The Ambiguities of Bacurau

Bacurau is the name of a city in Brazilian hinterland whose inhabitants fight to survive a foreign invasion. The struggle of native populations for the right to remain on their land is a common motif not only in the history of cinema, as in classic Westerns, but also in Brazilian culture and history, In this article, Ikeda proposes that Bacurau’s originality lies in how it seeks to establish a balance between genre film and political cinema, eschewing the commodified exotic spectacle of Sérgio Rezende’s The Battle of Canudos (1997) and Glauber Rocha’s radical political allegory in Black God, White Devil (1964), in order to offer a more complex commentary on the current Brazilian historical moment

Aesthetics · Allegory · Ancient history · Art · Battle · Commodification · Economy · EPIC · Literature · Motif (music) · Movie theater · Originality · Political science · Politics · Spectacle · Brazilian cultural history and politics · Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies · History · Law · Literature, Culture, and Criticism

• The Precarious Multitude of Bacurau

  Open Access•Francesco Sticchi•Theory Culture & Society•2022

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