Brazil

Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil

mandy — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In this well-crafted ethnography, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds explores narratives and practices surrounding plastic surgery in contemporary Brazil. Cosmetic procedures, or estetica, have been increasing rapidly among the urban populations. Rather than simply lamenting the increase of plastic surgeries in a country famous for embracing the sensual, Edmonds instead explores the reasons why estetica has become so popular across race, class, and gender lines. Examining beauty culture in Brazil from an ethnographic perspective, he suggests in Pretty Modern that it is essential to understand what beauty means and does for differently located social actors.

Arguing that anthropologists have typically ignored the aesthetics and erotic allure of beauty, he instead takes practices such as plastic surgery seriously for what they can reveal about the fears and aspirations of urban Brazilians. He begins from the premise that perceptions and acts of beautification can only be understood within specific moments and relationships, and he set out to explore the locations where definitions of beauty are defined and negotiated: cosmetic surgery clinics, public hospitals, TV studios, favelas, cafes, and homes.

Edmonds interviewed and observed plastic surgeons, celebrities, fashion models, low-income domestic workers, media producers, and housewives in order to make sense of the increasing popularity of plastic surgery. He shadowed doctors, students, and patients in hospitals and clinics to observe consultations, surgeries, and trainings. Additionally, he engaged with images and stories of plastic surgery in popular culture through ethnographic observations of media production sites and textual analysis of magazines dedicated to estetica.

Throughout Pretty Modern, Edmonds follows two simultaneous lines of analysis. First, he uses the specific socio-historical circumstances of contemporary Brazil to shed light on the significance of beauty and cosmetic surgery. At the same time, he uses the desire for beauty as a point of entry to examine the larger tensions and anxieties of modernizing Brazil, specifically the effects of the global capitalist economy, market inequalities, and consumer culture.

The book is organized into three interrelated sections, which each focus on plastic surgery in relation to a particular domain of modern experience: medicine and psychology, race and nation, and gender and sexuality. First, Edmonds provides a genealogy of self-esteem and shows how this concept has allowed plastic surgery to be mobilized as treatment for mental suffering. He situates this analysis in the longer history of medical and therapeutic techniques of self-governance in Brazil and examines how the redefinition of cosmetic surgery as a method of “aesthetic health” has produced a language of rights around these practices.

Next, Edmonds contextualizes current beauty practices through Brazilian nationalism and local racial politics, and explores the historically specific ways that color, beauty, and power intersect. He unpacks the aesthetics of race and the scientific racism that imbues discussions of beauty and appearance in past and present Brazil.

Finally, Edmonds examines the role of cosmetic surgery in relation to the larger political economy of female reproduction. Specifically, he shows the ways that plastic surgery highlights the tensions between women’s roles as sexual and maternal subjects and argues that plastic surgeries have become naturalized as part of women’s health along with cesareans and tubal litigations.

Edmond’s thorough analysis is shaped by his engagement with broader literatures on Brazilian history and anthropology, capitalist modernity, neoliberal subjectivity, and the political economy of desire. However, Pretty Modern also reflects the best aspects of ethnographic research and writing: thick descriptions of personalities, spaces, and encounters; detailed accounts of conversations with a wide array of people; and a refusal to ignore or explain away the contradictions that shape people’s perceptions and practices in everyday life.

Written by: Traci Yoder, April 5th 2011

Mutum

mandy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Sandra Kogut

Global Film Initiative

Mutum is a coming of age, low-budget feature about a subsistence farming family living in the sertão, the hardscrabble outback of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The family is so dirt poor and isolated that nearly every meal is rice and a little meat, the roof leaks buckets in a rainstorm, and a person can die from lack of treatment for a minor scrape that becomes infected.

The protagonist, Thiago (Thiago da Silva Mariz), nine years old, is guileless, curly-haired, doe-eyed, a moralist, a storyteller, a profound questioner, and a favourite of his long-suffering mother (Izadora Fernandes). His innocence is broken by death, violence, and sexual betrayal, mostly played low-key or off-screen, except for a small amount of overt physical violence.

