By SHEILA SCHVARZMAN
Considerations on the two films, landmarks of recent black protagonism
“We are spectators of our absence”
(Akins Kinte apud live with Lincoln Pericles).[I]
In charge of news programs, advertising properties, university courses, cars, or representing a typical Brazilian family in sitcom, it was possible to observe from 2022 onwards, with unprecedented frequency, the inclusion of black people in positive images in the media. Not just creatures consecrated in football, popular music or soap operas. Presenting themselves according to conventional standards of elegance and neoliberal empowerment – smiling, well-dressed and not very black in complexion –, they were present in generic and neutralized national representations and, as such, included as consumers.
It was also in 2022 that two films by black directors, with predominantly black casts and crews, reached the mainstream (Martel, 2012): Provisional Measure, by Lázaro Ramos, with more than 500 thousand spectators and mars one, by Gabriel Martins, a film from Contagem, a suburb of Belo Horizonte, the Brazilian nominee for an Oscar. This unprecedented relevance constitutes a media event (Weber, 2011) that demands an analysis that qualifies and demarcates this singular historical moment and these films.
In addition to an international 'trend' triggered by barbaric events such as the murder of George Floyd in 2020 in the United States and related national events, the neoliberal focus on black people as a consumer market to be further exploited, in addition to an indelible racism in the Brazilian social formation - which is thus exposed in reverse by denial, increasing the presence of black people where they do not usually appear -, the mediasphere is having to open itself to the images and speeches of this minority majority of 54% of the Brazilian population.[ii]
A sign of the times, the result of decades of struggles and affirmation work that has intensified and become more qualified in the ten years since quotas were introduced in universities[iii], public policies in the social and cultural sphere, especially in the audiovisual sector, allowing new expressions and self-representations to emerge, alongside the increase in neoliberal identity politics.
Provisional measure e Mars one These are films with distinct themes, scope, social ambitions, production methods, staging and aesthetics. They were produced from 2018 onwards and commercially released in 2022, in April and August respectively. The first is a production with a television cast, the participation of a renowned black foreign actor, a large budget and significant media exposure for the director and promotion on social networks, aimed at a wide audience, which is usually referred to as a commercial film, which does not imply a value judgment.
The other is a low-budget film from an independent production company, made with funding from a public affirmative action notice. What brings them together and justifies the selection was their unprecedented media relevance, public reception and the reverberations they received as films by black directors. Furthermore, released in the year of the presidential elections, their narratives, especially Provisional measure, echoed and responded to the feeling of revolt and indignation. At a time of very low attendance at movie theaters after Covid-19, the public filled theaters throughout Brazil, helping to recover spectators who, with the streaming, they settled down on the sofa in the house.
Thus, keeping in mind postcolonial and peripheral studies and representation, from Franz Fanon (2008), Leila Gonzalez (1988), Stuart Hall (2016), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985/2010) to Achille Mbembe (2011), as well as those on regimes of visibility such as Jacques Rancière (2009), or black invisibility as in bell hooks (2019), given the specific characteristics of each of the objects under study and the social and aesthetic processes to which they are associated, Muniz Sodré, a specialist in communication and black cultures, when defining the Brazilian social form as one of incomplete slavery, since “the slave form of spirits has not been abolished”, allows us to understand and base in its breadth the event that we seek to highlight here.
According to Muniz Sodré (2019, p. 879): “The social form is the way in which society is configured inside and out. The idea of social form encompasses a vision of people’s interiority: how can one understand the other, how can one see the other. (…) The concept of social form tells me: ‘slavery is not over’. In the social form, people still reject dark-skinned individuals. I usually refer to the expressions light and dark. (…) Life can be difficult depending on the color of one’s skin. So, this form tells me: ‘the slave form has not been abolished from the spirits’.”
From this paradigm that viscerally composes the Brazilian social formation, arises the examination of what the films create, their political and ideological circumstances, which are expressed in the form of images and discourses that refuse the established, stereotyped, reiterated visualities (Bhabha, 1998), promoting another imaginary, to be shared by 'light or dark' skins (Sodré, 2019) and which will have repercussions in mainstream. As director André Novais notes, Plastic Films, the same production company as Gabriel Martins, responsible for mars one, refusing and opposing the usual forms of representation about black people is a political gesture. It opposes, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “epistemic violence” (2008), that which is enunciated by discourses and images and, thus, conforms, imposes and defines the identity of the other, subjugating him.
According to Novais, “portraying black people as people who live normally. Without the issue of violence or drug trafficking, which is generally how they are portrayed in Brazilian cinema and even in world cinema (…) Some people do not understand how political this is, in the sense that it is a way of getting people used to the idea that black people from the outskirts also live in harmony.” (NODAL, 2016)
Based on these premises, and remembering that each film expresses a distinct artistic, social and aesthetic project, it is in the differences that the broader picture of the possible paths of this inclusion lies and what these self-representations bring that is new and disruptive..
It is also necessary to clarify that we understand the mainstream, according to Fréderic Martel, as “the culture that pleases everyone”.[iv] (2012, p. 20).
The word, which is difficult to translate, literally means “dominant” or “general audience”, and is generally used to refer to a means of communication, a television program or a cultural product aimed at a wide audience. Mainstream It is the opposite of counterculture, subculture, niches; for many, it is the opposite of art.
Mainstream may refer to a 'market culture'' or the market, without aiming only at the monetization of entertainment, on the contrary, we believe that the purpose of these films is to reach a significant audience, to circulate other narratives, images, to build new imaginaries, contradicting what is established by white Eurocentric otherness, assuming the leading role of creation, in a unique and original artistic aspiration.
The construction of the event
Contrary to Weber's characterization of the media event (2011), the repercussion of the two films was not overwhelming, although the release of Provisional Measure since 2020, has been extensive, achieved reverberation and constant work of public engagement. The impact of mars one came from awards and repercussions at the Gramado Festival, but above all from the nomination by the Brazilian Academy of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts to compete for the Oscar for best foreign film of 2022. It is the exceptionality that marks the event: for the first time in the history of the exhibition of Brazilian films in commercial theaters, in the history of Brazilian cinema, therefore, two films produced by black people had significant public repercussion.
Cinema in general, and Brazilian cinema in particular, is an expensive activity, difficult to access, difficult to circulate and difficult to receive in public. Only in the 1980st century, with new digital equipment and their exhibition windows, combined with public policies to encourage production, has it become possible to film on a larger scale. Reaching the big screen and large audiences, however, remains complex. It is in the nature of Brazilian exhibition to be predominantly occupied by foreign films, the majority of which are American (Paulo Emílio, XNUMX).
Internal and external socioeconomic and cultural issues explain this panorama. For black people this difficulty is even greater (Carvalho, 2005). If we can mention the contributions of professionals such as Cajado Filho (1912-66), Odilon Lopez (1941), Haroldo Costa (1930), who worked as assistants, set designers, scriptwriters and even directors from the 1940s/50s onwards, with Cinema Novo, significant works by Zózimo Bulbul (1974), Luís Paulino dos Santos (1969) and Adélia Sampaio (1984) emerge, who, despite the density of their creations, which went hand in hand with the new cinemas, the expressive dialogue with what was taking place between the black and black women's struggle and affirmation movements in the USA (Gonzalez, 1982), the approximations with African cultures, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, and the oppression of the Military Regime, vividly expressed in Soul in the Eye (1974), an experimental short film by Zózimo Bulbul made with leftovers from another film, where the body and gestures speak of the place of black people in Brazil, this film, like that of Adélia Sampaio, the first film about love between two women, had difficulty being shown and distributed, and only from the 2000s onwards did they begin to be revived.[v]
A director like Joel Zito Araújo, with documentary productions like The Denial of Brazil (2007), fictions such as Daughters of the Wind (2004) and TV series, this pattern of difficulties in production and repercussions continues with greater relevance. In 2008, the Dogma Feijoada, with a manifesto, like the Dogma Danish where sociologist Noel Carvalho, director Jefferson De and other signatories prohibit the reproduction of stereotypes, in addition to promoting reflections that have continued ever since (Carvalho; De, 2005, Carvalho, 2022). In addition, both De who participates in television series and made M8 When death comes to the aid of life (2019), a feature film, and other independent directors produced films that, however, did not stand out.
From the 1990s onwards, with the Redemocratization, and the beginning of the 2000s, according to Liliane Leroux, schools in several cities offered audiovisual training to “young people from the working classes, residents of favelas, suburbs and outskirts.” As they were based on public notices and needed them to sustain themselves, they ended up, according to the author, becoming 'social projects' that present, in her understanding, a “civism of results” (2019, 26).
This path soon assumes, to a greater or lesser extent, the well-known formula of using art reduced to a tool to civilize young people from the working classes, through the pedagogical construction of artistic experience, by imposing a palatable thematic and aesthetic standard. The gaze and voice of the poor, even in these initiatives of “giving authorship”, would be in a certain way restricted by the expectation that they express what is imagined as being “proper to the working classes”: only what is necessary and useful. (Leroux, 2019, 26).
This assessment certainly does not reflect the totality of these productions and the paths they opened up; however, it is important to retain from this analysis how the form of inclusion, the socioeconomic situation and the place of residence of these producers were transformed into a genre – peripheral cinema – that was imposed on them. (Leroux, 2022, 26).[vi]
The uninterrupted production of documentaries and short films by black people is significant, as is the emergence of collectives, among them, Black Women, festivals, black feminist and peripheral affirmation publications, producers such as Plastic Films in Contagem in 2009. Any attempt at systematization will be incomplete, fortunately, as the achievements of various subjects throughout the country are multiple, powerful and uninterrupted.
Amidst this intense molecular movement of different achievements, geographies and territories that express themselves, from the point of view of mainstream It was the execution of George Flyod in 2020 in the United States that catalyzed yet another broad and international media process of indignation against racism, which became known as the Black Spring,[vii] term originally referred to by Lélia González, in Spring for the black roses in 1991, in the sense of a blackening of female and social struggles (GONZÁLES, 2018), recovered by the Bahian publicist Paulo Rogério Nunes, (CNN, 2020).[viii]
This is a historic moment. We are experiencing a Black Spring, with several countries joining the American protests. It is a process that will continue for a long time. However, it is important to remember that police violence is something serious and is linked to issues of racism in the economy, in the media, and in all areas.
According to Nunes, founder of the Vale do Dendê Accelerator and Instituto Mídia Étnica (a black media NGO in Brazil)[ix]), representation in the media was not a central issue in the fight against racism, but “representation is fundamental to creating identity. Consumers want to be seen in the media, in the movies. By placing them in these spaces, you include more people in the market, and by bringing in new consumers, you also bring more innovation to the sector”.[X]
From the movement of social awareness, self-awareness and struggle proposed by Gonzáles in 1991 and throughout his career, among other thinkers and activists of the black cause, in the present day, in a neoliberal and identity-based bias, this movement becomes an 'enterprise' of inclusion of poor black populations marginalized or of the lower middle class by consumption, according to the proposal of the advertiser. This approach seems to explain in part the current logic of the eugenic and tokenized presence[xi] of black people in the hegemonic media, approaching aspects of Provisional Measure, as we will show later.
Furthermore, contrary to what Nunes claims, there has always been concern about black representation, and not only in the media. The question is how, in the unfinished Brazilian slavery, black people had/have the power to control their representation. Recalling Jacques Rancière (2009, 16): “The sharing of the sensible makes it possible to see who can take part in the common according to what they do, the time and space in which this activity is carried out. Thus, having this or that “occupation” defines competences or incompetences for the common. It defines the fact of being or not being visible in a common space, endowed with a common word, etc. Therefore, there is, at the basis of politics, an “aesthetics” (gda).
This 'aesthetic' that Jacques Rancière speaks of echoes the disruptive party of Plastic Films. The opposite is visible in the whitewashed portraits of Machado de Assis for over a century. According to Jacques Rancière, he had the right to space for his noble activity as a writer and for social recognition; however, the image of the black man in the photograph was 'retouched'. One example among thousands of others.
On the other hand, the 'uprisings' also converged on this event,[xii] the peripheral insurrections of decades of cultural productions encouraged by NGO workshops, cultural centers, promoted by public notices (Leroux, 2022, p. 29) or independent (24th Tiradentes Exhibition, 2021) poor experiments, mixes, remixes do mainstream, of art, of cinema, practiced in different places, which with mars one comes to a palatable form mainstream.
It is a work by a director from the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, a producer who has been creating unique works since 2009, promoting other sensibilities, narratives, perspectives and bodies on screen, an experience of the common that manifests itself among black populations, but not only. Other miscegenations are expressed in Brazilian territories, as can be seen in rich discussions between creators such as Gabriel Martins from Contagem (MG), Lincoln Péricles, from Capão Redondo or Carol Rodrigues, from the outskirts of the South Zone, both from São Paulo.[xiii]
In these territories, works are carried out that do not even intend to reach the mainstream, as happened in 1988, when the indignant erupted rap ofThe Rationals, now incorporated into the media sphere. They are audiovisual manifestations that, like music, seek to express, think, think together and in other ways, and often in connection with music, poetry with slams by Akins Kinté[xiv] e the audiovisual as it occurs in Pericles' cinema (Silvino, 2021)[xv] among many others.
These are actions by young people also driven by access to university, which resulted in the increase of a critical mass that has been diversifying the perspectives of academic production, made by 'light or dark' people (Sodré, 2019, 879). The interiorization of federal universities is also in the wake of the creation of collectives such as Rozsa Films,[xvi] from Recôncavo Baiano, among other examples.
There is a tree anti-racist publications by national and foreign authors, the struggle of black women, the recognition of the writer Conceição Evaristo, Ana Maria González, the return to the scene of Carolina Maria de Jesus, films by beginners being recognized at festivals such as the Mostra de Tiradentes and taken to international festivals. There are countless indications, and from this point of view, the making of a film mainstream , the Provisional Measure, written by a renowned black actor like Lazaro Ramos, took a long time to arrive.
Provisional measure
Provisional measure is the first commercial Brazilian film to address racism as a central theme and gain widespread repercussion. Racism, but also its consequences, such as the distortion of laws and the aggressive and perverse normalizations that are present there. Using popular genres today – horror, science fiction in the form of dystopia and humor –, the film achieves the result of an almost epic by promoting the public exposure of Brazilian racism, while at the same time, giving vent to the common feeling of oppression in the face of the political climate that has been established in the country since 2016, especially under the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro.
The piece Nanibia, No, by Adri Assunção, directed by Lázaro Ramos in 2011, is the origin of the film that the actor began to adapt for cinema in 2013, transforming the play – in which two characters discussed black belonging at a time when the country still seemed to have positive expectations of the future – into the disheartening dystopia filmed between 2019/2020, which had its release blocked by Ancine. This blockage, delay or veiled censorship of the premiere in theaters,[xvii] had already happened with marighella, by Wagner Moura, also with a black protagonist, which was completed in 2019, but only released in 2021.
The career of Bahian Lázaro Ramos (1978) began in Olodum Gang in Salvador, at the age of 15, and is marked by successes as an actor in cinema, theater, television, as an interviewer, as the author of five children's books and the autobiography, On my skin (2017), which has racism as its central theme. He is also a UNICEF ambassador in Brazil. In other words, he is a name linked to social causes and in particular to the racial issue, publicly embodying the figure of the 'unique black man', that is, the one who has the visibility to speak for all others, according to the concept of Ana Maria Gonçalves, in A Color Defect (2017), referred to by him on the television program Live Wheel (11.4.2022)[xviii]
It was from this place of visibility and representation that Lázaro Ramos gave 72 interviews between 2020, in the final moments of production and Ancine's blockades, and in 2022, when the film was released (Live Wheel, 2022). This promoted a constant media intervention on the themes that Afrofuturist dystopia raises. It was also through this that he staged his experience under Jair Bolsonaro: “How did we not realize that this was going to happen?” a terrified question from the film’s characters, and from the viewer.
The dozens of interviews allowed him to address his ideas about the destiny and power that greater participation of black people can bring to society: “The public wants this. It is not a social demand, it is a market demand.” (Live Wheel, 2022). In the interview, it should be noted that the social has become the market.
The interviews helped to create expectations around the film, through an effective media campaign, which amalgamated the film and Ramos's speeches into a militant resistance against racism (Ramos's Instagram Provisional measure offers instructions and courses on combating racism in companies[xx]) and the oppressive power of Jair Bolsonaro's government, “perversity as state policy” (Roda Viva, 2022). Based on the film's initial good reception, the author encouraged the continuation of Provisional measure in the country's movie theaters, encouraging the uninterrupted presence of the public, a mandatory factor for a film to remain on display.
He achieved this feat for six months, reaching 500 spectators in movie theaters, at a time when the public went to the cinema very little, and practically no Brazilian films. In addition, he published the Director's Diary, a book about the making of the film. By-products filling 'de Lázaro Ramos' media spaces and recesses, spreading the idea of a film about black people made by black people[xx].
The plot and the staging
Provisional measure builds a dystopian future, where an oppressive government decides to forcibly return the black population to Africa, as a response to the demand for compensation for centuries of slavery. Antônio Gama (Alfred Enoch), a young lawyer – with the same last name as Luís Gama, like the character, a black lawyer who fought against slavery – married to the doctor Capitu (Taís Araújo), resists the expulsion by fighting against banishment through legal means. Along with the couple lives their cousin André Rodrigues (Seu Jorge), a journalist who is dating Sarah (Mariana Xavier), who is white.
The 'return' of citizens with 'heavy melanin', according to the film, a euphemism with which the government refers to the black population, is led by Isabel (Adriana Esteves), “the dedicated and relentless bureaucrat” (Araujo, 2022) and her secretary, Santiago (Pablo Sanábio). The feminine name, above all, is not innocent, since Princess Isabel became known, in official historiography, as “the Redeemer” of black people, responsible for the abolition of slavery.
In the film, the rebels are hunted down violently by the police, which happens to Capitu in the hospital where she is a doctor. She and other fugitives run through the forest and are rescued by the resistance of the Afrobunker, the urban quilombo where they take refuge. There are countless black people there, all different in their ways of being, skin tone, profession, age. Antônio, the lawyer and André, entrenched in the apartment, resist, but are persecuted by Izildinha (Renata Sorrah), the building manager where they live.
Outside the apartment, André is killed by the police. Santiago, Isabel's assistant, leaves his job and goes to meet Ivan, her boyfriend, one of those responsible for the Afrobunker, but the resistance fighters, fearing that he is an infiltrator, execute him. Antônio meets Capitu again, the two are arrested, but manage to escape with the help of resistance fighters. In the end, while hundreds of black people take to the streets to the sound of What is silent, music by Elza Soares, this image is superimposed over images of other black personalities. After the final credits, the film shows that the couple and their son had a happy destiny in some other land.
When working on popular genres such as horror and science fiction, the film reaches a dystopia to contemporary taste, with persecutions, hiding places, arbitrariness and violence of the oppressor, composing a melodramatic narrative of the struggle of good against evil, punctuated by tragic circumstances, with comic breaths and a happy ending, using black middle-class protagonists, which is not usual in Brazilian audiovisual fiction. It is a narrative arrangement to the taste of mainstream, constructing a melodrama of black self-representation with injustices, trials, the hero's trajectory and even contradictions and errors between them.[xxx]
The director's inspiration from American and black series and directors is explicit. There is an amalgamation of atmospheres from series like Black Mirror e The Handmaid's Story with landscapes of Little Africa, a significant territory for African culture in Rio de Janeiro, where a decade ago, from excavations at Cais do Valongo, the places where slaves arrived and were sold were discovered. These landscapes appear in scenes of chases through the alleys, on the scribbled, gray walls – canonical settings of cinematic dystopias –, with the reproduction of advertisements for escaped and wanted captives from the 19th century, which evoke the persecutions of that time.
It is there, passing by Pedra do Sal, an old reference point for slaves, that the Afrobunker. In contrast to the shadows of these territories of escape and resistance, the center of power is luminously oppressive with its rectilinear spaces of large, uninhabited glass buildings that also blatantly occupy other Brazilian cities.
O Afrobunker It is the hiding place and place of resistance where the film gives space for different characters, faced with the fear of being denounced by the white Santiago, to cry out their pain of injustice and persistent prejudice. It is the central moment of the film, in an intense psychodrama, which appeals to identification and dialogue with the viewer. A moment of catharsis and engagement. However, it culminates in Santiago's execution.
According to Lázaro Ramos, he sought inspiration for the staging and lighting in Moonlight (Barry Jenkins. 2016), in the atmospheres of “If Baele Street Could Talk (idem, 2019), in Spike Lee and Jordan Peele, all black American filmmakers, seeking terror, which is constructed in the faceless image of the police officers. Terror, however, although sought, does not come from the staging, but from the situation that is created, unlike what happens in About (2019), by Peele.
At the same time, as the director approaches the Brazilian racial issue by resorting to recognition by law, a practice that has not developed properly in Brazil – it is part of North American law and it was through it that segregation was put to an end there, amidst the persistence of violence and racism –, we understand the concept of a lawyer protagonist who seeks compensation and citizenship through the law that would protect black people from exile.
Compensation was never considered in Brazil, except by José Bonifácio, who was in favor of Abolition at the time of Independence. As a rule, only farmers claimed their losses from the Emperor and the Republic. What we have had after a century of Abolition is the criminalization of racism, a law from 1989, not always practiced and respected, and reparation policies such as the still contested quotas in universities or funding notices in the audiovisual sector – only one in 2016.
It is true, however, that in the 1970s, when the black movement in Brazil gained momentum in a more structured way, it was inspired by what was happening in the United States, a time of great effervescence in the struggle for civil rights, following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, due to his actions, the militancy of intellectuals such as Angela Davis, from the Black Panthers, who would impact Lélia Gonzáles and other Brazilian activists, as well as the artistic work of Zózimo Bulbul, according to Noel Carvalho (2005).
What changes with Provisional measure is the point of view from which the film and the characters move. The protagonist is a middle-class man, as is the woman, a doctor. The plot censors and circumvents the established cliché images of black people living in favelas and/or with weapons. The favela is only mentioned in one dialogue and during a news report reporting on the attacks, but it is distant. Ramos gave prominence to middle-class black characters like himself, since they “are practically abandoned in the history of our cinema” (Roda Viva, 2022).
In this way, it seeks another visual identity, a geographic territory of its own, which will sometimes have appeared in exceptional characters in soap operas or sitcoms from TV. The three protagonists have higher education and live in an apartment in Botafogo, not in the communities or suburbs, where they are usually located in Brazilian mass audiovisual productions.
The ambition to reach a wide audience is noticeable, including outside Brazil, particularly in Africa, where it was released in early 2023, rekindling a dialogue that Brazilian cinema already experienced during the Cinema Novo, or in the United States where it was shown at black film festivals. In his account, the importance of contact with the pay TV channel is clear Black Entertainment Television from Los Angeles, and with his “sales strategies (…) realized that there is an audience interested in stories linked to the black population” (21). Put this way, for the director, seeing and being seen seems to account for the tragedy launched by the film.
At the same time, what can be seen in Lázaro Ramos and what can be seen in the images ofProvisional MeasureIt is the experience he brings from the massive medium in which he operates, television, with the dramatic structure of his fictional products.
There is a kind of 'media wisdom' in the composition of the actors and the team: co-director Flávia Lacerda comes from television, as does Daniel Filho, the producer, who gives the film the quality of setting and finish, noticeable from the presence of drones in the traveling shots aerial and night scenes taken from Praia de Botafogo, but also in the choice of the English actor Alfred Enoch, known for harry potter, son of an English actor with “Afro-Brazilian descendant” mother, according to Imdb, Taís Araújo, the charismatic Seu Jorge, the friendly chubby Mariana Xavier, his girlfriend, the renowned television villains Renata Sorrah and Adriana Esteves, and black personalities such as D. Diva Guimarães, Emicida, as well as countless actors, and another 26 black extras who make up the Afrobunker, among the 77 actors in the cast, as well as the technicians, most of whom are also black. (Ramos, 2022, p. 48)
The director hired sociologist Aline Maia Nascimento to investigate what black people did not want to see in the image, such as their own characteristics. (Ramos, 2022,13) And this certainly contributed to the empathy that the film promoted among the black and white viewers it reached, as it is a film that aims to speak to white people as well: it is about teaching them how to look at black people.
The film addresses its audience from a new point of view, if we consider the characteristics of Brazilian films, according to the studies of Noel Santos Carvalho (2005, 2022) or even João Carlos Rodrigues (2011). Thus, it is not from the perspective of the violence of the oppressed, nor of resentment (Carvalho, 2005). Nor even through the conciliation based on cultural contributions – carnival, samba –, according to Ismail Xavier, or through the supposedly happy sexual miscegenation, which omit and erase conflicts. (Xavier, 1993).
It is also not about examining the representations of black people on television, like Joel Zito Araujo in The Denial of Brazil from 2000, by this director, screenwriter, producer and curator who has recognized work for TV Globo. On the contrary, the film seeks to respond to the themes of the research, thus bringing up the Princess Isabel syndrome, the good white man who wants to help, the interracial relationship between Seu Jorge and his girlfriend. Other anchor points of the narrative, another perspective.
However, the dramatic structure does not escape the clichés of melodrama that overlap with dystopian essays: the central couple, separated and sacrificed by adversity, resists.
The stalkers are stereotypical, caricatured, and not without reason, consecrated villains of soap operas. In the ending, the director creates a dramatic situation that parallels the murders of André (Seu Jorge), who was reported by the evil union, and Santiago, who leaves his job as Isabel's advisor at the Ministry of Devolution and takes refuge in Afrobunker, creating the expectation of successful adhesion of the white man to the wronged “melaninated”, which does not happen. Santiago is there only because he is the boyfriend of one of the leaders – another diversity that the plot contemplates –, however, misunderstood by the majority of blacks, he is executed.
André, in Botafogo, will be surrounded and killed by the police, the Devolução henchmen. But Santiago, the white man, will also be eliminated, not without violence or opposition, by those who fear for the safety of the quilombo. With the plot revolving around Santiago, the director stages the reverse of prejudice and its equally harmful consequences.
Ramos thus sought to create a parallel between the irrationality of André's elimination by the police and the execution of Santiago by blacks, but the comparison is of a different order. Blacks kill out of fear, to survive. The police kill because this is their job, they are paid for it. The police have the rationality of power. Blacks of Afrobunker They fear being captured, and they don't want to believe that Santiago would be there because of his love for a black man.
The construction of the scenes with Santiago, the entire sequence of his trip to the hideout and its consequences, lacks coherence, especially because his beloved, Ivan, who is one of the leaders of the place, soon forgot what happened after his murder. There are many actions that simply build up, which must be shown to the viewer because they seem to respond to a progressive agenda of customs.
This homosexual love, this adhesion by a white man that only generates distrust, suggests that the issues concerning black men can only be resolved by their own actions: it is not a problem for white men. The quick and shallow scenes in this part are not explained clearly. They do not have the time or development to be understood. They are there to show something. They say something because it is necessary to capture the audience, the “market”, as the director says, but they soon give way to another issue.
In short, Provisional measure affirms the right to existence in extremis, in a dystopian scenario, but that is exactly the mechanics of dystopia: to lead to action, awareness. With this, or despite this, what stands out is the pedagogy on how black people should be seen, re-seen and see themselves.
At the end of the film screenings, over the course of almost six months, especially on weekends, the film was applauded emotionally by the audience. It resonated socially.[xxiii]
Mars one
“you need to have eyes to see this immense reserve of imagination that nestles beneath the skin of routine and transform it into cinema.” (Guimarães, 2021).
Mars one, awarded by the popular jury of the Gramado Festival (20/8/2022) as best film and the special jury prize for “bringing back affection”, a feeling shared by the “cries at the end of the screening at the festival and wherever it has been shown in a short and fought space on the Brazilian circuit in 33 theaters” (Dias, 2022), it did not have the same space and media repercussion as Provisional measure.
The film was shown at the Sundance Festival in Toulouse and won best film. Black Star Film Festival in Philadelphia[xxiii], an event dedicated entirely to black films (Anic, 2022), a fact practically ignored in mainstream Brazilian. However, it was the choice of the work by the jury of 19 critics of the Brazilian Academy of Cinema[xxv] to the 2023 Oscars (5.9.2022) which attracted attention, mobilized a campaign to raise funds to raise awareness among voters of the American Academy, interviews for newspapers and blogs, but did not pass the barrier of the 15 pre-selected for the Oscar in December.
Before that, however, independent producer Array Releasing[xxiv], by Ava DuVernay – the first black American director to win a film festival, at Sundance in 2012, with the film Middle of nowhere – has acquired distribution rights for the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and for American Netflix, premiering there in January 2023. According to Tilane Jones, the collective's president, “Array is proud to distribute Mars One, which marks the first time that Brazil has chosen a film by a black Brazilian director to represent the country at the Oscars for best international feature film”. As a result, in Brazil, the number of movie theaters interested in screening the film reached 69 and, according to the website Live Screen, had a 200% increase in audience (Tela Viva, 2022[xxv]).
mars one does not address racial prejudice. Gabriel Martins, as well as his three colleagues from Plastic Films, turns to the dense being in the world that can emerge from the backyard, the street, the house, on the long bus trips that separate Contagem from the center of Belo Horizonte, where the cinemas and college were, a time of imagination, of imagined films that were created in the tedium of waiting for the journeys. The observation and the affections that flow from the supposed banality of a window where one sees a busy street and a gas station, in the short film Ghosts (2011), in Just over a month, or Season, by André Novais, in Martins' shorts.
As Victor Guimarães observed about Saturday Movie, Martins' short film, summarizes much of his career, from Plastic Films, it's from mars one “when everything outside says no, the gaze turns to the backyard and sees there an immensity of possibilities” (2021).
This is the central theme of mars one. The dreams, fears and thread of life that is woven into the daily life of the family of Deivid (Cícero Lucas), a twelve-year-old boy who, despite playing soccer well, wants to be an astrophysicist and colonize Mars, going against the plans of his father, the doorman Wellington (Carlos Francisco), a former alcoholic who attends AAA, works in an upper-middle-class building, and wants to see him play. Deivid shares his secret plan with his sister, Eunice (Camilla Damião), a young university student, who helps him buy a ticket to see the lecture by the black American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, about mars one, which the boy wants to be a part of in 2030.
She, in turn, shares with him her love for her girlfriend Joana and her plan to leave home to live together, but she fears her parents' reaction. Tercia (Rejane Faria), the mother who takes care of the artist Tokinho's house, is the victim of a prank on television in a bar in the city center. Scared ever since, she believes she is the victim of a curse that could harm the family. Meanwhile, the father gets the help of a famous player so that Deivid can take a test at Cruzeiro, however, this would be on the same day as the conference and the boy does not want to miss it, and above all, he does not want football to be his destiny.
The father, on the other hand, is hopeful about this possibility and leaves work for a few hours to prepare for the occasion. He asks an assistant to replace him in the tasks at the building manager's house. However, he never imagined that the young man who complained about the inequalities between his life and that of the residents of that building would rob the building manager's house in his absence. He is summarily dismissed, at the same time that Deivid causes an accident with his bike and breaks his leg, putting an end to his future in football.
The fired father finds out about his son's accident and, upset, starts drinking again. After the storm of mismatched desires and dreams, Deivid is relieved, his father recovers and his mother realizes that fate has spared her from a serious accident, while his sister continues with her girlfriend. Deivid, who built a telescope with recycled material and gadgets from his grandfather, who was also inventive, on the terrace of the house, shows the family the stars and the possibility of reaching them, reaching Mars. Life and its possibilities that can be thought of for everyone.
Limits, destinies, setbacks that everyone shares and that would tend, in other hands, to be treated with a drama that mars one and Plastic Films avoids. Limits can be drawn by social, racial, or gender situations, however, one must look at them, seek escapes, understanding, and put oneself in the other person's shoes. This is the political and emotional gesture that the film proposes at a time of so much discord, of so many prejudices unleashed with such violence and irrationality as those experienced in Brazil at that time.
This is the empathetic insurrection proposed by the images, “showing the lives of black people without making it activism. The subject is there,” as critic Inácio Araujo (2022) observes. However, “Just look at the way the father is treated when he loses his job – which reveals how this population and the lower social classes are treated in Brazil.” (Araujo, 2022)
Deivid is Gabriel Martins and his telescope, a sum of stories, personal experiences and the possible DIY to do what he has dreamed of since he was 8 years old, as happened with him and his classmates. Making 'plastic' films, the suggestive name of the production company, films with the possible resources for young people from peripheral neighborhoods who like movies, but do not see on the screen people like those they know, the spaces where they live. Other lives, landscapes, spaces like Tercia's birthday party, Eunice's dances, the family card game in the living room, the bicycle, the cafeteria, the tiredness and the discomfort on the bus.
The doorman struggling with the building manager he tries to please, and the cleaner who bothers him by criticizing the unequal situation, the instability of Tercia's livelihood as a day laborer, and even the studious black boy on the computer, with his big glasses. According to Gabriel, bringing this to the screen: “It's a state of mind, talking about characters in this condition of some kind of marginality, which is not the central place of the narratives, characters who occupy places that the world is not looking at” (Dias, 2022).
Thus, the characters are black and live their lives, but they are all different, like the parents of Eunice's girlfriend who, having a better social status, welcome their daughter's relationship, while Wellington and Tercia do not understand at first, a tension visible in the scene where, on Joana's first visit to Eunice's family, in front of the television where Cruzeiro, her father's team, and Atlético MG, his girlfriend's team, are playing a game, Atlético wins, which makes the father very upset, certainly because he is not only bothered by football, but also by realizing his beloved daughter's choice. Small notations that are constructed with and far beyond racial issues.
Se Provisional Measure spoke to a large audience by bringing up the oppressive climate that was being experienced, mars one Although it initially resonated with a smaller audience, it also fits into this same reality when in the opening scenes, in the kitchen, the daughter who is washing the dishes, criticizes her mother for not encouraging her brother to help with the housework, and the news of the 2018 election results can be heard on the radio in the background, but there is no commentary. The characters, as well as the viewer, live through that change, and have to continue living. It is everyone's condition.
The bus and the cinema
Gabriel Martins (1987) grew up in Contagem when it was still a forest, the place where the family could buy the land for the house that was gradually built. He started thinking about making films at the age of 8, although there was no movie theater there or nearby. With the encouragement of his parents, at the age of 12 they took him to Tiradentes Film Festival, when you can do workshops and see seven-headed beast (2000), by Laís Bodansky. “I went crazy with that. Understanding that there were actors who transformed themselves, that made sense to me.” (Dias, 2022).
At 17 he attended Free School of Cinema Belo Horizonte (2005) where he made his first short film and met André Novais and Thiago Macêdo Correia. Maurílio Martins, the fourth partner of Plastic Films, came to the film school he attended with a scholarship. In a debate with other creators, he says that, “to come to college, I lived far from Belo Horizonte, I spent more than an hour on the bus. Home and study, home and work, a place of experiences, of boredom and delays in getting between home and study. This social neglect, the government’s neglect of public transportation, ends up generating in dreamy and very stubborn minds an excuse to invent. This is my story, it’s the story of André and Maurílio, public transportation has always been a point of great invention. And these people I saw, still awakened something very strong, parallel to the cinema that reached me. (…) And when I started to think about what it would be like to make a film, what I saw in my daily life and what I accessed in the cinema were very opposite and very distant things. What I saw was mainly American cinema and some things that came to me from Brazilian cinema and seemed very distant from me. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Brazilian cinema I saw was quite limited in terms of themes and locations” (Martins, 2021).
Plastic films?
In the production company that was founded in 2009, the four partners take turns in the different roles of production, filming, editing, using their own homes as locations, relatives, neighbors, and girlfriends as actors, their stories as themes, as seen in Novais' films, themes that were broadened as they obtained more resources and the films were well received in Brazil and abroad, as also happened with mars one the first solo feature film directed by Gabriel after In the Heart of the World (2019) with Maurilio Martins.
The idea for the script came about in 2014 with the euphoria of the World Cup, but it changed as Brazil changed and was only realized because Gabriel was approved in a first and only ANCINE notice in 2016 for low-budget affirmative action films aimed at black people, which, as always happens, took a long time to be implemented and was only filmed in 2018, under very different political conditions and which the film reflects even in the option for a future lived on Mars.
The last few years have been very difficult for film production, and for Gabriel, although there are streams international producers who have employed local directors and crews for films under their supervision, it is public money that can include more, even from an economic point of view, as it gives work to many people. “When you make a film with public money, you can put the personality of your collective in a much more direct way, without mediators. Which is very important, even in terms of income distribution in Brazil.” (Anic, 2022).
As you can see, Gabriel Martins does not make a racially affirming film, even though it exists precisely because it brings black people and lower middle class populations to the screen in situations that are not generally seen in mainstream.
"mars one It is not a film that will keep pushing you to talk about race, politics, or affirmation. It will capture you from another perspective, it will capture you through emotion, to make you understand how to empathize with the situation of others.” (Brito, 2022)
To build this empathetic environment, the film uses an almost documentary tone in the close-up shots of the characters, in the construction of the dialogues and in the performances of the cast, in the generally warm lighting of family gatherings, between a warm orange-brown or a soft blue, since it is generally at night, when they return from work, that everyone gets together, or in the bedroom when the siblings talk. The camerawork is close to the characters, without unnecessary juggling.
The training and imagination of these filmmakers and their work, as we can see, say a lot about Brazilian inequality and the social abyss that is consecrated and reiterated in the hegemonic culture and in media products where these populations as such do not exist, serve the news as administrative problems, security problems or tearful pity without consequences, or as laughable caricatures, generally hysterical or dangerous in different fictional formats, as can be seen in countless productions of the conglomerate. Globe, although exceptions are made.
And, in the academic sphere, if they continue to be defined as peripheral, seen as outside the center, outside the culture, or below the established culture, when they are precisely making decentralization, inclusive culture.
By way of conclusion
In the end, each of the films, with its differences, offers other possible images of black populations, free from the uncomplex and unequivocally prejudiced clichés that have been historically manufactured and continually reiterated. It is about the possibility, through new fabrications with other creative subjects, of making black people fully “visible in a common space, endowed with a common word”, as Rancière (2009) points out, based on Brazilian cinema.
There is still a long way to go. However, it is important to highlight that, at a time when Brazilian box office sales reached their lowest level in 2022, with 1,6% occupancy, these films and directors should point to other images and possibilities for cinema made in the country.
*Sheila Schvarzman, historian, is a professor of the Postgraduate Program in Communication at Anhembi Morumbi University.
References
Anic, L. (2022.11.6) Director of mars one talks about independent cinema. Uol Magazine Range. l1nk.dev/gq2Ac
Araujo, I. (2022.4.13). Lázaro Ramos' Provisional Measure seems like a didactic soap opera, Sao Paulo Newspaper. l1nk.dev/AgAix
Araujo, I. (2022.8.24). mars one promises more than it delivers by stitching together conservative Brazil, feminism and racism. Folha/Uol Guide. l1nk.dev/JaoRR
Bhabha, HK (1998). The place of culture. UFMG Publishing House.
Brito, L. (2022.8.21). With four awards, mars one is featured at the 50th Gramado Film Festival. CNN Brazil. encr.pw/dTGwq
Campaign “From Minas to the world drives Mars one to the Oscar. (2022.9.19). Living Screen. https://encr.pw/Y0hj7
Carvalho, NS (2005). Outline for a history of black people in Brazilian cinema. In J. De. Dogma Feijoada: Brazilian Black Cinema. (pp. 17- 101). Official Press.
Carvalho, N. S. (2022). Brazilian black cinema. Papyrus.
Cavalcante, A. (2017). Brazilian (feminist) filmmakers during the civil-military dictatorship. In: K. Holanda; MT Cavalcanti (orgs.). Feminine and plural: women in Brazilian cinema. pp. (pp. 59-76) Papirus.
Dias, T. (2022.8.29). From Contagem (MG) to the world: Gabriel Martins and the inspiration in the characters and situations of his neighborhood. TAB UOL. l1nk.dev/WSJSS
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. Salvador: Edufba.
Gomes, P. E. (1980). Cinema, a trajectory in underdevelopment. Peace and Earth.
Gonçalvez. AM (2017). a color defect. Record.
González, L. (1988). The political-cultural category of Amefricanity. Brazilian weather (92/3). pp. 69-82
Gonzalez, L. (2018). Spring for the black roses. Union of Pan-African Collectives of São Paulo.
Guimarães, V. (2021). Aesthetics of the backyard remix: fragments around Plastic Films. Kinetics https://encr.pw/rKukA.
Hall, S. (2016). Culture and representation. (D. Miranda and W. Oliveira Trans.). Ed. Puc-Rio.
Hogg. M, and Vaughan, G. (2018). Social psychology. Pearson Education Limited.
hooks, bell. (2019). Black looks: race and representation. Elephant.
Huberman, G. D. (2017). Levantes. Sesc Publishing House.
Keslassy, E. (2022.12.2). Ava DuVernay´s Array releasing buys 'Mars One', Brazil´s Oscar entry. Variety. pw/CDYLf.
Martel, F. (2012). Mainstream: the global war of media and cultures. (C. Marques Trad). Brazilian Civilization.
Martins, G. (2021) What is a character. 24th Tiradentes Film Festival. https://encr.pw/k2x4Y
Nodal (2016). She returns on Thursday portrays an ordinary family from Belo Horizonte. NODAL Culture. https://goo.gl/7thNBh
Ramos, L. (2022). Provisional Measure: Director's Diary. Cobogo.
Rancière, J. (2009). The sharing of the sensible: aesthetics and politics. EXO/ Publisher 34.
Rodrigues, J. C. (2011). The Brazilian black and the cinema. Pallas.
Silvino, AJO (2021) cine-sample by Lincoln Péricles. Kinetics. http://revistacinetica.com.br/nova/lincoln-pericles-anajuliasilvino-2021/
Sodré, Muniz (2019). From the place of speech to the body as a place of dialogue: race and ethnicities from a communicational perspective. Receipts. 13(4). https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/view/1944/2314.
Spivak, G. Can the subaltern speak? (2010) (Almeida, S, Feitosa, M. Trans.). UFMG Publishing House, 2010.
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Notes
[I] Akins Kinté is a poet from São Paulo. Lincoln Péricles is a filmmaker from Capão Redondo. https://encr.pw/k2x4Y
[ii] https://jornal.usp.br/radio-usp/dados-do-ibge-mostram-que-54-da-populacao-brasileira-e-negra/
[iii] A critical reading of case studies from the research Assessment of Affirmative Action Policies in Higher Education in Brazil. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365943948_Uma_leitura_critica_dos_estudos_de_caso_da_pesquisa_Avaliacao_das_Politicas_de_Acao_Afirmativa_no_Ensino_Superior_no_Brasil [accessed Jan 13 2023].
[iv] From the original title Mainstream: poll sur cette culture qui plâit à tout le monde, Paris: Flamarion, 2010.
[v] Studies on Brazilian female directors since the 2010s have brought back the contribution and characteristics of Adélia Sampaio's work and career (Cavalcante, 2017).
[vi] Because of appropriations of this type, and because the notion of periphery is in itself a value judgment, it presupposes a center; the place of the norm; and what is outside it, the periphery; I avoid using it, even though it is a word in full use today to designate a cinematographic and cultural genre, academic use, among others.
[vii]Paulo Rogério Nunes considered one of the 100 most influential black people by the UN” https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/estamos-vivendo-a-primavera-negra-diz-publicitario-paulo-rogerio-nunes/
[viii] https://liderancacomvalores.com.br/lideres/paulo-rogerio-nunes/
[ix] https://liderancacomvalores.com.br/lideres/paulo-rogerio-nunes/
[X]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/estamos-vivendo-a-primavera-negra-diz-publicitario-paulo-rogerio-nunes
[xi] The term tokenized comes from tokenism (from the English token: symbol), “the practice of publicly making small concessions to a minority group to deflect accusations of prejudice and discrimination” (Hogg and Vaughan, 2018, p.387).
[xii] In the sense of Georges Didi Huberman in his book and exhibition Levantes (2017)
[xiii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buFUHow5D_0
[xiv] Slam https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1429648970451151
[xv] Community Cinema. https://www.youtube.com/c/lincolnpericles
[xvi] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcbsaYbMpcg9-mAeD8dUVpQ
[xvii] https://veja.abril.com.br/cultura/ancine-nao-libera-filme-de-lazaro-ramos-e-trava-estreia-no-pais/ 6.12.2021
[xviii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oca5C6bwXOY
[xx] https://www.instagram.com/medidaprovisoriaofilme/
[xx] On the film's Instagram: “I just watched it and I confess that I'm crying... As a black woman, I felt in my soul the pain that the film shows, but I was also able to get involved in the strength of resistance that is explicit from beginning to end. A Provisional Measure is not far from happening if we do not resist and fight for the country that is also ours.” (luciana galizabaoba) https://www.instagram.com/medidaprovisoriaofilme/
[xxx] Evidently white fiction about blacks is full of melodramas, like the Slaveship de Castro Alves and many others, not just Brazilians.
[xxiii] “Watch the Provisional Measure in the cinema is a revolutionary act” Comment on the film’s Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/medidaprovisoriaofilme/ 22.8.2022
[xxiii] https://issuu.com/blackstarfest/docs/bsff22_program_guide_digital_pgs. 7.8.2022
[xxv] https://academiabrasileiradecinema.com.br/oscar2023/filme-indicado.php
[xxiv] Array is an independent film distribution collective founded in 201 with funding from arts advocacy organizations, volunteers, and rebel member donors around the world. It focuses on more than just film. https://arraynow.com/about-array/
[xxv] https://telaviva.com.br/19/09/2022/campanha-de-minas-para-o-mundo-impulsiona-marte-um-para-o-oscar-2023/
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