January 2005 marked the 40th anniversary of the publishing of Glauber Rocha’s manifesto An Aesthetic of Hunger which called on filmmakers to create films in “a style appropriate to the real Brazil, to articulate a social thematic together with a production strategy into a truly revolutionary esthetic.” [1]

In it, Rocha defined Cinema Nôvo as “an on-going process of exploration that is making our thinking clearer, freeing us from the debilitating delirium of hunger. The Cinema Nôvo cannot continue to develop if it is consigned to a marginal existence in the overall economic and cultural processes of the Latin American continent.” [2] Inevitably, in the last forty years, history has marched on and Brazil and its cinema have moved forward even though the road has been bumpy. Since its introduction in 1898 by Italo-Brazilian Affonso Segreto, [3] film production in Brazil has had more than its fair share of reversals of fortune: between American colonial predation, a lack of technological infrastructure, a lack of financial backing, censorship by military dictatorships, and fluctuations in interest for domestic product at home and abroad, the struggle for an indigenous film industry addressing the identity and cultural concerns of the Brazilian people has not been easy.

Cinema Nôvo arose in the 1950’s to address and find solutions to these issues and until the early seventies it served as the aesthetic conscience of Brazilian cinema. As a movement Cinema Nôvo closed shop in 1974, and for almost twenty years largely as a result of the ascendancy of television and censorship most of these concerns were more or less either suppressed or sublimated only to re-emerge in the 1990’s.

In 1990, President Fernando Collor de Melho looking to please Jack Valenti et al. puts the kibosh on the Brazilian film industry by dismantling Embrafilme. Brazil went from an average of 100 films produced and released in 1969 when Embrafilme was founded to a mere 2 in 1992. [4] But since Collor de Melho’s impeachment resulting from charges of corruption that same year, Brazil has “achieved and enjoyed—through a series of improved laws regarding tax incentives—a resurgent interest in regaining its cinematic identity. This period (1993-1998) became generally known as the “Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro” (Reinstatement of Brazilian Cinema).” [5] During that period, the polemics on Brazilian identity as expressed through Cinema Nôvo once again become topical and with Central do Brasil Walter Salles joined the fray.

Allegories

On the surface, Central do Brasil is a melodrama of transformation organized around an odd-couple composed of Josué, a nine year-old boy, and Dora, a crusty sexagenarian retired school-teacher, who embark on a cross-country quest for the boy’s father. However, the various narrative elements, visual allusions and themes point to a variety of possible interpretations to the underlying drives: if one is to account for the wealth of significations, “an adequate analysis of the film, therefore, must go beyond the represented fiction (the diegesis).” [6] The film can be interpreted as an allegory on the writing process, as an allegorical quest for the source of Brazilian identity as represented by Dora’s transformation, or as a Christian religious allegory inviting “a theological reading as the story of human beings struggling to maintain a relationship to an absent God.” [7]

“The film’s densely metaphorical style virtually pleads for allegorical interpretation even while its internal organization frustrates and defies the interpreter searching for a unifying “key” or implicit vision of the world.” [8]

A People Wanting to Tell Stories

Although the epistolary side of Central do Brasil comes from Socorro Nobre, a film Salles made in 1995 about the correspondence between Polish sculptor Frans Krajcberg— exiled in Brazil after World War Two— and a woman inmate serving time in a high-security penitentiary in Bahia, Central do Brasil can be construed as an allegory for a writer’s transformation by life and experience from being a hack writer processing other people’s stories, to understanding the need to tell those stories, and ultimately tapping into the liberating side of one’s creativity to write one’s own stories. (Josué can be interpreted as the little nagging voice egging the writer on to write truthfully from the heart.) Dora is no bumbling Macabéa (from A hora da Estrela, Susana Amaral 1985) on the typewriter; she’s the real thing. She writes her stories the traditional way, with pen and paper—she’s a schoolteacher with all the implied responsibilities as a role model resulting from her vocation, flavoured with all the cynicism and disillusionment that an ex-civil servant living on a meager pension can muster. She’s no Mary Poppins, as we witness her transformation from a curmudgeonly old hag to a caring, benevolent, warmhearted grandmother with her care’s best interests at heart. Dora’s transformation as a person and as a writer can be tied in to a broader, more satisfying interpretation—the quest for the “source” of Brazil’s identity.

From the beginning of the film, images of masses of people emerging from trains onto platforms juxtaposed with close ups of individuals relating their own personal stories establishes the thématique of a people wanting to tell their stories en masse. It’s an expression of pride and of belonging and a validation of the self and it seems like the most natural thing to do. Brazilian society is a melting pot of white, black, indigenous and mestizo and the Central Station is like a cauldron where the human feijoada all comes together and the shared culture is what keeps the sauce from separating. It’s not for nothing that on the desk she writes her letters, every time she positions a sheet of paper she does it on her desktop map of Brazil. The stories that she is “notarizing” are about defining the relationship of the self to others i.e. identity, and taken as a whole they create a shared or common identity i.e. society. Even the discrete presence of I.D. card photo stands in the background of Dora’s stall point in this direction.

The photographs in Central do Brasil could easily be made to stand in for Brazilian film as definers of identity but they also drive interpretation towards other readings. “Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies, as a photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” [9] At the beginning of the film, photographs can be read as a control on the mobility of its population i.e. oppression, but with Josué’s picture the photograph assumes the second interpretation—it becomes “incontrovertible evidence” that the photographed person did indeed exist. The theme of photographs as evidence is carried to the extreme as depicted within the “Casa dos Milagres.” The manifestation of the multitude of images (variety of personal stories) is reminiscent of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo—(Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared) whose sons, husbands and fathers disappeared or were “suppressed” in many Latin American countries. Dora is forced by the overwhelming presentation of evidence to accept and repent for denying (i.e. been a willing participant in the suppression of) the richness and variety of Brazilians’ experience—as a letter writer. She breaks down when she realizes that Josué is just one story amidst a sea of stories possibly each one as intense and as meaningful as the one she is living. The next scene shows Dora sleeping on a sidewalk with her head in Josué’s lap, a gender-inverted Piéta which tells us that tradition will be nursed back to health (restored) by faith in the future.

The suppression of a people’s stories is censorship —whether it is self-censorship because of feelings of inadequacy, fear, illiteracy or ignorance or censorship imposed by others: teachers, government censors, the financial demands of the medium or the taste and fashions of culture, etc.— and the film makes the argument that there is no need for it once one realizes the “wealth“ that’s there. What is great about the stories from the people in Central do Brasil is that they are so forthcoming, genuine and unfettered, and when they collide with Dora’s lies, small-time censorship and ridicule, one can see parallels to the demeaning and petty censorship of a bureaucratic military Brazilian filmmakers were forced to endure. Only much later, after Dora goes through her conversion and discovers the need for telling those stories, is she capable of commiserating with the people and understanding the significance of transmitting those stories. And only then, does her mission to find Josué’s father take on meaning and urgency—the Casa dos Milagres miracle is Dora’s realization that the stories of the people are the source of identity and at the same time the expression of these “neo-realist” stories are economically viable, even if it is only through her letter writing. The picture of Dora and Josué with the Saint is “incontrovertible evidence” that Dora’s realization is feasible even though it is reified with the Saint as a “false-prophet” stand-in within the trinity as source or core of Brazil’s identity.

Road Movie

Like all road movies, the primary drive is one of transformation from the starting point to their destination. As Salles puts it: ”The main interest that I have in road movies is that the psychological arc of the main characters is always extremely interesting. They have to escape from that shelter they live in at the beginning and face the unknown. And the idea of facing the unknown breaks the mold in which they feel secure and they have to respond to a world that they cannot control anymore.” [10]

The road trip serves as a metaphor for life in fast-forward where the road brings on challenges and situations at a faster rate than life normally would. The images of migration through and away from the sertão to the city abound in Cinema Nôvo. Vidas Secas, Macunaima, Bye Bye Brasil, Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol, etc. But Salles’ back-to-the-future ride takes Josué and Dora away from Rio in the same way that Ciço and Dasdô in Bye Bye Brasil were brought to Rio or the unemployed migrate from the northeastern sertão looking for work in Sao Paolo in Brasil Verdade. [11] In a weird kind of parallel Josué leaves Rio with Dora the same way that Manuel and his wife leave the sertão—after his mother is killed. The via dolorosa of traversing the sertão with one’s belongings in a case on top of one’s head like Vitoria does in Vidas Secas is reprised as ritualized suffering by Manoel carrying the rock on his head in Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol and then as par for the course for the pilgrims of Central do Brasil. Josué and Dora manage to do it more comfortably than their predecessors but they make the same trek—they’re just always more concerned about paying their way all the time. But most of the time (except for Macunaima) it’s a one way ticket in Cinema Nôvo: sertão—the city.

