A conversation between Everlane Moraes, Janaína Oliveira, Kênia Freitas, and Tatiana Carvalho Costa.
Translated by Lillian Maguire and Natalia Davies.
In Brazil a heterogeneous group of Black people – working in production, criticism, curation, and other positions within cinema and audiovisual media – have recently begun to unite. Although we are still a relatively small number, given that the proportion of Black people in Brazilian society is more than half of the total population, our presence is unprecedented. This network, an aquilombamento that constitutes the so-called Cinema Negro Brasileiro (Black Brazilian Cinema), has emerged in the last ten years as a provocation and confrontation to what has historically been understood as our national cinema. The word aquilombamento derives from the word quilombo, which is used to name groups of Black people who unite to resist racism and neo-coloniality.1 By aquilombamento we mean – in the words of historian and Brazilian Black feminist Beatriz Nascimento – an “aggregation, a sense of community, of fight.” For Nascimento, “the investigation into quilombo is based on the question of power. No matter how much a given social system dominates, it is possible to create a differentiated system therein, and this is what the quilombo is. Only it is not a state power in the sense that we normally understand it – political power, power of domination – because it does not share that perspective. Each individual is the power; each individual is the quilombo.”2
The following conversation brings together four women who form part of this quilombo cinema network: the filmmaker Everlane Moraes; curator and researcher Janaína Oliveira; researcher and critic Kênia Freitas, and myself, Tatiana Carvalho Costa, a curator, professor, and mediator of the discussion. The four of us have met before on many occasions, at film festivals, conferences and other events, and for us this conversation was a great opportunity to elaborate on the questions that recur in our respective fields and to try to understand the parameters of power in the world of Brazilian cinema. Although this discussion relates for the most part to our national context, it is also informed by a consideration of the production of and thought about films made by Black people in other parts of the world, and may therefore resonate with issues pertaining to other Afro-diasporic countries.
Understanding the Brazilian context means identifying the various factors that have contributed to the increase of Black people in leading roles in cinema. Brazil has a strong history of Black activism and of the participation of Black intellectuals in culture, education and institutional policy, and this has of course been influenced by movements for civil rights and colonial freedoms in other countries of the African diaspora. This activism has, for example, included the founding of major experimental groups in Black drama, such as the Experimental Black Theater (TEN), founded by Abdias do Nascimento and active between 1944 and 1968. The two decades of affirmative public policies at the start of the 21st century, along with progressive governments for the inclusion of Black people in higher education and in other areas of education and cultural production, can be seen as the cumulative result of movements and groups like these. Another critical figure in the history of Cinema Negro Brasileiro is Zózimo Bulbul, who was also an important actor in the Cinema Novo and acted in films such as Ganga Zumba (1963/72, Carlos Diegues) and Terra em Transe (1968, Glauber Rocha). Bulbul is the director of the seminal ‘Alma no olho’ (‘Soul in the Eye’, 1973). Dedicated to John Coltrane and inspired by the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice (1968), the film operates what Janaína Oliveira describes in the following conversation as an “oppositional Blackness”: a direct and incisive approach to racial issues that draws on and illustrates the Black experience. Although there were others before Bulbul it was this 11-minute film that laid the foundations for Cinema Negro Brasileiro. Bulbul formally disrupted stereotypical representations of the Black body on-screen, bringing this body into a new and inclusive relation to cinematic time, space and rhythm. He was followed by other men of the same generation – such as the actor and director Antônio Pitanga – and later directors such as Joel Zito Araújo and Jeferson De have also been deeply influenced by his work.
The recent rise in Black film exists in contrast to the almost total historical absence of Black people in positions of power within the film industry, which is an arena from which Black women have been doubly excluded. Brazilian cinema was born in the late 19th-century, but the first full-length fiction film directed exclusively by a Black woman and released commercially did not appear until 1984: Adelia Sampaio’s Amor Maldito (Cursed Love). To set historical landmarks is always a risky and imprecise task, but as far as we know, the first decade in which a group of Black women directed full-length documentaries or feature films was in the 2000s: Lilia Solá Santiago with Família Alcântara (2004) and Eu tenho a Palavra (2011), both co-directed by Daniel Solá Santiago; Sabrina Rosa with Vamos fazer um brinde (2011) co-directed by Cavi Borges; Carmen Luz with the documentary Um filme de dança (2013); Camila de Moraes with the documentary The Case of the Wrong Man (2018); Camila Pitanga with the biopic Pitanga (2017), co-directed by Beto Brant; and Glenda Nicácio directed Coffee with Cinnamon (Café com Canela, 2017), Island (Ilha, 2018) and the Deep End (2020) with Ary Rosa. The second time a Black woman was the sole director of a highly-circulated film was last year: Viviane Ferreira’s ‘Jerusa’s Day’ (‘O dia de Jerusa’, 2019). Others might have appeared between 1984 and this century, but one of the things sexism and racism in Brazil does effectively is to erase Black female subjects from History. And we regret that at this time we don’t have much more available data on those other pioneers.
For obvious structural reasons, women have often found themselves excluded from processes where there is a great concentration of money and power. But despite this unfavourable framework a new generation of filmmakers – mostly young – is gaining ground. While the terrain of feature films remains more difficult to penetrate, when it comes to short films the situation is changing at a greater speed. Data from one of the most important festivals in the country – Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes (Tiradentes Film Festival) – shows that the number of Black people in directorial positions has significantly increased: out of the 806 shorts included in 2019 there were 206 Black directors, while in 2020 there were 231 shorts with Black directors out of a total 870.
