Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

André Novais Oliveira’s Long Way Home (2018), their most quietly entrancing feature, tells the story of Juliana (Grace Passô, star of FP’s anti-star system), a woman who recently moved to Contagem for a job with the city’s anti-dengue unit. She knocks doors and inspects backyards for humid areas where mosquitoes might gather. She’s touchingly reticent; eventually, we learn that her husband, supposed to relocate with her soon after her move, has ghosted her, their marriage crumbling after a car accident ended her pregnancy. This appears to be the plot, but the pulse of the film is elsewhere: it is less an individual than a plural story, as Ivone Margulies has argued in Film Quarterly. The representative shot, rather than one of an individual alone in a crowd, is one of Juliana and her coworkers walking slowly down the middle of the street, the bright rolling hills of Belo Horizonte’s outskirts as backdrop. Juliana makes friends at work, opens up a bit. Her life stays suspended amid disorientation and late paychecks, but meanwhile it reaches a kind of ordinary half-happiness, a life lived in relation. Politics appears at a slant: through the racial lineage of old family photos in a stranger’s home, complaints of terrible pay, or a story of the suburb’s origin in forced relocations. In the feminist film journal Another Gaze, the curator Janaína Oliveira spoke of how Long Way Home wasn’t received in Brazil as Black cinema, since it doesn’t revolve around racism or social struggle. And yet “Temporada [the film’s Portuguese name] is Cinema Negro, man!” In the same way, it’s working-class cinema. Here is a film made possible by the Workers’ Party that devotes less attention to class war than to the banal rhythms of working-class community, crafting a proletkino of everyday Black life, modest and unspectacular, beyond romance or bleakness. Its politics enter here, through a cultural vision that values working-class life at its most quotidian.

—p.183 On the new proletkino (175) missing author 1 year, 3 months ago