Bacurau: a colonial situation?

Abstract

The Brazilian cinematographic production – and the theoretical / critical thinking started by it – presents, in recurring way, influxes about the problem of underdevelopment. Cinema Novo's movement is symbolic in this sense for trying to creatively incorporate its own economic and technical precariousness, third world indices, into the cinematographic language of its films, seeking an original diction, that is, independent of foreign repertoires. Other artistic manifestations will also put in perspective the construction of national identity in dialogue with the precariousness discourse (such as tropicalism in music and marginal cinema, for example), and it is in this tone that this article intends to analyze the film Bacurau (2019) , directed by Pernambuco's filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. To this end, we resort mainly to the study of violence as a product of an aesthetic derived from the Aesthetics of Hunger (Estética da fome), a manifesto by Glauber Rocha to define the ethics and aesthetics of cinema produced in tupiniquins’s lands. In addition, we seek to map historically the film in the field of contemporaneity, identifying elements that are sometimes anachronistic together with the cinematographic tissue of the film. Therefore, we looked at the investigation of the proper aspects of film language (framing, dialogues, camera movements, etc.), as well as the interaction of these elements with studies related to the fields of history and sociology, in order to make dynamic the reading, dialectic, in the sense of discussing art and society.