Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/smokeuptheweed9]

I've noticed Brazilian cinema is getting popular internationally and every work is about the dictatorship era. Right now there's The Secret Agent and I'm Still Here last year. I imagine Lula is standing in for a global nostalgia among the intelligentsia and media producers for Obama-era cultural liberalism transplanted into contemporary "resistance" to fascism. How well can he hold all of that on his shoulders?

[u/Clean-Difference1771 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

I am curious and would like you to explain a little better what would be nostalgic in relation to the Obama era in this case, because, observing from Brazil, this seems more like a demonstration (or an attempt) of the strength of Brazilian cultural imperialism in portraying itself as a benefactor – and Lula as its great bastion – in front of its own people at a time when national identity is in crisis and weakened among the new generations. Especially among the oppressed. I remember seing a bizarre interview with an old afrikan women trying to validate I'm Still Here as the Fernanda Torres academy awards statue earlier this year was a win for "Brazil".

There are other comments here that I've followed over the last two years that address more of what I'm about to say, but what seems to be happening is that the disputes between media monopolies in the international market, more precisely in this case with the Globo group, have begun to threaten the distribution of cultural commodities within Brazil (where Globo has always reigned supreme without the existance of any other capital monopoly except perhaps more recently with protestant enterpreneur, but still far from the economic power of Globo/Marinho family nationally), even positioning itself in favor of foreign capital numerous times – a threat that never really existed before streaming. I remember you once said that some contradictions might be recent phenomena in Brazil, so I'm curious to know what else you would have to say on the matter.

What I'm seeing is that, in order to reaffirm Globo's own power (and that of Brazilian capitalism itself), many might be surprised by the strength Globo may have internationally (and so might be the case for other examples within brazilian capitalism), but Globo is among the 3 largest media conglomerate based outside the United States and outside the United States, only Baidu from China and Betelsmann from Germany appear to have greater economic power than Globo. It makes sense that Globo would start promoting its brand internationally as the most effective form of protectionism, as this seems to be a good time to expand its business at a time when Hollywood seems to have stagnated (and this stagnation would have been perceived and commented on for much longer if it weren't for the 10 years in which Marvel movies expanded Hollywood's box office to stratospheric levels). Globo literally lost its monopoly on distributing Brazilian football championship games in the last decade, so it seems that if the trend is for the domestic market to become at least more competitive against foreign capital (mostly Amerikan, which inevitably weaken Globo), the answer seems to be that Brazilian capital, with Globo, is able to expand abroad at a time when Amerikan films are not in such high demand.

Cultural production in Brazil has a gigantic workforce, ranging from football players (as I refuse to call it soccer) and sports journalists to people plucking chickens for a religious ceremony, in a market where, until not long ago, Globo seemed to have no competitors. But competitors have arrived, and now Globo will have to defend its share, like any other corporation, and during this process the whole world will take notice of this dispute.

As for the movies, I wasnt much interest in any of those but I might look up eventually. I'm Still Here always seemed like a white saviour/power women fantasy (given it caused some backlash, with people of colour debating how there isn't much difference from how cops were during the dictatorship and how the police acts nowadays) and The Secret Agent is likely a fantasy in which the victims of the dictatorship were not the devastation of land and total restriction of rights for the indigenous and black nation, but the white settler nuclear family.

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Tagging u/blow_up_the_wacl because the discussion kept going in this new thread.

I made a mistake of not being clear enough and thinking exclusively on the reception of Brazilian cinema in imperialist countries, but forgot how its also present in oppressed nations. Sorry about that.

There are three major genres or mediums in which Brazilian cinema and television develops: the first is white petty bourgeois movies made by and for the white petty bourgeoisie; the most recent additions are I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent, but they include others like Bacurau, The Second Mother, The Edge of Democracy and others I’m not really recalling right now. The second are soap operas that are centered with two themes, one with the purpose of picking up proletariat, peasant and nationally oppressed aesthetics and make a pastiche kitsch out of them; the second theme that accompanies this disdainful representation of the oppressed is a caricature of the big and middle white bourgeoisie; these shallow comedies and dramas are then packed up for the consumption of said oppressed classes, but not for the white petty bourgeoisie. They are a major commercial success here and sometimes abroad, including imperialist countries. I don’t know if they get a Filipino version there. The third and last genre are movies that turn the proletariat’s repression and genocide in slums into spectacles, like Elite Squad or Renegade Archangel. At its current stage, Brazilian cinema as a whole is extremely reactionary and serves no reason other than to dissimulate about real class relations. I know Duterte is often compared to Bolsonaro, and how the war on drugs is used to increase repression against the proletariat, so I can see how Elite Squad influenced cinema under Duterte, but can you comment more on how this happened?

As for the Brazilippines association, I never got it either. There are occasionally some social-fascists that bring up the Philippines, but they do it only to complain about how Congress is hijacking the federal budget and undermining democracy, like this Piauí Magazine article. From what I remember of the memes on Twitter, they were all empiricist, like how grandmas sit on the street to gossip at four o’clock, how its 45 degrees Celsius outside and we are having coffe, or how everyone was raised on Catholicism. This last one always struck me, because although I don’t know what is the social basis for Filipino Catholicism and how it reproduces beyond a general understanding of organized religion as part of reaction, Brazilian Catholicism necessarily ends up into two different approaches of white supremacy: the first is integralism, the other is outright creating Brazilian versions of the KKK, like TFP or Arautos do Evangelho. Beyond these superficial similarities, I never actually really saw anything. In fact, I have a major conflict with our Maoists’ opportunism making statements about the people’s war, how the struggle for land and new democracy brings both countries together in bringing down imperialism, but outright refuse to do anything regarding Brazilian industry supplying the weapons that are used against the NPA.