The household’s father, Bero (João Miguel), can joke with his kids, but has a hair-trigger temper, is subject to rages, and abuses his family—especially Thiago because his son is broodingly sensitive. His personable uncle (Rômulo Braga) treats Thiago well, but exploits the relationship to manipulate the boy. His older brother, Felipe (Felipe Leal Barroso), with whom he is close, suffers a disturbing fate.

Sandra Kogut, Mutum's director, takes chances that pay off. The temporal and thematic connections between scenes are not always immediately obvious. This method requires a viewer to actively engage with the scenes to connect their meanings—a good thing. Kogut’s actors are mostly non-professionals. All of them—kids and adults alike—do amazingly well in range and expression. One feels their authentic presence, undoubtedly because they are native to the locality. This casting creates the feel of eavesdropping on real lives, as well as foregrounding by comparison the artifice of so much Hollywood acting.

Contrary to the hyperkinetic editing fashionable in many studio films, Kogut establishes an unhurried rhythm using long takes that employ close-ups and extreme close-ups, often of people’s faces, which contrast sharply with telephoto landscape shots. This method and its results mirror the slow pace of the countryside and also allow the characters to bond emotionally in a convincing way, which big feature films often fail to do because those movies almost always restlessly move on to the next edit.

Example: Thiago and his mother must make a decision that will alter their lives forever. He comes to her, climbs in her lap, rests his head on her shoulder. Dialogue is minimal. Everything they feel lives in their faces and their hug. One keeps expecting an edit, but the camera is not impatient; it holds for about a minute—an eternity for most shots in movies nowadays—so they and we can feel the love between them. It’s a beautiful, simple, complex minute.

Finally, in this incomplete list of Kogut’s achievements with this film, Mutum eschews a music track. This tactic lets an audience experience on its own the emotions arising from those long, intimate takes rather than being coerced into those emotions by hammer-and-anvil leitmotifs. Sounds from the environment—the barking of dogs, a cow lowing, birds calling, insects chirruping—contribute to a scene’s tone, while simultaneously helping to create the sense of place.

I do have a major beef with Mutum. In the last few minutes of the film, with nary a scintilla of backstory, seeding, or foreshadowing to set this up, there occurs an extremely important revelation about Thiago. This sudden revelation is all the more jarring because it seems incompatible with what we have seen of him; thus the suspension of disbelief necessary to drama—indeed upon which emotional involvement in drama absolutely depends—is shattered. This flaw is not a dealbreaker, as there are so many pleasures and treasures in Mutum, but it sure is a clunky misstep in an otherwise excellent picture.

Written by: Neil Flowers, March 10th 2011

Side Dishes: Latina American Women, Sex, and Cultural Production

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

By Melissa A. Fitch

Rutgers University Press

Side Dishes, at times more tasty, original, and irresistible than “the main dishes,” is a delightful, playful, and innovative work about Latina, Brazilian, and Spanish American women writers, filmmakers, cartoonists, and science fiction producers. Invaluable works by women in Side Dishes are found outside the usual diet of canonical texts by Latin American women. They broaden our knowledge and understanding of different ways and approaches of looking at cultural narratives of women. Beside “the main dishes” regularly serving narratives of women as victims of male aggression, “the side dishes” write, talk, or make films about sexual lust by women and about the treatment of women’s sexuality.

In fact, the first chapter of the book “Lust” discusses sexuality often classified as Pornography, dealing with bisexuality, lesbianism, and masturbation. Chapter two, “Pop,” is about science fiction writers and cartoonists, namely Marta Gómez, the comedian from the United States; Cecilia Rosetto from Argentina; and her compatriot, the cartoonist Maitena Burundarena together with science fiction writer Daina Chaviano from Cuba. Chapter three, “Issues,” explores the academic studies dealing with feminism though journals such as_ Debate Feminista_ from Mexico, Feminaria from Argentina, and Cadernos Pagu from Brazil.

Chapter four, “Flicks,” discusses the representation of women’s sexuality in film. Argentinean Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (The Holy Girl) is about a devoutly religious girl Amalia (María Alché) who constantly talks and thinks about sex. Mexican María Novaro’s Sin dejar huella (Without a Trace) explores metaphorical and physical borders in a story about Ana (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a Mexican born, but Spanish raised dealer of fake Mayan archaeological relics. In it we also meet Aurelia (Tiaré Scanda), a young Mexican mother who makes her way to Cancún after stealing cash from her boyfriend. Tata Amaral’s film Antonia, a hit in Brazil, is about four young black women living in favelas (slums) outside Sao Paulo who had each experienced a tragedy and want to improve their living conditions. This film is about feminine friendship.