In a country with colonial foundations, the idea of being ‘Black’ presupposes a subaltern homogeneity, based on stereotypes, or what Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images”.3 Our growing body of films contradicts this historical flattening, showing a heterogeneity of representations of Black life and a diverse set of approaches to cinema. The same is reflected in our conversation below. Points of divergence between the interlocutors point to the rich variety of cinematic thought and what it means to be an artist and Black intellectual in Brazil. What does Cinema Negro Brasileiro mean? In the words of Heitor Augusto, one of the leading voices to define and describe this recent phenomenon, contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema is a “political gesture to make a special demarcation […] as a way to exist outside the hegemonic”.4 The history of national cinema is full of attempts to circumscribe the Black presence in film. But the situation is changing. Our conversation is a way of understanding the specificities of this historical moment and where both these production paths and the reflections that surround them situate us. Although this conversation may seem devoid of contemporary Brazilian political context, it is not. Since January 2019 we have had a far-right national government that works on a daily basis to dismantle national policies for culture and particularly targets the film industry. The heterogeneity and growth of Cinema Negro Brasileiro is vulnerable. But what we’ve achieved up until now is enough to demonstrate the strength of this movement and its impact on contemporary Brazilian Cinema. Inspired by those who came before us, we point to a path of possible resistance to both the present and historic brutality in a country founded on structural racism.
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EVERLANE MORAES is a filmmaker, visual artist and activist in the Black movement. She was raised in Sergipe and graduated in cinema in Cuba, at EICTV – Escuela Internacional del Cine and Televisiòn. The paintings of her father, Everton Santos, her quilombola-inspired upbringing and the influence of the religions of a black Brazil – both Catholic and Candomblé – are present directly or indirectly in her work. Her hybrid documentary short films mix Brazilian social issues with broader philosophical and anthropological notes. Most recently, her film ‘Aurora’ was shown at this year’s True/False Film Fest and Pattaki at this year’s Sundance. This year she will begin development on two feature-length projects.
JANAÍNA OLIVEIRA is a curator and researcher who holds a doctorate in history and was a Fulbright scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University (USA). She is one of the founders of FICINE – Fórum Itinerante de Cinema Negro. Her research focuses on Black Brazilian and aphrodiasporic cinemas and also on African cinematographies. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations and the Ministry of Culture of Brazil. She has worked as a programmer and consultant for several festivals worldwide. In 2018, in partnership with Tessa Boerman and Peter Van Hoof, she programmed the 28-film programme ‘Soul in the Eye: Zózimo Bulbul’s legacy and the contemporary emergence of black Brazilian Cinema’ at the 48th edition of the Rotterdam International Festival (IFFR). In 2019, she collaborated on the Black Light Retrospective exhibition at the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival. She is the current programmer for the 66th Flaherty Film Seminar; her curatorial proposal is structured around the concept of ‘opacity’ after writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. The works presented will “clamour for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities.
KÊNIA FREITAS holds a PhD in Communication and Culture. Her current research focuses on critical afrofabulation (afrofabulação) of contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema, articulating the concepts of afrofabulation by Tavia Nyong´o, and critical fabulation (fabulação crítica), by Saidiya Hartman. She is part of the critics’ circle Elviras – Coletivo de Mulheres Críticas de Cinema. She is a programmer for and jury on film festivals. As a curator, she held the shows Black Directors in Brazilian Cinema (Diretoras Negras no Cinema Brasileiro) in 2017 at different cultural centres across São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Belo Horizonte and Afrofuturismo – Cinema and Music in an Intergalactic Diaspora (Afrofuturismo – Cinema e Música numa diáspora intergaláctica) commissioned by Caixa Cultural and which took place at Caixa Cultural centre in São Paulo in 2015. She currently writes for the website Multiplot.
TATIANA CARVALHO COSTA is a curator and teacher. She is a doctoral student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais where she researches Afro-Brazilian epistemologies and Black Brazilian Cinema, in particular the recent production of short films. She works as programmer and jury of festivals and recently joined the curatorial team of the Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes (Tiradentes Film Festival, 2019 and ‘20), the FAN – Festival de Arte Negra de Belo Horizonte (2019) and the Cinema e Narrativas da Diáspora Negra (2020). She is part of the black dramaturgy movement SegundaPRETA and coordinates the university project PRETANÇA – Afrobrasilidades e Direitos Humanos (Human Rights and the Afro-Brazilian question).
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TATIANA CARVALHO COSTA: In the 1960s Brazilian cinema sought to create a national identity, presenting the idea of povo [the people] and Black bodies as central to important Cinema Novo (New Cinema) films, such as Glauber Rocha’s Barravento (1962).5 But these narratives were still constructed almost entirely by white men from the economically privileged classes. I only add “almost” in order to account for Helena Solberg, who was nevertheless also white and wealthy. By way of contrast, the historical landmark of Cinema Negro Brasileiro came more than a decade later, in 1973, with Zózimo Bulbul’s ‘Soul in the Eye’ (‘Alma no olho’).
JANAÍNA OLIVEIRA: I think a conversation about Cinema Negro Brasileiro can only take place as part of a broader discussion, as I believe that we should approach it within the context of discussions about Black cinema across the world. What we might call Black cinema has often been aligned with other artistic forms, springing from discontent, and searching for other ways of having a presence. One can gauge the specific qualities of our Black Brazilian cinematography only from a global perspective. I am talking about our presence in the field of cinema as a whole, because although cinema is an art, it is a hegemonic industrial art practiced within a predominantly capitalist, white, heteronormative and cisgender context. There has been an extreme absence of Black people both on-screen and across the audiovisual and creative sectors. Not all people would necessarily see Cinema Negro Brasileiro as beginning with Cinema Novo, because as you say the gaze which directed and created these 1960s representations of Black people was that of a middle class white elite. Consequently its framing – although important and historically necessary, especially because this first generation of films had Black actors and actresses who would go on to make films themselves – was still tied to stereotypes and preconceived notions of Black people. That is, these films almost exclusively took the candomblé (hoodoo), favelas, the petty criminal and the bandit as their subjects.6 Was this cinema historically important? Of course. But I disagree with the contemporary tendency in Brazilian cinema studies to see Cinema Negro as beginning with the Cinema Novo. This isn’t the case! The gaze which drove and organised these cinematic representations placed Black people at the periphery of the movement.
Barravento (Glauber Rocha, 1962); ‘Soul in the Eye’ (‘Alma no olho’, Zózimo Bulbul, 1973)
KÊNIA FREITAS: To build on what Janaína has said, I think that we should now address Black authorship. People tend to think in terms of one defining factor, such as Blackness, but Blackness is just one component within an intersection of gazes and perspectives. When Cinema Negro began it was created by and made up of actors who were part of Cinema Novo, and therefore involved a displacement of the gaze and a change in the perspective of those making the films, which cease to be that of the white middle class. These films were made by Black actors who put the demands and desires of Black movements and Black livelihoods on film. There is a speech by Hélio de Menezes in which he says that when he heard talk of Arte Negra (Black Art), he found it difficult to find a common aesthetic marker or even common characteristics, and so for him the only possible marker was to some extent authorial.7 There seems to be this impulse to group together a series of artists who are quite different from one another and categorise them as being part of Arte Negra, for example, and to take that as a starting point through which to try and find common characteristics. Therefore, authorship is always a complicated issue for me – just the fact of being Black doesn’t mean one is going to make films in a certain way. But at the same time, that dimension of authorship begins to delineate a certain space, of course.
JANAÍNA: This can also be applied to other places where people see the presence of Black cinema, which does not take place according to an evolutionary scale, but is rather a process of appropriating a productive space. To begin with, the question of the auteur – the classic interpretation of which marks a certain type of western cinema – is not so relevant when it comes to thinking about what the specifics of Black authorship are, but comes into its own when considering authorship as a productive visual space. That’s not to say that Black people occupying visual space in itself characterises Black authorship, but rather that the presence of Black people in a space of authorship produces different types of representation. And, from what I see, at the same time the forms of authorship themselves also diversify. The generation making films now does not necessarily have to address the classic question of authorship, which belonged to a time when certain films had to be populated with certain actors and actresses. It’s almost as if this was an abrir caminho [opening path] in itself – afterwards the space of cinema had to become different.8 But it’s also clear that there were people since the start who made films in an alternative way. In the case of the United States, there were people involved in the making of so-called “race movies” who went on to make films that explicitly addressed the question of Black authorship. However, if one thinks about the structure of those narratives, they were still extremely classical in the Hollywood sense of the word. What can we see as a landslide moment? Maybe a movement like L.A. Rebellion, which began in the sixties. Although they drew on elements from earlier instances of Black authorship, these filmmakers recrafted authorship through innovation in formal aesthetics, through the diverse makeup of the parties involved, and through the narrative forms that they used. At least, this is the way I see it, but maybe that’s because of my history background.
“My existence makes it necessary for you to update your rules, but you do not constrain me. Right now my existence is able to constrain your authority, your liberty of expression, which was always abundant. And it is because of this that white people are scared.” —Everlane Moraes
EVERLANE: Just as well that somebody has that degree! I wanted to speak a bit about what for me is the principal question in this discussion of authorship, the question of lived experience. Janaína spoke about discontent and I think that is a fundamental element in Cinema Negro Brasileiro. But, in addition to a discontent with the representation of Black people within various media channels, arts and academic fields, there is also a dispute over the role of the empirical. This comes up in discussions about the ‘auteur’ film versus the genre film, too. In Brazilian Cinema, since the era of Cinédia, Atlântica, Vera Cruz, Cinema Novo, Embrafilme, Boca do Lixo and Retomada, there have always been conversations around the figure of the Black person; this figure has always been represented. The problem arises when people begin to discuss the question of empirical honesty instead of that of representation. And, as Janaína said, these directors tend to be white people who belong to a certain context in Brazil and who talk about the symbols and signs of the Other despite not having a substantial relationship with said people or the topic. No white person would be able to make a film like ‘Soul in the Eye’. Therefore I find it very interesting when this question of the representation of Black people in historical thematic films is discussed, as this ‘being Black’ was always constructed on-screen by said white authors. Such films bring up Black themes, but lack the empirical knowledge necessary to depict them honestly, and this means that they do not manage to recognise or express specific aspects of the Black universe or experience. Such cinema, since its birth, has been led by archetypes: of the old Black person, of the Black mother, of the martyr, of the Uncle Tom (Black person with a white soul), of the noble savage, of the Sapphire, of the malandro, of the favela dwellers, of the exported mulata (Jezebel; mixed-race woman), of the mad criolo, even the Afro-Bahian…9 It’s a form of cinema saturated by its own images.
JANAÍNA: In light of what Everlane has spoken about, I think that ‘Soul in the Eye’ was really the film that revised that space. The Black experience has historically been discredited by western filmography, by western film preferences that exclude it for its alleged illegitimacy. These sterilise the authorial space, creating an art in which the body is not even present, and disqualify the dimension of experience, treating it as if it were a lesser thing, less relevant, less of a determining factor in the construction of ‘reality’ in work that aims to depict it.
EVERLANE: I would say that this applies not only to cinema, but to all pictorial representations of Black people in Brazil. It is part of a wider academic context that still frames Black people in a certain restrictive subjective Brazilian imaginary: from the Black people that appear in the works of Jean-Baptiste Debret to the photography of Pierre Verger, or their framing in the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, or in the works of Candido Portinari or those of Tarsila do Amaral… All these share a particular construction of the imaginary of the Brazilian people. And this is legitimised by academia, by science, by politics, by religion. And it traverses contemporary art too, which is of course influenced by the philosophical, anthropological and sociological currents of the past. They reflect the thinking of a certain era – all Brazilian modern art icons are influenced by the same colonial racist theoretical framework.
