World Film Locations São Paulo

By Natália Pinazza, Louis Bayman

Intellect, Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-029-0

Contents

Maps/Scenes,
Scenes 1-8 1929 – 1981, 10,
Scenes 9-15 1981 – 2002, 30,
Scenes 16-22 2002 – 2005, 48,
Scenes 23-29 2006 – 2007, 66,
Scenes 30-36 2007 – 2008, 84,
Scenes 37-43 2008 – 2012, 102,
Essays,
São Paulo: City of the Imagination Reinaldo Cardenuto, 6,
São Paulo on the Big Screen: Cinematic [Post] Modernity Alfredo Suppia, 8,
Paulista Film Industry: An Overview Fábio Uchôa, 28,
Cinema Marginal Daniel Serravalle de Sá, 46,
The City of São Paulo as Depicted in Tata Amaral’s Movies Marcia Carvalho, 64,
The Geography of Segregation: Violence and Class Division in Contemporary São Paulo Cinema Tiago de Luca, 82,
Transnational Minhocão: The Emblematic Highway Natália Pinazza, 100,
Backpages,
Resources, 119,
Contributor Bios, 120,
Filmography, 126,

CHAPTER 1

SÃO PAULO

City of the Imagination

Text by Reinaldo

TO WRITE BRIEFLY ABOUT the presence of São Paulo in films is a complicated task. Confronting a city that at the beginning of the twentieth century was predominantly rural, but that entered the twenty-first century as one of the biggest and most complex megalopoli in the world, Brazilian cinema has constructed multiple approaches to stress the haunting feeling of being faced with a locus where historical and geographical changes happen in a vertiginous and at times violent way. In the cinema – and in the ‘Paulistano’ (São Paulo city dweller) – São Paulo evokes profoundly ambiguous feelings: a scary and overwhelming city of social and political contradictions that have become increasingly acute as the years have gone by, it is simultaneously a source of inspiration for its multicultural character, for the poetry extracted from the concrete, and for a cosmopolitanism that projects the city towards the outside world. Brazilian cinema has transited through this ambiguity, and it is not easy to provide an overview of the films that have represented the city over time. Nonetheless, it is with the pleasure of confronting my own memory as a cinephile that I present some of the subject’s key aspects.

Overall, the tendency in Brazilian cinema in the first half of the twentieth century is to represent São Paulo as a city where a work ethic and economic growth were part of a project of modernization. In the rare films that remain from the 1920s, São Paulo appears as a metropolis destined to be an exemplar of bourgeois progress and virtues. In Exemplo regenerador (1919) and Fragmentos da vida (1929), both directed by José Medina, the characters’ moral vices end up punished, for they display a lack of adaptation to a city aiming towards perfection. In São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole/São Paulo, a Metropolitan Symphony (1929), a documentary made by Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig, the most important element lies in the attempt to adjust a cinematographic language to a dynamic locus where the accelerated rhythm of life and work seemed to contain the expectation of a pleasing urbanization marked by social well-being.

Into the 1950s, some of the films made in Brazil remained inclined to record São Paulo as holding the promise of a possible modernity. In institutional films produced for the governing São Paulo City Councils or for the industrial sector, film-makers such as Benedito Junqueira Duarte (Retificação do rio Tietê [1940]) and Jean Manzon (A Luta pelo transporte em São Paulo [1952]), made propaganda documentaries that assigned power to public and private forces, thus leading the metropolis towards the desired progress. Although some fictional feature films started narrating social dramas lived in the city – such as the comedy Candinho (1953) by Abílio Pereira de Almeida and the realist film O Grande momento/The Great Moment (1958) by Roberto Santos – the tendency remained to represent the city as a symbolic space of conflicts that would eventually be resolved.

It was only in the 1960s that the cinematographic vision of São Paulo radically changed. Confronted with the failure of the desired modernization and a city whose social contradictions were increasing, Brazilian cinema started to take a critical distance towards the Paulista metropolis. In that decade, alongside documentaries such as Viramundo (1964–65), in which Geraldo Sarno exposes the drama of the north-eastern migrant facing under-employment and a lack of prospects in São Paulo, important films invested in aesthetic experimentation through which echoed contemporary metropolitan dissonances and crises. In Noite vazia/Eros (1964) by Walter Hugo Khouri the emptiness felt by two men bored with their bourgeois lives inspires a striking mise-en-scène that transforms the Paulistana dawn into an environment of profound existential agony. In São Paulo Sociedade Anônima (1965) by Luiz Sérgio Person, the city becomes a force that oppresses the protagonist, Carlos, and prevents him from breaking free from a life imprisoned in the mechanisms of capitalist work without hope of freedom.

From these works onwards, films which had a political tendency – making up a significant share of Brazilian cinema – generally continued with a dramaturgy that represented São Paulo as an agonizing space marked by acute conflicts, in which contradictions multiply and seem increasingly far from a solution. The drama of north-eastern migration, ‘favelization’ (the emergence of a number of favelas, slums) and the oppressed worker re-emerge as topics in O Homem que virou suco/The Man Who Turned Into Juice (1981) by João Batista de Andrade. A metropolis in which the popular classes live amidst violence with no escape from criminality or police corruption emerges in Pixote: A lei do mais fraco/Pixote: Survival of the Weakest (1980) and Carandiru (2003) both by Hector Babenco; in Os 12 trabalhos/The Twelve Labours (2006) by Ricardo Elias; or in Linha de passe (2008) by Walter Salles and Daniella Thomas. São Paulo is a city of social relations pushed to their limits, with a sort of continuous and endless tension, in films such as Um Céu de estrelas/A Starry Sky (1996) by Tata Amaral; O Invasor/The Trespasser (2002) by Beto Brant; A Casa de Alice/Alice’s House (2007) by Chico Teixeira; or Os Inquilinos/The Tenants (2009) by Sérgio Bianchi.

Film-makers whose approaches differ from the realism mentioned in the previous paragraph have made films in which some of the constituent elements of modern São Paulo – cacophony, cosmopolitanism, existential fragmentation and the ‘concrete’ – form a poetic representation of the anguish of contemporary urban men. Without abdicating readings of the city as a violent dystopia, but inspired by the city’s contradictions to create extremely intriguing aesthetic experiences, are counter-culture films such as O Bandido da luz vermelha/The Red Light Bandit (1968) by Rogério Sganzerla; Zézero (1974) by Ozualdo Candeias; and Filme demência (1986), by Carlos Reichenbach, the last one a loose adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (1772-1829) in São Paulo.

The emptying of a social and political critique alongside the fascination with the modern metropolis refers to the creation of the practices of a postmodern perspective, in a polyphonic style which includes parody and that worships the pop and electronic cosmopolitanism of São Paulo in the 1980s, in feature films such as Cidade oculta/ Hidden City (1986) by Chico Botelho; Anjos da noite/Night Angels (1987) by Wilson Barros; and Beijo 2348/72 (1990) by Walter Rogério. More recently, Lina Chamie’s A Via Láctea (2007) departs from the naturalism that has marked contemporary Brazilian cinema, in a film that contributes to the multiplicity of gazes turned on São Paulo with a non-linear narrative consisting of audio-visual fragments of the city to mirror a shattered subjectivity in the chaos of the urban universe.

CHAPTER 2

SÃO PAULO ON THE BIG SCREEN

SPOTLIGHT

Cinematic [Post]Modernity

Text by ALFREDO SUPPIA

AT 24 OR 30 FRAMES PER SECOND, the largest city in Brazil emerged as the most genuine face of national modernity throughout the twentieth century. A controversial face, given the ambiguity and contradictions of modernization in Brazil.

