Cinema Then, Cinema Now; Macunaima

your Hi, welcome to Cinema Then Cinema Now, the film series with lively discussion. I'm your host, Jerry Carlson, and I teach Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. Today we continue our ten film survey of the last 25 years of Latin American film. We'll be seeing the first of the two Brazilian films we'll see in this series.

Today that film is Makunayima, a wild, outrageous, allegorical, strictly anti-realistic comedy based upon a famous Brazilian novel. This film calls for the imagination of Monty Python, not for any other kind of comedy. We'll be discussing that in a variety of other things after today's screening with two guests. Today we have Professor Robert Stam of New York University and Professor Zeigati of the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. Enjoy the outrageous Makunayima. Hi, welcome back to Cinema Then Cinema Now. I hope you enjoyed Makunayima, a wild film and extraordinary film, a film that certainly

deserves some discussion. But before we get on to the discussion, I'd like to take these few moments to introduce today's two guests. Sitting to my left is Professor Robert Stam of New York University, who's in the Cinema Studies program there. Bob is a very well-known expert on the Brazilian cinema, as in fact one of the co-authors and co-editors of the Collection Anthology Brazilian Cinema issued by the University of Texas Press. He's also the author of a Reflexivity in Literature and Film, which has a ripe section of a chapter on Makunayima in it. And in 1989, he will also be publishing subversive pleasures, bhaktiin, cultural studies, and film. Over to my right is Professor Zeigati. Zeig teaches at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil in their Media Studies program where he teaches film history, film aesthetics, and in fact video production.

He's the author of a book published in Brazil on global Russia, the distinguished Brazilian director, and he's in the United States at this time pursuing his doctorate in cinema at NYU. Zeig as one of our two resident, Brazilian experts, but as our resident Brazilian of the show, this film we've just seen comes out in 1969 to the end of the sixties itself. The sixties were what kind of period in Brazilian cinema itself? Well, this film also marks a transition from the cinema novel movement which dominated the film scene in Brazil during the sixties. The most important films of that period were produced under the eges of the cinema novel movement, like, let's name just a couple of those. Global Russia made a black god white devil and Nelson Pieder de Santos directed barren lives and other films which were, you know, they were praised in international festivals

over in Europe, in the United States, and so forth. So Makuna Ima, it breaks with a tradition of so-called serious films of cinema novel which were, you know, more, they treated issues, social issues, problems of Brazilian society in a very serious kind of tone. And Makuna Ima, you know, draws from comedy, you know, all its force, all its strength. Okay, so I was just thinking that one of the models for cinema novel before Makuna Ima would be, was it clearly neo realism and the way in which it really in touch with the social and historical realities? Yeah, we could say that Italian neo realism and the French Nouvelle Vogue were the main, you know, influences in cinema novel. Even though cinema novel had its own aesthetics, its own, you know, forms of narrative, but the main influences acknowledged by the directors were these two movements.

Interesting point about Makuna Ima is that it renews contacts with a very Brazilian pre-existing genre which the first cinema novel directors were very critical of. And that was the Shanchada. And these were comical, usually musical films from the thirties, thirties, in fifties. Common Madonna, for example, got her start in the Shanchadas. Now the major black actor in Makuna Ima, Granjo Tello, or Big Ocello, was someone who became known as an actor in the Shanchadas. He was also the featured actor in the Orson Wells film, It's All True, which was shot, but never actually completed in Brazil in 1942. And he's participated in all phases of Brazilian cinema, from cinema novel to the avant-garde. But by choosing him as an actor, I think that was one of the secrets to the film's commercial success, that he was such a popular actor. He was known as the King of the Shanchadas. And it renewed contact with a popular audience, which cinema novel hadn't really managed to make contact with.

And cinema novel been shown, because the question of venue, where films get shown, is very important. The novel, shown in commercial venues, normal movie houses, or was it a mixed cinema clubs or what's it was a mix? Zay can perhaps address this more than I can, but they were screen commercially. They were screens in cinema tags, but there was a lot of frustration on the part of cinema novel that they didn't get access to all the popular audiences that they wanted. So much of their audience was kind of middle-class, student audience, but I'm sure Zay has among the big problems with cinema in Brazil, till today, is that exhibition and distribution are in the hands of multinational corporations. And this is a big problem, because Brazilian directors cannot show filmmakers, they cannot show their work in their own country. And that's one of the plagues with cinema novel. But what happens is that also cinema novel films were sometimes too sophisticated for the audience, or maybe they didn't choose the right way to address the audience.

They were too worried about the things that they wanted to say, but sometimes they forgot how to get contact with the audience. And Makuna Imma also breaks that tradition, because even though Joaquin Pedro Gendraji, who is a Makuna Imma's author, the filmmaker, and he was very much connected to the cinema novel movement. But Makuna Imma is the first big box office hit in Brazil, and so cinema novel can be a success too. That's what people said in 1969. Well, it's also, even though it must be so weird for American artists, because it's such a local, regional film, it's so related to Brazilian film. Well, but there's a way in which I don't think this film comes out of a tradition that's a mainstream tradition to us, this kind of comedy, this kind of thing. But I think we have some touchstones on it. I mentioned in the introduction something like Monty Python, the non-sequential nature, episodic nature of that.

And you know, if you don't know very much about the United Kingdom, Monty Python is just crazy, and very amusing, but then the more you know about the culture of Great Britain, then the more, you know, precise the strategies, the social criticism, the inversions of types, etc. And I suspect that's the case as one gets to know, as you do know, the specific cultural context of Amakuna Imma, or Bob, we'll let you both take this, what are some of the things that might be difficult for an audience to understand about this film that are culturally, you know, specific, and that we might not be familiar with. I think it's one of the most culturally coded films ever made, starting even with the credits, the fact that you see a backdrop that looks vaguely Amazonian, the colors are green and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag. Later, Montyima, he wants to get a scholarship to Europe as an artist to go pursue the people leader.

He dresses up in green and yellow, patrioticly in order to get a government scholarship. There are many kind of verbal jokes, much of the film is spoken in kind of nursery rhymes. It would be something like different strokes for different folks, kind of Muhammad Ali style rhymes. For instance, if you remember, Amakuna Imma comes back to the teepee and he says to his mother, mother, I dreamed a tooth fell out and she says, then a relative will die and then she proceeds to die. It's a bit like step on a crack, break your mother's back, as if in a film suddenly the back would be broken, so kind of literalizing these proverbs. I'll just give one more example, I'm sure they will have many others. At one point, Amakuna Imma is in the hammock with Suzy and obviously there's some sort of sexual activity going on. G. Gay, who is Suzy's boyfriend supposedly is outside the door and he says, I have a pain in my elbow. Well, there's an expression in Portuguese that when you have pain in the elbow, it means you're being cuckled it.

Which is precisely what's happening at that moment in the film. But not only popular images like that, but also there is the film itself, it deals with images that we learn at school in Brazil versus how the Indians live, how it's all made fun of all the time. So not made fun of the Indians, but made fun of the film makes fun of the images of the Indians that we are supposed to have learned at school. And the same is with racism, how the film deals with racism. Some people out of Brazil, they take that scene in which Makuna Imma is black and he gets sprinkled by that water and he turns into white Prince Charming and they say, well, that's racist because the whites are valued as more superior to blacks and that's up a parody.

It's making fun of racism. In fact, the music you hear during that sequence, I don't know if you recognize it, is from Footlight Parade. Well, that's my favorite. It had, I knew it was an American show to invite him to buy a waterfall, so Bhumakaskat. So it's a kind of tacky camp version. And if you remember Footlight Parade, the James Cagney character is inspired by the site of black children in Harlem playing in the water of a hydrant to have a scene of many whites and what could be more white than a Busby Berkeley musical. Well, so there's a whole kind of joke on this valorization of whiteness. And it's important to note that the author of the source novel was himself mulatto and was very conscious of Afro-Brazilian culture and you have many Afro-Brazilian references in the film, such as to Makumba, where Makonaima uses Afro-Brazilian religion to get his vengeance. You remember when he's kicking? Yes, yes, yes. He has a bull on giant. Right. Exactly. Now, that brings us to the fact that this is a literary adaptation.

I mean, the film, when we're watching it, I think, seems extremely filmic. I mean, the stunts, the way everything is, it is staged. So, I mean, one can't imagine this, I mean, as a stodgy novel, it must be a wild thing in itself. Right. Maybe I should say a few words about the source novel. It's a novel written in 1928 by a modernist Brazilian writer, influenced by very diverse sources from the Indian Romantic movement in Brazil by surrealism. He includes some surrealists in the books and he calls them Makumbedos. In other words, practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religion. Okay. So, he makes a link to this kind of European avant-garde, valorization of what they called Suvajurhi, but saying, now, here in Brazil, this is part of our culture. So, there's kind of a reversal. The title, it's interesting that it's an Indian name, which means the great evil. This is not a name. You don't meet Mackinayimas, and bring you my Carlos Pedro, but I'm a straight title.

