Released three years after Ganga Bruta, this Discovery of Brazil is certainly not as sophisticated as previous movie by Humberto Mauro, who, anyway, still must be praised by his pioneer work. Besides him, other giants from Brazilian cultural and intellectual circles cooperated in the film. Nobody less than Heitor Villa-Lobos composed the obviously excellent soudtrack. The father of Brazilian radio, Roquette Pinto, was a consultant, together with Afonso Taunay and Bernardino José de Souza. The movie is very didactical, as it was a project by the Ministry of Education for educational reasons. Off course the film was biased by the historical views of those times, very acritical ones. The contact between Portuguese and native people is portrayed as very kind, calm and well intentioned in both sides, in spite of minor mutual strangeness. In the beginning, there is a bizarre inclusion of two kids in Pedro Álvares Cabral's ship, what I cannot believe that may have happened. Technically, the film has a very good production, with a nice portrayal of the ships from inside and outside, and convincing enough costume design and navigation instruments. While there are some nice sail scenes, I considered most of the film too static, almost as if the characters were motionless paintings (no, it was not similar to Barry Lyndon, far from it, if you are thinking about it). It is curious that, despite it be a spoken movie, with some dialogues either in Portuguese or in Tupy, there are also many moments in which the characters talk but the sound is just the musical score, as if it were a silent film. A great part of the old movie portrays the trip from Portugal to America, also showing a map where the ship singals the crossed path. What happened along that trip follows closely the testimonies by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the man in the crew who was responsible for reporting the events. To resume, the film is not a gem, but it is historically important and still has some merits despite dated.
0 out of 0 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink