"SERTÃO DAS USINAS": canavieira cultural landscape and paradigmatic violence of the system of large plantations through the Pernambuco film Baixio das Bestas

• Main Author: Caio Augusto Amorim Maciel
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco 2008-12-01
• Series: Clio: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica
• Subjects: Cultural; geography; landscape rhetoric; cinematographic landscape; Brazilian cinema; sugar cane plantation; Brazil´s northeastern region.
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufpe.br/revistas/revistaclio/article/view/24179/19616
• ISSN: 2525-5649; 2525-5649

This article attempts to interpret the landscape representations of the sugar cane region as they have been constructed in Brazilian full-length fiction films, providing a reflection on the ways certain northeastern Brazilian spaces acquire the cultural meaning of regional syntheses. Such geographical metonymies assume a powerful capacity to represent a territorial image that is socially accepted, while also contributing to its redefinition. Emphasis is put on the rhetorical role of landscapes, singling out filmic representations and analyzing the composition of senses and values of a cultural region as they are depicted in the set design, locations, and other cinematic techniques. Cinema is understood as social practice, its images representing actualization points drawing the regional and the national geographic imaginary nearer. The well-known feature film production about the Northeast of Brazil make plain the symbolic and image building of the regional setting. In spite of the prominence of this filmic imaginary, very few motion pictures go beyond the set of shared ideas about the sertão (semi-arid outback). The few works that deal with the plantation region in the Northeast justify a detailed analysis of their conception of the territorial identity of this much studied area in agrarian geography, one still under-represented in Brazilian film studies.