Forceful and Dusty Magnifying Glasses: Violence and Resistance in Bacurau

Abstract

This article is on Bacurau, a film by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. It discusses some of its possible references such as Tropicalism movement, Guimarães Rosa’s literature, Glauber Rocha’s New Cinema and Helio Oiticica’s work of art in order to stress the encounter of the primitive and the popular, of technology and mass culture. Despite the radicality of biopolitical and necropolitical dimensions and their unfolding into a kind of necro-capitalism, this article aims at proposing something else concerning the violence infringed by Bacurau's community: first, the idea of literal or immanent violence, mainly by throwing new light into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence; second, moving from immanent violence towards action and resistance. Resistance as an extraordinary and ordinary movement performed individually or collectively by Bacurau’s community. Considering that Bacurau is not just a local community in the Backlands of northeast Brazil but can be any other community in the Globe, we conclude in a non-conclusive manner taking Viveiros de Castro “Indian-becoming” as that which Bacurau encourages us to do.

Keywords

• bacurau
• tropicalism
• biopolitics
• necropolitics
• violence
• resistance
• walter benjamin
• indian-becoming