IN THE Brazilian and Latin American experience of social construction after the colonial period, and the natural survival of each ethnicity’s culture, it was increasingly realised by most of the leading national social thinkers and serious artists in various genres that the pursuit of development with a prominent national and regional geographic identity — for example, a Brazilian as different from a Portuguese one — posed interesting intellectual and cultural challenges that could be a major stimulus to the mental and physical ingenuity of their citizens’ creative capabilities.
As citizens of a large new geographical area that historically was the last to be known to the rest of the Old World, plus the colonial transfer of that Old World’s values and languages to it, remaining duplicates of older cultural forms would be far easier to maintain (demanding less thought and creativity) than engaging the creative consciousness in its new social circumstances, and thereby constructing a fresh national consciousness from it.
Because the construction of such a national culture comes mainly from innovative structural artists with equally innovative and positive governmental support, it benefits and enhances a nation like Brazil.

Creative constructivism
The construction of a culture based on one’s geographical location, even though everyone is a human transfer with original ancestral or racial roots from somewhere else very far away in the old world of Asia, Europe, and Africa, became an advantageous position within the reality of the Americas (North, Central, Caribbean, and South).
The challenge of constructing such a national culture necessitated the development of the contemporary temperament of modern culture. For this reason, it is in the nations of the Americas (North and South) that some of the best, some of the most excitingly fresh and attractive contemporary modern artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, creative literature, and cinema emerged over the past 80 years.
In facing the contemporary social necessities of their countries and region, such artists inevitably create art which has an everyday positive impact on how to constructively enjoy, overcome or survive various aspects of Brazilian contemporary life. I recently had a chance to see how this is achieved in four Brazilian films made between 2004 and 2009 and shown at the Brazilian Cultural Centre in Georgetown, Guyana, Brazil’s only English-speaking neighbour in South America.
The Centre itself is worthy of comment: Its wooden architecture, with a clean white tiled floor, ample screen, big sofas before a large TV showing Brazilian channels; an adjacent wonderful little library with high glass windows beaming in sunlight and the tropical sky (a strategic construction blocking human ground-level distractions) stocked with Brazilian books on diverse national topics, especially culture; the upper floor with classrooms for students in Portuguese; the outer compound spacious and well kept with towering palm trees and gardens.
The Centre also holds art exhibitions, Brazilian fairs, live music and stage dancing, etc, with sumptuous Brazilian hors d’ouvres  and drinks served.

‘Veronica’
The first film I saw was ‘Veronica’, in good strong colour richly toned with tropical daylight and urban optical/kinetic night lighting. It was made in 2008, mostly in Rio, with zestful lead stars Andrea Beltrao as Veronica, a primary school teacher, and Matheus de Sa as Leandro, a little typically mixed-race Brazilian schoolboy from a congested low-income area, who is never picked up one day after school by his young parents, who have become victims of the city’s drug scene.
It is the typical suspense drama with many escapades, found in Hollywood films and TV serials; indeed, this sort of film is found across the globe today in countries dealing with their own forms of drug abuse and official corruption.
What, then, is the difference of Brazil’s ‘Veronica’ from this increasingly familiar cinematic commercial trend?
The first noticeable quality which stamps this film with Brazilian originality is the opening fine-line graphics of kinetic architectural lines, purely creative, proving the Brazilian cinematic continuity of Brazilian Constructivist fine art made since the 1950s and 60s by wonderful modern Brazilian constructivist painters and graphic artists like Lygia Pape and Lygia Clark, Waldeman Cordeiro, Judith Luand, Helio Oiticica, and many others.
This cinematic style harks back, but in its own Brazilian way, to those exciting artistic openings of 50s and 60s Hollywood films like Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, Stanley Donen’s ‘Charade’, Blake Edwards’ ‘The Pink Panther’ etc, and especially French director Philippe de Broca’s 1960’s ‘That Man From Rio’ with Jean-Paul Belmondo, where the film opens with kinetic bands of colour pulsating to the Samba beat.
What has happened to this exciting cinematic preface in today’s Hollywood and European films?
What happened is that the style was originally adapted from the optical/kinetic Constructivist Fine Art style that was a leading visual style in the late 50s and 60s.
When the style became just another passing trend, its cinematic continuity went out the window. But for many Brazilian filmmakers of today, this Constructivist art tradition is not a trend, but a value; a value which links their films as style and content to social constructivism.