Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes

On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde, Stephanie Dennison

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786833259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–77) is revered in Brazil as the first ardent defender, promoter and theorist of Brazilian cinema. A film professor, critic and historian, his dedication to cinema shaped a generation of influential film critics in his home country, and set the foundations for the serious study of film in Brazil. For the first time in English, this book brings together a selection of his essays for an English-speaking audience, with detailed explanatory introductions to each section for readers unfamiliar with the context of the writings of Salles Gomes.

By blending together ruminations on global and national cinema, as well as avant-garde film and popular movies, the collection shows how the defence and promotion of a national cinema has been forged through dialogues with international trends, informed by commercial influences, and shaped by global and national political contexts. The book thus introduces readers to the international dimensions of Salles Gomes's engagements with film, and in doing so reassesses the locatedness of his formulations on national cinema and signals their international dimensions.

Part I:

Social and Cinematic Engagements

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: Film critic and activist. Image courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira/SAv/MinC.

Introduction

MAITE CONDE

In 1941, shortly after returning to Brazil from political exile in France, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes began writing for a new journal, Clima, becoming part of what became known as the Clima generation. The publication developed from the cultural activities of a group of students from the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Philosophy, Literature, Sciences and Humanities, which included the future literary critic Antonio Candido, the anthropologist Rui Coelho, the philosopher Gilda de Mello e Souza and the theatre critic Décio de Almeida Prado. Regularly meeting in the city’s cafés to discuss contemporary culture and society, the students formalised their conversations in the journal, which was published from 1941 to 1944.

As Paulo Emílio notes, in its early days Clima was marked by political abstention as ‘political issues, whether national or international, would not be discussed in the journal’. The journal included articles on law and the economy. It also published essays on culture, with Antonio Candido focusing on literature, Décio de Almeida Prado on theatre, and Paulo Emílio penning his first essays on film in it. The journal’s broad focus reflected the faculty of which the students were part. The journal, however, was distributed beyond the university to secure an intellectual audience outside the academic world, though it was one that was not always receptive. Indeed, despite Clima’s apoliticism the journal and its writers were harshly criticised. Left-wing intellectuals in particular rebuked Clima’s lack of engagement with Brazil’s political context, condemning the new generation as uncommitted and conformist.¹

Clima’s political abstention came to an abrupt end in 1942 with the publication of its ‘Declaration’. The group’s ‘Declaration’ signalled a new direction for the journal and the group, making engagement with contemporary politics, both national and international, paramount. International events played a key part in this. The spread of fascism and the intensification of the Second World War placed politics at the forefront of the world stage. Brazil was not immune to these global events. The bombing of Brazilian ships by German submarines in 1942 led the country to declare war against the Axis powers. In this context abstention was no longer an option so in its ‘Declaration’ the Clima generation emphasised political engagement.

Clima’s ‘Declaration’ unequivocally affirmed the need to unconditionally combat the spread of fascism in Brazil and beyond, using highly bellicose language that reflected a sense of urgency both for the country and for Brazilian intellectuals. Antonio Candido has stressed the key role Paulo Emílio played in Clima’s new political stance. Its ‘Declaration’, he recalls, was conceived of and written by Paulo Emílio, who incorporated ideas and suggestions from the rest of the group.² Clima’s ‘Declaration’ gained much attention in São Paulo and beyond: it was read out on radio stations nationwide; copies were widely circulated around the country’s major cities; and students turned its key points into political slogans. Brazil had entered a new era of political commitment and Clima was at the forefront of this.

Members of Clima had, of course, never been completely impartial or politically neutral. As Paulo Emílio notes, the group’s intellectuals were ‘from different ideological backgrounds’. Its adherents included those sympathetic to the left as well as the right. Paulo Emílio himself had also been particularly politically active from 1930 onwards. The Brazilian Revolution of 1930 ended the country’s First Republic (1889–1903) and brought the demise of the traditional political oligarchy. The years that followed were marked by numerous social reforms, leading to what José Inácio de Melo Souza refers to as ‘a climate of political effervescence’.³ The period saw the expansion of the Communist Party, which moved beyond its original trade union roots and the confines of the party to become a broader social phenomenon – part of everyday life for the urban middle classes, especially for students. A key influence of this expansion was the Soviet Revolution, which inspired many to take an interest in Brazil’s own social reality – particularly its underdevelopment and the extreme inequalities in a country still dominated by a traditional landed oligarchy. In Brazil this had been foregrounded by Luís Carlos Prestes, the future General Secretary of the Communist Party, who in 1925 led a legendary predecessor of Mao’s ‘long march’, the Prestes Column, across the country in an attempt to mobilise a popular armed rebellion that demanded state assistance for impoverished rural workers. The march highlighted the vast gulf between the poor masses in the north-east of Brazil and those of bourgeois urban society in the south, revealing a divided society. The actions and ideas that grew out of the march inspired other individuals to lead the Brazilian Revolution of 1930 to bring down the old government and its traditional political elite.

Like others at the time, Paulo Emílio was profoundly influenced by this period and the social and political issues it foregrounded. He joined the Communist Youth Party while still a high school student, began to read works by Stalin, Lenin, Riazanov and Max Beer, and organised the first student committee against fascism and imperialism. Paulo Emílio’s struggle against imperialism led to his joining the leftist coalition the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (National Liberation Alliance), which gave his political concerns a profoundly national vision.

Paulo Emílio’s political activities led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1935, when a new regime led by president Getúlio Vargas sought to suppress the influence of communism in Brazil. Paulo Emílio spent two years in prison, before taking part in a dramatic prison break. After digging a tunnel for two weeks, he escaped with 16 other prisoners and eventually fled to Paris, becoming the first student to be exiled by the Vargas regime.

These years of exile had a great impact on Paulo Emílio’s politics, leading him to reflect on his ideological and political views. Events taking place in the broader context were key to this. His arrival in Paris coincided with the start of the Great Purge and the Moscow Trials, which led to what Paulo Emílio recalls as ‘A Time of Pessimism’. Many who had once wholeheartedly embraced the Marxist creed now publicly renounced it, some surrendering themselves to what Paulo Emílio calls ‘an anti-communism taken to extreme consequences’. Others never abrogated their communist past but did begin to search for a means beyond official party lines to restore their lost faith. For Paulo Emílio, George Orwell epitomises the latter. Reading Orwell’s 1984 as the expression of the nihilism that Stalinism caused among the left, Paulo Emílio notes that this novel nevertheless registers a need to revise rather than renounce the past to formulate a new language and culture beyond party lines and the totalitarian state. Culture, then, need not be a tool of ideological state apparatus; it can engage with and critique it. Paulo Emílio thus interprets Orwell’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1984 as pointing to an optimistic future.

Brazil was not immune to this nihilism, as Paulo Emílio’s essay ‘Platform for a New Generation’ outlines. Written in 1945, the essay provides a critical overview of the emergence of a new intellectual generation in Brazil, situating it within national political events. The essay’s key point, though, is the violent suppression of democracy by the post-1935 Vargas Regime. Constituting Brazil’s own time of pessimism, this period was characterised, according to Paulo Emílio, by a crisis in Brazil for both the intellectual left and the right, with both sides marked by ‘a great ideological confusion’. As in his essay on Orwell, however, Paulo Emílio points to an optimistic future. The ideological dissolution caused by the black years of the Vargas regime was, he says, being replaced by a new era in which ideas were inspired by the past, most notably the Russian Revolution and its commitment to foregrounding and overcoming imperialism, fascism and underdevelopment – all issues pertinent to the contemporary Brazilian context. This revitalisation of Russia’s revolutionary past thus ushered in a new focus on Brazil’s social and political issues; it also led to an interrogation of orthodox Marxism, which was revised for present historical necessities, most notably the construction of a new democratic order for Brazil and a continued struggle against fascism.

