Bodies in crisis, territories in dispute

Reflections on the road movie Iracema - uma transa amazônica

Abstract

This text analyzes the film Iracema - uma transa amazônica (1974), by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, highlighting how the work reflects the tensions and crises along the Transamazônica, in the context of the colonization of the Amazon in the 1970s. Considered a landmark of the road movie genre in Brazil, the film is explored as an interpretive key, especially regarding the journey as a metaphor for internal and external transformations, both of the characters and the landscapes they traverse. In this sense, the road movie functions as a narrative device that reveals the complexity of the relationships between movement and stagnation, progress and degradation, and, above all, the colonization of spaces marked by disputes. Iracema - uma transa amazônica thus consolidates itself as a critique of the presence of the road in the representation of deteriorating natural landscapes. The film's unique production is addressed both for its instances of fabulation and its impressions of reality, involving what is inside and outside the frame, what is shown, and what the military government sought to conceal. As a metaphor, the Transamazônica appears as a scar on the land, while Iracema's journey and her relationship with the truck driver Tião Brasil Grande expose the impact of this progress on the local inhabitants, especially women and marginalized workers, whose constantly shifting bodies are marked by exploitation and violence.