1

Possibilities for queer revolution in Glauber Rocha’s Barravento (The Turning Wind)

(1962)

James Hodgson, University of Manchester

Abstract

Previous readings of Glauber Rocha’s Barravento (The Turning Wind) (1962) have generally

focused on Marxist rhetoric or on the film’s treatment of Candomblé. Through a close

reading of the film, this article proposes an interpretation that foregrounds the film’s

depiction of sexuality and sexual identity, which helps illuminate to a greater degree the

film’s potential to challenge the status quo. Coupling a queer theoretical framework with

attention to the specificities of contemporary Brazilian sexual culture, this article suggests

that the film’s more ambivalent or contradictory aspects often relate to how it constructs

sexuality and sexual identity. Furthermore, it suggests that tensions around sexual identity

can be traced to the heart of the political problem Rocha explores in Barravento, and that the

resolution of these tensions is key to the development of a liberated, non-hierarchical and

anti-authoritarian community.

Keywords

Brazilian cinema

Barravento

Glauber Rocha

Cinema Novo
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homosexuality

queer relationality

queer film
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According to Robert Stam, the word ‘barravento’ has several meanings: from ‘changing

wind’ or ‘transformation of events’, to ‘the experience of spiritual possession’ (1997: 205).

Scholarship on the Brazilian film Barravento (The Turning Wind) (1962) suggests that its

director, Glauber Rocha, likewise inflects his film with uncertainty, especially in its portrayal

of Marxist politics and the role that Candomblé (a syncretic polytheistic religion focused on

the worship of a pantheon of gods) might play in effecting social change. Less academic

attention has been placed on the role of sexuality in the film; one could argue, justifiably so,

given the film’s focus on the liberation of impoverished black fishermen from white,

bourgeois oppressors, which begs an examination of the treatment of race and class. But, an

analysis that attends to how the film deals with sexuality might contribute towards a

productive account of its complex political valence. In this article I show that the film

explores how systems of oppression have consequences for sexuality, and that the question of

sexual identity forms one of the impasses impeding the emergence of a radical politics. To

bridge the gap in the existing scholarship, I will analyse the film using an interpretive

framework derived from queer theory, a branch of gender and sexual identities studies

influenced by post-structuralist accounts of identity. After examining how sexual identity is

formulated in Barravento, paying close attention to the film’s cultural context, I will argue

that a radical version of (sexual) identity can be found in the film’s concluding moments –

one that seems to threaten an oppressive status quo in a more dramatic and fundamental way

than, say, Barravento’s presentation of Marxist revolutionary discourse.

A reading attentive to sexuality can lead us to novel ways of understanding the film’s

contradictory elements, including its plot and characters, and would contribute to the existing

critical literature on the film, which, following Rocha’s own avowed political aims, often

employs a materialist perspective (Bernardet 1977: 60; Stam 1997). While this article does

not take race or gender as its focus, it nonetheless aims to open-up the road towards an
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intersectional account of the film. It would also add to the debates on the representation of

homosexuality in Brazilian cinema more broadly (Trevisan 1986: 126; Rodrigues 1989: 15;

Moreno 2001: 291–93) by signalling the nuances and complexities around sexual

representation in a period often lamented for the paucity of queer figures on-screen To

approach this argument, first I will need to detail the basics of how sexual identity is

generally constructed in Brazilian culture, and to review the crucial features of existing

debates about the film.

Sexual identity in Brazil

To understand sexual identity in Brazil and its relation to Candomblé in the context of

Barravento, it would be a mistake to transpose western notions of gay and lesbian identities

onto the film. In fact, in his path-breaking study of sexual identity in Brazil, Para Inglês Ver

(For the English to See), Peter Fry argues that Brazilian sexuality should not only be

discussed in terms of an individual’s attraction to a certain gender, since the categories of

‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are too broad to encompass the specific configurations of

sexual identity he encountered in his investigation of Brazilian cultural relations (1982: 88).

In Richard Parker’s terms, a ‘traditional’ model, deeply informed by patriarchy, is significant

in shaping how Brazilians view themselves in terms of sexual identity (1991: 30–31). The

‘traditional’ model codes individuals through the sexual relations they form, or are presumed

to form, with others, rather than their partner’s gender per se: the active, penetrative role

becomes culturally synonymous with masculinity; the passive, receptive role connected to

femininity and feminization. Furthermore, so long as the relationships between an individual

and his or her sexual partner are sustained, gender takes something of a back seat: a male

could penetrate another man during sex and retain a masculine, macho identity, in theory,

while sexual submission to another man, or the perception that this had taken place, would

shift his status to that of a passive bicha or viado (feminine homosexual, queer) (Parker 1991:
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30–31). Fry suggests that a second model of sexual identity emerges against the background

of this traditional structure in the 1960s, with the rise of the term entendido (one ‘in the

know’) (1982). This term – largely restricted to the middle classes – results from the

propagation of western ideas of homo- and heterosexuality by Brazilian medical and legal

institutions (Parker 1991: 36–42). Strictly, it indicates someone ‘in the know’, who is aware

of homosexual subculture, but it also serves as an umbrella term for those who experience

same-sex desire but reject the definitional terms of the ‘traditional’ model, ‘a person with a

certain freedom with respect to their gender role and “activity” or “passivity”’ (Fry 1982: 93,

my translation). Thus, when Barravento was produced, ‘the average Brazilian conflated male

homosexuality with effeminacy’ because the bicha was the primary term in the bicha

(macho) dyad that made homosexuality visible to society. Nevertheless, alternative attitudes

to the affirmation of sexual identity were beginning to circulate, at the very least, within the

middle classes (Green 2001: 6).

It is worthwhile exploring how such models operate in relation to Candomblé, given

its importance to the film. Candomblé is rooted in African spiritualist traditions and was

originally introduced to Brazil by slaves. Adherents typically gather for worship in spaces

known as terreiros (temples), wherein a number of the congregation may come under the

influence of a deity during the proceedings – understood as a state of temporary ‘possession’.

Furthermore, a strong connection is believed to exist between individual orixás (gods) and

those who are repeatedly possessed by them, akin to a form of patronage. Fry notes that the

gender of an adherent’s orixá patron is understood to bear on their sexual identity – in

particular, males who are ‘sons’ of female orixás would be perceived as bichas (1986: 137–

53). As a corollary, he indicates a widespread belief that homosexual men populate the

possession cults in high numbers largely because the mechanics of possession allow them to

give free rein to feminine tendencies – in other words, taking on a female spirit provided a
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legitimate outlet for effeminacy, an otherwise stigmatized behaviour. James Matory develops

this in his remarks on possession. He points out that possession is an act loaded with sexual

connotation: ‘riding’and ‘being ridden’ by an orixá, become equivalent to sexual penetration,

and being penetrated, respectively (2005: 214). Matory suggests that this stems from the way

Candomblé preserves ‘a West African logic of “mounting”’ or possession within its

devotional practices, a logic which converges with Brazilian models of sexual identity (the

active [passive binary]). As the orixás are always those that descend, possess or ‘ride’ the

priests, they are coded as active or male regardless of their ostensible gender. The capacity

for frequent possession would come to indicate a kind of passive identity in the same way

that a male known for having been penetrated by another male would be viewed as a bicha.

Thus, Matory suggests that women and ‘passive’ men were considered the natural candidates

for possession by the orixás, sharing ‘the symbolically loaded fact of their penetrability’

(2005: 214). This also explains the prevalence of the ‘adé’, a male possession priest assumed

to be homosexual. Finally, if spiritual penetrability implies a tendency to submit to physical

or sexual penetration, then it is not surprising that men wishing to preserve their status as

macho or as (sexually) active would resist, or even fear, possession by an orixá. As Matory

writes, possession by ‘an exogenous Other […] is both a precondition to eligibility for the

possession priesthood and a great threat to those who regard masculinity as their only ticket

to some semblance of authority in daily social interactions’ (2005: 214). The actual behaviour

of machos, bichas and adés in day-to-day social and sexual situations would, of course, be

more diverse and varied, escaping strict categorical frameworks, but nevertheless it is ‘local

ideological assumptions and expectations [that] tend to link habitual male “passivity” with

transvestism, feminine gestures […] and the social subordination of the penetrated party’

(Matory 2005: 208).

Interpreting Firmino – limits of the spiritualist and materialist approaches

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Barravento begins with the return of an exile, Firmino, to a community of fishermen

living in poverty on the coast of Bahia. Before we are provided with any context we are

immediately clued into his status as an outsider: when he first appears, scrambling over a

rocky shoreline and dressed in a striking white suit, he is brought into visual contrast with the

fishermen, who are shown pulling a large net from the water (see Figure 1).

<INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE>

Rocha dedicates roughly two and a half minutes to shots of the muscular black bodies of the

men as they haul the massive fishing net and its catch to shore. Throughout, their shirtless

torsos dominate the screen. The sequence is a striking display of male physicality, with

lighting that emphasizes the definition of musculature, and cannot help but draw attention to

their corporeality and masculinity. In-keeping with existing Marxist analyses of this film, it is

true that the immediate framing of the fishing community in terms of communal labour and

harmonious interpersonal relations anticipates the political themes that run throughout,

including the importance of the means of production, the fishing net, for the community’s

survival and the need for solidarity amongst Afro-Brazilians faced with white oppression. But

this sequence also invites the viewer to consider male homosociality in aesthetic terms,

drawing attention to the beauty of the male body, questions of masculinity and – I will argue

– sexuality.

If Rocha uses male bodies to suggest the community’s solidarity in his opening sequence,

this develops over the course of the film into a contrasting representation, highlighting a

sense of their stagnancy and entrapment. For example, male bodies are often used to frame

shots (see Figure 2) and tend to be shown as motionless during critical moments of conflict

that might provide ways out of their impasse (see Figure 3).

<INSERT FIGURES 2 and 3>

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This visually enforces what the film communicates through narrative: the community is held

back by a combination of oppressive forces that prevent political action. We learn that the

fishermen are locked into a precarious living situation by virtue of their dependence on the

fishing net, while their Candomblé faith prevents them from taking serious political action

against the exploitative white net-owners by placing responsibility for social change in the

hands of the orixás. Granted, the film’s presentation of activities such as a samba roda

(circle) or the Candomblé ceremonies provides evidence of the men and women of the

community in movement, but this movement is perhaps somewhat limited by convention and

ritual. In contradistinction, Firmino moves with complete ease: he flits through scenery, slips

around houses and bounds along stretches of the coast (see Figure 4), frequently darting from

one side of the frame to the other and back again. While his white suit signifies a degree of

urban style, his body is frequently shown charged with anger and political will (see Figure 5).

<INSERT FIGURES 4 and 5>

In other words, his corporeality – frantic, energetic, spontaneous – conveys his freedom.

Firmino is not bound by the community’s norms or rules, which both redoubles his status as

an outsider and suggests in a physical or visual sense that he might have some solution to the

oppressive circumstances that imprison the community in stasis. As he darts from one

liberatory effort to the next, his rapid and erratic movements also imply a degree of

ambivalence, undecidedness or tension in his actions. Rocha’s treatment of Firmino is key to

several arguments in the literature regarding the political dimensions of the film, and will also

prove central to my argument, though in my reading I draw more attention to the import of

this ambivalence for relationality itself. First, I detail the ways in which ambivalence with

regard to religion, materialism and colonialism have been explored in the literature thus far.
9

Firmino’s role within the narrative is particularly prominent in analyses that handle

Barravento’s political aspirations – specifically in work by Jean-Claude Bernadet (1977),

Ismail Xavier (1980) and Robert Stam (1997). Of course, contemporary scholarship on

Barravento has addressed issues other than its political message, including the film’s

groundbreaking treatment of race, its ambivalent attitude to spirituality and its complicated

production history (Carvalho 2008; Nunes 2011; Sobenes 2013). I do not wish to dismiss this

recent scholarship, but rather, to specify the line of enquiry to which I aim to contribute: as I

see it, the film’s treatment of sexuality is entangled with its treatment of the political issues.

With comparable intentions, Isis Sadek (2011) also reappraised canonical Cinema Novo films

for their political value and the possibilities for the change it brings, which takes affect as her

starting point.

As is to be expected, given his role in the narrative, Firmino’s actions typically form the

crux of the arguments put forward concerning the film’s political valence. Firmino has been

understood as an individual who seeks to liberate his community from racialized and

economic oppression, although not one with full political consciousness (Bernardet 1977).

Elsewhere, he has been taken as the manifestation of Exû, the trickster orixá of borders and

liminal spaces who is locked in perpetual war with fellow orixá, Yemanjá (Stam 1997). But

Firmino’s desires to change the material conditions of the community and liberate them from,

in part, the trappings of Candomblé cannot explain his occasional reliance on spiritualist

beliefs. In other words, he does not simply act in the name of a strictly materialist, anti-

spiritualist liberation. Likewise, reading Firmino as an avatar for Exû cannot explain why he

appears, at times, to want to undermine the system of religious belief wholesale, which would

undermine the very religious framework that gives him power. He is, in other words, a

contradictory figure not easily understood according to either paradigm.

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This ambivalence and complexity also runs through the film more generally. For

example, addressing a tension between Marxist rhetoric and spiritualist logic in the film,

Ismail Xavier (1980) suggests that the narrative’s immediate political message of liberation

does not sit easily with the film’s formal elements, which stage certain spiritualist tropes.

This can be seen in the way Rocha uses editing to balance sky and earth at the end of the

film, or in minor narrative points, for example when Cota’s death mirrors the death of

Naina’s mother, the film also preserves cyclical storytelling, a logic established through the

community’s symbolic system (Xavier 1980: 75). For Xavier, the only way the film can

authentically address the complexities of life is to affirm both spiritualism and materialist

critique, or at least hold them in together, whilst in tension (1980: 82). This would avoid

either simply embracing traditional belief (which would count as mystification) or rejecting it

in the name of materialism (which would constitute a colonialist act), and suggests that

Rocha has found a way to critique the status quo without reinforcing its terms – a key insight

provided by Xavier which I use to inform my argument in due course. In fact, both Xavier

and Stam point out that the film is essentially ambivalent, at once embracing the language

and symbolism of Candomblé by associating characters with orixás while at the same time

providing a materialist analysis of the fishermen’s conditions. For these critics, the film

oscillates between both discourses, and as such ‘goes in and out of trance’ (Stam 1997: 223).

I want to take forward the idea of the film’s essential ambivalence and suggest that because

Rocha’s film resists a singular interpretation (either spiritualist or materialist) it critiques the

binary approach to power relations that is common in both spiritualist and materialist

discourses. Put differently, my intervention in the debate is to suggest that Firmino’s actions

could be interpreted as seeking to liberate the community from an oppressive way of relating

(that has to do with identity, and in particular, sexual identity) not just from material

oppression or mystification.
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Power relations and sexual identity

Despite the harmony suggested visually by the fishermen cooperating to haul in the net

(see Figure 1), the film soon after presents the viewer with evidence of oppression and

hierarchical relationships when Firmino marks Cota, a prostitute whose services he buys,

with chalk (see Figure 6).

<INSERT FIGURE 6 HERE>

Arguably, hierarchies are often figured in Barravento through both the act of marking as well

as demarcation. By inscribing his initial on her cheek he codes her clearly as an object, a

possession. We can see how the relationship is underpinned by binary logic; owner/owned

being a version of the hierarchized binary relationship between subject and object. It is also

worth pointing out that this identity, determined by capital (Cota’s ‘objectness’), is

potentially transitory. Firmino owns Cota because he purchased her services (her body), and

their respective statuses as paying subject and paid-for object are both dependent on his

capacity to pay for her time; that, to some degree, an identity determined by capital is also

determined by the flux of that capital. Not so for those identities figured along similar lines in

Candomblé. An example of this is Naina, a young woman also marked throughout

Barravento, although much more extensively. She is initially presented as mentally unstable

or disturbed – two fishermen counsel her to leave her troubling thoughts alone, and when she

seeks advice from a local priestess she is told to find a cure for psychological distress in a

terreiro. Later on, as the viewer is presented with a sequence inside the terreiro, Naina reacts

to the induction ceremony with panic, shown through a startled gaze directly at the camera,

which is followed by a bout of violent fitting (see Figure 7).

<INSERT FIGURE 7 HERE>

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The priestess interprets both her madness and her reaction as signs that Yemanjá acts as

Naina’s patron and claims her for her own. Marks indicating Yemanjá’s patronage abound:

Naina’s fellow fishermen suggest the orixá is chiefly interested in Naina’s Caucasian

appearance – ‘[Yemanja’s interest] is all to do with the colour of [Naina’s] eyes and hair’ –

while her name, the very basis of her social identity, is also a contraction of Janaina – a

synonym for Yemanjá (Rocha 1962, my translation).