Paulo Emílio’s own stance was similar to Orwell’s. Though he never renounced communism, the political crisis caused by Stalinism and by Vargas made Paulo Emílio take an interest in a wide array of ideas and ideologies, from both the left and the right. Left-wing politics continued to pay a decisive role in Paulo Emílio’s life, but it did not become the steadfast nucleus of his opinions and viewpoints. Rejecting political orthodoxy, he never shied away from conversations with people of different beliefs, making him what Hannah Arendt would term ‘a former communist’.⁴ This is evident in his assessment of Brazilian communism in his 1942 manifesto ‘Commentary’, written for Clima, which distinguishes between ‘academic Stalinism’ and a politics based on the ongoing toils of ordinary people. Moving beyond the rigidity of scholasticism and also historical dogmas, including Trotskyism and communism, ‘Commentary’ points to the possibility of forging a new political space in everyday struggles – one that is independent of official doctrines. Far from adhering to official party lines, Paulo Emílio sought a politics that had its roots in a universal regard for the struggles of real people.

This emphasis on a politics of the everyday and the ordinary played an important part in Paulo Emílio’s work as a film critic. Far from being an enlightened critic who was communicating preconceived ideas regarding cinema, Paulo Emílio played close attention to the audience, seeking to learn about film from viewers themselves. This engagement with the audience is at the heart of Paulo Emílio’s distinctive style of film criticism, as seen in the essays ‘Unnecessary Intellect’, ‘A Century of Film’ and ‘Start of a Conversation’.

In the 1963 essay ‘Start of a Conversation’, his first column for the journal Brasil, Urgente, Paulo Emílio self-consciously reflects on what his task as a film critic will be, initiating an intimate mode of address that converses with the reader as an equal. His style departs from that of traditional film critics who, Paulo Emílio says, ‘spend their lives reading each other’s work’: they ‘only really understand other critics’ and ‘take great pleasure in allusion and subtexts’. The audience has ‘nothing to do with what these critics say directly and what they suggest indirectly’. Paulo Emílio here echoes Rudolf Arnheim’s discussion of film criticism, which likewise bemoans critics who ‘discuss films no one has seen […] with people of their own ilk’.⁵ Dismissing this tradition, Paulo Emílio proposes his style of criticism to be a conversation in which he hopes his readers will participate. ‘One of the good things about film is the conversation it inspires and encourages […] What is great about film is that we are all up to date with it, just as we are with politics, football or high-profile crimes.’ For Paulo Emílio, then, everyone plays a part in cinema, which, through conversation, can forge a sense of unanimity where people can forget their isolated individuality.

Stressing film’s collectivity is at the heart of the essay ‘A Century of Film’. Written in 1970, this work reflects on cinema and recasts its origins away from production to reception, placing the audience at the heart of film’s foundations. Recalling a particular encounter with a Brazilian cinephile family, the critic describes how the moving pictures unite three generations of a movie-going family. Foregrounded as a medium that can bring together people of different backgrounds, film is portrayed as a democratic art form which everyone can understand and interact with. Paulo Emílio’s focus on cinema’s reception and on the audience is particularly poignant in this essay. Written in the context of the increasing use of television and changes to urban space, it notes that the dynasty of family movie-goers no longer exists, pointing to what Susan Sontag lamented as ‘The Decay of Cinema’.⁶ Indeed, going to the movies is no longer a major part of Brazilians’ everyday life and Paulo Emílio sorrowfully sums up how ‘we have seen the birth, growth and death of the cinema and its audience. The cadaver is impressive and defenceless.’

Yet, if Paulo Emílio’s essay is reminiscent of Sontag’s swansong to movie-love, it crucially also points to the emergence of a new cinematic era that has ‘excited the modern mind’ through ‘its quality, variety and freedom. The barrier that separated old cinema from the literary and artistic expressions of its time has disappeared. All over the world, more and more quality films are being produced, including here in Brazil.’ These new films, Paulo Emílio urges, ‘must gather and organise [their] audience’; in other words, they must seek out and address a fourth generation of film lovers. Paulo Emílio’s insistence on the audience is particularly pertinent for Brazilian cinema. Films and filmmakers in Brazil have often struggled to converse with their audience, which has tended to favour foreign films over domestic productions. What thus needs to be invented or resurrected, Paulo Emílio underscores, is Brazilian cinema’s conversation with its audience.

