Brasilia, Contradictions of a New City, 1967
Brasilia, Contradictions of a New City. Dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1967Shot seven years after the construction of Brazil’s Capital, the film was already denouncing social injustice. Year 1967 Download movie _ “I can only make films in Brazil and about Brazil. Only Brazil interests me.” Though likely a bit of a purposeful overstatement, such a provocative declaration makes quite clear both the nature and commitment of Brazilian filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s cinematic project. True to his words, each of de Andrade’s films was made within the borders of his nation and tackles a distinctly Brazilian subject, from the national obsession with soccer, to Carnival, to political repression, to the modernist motif of creative cannibalism. All five of his feature-length fictions are based, at least partially, on an eclectic mix of Brazilian texts, including poems, manifestos, novels and short stories, even official court transcripts. He was also a leading figure of the Cinema Novo movement, scoring the group’s first truly popular success with Macunaíma (1969), the film for which he is best known. De Andrade and his Cinema Novo cohorts called for the development of a filmic style appropriate to the realities of modern Brazilian life, and he attempted to realize their ideas through filmmaking praxis. (…) In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of Brasília. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasília, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed Brasília to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. While vibrantly coloured cinematography emphasizes the city’s æsthetic modernism and Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s visionary architecture, narration explains that the city’s vast apartment complexes were intended to integrate the classes, preventing the development of rich and poor neighbourhoods. De Andrade quickly reveals that in reality, the majority of the city’s workers, including those who built it, live in slums outside Brasília’s urban limits. Commuting via bus three hours in each direction, the workers are shuffled from one construction firm to another, all owned by the same corporations, in order to deny them wages and benefits. As the film ends, de Andrade juxtaposes footage of workers constructing a new building while on the soundtrack Maria Bethânia sings of transforming the world, ironically suggesting the impossibility of change for the lower classes. (…) Continue reading here, at senses of cinema.
|