Vidas Secas: crossing in the sertão

Abstract

The representations of the Brazilian Northeast in artistic works deal with the countryside in geographic crossings from imaginary geopoetics. The literary and cinematographic narratives are crossed by the realist discourse captured by the aesthetic eye. In this article, we comment on the images and geopoetic landscapes constructed in these crossings, observing characters from the narratives of the works Vidas secas (1938), by Graciliano Ramos, and Vidas secas, from the cinema (1963), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. The Geopoetic theory is a way to perceive the nuances and the living potency of this real environment, paradoxically presented as almost lifeless, but revitalized by the artistic, literary, and cinematographic gazes. To conceptually ground this production, we have Barthes (1984); Debs (2010); Santos (1996); Souza (2009), and White (2020), which subsidize the semiotic discussions about the literary and cinematographic constructions treated here geopoetically. We conclude that the representations of the natural and cultural environments of the sertão, under the geopoetic perspective, go beyond the aesthetic relations between the works, thus reaching traces of the ethical engagement in each period of modern literary and cinematographic art of Brazilian popular-nationalism.