Top: ‘Salvador, Bahia’ by Pierre Verger (1959) Bottom: ‘A Brazilian family in Rio de Janeiro’ by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1839)
TATIANA: Brazil, like other colonised countries in Latin America, has difficulties in dealing with its own history: the legacy of the diaspora, the enslavement of Black people and what this means for the structure of power relations and subjective dynamics in society. Thinking about what Everlane just said, we are today witnessing a powerful repositioning of the Brazilian imaginary by auteurs who are not in the centre, who are not part of the hegemony. Since the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a more confrontational approach to the hegemonic historical narrative in various fields – in wider public debate, in education and, above all, in the arts – and this has come from Black people. And I would highlight the growing presence of Afrocentric and Black Caribbean epistemologies that emphasise historical revision and the production of representations from diasporic subjectivities. How would you describe the role of Brazilian Cinema in this process? What have the films of Cinema Negro Brasileiro brought to this discussion?
EVERLANE: I find it interesting that white people in Brazil are having what I would call an existential crisis, which in reality is a social crisis. The white person has always required Others in order to proclaim their own existence, to maintain their place, right? The white person always needed an Other and has needed to speak of and for that Other. And now these others are speaking for themselves. Thus white authors are experiencing a crisis. Now everyone knows that in order to speak about a Black person or someone of another ethnicity one has to tread carefully, as the public both regards Black authors more highly, and can spot criticism of them too. And so there are more places and possibilities from which to refute their cinema, and possibility that they might lose the privileged space from which they speak. White people are scared of losing that space. But now a space is opening up that is increasingly ours. It’s important that Black people have managed to take the reins, bit by bit, of our own representation. I don’t remember white people ever being afraid of the mere act of dialogue before.
JANAÍNA: Race, gender, class – these things were always present but were never announced. Now white people need to confront them. The new debate is important and people can’t escape it. Now we see tensions, now people do not know what to do, and I think that this is an important development. People are sometimes a little hard on the white people who are going through these processes. [Laughter]. But in reality there are many people trying to find original ways of exploring and adjusting to this,
EVERLANE: Like Petra Costa.
JANAÍNA: I don’t think so! She explored class themes but did not manage to take her critique further in terms of race, for example. I’m speaking of other people who do not have such definite views, but who are still working out how to speak. What ideas do they have about race, class and gender? They are still learning. However, it is urgent that they learn quickly.
EVERLANE: This crisis is also existential in that it involves emptiness. White people are suffering because they are realising that emptiness. It’s necessary to create white anthropology. If white people don’t start speaking about themselves, I’ll start speaking about them. [Laughter]. I’ll make a film about white people on the Geographic Channel. [Laughter]. And then they will realise their own history. And also realise why my subjective experience is as strong as it is, strong enough to produce, to speak, to reclaim – so strong that even the white person finds themselves pressed against a wall. What is it that you have to reclaim about your existence, about your condition, about your history? Seeing me as a Black person making films for myself, seeing my colour, my hair, and my Blackness, to see me needing to speak – all this is a great confrontation when, for example, one doesn’t have such experiential baggage in life. My existence makes it necessary for you to update your rules, but you do not constrain me. Right now my existence is able to constrain your authority, your liberty of expression, which was always abundant. And it is because of this that white people are scared.
‘Water Reservoir: Which Quilombo Is This?’ (‘Caixa D’Água – Qui-Lombo é Esse?’, 2012) by Everlane Moraes
KÊNIA: I am still thinking about the question of Cinema Negro’s contribution. It is the idea of repositioning of the imaginary which interests me, thinking about the role Cinema Negro has played in that transformation. I think it’s about much more than revising history from a Black perspective. The films of Cinema Negro raise other questions, social, economic, gender, and finally bring in all those things that are not simply a response to the historical construction of white cinema as supported by history and anthropology. People return to Cinema Novo, perhaps because it elaborates on that within Brazilian cinema. More so than the films of the current moment, which for me are in some ways much less of a response to that macro-narrative and much more a diffusion of various perspectives based on the concrete existence of the present. There is a lot more on the genocide of the Black population these days than films on slavery. And from Cinema Negro onwards there is a certain displacement of that will to think about questions, a prioritising the urgency of the present over the revision and construction of the past, which in turn obviously ends up shoring up a certain view of the past. When [Tatiana] finished speaking I was left thinking a lot about what Black films have concretely accomplished when it comes to the construction of that imaginary. Do you know what I mean? What I am trying to say is that I think that they do not have the same goals as those macro discourses; however, I think that this repositioning is in some ways the result of a diversity of positions.
EVERLANE: There is the possibility of a cinema that emerges to refute the past, that enters into dialogue with the past, and that redefines it, bringing a new perspective. And there is also that form of cinema that searches for rupture. However, it depends on each filmmaker. As someone who works in more experimental documentary cinema, even within Cinema Negro I have not found a space for making…
JANAÍNA: What are you talking about, Everlane? [Laughter].
EVERLANE: Calm down, calm down. Do you know why I am saying this? I go to Sundance, but I do not go to Panorama. I go to Rotterdam, but I’ve never been to Brasilia. I go to the Madrid Documento, but never to the Gramado.10 You get the point. And so what I mean is that there is a cinema which is more about a rupture of language, about another dialogue altogether, one which is not only a social dialogue, but also a dialogue of language in that it interrogates that very language itself. In Brazil, for example, Cinema Negro is still very harnessed to historical cinema, which often in fact entails the continuation of historical stereotypes of the Black person. In the first five minutes of the film, one has to speak of ‘Blackness’, ‘race’, or some other impactful word, in order for a festival to take that film. Films like mine, which you need to watch for at least 15 minutes to understand what is happening, are much rarer. It is as if Brazilian festivals demand that films made by Black people have an explicit thematic (racial) approach if they want to be given any space.