In chapter five, the author examines the development of women’s studies in Latin America and hopes that students will be encouraged to evaluate cultural texts in debates in and out of academia. In Fitch’s own words her goal with Side Dishes is “to put an array of cultural artefacts related to women in Latin America on the table.” She has done it beautifully. Through the culinary metaphors she has expanded on a sometimes forgotten area in feminist studies. With this fascinating work she signposts new directions for areas of Latin American feminism, cultural studies, and film studies, and makes a significant contribution to the main canon of Latin American narratives. This work is most likely to satisfy not only the tastes of academics but also any open minded reader interested in “the side dishes” of the diet.

Written by: Anna Hamling, October 30th 2009

Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:52:00 +0000

By Stanley R. Bailey

Stanford University Press

Legacies of Race answers many of my personal questions about a strict notion of racial identification among the “black and white” in Brazil. When I visited Rio de Janeiro for the first time in 1993, I was intrigued by the notion of the “Afro-Brazilian” population who viewed themselves as “mixed race” rather than the distinctive “white” or “black” of the United States. As Professor Bailey indicates in this excellent book, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics employed five categories in “a color-race” data research question in 1991. These were: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (of Asian ancestry) and Indigena (Indigenous). According to the 2000 census, Brazil’s racial or color composition is approximately 54% branco, 39% pardo, 6% preto, 0.5% amarelo and 0.4% Indigena. The census question of race was added in 1991 after over 100 years of asking only about color.

Bailey delivers a wealth of data on legacies of race in his solidly reasoned and impeccably researched book on racial attitudes in Brazil. He also argues that North American theories of racial identity and racial group interests find little support in Brazil where the population of African origin is nearly three times as large as that of the United States. Bailey reasons that the strict notion of racial identification as black or white cannot be labeled “universal.”

His research reveals that color or race is not a significant predictor of beliefs concerning Brazilian racial disadvantage. “Culture wars” are nearly non-existent in Brazil in comparison to the United States. Racial attitudes in Brazil appear to embrace “racial ambiguity and mixing” as the very essence of Brazilian people. The great majority of non-white Brazilians prefer the term “intermediate” or “mixed-race” claiming to be neither “white” nor “black.” Bailey argues that only through disposing of many of the U.S. racial assumptions, a general theory that originated in the United States of racial attitudes can emerge.

It is my hope that in the writer’s future studies we will find a chapter or two on the racial relations between women and their role in the political and social life in Brazil.

Written by: Anna Hamling, October 23rd 2009

1st International Body Music Festival (12/05/2008)

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:20:00 +0000

Theatre Artaud

San Francisco, California

I love step teams, hand-clapping games, and beat-boxing. I even once had a plan to create a band out of fat people playing drumbeats on our stomachs (it was going to be called “Bongo Jam”), but I never thought of this as falling into a specific category of music. Body music, of course. I was lucky enough to attend the opening night performance of the first International Body Music Festival, an extravaganza of performances and workshops, which took place over a weekend in the Bay Area. The event covered a wide range of musical and dance styles and traditions, and was truly international with performers from the US, Brazil, Turkey, Bali, and Canada.

The immediacy of the body as an instrument means there is nothing to hide behind, for performers or audience members. The whole event was so visceral. I loved the way it interrupted the tendency of audience members to resign themselves to simply being spectators; the audience became involved, sometimes being called upon to breathe or snap in time, erupting into whoops and thunderous foot-stomping at the end of acts that moved us to really feel ourselves and our connection to our environment.

The soft, watery movements of the Turkish duo Kekeca played out over long cycles that don’t fit into 4/4 or other recognizable time signatures, offering a sinking in rather than a showing. The solid beats and goofy antics of French clowning duo Loop It, who made the kids in the audience shriek with laughter, elicited my delight when showcasing the various sounds made by hitting belly fat (Bongo Jam!). The Hambone tradition was revived and revitalized by Derique McGee. His hands moved so fast they were literally a blur, but never missed a beat. Interweaving melodies, jungle sounds, warrior games, and dazzling visual patterns were highlighted in a piece created specifically for this show by Dewa Putu Berata, a Balinese artist. And these are just some of the possibilities of body-as-instrument.

