Any English-speaking individual a little more distracted taken unaware to a Brazilian big city might never notice he left home. Several radio stations seem to ignore any other music but American hits and other less than successful tunes. On cable, people are served the diet Americans are used to, including CNN, HBO and MTV. In movie theaters more than 60 percent of films being shown are from Hollywood. (In the first week of January, for example, of 29 movies being shown in Rio, 18 were American — including Space Jam, Daylight and 101 Dalmatians — 3 from England, 3 from France, 2 from Spain, 2 from Italy, 1 from Iran, 0 from Brazil.) They have been translated into Portuguese, but among the 10 best-sellers list are books by Ken Follet, Sam Shepard, Morris West, Scott Adams, and James Redfield. Not to mention the McDonald's, Jacks in the Box and shops naming themselves with cute little English-sounding names and the Walt Disney characters spread all over.

Is the Yankee leviathan going to devour what is left of Brazilian culture? Is America cannibalizing the world and Brazil in the process? The majority of the Brazilian intelligentsia seems to say yes. They accuse the for-the-masses cultural offerings of the US of being shallow, caricatured and unfair in its juggernaut power of marketing their gringo culture. In the 1920s, Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) created a movement called Antropofagia (Anthropophagy). His proposal was the deglutition of all foreign influences in order to create a true national art. Back then it was the European cultural dominance that Brazilian intellectuals feared most. This anthropophagic action has never stopped in the musical area for example. But today many intellectuals would prefer seeing Brazil loving itself more and borrowing less from the outside.

"Culture in Brazil is a luxury item, " said playwright Alcione Araújo in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil in December. "The middle class with its pared-down salary has to pay for school, health plan and taxes. Who is going to consume the cultural product? The revolutionary vision for the 21^st century is to understand that the only way out during these globalization times is through education and culture." Araújo is one of those who are betting that 1997 will be a watermark year, bringing Brazil back to its own cultural roots.

The recent samba boom is just one sign that interest in Brazilian culture among Brazilians is picking up anew. Paulinho da Viola with Bebadosamba (Drunksamba) and Aldir Blanc with 50 Anos (50 Years), two big names of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira — Brazilian Pop Music) who had been silent for years, have just released their contribution to the samba comeback. Pagode, samba's very close relative, is also a big hit again and Zeca Pagodinho is back on the charts. Sambista Martinho da Vila is selling more than ever and rocker emeritus Lula Santos is coming out soon with his own samba album. New bands like Aquarela Carioca and Nó em Pingo D'água are giving chorinho a new lease on life.

Brazilian music does not need any presentation, but it has recently received anyway some accolades from music bible Billboard. The US magazine has included three Brazilian albums in its list of best of 1996. They are Daniela Mercury's Feijão com Arroz, Sérgio Mendes's Oceano and the sound track for the movie Tieta do Agreste.

In an interview with Jornal do Brasil, playwright and director Aderbal Freire Filho talked about his hope that Brazil will soon yearn for art. "Up to the 70s and 80s there was this notion of art as necessary, committed, which mirrored the social utopias. Then, came the idea that no art is necessary. Now, I believe that we will have a phase in which every art is necessary, even art for art's sake, something that's negated by the engagé artists. Art will be engagé just for the fact of being art, in a utilitarian, inhuman, cruel and anti-artistic society."

Writer Silviano Santiago analyzed the literary moment in a conversation with Rio's daily O Globo: "In the 70s, everybody wanted to participate in a movement, to launch a campaign, to gather a group around an aesthetic concept. It was that which drew people like (singer-composer) Caetano Velloso, (theater director) Zé Celso, (movie director) Gláuber Rocha and (painter) Hélio Oiticica. Today, there is no common idea, there is no aesthetic movement, but there is a big interest from the market."

Books

Brazilians have never read so much. The stabilization of the economy with the introduction of the new currency, the Real, in mid 1994, and lower inflation have created a new legion of readers. In 1994, for the first time the book industry was able to break the barrier of $1 billion in books sold. Commenting about the improvement, Culture minister Francisco Weffort said, "We already have the size of the Spanish market. All we need now is to improve the quality of the books."

While 290 million books were sold in 1994, this number had risen to 374 million in 1995, and 420 million in 1996. In terms of earnings this represented $1,261 million in 1994, 1,857 million in 1995, and more than 2 million in 1996. The number of titles published increased from 17,500 in 1991 to more than 50,000 last year. But there is still a lot to grow. With a population of 160 million people, Brazil has only 1,200 bookstores. Five-times-smaller Argentina has 850.

The Câmara Brasileira do Livro (Brazilian Chamber of Book) is hopeful that the recent interest in books will become a trend and will place more books in peoples' homes. The number of readers in Brazil has been so insignificant that a first printing of 3,000 copies is considered a good number. Smaller editions mean also that book prices are considerably higher in Brazil than in the US.