In early twentieth-century São Paulo, economic development demanded increasingly frequent cinematic records of events and ‘modern touchstones’. Films like Eletrificação da Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro/Electrification of the Paulista Company of Railroads (1923), and particularly A Sociedade Anonyma Fábrica Votorantim/The Votorantim Company (Armando Pamplona, 1922), approached modern motifs under an essentially descriptive aesthetics. The Votorantim Company illustrates the ambiguities of modernization in São Paulo and Brazil, in as much as it suggests curious contradictions between discourse and image, as shown in Ismail Xavier’s analysis of industrial discipline vs the workers’ spontaneity in the film (Xavier 2012: 58–59).

The dynamism of the metropolis, its frenzy of pedestrians, vehicles and industrial machines captured the attention of a number of film-makers. This is how São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole/ São Paulo, a Metropolitan Symphony (1929), by Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig (Hungarian film-makers based in Brazil), appeared imbued with the spirit of films like Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt/Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] /The Man with the Movie-Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Since then, magnetic investigations of the city have multiplied onscreen, such as Jean-Claude Bernardet’s São Paulo: Sinfonia e Cacofonia/São Paulo: Symphony and Cacophony (1995) or Elie Politi’s Visão Paulista/ Paulista Vision (1972).

In the 1950s, São Paulo continued to capture national attention as an expression of modernity with the rise of Vera Cruz, the big studio funded by the bourgeois elite. However, it was Roberto Santos’s independent film O Grande momento/ The Great Moment (1958) which best depicted the more human and familiar face of ‘[a] city growing before our eyes, but seen from the little neighborhood, a place which remains warm and optimistic’ (Barbosa 2012: 68). Later, Luiz Sérgio Person’s São Paulo S.A./São Paulo Co. Ltd. (1965) portrayed a noisy and ruinous utopia, the existential collapse of a middle-class man oppressed by the vertical, monumental and profit-oriented metropolis.

The motif of São Paulo as a harsh mistress, guardian of both treasures and misfortunes to those who dream of the utopian metropolis, is reiterated in a series of films that revolve around the theme of migration, the inland worker seeking better living conditions in the big city – such as in Ozualdo Candeias’s Zézero (1974) or João Batista de Andrade’s O Homem que virou suco/The Man Who Turned Into Juice (1981).

In the 1980s, São Paulo recovered its status as a privileged landscape in film production, which was notably urban in terms of style and themes. It was time for the ‘New Paulista Cinema’ (‘Novo Cinema Paulista’), well-illustrated by the ‘São Paulo night trilogy’ (‘trilogia paulistana da noite’): Cidade oculta/Hidden City (Chico Botelho, 1986), Anjos da Noite/Night Angels (Wilson Barros, 1987) and A Dama do Cine Shangai/The Lady from Shanghai Cinema (Guilherme de Almeida Prado, 1988). According to Andréa Barbosa,

[a] gigantic city thus appears as one of the main features in these films. It is not just a backdrop, it is both a landscape and a character that interacts with other characters through its own form, its emptiness, its beauty, its misfortune. (2012: 101)

Rubens Machado notes that São Paulo seemed ‘to have become a kind of fashion’ in the 1980s, with a new ‘cycle of cosmopolitan reaffirmation’ in tandem with a certain ‘depersonalization’ of the metropolis (quoted in Barbosa, 2012: 21). This ‘New Paulista Cinema’ is the one Luiz Renato Pucci J. (2008) denominates ‘neon-realism’, the Brazilian postmodern film from São Paulo. According to Barbosa, the cinema paulista of the 1980s recreates São Paulo as ‘[a] nocturnal, blue and humid city, populated by angels and marginal people (or marginal angels) that wander amidst endless alleys and walls’ (Barbosa, 2012: 102).

During the Retomada years (approximately 1995-2002), the architectural modernity and verticality of the borderless ‘concrete jungle’ – metonyms of a controversial modernizing utopia – gave way to more heterogeneous, ‘subterranean’ and ‘fragmented’ gazes. The streets of São Paulo re-emerge as a laboratory for investigations into the country’s most acute contradictions. In this context, Beto Brant’s O invasor/The Trespasser (2002) is a film that sharply criticizes the corruption and social violence so deeply rooted in Brazil. Unlike São Paulo Co. Ltd., The Trespasser ‘darkens’ the tone, further exploring the labyrinthine character of the metropolis in a cruel and naturalistic approach to social inequality and widespread crime.

