Nelson Pereira dos Santos (review)

Nelson Pereira dos Santos, whose cinematic production spans more than half a century, is arguably one of Brazil's—not to say Latin America's—most important and influential living directors. Following the release of his neo-realist masterpiece, Vidas Secas in 1963, Santos—along with Glauber Rocha, Carlos Diegues, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Ruy Guerra and Leon Hirzman—became one of the country's best-known filmmakers and one of Cin ema Novo's leading figures. Indeed, Rocha, the movement's theoretical mouthpiece who had worked closely with Santos during the filming of his Man da caru vermelho (1961), views Santos as Cin ema Novo's consummate au teur. In Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro, the late cineaste reveals, in fact, that it was Santos who first taught him how to use and manipulate the cinematic idiom. By 1962, Santos had already been making films for over a decade.

The extent of Santos's activity as a filmmaker by 1962 is especially significant because, as film historians have often noted, this year marked the release of an unusually large number of Brazilian pictures made by first-time or young directors, and these films enjoyed a notable commercial success (in one case matching the box office receipts for no less a Hollywood blockbuster than Ben-Hur). 1962 is thus generally regarded as the pivotal or "banner year" not only for Cin ema Novo but for the national film industry as a whole. Yet Santos's first film (now lost), a 45 minute documentary about São Paulo's working youth commissioned by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and entitled Ju ven tude, dates back more than a decade, to 1950.

Set in the Rio fa vela near which the director was living at the time, and finally released in 1956, after a nation-wide campaign against the ban imposed upon it by the national censor board, Santos's first feature film Rio, 40 graus received a lukewarm public reception. Yet the critical recognition it garnered from both domestic and international film circles was nearly unanimous. Enthusiastically reviewed by Le Monde's major film critic, it went on to earn Santos the award for best young director at a 1956 film festival in Czechoslovakia. Nearly a decade later, when he coined the phrase cin ema novo to describe the explosion onto the national cultural scene of socially engaged and mostly low-budget films in the early nineteen-sixties, the Brazilian film critic Ely Azevedo would attribute a crucial and pioneering role to Santos's Rio, singling out for special praise its "bravery at breaking through the limitations of a cinema imprisoned within the studio system. . . .and for its shocking, naked view of reality" (qtd. in Sadlier 29). Despite this critical tendency to present him as one of the movement's precursors, however, Santos himself offers a more modest and modulated account of his relationship with this dynamic group of young and radical film-makers, suggesting in effect that he had been "co-opted" by the movement, and stressing that he was "ten years older than they were" (in Sadlier 31).

In her excellent new book on Nelson Pereira dos Santos (published as part of the University of Illinois's Contemporary Film Directors Series), Darlene Sadlier seems especially alive to this kind of ambivalence. Rather than rely upon the received critical wisdom about Santos's role within the cin ema novo group, she carefully constructs Santos's early itinerary as a film-maker. While laying stress on the close-knit relationships that developed among the new generation of socially engaged filmmakers and future film critics, especially in Rio, for instance, she emphasizes just as much the eclectic and diverse character of Santos's filmic production over the last fifty years or so, scrupulously documenting his shift from his early committed cinema, to neo-realism and his Godardian experimental phase, and ultimately to what she defines as a form of popular realism. Sadlier's study is a welcome and no...