Microcinema DVDs - Brazil: An Inconvenient History

2012-04-12 Pop Matters
By Terrence Butcher

Ah, Brazil. Land of the sultry samba, raucous Carnival revelry, and throngs of scantily-clad locals – of all genders – frolicking along sun-dappled beaches. You, the lucky tourist, stationed at an oceanview cafe in Rio, tap your fingers lightly to Astrud Gilberto’s shimmering “So Nice (Summer Samba)”, as a swarthy, blue-eyed waiter delivers your platter of feijoada, and the Girl From Ipanema saunters by, wearing little more than an insouciant smirk. Life is sweet.

This Travel & Leisure fantasia – stoked by the international bossa nova craze of the ‘60s, not to mention the annual Rio Carnival’s bacchanalian reputation – has lured millions of travelers to this overwhelming South American country, but as a South African professor friend of mine points out, Brazil’s renown as a decadent hub of easy sensuality may be something First Worlders construct in their minds. Surely, the world’s largest equitorial nation is a more complicated place than many realize.

To wit, Phil Grabsky’s documentary Brazil: An Inconvenient History, produced for the BBC’s “Timewatch” series presents a wholly different narrative of this troubled country rapidly transforming into a global powerhouse. Yes, Brazil has lovely beaches, an incomparably rich musical heritage, and an attractive populace unbound by Northern notions of sartorial propriety. It also has a particularly shameful past as the foundation of the most extensive forced migration in human history.

Americans (such as myself) often imagine that the bulk of Africans kidnapped from their homelands were transported to my shores, but in fact, most were shipped to the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, and Central America. At least four million, or 40 percent, of those unfortunate souls wound up in Brazil, named after a much-valued type of wood that was prized in 16th-century Europe. In the decades prior to Spanish naval dominion, Lisbon was the spoke in the wheel of global exploration, and this tiny nation had been importing slaves to the Cape Verde Islands for 50 years before Columbus’ unplanned arrival in the Caribbean. Of course, Portuguese authorities first enslaved indigenous Brazilians, but this scheme quickly fell apart as the ‘Indians’ succumbed to European pathogens. As was the case with other European powers, they soon eyed Africa as a labor pool, and began the transport, taking people mostly from the future lusophone colony of Angola.

As Grabsky explains, Brazil was an especially brutal society for the displaced Africans, as the slaveholders viewed Africa as an infinite resource. If the tap could never be turned off, there was no impetus to treat their ‘property’ with a modicum of decency. As sugar became a prized condiment amongst Europe’s affluent set, sugar cultivation took off in Brazil, becoming the #1 agricultural product. Cruelty was rife – we hear a harrowing tale of one dreaded master who slices off the breast of a female slave after a visiting dignitary expresses a fondness for them – and slaves were branded much like cattle would later be in the American West.

Of course, over the centuries, as in any racially tense human mosaic, a sort of melting pot developed, as Portuguese mixed with Africans and whatever natives still remained. This pot was further spiced during the 20th century, other European ethnicities, i.e, Italians, French, Germans arrived on the continent as immigrants by choice. This was actually a deliberate plot by Brazil’s light-skinned criollo elite, in their Third Reich-ish attempt to ‘whiten’ the country’s population following the abolition of slavery, which by the way, didn’t occur until 1888, more than two decades after the conclusion of the American Civil War, and 80 years after the United States banned its Transatlantic Trade. This seems analogous to Hitler’s plan to breed more golden-haired, blue-eyed Germans or Australia’s less-discussed importation of British children to fill up their empty nation, thus staving off emigration pressure from the nearby Asiatic countries.

Out of this diverse biological admixture forms contemporary Brazil’s polyglot tropical culture. Without the African presence, you wouldn’t have samba rhythms, thus, bossa nova could not have existed. Would you have the gleeful, exhausting Carnival, Brazil’s spiritual counterpart to New Orleans’ storied Mardi Gras? I think not. The custom of very casual seaside attire is more difficult to quantify, as one can find plenty of that, even stark nudity, along the Cote d’ Azur. I suspect that the steamy humidity, unfamiliar in temperate Europe, plays a major role in Brazilians’ beachwear choices.

Brazil: An Inconvenient History doesn’t dwell too much, however, on African contributions to Brazilian culture, choosing instead to rake the muck of a history little-taught in Brazil today. It’s mentioned that 21st-century Brazil leads the world in income inequality, even as the rapidly-modernizing country grows wealthier. Also, that white remains the color of upward mobility, as evidenced by the home décor selected by many middle-class Brazilians, or the “Ebony & Ivory” dichotomy present in John Updike’s magical realist interracial love story Brazil.

As in South Africa, violence – borne of economic desperation—continues to be a significant impediment to progress, and this is reflected in cinematic crime epics like the distractingly stylish City of God or Carandiru, not to mention the landmark tragic-romantic Pixote. Phil Grabsky’s Brazil: An Inconvenient History is a brief but thorough primer for audiences who have flocked to those films, and desire a deeper understanding of Brazil’s heartbreaking duality. Grabsky utilizes stills, motion footage, and interviews to weave a compelling tale too often swept under the rug, and this doc holds its own against many productions one might see on PBS.

Brazil’s racially-tinged socioeconomic divide likely won’t disappear anytime soon, despite several momentous events in its immediate future, namely the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and 2016’s Summer Olympiad, to be staged in the tony section of Rio de Janeiro. I expect that Ary Barroso’s chestnut “Aquarela Do Brasil” will be crooned at both. This tune, a rather ironic embrace of the country’s essential African component, nevertheless has a lilt simultaneously joyous and melancholy, not unlike the nation that spawned it.

2012-02-12 Technorati
By Bob Etier

Simply the notion that one man could hold anotherâ€”or manyâ€”as his property, to do with whatever he pleases, seems so bizarre. How slaves must have hated their mastersâ€”think of how much you have hated an unreasonable boss, and you were getting paid to spend time with him or her.
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When the Portuguese â€œdiscoveredâ€ Brazil, they enslaved the native people to work on their sugar plantations. After half the native population was wiped out by European diseases (and ethics), the need to import slaves arose, and they did exactly what the folks in the old country didâ€”they imported slaves from Africa (Algeria, to be exact). Through interviews with historians, Brazil: An Inconvenient History exposes Brazilâ€™s slave history, revealing that Brazil is a country that was built on the backs of slaves.

According to Brazil: An Inconvenient History, Brazil â€œimportedâ€ ten times as many slaves (4 million) as the United States, and engaged in slave trade far longer. With little leadership and regulation from Portugal, the overwhelmingly male population of Portuguese in Brazil were able to treat their slaves as cruelly as they wished, and apparently some of them wished to be very cruel, to the point of torture and murder.

African slaves lasted approximately seven years in Brazil, first working on sugar plantations and then being used in gold mining and coffee plantations. A slave owner is quoted as saying that if he got a year out of a slave, he had more than made his money back. Although the majority of slaves were men (it wasnâ€™t as profitable to â€œgrowâ€ slaves from infancy), women were used as cooks and prostitutes.

Inarguably, Brazilian culture is rich with African and European influences, but at what cost? Jesuit priests and travelers, though their contemporaneous journals and letters, bear witness to the conditions under which slaves were kept and the way they were treated.

Brazil: An Inconvenient History will be released on DVD by Microcinema, February 28, 2012. It is both absorbing and unsettling.

2012-02-01 DVD Verdict
By Judge Russell Engebretson

In 2002, President George W. Bush asked former Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso: "Do you have blacks, too?" He and America might have been spared that particular humiliation had Bush viewed Brazil: An Inconvenient History before meeting with Cardoso.

The documentary, written and directed by Phil Grabsky, originally aired on the BBC Timewatch series in 2000. It is a short, vigorous account of the Portuguese slave trade that helped create the cultural and economic stratification of society that exists in modern-day Brazil. It explains why there is such a broad range of blacks, browns, and whites—and why so much of the country's wealth is in the pockets of so few, mostly pale-skinned, Brazilians. The answers lie in the history of sugar and slavery that extends back into the mid-1500s.

Sugar was hard to come by in the sixteenth century—and literally worth its weight in gold. The narrator states, "In 1598, a traveler in England noted how Queen Elizabeth's teeth were black from too much sugar. The cause of a Queen's poor dentistry was the source of Portugal's new wealth. Huge quantities of processed sugar were shipped to ports like Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Venice. Sugar was Brazilian gold."

However, sugar was only misery and death for the blacks who were kidnapped from their African homeland by the hundreds of thousands and shipped to Brazil to work the plantations—a practice that continued well into the nineteenth century (Brazil was the last country to officially abolish slavery.) Life expectancy for new arrivals was six or seven years, and slaves born in Brazil only lived on average into their early twenties.
A planter from the 1800s was asked if the mistreatment and consequent early death of his slaves was not economically harmful. The film's narrator says he answered that, "On the contrary, it brought him no personal injury at all, since when he purchased a slave it was for the purpose of using him for only a single year, after which very few could survive, but nonetheless made them work in such a way that he not only recovered his original purchase price, but made a considerable profit."

Brazil: An Inconvenient History is peppered with several truly horrific stories similar to and much worse than the one above—murders, castrations, and brutal whippings and beatings—but most of the film is a trenchant, condensed history that is informative and fascinating. It does not approach its subject with dry, academic verbosity, nor does it oversimplify. Overall, it's a nicely balanced historical documentary.

The non-anamorphic DVD presentation is in the somewhat unusual aspect ratio of 14:9 (formerly used by the BBC) and results in a "floating" image that is both pillar and letterboxed. The image is rather soft and displays some combing on horizontal pan shots. Color is about average for a twelve-year-old TV video. The 2.0 Dolby audio is crisp and clear with easily understood dialogue and excellent vocal translations of the non-English speakers. There are no extras, only trailers for a pair of BBC documentaries, also directed by Grabsky.

The film is a bit too verbally graphic for younger viewers, but the DVD should be suitable for high school or college classroom viewing and is just the correct length to show in one class period. I also recommend it to casual viewers for its interesting and cogent short history of the slave trade in nineteenth-century Brazil.

The Independent

It's an eye-opener

Mail on Sunday

A beautifully constructed film