The Brazilian Eisenstein (1961–1981)

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American filmmakers and filmgoers began to interpret and adapt early Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s in an unprecedented fashion, extending its half-life in innovative ways. In this context, Brazil is a generative but seldom explored site. This article traces the Brazilian reception of Soviet cinematic poetics through the shifting approaches to Sergei Eisenstein in the filmography of Leon Hirszman (1937–1987). Eisenstein’s approaches to montage would shape Hirszman from his first student film to the workerist cinema that characterized his late filmography. Like his contemporary Glauber Rocha (1939–1981)—after Hirszman, the Brazilian filmmaker most marked by Eisenstein—Hirszman tranculturated the avant-garde postrevolutionary Soviet film for the truncated revolutionary context of Brazil. Changing and emphasizing different elements in Eisenstein’s understanding of montage, Hirszman consistently depicted it as a capacious opportunity for both capturing and transforming the world: registering justices and multiplying a cinematic off-screen where anti-capitalist solidarities might flourish. His experimental filmmaking praxis also suggests how Eisenstein’s montage method (activating disparate or contradictory contexts through juxtaposition) produces a paradoxical ground for comparison, a poetics of the urgent untimely, rather than either belated or diffusionist accounts of world cinema.