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Carlos Diegues, a film director who celebrated Brazil’s ethnic richness and its social turbulence, helping to forge a new path for cinema in his country, died on Feb. 14 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 84.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which he was a member. The academy said the cause was complications of surgery. The Rio newspaper O Globo, for which Mr. Diegues wrote a column, reported that he had suffered “cardiocirculatory complications” before the surgery.
Mr. Diegues, who was known as Cacá, was a founder of Cinema Novo, the modern school of Brazilian cinema that combined Italian Neo-Realism, documentary style and uniquely Latin American fantasy. He focused on hitherto marginal groups — Afro-Brazilians, the poor, disoriented provincials in an urbanizing Brazil — and was the first Brazilian director to employ Black actors as protagonists, in “Ganga Zumba,” (1963), a narrative of enslavement and revolt that was an early cinematic foray into Brazil’s history of racial violence.
The often lyrical results, expressed over the course of 60 years in dozens of features and documentaries, charmed audiences in his own country and abroad, though critics sometimes reproached him for loose screenplays and rough-edged camera work.
Mr. Diegues’s international breakthrough film, “Bye Bye Brazil” (1979), nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, is considered the apotheosis of his dramatic visual style and of his preoccupation with those on the margins of Brazilian society. It follows a feckless group of rascally street performers through the outback, documenting a vanishing Brazil where citizens in remote towns are beguiled by fake falling snowflakes — actually shredded coconut — and hypnotized, literally, by a rare communal television set.
The performers, frustrated that the people are entranced by the TV set and ignoring them, blow it up in one of the film’s many nonchalant gags. They go on to blithely couple and uncouple as the film progresses.
Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, called “Bye Bye Brazil” a “curious, quiet, introspective sort of film, which pays attention to the changing nature of a Brazil that is paying increasingly less attention to these nearly extinct players.”
The film’s characteristic mix — the camera documents the landscape’s spareness while spinning a distinctive magic realist web around it, and the performers themselves are fantastical, extravagant and grittily impoverished — was intrinsic to Cinema Novo, and to Mr. Diegues’s style.
“The film bids farewell to what it sees as outmoded visions of Brazil,” Randal Johnson and Robert Stam wrote in their book “Brazilian Cinema” (1995), “not only to rightist dreams of capitalist development but also to leftist dreams of popular resistance.”
“It is hard to imagine Brazilian cinema without him,” the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz wrote in an email. Mr. Diegues’s work, he said, was “infused with immense joy.”
The Brazilian director Walter Salles wrote, also in an email, that “Diegues inspired, influenced and mentored several generations of filmmakers with extraordinary films.” In a tribute after his death, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said that Mr. Diegues brought “Brazil and Brazilian culture to the cinema screens, and captured the attention of the entire world.”
Mr. Diegues reached into Brazil’s racial and social conflicts through history and sociology, in films including “Quilombo” (1984), about people who escaped slavery in the 17th century; “Xica da Silva” (1976), about an enslaved 18th-century enchantress; and his “Orpheus” (“Orfeu”) a 1999 retelling of the Orpheus and Euridice myth set in the modern-day favelas, or slums, of Rio. (Marcel Camus had told the same story in the same way in his acclaimed 1959 film, “Black Orpheus.”)
While the film won the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize as best picture, the reviews were mixed. “‘Orfeu’ tries to do too much at once: to be both mythic and realistic, to celebrate Rio’s rich culture while exposing the brutality and cynicism that dominate daily life in its slums,” A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote in 2000.
The extravagance of Mr. Diegues’s décor and characters sometimes left critics outside Brazil unmoved. But movies like “Quilombo,” released the year Brazil’s 20-year military dictatorship came to an end, marked the transition with the celebration of a multiracial country.
“It’s neither a masterpiece nor an accomplishment of supreme beauty,” the critic Louis Marcorelles wrote of “Quilombo” in Le Monde. “Vulgar, crude, generous, it’s above all an act of faith in the future of a Brazil that has returned to democracy.”
In “Quilombo,” Mr. Johnson and Mr. Stam wrote, Mr. Diegues “aims at poetic synthesis rather than naturalistic reproduction.”
It was several years before the dictatorship’s onset in 1964 that Cinema Novo, the movement with which Mr. Diegues is most closely associated, came into being.
In a kind of manifesto published in the journal of Brazil’s National Students Union in 1962, a young Mr. Diegues wrote that the new movement sought to shed the influence of Hollywood sentimentality in favor of an authentic national focus. “Brazil and its people became the central preoccupation of the new group of Brazilian filmmakers,” he wrote. “Their goal was to study in depth the social relations of each city and region as a way of critically exposing, as if in miniature, the sociocultural structure of the country as a whole.”
An early hit, “The Big City” (“A Grande Cidade,” 1966), about the travails of a young provincial migrant in Rio, exemplifies these preoccupations. Its hard black-and-white documentary style is infused with lyrical fantasy: The actor Antônio Pitanga, playing a street person, cavorts through indifferent city streets like a character from a fairy tale.
By the mid-1970s, Cinema Novo was over, although Mr. Diegues continued to employ the style in later films. Filmmaking under the dictatorship demanded a softening of the edges and a more allegorical style. “Summer of Showers” (“Chuvas de Verão,” 1978) was described by the New York Times critic Janet Maslin as a “gentle Brazilian film with a knowing air and not so very much to reveal.”
After the success of “Bye Bye Brazil,” Mr. Diegues would go on to make nearly a dozen films, including the 2003 hit “God Is Brazilian,” which drew 1.6 million people to the box office, his second-biggest success after “Xica da Silva.”
Carlos José Fontes Diegues was born on May 19, 1940, in Maceió, in the state of Alagoas in northeast Brazil. He was the son of Manuel Diegues Jr. and Zaira Fontes Diegues. His father, a sociologist and folklorist, was working for the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage at the time and was later a professor at Pontifical Catholic University in Rio.
The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when Carlos was 6, and he attended St. Ignatius School, a Jesuit institution, before studying law at the Pontifical Catholic University.
At the university, he joined student groups that were to play a founding role in the birth of Cinema Novo, including the Centro Popular de Cultura. He began his career as a feature-film director in 1962, while still a student, with one of five segments in “Cinco Vezes Favela,” set in the slums of Rio.
Mr. Diegues left Brazil briefly during the dictatorship, in 1969, to live in France and Italy with his first wife, the singer Nara Leão. But he soon returned to Brazil, the wellspring of his imagination.
He is survived by two children, Isabel and Francisco Diegues, from his marriage with Ms. Leão, from whom he was separated in 1977; and by his second wife, Renata Almeida Magalhães, a producer. His daughter with Ms. Magalhães, Flora, died of cancer in 2019. Ms. Leão died in 1989.
In his last column for the newspaper O Globo, a tribute to Mr. Salles’s current hit film “I’m Still Here,” published on Jan. 21, Mr. Diegues wrote:
“Making life worthwhile does not mean accumulating wealth or status, but rather living with purpose, in balance. The message is that life should be a stage for personal expression. May each of us find our own way to make life an honor.”
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