From Vidas Secas to Recife Frio: the regionalist literary dialogue in the neoregionalist audiovisual creation

Abstract

The collective imagination of a society is constructed alongside the ideological formation of individuals. This formation, in turn, is created through the interaction between people and their environment, shaping both the psychological and behavioral agency that emerges from the intersection of the two. In this sense, altering the spatial conditions of a particular community will lead to not only physical changes but also sociocultural ones. This is a discussion proposed when analyzing Kleber Mendonça Filho's short film Recife Frio (2009) in dialogue with Graciliano Ramos' work Vidas Secas (1938). The objective is to explain how regionalist narrative aesthetics function in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s neoregionalist audiovisual creation, while also examining how the filmmaker updates the issue of the subaltern condition of the northeastern population in light of the need for contemporary geopolitical adaptation. To this end, we rely on the discursive ideas of Jean-Claude Bernardet (2007); Michel de Certeau (1998); Wolfgang Iser (2013); Sylvie Debs (2010), among others. According to the study, it was possible to observe that the formation of neoregionalist aesthetics draws upon regionalist precepts, now reinterpreted through contemporary discourses in response to the adaptive manifestations of the production era. Thus, the neoregionalist audiovisual narratives of Kleber Mendonça Filho are anchored in a dialogue with the literary aesthetics of the past.