Maybe a little late, compared to what has happened in Europe and the US, Brazilian booksellers are also going for the-bigger-the-better philosophy. Big São Paulo chain bookstores like Ática, Nobel and Saraiva are all building and opening megastores in which people have close to 100,000 book titles to choose from and can also buy stationery, CDs and videos. Ática, for example, is spending $20 million in its Ática Shopping Cultural to be open in May. Saraiva has already opened two of these huge bookstores. In one of them, with 70,000 books, in the Ibirapuera shopping mall, people are able to cruise the Internet in the bookstore's Cybercafé.

Despite recognizing that there has been a recent retraction in the market for books, Culture Ministry's secretary of Exchange Eric Nepomuceno talked about his "cautious optimism" about the prospects for Brazilian culture this year. He seems encouraged by what he sees as a new attitude by business people who are starting to be aware that financing a cultural work like a play can bring dividends to a company. "People do not wait anymore for the State's sacrosanct role," says Nepomuceno, "neither do they delude themselves with this neoliberal foolishness that the market solves everything by itself."

President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has started an apparently more adequate way for the federal government to help the arts and culture in the country. Law 8,313, better known as the Rouanet law, has been improved in a way that businesses now can discount up to 5 percent (the limit was 3 percent) of their federal taxes due to culture. Movies are the ones that are benefiting the most from the new law. In 1996, the Culture Ministry budget was increased to more than $200 million, doubling the $103 million applied in 1995. The Fundo Nacional de Cultura (National Fund for Culture) which finances public or private non-profit projects had its budget tripled to $32 million in '96, too little, however, since the demand for funds last year was close to $350 million.

The Big Screen

In recently released movies, Brazilian themes have been treated with critical acclaim albeit with little popular enthusiasm. Quem Matou Pixote? (Who Killed Pixote?), from director José Joffily, for example, discusses the theme of poverty and police corruption and brutality. Another kind of violence from the Brazilian past, the cangaço (backlands banditry), has also made it to the big screen through Corisco e Dadá by Rosemberg Cariry and Baile Perfumado (Fragrant Ball) by Lírio Ferreira and Paulo Caldas. Several movies to be released in 1997 also deal with nationalistic themes. Among them, Bruno Barreto's O Que É Isso, Companheiro? (What's the Matter, Partner?) based on Fernando Gabeira's book of same name that deals with guerrillas and the student movement during the military dictatorship in the 60s and 70s.

Director Walter Salles Jr., will be bringing Central do Brasil (a reference to Federal railroad company Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil), a Brazilian-flavored road movie. Sérgio Rezende's Canudos will retell the 20-year saga of Antônio Vicente Maciel, the Antônio Conselheiro (Antônio, the Adviser), a holy man who at the end of the last century lead a revolution of thousands against the federal government in the Bahia backlands. Canudos, which had as many as 20,000 residents, was the autonomous town founded by Conselheiro in 1893, four years after Brazil deposed emperor Dom Pedro II and became a republic. Another film of the current crop is Paulo Thiago's Policarpo Quaresma based on Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto's (1881-1922) book Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (Policarpo Quaresma's Sad End) which is a portrait of Rio at the end of last century.

Despite all the enthusiasm of the movie industry and the new releases, for the films it will be an upstream struggle since 1996 was a very bad year for movies in Brazil. The country counts only 800 screens (compare this to the 29,000 movie screens in the US). In 1996 there was a 30 percent fall in attendance compared to the previous year. In the 70s, when ticket prices were much lower, theaters made an average of $250 million a year in tickets. This amount has fallen to a meager $90 million with ticket prices between $5 and $8 dollars, comparable to those in the United States.

However, some people in the movie industry are not deterred by this decrease. "The notion that the national film has lost public seems incorrect to me," says José Carlos Avellar, veteran film critic and RioFilmes president. "We had 20 Brazilian films distributed commercially in 1996 and I have the impression that there is still a repressed demand from people unsatisfied with the American production's total hegemony."

Bruno Wainer, a young distributor, defends the idea that "the public doesn't care if the movie is French, Brazilian or American. All they want is a good movie, he says. Producer Luís Carlos Barreto, the chief of a clan that is an integral part of the motion picture industry in Brazil, also disagrees that there is no public for Brazilian films: "We were able in the past to corner 55 percent of the film market. What happened? We stayed six years off the market, and the foreign movies, mainly American, took over the screens. Now we are recouping the time. I am sure that at the end of 1997 Brazilian movies will have conquered from 35 percent to 40 percent of the market." Barreto criticizes those who make movies only to please the critics. "We need to start making popular, narrative movies. The critics are making a big mistake. They label as a soap opera every film that doesn't present an exhibitionism in language."