It is worth signalling that Naina occupies a complicated position in terms of race. She is

excluded by the white capitalists and so remains subject to their oppressive control of the

fishing net, like the community. But to some degree she is also excluded from the same

community because, in the eyes of the predominantly black fishermen, her whiteness

contributes to her status as a mystified and quasi-supernatural figure. This is seen, for

example, when she stands outside the community’s roda (wheel) as they dance. In other

words, Naina’s whiteness, viewed as indicating Yemanjá’s divine interest, marks her as a

liminal character, in-between otherwise racialized (and hierarchized) groups. Key to Naina’s

markings is the perception that Yemanjá ‘owns’ her on a permanent, immutable basis, in a

way that determines her entire physical, social and psychological existence. While Cota’s

subordinate status, her ‘objectness’, is contingent on the world around her, Yemanjá’s mark,

and the subordination it appears to confer on those who bear it, is essential and fixed.

Aruã, the community’s leader-in-waiting, also bears a mark that has qualities of this

sort. Although included as part of the community’s activities, shots that indicate an

unspecified otherness cumulatively suggest his difference from the film’s start (see Figure 2).

Yemanjá’s patronage is initially relayed by the fishermen when they say ‘Yemanjá only

appears to Aruã’, and shortly after, when Firmino asks the priestess to place a curse on Aruã,

she refuses because the latter carries Yemanjá’s protection (Rocha 1962, my translation).

What is curious is that, just as in the terreiro, the film seems to suggest that this has an effect
13

on Aruã’s sexual identity, as several elements taken as indicating Yemanjá’s patronage also,

arguably, count as subtle signs of homosexuality. A key piece of evidence for this

interpretation would be Cota’s remarks in a confrontation with Firmino: ‘if Aruã liked

women, perhaps I would not be so overlooked’ (Rocha 1962, my translation). She delivers

these remarks with a knowing, subtle smile, to which Firmino responds with a sharp slap. Her

comments introduce the condition that comes with Yemanjá’s patronage: Aruã may not sleep

with another woman and is compelled to live in isolation with the Mestre, another man who

is under the deity’s protection.

However, they also imply, by dint of their reference to Aruã’s disinterest in women, a

sexual interest in men. The suggestion of homosexuality is too much for Firmino, and he

stops Cota’s insinuations with a quick slap. Here, arguably, the film indirectly suggests

homosexuality in a comparable way to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), as outlined in DA

Miller’s reading (1991). According to Miller, to side step the prohibitions of the 1934

Production Code, Hitchcock directs his audience towards the homosexuality of his characters

using connotation, a secondary system of meaning that takes a series of primary signs as its

signifiers: ‘connotation enjoys, or suffers from, an abiding deniability. To refute the evidence

for a merely connoted meaning is as simple – and as frequent – as uttering the words “But

isn’t it just […]?” before retorting the denotation’ (1991: 124). Tellingly, rather than provide

an explanation for this supposed indifference to women, Firmino admonishes Cota and ends

the conversation. This leaves the connotation lingering as a meaning that is only forbidden

but not inaccurate. Furthermore, various characters account for Aruã’s mystical power in

ways that indicate some kind of sexual otherness. For example, Naina comments on his

isolation at night, ‘at night no-one sees him with the other men, he just sits on the beach,

watching the sky, counting stars’ (Rocha 1962, my translation). This is confirmed when we

are shown Aruã sleeping on the beach prior to his seduction by Cota. Meanwhile, when the
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priestess discusses other men who have previously held Yemanjá’s attention, she says that

‘Joaquim was a man so beautiful that Yemanjá didn’t want him to marry anyone’, linking her

patronage to excessive male beauty and redoubling an association with confirmed

bachelorhood (Rocha 1962, my translation). It is not accurate to say these lines of dialogue

explicitly denote homosexuality, but they connote it and, alongside Cota’s original comment

and her knowing smile, they seem to evidence Aruã’s implied sexual deviance.

An investigation of the significance of Yemanjá’s mark should also take into account

the figuring of homosexuality within Candomblé and its relationship to the ‘traditional

model’ and the perception of a person’s sexual activity or passivity. Aruã’s particular

demarcation, his bearing the mark of Yemanjá, codes him as an object over which she exerts

her authority. He is her property or possession. If bearing her mark is to maintain a

relationship, and if the only possible relation with an orixá is non-negotiable passivity, then it

is arguable that Yemanjá’s mark also provides Aruã with an unchanging, fixed identity based

on this passivity, that is, as having a passive essence. The traces of femininity are subtle and

connoted, rather than outrageous and camp. For example, when Firmino breaks the net, and

watches in despair as his community prepare to fish further out into the sea, the film lingers

on Firmino’s body, his muscularity and athleticism evident as much as his anger (see Figure

5), before then showing us his energetic exhortations to Cota about the foolishness of this

endeavour. As he talks the film cuts to a close-up of Aruã, whom, we can infer, holds some

anxieties about sailing onto the treacherous Atlantic (see Figure 8).

<INSERT FIGURE 8 HERE>

Here Aruã stands in clear contrast to the frenetic politically charged masculinity of Firmino –

Aruã is hesitant, his lips open, the lighting illuminating the contours of his face, drawing our

attention to its sculptural qualities. In other words, where Firmino is defiant and angry, Aruã
15

is passive; where Firmino acts as a politically conscious subject, Aruã is presented to the

viewer via close-up as frozen, paralysed by fear. Firmino’s agency implicitly defines Aruã’s

lack thereof, emphasizing his status as object rather than subject. Montage, in short, invites us

to infer subtle differences in gender.

As long as Yemanjá holds him as her object, the film suggests that he will not be able

to relinquish this passivity. This passive essence results from his unchangeable position in a

structure of relations, and might be thought of as a kind of relational essentialism. 1 How

Aruã’s essentialized passivity relates to the social order is significant, as this element would

be relevant for Firmino’s revolutionary project. By ensuring that Aruã remains Yemanjá’s

property, the community is, theoretically, able to secure good weather for fishing. It could be

argued that Aruã sacrifices a strictly masculine essence to preserve the status quo, becoming

both an outsider of the community (different to the other men) and, as the guarantor of food,

central to its survival. Aruã’s passivity also makes him susceptible to the rule of the

conservative Mestre, who takes up a position of authority over him and assumes, in figurative

terms, the position of an ‘active’ male to a ‘passive’ male. The Mestre’s faith in Candomblé

and his reluctance to challenge the white net-owners is a major contributor to the

community’s general docility. This plays out cinematically when white net-owners come to

demand their payment of fish midway through the film: as the Mestre and the net-owner

argue, Aruã attempts to fight the net-owner in a brief show of rebellious spirit but is pulled

away by the Mestre. Following this, with the status quo restored, Aruã looks downcast, and

the Mestre provides him some comfort. The visual composition of the first of these shots (see

Figure 9) is short-hand for the binarized, hierarchical relationship between the Mestre and

net-owner. It is a visual structure that is repeated a moment later, when Aruã takes the place

of the net-owner in the shot (see Figure 10).

<INSERT FIGURES 8 and 9 HERE>

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Here, the prolonged contact on the part of the Mestre and the affection he displays for his

protégé is comforting and protective, but it could just as easily be read as holding Aruã in his

place within the social hierarchy. Here, homosociality and the affect expressed therein

becomes entangled with stagnancy and with a restoration of the status quo. Finally, we are

shown on numerous occasions that Aruã is venerated by the villagers as a semi-divine, saint-

like figure and, by dint of this mystification, they refuse to criticize his actions. The broad

structures of oppression require Aruã as their keystone: the white capitalists exert control via

the community’s fishing net; the Mestre furthers the community’s dependence on the net

because he believes Yemanjá will furnish them with food no matter how it is obtained; and

the Mestre’s authority, and his faith, are both supported fundamentally by the pacifying mark

borne by Aruã. At the core of the structures supporting the status quo is an unalterable

active–passive relationship. It is this aspect of the status quo, a relational essentialism, against

which, I argue, Firmino eventually directs his revolutionary energies.

Fractured essences, queer subversion

Having outlined how relations of power operate in Barravento, I can now suggest that

Firmino’s first two attempts to demystify Aruã and liberate the community fail because, at

base, they repeat the relational logic of the status quo. In the first case, Firmino attempts to

kill Aruã by contesting the protection afforded by Yemanjá via sorcery. Here, an attempt at

mastering an orixá simply duplicates relations of power (master/subordinate) and fails

because the dominant term (Yemanjá) will always be stronger than the subordinate (a human

sorcerer, paid by Firmino). In the second case, Firmino hopes to deplete the community’s

resources to unbearable levels by destroying the net, but this again remains within binary

thinking in that he aims to force the subordinate term (the fishermen) to rise up against the

dominant term (the capitalists) and, in any case, only ends up strengthening the community’s

reliance on Candomblé. By repeating established power-relations, even with the aim of

17

overturning the established order, Firmino inadvertently secures the status quo. In line with

the analysis set out above, Firmino cannot bring about social change by forcing Aruã to act,

by fighting him or by ordering him to do so, because such behaviour would place Firmino in

an ‘active’ position over a subordinate Aruã and instantly reproduces the relationships of

domination and submission that the former seeks to dislodge. It would change the face of the

system, not its fundamental structure.

Firmino’s third attempt (Cota’s seduction of Aruã) more effectively fractures

essentialized binary relationships. If we unpack Firmino’s motives, we find elements that

lead us to interpret Firmino as potentially nurturing an unconscious or implicit desire for

Aruã. This desire also impels his revolutionary ambitions. Furthermore, the form the desire

takes has some homology to the solution he proposes in this third attempt at politicization.

Eve Sedgwick’s (1985) analysis of love triangles is pertinent to a key set of

relationships here (Firmino, Cota and Aruã). Sedgwick suggests that ‘homosocial desire’, a

neologism formed by combining ‘homosocial’ (social bonds between persons of the same

sex) with ‘desire’ understood in psychoanalytic terms as ‘the affective or social force, the

glue […] that shapes an important relationship’, has long implicitly determined male-male

relationships (1985: 2). She suggests that homosocial structures might be constructed on

powerful bonds of male–male desire, but, thanks to the compulsory heterosexuality that

accompanies patriarchal culture, this desire must be repressed – a repression, she argues, that

is part and parcel of a child’s progression through the various phases of psychosexual

development (Sedgwick 1985: 21; Warner 1993: xiv). To support her thesis, Sedgwick points

to evidence of intense rivalry in literary portrayals of love triangles that are composed of two

men who vie for the affections of the same woman. Intrigued by the intensity of the male–

male bond (which may often exceed the desire either man expresses for the coveted woman),

Sedgwick argues that the patriarchal restrictions placed on their sexual behaviour make men
18

unable to express desire for each other directly. They must route such desire through a proxy,

a permissible object of desire, namely, in the case of a love triangle, the woman. The result is

an indirect expression of desire for each other, which manifests as intense rivalry. 2

How this maps onto the film is more or less straightforward. Although Firmino

spends the duration of the film in conflict with Aruã, much of this conflict is mediated

through Cota, forming a triadic structure similar to the rivalrous love triangle analysed by

Sedgwick. Indeed, Firmino’s sexual activities with Cota are at some point always defined

with reference to Aruã (likewise, Aruã’s only sexual experience comes about at Firmino’s

behest). For example, when Firmino and Cota first have sex, Firmino interrupts the act of

coitus twice before discussing how he feels about Aruã – his passion for Cota seems

completely subsumed by his rage at Aruã. Firmino then returns to the same topic later on,

when Cota enquires as to why he is unable to settle down and marry. Intense homosocial

desire seems to dispel or interrupt the actualizing of heterosexual desire. In this sense, Aruã

implicitly defines Firmino’s relationship with Cota. Sedgwick’s theory also helps explain

why Firmino seems so motivated to remove Yemanjá’s mark from Aruã. As mentioned

above, each time Firmino tries to have sex with Cota, notions of Aruã’s passivity interrupt his

lovemaking – which suggests that Firmino cannot perform in heterosexual coitus so long as

