A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film

“This book covers one hundred years of documentary film in Brazil,” claims Darlene J. Sadlier in introducing her book, an innovative and fascinating narrative about the art of Brazilian documentaries (p. 1). Sadlier meticulously collected examples from various archives, specifically the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo (where three rooms full of films burst into flames in 2021), the Edgard Roquette-Pinto archive at the Academia Brasileira de Letras, and Indiana University. The documentaries analyzed—whose run times vary from 30 minutes to over 70 minutes and which include both the internationally awarded and the lesser known but equally emblematic—are organized in roughly chronological order, mostly grouped according to their thematic concerns, across eight chapters.Modernity in the 1920s is addressed in chapter 1, shown through Silvino Santos's masterpiece No país das amazonas (1922). This film, which attracted large, enthusiastic audiences when Brazil celebrated the centennial of its independence from Portugal, portrayed the intrusion of industrial modernity in the Amazon region. By contrast, Adalberto Kemeny and Hungarian-born Rodolfo Rex Lustig poetically but critically reflected on urbanism in São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (1929), in which immigrants brought cosmopolitan cultures but also fascist ideologies.In chapter 2, Sadlier draws from her deep knowledge of the Getúlio Vargas era (1930–45, 1951–54)—particularly its nation-building policies and government censorship—that she had amassed for her 2012 book Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II. Particularly fascinating in this chapter is her reconstruction of the legendary outlaw Lampião and his companion Maria Bonita, who were chosen by Benjamin Abrahão as subjects for a documentary sponsored by Bayer aspirin. But Lampião challenged Vargas's political mission of Order and Progress, and both the outlaw and the filmmaker following him were killed in 1938. The cinematography of the Vargas-period films, particularly those produced by Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz in the 1950s, were rich, and they featured Afro-Brazilians as protagonists. This creative art film studio only went bankrupt because it lacked its own distribution system and subsequently had to rely on Columbia Pictures in the United States to do so. Influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, Brazilian Cinema Novo (the topic of chapter 3) profited from two decades of postwar liberal democracy; films like Arraial do Cabo (1959) and Aruanda (1960) portrayed poverty and exploitation in the country's Northeast, whose mythical backlands were described in João Guimarães Rosa's epic novel Grande sertão: Veredas (1956).This artistic diversity was radically reduced by the military dictatorship, discussed in chapter 4. The highly productive collaborative Caravana Farkas, led by the Hungarian-born Thomaz Farkas, which created documentaries like Herança do Nordeste (1972) focused on the impoverished Northeast, particularly suffered the destructive power of strong censorship. But, behind the thematic camouflage of soccer, folklore, and samba, the collaborative still managed to address sensitive social and political issues. Subterrâneos do futebol (1965)—whose title is a reference to Jorge Amado's Os subterrâneos da liberdade (1954), a critique of the Vargas dictatorship—celebrates the working-class youngsters and their desire to rise socially. While Cinema Novo was an all-male club, Sadlier emphasizes the contributions to the movement of Helena Solberg, whose first film, 1966’s A entrevista, was followed almost 30 years later by the much-admired Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994), about the Brazilian bombshell who was one of Hollywood's exploited icons of the Good Neighbor Policy.Chapters 5 and 7 illustrate that Brazilian issues continued to dominate Brazilian documentary filmmaking, whether the subject was mythical Indigenous women, famous musicians (Tom Jobim), iconic images (Cristo Redentor), or idealized portraits of presidents (Getúlio Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek, and João Goulart). As chapter 6 shows, beginning in the 1980s documentaries deconstructed the longtime myth of the “noble savage” by offering authentic voices who spoke for themselves (p. 146). But it took longer for Afro-Brazilians to be presented, as Joel Zito Araújo highlighted in his documentary A negação do Brasil: O negro na telenovela brasileira (2000). Family histories such as Um passaporte húngaro (2001), about transatlantic intergenerational and multilinguistic journeys based on flight and emigration from Europe, enriched this broad sociological spectrum, while twenty-first-century documentaries focus more on crime and violence (2002’s Ônibus 174, by José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda) and the military dictatorship (2009’s Cidadão Boilesen). Urban social tensions, climate change, and austerity measures are also frequent topics. Consequently, the book's epilogue compares Petra Costa's award-winning and internationally praised lyrical documentary Democracia em vertigem (2019) with Maria Augusta Ramos's O processo (2018), about the impeachment process against President Dilma Rousseff. Vividly written, this first monumental history of feature and short documentaries made in Brazil presents a broad range of films—anthropological, propagandistic, biographical, autobiographical, instructional, educational, state-sponsored, and independent—and provides a unique way of discussing the larger history of Brazilian society, politics, and culture, for Brazilianists and for a larger public as well

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