“From the Aesthetics of Hunger to the Cosmetics of Hunger in Brazilian Cinema”
Sophia A. McClennen (Pennsylvania State University)
sam50@psu.edu

 

            In 1965 Glauber Rocha presented his political film manifesto “Eztétyka da fome” (“Aesthetics of Hunger”) in Italy.  Linked to the Brazilian film movement known as “cinema novo,” Rocha was part of a generation of filmmakers across Latin America that understood cinema as a central weapon in revolutionary struggle.  Key to Rocha’s practice was the idea of “hunger” as a complex, contradictory cinematic mode of cultural practice.  According to Rocha films with an aesthetic of hunger "narrated, described, poeticized, discussed, analyzed, and stimulated the themes of hunger: characters eating dirt and roots, characters stealing to eat, characters killing to eat, characters fleeing to eat." These are the bases for his aesthetics of hunger: "Economic and political conditioning has led us to philosophical weakness and impotence.…It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society.” Hunger here is more than a lack; it is actually a form of violent expression and a source of critical power.  It is, in fact, the only form of expression, for Rocha, appropriate for political filmmaking in Brazil.
        Over thirty years later Brazilian cinema experienced a resurgence, and young directors like Fernando Meirelles worked alongside veterans of cinema novo like Carlos Diegues.  One of the breakthrough films of this boom was Meirelles’s Cidade de deus (City of God), which broke box office records in Brazil for a national film and had a major worldwide distribution.  Using an aesthetic that borrows from television, advertising, and music videos, the film presented a graphic look at urban violence and was quickly criticized for its cosmetic, slick view of the tragedies of Brazilian daily life.  Its director countered, though, that the film’s success had to be measured not only by the work itself, but also by the debates that it provoked and by the way that it broke down the dialectic of entertainment versus social critique that had governed Latin American approaches to filmmaking. 
            By tracing this trajectory in Brazilian cinema this paper theorizes the idea of hunger as a troping mechanism for politically engaged filmmaking.  At the heart of this presentation is the question of how hunger can serve as both a marker of loss and lack, while also representing a powerful signifying force.  Is it ever possible to depict hunger on the big screen in ways that avoid the fetishizing of poverty? And, if some measure of spectacle is always, already part of the aesthetic of hunger, then how to reconcile the cosmetic with the critically reflective? Central to these questions is the fact that hunger is inseparable from violence, i.e., the violence caused by hunger is (or should be) unthinkable without attention to the violence that produces hunger.  One final set of questions concerns the aesthetics of hunger as utopic longing, as desire, and how that too calls for a certain degree of cinematic pleasure, thereby suggesting that some measure of cinematic spectacle may be necessary for political filmmaking.