By CRISTIANE FREITAS GUTFREIND and BRUNO LEITES*
“Preface” and “Preface” of the newly released book
Preface [Cristiane Freitas Gutfreind]
Em Cinema, Naturalism, Degradation: essays on Brazilian cinema in the 2000s, Bruno Leites presents us with a disturbing theme that is present in the ontology of filmic images, proposing different interpretations and different philosophical and artistic reflections. It is a challenging theme, one that torments the spirit, promotes discomfort and sweeping aesthetic experiences. The author faces the challenge set in his life drive and dedicates himself to deepening the theme from the Brazilian cinematography of the 2000s.
For this, he resorts to reflections undertaken in his academic career, using an impeccable writing style, in which the thought starts from the image to build ideas and concepts. These tension the objectivity of the world and the subjectivity of the look towards the body, time and politics.
Naturalism extends from the existing reality in human nature to the psychic and social reality, that is, it puts the subject before the difficult understanding of establishing limits between the human and the craftsman, risking emptying himself in a designation that is all that exists. and its possible variants. Furthermore, in cinema, realism is technically naturalized, as the filmed object is understood as a totality of the structure of reality. However, in Bruno Leites' essays, we escape emptyings and generalist statements on the subject of cinema-naturalism. What we have, then, is the consistency of the theoretical domain of the multiple understandings of the notion of naturalism masterfully discussed, traversing a precise path, supported mainly by the reflections of Gilles Deleuze. Naturalism is presented to the reader not only as a theme that characterizes a film genre, but as a feature of films that show themselves to the world in a unique way through images that make individuals resist around the presence of degradation.
The films thought here – chronically unfeasible, bass of the beasts, drain smell, among others – tell us about Brazil at the beginning of the XNUMXst century and show the cohesion and resonance of violence, the ambience of customs and values that surround the country. Deleuze's drive-image, which guides the understanding of these aspects, is questioned in order to lead the reader to apprehend the force of death by reducing tensions.
the naturalist thought, aligned with the movies that think about impotence of life, reveal the instinctual, the sordid, the misery, in short, in the words of the author, “the diseases of the world”. In this way, we reach the end of the path with the exquisite essay, revealing the social and psychic alienation that indicate the symptoms of the image that bothers, through the films of Cláudio Assis. In these alignments, the author shows us the domain of the researched objects and the order of relationship between them, which reveals a certain idea of naturalism: the degraded space and the performative figuration of the characters through the death drive.
From this point of view, it can be said that the author discusses a Brazilian cinema that presents itself as a cultural device based on an inventory of naturalistic films (ironic, cyclical, dispersed) that dissect the elements and sensory forms. In this sense, these films make human nature apparent, which makes reference to a violent country, expanding what philosophy apprehended us as a naturalist: the integrally natural characteristic of the world.
Bruno Leites presents us with a reference work on a fundamental theme for those who are interested in images and leaves us with a structural matrix to think about naturalism in other films from other times.
Presentation [Bruno Leites]
1.
The films mentioned in this book and the concept of “pulse-image” proposed by Gilles Deleuze are the constructions that awakened in me the need to think about the relationship between cinema, naturalism and degradation.
In researching the concept of naturalism, I came across a series of definitions, sometimes diverging from each other. The term can refer to ontological reflections on the properties of the cinematographic device;[I] the language that seeks to simulate a supposedly natural view of the spectator in front of the scene, in the tradition of the search for the transparency of the device;[ii] to filmmakers who would position themselves as “observers” and “photographers” of reality;[iii] to films whose objective would be to reveal a truth extracted from reality, often characterized as an authentic and courageous denunciation.[iv]
Other characteristics attributed to naturalism are: the relationship with easy and popular genres, eventually without major aesthetic concerns;[v] the conception of characters guided mainly by impulses of the body;[vi] the morbid, pessimistic and deterministic view of life.[vii] Naturalism also appears as an aesthetic of excesses,[viii] with influence on the film noir and horror movies.[ix]
Among so many meanings, I stayed on the axis proposed by Deleuze in the motion-image (1985), which is the result of a long journey by the author thinking about naturalism and its relationship with the death drive, as I explain in the essay Impulse-image, naturalism in Gilles Deleuze. For him, naturalism implies the observation of a determined reality (located in space and time), which suffers the action of a death drive, understood as an autonomous force that acts on bodies and spaces, condemning them to degradation and repeating cycles.
