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209 DOCUMENTING THE SOCIAL REALITY OF BRAZIL Roberto Rossellini, the Paraíban Documentary School, and the Cinema Novistas sarah sarzynski There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it. —ROMAIN ROLLAND, Epigraph in Josué de Castro’s Geografia da fome Roberto Rossellini visited Brazil in August 1958 after the Brazilian government invited him to plan a semidocumentary about Northeastern Brazil. Josué de Castro’s books on the politics of hunger, specifically Geografia da fome (The Geography of Hunger, 1946), piqued Rossellini’s interest.1 According to Rossellini, “The book is extremely easy to translate into a cinematographic image and is also easy to show in the form of a documentary the world’s hunger and misery.”2 Although the local Brazilian press highlighted Rossellini’s dramatic personal life (which at the time was divided between Ingrid Bergman and Somali Das Gupta), Rossellini focused on his intentions for the film. He told interviewers that his experience of filming in India would “bring a contribution to how the Northeast is seen.”3 He mentioned that a major theme of the film would be the heroism of the Nordestino (person from the Northeast),4 who was heroic because it took great courage and strength to survive in an underdeveloped area. Rossellini claimed that his films took no political position. He believed that art must be connected to social problems, and film was a means to “artistically —and scientifically—document” social reality.5 He explained that neorealism was not an expired cultural movement but was experiencing a “crisis,” as were all the world’s major film industries in the late 1950s.6 Rossellini had just returned from India, where he had filmed a television documentary that would be broadcast in 1958 as well as India matri bhumi (India Motherland, 1958), productions that combined “documentary and poetry” in short, unrelated 210 sarah sarzynski segments.7 For a brief period, Rossellini had departed from Europe and turned to the Third World, inspired by “underdeveloped areas” that were the “countries of realism,” where people lived “only in the concrete.”8 Rossellini viewed underdeveloped areas as a “battlefield” where traditional culture clashed with modern technology and science.9 Whereas many directors might have seen a drastically different battlefield forming in the Third World in 1958, Rossellini’s mission was to “show” reality and portray what he considered the “great problems of humanity”: hunger, water, energy, and science.10 The meeting that took place in August 1958 between the father of neorealism and the eminent Brazilian politician famous for his studies on poverty and hunger is significant in that it symbolizes the idealism of broader political and artistic movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s.11 During this period, the Third World, its “revolutionary” poverty, and the contradictions of modernity rose to the forefront of international Cold War politics. Neorealism in Italy provided the basic language for filmmakers around the globe to express these social issues in a realistic way, granting them a power of depicting what they claimed and what audiences recognized as the “truth” or “reality” of a compelling social or political issue. As a consequence of increased rural social activism in the impoverished Northeastern region of Brazil and a historical legacy of realist novels and images that portrayed Northeastern Brazil as a nonmodern, feudal, miserably poor region, Brazilian filmmakers interested in depicting the reality of the Third World flocked to that region. In 1963, the newspaper O norte claimed that Paraíba had turned into a mecca for filmmaking.12 This essay connects the transnational language of neorealism with the nascent Northeastern film movement of the Paraíban documentary school and the early radical cultural movement known as the Cinema Novo movement to trace the development of the aesthetics and politics of filming the social reality of the Third World. Historical Precedents to Linduarte Noronha’s Aruanda (1960) One Northeastern documentary in particular, Aruanda (1960), caught the attention of well-known Brazilian filmmakers. It is quite possible that at any other historical moment the films of the Paraíban documentary school would have drifted into obscurity—in fact, most of the films have almost disappeared, with the exception of Aruanda and Romeiros da guia (Pilgrims of Guia, 1962). In this section, I sketch the language and politics of neorealism and outline the historical developments occurring in Northeastern Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I contextualize the...

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