JANAÍNA: We are talking about so many topics that I can no longer remember the original question. [Laughter]. These days we can see films that have different possibilities, different aesthetic paths and which implement different narratives. And the challenge within what people consider to be Cinema Negro – and also for audiences – is to think not only about who produces these films but also who watches them, who goes to festivals. If these are predominantly non-Black spaces, what should we expect of Cinema Negro? People come with preconceptions, that’s what Everlane was saying. And this is why I think that these festivals in Brazil still do not engage properly with Black directors. Because it is still an issue of quotas and stereotypical representation.
EVERLANE: Certainly.
JANAÍNA: And so you lose whatever doesn’t fit into this stereotypical framework, you lose the confrontation of which you were speaking, Everlane, and what I call ‘oppositional Blackness’, in the vein of ‘Soul in the Eye’ and ‘Kbela’ [Yasmin Thayná, 2015], which is direct and incisive about historical issues, racial issues, and in affirming a Blackness people do not necessarily identify as being part of Cinema Negro. For example, the films of André Novais and Gabriel Martins. They also affirm the place of Black filmmakers and Black production, however these films were accepted within this hegemonic circuit without that inflection, without being seen as belonging to Cinema Negro.
EVERLANE: That is very well quoted, very well remembered!
JANAÍNA: Temporada [André Novais, 2018] is Cinema Negro, man!
EVERLANE: Totally!
Temporada (André Novais, 2018)
JANAÍNA: But the film won at the Festival de Brasília without being viewed as Cinema Negro not only by the Festival, but also by the public. And this is despite the fact that at the awards ceremony André explicitly honoured Cinema Negro, honoured Zózimo Bulbul. Do you get what I’m saying? And why is it like this? Because people do not know what to do when Black expressions do not fit into a certain frame of understanding, of being understood, let’s say, within a general or shared sense of what it is to be Black. In this frame, to be Black is to be fighting, to be overcoming; to be Black is to be suffering racism; to be Black is to be executing or suffering violence. So when you are not doing any of this people don’t know what to make of it. The point at which I find myself now – and I think that the role of curatorship is important in this, too – is that of bringing this discussion to the table. And of forcing – although this verb might seem a little heavy – the public to see other things, other spaces, in Cinema Negro, to make this shift, to understand that other expressions are possible. To understand that being Black can mean anything, has endless expressions, you see?
EVERLANE: Exactly, Cinema Negro is cinema, right?
JANAÍNA: And we have to do this without losing our grip on the label, because politically it’s still important. If it disappears we’re back at square one.
EVERLANE: Absolutely! Cinema Negro!
“It’s not about ceasing to read [these things]. It’s about asking oneself if you need to try so hard to make [them] fit.” —Janaína Oliveira
JANAÍNA: What can Cinema Negro be and do? Anything and everything. We can talk about anything in any way. And if a Black person doesn’t identify with it, or if something can’t be identified as Cinema Negro, then we need to think about that. It’s important to think about what it is and can be without disqualifying the experience in question.
EVERLANE: Sometimes I get the impression that talking about Cinema Negro outside of Brazil is actually easier. Can you believe that in France, in Spain, and other places, I was able to speak about it more clearly than I could in Brazil? Because it’s all very exotic to them, right? We’ll be showing a film abroad and we won’t know exactly whether the public and the critics understand what we are talking about, or if everything we are saying ends up inside the package of the exotic. It’s all new to them, and so I don’t know if they ever really understand what it is that we are trying to convey. But at the very least they are curious to see it and to try to understand it, right? I feel more openness and more understanding of my films abroad than I do in Brazil itself.
TATIANA: This is from the point of view of festival selection, right?
EVERLANE: Yes, where my films are placed from a curatorial standpoint.
JANAÍNA: But also, we can’t generalise. For example, in certain international contexts naming something as Cinema Negro happens in a very fluid kind of way; it’s not a strange term at all. I don’t think that this is the case even now in Brazil. Speaking about Cinema Negro 10 years ago turned heads. Nowadays everybody accepts or perhaps already uses the terminology in a certain way, but still without entering into the specifics of what they understand Cinema Negro to be, although it’s not an a priori rejection, like before.
EVERLANE: Totally.
JANAÍNA: Depending on the way you frame Cinema Negro, there is still a degree of difficulty of acceptance. Because – and this is why I always think about the historical dimension – to affirm Cinema Negro is always to experience an embarrassment of the Other. For example, when I was doing the programming for Rotterdam in 2018, the festival’s first approach was to present a showcase of Zózimo’s works, of his work in connection with the rest of the world, and it was framed as though intended to broaden horizons, that is, ‘world cinema’. But by wanting to frame it like that it was like they were saying it’s not for the the rest of the world, but for the inside, in that connection with Cinema Negro Brasileiro. But this is limiting. The idea of Brazil comes in, of contemporary Brazilian cinema as an export, and then Cinema Negro becomes Cinema Negro Brasileiro. Full stop. We move from Zózimo Bulbul to the legacy of Zózimo Bulbul and then to contemporary Cinema Negro Brasileiro, but what is it that we need to say about it? In the end, the festival was beautiful and also a historical moment for us, but it didn’t come easily, you know? If I had accepted the initial proposal it would have been easier. But festivals are more likely to represent these other perspectives now. I think that in this sense Rotterdam was pioneering, because Locarno [Festival] came next. In 2019, they did the retrospective Black Light, which explored Cinema Negro from its beginnings to the 2000s. So you can see that people are opening up to it. But this isn’t necessarily because they like it, because usually people don’t like to talk about race. If you ask what Cinema Negro is people will reply, “If there’s a Black cinema, what can we call cinema then?” In the big festival circuits, people prefer something more Eurocentric, because it deracialises and decontextualises the historical dimension. So, it’s accepted but it’s also not pretty.
TATIANA: For us to have some concrete examples, can you all speak a little about some of the films of Cinema Negro Brasileiro that demand this non-hegemonic conceptual framework?