The subtitle is the hero without any character, and now this is true in a double cent, because he has no character ethically, sometimes he's courageous, sometimes he's noble, sometimes he's the opposite, because he's a summer of Brazil. Right. So, he has no consistency. The author said his consistency is not having consistency. Why? Because he's the synthesis of everything that's Brazilian. Now, this cover, the Brazilian version, you see that he's black, he's white, and he's indigenous. And there too, he's an ethnic synthesis, and the opening sequence of his birth, first of all, the Indian names, the manner of giving birth is Indian, using gravity to hell right in the childbirth. Jigae has African robes, a reference to the African ancestry. Monape, who's kind of religious and moral, has kind of a cape that is vaguely religious. The hut is kind of indigenous, but also kind of backwoods. Right, yes.

So, there you get a total synthesis of Brazilian ethnicity, and this kind of fusion with all its problems, but which makes up Brazil, it's kind of a periodic version of the Brazilian family. Okay, and all of that, I mean, this is a translation of something, all of which is in this novel. Right. Well, it's important to say, the novel in 1928 was based on a collection by a German anthropologist of legends from the Amazon. Now what the director did is he updated, in fact, he went back to the original legends and even added some items which were not used in the novel. And just to give one example of the updating, for instance, in the novel, there was a character C, the imperitrous empress of the Amazon. Okay. She becomes an urban gorilla in the film. Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, cause. Initial of 1969. Exactly. It was a year after the coup d'état, and the lab, because it was a very severe repression, started robbing banks to finance itself.

Everything she has is the equipment of an urban gorilla. She has a target for target characters. Absolutely. She has a ditto machine for leaflets. And there are many sexual inversions. Remember, she goes off to war while he stays home. He stays home. She has a baby. He rests after pregnancy. So the typical kind of carnival-less technique, there's a lot of sexual and commercial. He just mentioned the word carnival-esque, and that's one of the things, I mean, I think we would think of, one of the things that people think of when they think of Brazil, one of the few things people may know of it, it's Brazil's famous for carnivals themselves. What kind of relationship, say, do you find between a film like this, the carnival tradition, and the carnival tradition in Brazil, and the carnival tradition, or the carnival-esque tradition in literature or film? Well, actually, as I said before, Makunaima breaks with the tradition of serious films of the cinema novel, quotation marks for series, of course. But it draws from a tradition of Brazilian cinema, Bob mentioned the shinshadows of the

40s and the 50s, the comedies, and so on. But the shinshadows themselves, they were an outcome of the carnival-esque films, literally carnival-esque films, of the 30s, in which the songs for carnival were performed by Carmen Miranda, among others, in front of the cameras. They were very simple films in terms of narrative and so on. But so the Brazilian audience, who goes to watch a film like Makunaima, is already prepared by that, you know, because they are familiar with that kind of film. So the film is carnival-esque from beginning to end, and it's something very familiar to Brazil, is to go to the movie theater and watch a carnival film in itself. And just one specific example is the use of costume in the film. Now I think it's interesting that Makunaima had a budget of $100,000, which is extremely low for the kind of rich look, and a lot of it is done through costumes, and costume

is used very symbolically. For example, you remember the first time that Makunaima smokes a magic joint, and he turns into a prince. The prince is dressed in the cheapest kind of carnival costume, you know, and they say, oh, how beautiful. But there's a whole political allegory occurring. This is another sequence I think which was misinterpreted as racists, when in fact it's anti-racist. Because the woman, and I think this is very hard to see in a television presentation, her dress says Alliance for Progress, donated by the people of the United States. So there's a whole allegory that Makunaima, the fear of his people, yeah, wheat flour, the here of his people is being turned into a prince. Now what does this refer to? It refers to what was called the Brazilian economic miracle, which basically after the Kudeitah, there was a lot of collaboration with multinational companies. There was an appearance of a certain wealth on the backs of poor people who got poorer.

So what happens is you see he's turned into a false prince with a kind of taudry, cheap costume, but it looks like a miracle. In fact, we know he dies in the Amazon, as we know that the Brazilian economic miracle was very short lived and now Brazilian the Amazon, exactly. And the Brazil has the largest foreign debt of 160 billion, whatever. So in a way that's all prophesied in a very allegorical comic and carnival-less mode in this film. And we should remember too that at that time the military government was commissioning films dealing with historical issues of Brazil, but in the way that they thought it would be taken seriously, for instance, like the independence of the country and the heroes of the country and so on. Those films were never a success, but they were shown in theaters distributed all over and they were shown on television in special national holidays and things like that. And Makunayima makes fun of all that.

So it's very subversive in that moment for a film like Makunayima to be produced, to be made, and to be a success. Well, the other thing about it's a versiveness in addition to costumes is that it covers all of the art, it seems to cover all of the indigenous environments of Brazil itself. That is geographically, while the film may be inexpensive, it has a crazy geography, I mean. Because the novel is very magical in the sense that in one step Makunayima will go from Sao Paulo to the extreme north and Brazil is a huge country, so it's kind of a magical real-less novel. The film diminishes that to some extent, but still, as you say, there is this variety of topographies, but if I could elaborate on Ze's point about the subversive side of the film, there's a wonderful outwitting of the censors, and you get attacks on political repression in the film. For example, first of all, I think perhaps it was difficult to read the subtitles here, and we should comment on it at one point.

There's a man giving a speech, which in fact is a very conservative speech he's talking about warning Brazil against foreign ideologies, right? Makunayima comes up and says, that's not true. He contradicts the man and gets up on top of the statue and makes a speech in which he says the real problems of Brazil, and then he lists a litany of different diseases. Then people start calling a communist, a subversive. In other words, if you talk about the real problems of Brazil, you'll be called a subversive. He starts running. He's arrested, and Makunayima says, why are you arresting me? I wasn't doing anything, and the man who arrest him in civilian clothes, interestingly, says suspicious attitude, because you were running. So already there, you see allusions to the whole political repressiveness, and then this kind of parody of patriotic aesthetic, the fact that it uses green and yellow, but in very ironic ways. The fact that the opening song you hear is a patriotic anthem about the heroes of Brazil, yet you see this kind of antihero that this heroic language doesn't really correspond to.

But I think that some of the magic remained, not only in terms of he's being black and turning white, and then he has a son who is himself as black. And also, things that the Brazilian audiences pick up and maybe a foreign audience wouldn't understand. For instance, who plays Makunayima's mother is the white Makunayima, the same actor himself. So I don't know if you can tell that from the print that's being shown. Which is again carnival. The trend like this is playing different roles. Also I think the fact that black Makunayima comes back is kind of a joke on the Brazilian proverb that every Brazilian has a foot in the kitchen. The idea is that every Brazilian family has some black African ancestry. So this denial on racist grounds is very false. It always, the blackness of Brazil always returns. But that brings us to another sort of aspect of the film. We were chatting about a little bit before the film began.

And that's the whole notion of the tropicalist movement. What is the tropicalist movement? Tropicalism was a movement in which started roughly around 1967, which embraced theater. There was a kind of jerry-esque plague king of the candle in 1967. A film to a certain extent, music, if people know Roberto Gill's music. He was a strong tropicalist. Basically the impulse was a rejection of kind of the serious cinema novel, old left pedagogical model where you show people the truth and they see the truth and they change society. It was against some of the pureism of that attitude, which would say the country is less corrupt than the city. What tropicalism said is that Brazil is a synthesis and the international mass media are here.

There's no pure Brazil. Brazil is this mess and let's affirm it. We can be critical, but that's what we aren't. So there's a whole kind of camp aesthetic, which in Brazil is called Caffonisi. Pietro Pietro's bathtub, memory has a kind of bubble bath. That's kind of a tropicalist reference. At the same time, it's not a complete tropicalist film because in a strange way, it still does have that kind of cinema novel political message. I don't know if they agree about this, but I think it's both within and without the movements. It's a transition work, definitely. Okay. Where does it seem like, one of the scenes, let's get back to some of the things that might be strange in the film and in some sense, many, many, many, I mean there's a lot. We have the scenes at the end at the home and we have that rather strange swimming pool in which what is, I mean, the swimming pool is just swimming pool and it's not a swimming pool.