Since February 1995 when Fábio Barreto's O Quatrilho — the film won a nomination for an Oscar as the best foreign movie, the first time this happened to a Brazilian film — started a new era in Brazilian movies through the use of the new federal audiovisual law, more than 30 films have been shot and released. Between 1975 and 1979, the most productive time for Embrafilme, the federal organ that was closed by President Fernando Collor de Mello, only $7.5 million a year was being invested by the government in movies. In the last two years, the industry has raised around $50 million through private financing.

Behind much of this revival there is Italian Bruno Stroppiana, 49, a superproducer. He was the man who made possible the shooting of Cacá Diegues's Tieta do Agreste last year and he is involved in at least four other megaprojects: Estorvo (Impediment) based in Chico Buarque de Hollanda's book to be directed by Ruy Guerra, For All with direction of Luiz Carlos Lacerda and Buza Ferraz and $8.5-million superproduction O Xangô de Baker Street based on Jô Soares book of same name, to be directed by Miguel Faria Jr. Stroppiana has put all of his money into making movies. "When the Brazilian motion picture industry fell part in 1990," he revealed, "I bluffed. I continued to work under the name of Sky Light, distributing only foreign movies, since there were no national films."

The most populous and powerful state of the Union, São Paulo, which is the industrial center of the country, is also trying to assert its cultural leadership, a position it always disputes with former federal capital Rio de Janeiro. Filmmakers were enthusiastic when Bovespa (Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo — São Paulo's Stock Market) started to trade certificates of audiovisual investment last December. Governor Mário Covas announced a $4 million program to be distributed to 11 films selected by PIC (Programa de Integração Cinema e TV — Program of Cinema and TV Integration). While this kind of money might seem negligible by Hollywood standards, it can mean a lot in Brazil where a feature-length film can be made for less than a million dollars. In 1949, on average, a movie already cost more than one million to be produced in Hollywood, nowadays the price has risen to an average of $30 million.

One month after the announcement of the program, five movies had already benefited from it: Walter Hugo Khouri's Paixão Perdida (Lost Passion), Ricardo Dias's Fé (Faith), Aurélio Michiles's O Cineasta da Selva (The Jungle's Filmmaker), Ugo Giorgetti's Boleiros (Scoundrels), and Hector Babenco's Vinte Anos Depois (Twenty Years Later). Khouri's movie is budgeted at a mere $1 million and shooting should start in March.

According to Ivan Negro, PIC's coordinator, the program is to create a movie pole in São Paulo and establish co-production with TV stations the same way this is done in France, Italy and the US. Filmmaker Carlos Reichenbach has hailed the initiative. In an interview with the daily Folha de São Paulo he declared, "This program is exemplary to prove that TV can a be a partner since it is already a consumer of films. This is very important because I believe that quality is the result of quantity." He has applied for the program's money with his script Dois Córregos (Two Brooks).

World-renowned Berlin's International Festival of Cinema which takes place this February between the 13 and 24 is presenting a special section with the recent crop of Brazilian movies. They include close to a dozen movies like José Araújo's Sertão de Memórias (Backlands of Memories), Bia Lessa's Crede-Mi (Believe Me), Murillo Salles's Como Nascem os Anjos (How Angels Are Born). Compare this to the Brazilian participation in the Festival in 1995. Then, from the three so-called Brazilian movies none had been shot in the country or was spoken in Portuguese.

The Arts

Documenta, the German art show held every five years in the town of Kassel, is the world's largest and most important contemporary art exhibit. When it opens its doors next June 21, at least three Brazilians will be sharing space with the best the art world has to offer. They are world-renowned Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, both dead in the 80s and Carioca (from Rio) Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão, better known as Tunga, 45, a performancing artist who will be presenting among other works his Crime da Mala (Suitcase Crime).

Already shown in New York, the live art consists of seven young and blond men dressed in black and carrying a black suitcase. Every time they open the suitcases broken pieces of sculpture representing people fall on the floor. In another performance, a group of seven naked young girls will get inside a room and then walk up to little mounds of argyle against which they will press their vagina to leave there their sex imprint. Tunga is also a sculptor who uses copper, plumb or iron to make jars, calices, and his obsessive theme: tresses. He studied architecture, but he never finished the course.

Brazil has never produced a great name in the arts as it has in music, literature or architecture. But, recent art auctions in London and New York have shown that Brazilian artists are starting to get some respect in the world. Last November, Christie's of New York auctioned 26 paintings and drawings by Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976), Cândido Portinari (1903-1962) and Italian-Brazilian Alfredo Volpi (1896-1988) , three of Brazil's best modern painters, getting $2.1 million for them, double of what was anticipated by the event organizers. Di Cavalcanti's Mulheres com Frutas (Women With Fruit) brought $650,000. The painter had never sold any work before for more than $500,000. The painting was bought by Argentinean art collector Eduardo Constantini who in 1995 had acquired Tarsila do Amaral's (1886-1973) Abaporu for $1.43 million, a record price for a Brazilian painting. There is still a long way before the Brazilian art becomes accepted. The best Colombian and Mexican painters are sold for $3 million and more. In a recent article about São Paulo's Bienal, the British magazine The Economist classified Brazilian painting as "mediocre".

The Stage

For the good theater professional there does not seem to be any lack of work. Despite all the criticism against TV Globo network, which feeds Brazil with a daily diet of several prime-time soap operas, nobody denies its merit in making Rio a flourishing place for theater. There are all of those actors and actresses in between novelas raring to work on the stage.

Veteran actress Fernanda Montenegro, 67, 47 of them on stage, for example, has her agenda taken up until 1998. She is shooting right now Walter Salles Jr.'s movie Central do Brasil. In March she starts taping her participation in a Globo network novela (soap opera). She stars in the Anton Pavlovich Chekov's play The Seagull, June in Salvador (state of Bahia). In the ensuing months she will also be Molly in the Irish Brian Friel play of same name and Coco Chanel in a play written by Paulista (from São Paulo) playwright Maria Adelaide Amaral.

"There was a time in which the actor belonged only to the theater," says Montenegro. "Afterwards came movies and the theater, and radio, but the theater continued to be the base. Then came TV, ravenous. And today the beast called an actor is available as long as he wants it. There is a myriad of possibilities, even from the point of view of economic survival."

Going to the international front, off-Broadway could be soon showing a work by one of Brazil's most prominent playwrights. Alfredo Dias Gomes has recently traveled to New York to negotiate the rights for Roque Santeiro (Roque, the Saint Maker), a play that has been having full houses in Rio. It was Leon Lydey, the translator of the play into English in the 1970s, who suggested that the work be brought to New York. It would not be anything extraordinary, however. Roque Santeiro had its world première in 1976 in the US, when the text was still known as O Berço do Herói (The Hero's Cradle).

Ironically, the play was sponsored by the Brazilian embassy in Washington at the same time that the Brazilian military regime had forbidden the play to be shown in Brazil. Gomes had two other plays shown on New York's off-off-Broadway: O Pagador de Promessas (Keeper of Promises) and O Santo Inquérito (The Holy Inquisition). Dias Gomes has become better known these days by his socially-aware TV novelas (soap operas).

The Underground

The alternative press, which was an important way of spreading ideas and publishing poems during the 70s, is having a revival with a twist. While these publications were many times artisan copies made by mimeograph, much of so-called underground press nowadays has nothing of underground. Some like Inimigo Rumor (Enemy Rumor) and Item have slick covers and daring graphic projects. They deal with arts (Item), theater (O Percevejo), literature (Inimigo Rumor, Caderno de Literatura Brasileira) and culture in general (O Carioca, Remate de Males, Revista da USP).

With 150 pages and sold for $15 in libraries, Inimigo Rumor started publication in January. The magazine published by Sette Letras bookstore intends to divulge poetry from unknown and renowned poets. A similar formula has been used with success by O Carioca, a literary magazine created in Rio in January that has already become a cultural institution of the city. Editor Chacal explains: "O Carioca intends to record the culture that is made in Rio. It's an affirmation of the young culture, but we are not afraid to pay homage. Our first issue celebrated the Carnaval blocos like Suvaco do Cristo (Christ's Armpit)."

Another way Brazilians are preserving their culture is by taking care of their historic monuments. At the end of 1996 there were more than 250 historic buildings being restored across the country. Thanks to private effort and government grants neoclassical structures, baroque churches and a number of other landmarks are being brought back to their past glory. While five years ago, projects dealing with historic monuments represented 1 percent of all the money applied by private companies in the cultural field, today this amount has jumped to more than 40 percent. From $87 million allotted to the Culture Ministry as a supplement for the 96-97 period, $60 million were allotted to the restoration of historic buildings.

Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, a historic city, with 32 churches from the XVII century, has become a shining example of what preservation can do to a place and to the pride of its inhabitants. Its San Francisco de Assis church, for example, the masterpiece of Antônio Francisco Lisboa, the Aleijadinho (Crippled One) the most important sculptor Brazil has ever produced, has regained all of its original splendor. Many other churches and buildings with the help of government and private companies have also been restored. Tourism has picked up in the city. Rio has renovated its Biblioteca Nacional and Salvador (Bahia) recuperated a whole neighborhood known as Pelourinho, in 1993 at a cost of $30 million. Thanks in part to this work Salvador has seen an increase of 100,000 tourists a year. Even the New York Times praised the effort.

IN VERSE