Mannerism in contemporary Brazilian cinema

Abstract

This article comments on the mannerist tendency that has marked contemporary Brazilian independent cinema and its relation to the country's social and political situation during the period 2013-2018. The hypothesis that the text defends is that the mannerist attitude expresses some social anxieties of the moment and manifests a disbelief in the modern forms of experiencing history, which traditionally offered the intelligibility and legitimacy of Brazilian experience of modernization. The text proposes a reconstruction of the concept of mannerist cinema, based on a genealogy of the critique of the maniera in art history, which articulates the repudiation of mannerism with the understanding of history as a moving singularity, directed towards an open future. The article interprets a constellation of films made during the 2010s, proposing an articulation between the mannerist attitude and the recurrence of a series of historical motifs, in which the films sought to elaborate the experience of national economic development in the first half of the decade and the political crisis triggered by the 2016 parliamentary coup.