Deleuze's proposition about naturalism in cinema was hailed by important theorists, but also neglected or harshly criticized by others.[X] She certainly places emphasis on an aspect of naturalism that literature textbooks tend to call determinism or fatalism. What Deleuze tells us is that this aspect, far from being secondary or restricted to the “content” of the works, is a constitutive element of the naturalist way of seeing the world, constructing images and thinking about the role of art in the collectivity. We must not forget, also, that naturalism predates the birth of psychoanalysis by a few years and the proposition of the concept of death drive by Sigmund Freud (2019) in Beyond the pleasure principle.[xi]
The development of the degradation axis in naturalism led me to incorporate works by two important specialists in literary naturalism into my work: David Baguley (1990) and Yves Chevrel (1993). Chevrel tells us about the tragic nature of the naturalist worldview, which is always involved in everyday life, unlike what happens in classical tragedy. Baguley, on the other hand, presents naturalism as a diverse literature and qualifies it as an “entropic vision” of the world.[xii] In this sense, naturalism would not only be the result of an encounter with a degraded reality, but a thought that sees the world in continuous degradation, often under the guise of stability and progress. Baguley also emphasizes “comic naturalism” and the ironic vision that exists in naturalism, something that we will certainly find in films analyzed in the essays gathered here.[xiii]
This appropriation of naturalism would be worth little if the set of images and sayings of filmmakers that appear here did not lead to the same universe. What theorists called the “death drive” (Deleuze, 2007c; 1985), “entropic vision” (Baguley, 1990) and “everyday tragedy” (Chevrel, 1993), filmmakers thought of as the “time that swallows everything”, the “chronically unfeasible”, “tendency towards destruction”, “violence within us”, invariably designating forces that act in specific, contemporary and usually peripheral environments.[xiv]
The selection of films was made in a relatively rhizomatic way, starting from a preliminary perception that there was violence in Brazilian cinema in the 2000s that resulted from an almost innate condition of the Brazilian body (our drives and their tendency to destruction), or inscribed in our DNA (the original sins of Brazilianness).
Thus, I arrived at a set that covers the following films: zero latitude, chronically unfeasible, mango yellow, Against everyone, the smell of the drain, arid movie, How much is it worth or is it per kilo?, happy desert, bass of the beasts e the tenants. Other films are also used as they allow viewing “traits” of naturalism or different ways of facing the same universe of questions: Through the window, the invader, Madame Satan e rat fever.[xv] Evidently, this set does not imply the totality of appearances of naturalism in the cinema of the 2000s.
By bringing these films together and placing them in an agency with naturalism and degradation, a transdisciplinary thought about cinema in its relationship with the body and culture is highlighted. The image influenced by naturalism includes a thesis on the force of matter and the excesses of the body. There is a vision of opposition between body and culture, in such a way that the body is seen as a sphere of animalistic drives, which, without the sufficient counterpoint of culture, yield to the empire of the great death drive. Therefore, in these images the characters are in the process of bestialization, and sexuality is part of a primitivism seen as decadence and fall of “return to the inorganic”.[xvi]
More than the violence itself, this set of images highlights a wide range of deformation aesthetics, including wasting bodies, pieces of bodies, malformed spaces, peeling walls, rusty gates. There is a taste for the residues that form when forms do not stabilize, especially smoke and blood.
The characters are in a capture situation within a time that multiplies their repetitions, but the innocent qualification cannot be applied to almost any of them. As for the repetitions, they seem to become independent of the characters, bigger than them. There is little tension between the characters and the spaces they inhabit, given their integration, their almost inseparability. It is not common to see characters struggling against the degraded environments that pressure them. All of them, mediums and characters, border on the inseparable and are enclosed in a temporality of infinite repetition.
