New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema ed. by Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (review)

As the title indicates, this volume discusses features developed in contemporary Brazilian and Argentine cinema, mainly from the 1990s onwards, and the impact that cultural policies, globalization and neoliberalism have had on the two countries’ film production. The book is divided into three sections besides the editors’ introduction. The first, ‘Funding’, comprises two chapters on Argentine film production, two on Brazilian, and a comparative one. The second, ‘Class, Citizens and Spatial Relations’, contains five chapters on Argentine and two on Brazilian cinema. The last, ‘Gender’, brings one chapter on Argentine cinema and two on Brazilian, and a comparative one. From the total chapters, one on Brazil and three on Argentine cinema had been previously published in article format. For the purpose of this review, I will concentrate on the eight chapters dealing with Brazilian cinema.

The chapters in the first part focus on various issues Brazilian film production faced in the 1990s because of the end of the state support for filmmaking, particularly because of then president Fernando Collor’s closure of the federal government’s Embrafilme. Cacilda Rêgo discusses how the local film industry looked for ways to get back into production, which had a revival in the mid-1990s, in the now termed Retomada (‘retake’). As Courtney Brannon Donoghue’s chapter informs us, this period witnessed the rise of production companies such as Globo Filmes, which the author calls ‘transnational industry’, and also new forms of funding. Marina Moguillansky’s comparative chapter in the section analyzes cultural policies in Brazil and Argentina, but also in other countries that were members of Mercosur at that time. It discusses issues of production, distribution and financing and alternative ways to expand these among and beyond the countries concerned.

Regarding the two chapters dealing with Brazil in the second section of the book—which explores the impact that neoliberal policies have had on unemployment, inequality, poverty and personal relationships—Piers Armstrong’s chapter engages with representations of Brazilian urban spaces in the ‘über-dramas’ genre whereas Vanessa Fitzgibbon’s engages with ‘racial resentment’ in new Brazilian cinema, but focusing on City of God (2002).

In section three, Jack Draper III’s chapter makes an interesting and valid analysis of the representation of female sexuality and nature in music and cinema, despite overstating the uniqueness of some films of that time. Charlotte Gleghorn engages with the ‘dystopian city’ in her gendered interpretations of the urban space in one Argentine and one Brazilian film and Leslie L. Marsh deals with female filmmakers before and after Retomada.

This edited collection provides important information about Brazilian cinema, particularly in part one, but it has some weaknesses as a whole. First, after reading the chapters, one is left wondering about the organization of the sections and the balance between the number of chapters on the two countries concerned. Some of them do not show clearly what ‘the new trends’ in Brazilian cinema are, especially in sections two and three. Some make statements that are not particularly new, a fact that suggests a lack of knowledge about past and present film production in Brazil beyond the films that are well-known abroad. I felt that some of the chapters do not contextualize the discussion enough and rather take theories and apply to a specific film without giving information on the main topics. This is particularly the case of the chapters focusing on race and gender, which do not provide enough information on the subjects and dismiss important previous work on these themes done by such critics as Roberto DaMatta, David W. Foster, and Robert Stam, to cite only three. For instance, although Fitzgibbon’s chapter promises to talk about racial resentment in Brazil, little about race itself is explored. There is not enough contextualization about racial debates and relations in Brazil, such as the ‘whitening project’ of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century and ‘racial democracy’—many readers...