Bacurau tá com fome

Valeria Villegas Lindvall (Independent scholar)

In her writing on Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Brazilian national character, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz offers: “Já se disse várias vezes que o Brasil não é para principiantes” (2008, 83). “It is often said that Brazil is not for beginners” ––thus, normative Brazilian national identity and the power dynamics at its core present a productive challenge to decolonial critique of visual culture. Importantly, genre filmmaking provides a generous display of subversion of such power relations. I demonstrate this potentiality elsewhere (Villegas, Lindvall, 2024) by engaging with Juliana Rojas’ and Marco Dutra’s As boas maneiras (2017) and its prospects as a feminist, decolonial text. 

While Brazil might not be for beginners, this video essay is an effort to understand her. In this video essay, I explore Juliano Dornelles’ and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (2019) and its liberatory re-interpretations of violence and hunger as kindred gestures of resistance. The film resonates with Oswald De Andrade’s “disobedient aesthetics” (1928), where cannibalism can be understood as an equalizer; where hunger, violence, and digestion become primary manifestations of Latin American belligerence. While colonial hierarchies insist on the de-subjectivization of the racialized, feminized, and impoverished to the service of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, I posit that hunger and violence appear as impertinent reminders that colonial ontological violence can be resisted. 

To this end, I also turn to Glauber Rocha’s Uma estética da fome. His theses on violence and hunger channel Frantz Fanon’s (1963) unperishable statement of decolonization as an enterprise that will come at the cost of great violence. Bacurau, I argue, showcases that the “most noble cultural manifestation of hunger is violence” (Rocha 1965, p. 369). In Rocha, such violence is transformative. He decries the condition of Latin America as a colony that merely changes colonizers ––a matter taken to task in Bacurau, with the violent killing of neocolonizers that hunt the town’s inhabitants for capitalist blood sport. Bacurau portrays a communal dynamic of anticolonial resistance where the racialized, impoverished, and dissident can prevail, which unveils violence as an act of brutal love: “not the kind of love which derives from complacency or contemplation, but rather a love of action and transformation,” as Rocha writes (369). 

This video essay explores a Rochian, Fanonian fantasy of rebellion by engaging in dialogue with the radical legacy of Brazilian thought and underlining its currency. Consequently, it stresses the relevance of hunger and violence as features of subjectivization and as kindred equalizers. The thorough repetition of the word fome (hunger, in Portuguese) functions as a reminder of this equalization. The music in this piece establishes a dialogue with the disruptive and playful experimentation of Azymüth during the 1970s ––in the middle of Brazil’s long-lived dictatorship––, Chico Correa’s Nordestino loops and Goat’s lysergic “Run to your mama.” The feedback between these songs cuts across musical traditions, contexts, and history and in so doing, gestures towards Bacurau’s raw hunger for liberation as a global invitation. Here, discursive and aesthetic choices highlight hunger as a catalyst for change: this video essay is a call to explore the brutal love of anticolonial violence as an act of radical, transformative hope.

Bibliography

De Andrade, O. (1928) Manifesto antropofago. Revista de Antropofagia, 1(1), 3,7.

Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

Moritz Schwarcz, L. (2008) Sérgio Buarque de Holanda e essa tal de ‘cordialidade’. Psicanálise e Cultura, 31(46), 83-89. 

Rocha, G. Johnson, R., & Hollyman, B., trans. (2021). An Esthetic of Hunger: Glauber Rocha, Brazil, January, 1965. Black Camera 13(1), 368-370. 

Villegas Lindvall. V. (2024). Sem medo de lobisomem. Subversion, intimacy and animality in As Boas Maneiras (2017) in Lawrence, N. and Means Coleman, R. (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Films. Oxford University Press.

Filmography

Dornelles, J. & Mendonça Filho, K. (Directors) (2019) Bacurau. CinemaScópio Produções, SBS Films, Globo Filmes, Símio Filmes, Arte France Cinéma, Telecine Productions, Canal Brasil, L’aide Aux Cinémas du Monde.

Dutra, M, & Rojas, J. (Directors) (2017) As Boas Maneiras. Good Fortune Films, Urban Factory, Dezenove Som e Imagens,  Filmes do Caixote, L’aide Aux Cinémas du Monde.