2.
The essays presented here explore naturalism in cinema[xvii]and can be read independently, except Naturalistic films and their dispersions, which serves as an introduction to the main topics of the book. In it I present a conception of naturalism that serves as the basis for other appearances of the concept throughout the book.
In addition, I propose the recognition of different trends of naturalism in films of the 2000s: naturalist films, ironic and cyclical naturalist films, films with naturalistic traits and films with dispersion naturalism. In Drive-image, naturalism in Gilles Deleuze, I present a study on Deleuze's drive-image, which is the author's proposal for understanding naturalism in cinema. The concept of drive-image is relevant in Deleuze's studies, because it is a proposition that dialogues with fundamental themes of the author's thought, such as the death drive, symptomatology, desire and the body without organs. On the other hand, I think it is also relevant for studies of naturalism, due to the proximity it presents with theses of other contemporary authors, such as David Baguley (1990), Yves Chevrel (1993), Jacques Rancière (2009) and Fredric Jameson (2015 ). In this chapter, I carry out a genealogical study, showing that the concept of drive-image brings together Deleuze's thinking on naturalism and the death drive of the 1960s, with the critique of the drive theory that he erected in the 1970s with Félix Guattari.
Em the naturalist thought, I put into dialogue some of the main characteristics attributed to naturalism, such as transparency, sensoriality, tragicity and objectivity. The text is conducted alternating expressions of naturalism in XNUMXth century literature and XNUMXst century Brazilian cinema, including a comparative approach to criticism of works from both periods. The closing of the text points to a dualism that seems to be constitutive of naturalism, that is, the tension between the objectivity of the degraded world and the subjectivity of the gaze that can only see the world in degradation.
Em Films that think the impotence of thought, I analyze the proliferation of commentator characters of different orders, whose theses are explicitly stated, but which are revealed to be laughable, unhealthy and passive in facing the world's diseases. The word in the films alternates between communion with the disease of the world and passive testimony to the inevitability of degradation. In this way, some filmmakers use cinema-thought as a way of investigating the impotence of thought itself in the face of the degrading inevitabilities of the body and time. A risk that comes with such impotence is the crisis of politics and the emergence of terrorism, a line of investigation that was opened in chronically unfeasible e How much is it worth or is it per kilo?.
Em Naturalistic worlds and underworlds, I weave a cross-sectional look, highlighting the relationship between naturalistic worlds and underworlds, with an emphasis on the conception of space and character in these films. Following the naturalist tradition, space and characters are inseparable: normally the characters do not “become aware” and almost never have the autonomy to oppose the space in which they live. The naturalist underworld, on the other hand, is an obscure, poorly formed force that is in the immanence of naturalist worlds. Eventually, the underworld is depicted directly, but it is often depicted through a “negative figuration”. In this sense, naturalist films inherit the difficulty of figuration that constitutes the death drive and the unpresentable “absolute”.
Em Cláudio Assis and the image that makes a symptom, I carry out the only essay focused on just one filmmaker. In addition, it is the one with the highest recurrence of interviews, following the tradition of filmmakers theory.[xviii] In the text, I present the specificity of the image that makes a symptom, a strategy that differs from images that aim to weave diagnoses in the interpretation of realities. Producing a symptom with an image, in Assis, involves the conjugation of signs aimed at discomfort, with signs aimed at satisfaction. In this symptomatology, however, the excess of satisfaction also carries the risk of feeding back the unhealthy regime of signs that the films would have come to renew.
Throughout the book, distributed in several essays, there are seven items classified as [In addition to naturalism n._] and its abbreviation [Besides… n._] They show aspects of films from the same period that seek to place themselves in the beyond of naturalism. The idea of a beyond shows that these films have some relationship with naturalism, but that they move away from its premises: there are films made by filmmakers who had previously approached naturalism (the tenants, rat fever); others with naturalism in dispersion, which are located in a tense zone, approaching, but seeking to move away from, naturalism (arid movie, happy desert, the tenants); and there is still Madame Satan, which focuses on a theme that was also of interest to naturalism, namely, life and sexuality in peripheral regions with shared popular housing, but which deviates from the typically naturalistic entropic view. In this sense, when films look for strategies based on bodies that desire themselves, that become aware, that move, that resort to the active word in the formation of communities, we can speak of dispersions beyond of naturalism.[xx]
3.
