Cinema at the Periphery

Back to the Margins in Search of the Core: Foreign Land’s Geography of Exclusion

The Tagus is fairer than the river flowing through my village, But the Tagus isn’t fairer than the river flowing through my village Because the Tagus isn’t the river flowing through my village. —Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym), “The Keeper of Flocks”1 Lampião was great, but he often became small. —Dadá, in Black God, White Devil 2 The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and reapproach the old colonial center, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift aimed at providing a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon, and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Even Portugal is defined by its location at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of core or center are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogue combines Brazilian, Portuguese, and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes that refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery 190 Lúcia Nagib Back to the Margins in Search of the Core Foreign Land’s Geography of Exclusion 02 Iord_Part 2.indd 190 12/17/09 10:11 AM 191 Foreign Land’s Geography of Exclusion turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange that resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging. The poet Fernando Pessoa, a looming figure behind the film’s form and content, shows, in the famous verses quoted above, how notions of center and periphery can vary according to the point of view. But while Pessoa’s oxymoronic order secures a central position for the author’s native village, in Foreign Land the view from abroad enables the realization of Brazil’s smallness , despite its great territorial dimensions. In this chapter, I will attempt to demonstrate how the dialectic tension between great and small, center and periphery permeates the film at all levels and accounts for its main qualities . The Perspective Shift Foreign Land was one of the first signs of cinematic revival after the collapse of Brazilian film production, following the drastic measures introduced by newly elected President Collor de Mello, in 1990. As well as freezing the bank accounts of the entire population, the Collor government downgraded the Ministry of Culture to a mere Secretariat and closed down several cultural institutions, including Embrafilme, the state production and distribution company that had supported two decades of a burgeoning popular film industry. Foreign Land is thus a modest, independent production, in sharp contrast to Salles’s previous film, A grande arte/High Art (Walter Salles, Brazil /USA, 1991), a commercially ambitious, English-language production, aimed at the international market. As the director explains, “I was emerging from a much more hierarchical and painful process, from a personal point of view, which was High Art. Foreign Land was a true rediscovery of the pleasure to shoot a fiction film with the same lightness and enthusiasm of my documentary filmmaking, which is where I come from.”3 The film was conceived and developed in a collaborative manner. The script was co-written by Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas, and Marcos Bernstein, with additional dialogue by Millôr Fernandes. Salles also contributed to the editing, alongside Felipe Lacerda. Thomas’s cousin, Fernando Alves Pinto, then a beginner, was cast in the lead, and other professional actors, such as Fernanda Torres, Alexandre Borges, Laura Cardoso, and Tchéky Karyo, were hired on the basis of friendship or reduced fees. Black-and-white 16 mm stock, later blown up to 02 Iord_Part 2.indd 191 12/17/09 10:11 AM [3.133.160.249] Project MUSE (2024...