{"id":572354,"date":"2026-01-20T11:02:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T14:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=572354"},"modified":"2026-01-20T11:02:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T14:02:25","slug":"film-personality-jean-claude-bernardet-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/film-personality-jean-claude-bernardet-dies-at-88\/","title":{"rendered":"Film personality Jean-Claude Bernardet dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jean-Claude Bernardet had just put the finishing touches to a new project. The book Viver o medo \u2013 Uma novela porn\u00f4-gourmet <\/em>(Living the fear: A gourmet porn novel)\u2014written with author and scriptwriter Sabina Anzuategui, a professor at the C\u00e1sper L\u00edbero College\u2014which shifts between his most intimate memories and fiction, is about to be published by Companhia das Letras. The researcher, film critic, cinematographer, and actor, to list one or two more of his facets, had other projects in the pipeline and wrote until his work was interrupted by a stroke that killed him at 88 years of age in the early hours of July 12 in S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n

Leaving work unfinished had been a fear of his since 1993, when he was a professor at The School of Communication and Arts of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (ECA-USP), working on the film S\u00e3o Paulo \u2013 Sinfonia e cacofonia <\/em>(S\u00e3o Paulo: Symphony and cacophony<\/em>), one of the first thematic projects funded by FAPESP in the humanities. Bernardet tested positive for the AIDS virus HIV, in those days a death-sentence diagnosis, and embraced the film with all the urgency of a swan song. He and his team managed to complete the film in 1994, but that was not the end. The advent of antiretroviral medication the following year allowed him another three decades of notable works, and he overcame health issues such as recurring prostate cancer, for which he opted not to seek treatment, and successive bone fractures.<\/p>\n

Progressively losing his eyesight as a consequence of macular degeneration\u2014for which the biography Wet macula <\/em>(Companhia das Letras, 2023) is named, written with Anzuategui as part of a project with editor and translator Heloisa Jahn (1947\u20132022)\u2014Bernardet maintained his habit as a moviegoer, avoiding subtitled films. At this stage he could not make out fine detail, and it became increasingly challenging to read and write, so he reinvented himself as an actor, up to then an occasional habit. Arthur Autran, a professor at the Arts and Communication Department of the Federal University of S\u00e3o Carlos (UFSCar), recalled a situation from when he was a student at ECA-USP. Vitor \u00c2ngelo, a student at the time, recruited Bernardet to act in his short 1995 film Disseram que voltei americanizada <\/em>(They said I came back Americanized) (1995), and the professor rose to the challenge. \u201cHe turned up wearing heavy makeup, drag-queen style, although that term wasn\u2019t used much at the time,\u201d he recalls. \u201cHe removed the makeup little by little, doing a piece to camera about how he noticed those first skin rashes that come with AIDS; it was a really intense, unsettling scene,\u201d says Autran, who had looked on as it was filmed. \u201cWe already knew that he had the virus, but that meant that the disease was developing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00c2ngelo talks of the love that Bernardet had for a challenge, both for himself and others. \u201cIn Historiografia cl\u00e1ssica do cinema brasileiro <\/em>(Classical historiography of Brazilian cinema) (Annablume,1995), the critic reassessed classical authors such as Paulo Em\u00edlio Salles Gomes [1916\u20131977], whom he considered his mentor,\u201d he adds. \u201cThis was looked upon as disrespect, but I disagree: he had no time for untouchable icons, and critically reevaluated these authors from a different angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

This same spirit of irreverence is evident in Brasil em tempo de cinema<\/em> (Brazil in the time of cinema) (Civiliza\u00e7\u00e3o Brasileira, 1967), through which he analyzed Cinema Novo, a style that started to take hold in the late 1950s, and concluded that films made to examine and portray the Brazilian people ultimately reflected a middle-class worldview. This had significant repercussions among filmmakers associated to the movement and, decades later, director Eduardo Coutinho (1933\u20132014) publicly declared that he had made the 1984 film Cabra marcado para morrer<\/em> (Twenty Years Later) in response. The version of Brasil em tempo de cinema<\/em> published in 2007 by Companhia das Letras carries a transcript of this conversation. History stands testament to Bernardet\u2019s vision for the film critic: to be \u201ca committed cultural participant\u201d in cinematographic creation and production. \u201cI needed to work with Brazilian films and topics because it was the only opportunity for having a dialogue,\u201d he told Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em> in 2014.<\/p>\n

In book reeditions, Bernardet made no changes to the original texts, but resignified them with new material, both his own and that of others. The second edition of Cinema brasileiro: Propostas para uma hist\u00f3ria <\/em>(Brazilian cinema: Proposals for a history) (Companhia das Letras, 2009), coproduced by Autran, is an example. \u201cWe included interviews with three lady cinema producers, because he saw it as an essential role, but this was not very widely perceived in Brazil.\u201d The choice of female interviewees was not random either, according to the UFSCar professor: \u201cJean-Claude said that women were more engaged in the area at that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The desire to act and dance is usually separated from intellectuality, but he was all of those things: contemporaneous and futuristic<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bernardet was a professor at ECA-USP between 1967 and 1997, with an 11-year interval when he was \u201cretired\u201d by the military government. After the Amnesty was enacted, he obtained his PhD and in 2012 became an emeritus professor at the institution. According to Autran, Bernardet \u201calmost aggressively provoked his students.\u201d Anzuategui had such an experience during the third and fourth years of her undergraduate course, when she was studying script specialization. She found the professor\u2019s original vision remarkable, combined with his \u201cFrench straightforwardness, which Brazilians find so different.\u201d While some colleagues were shocked, she admired his \u201czero tolerance for hypocrisy,\u201d his courage to speak without fear of offending his interlocutor. She recalls that Bernardet would often show a clip for students to comment on, to find the problem. After everybody had taken their turn speaking, he would point out something unexpected and incisive.<\/p>\n

Autran says that Bernardet was very active to the end, forging partnerships with young filmmakers such as Cristiano Burlan, Lincoln P\u00e9ricles, and F\u00e1bio Rog\u00e9rio. \u201cHe was very open to the younger generations, curious about what we had to say,\u201d agrees journalist Mariana Queen Nwabasili, currently doing doctoral work on audiovisual media and processes at ECA-USP.<\/p>\n

Nwabasili sought Bernardet out a few years ago after reading a critique by historian Maria Beatriz Nascimento (1942\u00ad\u20131995) on the film Xica da Silva <\/em>(1976), by Cac\u00e1 Diegues (1930\u20132015), published in the journal Opini\u00e3o <\/em>at the time of its release. When she read Brasil em tempo de cinema<\/em>, the young student understood that there was this extra layer: the filmmakers of the age were not only middle-class, but also white males. \u201cI wanted to speak to Bernardet about the possibility of deepening the racial dimension in the discussion about Cinema Novo authors, and he was generous with his interest,\u201d recalls the researcher. The two soon developed a close relationship, enabling them to discuss a wide range of topics not restricted to the academic environment.<\/p>\n

Nwabasili defines Bernardet as a blend of the artistic and the intellectual. \u201cThe desire to act and dance is usually separated from intellectuality, but he was all of those things; always contemporaneous and futuristic, detached from his time, until now.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Sabina Anzuategui, fiction was always foremost for Bernardet. Cartesian thinking served the cinema critic well, but he did not actually identify as a cinema person. The scriptwriter sees a literary quality in the critical texts that makes for good reading, regardless of the period and the film in question. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to define himself, he was kind of an orphan of existence, dragged away from his country, from his mother.\u201d Bernardet was of French parentage, though he himself was born in Charleroi, Belgium, in 1936. He moved to Brazil with his father, mother, and brother at the age of 13. \u201cHe was extremely intelligent and sensitive; he was an artistic soul looking for somewhere to settle for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radicalism was not restricted to his thoughts. At 70, he enjoyed a parachute jump so much that he repeated the experience several times. His first jump was photographed, and he acquired two copies: one for the Cinemateca Brasileira (Brazilian Film Library), which houses his document archives, and the other for his daughter Ligia. Bernardet is also survived by his granddaughter Alici\u2014both live in the United States, but this never stopped them from occasionally playing cards in remote gatherings that he loved. On the Sunday prior to his passing, he beat the whole family.<\/p>\n

The story above was published with the title “A free-flying artist<\/strong>” in issue 354 of August\/2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researcher, actor, and writer leaves a far-reaching legacy in critical thinking and the arts","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":572359,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[1348],"tags":[216,245,204],"coauthors":[1601],"class_list":["post-572354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituary","tag-film","tag-literature","tag-visual-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572354","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":572371,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572354\/revisions\/572371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572354"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=572354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}