Espetáculo e resistência no roteiro cinematográfico inédito de A hora dos ruminantes

Abstract

This thesis’ role is to bring back the memory of an important work of art: the unfilmed cinematographic project of The plague of the ruminants. Based upon the short novel of the same title, by José J. Veiga, the project was conceived by a duo: the screenwriter and critic Jean-Claude Bernardet and the filmmaker Luiz Sergio Person. The main document that makes it possible to retrace this project is the unfilmed screenplay of The plague of the ruminants, written in 1967 by Bernardet and Person. The thesis starts with a theoretical general discussion about some of the main problems connected to The plague of the ruminants, specially adaptation, screenwriting and the intersection between cinema, politics and spectacle. Sequentially, the second chapter introduces José J. Veiga's literature, pointing out some of its main issues, especially the discussion about his relationship with magic realism, and with the problem of political allegory. This chapter ends with an attempt to imagine Veiga's relationship with cinema (independently of Person and Bernardet's project). The third chapter gives an overview of Brazilian culture in the context of the late sixties, contextualizing the production of Person and Bernardet (prior to The plague of the ruminants) within the Cinema Novo generation. The fourth chapter, the main one, finally focuses on the corpus: the screenplay of The plague of the ruminants and its annexes. Our approach here is more or less panoramic, and tries to give a general idea of the project in its plurality of aspects, attempting to extract the most important aspect of each theme or sub-theme. We retrace, step by step, the chronology of the events linked to the cinematographic project of The plague of the ruminants, from its origin to its interruption. The chapter analyzes the adaptation process, describing the way in which Person and Bernardet recreate Veiga's work guided by an aesthetic and political point of view. It draws attention to original aspects of the screenplay (in comparison to Veiga's narrative). Also, it explores the relationship between the screenplay of The plague of the ruminants and literature. Bringing back some elements of the discussion in chapter two, we discuss which cinematographic genres would be present in the film The plague of the ruminants. Some of technical aspects are presented (drawing conjectures about aspects such as location, photography, costumes, sound and cast). Finally, the aesthetic-political model of The plague of the ruminants is discussed – a kind of cinematic magic realism aimed to the audience of smaller cities, trying to balance movie spectacle and politically engaged cinema (at this point, some elements from the discussion of the first chapter are discussed again). The fifth and final chapter of the thesis describes the context immediately after the suspension of The plague of the ruminants and reveals to the reader unpublished documents of the repression of the brazilian military dictatorship related to filmmaker Person. These documents shed new light about the unfavorable political context in which he and Bernardet worked, and help explain the reasons for the definitive interruption of The plague of the ruminants’ film project.