Carlos Diegues, a movie director who celebrated Brazil’s ethnic richness and its social turbulence, serving to to forge a brand new path for cinema in his nation, died on Feb. 14 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 84.
His demise, in a hospital, was introduced by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which he was a member. The academy stated the trigger was problems of surgical procedure. The Rio newspaper O Globo, for which Mr. Diegues wrote a column, reported that he had suffered “cardiocirculatory problems” earlier than the surgical procedure.
Mr. Diegues, who was often called Cacá, was a founding father of Cinema Novo, the trendy faculty of Brazilian cinema that mixed Italian Neo-Realism, documentary model and uniquely Latin American fantasy. He targeted on hitherto marginal teams — Afro-Brazilians, the poor, disoriented provincials in an urbanizing Brazil — and was the primary Brazilian director to make use of Black actors as protagonists, in “Ganga Zumba,” (1963), a story of enslavement and revolt that was an early cinematic foray into Brazil’s historical past of racial violence.
The customarily lyrical outcomes, expressed over the course of 60 years in dozens of options and documentaries, charmed audiences in his personal nation and overseas, although critics typically reproached him for free screenplays and rough-edged digital camera work.
Mr. Diegues’s worldwide breakthrough movie, “Bye Bye Brazil” (1979), nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, is taken into account the apotheosis of his dramatic visible model and of his preoccupation with these on the margins of Brazilian society. It follows a feckless group of rascally avenue performers by the outback, documenting a vanishing Brazil the place residents in distant cities are beguiled by faux falling snowflakes — really shredded coconut — and hypnotized, actually, by a uncommon communal tv set.
The performers, annoyed that the persons are entranced by the TV set and ignoring them, blow it up in one of many movie’s many nonchalant gags. They go on to blithely couple and uncouple because the movie progresses.
Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Occasions, referred to as “Bye Bye Brazil” a “curious, quiet, introspective kind of movie, which pays consideration to the altering nature of a Brazil that’s paying more and more much less consideration to those almost extinct gamers.”
The movie’s attribute combine — the digital camera paperwork the panorama’s spareness whereas spinning a particular magic realist internet round it, and the performers themselves are fantastical, extravagant and grittily impoverished — was intrinsic to Cinema Novo, and to Mr. Diegues’s model.
“The movie bids farewell to what it sees as outmoded visions of Brazil,” Randal Johnson and Robert Stam wrote of their ebook “Brazilian Cinema” (1995), “not solely to rightist goals of capitalist improvement but in addition to leftist goals of common resistance.”
“It’s arduous to think about Brazilian cinema with out him,” the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz wrote in an e mail. Mr. Diegues’s work, he stated, was “infused with immense pleasure.”
The Brazilian director Walter Salles wrote, additionally in an e mail, that “Diegues impressed, influenced and mentored a number of generations of filmmakers with extraordinary movies.” In a tribute after his demise, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stated that Mr. Diegues introduced “Brazil and Brazilian tradition to the cinema screens, and captured the eye of the whole world.”
Mr. Diegues reached into Brazil’s racial and social conflicts by historical past and sociology, in movies together with “Quilombo” (1984), about individuals who escaped slavery within the seventeenth century; “Xica da Silva” (1976), about an enslaved 18th-century enchantress; and his “Orpheus” (“Orfeu”) a 1999 retelling of the Orpheus and Euridice delusion set within the modern-day favelas, or slums, of Rio. (Marcel Camus had advised the identical story in the identical method in his acclaimed 1959 movie, “Black Orpheus.”)
Whereas the movie received the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize as finest image, the critiques had been combined. “‘Orfeu’ tries to do an excessive amount of directly: to be each mythic and practical, to have fun Rio’s wealthy tradition whereas exposing the brutality and cynicism that dominate every day life in its slums,” A.O. Scott of The New York Occasions wrote in 2000.
