Reframing Utopia: Contemporary Brazilian Cinema at the Turn of the Century

The fall of the Berlin wall in 9 November 1989 marked the end of the socialist Utopia and the victory of post-modern, anti-utopian neo-liberalism. A few months later, in 1990, Francis Fukuyama published his polemical article ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, subsequently expanded into a bestselling book. Also in 1990 the master of puns Jean-Luc Godard shot a film with the apt title Allemagne neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 nine zero), neuf in French meaning both ‘nine’ and ‘new’. Its references are clear: the fall of the wall as well as the film Germany Year Zero, directed by Roberto Rossellini in 1947, about a Berlin razed to the ground after the 2 World War. Both negation and inauguration are encapsulated in Rossellini’s zero. On the one hand, it allegorises a devastated country and Europe, where despairing children commit suicide. On the other, it establishes a tabula rasa where young filmmakers of his and other countries – such as Godard and his companions of the French nouvelle vague – can inscribe a new film aesthetics, free from the taints of a brutal past reduced to dust. Through humour and irony, Godard, in Allemagne neuf zéro, collects the debris of Utopia amidst the remains of the catastrophe. The film features Hans Zischler, who, together with Rüdiger Vogler, starred in Kings of the Road, directed by Wim Wenders in 1976, in which two flâneurs travel along the border between West and East Germany in a romantic search for the lost threads of history and the links of a homeland torn apart by the war. Through the 70s and 80s, Wenders applied himself patiently to the reconstruction of the narrative and the fable, bombarded by his idol Godard. His road movies, whose characters are endlessly searching for a story and a home, left their mark and created a school of which Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles is a devoted disciple. For Godard, in his turn, there seems to be no greater entertainment than to deconstruct his followers by means of parody, especially when they are quoting him. The result are jewels of self-reflexive humour, such as these lines from Allemagne neuf zéro: