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Clara Balbi
Professor Myriam Sas
Film 100
15 December 2014

Analyzing Karim Anouzs Love for Sale in the light of Andr Bazins concepts of
cinematic realism
1. Introduction
Love for Sale [O Cu de Suely in its original title], directed by Karim Anouz, was
premiered in the 63rd edition of the Venice International Film Festival in 2006. At the time,
the critics immediately linked the movie to the Italian Neorealist movement of the 1950s.
After all, the story of a young woman who decides to raffle her body due to financial
difficulties had already been told in two movies affiliated to the tradition: firstly, in the
segment directed by Victorio De Sica of Bocaccio 70 (1962); secondly, in La Riffa (1991),
directed by Francesco Laudadio and starring Monica Bellucci.
The plot revolves around Hermila, a 21-years-old girl who comes back to her
hometown only to find herself and her newborn son abandoned by the childs father shortly
after she arrives. With no perspectives and dreaming of moving out of the town she so much
hates, she decides to raffle herself the prize, she says, boldly, is a night in paradise.
The relationship between fact and fiction permeates Love for sale from its very start:
the screenplay was inspired by a news report. This wasnt, however, the first time Anouz
flirted with reality. His first short movie, the documentary Seams (1995), builds on
videotaped interviews of his grandmother and four great-aunts in order to discuss sexism in
the Northeast of Brazil; his first feature film, Madame Sat (2002), is about the homonymous
historical figure of the Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s. One of the most controversial characters

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of the carioca bohemian imaginary, Sat, whose real name was Joo Francisco, was both a
transvestite and one of the greatest street fighters of his time.
However, Love for sale which from now on Ill quote as O Cu de Suely (in a free
translation, Suelys Sky) is probably the most realist movie of Anouzs filmography until
now, even if the director himself denies the labeling. Set in in Iguatu, a little town in the
middle of the Northeast of Brazil, the actors performances rely heavily on improvisation, and
in a lot of the shots the crew was able to use real inhabitants of the town as extras. The actors
arrived in town a month and a half before the actual shooting of the film and reproduced in
real life the relationships their corresponding characters maintained in the diegesis: for
example, Hermila Guedes, who plays Hermila/Suely, shared a house with the actresses who
played her grandmother and aunt in the fictional world.
Anouzs refusal on classifying O Cu de Suely as realist is appropriately relevant,
once it draws its origins in a political concern: the idea that a film that proposes itself to
capture reality is pretending to be a neutral speech about the world when it never is. It is
in that assumption of objectivity that lays the danger.
Funnily enough, Andr Bazin, the renowned French film critic on whose writings Ill
be basing my analysis of O Cu de Suely, commits, in many essays, the exact offense the
Brazilian filmmaker so much condemns: the appraisal of an objective cinematographic
image, which he calls a pure cinema. Bazin writes: No more actors, no more story, no
more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more
cinema. (60) For many post-Bazin critics, including Anouz, such idea of the impartiality of
the image is utterly impossible, and I cannot disagree to that. Why then insist on Bazin to
help me through this particular reading of O Cu de Suely?

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My efforts when bringing to the discussion Bazinian terms are less in the direction of
his support of a particular type of cinema (in this case, that of the utopian pure cinema) 1,
but more in the sense of recognizing a great accurateness in the categories of analysis he
established in his attempts to depict the new image created by Neorealism.
Bazin defends that the biggest change between the Classical and the Neorealist
cinematographic image is in its smallest composing particle: the narrative unit. If in the
classical cinema that unit corresponded to the shot, an either logical or subjective point of
view (28) into which the pro-filmic event was divided, the narrative unit of Neorealism is
the fact, a fragment of concrete reality. Unlike the shot, this image-fact is ambiguous,
multiple, accidental, hence resembling reality itself.
That understanding of Neorealism not as a matter of social content the way the
movement had been classified until then but, instead, of aesthetics, is Bazins biggest
theoretical innovation on the subject, allowing not only a whole new comprehension of the
Neorealism, but also of realism in general. He writes:
Potenkim turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its
political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real
settings and the star with an anonymous crowd, but because Eisenstein was the
greatest montage theoretician of his day realism in art can only be achieved
in one way through artifice. (25, 26)
Therefore, a given art piece is qualified as realist not due to the content which it
represents, but to the form with which it represents it. Of course different movements, such as
the Soviet dialectical montage the author talks about in the excerpt, employ different

1 Its important to note that Bazin is a writer who tends to contradict himself a lot, especially when are brought
to comparison the film critiques he published in periodicals throughout his career and his theoretical work,
constituted by essays like The Ontology of the Photographic Image or The Evolution of the Language of the
Cinema. Therefore, even the appraisal for the pure image should not be taken as his final argument regarding
the cinematographic image.

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techniques in the effort of achieving that realism. The goal, nevertheless, is the same: an
aesthetical concept that somehow translates a feeling of reality.
In the specific case of Neorealism, Bazin says, those techniques to achieve realism
consisted on the elimination of three classical paradigms from the screen: the disappearance
of the actors, of the mise-en-scne, and of the story. My idea is hence to investigate each one
of those three levels of disappearance in the text of O Cu de Suely, having Bazins writings
on Neorealism as my foundation.
If Anouz resents the qualification of his second feature movie as realist because its
target was not to capture reality (which translates a criteria of realism based on content),
my aim with this essay is to propose that O Cu de Suely is, indeed, a realist movie. However,
its take on reality has nothing to do with what it represents, but with how it chooses to
represent it. And when it comes to representation techniques, some of the resemblance the
critics and the public of the 63rd Venice Film Festival perceived so intensely between O Cu
de Suely and Italian Neorealism may as well be justified.

2. The disappearance of the actors


Contradicting one of the most popular-known features of the Italian Neorealism, that
of the lack of actors in favor of real people, Bazin observes that an analysis of the
movements practice reveals a significantly more common presence of professional
performers on set than what the typecast might indicate. Because of that, he suggests talking
instead of a law of the amalgam. In that sense, the hallmark of the Italian film wouldnt be,
historically, the absence of professional actors; it would rather be a rejection of the star
concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally (26).
The reason behind that amalgam is that the public shouldnt be burdened with any
preconceptions concerning the films main characters, a view which is shared by Anouz.

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With the standard means of audiovisual in Brazil being the telenovelas, soap-opera-like
products which are aired daily and usually last eight months, the director worried not to cast
actors who were too familiar to the public: the story wouldnt work if the performers had
already been inside the intimacy of the spectators living room (Avellar and Sarno, 40).
Taking into account that law of the amalgam review suggested by Bazin, the
choices of O Cu de Suelys director on the work with actors are very close to those of
Neorealism: the film is constantly playing on the mix-up between reality and fiction. A mixup that starts with the characters stealing of names from their respective performers
(Hermila, the leading character, is Hermila Guedes in real life; Joo, her love interest, is
named Joo Miguel), but doesnt stop there: it is present in the use of the real-life settings of
Iguatu, in the improvisation and stage coaching dynamics and, finally, in the use of the city
folks as extras.
For the director, it is in that last point the actors interaction with the regular city
folk that the approximation of the film with reality is most visible (Hessel). In the scene, for
example, in which Hermila is selling the raffle to a group of men in the gas station, the men
had no idea of what was going on. The director of photography didnt even have time to light
up the frame: he just captured it. In another sequence, that of the dancing club, the crew
advertised the party as a real event all over town. It was a hit, and they filmed it from 11pm to
1am; then, from 2am to 5am, the shots of Hermila hooking up with a guy were recorded. In
the party scene, Anouz tells, everything is legit; there was even a knife fight happening in it.
In that sense, the film assumes an almost documentary vein, constantly playing around with
the borders of reality and fiction.
Its important to highlight, however, that the process coaching the actors was just as
important to this feeling of realness in the movie as the mixing up of professional and nonactors on set maybe even more. To prepare the actors for O Cu de Suely, Karim Anouz

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worked with the first (and most controversial) acting coach of Brazil, Ftima Toledo. Unlike
most contemporary acting coaches, Ftima refuses the Actors Studio method based on
Stanislavski, a technique centered in the psychological deconstruction of a scene, in favor of
a more holistic approach. In her words, shes seeking sensations rather than emotions from
the actors she works with (Pereira 183).
Ftima goes on about the technique she started to develop in the 1980s for Pixote
(Hector Babenco, 1981), a method that has been behind some of the most important Brazilian
movies of the last two decades, including City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002) and Elite
Squad (Jos Padilha, 2007) (Fraia):
For the kind of work were going to do here, the artifice of acting is a
bad thing In this method, there are no characters. In real cinema, one
shouldnt think of creating a character, he has to really live a situation. The
situations may be fictional, and its not really us, but at the same time its not a
character as well, because we are there, living it. After the cut, its over: the
actor comes back to its normal life, but in that moment, its really the person
the one whos living that.
Even if at first it may sound paradoxical, Ftima Toledos approach resembles in
many ways Bazins commentary on Neorealist acting dynamics. For him, the movements
take on performance isnt properly a matter of actors/not-actors in itself. In truth, it is rather
an issue of the refusal of theatricality by the movements very nature. Thats because, by
definition, Neorealism rejects analysis after all, its major turn was the substitution of the
shot for the fact as its minimal formative unit. Unlike the shot, immediately associated with a
cutting of reality in order to represent a specific point of view, the image-fact demands certain
integrality in portraying an event: it demands that it records reality in its wholesomeness.

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Well, if stage-acting presupposes on the part of the actor a psychological analysis of


the emotions to which a character is subject (Bazin 97), nothing more appropriate to realism
than a technique of coaching the actors that deny them that analysis of character traits and its
role on a story in favor of a wholeness in terms of performance.
Ftima Toledos method of coaching brings that denial of analysis to the limit: in
many of the movies in which she works, the actors dont have access to the scripts, being
progressively guided into the situations they will perform in the actual scenes through
exercises. In the case of O Cu de Suely, although the actors did have access to the script,
they had no idea what their lines of dialogue were. For Ftima, knowing the dialogues from
the start make the actors perceive not a story in the scripts theyre reading, but characters a
perception that would stray them away from the universe of the diegesis shes fighting to put
them in integrally.

3. The disappearance of the mise-en-scne


The second item of disappearances that, according to Bazin, Neorealism uses in its
set of aesthetical strategies to achieve a realistic image ending the mise-en-scne. The French
expression defines everything that appears on-screen in a given cinematographic image, may
it be its composition, props, actors, costumes, lighting, etc. Bazin himself had great
responsibility in the popularization of the term, using it in his writings on auteur theory. After
all, a true auteur should, above all, master the art of the mise-en-scne. Bazin proposes,
however, that in Neorealism the mise-en-scne is no longer needed, once the image-fact
would be able to talk for itself. . In an essay on De Sicas Bicycle Thieves (1948), he writes
that
the disappearance of the mise-en-scne is likewise the fruit of a
dialectal progress in the style of the narrative the event is sufficient unto

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itself without the direction having to shed any further light on it by means of
camera angles, purposely chosen camera positions (57)
I find Bazins determining of the disappearance of the mise-en-scne as a
characteristic of Neorealism quite problematic. Firstly, because assuming the directors
decisions arent present in the final image of a film ultimately culminates in understanding
that image as neutral an issue already discussed in this paper. Secondly, because it
contradicts some of the critics own writings. Bazin dedicated entire essays to the appraisal of
the directorial styles of Rosselini and DeSica. If one of the features of Neorealism is in truth
the absence of that shedding of the light on the event through directorial choices, why
should these directors be acclaimed, then?
In an effort to reconcile that said objectivity and the signature of the auteur, he writes
(98): It [the Naples depicted in Rosselinis Viaggio in Italia (1949)] is rather a mental
landscape at once as objective as a straight photograph and as subjective as pure personal
consciousness. Even so, I dont think this tentative explanation solves the theoretical
problem of declaring that, in Neorealism, there is no mise-en-scne.
Instead, Id like to highlight another view of the critic on the subject. As already said,
Bazin is an author whose contradictions are many. In this case, however, I find the paradox
established fruitful, once it provides multiple answers for a question indeed difficult: whats
the relationship between the existent reality and the one seen on-screen?
His first proposition suggests an answer that I find far too simplistic: Neorealism
would have ended the mise-en-scne, and for that reality would be the same in both the
physical and the screen spaces. Conversely, another answer of his, published in 1948 in
Esprit magazine, may be more interesting for this paper. In the essay An Aesthetic of
Reality, Bazin proposes that the reason we perceive veracity in a Neorealist image is

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because it somehow carries a human trait as if the Italian camera had mimicked our five
senses, a cinematic tact.
The camera would thus retain something of a human quality, a projection of hand
and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness. (33) With
that description of the Italian mise-en-scne in mind, the camera of Rosselini, acting as
almost an explorer who wanders through the space, is suddenly grasped. Most importantly, it
is with its qualification as somehow human that Anouzs camera takes form. In the way
with which it trembles in the scene after Hermila is expelled from home by her grandmother
always careful not to follow her too closely, as if it was tracking a scared little animal. In
the awkwardness with which it records the sex scenes.
The mise-en-scne of O Cu de Suely, just like that of the Neorealist movies, is
antipodal to that of the Hollywood silver-screen kisses. Unlike the Classical Narrative Film,
which through on-screen architecture and montage makes sure every piece of information
offered is ready to be digested by the spectator, the camera of the Neorealism (and, of course,
of O Cu de Suely) has no interest in informing anyone about anything. In the place of
information, it invites the viewer to experience the image on screen. As Anouz himself puts
it, its one thing to get out from a movie informed about a character, and another to get out
from a movie being able to smell him. (Avellar and Sarno 34)

4. The disappearance of the story


Bazin designates the disappearance of the story as the final element of the tripod of
aesthetic techniques employed by Neorealism to achieve that feeling of reality so pungently
characteristic of the movement. The end of the story, the author explains, would signify the
passage of the film narrative basis from the theater to the novel that is to say, a dedramatization of the film storytelling procedures.

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The scriptwriting manuals teach that there is no movie without a chain of dramatic
events which, ruled by the laws of cause and effect, move the path of the main character
forward. A subtler, yet no less fundamental rule of the classical cinema derives from that
principle of causality: everything that doesnt fit in the logical path of action/reaction should
be excluded from the screenplay. Hitchcock summarizes the idea perfectly: Drama is life
with the dull bits cut out.
Neorealism, however, inaugurates a cinematic style in which drama (which comes
from the Greek action) has no longer a place. The reality as seen through the lenses of the
Neorealist directors is understood not in an logical way, but in its integrality, its
wholesomeness, bringing to the spectator a form of experiencing the life that unfolds onscreen much more similarly to that that unfolds off of it. Life as we know it is not an
organized chain of cause and effect, the Neorealists whisper in our ears. No: life is accidental,
sometimes illogical, and between one event leading to the next stands a whole lot of dull,
random moments which we would better cut out if we were to make our lives seem
interesting to the general public (according to Hitchcock, that is).
Even though O Cu de Suely still presents main causal anchors in the script, theyre
only three: when Hermila realizes her husband abandoned her, when she decides to raffle
herself, and when she gets expelled from her house by her grandmother. Because of that
exchangeability between most the events, Anouz comments, the editing of the movie was
extremely painful: some of the scenes recorded could go anywhere. Its the same case of what
happens in Bicycle Thieves, as Bazin describes in his critic of the film: The film unfolds in
the level of pure accident: the rain, the seminarians, the Catholic Quakers, the restaurant all
these are seemingly interchangeable, no one seems to have arranged them in order on a
dramatic spectrum. (59)
The movies most striking device on its representation of reality, however, is its

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distension of time. Time in O Cu de Suely is not only that of the real actions that, as Bazin
writes in the critic of La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948), base the construction of the
image in the event itself, sparing no details in representing even the dullest act, like rolling a
cigarette. While those are abundant, they tend to have descriptive functions, like the ones
showing Hermila working at night as a car washer in the gas station the scenes bring to the
spectator an understanding of the physicality of that work, which depends on the body in an
incredibly dry, hot environment.
No: Anouz not only divides the event in the littlest possible pieces, but he also
extends its duration both ahead and before its very happening. Its as if us, spectators, were
not only invited to spy on what happened to the characters, but also to experience, together
with the them, the time after, the oppression of the time which follows the fact.
Some of the most beautiful shots in the movie represent exactly that time after in
which the effects of the just-happened or just-said seem to linger on the very materiality of
the screen. The scene after Hermila is kicked out of the house, which has already been cited,
is one of them; but there are illustrations equally as powerful as it. The shot in which
Hermila, silhouetted, waits to meet the guy who won the raffle, the stranger with whom shell
have to sleep with, for example; or the last shot of the movie, in which we see Joo, whos in
love with Hermila, following the bus in which shes parting from Iguatu with his motorcycle
only to, one minute after both the bus and the motorcycle have disappeared in the horizon
of the road, watch Joo coming back to the city in his own lingering, melancholic time after
the departure of the one he loves.

5. Conclusion
As we can see, each of the levels of disappearance that, for Bazin, together form the
aesthetics techniques used by Neorealism in its search for a more realist image is also

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present more or less problematically according to the disappearance in question in
Anouzs O Cu de Suely. Therefore, at least when its form is analyzed, the movie could,
indeed, be classified as realist.
What is the political purpose of that realism, however? For Bazin, the revolutionary
cinema would be the one in which the image would resemble reality so much that it would be
reality. Its worth remembering that, for Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter of Neorealist
pearls such as Bicycle Thieves (DeSica, 1948) and Umberto D. (DeSica, 1952), the perfect
neorealist movie would the one which showed the life of a man in which nothing
extraordinary happened for the whole ninety minutes.
For Karim Anouz, however, sees film as a political weapon. The use of realism in his
filmography is not purely there to emulate reality its a means to change it. Unlike Bazin,
the Brazilian director sees in the possibilities of realism the representation of a world that is
not only quite unfine as the real one is, but one in which change is possible, in which his
characters are able to mess up things with the status quo. For that, I would like to finish this
paper with a quote by him.
Drama, as the opposite of tragedy, its a possibility of transformation
and in a last instance the cinema as a possibility of transformation and
reinvention. The cinematographic experience is a transforming one. I have
faith in cinema as I have in life. (Garcia)

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Workscited
Avellar,JosCarlos,andGeraldoSarno."KarimAnouz:UmOlharPoticoePoltico."
Cinemais2003:2047.Print.
Bazin,Andr.WhatIsCinema?Trans.HughGray.1sted.Vol.2.Berkeley:UofCalifornia,
1971.Print.
Eduardo,Clber,andIlanaFeldman."APolticadoCorpoeoCorpoPolticoOCinemade
Karim Anouz." Revista Cintica. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.revistacinetica.com.br/cep/karin_ainouz.htm>.
Fraia,Emilio."ComoNoSerAtor." RevistaPiauJan.2009:n.pag.Web.10Dec.2014.
<http://revistapiaui.estadao.com.br/edicao28/questoesdeinterpretacao/comonao
serator>.
Garcia,Estevo.Porumcinemasensorial.Almanaquevirtual,N.p.,n.d.Web.10Dec.
2014.<http://antigo.almanaquevirtual.com.br/ler.php?
id=4451&tipo=23&tipo2=almanaque&cot=1>.
Hessel,Marcelo."OmeleteEntrevista:KarimAnouz,DiretordeOCuDeSuelyParte2."
Omelete. Uol, 16 Nov. 2006. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
<http://omelete.uol.com.br/cinema/omeleteentrevistakarimainouzdiretordeoceu
desuelyparte2/#.Uy4G7K1dUmY>.
Hessel,Marcelo."OmeleteEntrevista:KarimAnouz,DiretordeOCuDeSuelyParte1."
Omelete. Uol, 16 Nov. 2006. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
<http://omelete.uol.com.br/cinema/omeleteentrevistakarimainouzdiretordeoceu
desuelyparte1/>.

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Pereira,JosJosias."DireodeAtoresEntrevista:FtimaToledo."DireodeAtoresn.d.:
17886. Web. 13 Dec. 2014. <https://pt.scribd.com/doc/134370703/Direcaode
AtoresentrevistaFatimaToledopdf>.

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