JANAÍNA: I don’t think that today’s Cinema Negro Brasileiro puts women at the centre. I don’t think it ever has, as I’ve already said. But the contemporary visibility of Cinema Negro and the struggle for a new politics of the audiovisual has all happened because of Black women, since the presence of Black women in this debate. Black women start having a stronger presence with a wave of films that begun to appear at the beginning of the last decade: ‘Cores e Botas’, directed by Juliana Vicente [2010]; Renata Martins’s first film, ‘Aquém das Nuvens’ [2012]; and afterwards ‘O dia de Jerusa’ by Viviane Ferreira [2014]; and… which was it, Everlane, that film of yours, ‘Caixa D’Água’ [2012], no? And after that Larissa Fulana de Tal with ‘Lápis de Cor’ [2010].
‘O Dia de Jerusa’ (Viviane Ferreira, 2014)
EVERLANE: Yes.
JANAÍNA: And this also happens with Thayná’s ‘Kbela’: the film wasn’t accepted by the big festivals here, but later went on a huge tour of the international festival circuit. And this demonstrates the restraints here, in this country. This happens to films that centre Black women, and so our conversation should address these films in particular. If you were to follow the filmography of these women you’d see that they don’t have a reliable production output. What prevents them from continuing to make films? This is a complex issue, and I don’t have many answers.
“There’s a lot of Cinema Negro that I see that makes me say, “God, this could have been made by a white person!” The guidelines and language of white cinema are reproduced because these directors have a preoccupation with reaching a certain level and being part of that specific dialogue. This creates a cinema that is a little fragile. It’s a trap.” —Everlane Moraes
EVERLANE: Without saying that we can only understand these past films by Black men as individual, those of the women, who belonged to a much more collective movement, seem more collective by nature.
TATIANA: True. But I disagree with the idea that women are collective by nature and think it’s more by necessity.
EVERLANE: I said by nature, but I meant something that happens more naturally in the political sense versus woman’s nature. What happened was strategic.
‘Kbela’ (Yasmin Thayná, 2015)
TATIANA: Kênia, how do you see this? You were one of the curators of a really important showcase in Brazil in 2017 [Mostra Diretoras Negras no Cinema Brasileiro, Brazilian Cinema’s Black Women Directors], maybe the first big showcase to bring together the work of Black women.
KÊNIA: I think that the idea of being ‘first’ is very complicated. There were others before.
EVERLANE: Your showcase for me in particular was very important because when I left Brazil and went to Cuba in 2015 I almost fell into obscurity, going to an island within an island. And, just like that, you came and fished me out, right? And so I think for lots of women that showcase was important.
“From Cinema Negro onwards there is a certain displacement of that will to think about questions, a prioritising the urgency of the present over the revision and construction of the past, which in turn obviously ends up shoring up a certain view of the past” —Kênia Freitas
KÊNIA: I think that that’s more important than whatever was ‘first’ – the important thing is that there was a moment when these various films evolved into a movement of women making things, and it made sense for them to be united within this showcase. What they did wasn’t isolated. The showcase was trying to look to the women who already had a filmography of at least five or six films – they are few in Brazil – and programmed these films together so as to place them in dialogue, to think about where the films were coming from, what they were talking about and what we could gain by looking at them together. I get very apprehensive about this idea of being ‘first’ because the showcase came about as the consequence of many other things. The larger Caixa showcase came from a smaller showcase that I did at the [exhibition centre] Sesc, in which I also screened Everlane’s films.
JANAÍNA: When was the Sesc Showcase?
KÊNIA: It was also in 2017.
JANAÍNA: I started doing the showcase Por Um Cinema Negro no Feminino in 2015. But before that there must have been others, too. They are movements that we are contributing to.
KÊNIA: So that showcase of mine was not the first, and I’m not interested in claiming that anyway. What happened there was that there was a body of films that were being shown, and a series of other showcases went on to include them and this is maybe the first moment in which you have Black women really occupying large spaces of power within Cinema Negro in Brazil. Because, at the beginning, in the 1970s, it was mostly male directors. For example, Adélia Sampaio in the 1980s was a really isolated case, and her films didn’t enter the narrative of Cinema Negro until much later. And then you have this generation of Feijoada Dogma in which women are often close to, but not at the centre, of power.11 But after 2010 Black women start to occupy a little more of this space. I think apart from a few exceptions the films that draw big money are all still men’s films, for example the films of Joel Zito Araújo and Jeferson De. But in academic spaces, or spaces like Janaína has with FICINE [Fórum Itinerante de Cinema Negro], Black women are starting to stand out. This is very recent. But there were Black women before this, and that’s why I have to reject this title of ‘first’, because one cannot erase the work of these Black women who took action…
EVERLANE: We had [the film editor] Cristina Amaral from the Boca do Lixo [movement].12
JANAÍNA: Exactly. Racquel Gates with Michael Boyce Gillespie in Film Quarterly tells us to avoid this narrative of Black exceptionality. Being ‘first’ is exactly this, right? The first is always exceptional. When in truth there’s always someone who came before.
TATIANA: Yes, I agree with you. I noted some historical landmarks, but, as you say, it’s better to avoid this narrative of exceptionality. I’ve already got the picture that Kênia doesn’t want to talk about the individual films, right? [Laughs].
KÊNIA: I think when you speak about particular films in a larger discussion they always get a bit lost, no? [Laughs]. But there is work being made at the moment that strongly interests me, above all because it is being built around ideas of performing Blackness on-screen and secondly around a creation that starts from the essence of Black images. Ana Pi, with ‘NoirBLUE’ [2017], is a good example of both. Ana Pi is someone who comes from dance, from research, from choreography, from performance – in other words from other spaces of Black art – and in this film she in some way recomposes a story that challenges how we speak about construction, imagination and fabulation, or a return and encounter with ancestry, this place of the imaginary. It is a film that points towards so many things that I am almost afraid to speak about it in a rush. Another work that crosses into the field of the arts – and I don’t think that this is a coincidence – is Aline Mota’s ‘Ponte sobre Abismos’ [2017]. It speaks about this family history, about this return to the archives and about creating stories from a critical, fabulatory perspective. I think her most recent work has elements of this too. It’s not just cinema, it’s photography, it’s video, it’s multimodal.
‘NoirBLUE’ (Ana Pi, 2017)
TATIANA: What you’re saying here makes me think a lot about the absence of theoretical tools or mental frameworks for watching these films. Does it makes sense to think about this? Kênia, you talked about this idea from various angles and you mentioned the dimension of authorship. What I’m understanding from your conversation is that these problems with curation reflect the difficulty of reading these films, no? As people who analyse films too, what do you think of the theoretical frameworks that operate around cinema in this context?
KÊNIA: God, what a difficult question!
TATIANA: What’s difficult about it? This is what you do, isn’t it? [Laughter]
KÊNIA: I think it’s a lot of what Everlane and Janaína have already said, about how with some festival curators you still get this framing where people expect Black films to occupy a certain space, to have a specific theme and a traditional form. But I think we can start to put together an image of what we are calling Cinema Negro partly because other places of criticism, research and curation are beginning to show they will make the effort to look at the great quantity of films that are being made and are very different from each other. I think many curators have not yet managed to arrive at this kind of space and so they have a lot of difficulty when it comes to creating a canon of Cinema Negro outside of a standard expectation of what it should be, one that fits neatly into the expected little boxes. The work of Michael Gillespie, whom Janaína refers to quite a lot, holds onto this idea that Black film doesn’t need to be mimetic of the Black experience, although it can encompass this, of course. But the curatorial circuit has an expectation that Black films will be almost exclusively mimetic, and that being Black is demonstrated in that very direct way. There are plenty of films that don’t fit into that. Like Everlane’s films, the films of the Filmes de Plàstico guys, the films of the guys from Ceará, of Negritude Infinita…13 Anyway, there are many other examples. These films are part of Cinema Negro but in many cases they are not considered as such, or if they are only unwillingly, because they are not films with Black themes that fit into these boxes. Along with including these films, what would help create a more nuanced perspective is looking for other tools or ways to talk about them, ones that come from Black epistemologies.
EVERLANE: And there’s something else: people often believe that the artist only makes their art and cannot think about it, right? But I strongly refute the idea that you can’t talk about your own production or analyse or theorise your own work. There’s too much waiting on the part of the artist for the critic to speak.
JANAÍNA: Gosh, Everlane we keep wanting you artists to speak, to write…
EVERLANE: Perhaps, but it’s still a really common idea. I am the type of auteur who is always thinking about my own work, theorising, analysing, creating associations and seeking out a more interdisciplinary cinema, one that incorporates anthropology, politics, aesthetics and semiotics, and that enters into a dialogue with other discussions and academic fields. Academic training isn’t essential, but is important because it gives you tools to be able to know this practical manual of white cinema, right? But then to know how to reproduce it, and maybe it encourages you to do that. There’s a lot of Cinema Negro that I see that makes me say, “God, this could have been made by a white person!” The guidelines and language of white cinema are reproduced because these directors have a preoccupation with reaching a certain level and being part of that specific dialogue. This creates a cinema that is a little fragile. It’s a trap.
‘Monga, Retrato de Café’ (Everlane Moraes, 2017)
JANAÍNA: There’s a word I always use to think about Cinema Negro – “dislocation”. I think that there is a need for an epistemological dislocation because there is a need for the presence of other ways of thinking, other reflections. The traditional, classical, known, patented bibliography of cinema is an easy subject of dialogue because we know it and its mode of production. But the point is that this unique and exclusive bibliography doesn’t take account of other experiences, these margins, you see? Sometimes people ask me, “What is a scene in a film directed by a director of African origin from any country that really marked your imagination?” It’s a provocation to ask what the images are that are important to you. People can sit there for more than three hours discussing a scene from a film by a white director, and I don’t have anything against that director, but the point is that other films exist too, and does criticism ever take sufficient account of this? Particularly in Brazil, I see people really lagging behind on the use of references that don’t necessarily come from the hegemonic field of cinema. Like Black feminists, for example. People could bring in readings from the field of Cultural Studies and so on, not necessarily Black but non-hegemonic, in order to take account of this universe that is opening up. So the necessary shift is an epistemological one. Because I think that’s what it’s about, man. It’s 2020! It’s much more work for you to adapt Deleuze than to abandon Deleuze. [Laughs]. But the question is, why so many gymnastics? Why do you have to try so hard? If you’ve read The Time-Image, if you’ve read The Movement-Image, there aren’t many references from below the equator. Deleuze isn’t without his merits, but I don’t think he’s enough anymore… It’s not about ceasing to read it. It’s about asking oneself if you need to try so hard to make it fit.
EVERLANE: I remember that at one the meetings of Encontro de Cinema Negro Zózimo Bulbul: Brasil, África, Caribe e Outras Diásporas at a screening that I went to see, there was a white woman who stood up and she asked one of the filmmakers who was up there with her first film a tricky question.14 The filmmaker was a young Black woman who didn’t have an exact vision for her film, and the white woman asked her what her cinematographic references were. It took her a minute to reply. I remember that the filmmaker Larissa Fulana de Tal who was also part of the programme but sitting in the audience took the microphone and said, “My cinematographic reference are Sessão da Tarde, A Lagoa Azul [Blue Lagoon], Meu Primeiro Beijo [Howard Zieff’s My Girl]”.15 In other words, Deleuze comes later, at film school, but we start making conceptual films without all these concepts. And I feel like as a filmmaker I am a rare beast precisely because I’m more conceptual. I feel a great necessity to theorise about my work, precisely to help the spectator, as much as the critic, to elaborate their perceptions of my work, otherwise it’s difficult to understand. At a minimum, one should be generous with the public and with the critic, right?