The extravagance of Mr. Diegues’s décor and characters typically left critics outdoors Brazil unmoved. However motion pictures like “Quilombo,” launched the yr Brazil’s 20-year navy dictatorship got here to an finish, marked the transition with the celebration of a multiracial nation.
“It’s neither a masterpiece nor an accomplishment of supreme magnificence,” the critic Louis Marcorelles wrote of “Quilombo” in Le Monde. “Vulgar, crude, beneficiant, it’s above all an act of religion in the way forward for a Brazil that has returned to democracy.”
In “Quilombo,” Mr. Johnson and Mr. Stam wrote, Mr. Diegues “goals at poetic synthesis reasonably than naturalistic replica.”
It was a number of years earlier than the dictatorship’s onset in 1964 that Cinema Novo, the motion with which Mr. Diegues is most carefully related, got here into being.
In a form of manifesto printed within the journal of Brazil’s Nationwide College students Union in 1962, a younger Mr. Diegues wrote that the brand new motion sought to shed the affect of Hollywood sentimentality in favor of an genuine nationwide focus. “Brazil and its individuals turned the central preoccupation of the brand new group of Brazilian filmmakers,” he wrote. “Their purpose was to check in depth the social relations of every metropolis and area as a method of critically exposing, as if in miniature, the sociocultural construction of the nation as an entire.”
An early hit, “The Huge Metropolis” (“A Grande Cidade,” 1966), in regards to the travails of a younger provincial migrant in Rio, exemplifies these preoccupations. Its arduous black-and-white documentary model is infused with lyrical fantasy: The actor Antônio Pitanga, enjoying a avenue particular person, cavorts by detached metropolis streets like a personality from a fairy story.
By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, Cinema Novo was over, though Mr. Diegues continued to make use of the model in later movies. Filmmaking below the dictatorship demanded a softening of the perimeters and a extra allegorical model. “Summer time of Showers” (“Chuvas de Verão,” 1978) was described by the New York Occasions critic Janet Maslin as a “light Brazilian movie with a understanding air and never so very a lot to disclose.”
After the success of “Bye Bye Brazil,” Mr. Diegues would go on to make almost a dozen movies, together with the 2003 hit “God Is Brazilian,” which drew 1.6 million individuals to the field workplace, his second-biggest success after “Xica da Silva.”
Carlos José Fontes Diegues was born on Might 19, 1940, in Maceió, within the state of Alagoas in northeast Brazil. He was the son of Manuel Diegues Jr. and Zaira Fontes Diegues. His father, a sociologist and folklorist, was working for the Nationwide Institute of Historic and Creative Heritage on the time and was later a professor at Pontifical Catholic College in Rio.
The household moved to Rio de Janeiro when Carlos was 6, and he attended St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit establishment, earlier than finding out legislation on the Pontifical Catholic College.
On the college, he joined scholar teams that had been to play a founding function within the delivery of Cinema Novo, together with the Centro Standard de Cultura. He started his profession as a feature-film director in 1962, whereas nonetheless a scholar, with certainly one of 5 segments in “Cinco Vezes Favela,” set within the slums of Rio.
Mr. Diegues left Brazil briefly throughout the dictatorship, in 1969, to stay in France and Italy along with his first spouse, the singer Nara Leão. However he quickly returned to Brazil, the wellspring of his creativeness.
He’s survived by two kids, Isabel and Francisco Diegues, from his marriage with Ms. Leão, from whom he was separated in 1977; and by his second spouse, Renata Almeida Magalhães, a producer. His daughter with Ms. Magalhães, Flora, died of most cancers in 2019. Ms. Leão died in 1989.
In his final column for the newspaper O Globo, a tribute to Mr. Salles’s present hit movie “I’m Nonetheless Right here,” printed on Jan. 21, Mr. Diegues wrote:
“Making life worthwhile doesn’t imply accumulating wealth or standing, however reasonably dwelling with goal, in stability. The message is that life ought to be a stage for private expression. Might every of us discover our personal technique to make life an honor.”