Aruã is marked by the orixá, that is, so long as Aruã is a suspected homosexual. As a

structuring of male desire designed precisely to avoid the open acknowledgement of

homosexuality, the male–male–female triangle cannot properly function if one of the men is

actually considered to be homosexual; this would prevent the female element from serving as

a convincing proxy for the desires of the men (it is no rivalry, even a pretended rivalry, if one

of the men is openly uninterested in the woman), which would in turn raise suspicion over the

male–male desiring relation itself. I suggest that Firmino’s frustration could be partly

explained by the inability to form a working bond of homosocial desire with Aruã, stymied
19

by the effeminizing effects of the latter’s always-passive relationship with Yemanjá. A clear

tension exists between two systems of sexual meaning: Aruã’s passivity (an identity

determined by the traditional model) prevents the fluid articulation of a homosocial bond

(which belongs to the object-choice model of sexual identity). The solution to the problem of

Firmino’s frustrated desire is simple: Aruã must become active (masculine, heterosexual) so

that Firmino can more convincingly express his homosocial desire for him as rivalry via a

proxy. Or, put another way, Aruã must become unquestionably heterosexual so that Firmino

can desire him in a homosocial sense using the love triangle. A solution to Firmino’s desiring

problems would appear to be entangled with a solution to the community’s paralysis. As with

the possibilities of political enfranchisement, Firmino cannot simply compel Aruã to take up

a new active essence because this will render the latter passive (subjected to Firmino’s will),

and thus remains as unsuitable a partner for a rivalrous love triangle as he was before.

It would be important to signal, at this point, that homosocial desire has an inherently

ambivalent quality. It is a desire that superficially presents itself as a non-sexual expression

of feeling between men, but also helps trouble stable sexual identity by revealing desire’s

own duplicity of intent; it is desire in theory or appearance directed at a woman but really

aimed at other men which suggests that heterosexual identity only exists as such by dint of a

formative act of homosexual love. The idea of an ambivalent desire, a desire for women that

hides a desire for men, masked and articulated in the same expression, foreshadows

Firmino’s final, successful attempt at liberating Aruã, which I argue can be read as an attempt

to create in the latter an ambivalent state of both activity and passivity.

Conclusion: The revolutionary ambivalence of a ‘barravento’

At the climax of the film, Firmino persuades Cota to seduce Aruã, an act he believes will

break the sexual prohibition placed on Aruã and free him from Yemanjá’s stultifying
20

possession. Cota finds Aruã on a beach at night. At first, the seduction proceeds as expected.

Cota enters the sea, enticing Aruã’s gaze and a short while later the two embrace. Firmino,

hidden nearby, watches them have sex, taking an evident pleasure in Aruã’s corruption. Here,

the film triangulates the looks of Firmino and Aruã – Firmino watches Aruã, Aruã watches

Cota (see Figures 11 and 12).

<INSERT FIGUES 11 and 12 HERE>

Firmino’s voyeuristic gaze effectively shapes Aruã’s first experience of sexual activity with a

woman and helps to support an argument for homosocial desire as a structuring force in their

relationship. Aruã undergoes a transformation when he has sex with Cota, the act of sexual

penetration positions him as an ‘active’ male, and he can now serve as the ‘conventional’

(active, masculine, presumed heterosexual) second male in a love-triangle-type structure as

described by Sedgwick. With Aruã’s activity confirmed, Firmino is able to straightforwardly

articulate his own prohibited desires for him through Cota, by taking voyeuristic pleasure in

witnessing their coitus. As discussed, however, the fact that Firmino has effectively

engineered this sexual act himself consequentially replicates hierarchies of active/passive –

just as his framing gaze is desirous, it would also appear to reinscribe Aruã within a system

of active/passive, with Firmino now as the active term.

All is not lost, however. Running concurrently with the story of Aruã’s seduction is a

storyline focused on Naina and her initiation into the Candomblé cult. Barravento sets up a

series of visual correspondences between the two narratives, using montage to connect

characters together into visually similar couples. Juxtaposed shots of their eyes connect Aruã

and Naina (see Figures 12 and 13): Aruã’s express hesitancy when he sees Cota – he looks at

her, but, knowing he is forbidden from sexual intercourse, tries not to look.

<INSERT FIGURE 13 HERE>

21

This match the hesitancy Naina expresses, again with her eyes, when under the sway of the

Candomblé ritual (see Figure 13). Naina often looks directly at the camera, which has the

effect of suggesting some sort of contact with an Other, a presence exterior to the mundane

world. Here, as Stam suggests, the film appears to recognize Yemanjá herself as character

(1997). It is worth pointing out the troubling of racial hierarchies that takes place when a

white woman is possessed by an implicitly black orixá, which could be read as a ‘mastering’

of whiteness by a black divinity. However, simply reversing a hierarchy does not change the

underlying logic of that hierarchy, and so it is reasonable to suggest that what this apparent

reversal might mean for the prospects of a more intersectional analysis of the film is not

wholly clear.

Hesitant, ambivalent looks from both Aruã and Naina also help set up a second set of

correspondences between Cota and the camera (as a stand-in for Yemanjá). These

equivalences are cemented as Cota plays and frolics in the sea to music taken from

Candomblé ceremony running on the soundtrack, which, given that Yemanjá is heavily

associated with the sea, makes it possible to read her display as a performance of the goddess

herself. Moments later, Cota emerges from the sea to lie on the beach, her reflection in the

wet sand doubling her image, which connotes a dual status as both Cota and Yemanjá (see

Figure 14).

<INSERT FIGURE 14 HERE>

In fact, the film suggests equivalences between Aruã and Naina, and between Cota and

Yemanjá, without erasing their own specificities: Aruã is both an active, gazing subject, and,

equated with Naina, a figure about to be possessed by an orixá. Likewise, Cota is both a

passive sexual object and, when performing as Yemanjá, an active subject. Intriguingly, the

film sustains this ambivalence as they have sex. On the one hand, the viewer can presume
22

that Aruã penetrates Cota, meaning Aruã takes on the active role, and, by default, Cota the

passive. But Aruã does not initiate sexual pursuit. Instead, Cota’s actions generate and

perhaps sustain their coitus. With Aruã positioned beneath her, Cota dominates him, seeming

to possess him in a very literal sense by pulling his hair and cradling his head, as if he were a

coveted object.

Other elements of the mise-en-scène serve to maximize the correspondences between

the respective experiences, for example the hypnotic music played in the terreiro muddies the

difference between the two sets; the lighting, more precisely the use of heavy shadow,

similarly reduces the difference between the night-time beach and the terreiro. This

propinquity helps underline the ambivalence at the heart of Aruã’s first sexual experience. It

is a defloration, where he literally takes an active penetrative role, breaking free from

Yemanjá’s curse. Nevertheless, he is also possessed by Yemanjá, as suggested by the visual

symbolic equivalences between him and the possessed Naina, his passive role initiating the

sexual act and how Cota sexually dominates him, as a figurative parallel to the process of

possession itself. Sex with Cota-as-Yemanjá is both holy and profane, literally active but

figuratively a passive possession, prohibited and sacred; in other words, taboo. Aruã may

have proved himself an ‘active’ man, but the moment of penetration is also, paradoxically, a

moment where his status as possession, as object, is most visibly affirmed. As Xavier

suggests, the film uses montage to embrace both mysticism and materialist critique and is not

easily identified as a champion for either one or the other (1980). Similarly, formal and

diegetic events produce Aruã’s identity in terms no longer comprehensible according to the

active/passive logic. In sum, Aruã is transformed from a structurally passive individual into a

subject whose active or passive status is unknowable, uncertain – a fracture within an

otherwise inescapable binary system. This moment is key, I suggest, to breaking the logic of
23

active/passive essentialism that entraps the community, for it is this relational essentialism

and not simply their domination that ensnares them.

The immediate consequences for the community are harsh. A storm engulfs the coast

soon after, killing Cota, Naina’s stepfather and another fisherman. Firmino returns to cajole

the community into political action. His words aim to demystify Aruã, ‘he’s a regular guy –

he likes women, and has no power over the sea!’ (Rocha 1962, my translation). Firmino sells

the community a vision of Aruã as a regular man, just the same as the others, free of the

paralysing mark of (homosexual) difference and able to lead the community out of

oppression. He later contrasts Aruã’s leadership with that of the Mestre, who, still trapped by

Yemanjá’s mark and her essentializing relational logic, is an ‘escravo’ (slave). Of course, the

audience has enough evidence to believe that Aruã’s newly found, expressly masculine

identity does not actually correspond with an ‘active’ essence. Rather, his status has been

made unintelligible, at least according to oppressive active/passive hierarchies. As Bersani

writes in another context, a subject that makes a break from conventional relations (in this

case, active/passive) is free to imagine new forms of community that avoid repeating

oppressive structures (2009: 176–77). Firmino’s efforts engineer Aruã as a subject with a

concealed resistance to binary relations of power, who then represents one of the only ways

that the community might move forward without falling back into the trap of oppressive

hierarchy. He ‘is’ ambivalent, both passive self and dominating other, or, perhaps more

accurately, he prevents activity and passivity from attaching to self and other, scrambling this

previously static alignment and precluding the re-establishment of fixed hierarchies. It is

precisely at the point in which the racial, sexual and material relations implode that this

instability opens up hope for the future, but with immediately violent outcomes. The

consequence of this scene is that Aruã’s ambivalence seems to open a space for new

relationships – non-essentializing, mobile and contradictory – that, in turn, gestures towards a

24

society free from relational oppression. Such a space would seem vital for genuine political

resistance of the kind Firmino has been struggling towards throughout the film.

There are reasons to be cautious. First, as mentioned above, as a result of her

experience in the terreiro, Naina is fully initiated into the Candomblé community. Unlike

Aruã it seems that she remains trapped within the relational logic of passive and active.

Furthermore, while the film seems to suggest an easing of racial tensions via the integration

of whiteness into the black community (via possession by Yemanjá and so via the

propagation of spiritualist values) it is difficult to pin down the consequences of this narrative

choice. It seems to suggest or reinforce a gendered, hierarchized association between women

and spirituality, on the one hand, and, when Aruã is stripped of his mystical status and sent to

the city to work, between men and labour on the other. Further attention to Barravento’s

representation of race, gender and sexuality as social categories and how they interact, is

therefore needed to build upon the strands I have opened up around sexuality and queerness

in the film.

One could also make the point that Aruã’s apparent revolutionary break with

active/passive relations takes something of a backwards step when he helms the community

(as an ‘active’ leader of a ‘passive’ group). Significantly, however, his first decisive action as

leader is to leave his charges entirely, departing from the coast to seek work in the city, as

Bernardet points out (1977: 61). Bersani suggests that it might be necessary to relinquish,

temporarily, social relations with others in order to imagine new non-binary ways of relating,

and Aruã’s actions at the end of the film could be understood in the light of this

relinquishment (2009). In Bersani’s view, the revolt of the oppressed ‘will be effective only if

their subjectivity can no longer be related to as an oppressed subjectivity’ (2009: 177). On

that point, how Aruã will go on to lead a community without replicating oppression is not

clear. Barravento arguably draws attention to the need for revolution not only in terms of
25

racial or material relations as the literature has tended to assume, but rather across multiple

power relations at once, so as to fundamentally undo the active/passive binaries that structure

Brazilian society, but he still offers little vision for a society beyond that point.

The analysis presented here not only demonstrates how sexuality in Barravento is

overdetermined, with multiple registers informing concepts of sexual identity, but also how

tensions and ambivalences in these registers can be read in a politically productive way. Put

differently, I have attempted to show how, by examining tensions and ambivalences in sexual

identity, a certain radical potential can be traced in the film that has, so far, been left

unexplored. There are advantages to a queer interpretative lens: it helps explain the

transformation of Aruã at the end of the film better than a Marxist reading (which would

ignore the play of symbolism tied to Candomblé) and better than a spiritualist reading

(because Aruã must actively break from Candomblé to achieve freedom). A queer reading

also helps explain Firmino’s behaviour more satisfactorily by foregrounding the idea that

Firmino seeks to destabilize both the fixed power relations in the community’s economic

organization and those of Candomblé, and by suggesting unconscious or implicit motivators

in the workings of homosocial desire. This helps explain actions – for example, his rebuke of

Cota, or his obsessive return to Aruã’s veneration by the community – that remain unclear

according to a straight Marxist reading. Finally, by attending to how sexuality is bound up

with various signifying regimes, a queer reading highlights how the possibility for real,

effective resistance to these regimes opens up when they are most forcefully brought to bear

on Aruã at the film’s climax, in other words, when their collective power is most intensified.

I do not presume to have attempted a fully intersectional analysis of how power works

across social categories of race, gender and sexuality in Barravento, but by attending to one

of those axes this article goes some way towards clearing the ground for further analysis

along intersectional lines and has highlighted the film’s complex positioning of Naina as a
26

possible starting point for such a study. In this sense, then, the article shows how queer

readings are useful for canonical Brazilian films of the period, insofar as they attend to

understandings of sexual identity firmly rooted in context, while also opening up questions

for future research.

References

Bernardet, J. C. (1977), Brasil em tempo de cinema: Ensaios sobre o cinema brasileiro, São

Paulo: Paz e Terra.

Bersani, L. (2009), Homos, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carvalho, N. (2008), ‘Racismo e anti-racismo no Cinema Novo’, in E. Hambúrguer and T.

Amâncio (eds), Estudos de Cinema Socine, São Paulo: Anablume, pp. 53–60.

Fry, P. (1982), Para inglês ver: Identidade e política na cultura brasileira, Rio de Janeiro:

Zahar Editores.

____ (1986), ‘Male homosexuality and spirit possession in Brazil’, Journal of

Homosexuality, 11:3&4, pp. 137–53.

Green, J. N. (2001), Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil,

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

27

Matory, J. L. (2005), Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy

in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Miller, D. A. (1991), ‘Anal Rope’, in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay

Theories, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 114-133.

Moreno, A. (2001), A personagem homossexual no cinema brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro:

FUNARTE.

Nunes, R. P. A (2011), ‘Barravento: um filme, duas histórias’, Razón y Palabra, 76, 2 May–

June, pp. 1–18, available at:

http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/N/N76/monotematico/11_Nunes_M76.pdf.

Accessed 5 November 2017.

Rocha, G. (1962), Barravento, Salvador: Iglu Filmes.

____ (1963), Revisão crítica do cinema brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.

Parker, R. (1962),

____ (1991), Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil,

Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Parker, R. G. (1991), Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary

Brazil, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

____ (1999), Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male Homosexuality, and Emerging

Gay Communities in Brazil, New York, NY: Routledge.

28

Rodrigues, J. C. (1979), ‘O Homossexual e o Cinema Brasileiro’, Lampião da Esquina, 11

April.

Sadek, I. (2011), ‘A Serto of migrants, flight and affect: Genealogies of place and image in

Cinema Novo and contemporary Brazilian cinema’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas

(new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas), 7:1, pp. 59–72.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,

New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Sobenes, A. (2013), ‘Barravento: Resistência e alienação no candomblé’, Revista Brasileira

de História das Religões, 5:15, pp. 2–9.

Stam, R. (1997), Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian

Cinema and Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Trevisan, J. S. (1986), Perverts in Paradise (trans. M. Foreman), London: GMP Publishing

Ltd.

Warner, M. (1993), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press.

29

Xavier, I. (1980), ‘Barravento: Glauber Rocha 1962, alienação vs. identidade’, Discurso, 13,

pp. 53–86.

Contributor details

James Hodgson completed his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on

Latin American visual culture and in particular how form relates to the representation of

sexuality. He has presented widely on the topic of homosexuality in Brazilian cinema and is

currently working on an article that explores moral panics and art.

Contact:

University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

E-mail: james.hodgson-2@manchester.ac.uk

Notes
30

1 Leo Bersani (2009: 175–76) charts a similar kind of relational essentialism in Jean Genet’s

The Maids. In his reading, the play set out characters whose inner identities are totally

defined by hierarchical relationships – the identities of the maids, he argues, will always be

determined by their subordinate but aggressive relationship to their mistress.

2 Perhaps Sedgwick’s theory is only partially transferable to a Brazilian context as her models

draw from nineteenth-century English literature. However, the various models informing

Brazilian sexual identity are structured by patriarchy, and, furthermore worth pointing to

Parker’s (1999: 50) comment that neither the ‘traditional’ model (active/passive) nor the

object-choice model (homo/heterosexual) is fully isolable from the other. Nor is Sedgwick’s

rivalrous triangle intended as an ahistoric ‘Platonic’ form but, as she points out, ‘a sensitive

register precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making

graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate

with their societies for empowerment’ (1985: 27).