\n<\/p>\n
Carlos Diegues, a film director who celebrated Brazil\u2019s ethnic richness and its social turbulence, helping to forge a new path for cinema in his country, died on Feb. 14 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 84.<\/p>\n
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which he was a member. The academy said the cause was complications of surgery. The Rio newspaper O Globo, for which Mr. Diegues wrote a column, reported that he had suffered \u201ccardiocirculatory complications\u201d before the surgery.<\/p>\n
Mr. Diegues, who was known as Cac\u00e1, was a founder of Cinema Novo, the modern school of Brazilian cinema that combined Italian Neo-Realism, documentary style and uniquely Latin American fantasy. He focused on hitherto marginal groups \u2014 Afro-Brazilians, the poor, disoriented provincials in an urbanizing Brazil \u2014 and was the first Brazilian director to employ Black actors as protagonists, in \u201cGanga Zumba,\u201d (1963), a narrative of enslavement and revolt that was an early cinematic foray into Brazil\u2019s history of racial violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The often lyrical results, expressed over the course of 60 years in dozens of features and documentaries, charmed audiences in his own country and abroad, though critics sometimes reproached him for loose screenplays and rough-edged camera work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Diegues\u2019s international breakthrough film, \u201cBye Bye Brazil\u201d (1979), nominated for a Palme d\u2019Or at Cannes, is considered the apotheosis of his dramatic visual style and of his preoccupation with those on the margins of Brazilian society. It follows a feckless group of rascally street performers through the outback, documenting a vanishing Brazil where citizens in remote towns are beguiled by fake falling snowflakes \u2014 actually shredded coconut \u2014 and hypnotized, literally, by a rare communal television set.<\/p>\n
The performers, frustrated that the people are entranced by the TV set and ignoring them, blow it up in one of the film\u2019s many nonchalant gags. They go on to blithely couple and uncouple as the film progresses.<\/p>\n
Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, called \u201cBye Bye Brazil\u201d a \u201ccurious, quiet, introspective sort of film, which pays attention to the changing nature of a Brazil that is paying increasingly less attention to these nearly extinct players.\u201d<\/p>\n
The film\u2019s characteristic mix \u2014 the camera documents the landscape\u2019s spareness while spinning a distinctive magic realist web around it, and the performers themselves are fantastical, extravagant and grittily impoverished \u2014 was intrinsic to Cinema Novo, and to Mr. Diegues\u2019s style.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThe film bids farewell to what it sees as outmoded visions of Brazil,\u201d Randal Johnson and Robert Stam wrote in their book \u201cBrazilian Cinema\u201d (1995), \u201cnot only to rightist dreams of capitalist development but also to leftist dreams of popular resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt is hard to imagine Brazilian cinema without him,\u201d the Brazilian director Karim A\u00efnouz wrote in an email. Mr. Diegues\u2019s work, he said, was \u201cinfused with immense joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Brazilian director Walter Salles wrote, also in an email, that \u201cDiegues inspired, influenced and mentored several generations of filmmakers with extraordinary films.\u201d In a tribute after his death, Brazil\u2019s president, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, said that Mr. Diegues brought \u201cBrazil and Brazilian culture to the cinema screens, and captured the attention of the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Diegues reached into Brazil\u2019s racial and social conflicts through history and sociology, in films including \u201cQuilombo\u201d (1984), about people who escaped slavery in the 17th century; \u201cXica da Silva\u201d (1976), about an enslaved 18th-century enchantress; and his \u201cOrpheus\u201d (\u201cOrfeu\u201d) a 1999 retelling of the Orpheus and Euridice myth set in the modern-day favelas, or slums, of Rio. (Marcel Camus had told the same story in the same way in his acclaimed 1959 film, \u201cBlack Orpheus.\u201d)<\/p>\n
While the film won the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize as best picture, the reviews were mixed. \u201c\u2018Orfeu\u2019 tries to do too much at once: to be both mythic and realistic, to celebrate Rio\u2019s rich culture while exposing the brutality and cynicism that dominate daily life in its slums,\u201d A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote in 2000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The extravagance of Mr. Diegues\u2019s d\u00e9cor and characters sometimes left critics outside Brazil unmoved. But movies like \u201cQuilombo,\u201d released the year Brazil\u2019s 20-year military dictatorship came to an end, marked the transition with the celebration of a multiracial country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s neither a masterpiece nor an accomplishment of supreme beauty,\u201d the critic Louis Marcorelles wrote of \u201cQuilombo\u201d in Le Monde. \u201cVulgar, crude, generous, it\u2019s above all an act of faith in the future of a Brazil that has returned to democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cQuilombo,\u201d Mr. Johnson and Mr. Stam wrote, Mr. Diegues \u201caims at poetic synthesis rather than naturalistic reproduction.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was several years before the dictatorship\u2019s onset in 1964 that Cinema Novo, the movement with which Mr. Diegues is most closely associated, came into being.<\/p>\n
In a kind of manifesto published in the journal of Brazil\u2019s National Students Union in 1962, a young Mr. Diegues wrote that the new movement sought to shed the influence of Hollywood sentimentality in favor of an authentic national focus. \u201cBrazil and its people became the central preoccupation of the new group of Brazilian filmmakers,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir goal was to study in depth the social relations of each city and region as a way of critically exposing, as if in miniature, the sociocultural structure of the country as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
An early hit, \u201cThe Big City\u201d (\u201cA Grande Cidade,\u201d 1966), about the travails of a young provincial migrant in Rio, exemplifies these preoccupations. Its hard black-and-white documentary style is infused with lyrical fantasy: The actor Ant\u00f4nio Pitanga, playing a street person, cavorts through indifferent city streets like a character from a fairy tale.<\/p>\n
By the mid-1970s, Cinema Novo was over, although Mr. Diegues continued to employ the style in later films. Filmmaking under the dictatorship demanded a softening of the edges and a more allegorical style. \u201cSummer of Showers\u201d (\u201cChuvas de Ver\u00e3o,\u201d 1978) was described by the New York Times critic Janet Maslin as a \u201cgentle Brazilian film with a knowing air and not so very much to reveal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
After the success of \u201cBye Bye Brazil,\u201d Mr. Diegues would go on to make nearly a dozen films, including the 2003 hit \u201cGod Is Brazilian,\u201d which drew 1.6 million people to the box office, his second-biggest success after \u201cXica da Silva.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carlos Jos\u00e9 Fontes Diegues was born on May 19, 1940, in Macei\u00f3, in the state of Alagoas in northeast Brazil. He was the son of Manuel Diegues Jr. and Zaira Fontes Diegues. His father, a sociologist and folklorist, was working for the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage at the time and was later a professor at Pontifical Catholic University in Rio.<\/p>\n
The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when Carlos was 6, and he attended St. Ignatius School, a Jesuit institution, before studying law at the Pontifical Catholic University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
At the university, he joined student groups that were to play a founding role in the birth of Cinema Novo, including the Centro Popular de Cultura. He began his career as a feature-film director in 1962, while still a student, with one of five segments in \u201cCinco Vezes Favela,\u201d set in the slums of Rio.<\/p>\n
Mr. Diegues left Brazil briefly during the dictatorship, in 1969, to live in France and Italy with his first wife, the singer Nara Le\u00e3o. But he soon returned to Brazil, the wellspring of his imagination.<\/p>\n
He is survived by two children, Isabel and Francisco Diegues, from his marriage with Ms. Le\u00e3o, from whom he was separated in 1977; and by his second wife, Renata Almeida Magalh\u00e3es, a producer. His daughter with Ms. Magalh\u00e3es, Flora, died of cancer in 2019. Ms. Le\u00e3o died in 1989.<\/p>\n
In his last column for the newspaper O Globo, a tribute to Mr. Salles\u2019s current hit film \u201cI\u2019m Still Here,\u201d published on Jan. 21, Mr. Diegues wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking life worthwhile does not mean accumulating wealth or status, but rather living with purpose, in balance. The message is that life should be a stage for personal expression. May each of us find our own way to make life an honor.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n