Essaying the real: Brazil's cinematic retomada and the new commonwealth

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Notes

 1. Whitehead (2000) provides a detailed study of accounts of cannibalism, and a short critique of the use of the French texts and that of Hans Staden in the film.

 2. For a critical overview of the retomada up to 2002, see Orrichio (2003).

 3. For reasons of economy, alternative cinematic avant-garde movements such as udigrudi (from ‘underground’) are not covered here, though they did deal more directly with urban experience and civil dysfunction; see Xavier (1993).

 4. In Brazil, initial box-office attendances (in the first year of release) were as follows: Cidade de Deus, 3.1 million; Central do Brasil, 1.1 million; Carandiru, 4.5 million; Tropa de elite (discussed below), 2.1 million (source: Internet Movie Data Base, www.imdb.com). The first two were more widely and successfully distributed internationally. On balance, Cidade de Deus was the most commercially successful.

 5. The links between resistance and drug traffic are covered in Alba Zaluar's multifarious work; many themes are brought together in her 2004 anthology of essays. For a quick overview of the theme see her ‘Abertura’ to the special issue on ‘Violência e comunicação’, by the UFRJ e-journal Semiosfera (Dec. 2003). The same issue contains a reprint of Bentes 2003 (cited below), and an early Portuguese version (‘O choque do real: A violência e as estéticas do realismo midiático e literário’) of the Beatriz Jaguaribe article cited below in the 2005 English version.

 6. Gordon's comments on Aleijadinho, as yet unpublished, were presented at the 2008 BRASA IX Conference.

 7. Premiere Brazil! has been an annual event at MoMA since 2002.For 2007, see www.moma.org/exhibitions/film_exhibitions.php?id = 5229.

 8. Adler is quoted in UOL's cineclick (2008). Jangada's site for the festival is www.jangada.org/fr/festi_cine/index.htm.

 9. See Bentes’ 2003 print publication, which was reprinted online in the e-journal, Semiosfera; the quote is taken here from the latter, hence no page number.

10. Complementing Jaguaribe, but focusing on stereotypes rather than cathartic shock, Marta Peixoto (2007) provides an important critical overview of the representation of Rio favelas in both literature and film.

11 ‘Realia’ is a term used in education to mean real objects brought into the classroom. For example, when a foreign language teacher uses a clock to teach how to say the time, or when a history teacher brings in period artifacts.

12. Mello's video, in Portuguese with English sub-titles, is not a commercial production and is available online, on YouTube and elsewhere.

13. The two related songs with greatest repercussion were ‘Haiti’, by long-established stars Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (on Tropicália 2, Polygram, 1993), and ‘Diário de um detento’, by seminal negro-mestiço activist Paulista rappers Racionais MCs (on Sobrevivendo No Inferno, Unimar, 1998). Both album titles are emblematic of the stylistic ambients associated with the respective artists (tropicália-MPB and angry hip-hop); the sheer polarization of the styles suggests the wide public circle responding to the massacre.

14. Sacramento drew the title from the eponymous 1983 book by the journalist Percival de Souza, based on visits to Carandiru and other prisons.

15. At BRASA IX (2008), Robert Stam presented a deeper overview of the Carandiru cycle, looking beyond the immediate creative products to international ‘Prison Theory’ and to the ‘discursive afterlife of Carandiru’. This work is as yet unpublished.

16. Johnson's reference is Xavier (1981). See also Xavier (2004).

17. A rare case of such a scenario in the US is Mario Van Peebles' Panther (1995), about the Black Panthers, the CIA and Oakland; the resulting conspiracy theory is a sort of inverse Reefer Madness which undercuts the film's credential as drama and its use of old documental footage.

18. Segments of the film and the testimony of the woman can be seen on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v = 6ezCceJ9zY8).