Beyond difference: female participation in the Brazilian film revival of the 1990s

In this chapter, I will focus on the female participation in what became known as ‘The Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro’, or the Brazilian Film Revival, by thinking beyond differences of gender, class, age and ethnicity. I will first re-consider the Retomada phenomenon against the backdrop of its historical time, so as to evaluate whether the production boom of the period translated into a creative peak, and, if so, how much of this carried onto the present day. I will then look at the female participation in this phenomenon not just in terms of numerical growth of women film directors, admittedly impressive, but only partially reflective of the drastic changes in the modes of production and address effected by the neoliberal policies introduced in the country in the mid 1990s. I will argue that the most decisive contribution brought about by the rise of women in Brazilian filmmaking has been the spread of team work and shared authorship, as opposed to a mere aspiration to the auteur pantheon, as determined by a notoriously male-oriented tradition. Granted, films focusing on female victimisation were rife during the Retomada period and persist to this day, and they have been, and continue to be, invaluable for the understanding of women’s struggles in the country. However, rather than resorting to feminist readings of representational strategies in these films, I will draw attention to other, presentational aesthetic experiments, open to the documentary contingent and the unpredictable real, which, I argue, suspend the pedagogical character of representational narratives. In order to demonstrate that new theoretical tools are needed to understand the gender powers at play in contemporary world cinema, I will, to conclude, analyse an excerpt of the film, Delicate Crime (Crime delicado, Beto Brant, 2006), where team work comes out as a particularly effective female, and feminist, procedure.

Space, authenticity and utopia in the hip-hop teen dance film

The dance film flourished in the 2000s in the form of the hip-hop teen dance film. Such films as Save the Last Dance (Thomas Carter, 2001), Honey (Billy Woodruff, 2002) and Step Up (Anne Fletcher, 2006) drew on hip-hop’s dominance of the mainstream music industry and combined the teen film’s pre-existing social problem and musical narratives. Yet various tension were created by their interweaving of representations of post-industrial city youth with the utopian sensibilities of the classical Hollywood musical. Their narratives celebrated hip-hop performance, and depicted dance’s ability to bridge cultural boundaries and bring together couples and communities. These films used hip-hop to define space and identity yet often constructed divisions within their soundscapes, limiting hip-hop’s expressive potential. This article explores the cycle’s celebration of, yet struggle with, hip-hop through examining select films’ interactions between soundscape, narrative and form. It will engage with these films’ attempts to marry the representational, narrative and aesthetic meanings of hip-hop culture with the form and ideologies of the musical genre, particularly the tensions and continuities that arise from their engagement with the genre’s utopian qualities identified by Richard Dyer (1985). Yet whilst these films illustrate the tensions and challenges of combining hip-hop culture and the musical genre, they also demonstrate an effective integration of hip-hop soundscape and the dancing body in their depiction of dance, highlighting both form’s aesthetics of layering, rupture and flow (Rose, 1994: 22).

Progress report from the strategic sanctuary for the destruction of free will

Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will presents a new work combining film, music and installation that juxtaposes the setting of the institution with the aesthetics of psychedelia.Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will is an installation, film and sound work that takes over the gallery. Using plain white card, it distorts the structure of the gallery’s architecture, producing a paranoid shrunken space. Inside this space, performers in cardboard costumes re-enact abstracted, broken gestures drawn from video documentation of acid trips, psychedelic dancing, rehab sessions and radical psychotherapy workshops. Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will has been formed through Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s research into the anti-psychiatry movement, their interests in counter cultural movements and their studies around biopolitics and the proliferation of societal medication. In 1958, having had a life changing experience with LSD, former alcoholic Charles Dederich founded Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program based on residential care and an aggressive form of group therapy called ‘The Game’. The organisation gradually evolved into a controversial alternative community, described in a critical pamphlet as creating Strategic Sanctuaries for the Destruction of Free Will, “a subversive program for mixing delinquents and lefties”. In 1984, anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing described tranquillizers as chemical straight jackets. With our growing understanding of the plasticity of the brain and the potential to shape it, the tension between liberation and control in the struggle over the mind continues to define our relationship to labour, culture and production. Interrogating these ideas, the exhibition poses the question of whether a collective body can overcome the solipsism of the incommunicable experience of the individual mind.