The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (self) Discovery

By Sara Brandellero

The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self)Discovery explores some of the key trends and films in the development of the road movie in Brazil. Through a collection of essays by distinguished scholars, and covering a broad range of case studies, this text spans Brazilian film production from the silent era to the present day. This text examines issues such as the reworking of the genre in a Brazilian context, the relationship between documentary and fiction, between history, politics and cinema, gender and race, the wilderness and the urban space, the national and the transnational. The essays consider among other things how the experience of the journey helped develop and was instrumental in defining identities on screen. Adopting a variety of approaches, the volume considers the significance of the iconography of the road, the experience of movement and of life on the move for the representation of Brazil on screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783165650

Book preview

Introduction

SARA BRANDELLERO

Journeys and life on the road have fired the human imagination since time immemorial and inspired some of literature’s most enduringly popular narratives. Film did not escape this attraction, and the birth of cinema itself is tantalizingly associated with recording the experience of being on the move. Early cinema, as Giuliana Bruno has pointed out, ‘envisioned panoramic views that incorporated site-seeing journeys and the spatio-visual desire for circulation that had become fully embedded with modernity.’¹ Such connection between mobility and film is encoded in the very titles of some of the new medium’s earliest outputs, from the Lumière brothers’ landmark L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a train at la Ciotat, 1895) to Georges Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), to cite but a couple of cinema’s classics.²

Cinema’s long love affair with the theme of travel certainly crystallized into one of its most popular genres with the road movie. Often automatically thought of as a North American genre,³ the road movie in fact explores a long-established partnership between film and the road that goes well beyond the boundaries of Hollywood and also meets fertile ground in Brazil, which is the focus of this book.

The American road movie that developed in the late 1960s, with its outsider protagonists, countercultural message and expression of ‘masculinist fantasies of escape and liberation’,⁴ of which Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) is its most famous example, has often been taken to be the epitome of the genre. Yet the road story has instigated a variety of styles, and Mazierska and Rascaroli for instance, in their recent study of European road movies, aptly remind us of the proliferation of filmic journey narratives in 1950s European cinema, which saw films such as Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) and Fellini’s La Strada (1954) prove that it was ‘possible to be on the road in Europe’.⁵

Mazierska and Rascaroli’s recent contribution to the bibliography on the genre has indeed provided a timely addition to a field of study which had thus far been somewhat unexplored. Despite the genre’s popularity, relatively few studies have ventured in any detail into filmic travel narratives produced beyond the North American circuit. Indeed, David Laderman’s important book-length study on the genre, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, provided a landmark broadening of the spectrum of analysis, with its closing chapter entirely devoted to the European road movie and its re-articulations and dialogues with the North American tradition.⁶

Mindful that a substantial part of critical literature concentrates on the North American tradition and of the generalized perception of what constitutes an ‘authentic’ road movie, my original aim for this book was to provide an opportunity to bring together surveys on some of Brazil’s most significant film productions in which the theme of travel and life on the road occupy an integral role in the plot or character development. Thus, this volume necessarily includes films which deal with questions of exile, migration and displacement, of movement within national and global contexts, the experience of which has marked Brazilians’ lives and collective history. Through adopting a polycentric perspective in relation to world cinema, the volume looks beyond conventionally perceived dynamics of source and influence.⁷ Taking an intercultural approach and opening up the road movie horizon, as it were, it was important to provide a platform for reflection on how filmic travel narratives in Brazil have dialogued with road movies from North America and beyond.⁸

Road movies have constituted some of Brazilian cinema’s most iconic productions and box-office successes – one can think of Walter Salles’s internationally acclaimed Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998) as an example,⁹ but there has so far been no single booklength study of the genre either in English or Portuguese although the topic is attracting increasing critical attention. Samuel Paiva and Sheila Schvarzman’s edited volume Viagem ao cinema silencioso do Brasil (Azougue Editorial, 2011) takes the experience of travel as its organizing theme, mindful of the significance of the travelogue in the development of early film, in a selection of essays focused on Brazil’s silent cinema production and providing a timely contribution to this field of study.¹⁰ Indeed, the centrality of travel in Brazilians’ individual and collective experience – Brazil’s condition as a nation born out of European colonial expansion and its long history of internal and transnational migration invites a series of reflections on this – is evidenced in a sizeable body of work interrogating just such experience, making it all the more pressing to take a closer look at configurations of mobility in Brazilian cinema.

Brazilian cinema is rightly enjoying a period of flourishing interest on the international stage, especially in the wake of recent box office successes such as Central do Brasil, Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) and more recently Tropa de elite (Elite Squad, José Padilha, 2007). Important English-language publications which have emerged in recent years reflect current scholarship in the field. Publications including Lúcia Nagib’s edited volume The New Brazilian Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2003) and her Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I. B. Tauris, 2007), and Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw’s Popular Cinema in Brazil (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Brazilian National Cinema (Routledge, 2007) have provided invaluable critical material to scholars and students alike. By homing in on crystallizations of the road movie in Brazil, this volume intends to build on the growing English-language bibliography in the field of Brazilian cinema studies and, more broadly, in that of the road movie.

But what is a road movie? At the most basic level, the road movie is about the journey, and as Timothy Corrigan stated ‘what most of the films of this genre share is, quite obviously, a quest motif, which propels the usually male characters along the road to discovery’.¹¹ The prime position occupied by forms of motorized travel in most road movies echoes early cinema’s fascination with the train.¹² Identifying the genre as a descendant of the Western and a post-war phenomenon, Corrigan located its foundations in the ‘institutional turbulence’ of those years.¹³ Such cultural contextualization was later echoed in Cohan and Hark’s analysis, as they noted how ‘key moments in the history of the road movie tend to come in periods of upheaval and dislocation, such as the Great Depression, or in periods whose dominant ideologies generate fantasies of escape and opposition, as in the late 1960s’.¹⁴

Recalling the closing moments of the iconic road movie Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Laderman identified the desire for ‘rebellion against conservative social norms’ as encapsulating one of the fundamental markers of the American road movie within its drive for cultural critique.¹⁵ As a counterpoint to the American model, Laderman usefully identified a common thread in the European road movie and its association of ‘road travel with introspection rather than violence and danger. [. . .] travelling outside of society becomes less important (and perhaps less possible) than travelling into the national culture, tracing the meaning of citizenship as a journey’.¹⁶

These diverse engagements with the road narrative within regional specificities highlight the multifarious nature of the genre, for which rigid definitions prove problematic.¹⁷ As Wendy Everett noted, for example, critics have observed the American road movie’s love of wild, open landscapes, as opposed to the general lack of space and the inescapable presence of borders in European road movies, aptly concluding: ‘Indeed, it is the essential flexibility of the road movie that has allowed it to assume vitally different functions in different places and at different times on its own historical and cultural journey.’¹⁸

Within the variations, an aesthetic of mobility, often conveyed through the tracking shot,¹⁹ throws into relief the connection between ‘locomotion and mediamotion’.²⁰ And indeed, many road movies are strikingly self-reflexive as they interrogate the place of cinema from the vantage point of the ‘screen-like’ lens of the windscreen and through the mise-en-abyme of the road travelled, as it is glimpsed at in the rear-view mirror.²¹ Thus, the journey trope has served to reflect on the role of cinema in the process of (self) discovery, and it is a feature which is also relevant to the ‘Brazil on screen’ which comes to life in many of the films discussed in this volume.