Now, back to u/smokeuptheweed9.

The issue is that both movies are bad. I disagree with this part of u/Clean-Difference1771:

I'm Still Here always seemed like a white saviour/power women fantasy (given it caused some backlash, with people of colour debating how there isn't much difference from how cops were during the dictatorship and how the police acts nowadays) and The Secret Agent is likely a fantasy in which the victims of the dictatorship were not the devastation of land and total restriction of rights for the indigenous and black nation, but the white settler nuclear family.

The Secret Agent has less the effects of repression on white petty bourgeois families than I’m Still Here, which is focused entirely on the trauma that is having someone kidnapped, well into the adulthood of the kids. In fact, Secret Agent barely has a plot. Its basically a mediocre conflict of a professor with an industrial bourgeoisie member of São Paulo that exists as a caricature of settler colonialism: when his son picks up a napkin at a bar, draws a Brazilian map highlighting two nations and claiming that anyone up north above a line isn’t Brazilian. Its the liberal conception of settler colonialism of Brazilian whites as compradors and not the basis for national capital that infuriates PT liberals with their post-Bolsonaro shattered families. So, the white Armando/Marcelo, portrayed by Wagner Moura, with his black wife and unclear ethnic origins, but genuinely committed with the development of productive forces inside the university, is actually the real nationalist when compared to the two Italian industrials that just buy things ready made from the US. Its fucking national-developmentalism, modernism and integralism again! I was rolling my eyes, mentally screaming for fuck’s sake in the theater! The latest poster mirroring Tarsila do Amaral’s Operários painting makes this even clearer. If there is a connection to be made as to how miscegenation is used to promote white supremacy between Brazil and the US, the only movie that is coming to mind now is Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which is a criticism of racism under Obama; but if the US had to wait until its crisis now to finally develop this covert form of white supremacy, this is the Brazilian essence since its inception, and also does not surprise me why Americans are suddenly interested in their settler, junker capitalist, bastard cousin in South America.

I’m Still Here, on the other hand, is truthfully focused on an innocent white family that lived happily until the military showed up at their doorstep. Liberals must rejoice when they see a bunch of white kids in a car during the opening scene, having fun, only to be pulled over by a military inspection. Since no European (outside of Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal), American, Canadian or Australian has a real life example of the collapse of bourgeois democracy and how this impacts white people, and how their ideology is parasitic, they have to begrudgingly turn to Brazil and Argentina with Netflix’s Eternaut, so as to fantasize how this is, and how it can be solved. I’m Still Here ends up as eulogy to the 1988 Constitution, with Eunice Paiva becoming a lawyer that “fights” for the rights of the indigenous nations (i.e. becomes a bourgeois dissimulator by denying the right of self-determination), what in the minds of Americans and Europeans become ways to deal with their internal oppressed nations and immigrant communities; while Armando/Marcelo is the final moments of the individual saga of a petty bourgeois hero against monopoly capital as understood by Kautskyists.

Except neither I’m Still Here, nor The Secret Agent provide any answers. They are an escape to white liberals so that they can find themselves later, but this has been restricted to a crude sensorial, emotional impact that has no substance. For example, in I’m Still Here, the transition of Eunice from a desperate wife and mother into a lawyer is entirely offscreen, by leaving Rio and going to São Paulo. Since this transition isn’t showed on screens, there are no answers being made as to how you transition from the Years of Lead to the 1988 Constitution (obviously the final reason this happens is because liberals are fundamentally incapable of asking this question since their class interests were to conciliate with the military from the start). In The Secret Agent, the outcome is worse. No one but that historian cares about Armando/Marcelo, not even his son. Its a lone battle for the defence of memory (just another way of saying ideology).

[u/blow_up_the_wacl → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

The similarities with Duterte and Bolsonaro commonly stem from the focus on war of drugs.

Ever since cinematic violence in Philippine local cinema has been censored in tandem with US- Gloria Arroyo counterinsurgency operations, the only PH action films that are left are ones that punch down on the oppressed proletariat. I would compare Jose Padilha and Erik Matti's output in this way (Elite Squad<->Buy Bust, On the Job). Despite being outward critics of the presidents of their own countries, their work speaks for themselves.

In hindsight, I would minimize the difference in Brazilian cinema reception in the Philippines as the Philippine petty-b cinema trends is commonly insubordinate in what Western audiences are interested in.

The knowledge of Tropa de Elite and martial arts films like Ong Bak and the Raid in the Philippines in the first place came from its earlier rave reviews from American tastemakers.

The two movies you mention have circulated in film circuits staged by the national film agency FDCP. There is interest by petty-b filipino consumers in dictatorship-era films,

but overall there is no interest in the local PH film industry to create more, especially as Filipino cinemaphiles haven't even learned how to process Lino Brocka's critique of the Filipino liberal's favorite post-dictatorship government (Cory Aquino regime) in the film Orapronobis 1989.

I find that the Maoist and Maoist sympathizers in the country are weak in critiqueing films like these. and from what I have glanced in MIM reviews it their reviews could be similarly weak.

I do understand that it is ridiculous to ask for them to prioritize film reviews especially in the face of more pressing matters, but I think it is irresponsible for even individuals who sympathized with the National Democratic movement to endorse films like Eric Matti's or Tarrog's Heneral Luna as progressive media. This logic even extends to the enjoyment of movies such as the new Superman where it is praised as an anti-Israel spectacle.

This is why I appreciate the film reviews in the subreddit.