Getting into your other question, the first chapter of the book came out of my master’s [dissertation], which was about the history of Brazilian cinema. I often mention a researcher named Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, who founded the film program at the University of Brasilia. He said that we can’t talk about an independent-cinema history in Brazil since the country wasn’t economically independent for most of the 20th century. Now I teach cinema history there too, and I start my courses by saying that Hollywood cinema and Brazilian cinema have always been inversely related. Like when American TV companies sued the Hollywood studios in the 50s—as in the case of United States vs. Paramount Pictures [actually 1948 —ed.]—and the economic force of the studios went down, the force of Brazilian cinema went up.
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And then Brazil became a dictatorship, so that movement was shut down.
- Antonio das Mortes
It’s interesting how you refer to him as “Glauber,” like he transcends cinema and represents a cultural force. It reminds me of how certain European and U.S. cinephiles talk about “Godard.”
- The Red Light Bandit
We had our first free election in 1989 [since 1960]. We elected a guy called Fernando Collor, and he closed the Ministry of Culture. He was a neoliberal, following the advice of Reagan and Thatcher, and he felt that closing our Ministry of Culture would open our economy and culture to the world. This was terrible. In 1992, Brazil produced about 15 films. By the time the Ministry of Culture was down in 1993, we produced three films—zero, really, because those three had been started in ’92 but didn’t finish postproduction until ’93. So we say in Brazil that our cinema history stopped that year.
- Neighboring Sounds
Slowly, during the 70s, those theaters began to close or they started showing these sort of pornographic films. Not actual pornography, but . . .
