Examines the centrality of Cinema Novo to filmmaking in Brazil.

"A camera in the hand and ideas in the head" was the primary axiom of the young originators of Brazil's Cinema Novo. In Allegories of Underdevelopment, Ismail Xavier argues that this movement of the 1960s and early 1970s served to represent a nation undergoing a political and social transformation into modernity.

Its best-known voice, filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that Cinema Novo was driven by an "aesthetics of hunger". This scarcity of means demanded new cinematic approaches that eventually gave rise to a legitimate and...