It must be stressed that Paulo Emílio’s conversational style of film criticism does not mean he regards the film critic’s task as unspecialised. In his 1963 essay ‘Unnecessary Intellect’ he underscores the importance of ‘intellect’ in writing about film – that is, the need to take the cinema as an art form seriously and hence to defend it as an element of the nation’s cultural patrimony. The essay highlights Paulo Emílio’s interest in and defence of a national cinema, at the level of both production and distribution. Indeed, the end of ‘Start of a Conversation’ condemns the government’s inability to stimulate and protect Brazilian cinema, at home and abroad. Paulo Emílio believes that, as a national art form, film can represent the Brazilian people as a nation both to themselves and to others. Paulo Emílio’s defence of a national cinema is therefore profoundly international as its exhibition abroad counters nationalistic chauvinism and isolation.

The essays in this section thus highlight film as part of a social and political landscape and as a medium that can help to promote the values articulated in the Clima manifestos titled ‘Declaration’ and ‘Commentary’. Throughout his life and career Paulo Emílio promoted, argued for and defended cinema as an engaged activity. His social and political concerns in this sense fed into his attitudes to film, a medium he viewed as a unifier and a social leveller. Such attitudes were imbricated with Paulo Emílio’s own optimism regarding society and politics in general; they also speak of the times he lived in, when culture, including cinema, and politics were intimately related. In Brazil this relationship is widely recognised in terms of filmmaking through the emergence of a New Cinema movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During these years cinema’s transformative potential converged with a spirit of political radicalism in which filmmakers believed in film’s ability to forge a new and collective society. Paulo Emílio’s criticism and his writings shed light on this relationship between film and politics in Brazil but also his critical contribution to it. They also allow us to trace links between his attitude to film as a democratic art form and the events, debates and discursive practices in Brazilian society and the world at large in which he was intimately and politically engaged.

Declaration

The group that founded Clima in 1941 decided that political issues, whether national or international, would not be discussed in its journal.¹ This policy was scrupulously followed. Clima received, requested and published essays, critiques and poems written by intellectuals from different ideological backgrounds, as long as they did not go against the established norm of political abstention.

This never meant that Clima’s directors, editors and contributors did not hold views on contemporary issues. For us, the intellectual youths and soldiers who have signed this declaration, the war between Brazil on one side and Germany and Italy on the other is inseparable from the war against fascism that is taking place on an international and ideological scale.² It may seem strange for us to highlight this fact. Yet at a recent rally in the Largo de São Francisco a Law professor publicly expressed his belief that Brazil should wage this war ‘without counting on its allies, as strong as they may be, nor on the friendship of these allies, as sincere as it may be’. Given Brazil’s position as a Latin country with a Catholic history, this statement seems misplaced; the fact that Italy – a Latin country with a stronger historical connection to Catholicism than ours – is one of our enemies, could lead to misinterpretations that are best avoided.

Fundamentally, the war we are now fighting is against fascism. Fascism is the political regime instituted notably in Germany, Italy and Spain. It is the political foundation of Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists; of Father Coughlin’s North American movement; of Léon Degrelle’s Rexism in Belgium; of La Rocque’s and Doriot’s parties in France; and of the Integralist movement led by Plínio Salgado and others here in Brazil. Quisling and Laval are fascism. Decrepit and insensible military glories of the past, such as Hindenburg and Pétain, are also fascism. Fascism is Japan’s attack on Manchuria; it is Italy’s attack on Abyssinia; it is Germany and Italy’s support of the factious Spaniards; it is Austria’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; it is the weakness of the great democracies in the face of this invasion – it is the Munich Pact; it is Italy’s invasion of Albania and Greece; it is Germany’s attack on Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Yugoslavia; it is the betrayal of vast sectors of the military and the ruling classes in France; it is Germany’s attack on Russia; it is Japan’s attack on the United States; and, finally, it is Germany and Italy’s attack on Brazil.

This is a war against fascism, both nationally and internationally. Hitler and Mussolini’s enemies in Germany and Italy are our friends. Nevertheless, Germans, Italians and Japanese, who are, in principle, our enemies cannot be considered when thinking of the possibility of a fifth column in Brazil. A fifth column is typically made up of a country’s native citizens. In Brazil this is first and foremost the fascist Integralist movement. The world’s f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Sources
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introductory Essay: Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Cinema and Cinephilia
• Part I: Social and Cinematic Engagements
• Part II: Foreign Dialogues
• Part III: National Cinema
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Notes