In this text, writer and film critic Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes analyzes the underdeveloped state of Brazilian film, the sociopolitical and economic reasons for it, and what it implies on a cultural level. In Salles Gomes’s view, this problem is endemic, that is, historical, since “film is incapable of finding of its own devices the energies that would allow it to escape the fate of underdevelopment.” Unlike other Third World countries—India, for instance—Brazil acts like an extension of the West with no access to an original culture. From that perspective, nothing is foreign to it, “since everything” is pre-established. In Salles Gomes’s view, the only way to build a specifically Brazilian identity would be through a dialectic between “not being” and “being other.” This is the case, he explains, due to “a creative incompetence [that insists on] copying” foreign models. On that premise, the critic examines the eruption of Brazilian film, the country’s first productions, the attempts to sustain a film industry capable of producing feature films, the “Cinema Novo” movement of the sixties, and the marginal alternative film movement known as Cinema da Boca do Lixo in reference to the neighborhood of São Paulo where it developed. Finally, Salles Gomes asserts that his discontent is due to the lack of communication between the general public and intellectuals, as well as the tendency to privilege foreign production in the late sixties, when the harshening of the military dictatorship brought an oppressive climate.