I often came across questions about the relationship between the films I studied in these essays and works from other eras that also thought about degradation, especially Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal. Although I was tempted to adopt a comparative methodology to respond to this problematization, I kept postponing the challenge. I would not like to make hasty comparisons and miss the specificities that each of these generations has. I think there remains, therefore, a systematic work to be done in a comparative sense, taking care not to subject the diversity of these cinematographies to generic and impoverished conceptions.[xx]
Another method that the reader will find little in these essays is the taxonomic method, of classifying signs.[xxx] It is frequent that researchers feel the need to weave boundaries between different types of naturalisms and realisms, above all to affirm the specificities of a specific update – new realisms, new naturalisms – often adding some adjective (magical naturalism, dirty realism, etc. ) that will singularize originally comprehensive terms. Although this strategy was possible in my research, it was not implemented. Perhaps the formulation of an aggregating concept could give strength and facilitate the propagation of the thought expressed here. Designations such as “Degradation Naturalism”, “Entropic Naturalism” and “Naturalism of the 2000s” could eventually be adequate, but they have not been tested and debated.
4.
As I finish this presentation in March 2021, I could not fail to notice that the death drive thesis is recurrently used to explain the inertia and satisfaction that current power in Brazil feels with this whole process of “disengagement” that is consuming people. institutions and sacrificing the lives of our population. In this sense, it is as if we were being governed by naturalistic characters who so expressed the force of the death instinct in action. It is as if power were being exercised by the hypocritical ex-policeman and rapist of zero latitude; operated by the militiamen of Against everyone; financed by the merchant who trades bodies in the smell of the drain; sustained by the sick communities of happy desert, arid movie e bass of the beasts.[xxiii]
Naturalism questioned the effectiveness of thought in the face of the brute matter forces of bodies and their drives. A few years later, we are faced with an anti-intellectualism as a State policy, one of the most notable marks of the agents who exercise and sustain contemporary power in Brazil. It happens that we see, in these agents, the essential characteristics of characters that populated the naturalist films of the early 2000s.[xxiii]
The same criticism made in this book of naturalist films could be directed at some interpretations that only see a death drive in the exercise of contemporary power. We cannot forget that death is a policy, an affirmation inscribed in a very concrete regime, whose power was historically constructed to desire precisely this, the death of so many, the perpetuation of a few.
5.
The essays presented here problematize a series of questions, but leave many others to be considered regarding naturalism in Brazilian cinema in the 2000s. The theme is broad and opens up into aesthetic, narrative, philosophical, historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological issues etc.
I think there is still a need to put this cinema in perspective compared to other expressions of Brazilian cinema; it would also be the case to deepen the sociological and anthropological link between naturalist cinema and the sad and negative conceptions of Brazilianness; or, even, to propose the relationships that naturalism and its dispersions have with the economic and macropolitical scenario of Brazil in the 2000s. colonizers, while their dispersion coincides with the emergence of a mobilized and hopeful left to power, and also with the period of greatest economic growth in the country at the end of the decade.
In each of the essays included here, complementary ways of conceiving and working on a tragic element that is difficult to apprehend through image and word emerge. In this sense, what we see is a profusion of expressions that seem to result from the difficulty of coming up with the right name, a difficulty that, in my view, is a constitutive result of the element at stake. “Chronicly unviable”, “time that swallows everything”, “the smell of the drain”, “against all”, “violence within us”: these are names and expressions uttered in films, titles, prologues, monologues, declamations, interviews of filmmakers . I think that all names are somehow appropriate and inappropriate. Appropriate because they show possible approaches and reveal important aspects of the issue. Inadequate because they place themselves, on principle, in a universe “below” for the understanding of a force “beyond”, as profound as it is unshakable.