And where the migration to the city carried with it a message of economic betterment and freedom from the oppression of poverty, the characters ride the return ticket in Central do Brasil. In a Cahiers du Cinéma interview Salles states, “the drive of Brazilian cinema during the 80’s was essentially urban and reflected the country’s accelerated and uncritical urbanization. I wanted to return to a simpler, more archaic Brazil. The film changes the gaze and renews its links with a country no one wants to see, far away from the ads and commercials, with core values like solidarity and fraternity, all those themes that are currently out of fashion in a country taken over by an ideology of pragmatism.” [12] With the themes it explores, the imagery it uses, and its allegorical references, at first glance the film appears to place itself deep within the discourse of Cinema Nôvo, but the many references to Brazilian cinema of the 80’s and 90’s seem to use the history of Brazilian cinema during the last forty years—it feels like a “selection reel” of scenes from the best films played backwards. However, a more “political” reading reveals that Central do Brasil is the prototypical example of the films Glauber Rocha’s Aesthetic of Hunger fulminated against.

Central do Brasil is a cinematic time machine which travels backward in time but misses its stop. Instead of stopping at Cinema Nôvo it stops in a world of colonized imagery which posits the discourse back in the 1950’s: we are taken from the present-day predominantly urban reality depicted by a panoply of social problems including infantile homelessness and delinquency, urban violence and crime, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, alcoholism, broken families, etc., to the “sacred” place where the first films of Cinema Nôvo were set—in the sertão. Almost every shot or theme in Central do Brasil has a parallel in Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol. And one would think that the mirroring of images and themes would indicate that the concerns raised by both films are similar but where Rocha depicts the sertão as an arid historical tabula rasa where nothing grows, and everything is parched under the hot sun as an allegorical stage for the historical fight between messianic cults, social banditry and oppression, Salles carries us beyond the lefty neo-realist vision of Vidas Secas into a revisionist neo-conservative melodrama full of pathos and optimism with the sertão as the painted backdrop.

Why the sertão? Salles says that “during the location scout, I was surprised by what I found in the North-East and what has disappeared in the cities. In that desolate, far-away place away from civilization, we were ceaselessly invited to sleep over, to share a room, a bed, some food, by people who can barely subsist. I suddenly got the impression that the innocence of Brazil still existed, I believed once again in the possibility of a country where everyone had a chance.” [13] But whose innocence? The current reality of the sertão is different than Salles would like us to accept: 59% of the population is under 24 years old, 67% of the population is illiterate, and the average citizen earns less than US$2,000 per year—the lowest among Brazil’s regions and three times less than in the Southeast. [14] It’s well and good to show all the squatters row-on-row houses as a vision of hope for a new Brazil, but they have an eerie resemblance to the row-on-row construction of the Cidade de Deus of the 60’s. Within the context of the post-dictatorship, national (and personal) insecurity about the future and its longing for the purposefulness, unity, and plenitude of a mythologized national past, Salles provides a cinematic time-space in which contemporaneous cultural anxieties find vernacular expression. [15]

Salles sees the sertão through rose coloured glasses. We are pulled away from any political reading by the melodramatic, wide-screen technicolour elements of the story, and the peripheral real-life reality of the sertanejos does not seem to register beyond the level of background—even the shot from Cesar’s truck of migrating sertanejos is framed within a religious reading by the presence of Christ on the dashboard (and the next time we see the peasants we are already forgetting about them as they quickly recede in the rear view mirror). There’s a bit of the noble savage trope at work here: the metaphor of the sertão as the symbol of a renewed Brazil just does not take. Politically, Salles might want the viewer to buy the all-inclusive package of hope, optimism and the innocence of the sertanejos of his road trip but all we see on his tour bus is a village d’antan recreation of the sertão populated by actors asked to play the role of mixed-blood white-faced happy-go-lucky sambos just dying to share their bag of manioc chips with the tourists.

In the same way that Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes films were anchored in the sertão as spaces emerging from the American Western, Central do Brasil harkens back to Glauber Rocha’s imagery but they also made me think of the films of Wim Wenders for their road movie, buddy movie thang. Wenders’ films are full of representations of vehicles representing “head spaces,” interior/exterior projection spaces and cameras. The windshield as lens and the side windows as film frames work as two-way mirrors or as a camera/projector duality: experiencing life as a film and reality as a projection of the self. [16]

If we look at modes of transportation as a metaphor for Brazilian subjectivity, we can say that the train becomes the dominant mode with the urban landscape its principal reality. Even when the film opens, the trains are exploding with people/stories waiting to extricate/externalize themselves. The references to the taxi point as the selective —i.e. more subjective— landscape that moneyed minorities can afford to change whenever they feel the urge. The bus is between the two: it takes one to lands less traveled, into a more subjective landscape, and in this case is the sertão. Traveling in a bus can also be seen as a metaphor for the communal experience of perceiving a shared reality—and in this case the sharing of the sertão experience on a national scale. And if one really wants to delve deeper into the landscape of the Brazilian experience/mind one can always hitch a ride in an open top truck with a group of religious pilgrims and continue on foot (or on your knees with a huge rock on your head) at the end of the road.