The currency, highlighted by Corrigan and Cohan and Hark above, of the road movie in periods of unease resonates considerably in relation to the development of the genre in Brazil, where filmic travel narratives have long provided a fertile medium to reflect on individual and communal experiences of dislocation, framed within national and historical perspectives. Indeed, in Brazil, questions of national essence have lain at the heart of the development of its cinema, and critics have repeatedly noted its preoccupation with the question of national identity, drawing attention to Brazilian filmmakers’ ‘primordial desire to place the nation on screen’.²² Within this context, narratives of journeys and forays into new landscapes and communities have harnessed the construction of a Brazilian national identity: in a country of continental proportions, the allure and trepidation associated with life on the move has been inscribed into Brazil’s cultural output throughout its history, since it emerged as a nation following Portuguese colonization. The journals of the early travellers in colonial times or the critical gaze on the plight of those caught up in the process of mass migration witnessed in modern times, such as in João Cabral de Melo Neto’s classic play Morte e vida severina (Death and Life of a Severino, 1956), illustrate literature’s connection with the theme. Brazilian cinema’s engagement has been equally significant, exemplified by the landmark film adaptation Vidas secas (Barren Lives, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963) or the aforementioned internationally acclaimed Central do Brasil or Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, Marcelo Gomes, 2005).

Reflecting such engagement, the ten chapters included in this book provide an illustration of the breadth of range, through a selection of films spanning well-known classics as well as (re)discovered lesserknown outputs. The films’ aesthetic qualities and their grounding in specific historical and cultural contexts are accounted for, whether the films are viewed as illustrating specific trends or seen as innovative benchmarks in the history of Brazilian cinema, thereby highlighting how they have interrogated questions of national essence, of history and society within urban and natural landscapes.

One of the filmmakers featured in this volume, director Walter Salles, creator of international box office road movie successes Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998), Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), and of the 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road, explained how part of the attraction of the road movie genre lies in the blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary, given that the outside ‘real world’ is incorporated by definition into the diegesis.²³ Indeed, in the road movie, man-made and natural landscapes are far from being a mere backdrop against which the journey and the characters’ dramas unfold.²⁴ Salles’s own Central do Brasil, discussed here by Darlene J. Sadlier in chapter 7, takes us on a journey of rediscovery to the arid, impoverished interior of northeastern Brazil (known as the sertão), where a world of potential future promise is suggested in the sun-kissed, open landscapes we find there. Juxtaposed to the stifling reality of urban Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian north-east becomes the film’s protagonist, as Paulo Passos de Oliveira noted.²⁵

As a counterpoint to this optimistic outlook, the camera’s relationship with the landscape has in other cases provided opportunities for unabashedly political engagements with issues of social and environmental justice. A case in point, referenced in a number of essays included here, is the aforementioned classic 1963 adaptation of the canonical novel by Graciliano Ramos Vidas secas (Barren Lives, 1938), translated to the screen by acclaimed director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, whose documentary-style incursion into the lives in transit of a family of north-eastern peasants resulted in one of the landmark films of the groundbreaking Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s, which proposed a radical politicization of Brazilian cinema in the face of the country’s history of underdevelopment and social inequality. It is also central to another, slightly later, trailblazing road movie, the docudrama Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, 1974), discussed by João Luiz Vieira in chapter 10, where the life on the road of the hapless eponymous female protagonist throws into sharp focus the plight of the displaced indigenous population of the Amazon, in the face of the human and environmental cost of exploitative development pursued during the years of military rule in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

In an attempt to illustrate at least partly the range of road narratives in Brazilian cinema, the ten chapters included here comprise essays spanning the silent era to contemporary cinema. Although the volume is, for the most part, devoted to fiction films, it reflects on the synergies between fiction and documentary that have defined travel films, as observed by Salles above. The chapters are organized into two sections: ‘On the Road’, centred predominantly on filmic journeys within Brazil, and ‘The Voyage Out’, in which travels beyond Brazil’s borders or transnational relations play a more prominent role.

