Cinema Novo - Ideology

Ideology

Cinema Novo filmmaker Alex Viany describes the movement as having elements of participatory culture. According to Viany, while Cinema Novo was initially "as fluid and undefined" as its predecessor French New Wave, it required that filmmakers have a passion for cinema, a desire to use it to explain "social and human problems," and a willingness to individualize their work.

Auteur theory also greatly influenced Cinema Novo. Although its three phases were distinct, Cinema Novo encouraged directors to emphasize their personal politics and stylistic preferences. As Cinema Novo filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade explained to Viany in a 1966 interview:

In our films, the propositions, positions, and ideas are extremely varied, at times even contradictory or at least multiple. Above all they are increasingly free and unmasked. There exists a total freedom of expression. ... At first glance this would seem to indicate some internal incoherence within the Cinema Novo movement. But in reality I think it indicates a greater coherence: a more legitimate, truthful, and direct correspondence between the filmmaker--with his perplexities, doubts, and certainties--and the world in which he lives.

Class struggle also informed Cinema Novo, whose strongest theme is the "aesthetic of hunger" developed by premiere Cinema Novo filmmaker Glauber Rocha in the first phase. Rocha wished to expose how different the standard of living was for rich Latin Americans and poor Latin Americans. In his 1965 essay "The Esthetic of Hunger," Rocha stated that "the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society. ... originality is hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood." On this note, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster hold that "he Marxist implications of cinema are hard to miss".