that has been so important to Brazilian culture.

With that in mind, I use queer in this book as a term that disturbs, destabilizes, and questions ideas of centrality and normativity. As Carla Freccero (2011) says in “Queer Times,” “mestizaje, métissage, spectrality, the trace, and the uncanny all find themselves in certain ways allied with queer as terms that do the work of différance in relation to the identitarian inflections they carry” (17). Freccero’s choice of terms is particularly useful to this book’s project; mestiçagem7 has been a vital part of Brazilian culture and was one of Andrade’s main arguments while developing his anthropophagic theory. Michael Warner (1993), too, in Fear of a Queer Planet, uses the word queer in a manner that goes along with Antropofagia, proposing queerness to interrogate the heteronomativity of class and gender analysis as categories that are always embedded within a history of sexuality.

Following Warner’s example, I apply a queer analysis to a range of topics in line with Antropofagia’s original interests, such as the notion of emancipation and inclusion of the Indigenous and people of color, but I also broaden the scope of critical analysis to include women’s and abject bodies that have been denied visibility. I argue that such a queer reading of Antropofagia recovers the movement’s openness for representing different bodies and social modes of organization (e.g., matriarchal society). This way, the active process “queering” may be seen as an act of “swallowing,” or deglutição,8 a term that was highly important for the cultural antropófagos as an expression for their desire to emancipate the modernist artists (more about that soon).

Reversely, as I argue throughout this book, queer theory, too, may need to be anthropophagized: adapting Anglo-American terminology to a different cultural context continues an anthropophagic movement of re-deglutição. Revisiting what was “swallowed” in the past under the aegis of Antropofagia in “queer” terms today gives shape to self-consciously intercultural, dialogic, and specifically Brazilian theory for studying the issues at hand in this book of sexual liberation and queer visibility in Brazilian contemporary cinema. I argue that queer theory needs to be eaten9 by Brazilian queer bodies and devoured in ways that will fit their queer needs, thus creating an invigoratingly hybrid mestiço and queer encounter between and Antropofagia and Anglo-American theory. Ideally, Antropofagia will at once devour queer while simultaneously being queered. As David William Foster proposes in an interview with W. Daniel Holcombe (2012), “As cultural production, a queer reading is a reading that tries to understand in which ways this production is reproduced while questioning social systems” (199).10

Queer theory, as the discipline developed in the United States, tries not to conform to the norm and distances itself from the institutionalized gay and lesbian studies. During the past twenty years, since the time when Teresa de Lauretis (1991)11 used the term queer, there has been much discussion about whether or not the institutionalization of queer theory has defanged the critical, deregulatory queerness the term intended to achieve (Halperin 2011). Also, David L. Eng, J. Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz (2005), in their respective manner, hold that queer theory has become a discourse of mostly white male homosexuals, which is precisely one of the issues that scholars were trying to redress in the 1990s.

Problems of legitimacy are even thornier in the case of queer theory’s arrival in Latin America, where many critics urgently wonder whether the terms of analysis are not inevitably inscribed in a colonial dynamic: queer theory as a discourse through which the educated will enlighten the less educated. However, queer theory, like any other traveling theory that originates in the United States, is already preoccupied with “the other” (that is, non-US subjects). Such preoccupation with the other transforms the theory into the master of several subordinate bodies. Yet many authors in the Lusophone world have taken queer theory as a model for analysis. As Lugarinho (2002) says:

Anglophone queer theory does offer interpretive tools and useful insights for the analysis of homosexuality in Portuguese-speaking cultures. At the same time, its attempt at overcoming the binary heterosexuality/homosexuality in order to include other registers of sexuality, class, gender, race, nationality, and political ideologies, provides a valuable and more exhaustive framework for the analysis of peripheral societies such as Portugal and Brazil, at the same time as it links these societies to a much larger transnational framework of concerns uniting sexual and gender minorities throughout the world. (286)

Nevertheless, it is important to understand the vicissitudes of traveling theories and ask in which ways they are truly resourceful for Latin American contexts. After all, since its inception, cinema in Brazil is presented as an international novelty. As the well-known turn-of-the-century writer and journalist João do Rio says, “[E]verybody wanted to see the cinematographers” (qtd. in Araújo 1985, 18). More recently, the critic and writer Silviano Santiago (2002) has proposed a culturally sensitive approach for applying international models to the Brazilian context. In “The Wily Homosexual,” he holds that Brazil has ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Devouring Cinema: Queering Antropofagia
• Trailer 1: The Revitalization of Antropofagia in the 1960s and 1970s
• 2. João Silvério Trevisan’s Orgia ou o homem que deu cria: The Quintessential Anthropophagic Queer
• 3. HIV/AIDS in 1980s Brazilian Cinema: Abjection and Shame in Documentary, Fiction, and Pornography
• Trailer 2: Brazilian Cinematic Production and Effeminophobia
• 4. Dzi Croquettes and the Queer Documentary Tradition
• 5. Contemporary Trends in Anthropophagic Queer: Challenging Effeminophobia
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Interview with João Silvério Trevisan in São Paulo, Brazil, October 2018 and June 2019
• Notes
• Works Cited and Supplemental Readings
• Index