Film Review: Autonomy with Servitude

• Author: Rafael Marino,Daniela Costanzo de Assis Pereira
• Published date: 01 May 2021
• Date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975017
• Subject Matter: Film Review

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975017

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 238, Vol. 48 No. 3, May 2021, 262–264

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975017

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

262

Film Review

Autonomy with Servitude

by

Daniela Costanzo de Assis Pereira and Rafael Marino

Translated by

Sean Purdy

Marcelo Gomes Estou me guardando para quando o carnaval chegar (Waiting for Carnival),

Recife, 2019.

The documentary film directed by Marcelo Gomes, Waiting for Carnival (2019),

addresses contemporary Brazil in the midst of the crisis of Lulism and its contradictions

(Singer, 2012; 2018). Filmed in Toritama, a small town in the countryside of the state of

Pernambuco, the film features the (not so) new work relationships in Brazil and in the

world. In fact, on the pretext of recalling the peaceful country town he visited with his

father, a middle-ranking government bureaucrat, Gomes ends up exposing the insides

of what Roberto Schwarz (2012: 13) has called “a perverse form of progress.” In it the

distinguishing marks of national backwardness are to be seen not as mere residual

archaisms but as “an integral part of the reproduction of modern society.”

The main change Gomes sees in Toritama is in labor relations, which have reconfig-

ured the entire economy and local dynamics to be functional for the textile industry and

its needs. Since the 1980s, the city has become the national capital of the production of

jeans. Silence, quiet streets, and conversations on the sidewalk and in the shops have

given way to the incessant noise of sewing machines and the improbable transfer of

countless pieces on motorcycles, handcarts, and mules. The work process is presented

as something so flexible and plastic that, as several of the characters in the documentary

argue, “only those who don’t want to work don’t have work”: whole houses have

become ultraspecialized production cells with young people crowded into small spaces

turned into essential means of socialization and conviviality, while elderly people finish-

ing pieces chat on the sidewalk and children play among the machines and fabrics, virtu-

ally emulating the craft that they will later exercise in a kind of natural cycle—adapted,

however, to the exercise of a constant cult of Capital, as Benjamin (2013) has taught us.

The idea of a natural cycle is suggestive for understanding the world of work in

Toritama, since workers, skeptical and without any hope of building a better future,

collect the pennies they earn on the jeans parts they produce to travel to the beach in the

only annual break they have, at Carnival. When it ends, they return to their posts and

resume saving, waiting for the next 365 days to see the sea again. Indeed, one of the

essential time markers is the March rains, which traditionally served to indicate the

propitious moment for farmers to sow their crops but in the new economic configura-

tion point to the resumption of the annual enclosure around the production of jeans.

Despite this harsh reality, workers in Toritama value the fact that they have no bosses

and control their own time. The documentary does not explain who buys the pieces

975017LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975017LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESPereira and Marino / FILM REVIEW

research-article2021

Daniela Costanzo de Assis Pereira and Rafael Marino are Ph.D. candidates in political science at

the Universidade de São Paulo. Sean Purdy is a professor of the history of the Americas at the

same university.