University of São Paulo: The civilizing sense of Black Cinema

ÇIt is rumored that the 21st century would be the time of Aquarius and Peace. But unfortunately this era started with wars, we are witnessing a world scene that is excessively bellicose.
We are experiencing a process that calls into question bipolarity in favor of an emerging multipolarity, which is unfavorable to North American hegemony, exposing an unequivocal crisis of Eurocaucasian westernity. Context in which the ideal of the white man, tall and blue-eyed, as a symbol of harmony, goodness and perfection, fragmented with the political failure of the governments of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and the fateful tropical version, with Jair Messias Bolsonaro . In this way, the crisis of Western Eurohegemony is in the imaginary. Bertold Brecht, poet and playwright, Jew and anti-racist, in the fight against Nazism observed that: “(…) the doctrines dictate unshakable are shaken (…)”, in the play entitled Life of Galileo .

This century, on the other hand, brought the Technological Revolution which is in the advanced stages of artificial intelligence and life. It is likely that in the revolutionary complexity of technology, information occupies the same prestige that the machine occupied in the long period of industriality. We noticed that the abstract relations of representation became more important than the objective relations of history, the information is substantially cognitive and the symbol has an informative essence.

We observe, in this line of understanding, that the image is knowledge. In such a way that this Era is favorable to minorities, as it is substantially contrary to prejudiced relations. Prejudice and knowledge are antithetical, which reinforces the importance of the ephemeris of the month of Black Consciousness, as a union of struggles against the conventionalism of the euro-hetero-male-authoritarian domination, revealing a defeat of domination with the discomfort that exists in verticality intransigent, given that discriminatory attitudes are increasingly inadmissible.

In polyethnic societies with a dependent economy, as is the specific case of Brazil, the mode of production determines social location. We have, therefore, the perception that this process also guides racial selection. Thus, groups with phenotypes closer to the Caucasian Eurocolonization feature are more privileged. Marx and Engels, in the classic Manifesto of the Communist Party, teach that the bourgeoisie makes society its image and likeness. This is why the most distant segments of the white European physiognomy are more likely to be marginalized. We insist on saying that the Brazilian social pyramid looks like a clear chemical formula at the top and as it goes down it gets darker. People and ways of being different from Eurocaucasian behavior are victims of the reductionism of Euroheteronormativity, which tries to fragment the epistemological traits of those who are foreign to it and therefore understood as “others”.

The Information Age, therefore, has a favorable centrality to the struggle for the redemption of minorities, just as it was and continues to be in relation to the utopian battle of the proletariat for the regeneration of human relations in the industrial period. We understand that in the time of information technology, social conflicts were translated into minority struggles, as well as class struggles were projected into image struggles. Afro-descendants and minorities develop an ontological struggle against the verticality of the imagetic hegemony of the euro-hetero-male-authoritarian, which tries through the mass media to impose stereotypes of racial inferiority and the subalternization of those considered different.

The seventh art, for the esthete Giorgio Agamben, is the only transforming medium, as it allows the spectator to go to the possible and the impossible, facilitating a return to the past and a projection into the future, which enables disruptive postures with the established order. Cinema Negro is an emergency trend that characterizes the very radicalization of cinematographic language, as pointed out by philotechnician Paulo Alexandre-Morais, a researcher at the Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa. And, therefore, it is inserted as a filmography of vulnerable minorities, allowing them the condition of subjects, breaking with the hegemony of the script and direction by the dominant classes, represented by the Eurocaucasian patriarchy.

With the fate of their representation in their hands in an authorial process of realization, thus building their image of positive affirmation, the Afro-descendant and the minority rewrite their history based on their worldview, remembering that Sartre drew attention, in the book Reflections on Racism , for a possible domination through the eyes of the Eurocaucasian. According to the philosopher, the white man lived more than three thousand years observing without being observed.

The conceptual category of pedagogical dimension of Cinema Negro fulfills, in this way, a civilizing role insofar as it has a dialectical teaching of inclusive contemporaneity. The Afro-descendant, or minority, teaches how he is and how he should be treated, thus contributing to overcome the exclusionary anachronism of the euro-hetero-male-authoritarian, which tries to stifle the multicultural emergence of miscegenation dynamics – which is the true feature of the Brazilian people . We observe, therefore, that the civilizing meaning of Cinema Negro lies in the construction of a positive affirmation image of Brazil in a holistic perspective, which perceives its greatness in the breadth of respect for diversity and biodiversity.