1960s: culture and politics in Brazil

Abstract

The 1960s are known as times of cultural and political upheaval. It is true that they brought together a series of movements and saw the emergence of new characters and protagonists on the social scene, which the body and youth arrived to rival wisdom and maturity. It is often said that such a decade constitutes a moment of rupture, which is still true, since it shelters a generation that questions its predecessors, both for the responsibility for the near destruction of the world perpetrated by the Second World War, as well as by the conformism and resignation that marked the 1950s, a posture of many towards the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, still motivated by the first moments of the Central European welfare state. On the other hand, the sixties of the last century were a time of eventually radical responses to problems that presented themselves with different forms and contents, although they often supported the same libertarian impulse, in different regions of the world, or even in the within the same nation. It would be false, therefore, to take it as a univocal block of events, and still limit that historical experience to the limits of the chronology that apparently gives it frame. If there were many decades in one, equally the strengths and weaknesses that identify it can be seen in previous years, as well as their echoes perceived even today in the composition of the present. The Cold War, the clash between the countries aligned to NATO and those under the Warsaw Pact, found in the 1960s moments of great expression. It was when Cuba recognized its revolution as Marxist-Leninist and soon saw its territory suffer invasion attempts, but also be allocated for the installation of nuclear missiles; the Berlin Wall was built; decolonization wars in Africa and Asia were intense; South America and Central America saw coups d'état institute authoritarian governments and the corresponding attempts to overthrow them. From a geopolitical issue, the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia also became a strong cultural clash, which opposed American and European youth to the intervention of the United States of America in that country. This position, in turn, was linked to the rise of the body as a legitimate place of desire, an expression of peace linked to free sexuality, gender equality, the decriminalization of homosexuality, healthy eating, the defense of the environment, at the end of the day. of racism. It is likely that the main intellectual who gave shape to this spirit was Herbert Marcuse, a herald of the critical encounter between psychoanalysis and Marxism and, not by chance, the main teacher of the then student, now retired full professor, Angela Davis, a central reference of the movements for the emancipation of African Americans across the continent. It is often said that the 1960s were a decade of rebellion and youth claims, as what has been written above shows, but this also happens due to the imaginary demarcation of discourses about 1968, a year known for its month of May and the student revolts in France. One of the most important aesthetic movements in cinema and even in the arts in general corresponds to this context, the Nouvelle Vague, whose exponent, Jean-Luc Godard, was a sympathizer of Maoist students and was on the streets during the fighting in Paris. Young people, in turn, demanded new relationships with professors and with the university institution, seen as fossilized and archaic. They scheduled the end of the architecture of amphitheatres, which imposed a privileged place for the teacher, and of the evaluation regime, which destroyed libidinal energies. The new cinema did not just happen in France, but in other countries, such as Germany, with Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, among others, and in Brazil, with Cinema Novo. Filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, as well as photographers such as Dib Luft and Luiz Carlos Barreto, developed an aesthetic of hunger and backlit photography, prioritizing political and libertarian themes in their narratives.In Brazil, Cinema Novo was not alone, but it coexisted with the underground proposals of Rogério Sganzerla and the existentialists of Walter Hugo Khouri, as well as finding a musical counterpart in Tropicália, whose most complete memory is the book by Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical. This aesthetic movement, led by the musician and Gilberto Gil, which resumed and updated the 1922 Modernism, would have, however, weakened, according to Roberto Schwarz (Martinha versus Lucrécia), as an opposition to the civil-military dictatorship that would tyrannize the country during two decades. The counterculture would be in this register, not necessarily political criticism. The libertarian character of the 1960s also finds its desideratum in liberalism, so that Woodstock's heirs can be seen in newspaper editorials and in the production of advertising content, as well as on Wall Street. The contradictions only make that decade more interesting, making the knowledge about it, now that it goes far in 50 years, something constantly renewed, as the narrations, interpretations and echoes of memory and history gain new layers and lose old power lines. These were the years of Susan Sontag and José Agripino de Paula, of Marta Minujín and Che Guevara, of the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin and the Tlatelolco massacre, of Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Wilson Simonal, of the alternative education of the Glockseeschule and of Celso Furtado, of Charles Manson and Malcon X, by Mary McCarthy and Clarice Lispector, from Latin American dictatorships and Blow-up.It is considering this broad and contradictory, precarious and intense picture of rich and idealized years that the dossier Anos 1960: cultura e Política expects contributions with different methodological and thematic approaches, which are dedicated to specific themes or seek broader, conceptual perspectives. or empirical, compared or not. Initiatives that can bring renewed views on the subject will be valued.