The theme of controlled subjectivity is also carried by visuals of confinement and fencing around the characters. Salles speaks in big picture terms and about the opening up of the visual space (inclusion of sky) as getting away from the oppressiveness of the city. “On the one hand, I wanted to get away from all those images hung all over Brazil, these postcards which exist only at the Brazilian institute of tourism. And on the other, I wanted to get away from a television aesthetic as contrived and artificial as the télénovela soap operas. Thus, when the film starts in Rio de Janeiro, there is no horizon, we never see the beach, we only see the monochrome day of the 400,000 persons which pass through the station daily, as a representation of the real Brazil. Only when the characters begin to take note of their surroundings does the possibility of an alternative vision take place which allows them to see the world though new eyes, colour begins to invade the film: a palette produces itself and depth of field occurs.” [17] Salles continues the thématique of back to the future in the pilgrim’s progress as Rocha does in Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol—Rocha’s film literally opens with images of the soil of the sertão and gradually the point of view rises, to the point that we end up on the mountain “above it all” with an earth and sky panorama. Salles opens his film with the yellow and ochre smell of rancid body odour in Rio’s low-cost housing high-rises and takes us on a Sunday drive to the sertão: Salles’ overhead panoramas take us from the congested urban sprawl of Rio, to the fertile-looking, almost empty expanse of the sertão, and finally to the ordered urban development of the squatters’ homes.

The imagery of house as home (of the source) recurs throughout Central do Brasil and is easily incorporated into the imagery of the time machine. The film takes us from the overpopulated slums and housing problems of the favella to the new suburbia of the squatters in the sertão. But parallel to this imagery is the recurring image of the sertanejo’s house. In Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol Manoel’s house comes by way of Vidas Secas—which is slightly more substantial than the houses made by the Canela Indians of Brazil—the typical sharecropper’s house of the sertão. This is transformed into a folkloric image in Central do Brasil. It starts out as a painted image in Dora’s apartment, then as wall art in the truck-stop restaurant (in the same way that Greek Montreal restaurateurs decorate the walls of their restaurants with images of the Parthenon) and as we get closer to the Source it becomes more realistic until it becomes reified as Jesse’s house and then as the brother’s.

Salles spends a lot of energy on the folkloric transformation of the house as a symbol standing for the “purity” of life on the sertão, but he gives music the short shrift. His cues are “continental” and not very Brazilian—where’s Michael Nyman when you need him? The musical narrator/cordel troubadour of Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol is a lot more engaging than the “modern” music of Central do Brasil and another parallel between the two movies—both have a shot of a solitary guitarist singing in the market place. In Central do Brasil it is the only time that we feel the presence of an indigenous musical culture (apart from religious).

In Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol we are presented the visual theme of separation/confinement in the market place where Manoel goes to confront his boss. The horses behind fences force the question which one is freer, the horses on the other side of the fence or the humans on this side of the fence? Or which side is more fenced in? Or if the quality of being fenced in is the same for both animals on both sides of the fence, is there any difference between them? In Central do Brasil the eye is constantly arrested by the presence of bars, steel doors and screens which imply that in Brazil there is always a boundary to one’s subjectivity. We see this in:

A) the repetition of x’s created by the receding perspective:

• in the great hall of Central Station
• the railway station landings just before the masses get out of the trains
• the tracks and the buildings before the kid gets shot
• the train and the cross-dissolve to the exterior of the apartment building
• The bridge trusses as the bus leaves Rio at night

B) Metal Bars:

• on Dora’s apartment windows
• the different patterns on the windows of Dora’s neighbour’s apartments
• at the bus station separating the buses from the passengers
• in front of Dora at various ticket wickets
• in the windows of the restaurant when Dora and Josué meet César
• keeping people in at the station—when Josué’s mother leaves the bars behind that’s when she gets killed.
• Josué on this side of the bars in front of the virgin’s shrine at the station

C) Big doors and locks

• At the station, the big doors which close at night and open in the morning
• The many locks at Dora’s apartment
• The heavy door and locks at the “baby mill”

D) In the sertão

• The bars get less complicated: in front of the house which once belonged to Josué’s father. The crane up and above the wooden gate and fence is like jumping above it.
• The walls of the workshop at the brother’s house