Cinema came to Brazil not long after its birth in Europe, and the early arrival of the moving image, in 1896, soon materialized in Brazilian-produced films such as Vittorio de Maio’s Chegada de um trem a Petrópolis (‘Arrival of a Train at Petropolis’, 1897).²⁶ As the title suggests, cinema’s early fascination with mobility took root in Brazil as it had done in Europe, and Afonso Segreto’s 1898 travelling shot of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, since lost but shrouded in mythical aura, again points to this connection, as well as to the significance of the documentary in cinema’s early years.²⁷

Reflecting this trend, Luciana Martins studies one of the pioneers of Brazil’s silent cinema, in ‘Silvino Santos and the Mobile View: Documentary Geographies of Modern Brazil’ (chapter 1). Martins’s study of Santos’s early cinematography, with specific focus on his Terra encantada (‘Enchanted Land’, 1922), later reworked into the two documentaries Fragmentos da terra encantada (‘Fragments from Enchanted Land’) and 1922 – A exposição da independência (‘1922 – The Independence Exhibition’), considers its exploration of cinema’s attraction for transportation, movement and spectacle, as it leads its audience on journeys into modern Brazil. Though these films cannot be defined simply as road movies, Martins argues, they helped develop the public’s appetite for visions of the world around them.

How this fascination with movement gathered speed after the advent of the talkies and with Brazil’s increasing modernization is one of the thematic threads explored in the subsequent chapters of the section. Samuel Paiva’s essay ‘Paths of Brazilian Road Movies in the 1950s’ considers three road movies by three distinct directors: Sai da frente (‘Get Out of the Way’), directed by Abílio Pereira de Almeida (1952), A estrada (‘The Road’), directed by Oswaldo Sampaio (1955), and Pé na tábua (‘Foot on the Pedal’), directed by Victor Lima (1957). Among the issues Paiva addresses is the context of the 1950s’ momentous drive towards industrialization and road development, considering how these films interrogate the modernization project of the time and develop an ambivalent position in relation to the countercultural ethos often associated with road movies.

Complementing Paiva’s study of 1950s road movies, my own essay ‘Bye bye Brasil and the Quest for the Nation’ considers how a later and iconic film by Carlos Diegues, Bye bye Brasil (Bye Bye Brazil, 1979) interrogated the developmentalist project of its period, this time within the context of the political climate of military rule in which it was produced. The essay considers the film’s mapping of the nation, alternative to that promoted by the establishment of the day, including through the study of the film’s dialogue with road movies produced outside Brazil and its thought-provoking representation of what happens when women hit the road. This last issue is also central to Mariana A. C. da Cunha’s essay ‘Framing Landscapes: the Return Journey in Suely in the Sky’, in which the experience of female migration provides the entry point for the study of the relationship between mobility, subjectivity and the construction of cinematic landscapes, spaces and places in Karim Aïnouz’s 2006 film O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky).

If, in this film, the outcome of a life on the road remains uncertain, a reassuringly upbeat solution is provided in the film discussed by Tatiana Signorelli Heise in the chapter ‘Road to Riches: Migration and Social Mobility in 2 Filhos de Francisco’, which focuses on the film 2 Sons of Francisco (Breno Silveira, 2005), one of the biggest boxoffice hits in recent Brazilian cinema. Its positive affirmation of a contemporary Brazilian national identity, Heise argues, proved integral to the success of this aesthetically pleasing ‘rags to riches’ narrative. Something of the film’s uplifting mood is also relevant to Deus é Brasileiro (God is Brazilian, 2003), discussed by Adriana Rouanet in the following chapter, ‘God is Brazilian: a Re-Examination of Cinema Novo and Self’, which reassesses this feature film as a light-hearted comedy on the road which, beyond the humour, provides Diegues, one of the exponents of the Cinema Novo movement, with an honest vehicle for self-reflection.