In these essays, I tried to follow Deleuze's style in his cinema books, in the sense of not facing the thought of images as something to be fought, but to be understood in its multiple agencies.[xxv] Naturalist images never condensed my desires, nor what I think about cinema and life. I have never felt contemplated by any of the films analyzed here. I have felt uncomfortable, challenged and even insulted before. There is a distance between these films and the vitalism with which I insist on understanding cinema and life.
The way in which naturalism faces the unknown is organized in the form of a bottomless outside the lived level, also called the death drive, which acts by pressing and condemning bodies to an animalistic and destructive existence. We could establish other meanings of the death drive, but they would not be the death drive of naturalism and the images that populate this publication.
It is this conception, so intimate and so social, that is at stake. If I can know today the estrangement that these images provoked in me, it is due to the distance between the vitalism that I insist on believing in and the regressivism that they insist on testifying.
*Cristiane Freitas Gutfreind is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS).
*Bruno Leites Professor at the Department of Communication at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Reference
Bruno Leites. Cinema, Naturalism, Degradation: Essays based on Brazilian films from the 2000s. Porto Alegre: Ed. Sulina, 2021.
Notes
[I] As Andrew Sarris states, in Film: the Illusion of Naturalism, “Naturalism in cinema is almost a reflection of the medium itself. Theater was born out of ritual; the cinema, of reporting. Consequently, the term 'naturalist cinema' is almost tautological” (1968, p. 110, our translation). The reflection on the naturalism inherent to the camera also leads us to the famous text by Charles Baudelaire (2007) regarding the Salon of 1859, The modern public and photography, which denounces the naturalism of photography and its influence on the arts of the period. Luiz Nazario (2017), in Naturalism in film, criticizes the “ontological” approach to cinematographic naturalism.
[ii] Em The cinematographic discourse: opacity and transparency, Ismail Xavier (2005) associates classic cinema and naturalism, including due to the use of “classical decoupage”, which seeks to hide the montage gesture with imperceptible transitions. In Rivers, bridges and overdrives: transit and the (de)composition of space in Amarelo Manga, Ramayana Lira (2012) characterizes naturalism as the paradoxical union between the search for a regime of transparency and the interest in the formless, “ex-creted from the ruins”. In The early naturalist cinema: mass media and painting traditions, Gabriel Weisberg (2010b) includes naturalist cinema in the tradition of the “illusion of reality”, which had flourished in the previous century.
[iii] Em The return of artifice in Brazilian cinema, Denilson Lopes seeks to point out a path “different from the naturalist recurrence, interested in thinking of the artist as an observer, chronicler and photographer of reality and art as a document of reality or a window to reality”. For Lopes, the images of the hinterland and the favela, syntheses of the public space in both Cinema Novo and Retomada would be, in this sense, faithful “to the weight of Naturalism in our literary tradition” (Lopes, 2007, p. 102).
[iv] With regard to “Opening Naturalism”, Ismail Xavier states that one of its main characteristics is the intention to reveal a “truth” submerged in reality, associated with a narrative based on “traditional formulas”: “Naturalism appears, then, as seductive strategy of the show and as a mark of authenticity, daring, in the presentation of data”. Among the “Opening Naturalism” films, emphasis is placed on the tendency of the “politician-policeman”, seen in Lúcio Flávio, the passenger of agony (1976) and Pixote, the law of the weakest (1980), among others (Xavier, 2001, p. 112-114).
[v] The relationship between naturalism and “traditional formulas” or “narrative genres that are quite stratified in their easy-to-read conventions”, appears in two moments in which Ismail Xavier addresses naturalism in his work, whether to relate it to classic Hollywood cinema, or to characterize the emerging “Aperture Naturalism” in Brazilian cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Xavier, 2005, p. 41; Xavier, 2001, p. 112-114). Gabriel Weisberg also relates naturalist cinema and mass media, which in the 2010th century would be characterized in the Art Salons in which ordinary people were represented (Weisberg, 2010a, 2020b). The relationship between naturalism and less aesthetic productions is a recurring perception in the context of audiovisual production – for example, cinematographer Adriano Goldman (XNUMX) explains the tone of “enhanced realism” he created in the series The Crown as an antidote to “mundane” naturalism: “It was more difficult to maintain the same tone of heightened realism as the previous series without falling into an easier and more mundane naturalism”.
