BRAZILIAN SOCIAL FORMATION AND CLASS STRUGGLE IN SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA

Abstract

This research investigates how Brazilian social formation and class struggle are present in the works “Branco Sai, Preto Fica” (2015) and “Bacurau” (2019). In order to understand Brazilian social formation and its class struggle, the theoretical contribution of a historical-dialectical materialist approach is used. To study the operative tendency of Science Fiction, the historical logic of the emergence and development of Brazilian Sci-fi is researched. With the analyses, one can see in “Branco Sai, Preto Fica” (2015) the peripheralization of the black population in large urban centers as something symptomatic of the Brazilian social formation, in addition to explaining the role of the coercive forces of the State, such as the police, in oppressing the exploited/racialized classes; The reaction to this oppression in the film is a conspiracy whose driving force is the popular culture of marginalized populations to create a bomb that explodes Brasília and the Military Dictatorship that governs the country in the universe of the film. In “Bacurau” (2019), local residents have to fight for survival against foreigners who represent an alien threat from a colonialist/imperialist perspective, and also against the institutions of the Brazilian bourgeois State, such as politicians and businesspeople, who assist in the particular autochthonous oppression that returns for the universality of Brazilian social formation, as well as in this metaphor/analogy for the Brazilian historical development based on the exploitation of foreigners and the maintenance of slavery.