Cinemasparagus: Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City

All Mod Cons

Ever wonder what the story is with that spot in Brazil with the name? You need look no further than Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City [Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova, 1968]. The year prior, the Italian manufacturer and industrial design firm Olivetti commissioned Andrade to make a documentary portrait of the pre-planned city-in-progress, known from before its 1960 construction as "Brasilia." Note the hopeful, utopian ring to the name — if it sounds at all naïvely paradisiacal, that's because it was intended by the civil bureaucratchiks to signal to the people a place conceived as the modern metropolis, one in immediate congruence with the electro-technical times. Over a short span, however, the new capital Brasilia came more to reflect any other city's struggle in maintaining equilibrium among the classes, serving as an environmental/ambient eradication-zone intended to quash class and economical differences across-the-board. In fact, as experienced by all states which eventually give up on 'big ideas' (washing their hands of a Brasilia's now all-but-obvious infeasibility), the project metamorphosed less into "Ys" than into a gilded Potemkin village. And maybe Olivetti had some stake in its progress, or in the propaganda that might keep it at least a semi-functioning, or exploitable, asset. So their man Joaquim Pedro takes to the ground with camera in hand, and the producers are taken aback by this film whose title promises "contradictions."

Raul Marques on Letterboxd wrote: "Ingeniously starts out as a straight-up propaganda for the modernist utopia of a planned metropolis then proceeds to increasingly deconstruct itself to reveal the cracks in the concrete sand castle. Slips at affirming the almost immaculate qualities of the city's design, yet correctly addresses the inescapability of the country's issues independently of a deliberate urban experiment." •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade