To Serve Godard: Anthropophagical Precesses in Brazilian Cinema

Abstract

In 1928, Oswald de Andrade radicalized Brazilian Modernism by carrying the movement's anti-colonialist stance to its most iconoclastic conclusion. In his Cannibal Manifesto, Andrade alludes to the Tupinamba Amerindians who ingested their enemies in order to assume their strength, proposing that Brazilian writers and artists consume First World digest it, and create a new product for exportation. Decrying the importation of canned culture, the anthropophagist intellectuals hold as an ideal social model a matriarchal anarchy, devoid of laws and army. Yet despite its radical stand, anthropophagy is far from isolationist and envisions continued exchange between the First World and Brazil. As Robert Stam (1989) has argued, anthropophagy is a form of intertextuality, yet one which is set in a context of neocolonial cultural domination. Stam stresses that despite the presence of cannibalist metaphors in Western civilization from Montaigne to the Dadaists, the tendency only became a movement in Brazil. From the diverse dentitions of the Revista da Antropofagia to the Tropicalist movement of the late Sixties, anthropophagy has advocated the devouring of metropolitan culture and science and their subsequent reprocessing. While the tendency within the field of Luso-Brazilian studies has been to view anthropophagy from a national perspective, Erdmute Wenzel White has emphasized the movement's debt to Surrealism and Dada, which she feels provide the anthropophagist with creative processes capable of producing the emancipation of art. Stam and Shohat ( 1994) are aware of this delicate balance between Brazil and the Continent and have observed that Tropicalism fuses aesthetic internationalism with political nationalism, the folkloric with the industrial. Coinciding in time with the Tropicalist movement and displaying a marked deviation from the aesthetics of hunger of early cinema novo, Nelson Pereira dos Santos' 1971 film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como era gostoso o meu france:sj and Jorge Bodansky's Iracema (1974) recur to cannibalist imagery to advocate the cultural principals of Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagy. Though far more conventional on a diegetic level than some of the more experimental films of the Tropicalist phase, they nonetheless subvert narrative norms and expectations. These two films recoup neo-classical and romantic motifs from Brazilian literature andreposition them within the context of the narrative experiments of cinema novo. More importantly, they fail to assume a facile native position vis-a-vis the colonialist. Distinct from earlier primitivist visions in Brazilian cinema, they posit a complex and constant oscillation of spectatorial identification as an alternative to conventional cultural dichotomies. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman and Iracema are far from the only application of anthropophagist ideals within the context of the Brazilian cinema. We must recall, for instance, how Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaima (1969) recoups anthropophagy to more radical ends. Moreover, the udigrudi (underground) movement of the Sixties is faithful to the anthropophagic ideal of digesting and re-processing First World cultural norms. Its main proponents, Julio Bressane and Rogerio Sganzerla create in their films a unique synthesis of film noir, the Hollywood slasher, the American western, and the nouvelle vague. Yet How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman and Iracema are particularly significant in their reinterpretation of contacts between metropolitan Europe and Brazil's indigenous cultures. On the most superficial level they subvert the norms of two classics of the Brazilian literary canon that treat contacts between Europeans and Amerindians during the colonial era-Frei Manuel de Santa Rita Durao's Caramuru (1781) and Jose de Alencar's Iracema (1865). The former, a neo-classical epic poem, and the latter, a romantic novel, both position the encounter between the two worlds safely within the norms of bourgeois society. …

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