O tempo-espaço tardo-sessentista n'O anjo nasceu de Bressane

Abstract

This article is an attempt at formal analysis as immanent criticism, a kind of close reading describing and commenting on Júlio Bressane's film O anjo nasceu (The Angel Was Born, 1969) as an internal rupture within Cinema Novo, operating mainly on a formal level. Instead of the expressive mobility of “a camera in hand and an idea in mind” and the narrative dynamism associated with mobility around popular characters or their representatives — such as in Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe (1967) and so many other Cinema Novo works — the film constructs a rigid, frontal, and orthogonal visual space, as if viewed from infinity.