“The contemporary visibility of Cinema Negro and the struggle for a new politics of the audiovisual has all happened because of Black women – since the presence of Black women in this debate” —Janaína Oliveira
JANAÍNA: I think this relates a lot to the idea that it’s comfortable for academic criticism to go through what it already knows, to establish bridges, you know? It ends up establishing bridges with, I don’t know, the canon of traditional cinematic scholarship, and uses this hermetic language. It’s half a dozen white men writing for their peers. And of course this is much more comfortable than exposing yourself to the world and speaking in a way that everybody understands. Do you want to be understood, to provoke a discussion in the world? Or do you want to maintain the status quo, your place of power, or, as Foucault would say, your place of discourse – the way you speak, how you speak, to whom you speak? It’s from the movies to the world, and not from the world to the movies, you know?
KÊNIA: It’s dangerous because it returns us to formalist discourse, moving from the films to the world. Janaína said a little about it earlier, regarding auteurs. I think that when looking at Cinema Negro, whether it be African films or American films, there’s a whole history and a whole repertoire of images that already exist, and people are too lazy – academics, critics – to access these images, these films, and to lead with them in the discussion about Cinema Negro today. I don’t want to say that Black filmmakers today have necessarily seen those films and have been inspired by them to make their own. But they provide a framework and a relationship to the past and to Black experience around the world. Looking at these images is sometimes much more interesting than looking at images from Cinema Novo, for example. What I want to say, however, is not that we can’t look at Cinema Novo. It’s not about abandoning such or such a thing, but about bringing more things into the conversation. It’s about making an effort to understand that there is a point of view that in many cases was taken to be universal and that there are various other ways to approach the world, and that these approaches can be much more productive and interlinked than that of just staying in that same space and believing that there is a fixed epistemology, a way of talking about film that is universal and that takes all things into account. I don’t think this ‘universal’ exists.
1. Historically, a quilombo was a refugee community made up of Black people who fled slavery during the Brazilian colonial period. Between the 16th – 19th century there were thousands of quilombos in Brazil and the most famous one – Palmares – was almost considered a state due to its size. Because Palmares resisted colonial violence for over a century, it acquired a mythic status. While communities still exist that are related to the original quilombos, we also use the words quilombo and aquilombamento in a symbolic way, to name groups of Black people who unite to resist racism and neo-coloniality.
2. Excerpt from Beatriz Nascimento’s text (at 50’33) in the documentary Ori (Raquel Gerber, 1989). Translation Tatiana Carvalho Costa’s own.
3. “Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas has been essential to the political economy of domination fostering Black women’s oppression.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Routledge, 2008, p. 67.
4. Heitor Augusto – programmer of ‘Cinema Negro – Capítulos de Uma História Fragmentada’ (Cinema Negro – Episodes of a fragmented history) at 20º FESTCURTASBH, Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival. The quoted text is part of the exhibition catalogue, available online: Passado, presente e futuro: cinema, cinema negro e curta-metragem (Past, present and future: cinema, Black Cinema and short film). pp. 154-158.
5. Povo means ‘people’ but connotes the idea of the masses, the common people, especially those who are poor or politically oppressed.
6. Candomblé (lit. “dance in honor of the gods”) is a way of life that combines elements from African cultures including the Yoruba, Bantu, and Fon. Developed in Brazil by enslaved Africans, it is based on oral tradition and includes a wide range of philosophical and spiritual practices and may also be practiced as a religion.
7. Anthropologist and co-curator of the exhibition ‘Afro-Atlantic Histories’ at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, 29 June – 21 October, 2018.
8. “Abrir caminhos” is an expression often used in Candomblé and other afrodiasporic religions. It means something like a driving force which creates ways for us to live. It’s a philisophical way of thinking relating to idea that we, as beings, have a spiritual and objective existence built on foundations made by those who ‘came before’. What Janaína means here has to do with the idea of an older generation that came before this one and did things so that the new generation wouldn’t have to repeat those same patterns (and mistakes) and could focus instead on invention.
9. A malandro is a stereotype of a young criminal, punk or thug who is often of colour.
10. International Panorama of the Cinema of Bahia, the state in which Everlane studied; The Festival of Brasilia of Brazilian Cinema which had its 52nd edition in 2019; Festival of Cinema of Gramado, which in 2020 held its 47th edition.
11. Feijoada Dogma was a manifesto written by Jeferson De and published in 2000 that argued for certain ways of producing films about issues of race and developed theories around the “Brazilian black film industry”. It led to controversy in the cinematographic field, though it was greatly influential to many Afro-Brazilian filmmakers. ‘Feijoada Dogma: The Invention Of The Brazilian Black Movies’, Noel Dos Santos Carvalho Petrônio Domingues, Figshare, December 2017.
12. Cinema da Boca do Lixo is the name given to a film genre associated with the Boca do Lixo (“Mouth of Garbage”) downtown area of São Paulo, Brazil. Films of this genre are exploitational and often considered B movies. These films often feature eroticism.
13. Filmes de Plástico is a production company founded by the directors and screenwriters André Novais Oliveira, Gabriel Martins, Maurílio Martins and the producer Thiago Macedo in the city of Contagem in the centre of the state of Minas Gerais. Their films mostly centre on marginalised characters and aesthetically provoke or shift hegemonic perceptions of Black and other peripheral bodies. Ceará is a northeastern Brazilian state Negritude Infinita is a film festival that aims, according to its mission statement, “to promote a space to think collectively about the directions in which contemporary Cinema Negro Brasileiro is headed”.
14. Encontro de Cinema Negro Zózimo Bulbul – Brasil, África, Caribe e Outras Diásporas, was founded by Zozimo himself. 2019 was the festival’s 12th edition.
15. Sessão da Tarde is a daytime television program on a main channel; A Lagoa Azul is the trashy American movie The Blue Lagoon (Randal Kleiser, 1980) featuring Brooke Shields. Larissa Fulana de Tal was jumping in to defend this first-time filmmaker from a question that might be deemed cruel.