At the same time provincial and cosmopolitan, São Paulo continued to attract the gaze of foreign film-makers in the 2000s, including in Eric Eason’s 12 horas até o amanhecer/Journey to the End of the Night (2006) or Nelson Yu Lik-wai’s Dangkou/Plastic City (2008). Although not explicitly, São Paulo’s Octavio Frias de Oliveira Bridge helped to ‘futurize’ the imaginary city in Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness (2008). Also, a myriad of spaces have marked films with São Paulo’s unmistakable ‘stamp’. The skyline of the city, with the presence of the Banespa building in the downtown area, appears several times as a kind of ‘image-chorus’ in Chico Botelho’s Cidade Oculta/Hidden City (1986), whereas Rua Augusta has ‘starred’ in movies such as Carlos Reichenbach’s Esta Rua Tão Augusta (1966–/9), or Francisco Cesar Filho’s Augustas (2012). Avenida Paulista, the financial heart regarded as a pinnacle of modernity in Brazil, has hosted a variety of film sequences, like Phillipe Barcinski’s formalist delirium in his short Palíndromo/Palindrome (2001), a metaphor for the modernizing vertigo that victimizes ordinary people.

In the 1990s and the 2000s, São Paulo offered a privileged stage for the most diverse cinematic investigations into corruption (Sérgio Bianchi’s Cronicamente Inviável/Chronically Unfeasible, [2000]), social inequality and crime (Roberto Moreira’s Contra Todo, [2003]; Walter Salles J.’s Linha de Passe, [2008]; Jeferson De’s Bróder, [2009]), precarious labour (Caíto Ortiz’s Motoboys: Vida Loca, [2004]; Ricardo Elias’s Os 12 Trabalhos/ The Twelve Labours, [2006]); and dehumanization, delusion and isolation imposed by the city (Heitor Dhalia’s O Cheiro do Ralo/Drained, [2006]; Philippe Barcinski’s Não por Acaso, [2007]). In all these films, one can notice different times overlapping in a kaleidoscopic metropolis, archaism and modernity amalgamated or in conflict, the city’s dramatic role chiseled on its manifold ‘skin’. São Paulo is both a maze and a metonym for a nation still in search of its true (modern) identity.

SÃO PAULO, A METROPOLITAN SYMPHONY/ SÃO PAULO, SINFONIA DA METRÓPOLE (1929)

LOCATION

Rua XI de Novembro

THE SÃO PAULO VERSION inspired by Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt/ Berlin, Symphony of a Great City from 1927, is less modernist than its German counterpart. However, it keeps pace with the earlier film by using the same structure: one day in the life of what was to become Brazil’s and now South America’s economic centre, starting with its awakening around the city centre at the School Yard, where the city was founded in 1554. São Paulo then numbered few more than one million inhabitants and the many views of the panning camera at its beginning show open spaces of what is today a densely populated and chaotically grown sky-scraping megalopolis. Famous sites of the city, such as the Anhangabaú Valley, the Luz Train Station or the Jockey Club, the financial headquarters on Rua XV de Novembro and the commercial district around School Yard appear as placid places. The two directors, immigrants Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolph Rex Lustig, opted for a more didactic approach by focusing on working people and students and by suggesting how their arduous labour was leading the city to ‘order and progress’, the motto of Brazil’s flag. Educational buildings are filmed profusely, such as the Caetano de Campos School at Republic Square, the Butantã Institute, the Law Faculty at Largo São Francisco, and even an unknown kindergarten. Besides a single scene that draws attention to social inequality by means of a huge hand that takes from the rich in order to give alms to the poor, the film displays a rather overoptimistic patriotic attitude towards the city’s growth. This uncritical fascination again compares São Paulo with Berlin. São Paulo is an impressive document that gives an idea of how modernization was taking shape and was being praised in the late 1920s in Latin America. Carolin Overhoff Ferreira

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