A country was starting to end while another one was starting to begin: Bye Bye Brazil

Abstract

This discussion of Bye-bye Brazil (1979), film by Cacá Diegues, aims to understand how the director interacted with the 1970s Brazilian cultural policy. On the one hand, there was a filmmaker identified with the cinema novo nationalistic and authorial cultural perspective; on the other hand, an authoritarian and also nationalistic State that was fostering economic modernization. In these circumstances, there was a dispute over preponderance in the production of films that addressed issues related to national identity. The starting point here is the premise that the cinema field is an arena of representations of moving images where social players dispute hegemonic production of nation’s images amidst contradictions involving popular culture and mass culture notions. The outcome of these confrontations was a rich movie diversity of which Bye bye Brazil is an emblematic case.

keywords: Bye-bye Brazil; authoritarian modernization; national identity.