There's a sort of shifting of things that's going on there. If you remember the bourgeois, he's called, he's the so-called giant, this is Lao Pietro Pietro. It's also a comment on the Italian bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo and I'm a Italian Brazilian myself. I can see that. The Italian bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo, some of the immigrants, the Italian immigrants of the beginning of the century, they became wealthy and, you know, the owned factories and so on. They were very important in the city and the economic force and so he is a comment on that kind of bourgeoisie, a kind of tacky bourgeoisie without, you know, a refined education or anything like that. And he is the so-called giant, the men-eater giant, the men-eater giant, the men-eater giant. And that pool is the big party for the wedding of his daughter. It's actually a big visualada pool, visualada is a national dish of Brazilians, you know. It's black bean soup with pork and only that, that visualada was not only huge but instead

of pork you had people. Right, yes. The guests were, you know, picked up their numbers in a kind of lottery and they were thrown in the black bean soup because the giant family is a man-eating family, of course. Well that sort of brings us back to the soldiers of national symbols and to this whole idea of cannibalism, which is something strange and remote to an American bourgeois audience. I mean, you know, it's exotic, et cetera, but it's a metaphor that's been taken over by the arts in Brazil, as I understand it. Yes, yes. You see that the giant is a person-eating, you know, giant and that's a metaphor for capitalism and for exploitation and then the giant is an owner, a factory owner, you know. And that's a kind of, in person-led, joking Pedro added to the film and this was actually for the Venice Film Festival.

The prince in Brazil do not have this preface about cannibalism where he basically explains that the modernist in the 20s used cannibalism as a metaphor, basically as an anti-colonial metaphor, saying we, like the Brazilian Indians, should devour the enemy in order to get their strength. In other words, you use European and North American technology but try not to be dominated by it. And you can see the entire film as in a way illustrating all the points made in the preface because the preface says the strong eat the week. We see that the biggest people leader is Pietro Pietro, as an industrialist with second-hand American equipment, the poor eat each other. You see an instance of that when Macanaima is robbed, remember a man sells him a goose which supposedly defecates money, of course it's a rip off. Then he runs into a Shushan boy who has just been robbed and then he robs what's left that the Shushan boy has. So you see the poor eating each other within this kind of social cannibalistic environment.

The left eats itself through sectarianism. I think that's illustrated in the film when the left blows itself up. Number C goes off to war and explodes. And then consumerism is a form of consuming, of devouring, of cannibalism. When you get many references to consumerism, which was part of this economic model, remember when Macanaima goes back to the Amazon, he has all this brick-a-brack. He has TV-set, electric guitar, useless in the no-electric outlet, of course. So obviously a point is being made. Even in Pietro Pietro's mansion, you have a tiger. Now in Brazil at that time, the tiger in your tank of SO advertising was very popular. So an image much used in Godor, by the way, that's right. That's right. I think we should remark too that cannibalism is not necessarily a negative. Well, no, that's a very strong point, because culturally it means our own survival. We have to draw from information from abroad and metabolize ourselves.

So that's a positive attitude, definitely. And that's the way in which, as well as being an economic metaphor, an economic model, it's also a kind of cultural model in metaphor as well, and that turns it around into something extremely positive. And completely anti-Zinnophobic. Yeah, that's a very interesting aspect to it, that it is expansive at the same time. It's ingesting something else. It's kind of an artistic jujitsu, where you use the power of the enemy against the enemy. But you don't deny that power. That would be naive. And there, too, it's the tropicalist rejection of cinema novo, with its attempt to have kind of a pure, authentic Brazil. This is saying, no, there is no pure, authentic Brazil. Brazil is all this mixture, but let's use it in a dynamic and much as in a martial art against those who dominate Brazilian.

Is there a continuing tradition like this film in Brazilian cinema? Oh, I don't see this, right? Shikadaseva Silva is a film that was thrown in the United States during the 70s by Carlos Jaggis. That's a typical example of such, you know, carnival reversals. Shikadaseva is about a black woman who was in the richest region of Brazil and became kind of a power behind the throne in the 18th century. It's a very complicated film, and some people have found its racist and the sense that it, and I think, right with the stick, and the answer is, although there's some debate about it. But there was also a whole avant-garde tradition called Udi Grudi, which is the Brazilian pronunciation of underground. And they were very much in this anthropophagic, modernist, surreal, tropicalist mode. So it is certainly, and ongoing tradition. That tradition may be ongoing, but this discussion, at least on the air, can't be, because we've come to...

What a shame. We've come to the end of it. If you'd like more information about cinema than cinema now, or about graduate studies, or undergraduate studies, in cinema, drop us a line, drop it to cinema than cinema now, the College of Staten Island, Staten Island, New York, 10301, let me give you that information again. Okay? Drop it to cinema then, cinema now, the College of Staten Island, Staten Island, New York, 10301. Well, Bob, thank you for bringing your expertise and things, carnival-esque, et cetera, to the show. Thank you. Zay, you're equally carnival-esque expertise, and things are Brazilian, it's a place you're having both here. As always, I hope that our discussion here leads you to thought and discussion at home that you enjoy. Thanks for joining us.