The Magical Real and the Rural Modern in Cinema Novo: Vidas Secas and Black God, White Devil

In the early 1960s, the Brazilian filmmakers associated with the Cinema Novo movement sought out a new filmic idiom, one that would both challenge the conventions of Hollywood moviemaking and hone a political edge upon which Latin American revolutions could gain traction. More specifically, critics have recognized the movement as a direct response to the leadership of President Juscelino Kubitschek and his focus on a “[d]evelopmentalist ideology” that benefited industrialists and foreign investors at the expense of the rural peasantry.¹ Thus, the same energy that gave rise to the formation of Peasant Leagues organizing for agrarian reform also fueled the early messages and aesthetics of Cinema Novo. As Glauber Rocha—one of the movement’s most prominent figures—explains, Cinema Novo is a “complex of films” designed to “make the public aware of its own misery.”² Towards this end, the films underline the realities of uneven development in sparse but detailed visuals, gritty close-ups, stark use of natural light, spiky diegetic sound, and shaky handheld cameras.

Yet for all its investment in unvarnished realism, the aesthetic practices and political resonances of Cinema Novo bear oblique parallels to Latin American magical realism, particularly as Alejo Carpentier theorized it in the form the marvelous real (“lo real maravilloso Americano”). In this essay, I will use two representative films from Cinema Novo’s first wave, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas (1963) and Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol) (1964), as well as Rocha’s manifesto “An Esthetic of Hunger” (1965) and Carpentier’s essays “On the Marvelous Real in America” (1945) and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975), to chart those sites where Cinema Novo and Latin American magical realism bend towards one another. Although we must note that Cinema Novo is a specifically Brazilian creation while magic realism is an admittedly shaggy category with multiple Latin American—and global—variants, I will highlight their shared concerns as they relate to Latin American histories of political identity and development, an exercise which will help bring the political and aesthetic qualities of each into deeper focus.

Alternative Modernisms and Magical Realism

One important point of contact drawing the two forms together is that each falls within the realm of what we might call rural modernism. As Dilip Gaonkar shows, modernity—and by extension modernism—takes on different characteristics when examined outside of European narratives of progress that equate modernity with industrial development. A key feature of Gaonkar’s configuration of “alternative modernities” is the contention that “everywhere, at every national/cultural site, modernity is not one but many; modernity is not new but old and familiar; modernity is incomplete and necessarily so.”³ Modernity doesn’t automatically align itself with the linearity of industrialization; sometimes it runs in direct contrast to notions of progress underwriting the actions of modern capital. In this way, we can realistically recognize aesthetic representations of marginal rurality during the period as expressions of modernism, albeit modernism in a resolutely anti-development mode. Indeed, while it’s worth noting that the designation “rural” here definitely signifies underdevelopment, I make the distinction because discourse about development occurs within the city, the country, and all points in between. Development, it seems, is also a matter of underdevelopment, or uneven development, the effects of which are not restricted to the urban centers.

Identifying alternative or peripheral modernisms, particularly as they relate to rural subjects, is also an important move because too often a totalizing depiction of modernity collapses into a single narrative of development and urbanization, fulfilling Raymond Williams’ suspicions that modernism sets the stage for a “comfortable integration into the new international capitalism.”⁴ Modernisms that move in a contrary direction by drawing attention to spaces that lack modern development, such as both Cinema Novo and magical realism, help to amend a blind spot in crude Marxist thinking: by carefully examining the subjectivities of rural people and the political and economic structures that hold them on the margins, these works of rural modernism help to...