Devorações em Bacurau: ecos antropofágicos no cinema brasileiro

Abstract

In this research, we seek to identify and analyze the traces of cultural anthropophagy in the film Bacurau, by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, understanding how the feature film translates and reinvents external influences within a Brazilian aesthetic. To this end, we begin with the writings of Oswald de Andrade and explore their connections with Cinema Novo, Cinema Marginal, and other national artistic movements, such as the chanchadas and Tropicalismo, in order to investigate how Bacurau constructs itself as a mosaic of references. We understand the film as a blend of repertoires from popular art and the culture industry, engaging in dialogue with different cinematic genres such as the western, horror, and science fiction. A example of this intertextual play is the flying saucer, which at first evokes the imagery of classic science fiction films, but throughout the narrative reveals itself to be a drone, a symbol of foreign surveillance and technological domination over the village. In addition to Oswald de Andrade, authors such as Antonio Candido, Beatriz Azevedo, Douglas Kellner, Glauber Rocha, Ivana Bentes, Ismail Xavier, Jean-Claude Bernardet, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, form the theoretical foundation for our approach, establishing an interface between cinema and literature and analyzing the presence of anthropophagy in the construction of the filmic text. We conclude that the film mobilizes anthropophagic elements not only as an aesthetic resource but also as a strategy of resistance of Brazilian cinema against foreign blockbusters. We also seek to understand how the film revisits the Oswaldian concepts of utopia, patriarchy, and matriarchy of Pindorama, as it critiques the colonial patriarchy and the imposition of a European morality upon the bodies and ways of life of the original peoples. Bacurau, therefore, in our reading, not only appropriates external influences but digests and transforms them, reaffirming a Brazilian identity that, instead of submitting to global culture, reconfigures it from its own perspective. This symbolic operation becomes evident, for instance, in the final duel between locals and invaders, a scene typical of western films, which, in Bacurau, takes on the features of the cangaço.