City of God and Renigunta: the transnational, regional and local in Brazilian and Indian cinemas

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the transnational flows of Brazilian cinema and its manifestations in regional film industries of India. Through a critical elaboration on the topographical, stylistic, figural and narrative re-articulations of the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund, 2002) in the Tamil film Renigunta (R. Panneerselvam, 2009), a theoretical deliberation of liminal spatiality is proposed. It is argued that films such as City of God and Renigunta are textual sites where contemporary transnationalism is affirmed as the coalescing of the subjective aspects of narratives, intensified by the temporally fragmented visual stylistic, and a neoliberal industrial context of film-making. This situates films like Renigunta within several in-between spaces like non-mainstream/art-house, regional/sub-regional, independent/multiplex film and locally global. Indeed, a critical reading of the transnational aesthetic expression leads to a re-evaluation of these deterministic categories, suggesting how the liminal, or intermedial, can become a force field for interrogating dominant perspectives of the cinema, in both Brazil and India. A further observation that is presented here proposes the global/local as an active nexus for an emergent new wave of Indian cinema that has shaped the momentous re-emergence of regional film-making in diverse geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Intermedial
• Indian Cinema
• Brazilian Cinema
• Transnational
• Gritty Realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In an attempt to trace if City of God was screened in cinema halls or film festivals, I discovered that the film was never distributed in India. I received this information through a friend in Brazil who visited the offices of the distributor O2 Filme. The confirmation also indicated that no Brazilian films have been distributed in India till 2017. I thank Emilia Teles for helping me with this information.

2. This review has also been posted by the director R. Panneerselvam on his personal blog. See http://panneerselvamdirector.blogspot.com/2012/07/sifymoviescom-renigunta-review.html.

3. See Biswas (2013). For an account of how the Hindi film industry has accessed the recent revival of regional film industry in South India, see Ingle (2016).

4. Social realism in the context of Brazilian cinema is considered as a departure from the European or Anglo-American practices of ‘art cinema’. Films of the Cinema Novo movement amply illustrate what Glauber Rocha has termed as the ‘Aesthetics of Hunger’. This politics of social realism were rooted in forging a film practice that reflected and critiqued the conditions of existence in Brazil. See Johnson (1984).

5. Contemporary Latin American cinema is often described as a product of Hollywood-inspired film-making and its redeployment in the Latin American context. Many influential directors have learned the craft of film-making in the USA and have come back to Mexico, Argentina or Brazil to become transnational auteurs. See Alvaray (2012) and Baer and Long (2004).

6. For an ‘inter-cultural’ elaboration of this, see Srinivas (2003).

7. Within the burgeoning body of work on transnational cinema, the notion of resistance is consistently rearticulated, especially by highlighting some singular aesthetic or auteurist tendencies of films. However, the underlying ideological inflection of ‘transnational cinema’ is to provide a discursive space for the multiplicity of cinematic voices by acknowledging the value of films as artefacts of a global cultural politics. See Durovicova and Newman (2010).

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Hrishikesh Ingle

Hrishikesh Ingle is an assistant professor in the Department of Film Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFL-U), Hyderabad, India. He has published on Bollywood cinema, early Marathi cinema and the New Marathi Cinema. Hrishikesh has also worked on two short documentary films.