“How do you figure out that you are good at this?” my girlfriend wondered to me at intermission. My guess is you just start doing it, and you get obsessed. I remember spending hours playing “see-see-oh-playmate” with my sister when we were kids, perfecting our timing, going as fast as possible. I could see myself on this stage if my life had gone in another direction.

The MC, Diane Ferlatte, spoke about her ancestors being brought here from Africa, having everything taken from them—their names, their languages, even their drums. ("They thought they were using them to communicate. And we were!") But they still had their bodies, and they used them to make rhythms. This, she said, is what we have when everything else is taken away.

I was touched by the stunning intimacy of Inuit throat-singers Celine Kalluk and Lucie Idlout, cousins who stood face to face, grasping each other’s elbows and singing into each other’s mouths, using their throats as echo chambers. Their songs reflected sounds from their environment: melting ice on the rivers, a saw cutting down a tree. The songs had no endings; they would go as long as they could, a kind of contest, pushing each other until they would burst into laughter. It made me miss my sister.

I was mesmerized and lulled by tai chi master Dr. Alex Feng, who flowed around the stage in shimmering white fabric that caught the light and deflected sound. I kept waiting for music to come in. I could hear chirpings from backstage, so low I almost believed I was imagining them. Afterward, the MC commented on the need for silence in order to recognize music.

The whole show was great, but the truly spectacular moment of the evening was Barbatuques, a Brazilian ensemble who were making their North American debut. Their beats were powerful, the dancing playful and ecstatic, weaving contemporary and traditional influences. And the singing! Strong voices, more open and immediate than the sound of most trained American singers. Loud, joyful, childlike, and expressive. Music that plays through your whole body. They utilized a jaw harp, rapped in Portuguese, and wore super cute outfits. I went home and looked them up on YouTube, posted about them on Facebook, and watched their video over and over again. But nothing could let me relive the stampeding feet, whoops, and hollers of an audience entranced and engulfed in the power of their presence.

Written by: Nomy Lamm, December 30th 2008

Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

admin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:39:00 +0000

By João Biehl

Princeton University Press

Ethnographers, novelists, and prisoners write heart-wrenching books because they present simple truths. Will to Live is a powerful, at points searing ethnography of HIV antibody surveillance systems in Brazil and pharmaceutical industry influence in bringing forth new relations of politics and health care. It tells of the bodily suffering of Brazilians who contract, and eventually die from, AIDS - and of those who fear such diagnoses, although they are HIV antibody negative.

It demonstrates the varying degrees of access that Brazilians have to highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) and that track along the fault lines of social structure. That HAART works for many (but not others) or that it comes too late (or too early or is engaged too haltingly) signifies the contradictions and paradoxes of culture and social structure that are usually revealed in epidemics. Although it is filled with positive stories and better outcomes (HAART brings many back from the brink of death), Will to Live is as painful to read as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, also about Brazil but in context of infant mortality; Paul Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation, also about AIDS but set in Haiti; and Begonia Aretxaga’s Shattering Silence, about Northern Ireland women who deploy their incarcerated bodies and even bodily fluids in political protest.

Will to Live shows that the national and international response to HIV and AIDS has in Brazil “shifted from controlling the epidemic to controlling individualized disease.” “Yes,” the author writes, “distribution programs make antiretroviral therapies accessible, but they are one element in the full treatment of a disease that... remains a matter of a regional politics of nonintervention.” “It’s a shame what is happening to AIDS” is the direct utterance of an otherwise well-intended caregiver, suggesting just how much the cart has been put before the horse and what the public health costs can be of imagining only a pharmaceutical response.

João Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University who has a long time studied the conceptualization, implementation and evolution of the Brazilian AIDS Control Program (BACP). Multi-sited in location, multi-method in logistics, multi-voiced in narrative, and multi-purpose in scope, Will to Live unravels and critiques the ways in which NGOs (non-governmental organizations), churches, the Ministry of Health, pharmaceutical industry representatives, gender and sex work activists, and those suffering from HIV or AIDS mounted a “national” response to HIV and AIDS that is anything but. “A central concern of my ethnography,” the author notes, “has been to produce alternative epidemiological evidence and to generate some form of visibility and accountability for the abandoned subjects with AIDS.”

