The Brazil imagined in Latin America

Based on cinema critique of three countries – Mexico, Cuba and Argentina – the work aims to present the Latin-American reception of two Brazilian filmmakers: Glauber Rocha and Walter Salles. The first represents an important culture/cinematographic movement of the 1960s called Cinema Novo, and the second is the one of the most important directors of the “cinema da retomada” – a phenomenon of the 1990s that means, in other words, a resumption of Brazilian cinema. From this reception I try to comprehend identitary constructions through four categories regularly mentioned by the critics: the filmmakers “names”, the “real” represented by their films, as well as the “space” and the “time” revealed. Nevertheless the temporal gap that separates Glauber Rocha’s films of the1960s and Walter Salles’ works of the1990s/2000s, and the spatial distance that envolves the four countries (including Brazil), the critics brings to evidence two main ideas: a Latin-American community and the persistence of some aspects and sceneries. I ask then how and why such ideas are legitimized, trying to understand relevant agents of the circuit that checks the predominance and the permanence of a Brazilian singular representation, to the detriment of an identitary multiplicity.