Artigos

BETWEEN THE PREY AND THE HUNTER: THE INSTINCT OF RESISTANCE IN BACURAU, Jack Brandão

ENTRE A PRESA E O CAÇADOR: O INSTINTO DA RESISTÊNCIA EM BACURAU

This article analyzes Bacurau (2019), film by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, from a historical-sociocultural perspective that links the Brazilian sertão to the imaginary of cangaço and narratives of popular resistance. Based on a dialogue with regionalist literature – especially Franklin Távora’s O Cabeleira (1876) – and a critical discussion of 19th-century racial discourses (exemplified by Arthur de Gobineau), as well as Brazilian intellectual production represented by Euclides da Cunha (Os Sertões), the study seeks to understand how racialized and deterministic representations of the sertão contributed to naturalizing violence and justifying forms of domination. The study also establishes an analogy between the hunt portrayed in Bacurau and contemporary imperialist practices, in which hegemonic powers impose their military and cultural force on peoples considered inferior. This relationship is problematized in light of the Vietnam War, in which the Vietnamese subverted the logic of domination, inverting the condition of prey into hunter. To interpret the hunters’ sadistic pleasure and the collective dynamics of violence, the article mobilizes psychological theories of instinct and drives – articulating William James’s reflections on habit and instinct, William McDougall’s focus on instinctual motivators, and Freudian formulations of drives (including the tension between the life drive and the death drive). These combined perspectives illuminate how individual dispositions, cultural narratives, and racialized ideologies converge in the film’s representation of the hunt and popular insurgency.             

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