A site of Biehl’s particular focus is Caasah, a part-community house, part-hospice, part-pharmacy, part-training ground in advocacy. Caasah was formed in 1992, “when a group of homeless AIDS patients, former prostitutes, transvestites, and drug users squatted in an abandoned maternity ward in the outskirts of Salvador” and turned it into a care center. He returned to Caasah in 2001 to find a near-complete turnover there of patients and staff and a reorientation of service provision and funding source. As such, Caasah well represents both the protean nature of AIDS and the constraints upon and conditions under which local-level responses to it were mounted.

All but a very few pharmaceutical industry representatives, health authorities, and politicians talk in double-speak. Many exacerbated cleavage between rich and poor, politically visible and not:

As with all things political and economic, the reality underlying the AIDS policy is convoluted, dynamic, and filled with gaps. The politicians involved in the making of the AIDS policy were consciously engaged in projects to reform the relationship between the state and society, as well as the scope of governance, as Brazil molded itself to a global market economy. One of this book’s central arguments is that on the other side of the signifier _model policy _stands a new political economy of pharmaceuticals, with international and national particularities. As NGO activism converged with state policy making, and as the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, political rights have moved toward biologically based rights.

Comprising eight chapters including Introduction and Conclusions, Will to Live is equally heavy and light, grim and hopeful, ethnographic and theoretical. The Introduction (“A New World of Health”) bookends painful personal stories and broadly sweeping discussion of the political-economy of pharmaceuticals. Rhetorical and other slippage in the overly optimistic assessments of AIDS bureaucrats and pharmaceutical representatives is revealed in stories of busted aid posts, iatrogenic illness, and social structures that sicken people. Chapter One (“Pharmaceutical Governance”) discusses the complexities of state-local, transnational-NGO and doctor-patient relations. Biehl writes perceptively about the successes of Brazil in manufacturing generic drugs that challenged patent rights granted by the WTO.

The particular successes and failures of Caasah are scattered in discussion throughout the book, but Chapter Two (“Circuits of Care”) looks intently at the new subjectivities (e.g., patient-citizen, “risk group” member, the “worried well”) that arise in social, technical and economic relations brought to bear by HIV, HIV antibody testing and AIDS. The failures of the surveillance system – but also its tremendous promise – are shown acutely in the next chapter, “A Hidden Epidemic,” which reveals the biases in public health and society at large with regards to surveillance, treatment and counseling. Chapter Five, “Patient-Citizenship,” examines the Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of imminent death that has been occasioned in many of those who have responded particularly well to HAART. Many have resumed reasonably normal sexual and political lives relatively free of the anxieties and technoneuroses brought on by the antiretrovirals themselves and the HIV antibody testing and counseling regime. The first section of Chapter Six, “Will to Live,” is appropriately titled “Lifelong AIDS,” for it reveals the stark contours of the limits and promises of a largely biomedical “fix” for what is clearly and also about sickness in the social-structure.

There is little for a reader about which to complain. A quotation is repeated and some Index entries are incorrect, but there are extremely few typos or grammatical infelicities. I want to highlight one particular kind of problem that mars Biehl’s presentation at many points, however. Biehl claims that “Epidemiological surveillance services registered the first HIV/AIDS cases in 1982.” This conflates HIV and AIDS, as he does ad infinitum, and HIV hadn’t yet been identified, either. It doesn’t excuse him to say that everyone else does, too - for real damage is done in such conflation, for example, that “HIVab+” means a death sentence and a rhetorical slide to “AIDS” to “contagious” to social leperhood.

