23 FILM QUARTERLY HELENA IGNEZ, AN INCENDIARY MONSTER OF BRAZILIAN CINEMA Patrícia Mourão de Andrade Translated by Bruno Guaraná In April 2020, a little over a month into the quarantine imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, actress and filmmaker Helena Ignez released Fogo baixo, alto as- tral [Low Heat, High Spirits], a short video documenting a single day of her seclusion. At one moment, she is seen, her hair as red as fire, sitting on her balcony, meditative. In voice-over, she reflects: . . . social isolation basic rule in a pandemic can help us find the best version of ourselves. As soon as Ignez gets up, the lettering on her director’s chair is revealed: diretora (“directress”), a filmmaker and woman, clearly her “best version” of herself, proclaimed for all to see. The confidence of this gesture with which she asserts her identity as a directress is striking, for Ignez did not di- rect her first feature film until the age of sixty-eight. One of the greatest actresses in Brazilian cinema (and arguably within the entire history of cinema), she was a foundation- al figure in Brazilian filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s. Were it not for a national historiography blinded by its own patriarchal distortions, an entire history of Brazilian cinema could be told through Helena Ignez. Yet, her place in its history was ignored for decades, and only in the past fifteen years has she begun to gain the recognition long deserved and denied. The start of Ignez’s career coincides with that of Glauber Rocha. In the 1960s, she starred in a number of Cinema Novo classics, earning her the unfortunate moniker of “Cinema Novo muse.” By the end of the 1960s, though, Ignez would draw closer to a new generation and take part in the conception and creation of what later became known as Cinema Marginal: an iconoclastic, anar- chic, and even more radical movement than Cinema Novo. Very few members of that generation—who had to retire prematurely from the field, first due to the dictatorship and later because of a dismantled cinematographic industry— were able to resist and return to activity in the following decades with a level of experimentation and radicalism equal to that of the earlier years. Helena Ignez was one of the exceptions. She has made a total of ten films with- out any concessions to existing tendencies, popular taste, or commercial cinema. In Ignez’s chameleon-like figure, there can be found an allegory of modern Brazilian film history with its many turns, defeats, and tragedies, as well as its ability to transform hunger into appetite and scarcity into potency. When the quarantine began, Ignez had just released her latest film, Fakir (2019), a documentary look at fakirist performances popular in 1950s Brazil, in which artists would starve themselves for months inside a window box displayed for public view. She had also just been featured in a documentary about her own life that was released in commercial theaters, and had seen a book dedicated to her work as an actress published in France. 1 All that, and then stasis. It was not the first time Ignez had had her career abruptly interrupted by historical con- tingency, nor the first time she had been forced to isolate from the world outside. In 1970, at the apex of the military dictatorship in Brazil, Ignez—who had just starred in seven films in fewer than three months—had to flee the country for fear of repression, escaping along with filmmakers Júlio Bressane and Rogério Sganzerla (her partner from that mo- ment until his death in 2004). Ignez would return from exile pregnant with Sinai Sganzerla, the couple’s oldest daughter, today a filmmaker Film Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 23–34. ISSN: 0015-1386 electronic ISSN: 1533- 8630 © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2021.74.3.23 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/23/455384/fq.2021.74.3.23.pdf by guest on 17 March 2021