[vi] Em the shock of part: aesthetics, media and culture, Beatriz Jaguaribe observes trends that tend to realism and others that tend to naturalism. For the author, “while the 'realist' characters have identity conflicts, folds of conscience and uncertainties about the very nature of the 'real', the naturalist characters act without further questioning, because they are driven by a framework of desires that determines them” (Jaguaribe, 2007, p. 122).
[vii] This is the view of Luiz Nazario: “In a simplified way, naturalist films would be those in which the artifices of cinematographic realism were purposely exaggerated to form a pessimistic, morbid and deterministic view of life” (Nazario, 2017, p. 527).
[viii] Fernão Ramos (2004) identifies a “cruel naturalism” in Brazilian films of the 1990s and 2000s, in the sense of a constant form of representation in a diverse range of Brazilian films of the period, which would like to accentuate the “bestial and repulsive aspects of life” , with the aim of disturbing, attacking and causing embarrassment in the spectator. It is also worth mentioning the excessive aspect of naturalistic literature, as highlighted by Keith Newlin (2011a) in Introduction: the naturalistic imagination and the aesthetics of excess.
[ix] In this sense, cf. American Literary Naturalism and Film Noir (Jaeckle, 2011); Cain, Naturalism and Noir (ORR, 2000), The cinema of George A. Romero (Williams, 2015), Naturalism and horror at Twentynine Palms (Gural-Migdal, 2009).
[X] Serge Daney (1983) stated that this is the most beautiful chapter of the motion-image, and Raymond Bellour (2005) resorts to drive-images to exemplify Deleuze's “moving” method, which produces “embarrassing” and “open” assemblages. Luc Moullet (2011, p. 26) considers the chapter on drive-images as “by far the worst chapter of the Deleuzian diptych”, because it would have mixed the heat of the drive with the coldness of naturalist objectivity, among other mistakes. About the marginality of the drive-image in Deleuzian studies, Roberto De Gaetano (2015) attributes it to the great diversity that makes up the concept, which, according to him, usually causes strangeness, although it is also a power.
[xi] In this respect, even Jacques Rancière (2009) presents the thesis that the aesthetic unconscious produced by the literature of the XNUMXth century, with Émile Zola as one of the exponents, would have been the basis of the psychoanalytic unconscious and, later, of the concept of death.
[xii] The title of David Baguley's work is Naturalist fiction: the entropic vision (nineteen ninety). The French version, published in 1990, was entitled Le naturalism et ses genres (1995). For authors who expand the vision of naturalism proposed by Baguley to Brazilian literature, I recommend the work of Leonardo Mentes and Pedro Paulo Catharina, such as Le naturalism brésilien au pluriel (2019), among other articles.
[xiii] For example, in chronically unfeasible e the smell of the drain. For a study on comic naturalism in Brazilian literature, cf. Epic of human impotence: naturalism, disillusionment and banality in the late XNUMXth century Brazilian novel (Mendes; Vieira, 2012).
[xiv] The “time that swallows everything” is described in the poetry recited in the preamble to bass of the beasts; “Chronicly unfeasible” is the title of the film – the work strives to embody the statement through countless degrading situations. The “tendency to destruction” is described in the passage said by the narrator character of chronically unfeasible when he enunciates the thesis about human nature. The “violence within us” is the engine of all the violence that occurs in mango yellow, according to an interview with the filmmaker (Assis, 2003). A reflection on these and other qualifications appears in the fifth essay of this publication, Films that think the impotence of thought.
[xv]rat fever is a subtly later film, released in 2011, but remains in the collection, because it was produced by the filmmaker who had come closest to naturalist theses and because it has relevant dialogues with naturalist films regarding the conception of a desiring body and the attribution of active function to the word.
[xvi] Freud describes the death drive as a force that pressures living bodies to “return to the inorganic”. Cf. Beyond the pleasure principle (Freud, 2019).
