The Cosmetics of Hunger

Reflections on Contemporary Brazilian Cinema from a Global Perspective

Abstract

One of the most intense debates in brazilian cinema during the last two decades has revolved around the category ‘cosmetics of hunger’. It was coined at the end of the 1990s to describe a group of recent films that portrayed topics like poverty and violence. The notion of ‘cosmetics’ emerged from an explicit comparison between some blockbusters like City of God (2001), and the Cinema Novo films from the 1960s. ‘Cosmetics of hunger’ would be the opposite to Cinema Novo’s ‘aesthetics of hunger’: while the avant-guard movement questioned the colonial representations of European and American cinema, which reduced the intolerable reality of phenomena like hunger to familiar categories, contemporary cinema would reduce the complexity of such realities through a superflous international style close to the language of videoclips and advertising. ‘Cosmetics’ would be associated to a global language of entertainment and spectacle, while ‘aesthetics’ would be connected to the reflexive depth of a type of cinema committed to local and national identity. Instead of considering cosmetics as a pejorative term, this article proposes to understand the artifical dimmension of cosmetics as a space to critically think of the circuits of visibility of hunger. Instead of producing an image of the intolerable, contemporary costmetic cinema reflects on the mechanisms and global circuits of contemporary communication that construct our common imaginary on hunger.