Moreover, “AIDS” had not yet congealed into a biomedical category, either. This leads him at many, many points to confuse cause and effect, vector and pathogen, infection and antibody, for example, when he says that “the homosexual/bisexual mode of transmission accounted for less than thirty percent of the total number of AIDS infections.” Ontologically, epidemiological notions do no counting; epidemiologists do. Logically, “bisexual” mode of transmission (of HIV) has also to mean “heterosexual,” which then must be explained anew for its expanded and more complicated, often hidden properties. Empirically, the “total number of AIDS infections” would multiply the epidemiological categories of “HIV antibody positive” and “AIDS diagnoses” by at least five-fold if not twenty-fold, that is, in terms of pulmonary tuberculosis, cryptosporidium, toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, persistent diarrhea, anaemia, and so on. As well, this undercuts the force of Biehl’s informants who rightly point to the endemic state of such infections and problems prior to the arrival of HIV and AIDS. Further, it suggests that these individual infections or pathogens are sexually transmitted and that there are characteristic differences along the lines of sexual identity (i.e., “heterosexual” transmission of this, “homosexual” transmission of that).

The lengthy discussion of subjectivity comprising Chapter Four is difficult to follow and jargony, although its theorization of “technoneurosis” (and elsewhere, of “auto-bioadministration”) is spot-on. Biehl argues from the standpoint of careful analyses of case studies that the “confused and painful experience of Oxygen [the pseudonym of a sick and anxious woman repeatedly testing HIVab negative] was somewhat technically engineered. This testing apparatus played a determinant role in the emergence of a socially visible imaginary AIDS.”

Nevertheless, this and other chapters exemplifies well the Foucaultian thesis that discourse about subjects (in this case, about the technical aspects of an HIV antibody test and about what constitutes “good” and “bad” sex) creates new subjects: the worried well, the sick and the anxious, the promiscuous and the guilt-ridden. The algorithm of HAART adherence is predictable on sociological grounds. “Failures” are on blamed on the individual, not the system; not the social structure; not the lack of housing, food, education, and employment. Nor was the HAART roll-out so universal and stable as its proponents claimed

Laid atop an already struggling public health system, Biehl found that “the universal availability of essential medicines has been subject to changing political winds; treatments are easily stopped, and people have to seek more specialized services in the private health sector or, as many put it, ‘die waiting in overcrowded public services.” The meaning of “primary care” has changed to mean selective targeting of those more likely to live, and triage has replaced universality as a metaphor of coverage. Clients become clinical trial subjects. Treatment trumps prevention. Risk becomes individualized instead of increasingly social. Infection becomes increasingly moral and subject to religious edict. HIV antibody test counselors compete with one another not to be the one to read the positive bands. Social scientific insights are swept aside.

This newest addition to Princeton University’s (In)Formation Series, edited by Paul Rabinow, is a sober but accessible and extremely humane text, just as well constructed as attractively presented. The black-and-white photographs taken by Torben Eskerod are arresting and invite commentary, speculation and, in my case, envy. Around this exciting new work could be wrapped all manner of upper-division or graduate-level courses in anthropology, public health, medicine and even political-economy. Like too many countries and cultures to count, ill-tempered politicians, cynical epidemiologists and overburdened healthcare workers in Brazil have contributed to an official portrait of HIV transmission dynamics, infectious burden and prevention efforts that often bears little resemblance to reality. Once again, the inequalities of social structure get off scot-free. This ethnography is a major contribution to social theory and justice.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 14th 2008

The 3 Marias

admin — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:55:00 +0000

Directed by Aluizio Abranches

First Run Features

The 3 Marias, a gritty 2002 Brazilian film directed by Aluizio Abranches, revisits the age-old theme of revenge, but with a delightful empowering twist. The film opens with haunting opening credits, and the story begins with a rather cryptic yet powerfully operatic scene. The plot then steamrolls forward, introducing the victims of unwelcome murder, and off we go. It’s a whirlwind tale of a woman, wronged by an ex-lover, who happens to be her late husband’s archenemy, imploring her three daughters to avenge the cruel and corrupt death of their father and two brothers. Filomena Capadocio (Marieta Severo) is greeted with the news of her husband and sons’ deaths and immediately springs into action passing on three commands to her three daughters: to find a hit man each to kill the three men who murdered their family.

The death of one of the characters (I will not give the details away) is quite powerful, reminiscent of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. The film is rife with references to Christianity, specifically Catholic tradition and imagery, with the use of the number three and overt references to biblical tales.

The women in the film seem to represent female stereotypes, which, at first, was off-putting; I assumed these women would be portrayed more as superficial caricatures, but once the credits rolled, I was happily mistaken. Filomena plays the role of the forlorn widow, however, she exhibits a much stronger, empowered personality of a family matriarch. The oldest daughter, Maria Francisca (Julia Lemmertz), was introduced as a prissy, little lady who wears heels while traversing the difficult and rocky terrain of the desert. The middle daughter, Maria Rosa (Maria Luisa Mendonca), is seen as meek and emotional, and the youngest daughter is pigeonholed as a tough, stand-offish vixen with exposed cleavage and a penchant for hard looks. These superficial introductions to the characters are shattered, however, at the end of the film, when each of the girls exhibit qualities contrary to her stereotyped persona, which drives home the point that these women are not merely the “gentler” sex, but wholly humans.

Written by: Erin Murphy, July 17th 2007

Momento

admin — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:39:00 +0000

By Bebel Gilberto

Six Degrees

I’m not usually a headphones-in-the-outdoors type of girl, but I knew I had to take this one to the park. For real. This was an album requiring devoted listening. Musically complex, fresh and so fitting it’s title, this collection of songs required me to take a Momento to stop, appreciate and listen.

Maybe it’s the fact that I am sitting on a green-checkered blanket in the warm Oakland sunshine, gazing across the softness of sloping green grass at the lake on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe it’s the heat of the sun on my thirsty spring skin that has me flying. No matter which inspired which, Bebel Gilberto’s album has my soul dancing and swaying out across the water into limitless sky. I’m buoyed up by Bebel’s honey-toned voice, rhythms ranging from booty-shaking to a soft and steady heartbeat, achingly sweet acoustic guitar, funky electronic sounds and beautiful instrumentation. The cello on “Close to You,” melts me, the chorus of “Os Nuevos Yorkinos” demands that I get up to dance and sing along and her voice alongside the sax on her beautiful cover of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” turns my knees to rubber.

Reviewing an album of Bebel Gilberto’s is a serious endeavor: to try and meet her half-way; to honor her vision, artistry and herstory; to try and describe the expansiveness of her musical expressions and the way her voice flows easy as a ripple across water, and yet reaches straight into ones gut. Her latest album, Momento, is as well-travelled as she is - recorded in Rio de Janeiro, New York and London with friends, colleagues and producers from all over the world.

As a song-writer and musician, Gilberto comes from a family with an impressive musical genealogy, and has had music in her ears before she even had ears. She’s been singing and songwriting since she was a little girl, and it shows. Her album is a collage of sounds and genres from afro-brazilian rythms and percussion, samba and Brazilian pop, to dance, electronica, acoustic ballads and world music. She released her first album, Tanto Tempo in 2000 (nominated for two Latin Grammy awards) and a second self-titled album in 2004 (nominated for a World Music Grammy). As she releases her third album, the whole world is still eagerly listening.

Take a moment - or put on your headphones and make a moment - to appreciate exactly where you are, and where a visionary artist like Bebel can take you.

Written by: Jessmaya Morales, May 28th 2007

What’s Happening in Pernambuco: New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:29:00 +0000

By Various Artists

Luaka Bop

Pernambuco is at the heart of Afro-Brazilian tradition. Mangue Bit, the musical style of this album, weaves electronica with the centuries-old rhythm of maracatú _and the stanza-refrain pattern of _embolada. The name “Mangue Bit” combines the Portuguese word for mangrove with a computer bit. Although the waters are brackish, mangrove swamps are diverse ecosystems, and Mangue Bit reflects this fertility. The movement originated in 1991, when Fred Zero Quatro, a Recife musician of national renown, wrote the Mangue Manifesto. This lamented on the region’s poverty committed to a revival of the Recife arts scene, declaring that it was “time to inject some energy in the mud.”

This album blends the rootsy feel of Northeastern music with rock, rap, funk and electronica. It features Nacão Zumbi, the movement’s founding fathers, who sang with Chico Science as CSNZ – Chico Science Nacão Zumbi – in the movement’s early days. Junio Barreto’s “Amigo’s Bons” (Good Friends) typifies the form; this song is a social commentary on poverty, relying on the rhythm of maracatú and a refrain, experimenting with electronic sound throughout. Rhythmic and edgy, Mangue Bit is reminiscent of Candomble priestesses, who retained tradition older than they, and created something entirely new under oppressive circumstances.

Written by: Nathifa Greene, March 14th 2007