[xvii] In this book, there is no investment in differentiating “naturalism in cinema” and “naturalism in cinema”. The naturalist thought is updated in several fields (cinema, literature, theater, painting, photography), always with specificities attributed by the forms of expression and by the desires that move the directors. At all necessary points, I try to make it clear when I refer to general characteristics of naturalist thought and when I refer to its specific expressions, usually the Brazilian cinema of the 2000s and the naturalist literature of the end of the XNUMXth century.
[xviii] About filmmakers theory, cf. Making film theory from filmmakers – interview with Manuela Penafria (Penafria, 2020) and Presentation of the Theory of Filmmakers dossier (Leites; Baggio; Carvalho, 2020).
[xx] The strategy of watching films and excerpts that are in the beyond of naturalism, but in dialogue with it, is favored by a more restricted view of naturalism, associated with the death drive, which distances itself from some broader conceptions that I mentioned earlier. The inspiration came from an analysis by Deleuze (1985, p. 169; 2007a, p. 126) about the work of Luis Buñuel. The author states that Buñuel overcomes naturalism “from within”, reaching time-images by exploring repetitions that were presented as simultaneous worlds, as in The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie (1972). It is not the case to speak of simultaneous worlds for the films referred to here, even for How much is it worth or is it per kilo?, since the terrible parallel world of slavery is impregnated in the naturalist world, condemning it to cycles that only make misery repeat itself.
[xx] If I undertake this work in the future, I will think about investigating some lines that seem relevant to me: the idea of miserabilism as strength and potency in the aesthetics of hunger by Glauber Rocha (2004), in comparison with the bestial miserabilism of films with naturalist influence; the differences that exist between the strategy of producing allegories, recurrent in Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal, and that of “visualizing contemporary realities”, recurrent in the films gathered here; the aesthetics of fragmentation characteristic of many Cinema Marginal and Cinema Novo films, something that we rarely see in naturalism and in the films researched here; the technical sophistication and the beauty of the image, which were important values in part of the thought presented here, such as that of Cláudio Assis in mango yellow e bass of the beasts, and which seems to distance itself from the aesthetics of garbage and precariousness that we see in part of Marginal Cinema. Anyway, these are hypotheses, not sufficiently formulated, but which may have the strength to unfold into axes of future works with a comparative approach.
[xxx] Exception made to the proposed classification set out in Naturalistic films and their dispersions, in which I indicate the existence of some trends among the films analyzed in this publication.
[xxiii] For example, in Death and death: Jair Bolsonaro between enjoyment and boredom, by João Moreira Salles (2020). The deforestation scene in chronically unfeasible anticipates João Moreira Salles' analysis of current power: “Of the many construction sites where Bolsonarist demolition teams work, none is more spectacular than the Amazon. It destroys itself there without putting anything in its place, in exchange for nothing – it is the true political manifesto of the movement”. Pleasure and its enchantment with death, so important in naturalism (for example, in Cláudio Assis), also dialogue with the theses of the contemporary death drive: “It is something prior to all convention, an impulse that runs underneath, more primitive, more disturbing, and which, however, when it manifests itself, seems logical: death excites him. […] What provokes rejoicing is the body shot on the ground, the executed drug dealer, the beaten homosexual, the assaulted trans girl, the unconscious leftist, the wounded indigenous” (Salles, 2020).
[xxiii] I'm obviously talking about characters and not filmmakers. Criticism of naturalism has often associated authors with the sordid subjects they “study”. The fact that naturalism holds a vision of the world, called an “entropic vision” by Baguley (1990), does not result in a confusion between director and character. I explore this question in the essay the naturalist thought.
[xxv] The combativeness of Deleuze and Guattari in the anti-Oedipus e thousand plateaus against concepts of psychoanalysis, such as the death drive. However, this combativeness gives way to another type of approach in Deleuze's books on cinema. This question becomes evident when Deleuze takes up the concept of drive in the motion-image to think about naturalism in cinema and its obsession with negativity. Cf. Drive-image, naturalism in Gilles Deleuze.