{"id":122499,"date":"2013-06-24T19:31:48","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T22:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=122499"},"modified":"2013-06-24T19:59:46","modified_gmt":"2013-06-24T22:59:46","slug":"the-power-of-a-single-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-power-of-a-single-film\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of a single film"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Arte_207\"Photos Public domain images<\/span><\/p>\n

O som ao redor<\/em>, the modestly budgeted film made outside the typical Rio de Janeiro-S\u00e3o Paulo corridor and without the actors often seen on primetime television managed to achieve two feats: it attracted 100,000 spectators to movie theaters and dramatically rallied Brazilian critical thought, generating a considerable degree of critical review.<\/p>\n

Kleber Mendon\u00e7a, the filmmaker from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco who directed the film and wrote its complex (and somewhat sketchy screenplay, is the son of an historian and university professor. While his mother conducted academic research and delved into her studies of Casa grande & senzala<\/em> (The Masters and the Slaves), he watched one movie after another. He earned his undergraduate degree in communications from the Federal University of Pernambuco and became a film critic.<\/p>\n

O som ao redor<\/em> has generated a remarkable amount of critical review, comparable to that seen with the release of Terra em transe<\/em> (Entranced Earth) by Glauber Rocha in 1967, Cronicamente invi\u00e1vel<\/em> (Chronically Unfeasible) by S\u00e9rgio Bianchi in 2000, Cidade de Deus<\/em> (City of God) by Fernando Meirelles in 2002 and Tropa de elite 1<\/em> (Elite Squad) and Tropa de elite 2<\/em> (Elite Squad: the enemy within), by Jos\u00e9 Padilha in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s film left the cinematic ghetto and confronts issues such as class warfare, the predatory fury of real estate speculation, Brazilian style racism and the presence of militias in providing services to citizens threatened by a sense of fear.<\/p>\n

The story begins on a normal day, on a middle class street in the Pernambucan capital of Recife. \u201cIt would be a day just like all the others,\u201d Mendon\u00e7a points out, \u201cif only the militia had not come to offer the highly touted peace of mind that only private security can provide.\u201d But the presence of the militia members ends up \u201cbringing calm to some, but tension to others, in a community that seems to have a lot of fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ismail Xavier, film professor at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP), got excited about Mendon\u00e7a’s first feature-length fictional film. To him, \u201cthe film deals with a subject often repeated in recent Pernambucan cinema, which is the relationship between past and present, or the layers of time that build up in the contemporary experience of our incomplete modernization. The result is a dramatic reenactment of life in an upper middle class neighborhood of Recife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Scenes

Photos Public domain images<\/span><\/a> Scenes from the film O som ao redor<\/em> by Kleber Mendon\u00e7aPhotos Public domain images<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Xavier, author of Alegorias do subdesenvolvimento: Cinema Novo, Tropicalismo e Cinema Marginal<\/em> (Allegories of underdevelopment: New Cinema, tropicalism and marginal cinema), points out that \u201cby talking about the past\u2019s hold on the present, O som ao redor also attempts to analyze the rural and urban, or the presence of patriarchical traditions of command and cronyism in present-day city life, with a tableau of characters and situations that at first seem to be just fragments or snapshots of neighborhood life that come together not from a strong narrative connection, but rather from a commanding mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em> and a great soundtrack.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the USP professor, \u201cwhat really matters is that the tenuous nature of the passage of time permeates the course of O som ao redor<\/em> and enhances the relationship between fragmentation, opening and movement towards an outcome. At a time when open endings, with questions, have become the norm, Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s gesture goes against the tide by tying the prologue to the final scene as a comeback by the repressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researcher asks himself why the film generated such significant critical review. \u201cOn the one hand,\u201d says Xavier, \u201cseen from inside Brazilian production, O som ao redor<\/em> shifts the internal debate about violence and urban challenges that are generally associated with the crisis of the family and focus on \u201cfatherless\u201d youths whose social condition encourages their entry into organized crime (and here we are bound to recall films like Cidade de Deus<\/em>, among others).\u201d<\/p>\n

But unlike the film by Fernando Meirelles, \u201cMendon\u00e7a\u2019s film revisits the question of rage as it pertains to the authoritarianism of patriarchical tradition, in a way that instead of \u2018blaming\u2019 out of control urbanization because it dissolves the family, emphasizes the other side of the problem: it shows that authoritarianism is part of the family tradition of those on the top who survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Xavier points out that Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s film presents a synthesis in that the past in the present, the rural in the city, and issues of class are articulated within the patriarchical paradigm in a way that encourages us to look back on the path this cinema has taken for nearly 20 years. \u201cOne of the strengths of O som ao redor<\/em> is precisely the fact that it causes us to look back in retrospection, something that only extraordinary works are able to do,\u201d says the researcher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The power of a single film","protected":false},"author":489,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[204],"coauthors":[1212],"class_list":["post-122499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-visual-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/489"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122499"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=122499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}