Moving on to films which dialogue more closely with the experience of travelling beyond national borders, the section under the heading ‘The Voyage Out’ opens with Darlene J. Sadlier’s chapter ‘Leaving Home in Three Films by Walter Salles’. The socio-political implications of the experience of dépaysement form the main focus of Sadlier’s study of the successful road movies Foreign Land, Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries. In articulation with the experience of estrangement discussed in Sadlier’s essay, Lúcia Nagib’s chapter ‘Back to the Margins in Search of the Core: Foreign Land’s Geography of Exclusion’ considers Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s 1995 movie in close detail. Filmed in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, the film follows the encounter of people from across the Portuguese-speaking corners of the Earth, as they negotiate their marginal situation in today’s globalized world. Nagib analyses how the film articulates issues of centre and periphery on a number of levels, including in its revisitation of Brazil’s colonial history from the perspective of those on the fringes of society and in its reflection on globalized cinema which, Nagib argues, is articulated through citations and homage to other cinemas, through which it tries to retrieve a sense of belonging. Yet, Nagib contends, the film also universalizes the question of the loss of identity, relativizing the importance of the national imaginary, something which resonates in Stephanie Dennison’s study of Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, 2005) in the chapter ‘Sertão as Post-National Landscape: Cinema, aspirinas e urubus’. Set in Brazil’s sertão, this road movie, debut feature by film-maker Marcelo Gomes, gained wide endorsement by critics and audiences alike upon its release in 2005. Charting the story of a friendship across national boundaries, Dennison’s study argues that the film articulates a postnational identity which is intrinsic to the contemporary road movie and here emerges in the framing of the sertão, not so much in relation to the region or the nation but to a wider world which finds itself at war.

Following on from Dennison’s essay, and as the closing chapter of this volume, João Luiz Vieira’s study ‘Women on the Road: Sexual Tourism and Beyond’ adopts a distinctly gendered approach in its discussion of Brazilian cinema’s articulation of national identity through configurations of female bodies on the move. Vieira discusses two important films which have a dystopian Amazonian landscape as their prime backdrop: Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, 1974) and Rudi Lagemann’s first feature, Anjos do sol (Angels of the Sun, 2006). Vieira considers these films’ critique of foreign interests in Brazil, and the foreigner’s gaze on its land and people in the recent past and contemporary transnational world, considering how cinema dialogues with foundational literary narratives of the Brazilian nation. In its analysis, this closing chapter contrasts two different stylistic approaches and questions the shift from fictional documentary to updated melodrama in contemporary Brazilian cinema.

Notes

¹Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 19.

²This is a point highlighted by Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli who, quoting Bertram M. Gordon, noted the preponderance of travel films in the first decade of cinema: Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 4.

³Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s trail-blazing edited study of the road movie, for example, defines it clearly as an American genre: ‘The road movie is [. . .] like the musical or the Western, a Hollywood genre that catches peculiarly American dreams, tensions, and anxieties, even when imported by the motion picture industries of other nations’: ‘Introduction’ in The Road Movie Book (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–14 (p. 2).

⁴Cohan and Hark, The Road Movie Book , p. 3.

⁵Mazierska and Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006), p. 3.

⁶Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). See in particular the book’s closing chapter ‘Travelling Other Highways’.

⁷As I use the notion of polycentrism, I am indebted to the positive appropriation of the concept for world cinema made by Lúcia Nagib. Drawing on formulations by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam among others, Nagib makes a compelling case for a more balanced approach. In her recent book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism for instance, Nagib defines world cinema ‘as a polycentric phenomenon with peaks of creation in different places and periods . . . In multicultural, multi-ethnic societies like ours, cinematic expressions from various origins cannot be seen as ‘the other’ for the simple reason that they are us’ World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), p. 1. More recently, such reflections on questions of world cinema are developed further in: L. Nagib, C. Perriam and R. Dudrah (eds), Theorizing World Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012). An earlier important reference in theorizations of world cinema is Dennison S., and Lim, S. H. (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006). For Shohat and Stam’s trailblazing formulations on a polycentric multiculturalism see Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994).

⁸In a similar vein, Mazierska and Rascaroli pointed out the need for more critical literature on ‘the relationship between American and non-American road movies and on the phenomenon of cross-fertilization between road movies of different countries and continents’ ( Crossing New Europe , p. 2).

⁹Figures included in Randal Johnson’s study of contemporary Brazilian cinema showed Central do Brasil to rank tenth among the top 50 films of the period 1994–2003. See R. Johnson, ‘TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema’, in L. Shaw and S. Dennison (eds), Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity (Jefferson and London: McFarland & Co, 2005), pp. 11–38 (p. 25).

¹⁰ S. Paiva and S. Schvarzman (eds), Viagem ao cinema silencioso do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, 2011).

¹¹ Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 144. (First published by Rutgers University Press in 1991).

¹² As Corrigan noted: ‘road movies are, by definition, movies about cars, trucks, motorcycles, or some other motoring soul-descendant of the nineteenth-century train’ (p. 144).

¹³ Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls , p. 143.

¹⁴ Cohan and Hark, The Road Movie Book , p. 2.

¹⁵ Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie , p. 1.

¹⁶ Laderman, Driving Visions , p. 248.

¹⁷ Jason Wood argues that ‘conferring of full genre status on the road movie has proved problematic’ as road movies have traditionally intersected with a variety of more established genres (such as the comedy, the buddy movie etc.). 100 Road Movies (London: BFI, 2007), p. xvii.

¹⁸ ‘Lost in Transition? The European road movie, or A genre adrift in the cosmos‘, Literature Film Quarterly , 37/3 (2009), 165–75 (p. 167).

¹⁹ Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts , 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 294.

²⁰ W. Moser, ‘Présentation. Le road movie: un genre issu d’une constellation moderne de locomotion et de médiamotion’, Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies , 18/2–3 (2008), 7–30 (p. 16).

²¹ M. Atkinson ‘Crossing The Frontiers’, Sight and Sound , 4/1 (1994), 14–17 (p. 14). The point is also developed by Wendy Everett, ‘Lost in Transition?’, p. 172.

²² Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.

²³ ‘Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie’, The New York Times, November 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/magazine/11roadtrip-t.html [accessed 25/3/2010].

²⁴ N. Thornton, ‘Travelling Tales: Mobility and Transculturation in Contemporary Latin American Film’, Film and Film Culture , 4 (2004), 30–40 (p. 35).

²⁵ ‘Salles e Lima Jr: A ostra e o vento e Central do Brasil : o não-lugar e o lugar’, Cinemais , 17 (1999), 135–54 (p. 151), referenced in Shaw and Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema , p. 110.

²⁶ Shaw and Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema , p. 17.

²⁷ Amir Labaki, Introdução ao documentário brasileiro (São Paulo: Francis, 2006), p. 17.

Filmography

A estrada (‘The Road’, Oswaldo Sampaio, 1955).

1922 – A exposição da independência (‘1922 – The Independence Exhibition’), Roberto Kahané and Domingos Demasi, 1970).

Anjos do sol (Angels of the Sun, Rudi Lagemann, 2006).

Bye bye Brasil (Bye Bye Brazil, Carlos Diegues, 1979).

Central do Brasil (Central Station, Walter Salles, 1998).

Chegada de um trem a Petrópolis (‘Arrival of a Train at Petropolis’, Vittorio de Maio, 1897).

Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002).

Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, Marcelo Gomes, 2005).

Deus é Brasileiro (God is Brazilian, Carlos Diegues, 2003).

2 Filhos de Francisco (2 Sons of Francisco, Breno Silveira, 2005).

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969).

Fragmentos da terra encantada (‘Fragments from Enchanted Land’, Roberto Kahané and Domingos Demasi, 1970).

Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, 1974).

L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a train at la Ciotat, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895).

La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954).

Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles, 2004).

O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky, Karim Aïnouz, 2006).

On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012).

Pé na tábua (‘Foot on the Pedal’, Victor Lima, 1957).

Sai da frente (‘Get Out of the Way’, Abílio Pereira de Almeida, 1952).

Terra encantada (‘Enchanted Land’, Silvino Santos e Agesilau de Araújo, 1923).

Terra estrangeira (Foreign Land, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, 1998).

Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991).

Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, José Padilha, 2007).

Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, Roberto Rossellini, 1954).

Vidas secas (Barren Lives, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).

Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902).