The Sertão on Screen: From the Silent Era to the Pernambuco Revival

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Notes

1 See, for example, the essays by Ivana Bentes and Luiz Zanin Oricchio in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Taurus, 2003).

2 The poem was also known as “Ranchinho do sertão.” It was one of the first films made in Rio Grande do Sul and was the inspiration in 2002 for the Dia do Cinema Gaúcho (Gaúcho Cinema Day) that is held every March 27, the date in 1909 when the film was first exhibited.

3 No director's name appears in Brazil's cinematheque archives.

4 For more on the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition, see Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. Unfortunately, Ranchinho, Expedição Roosevelt, Avanhandava and many other early documentaries about the sertão have been lost. For critical response to Avanhandava, see http://www.cinemateca.gov.br/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/iah/?IsisScript=iah/iah.xis&base=FILMOGRAFIA&lang=p&nextAction=lnk&exprSearch=ID=002628&format=detailed.pft#1

5 No director's name for the film appears in archival documentation.

6 Abrahão's footage can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBR9wPp5gt8.

7 For more on Vera Cruz and this important film, see Maria Rita Galvão, "Vera Cruz: A Brazilian Hollywood,” in Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 270-280.

8 The quotation is from Glauber Rocha's manifesto, “An Aesthetics of Hunger,” which appears in Brazilian Cinema, 70.

9 For a longer discussion of the film, see Sadlier, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 31-48.

10 Pagador is generally not mentioned in terms of Cinema Novo, but it shares with later films, like the Cinema Novo classic Vidas secas, a preoccupation with injustices suffered by peasants at the hands of authoritarian figures. 

11 These are sites described in detail by Euclides da Cunha in his eyewitness account and now classic Os sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944), about the messianic leader Antônio Conselheiro whose religious peasant community in Canudos defied and finally was destroyed by the Republican government in 1897. 

12 For a discussion of Rocha's use of popular culture, see Ismail Xavier, “Black God, White Devil: Allegory and Prophesy,” 31-52.

13 Antônio das Mortes is also hired by the Catholic Church in Deus e o diabo. The landowner complains that he is losing his work force to messianism and banditry, while the priest complains of losing his followers to the same forces.

14 Between 1986 and 1990, an estimated 85 to 100 films were released annually. From 1991 to 1995, the average dropped to 24 films per year. This information is based on annual production information in Antônio Leão da Silva Neto, Dicionário de filmes brasileiros (São Paulo: A.I. Silva Neto, 2002).

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Notes on contributors

Darlene J. Sadlier

Darlene J. Sadlier is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author of books on Cecília Meireles, Fernando Pessoa, and post-revolutionary Portuguese women writers. Her most recent titles include Nelson Pereira dos Santos (2003), Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (2008), Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II (2012), and The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts (2016).