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In 1965, Glauber Rocha presented his political film manifesto "Eztétyka da fome" ("Aesthetics of Hunger") in Italy. Linked to the BraziUan film movement known as cinema novo, Rocha was part of a generation of filmmakers across Latin America that understood cinema as a central weapon in revolutionary struggle. Key to Rocha' s fimi theory was the idea of hunger as a complex, contradictory cinematic mode of cultural practice. According to Rocha, films with an aesthetic of hunger "narrated, described, poeticized, discussed, analyzed, and stimulated the themes of hunger: characters eating dirt and roots, characters stealing to eat, characters kiïling to eat, characters fleeing to eat" (par. 10). But for Rocha, hunger is more than the prelude to starvation, it is a state of craving, of need, of desire. These are the bases for his aesthetics of hunger: "Economic and political conditioning has led us to phiïosophical weakness and impotence. ... It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society" (par. 3). Hunger here is more than a lack; it is actually a form of violent expression and a source of critical power. It is, in fact, the only form of expression, for Rocha, appropriate for poUtical filmmaking in Brazil.
Over thirty years later, BraziUan cinema experienced a resurgence, and young directors like Fernando MeireUes produced films that were released alongside those of veterans of cinema novo like Carlos Diegues. One of the breakthrough films of this boom was MeireUes and Katia Lund's Cidade de deus (City of God) (2002), which broke box office records in Braziï for a national film and had a major worldwide distribution. Using an aesthetic that borrows from television, advertising, and music videos, the film presented a graphic look at urban violence and was quickly criticized for its cosmetic, slick view of the tragedies of BraziUan daily Ufe. One of the harshest critiques of the film was leveled by film critic Ivana Bentes who compared City of God to the work of Rocha and suggested that MeireUes and Lund's film replaced Rocha's "aesthetics of hunger" with a "cosmetics of hunger" (Bentes par. 1). Meirelles countered, though, that the film's success had to be measured not only...