Speculative Cinematic Spaces: Genre Films and the Urban Processes of Capitalism in "Sinfonia da necrópole"

• In Event: Engaging Cinematic Turns in Brazil

Abstract

In her 2014 film Sinfonia da necrópole, Juliana Rojas offers a critique of the urban processes of capitalism in São Paulo through a cinematic aesthetic that explores the limits of musical, horror, and comedy film genres. Known for her collaboration with Marco Dutra in directing similar genre-bending films such as Trabalhar cansa (2012) and As boas maneiras (2017), in Sinfonia da necrópole Rojas again employs what I call the “speculative cinematic aesthetic” of these movies—one that draws from multiple film genres yet resists fully conforming to the tropes of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural—to explore the everyday lives of city employees in a cemetery. Filmed on location in such sites as the Cemitério do Araça and Cemitério da Consolação in São Paulo, the film presents the renovation and removal of older tombs in order to construct new tombs that will extract higher rents from “tenants” as a specular allegory for the creative destruction of the built environment in city. In dialogue with work in urban theory by such authors as Raquel Rolnik, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre, in this paper I explore how the aesthetic and narrative elements implemented in the recent turn to “speculative cinema” in Brazil—led by such figures as Rojas—can create cinematic spaces to critique the speculative, real-estate practices in the central neighborhoods of São Paulo that are exacerbating the lack of affordable housing for poor and working-class residents and increasing material inequality in this immense metropolis.

Author

• Andrew C Rajca, University of South Carolina