Ideals of modernity and adaptation of the rural worker to the way of urban life in Viramundo (1965)

Abstract

In this study, we analyze critically the representations about the migratory cycle lived by the rural workers of the North and Northeast of Brazil present in the documentary film Viramundo (1965), by Geraldo Sarno. In order to accomplish this goal, we investigated the way in which this film points to the everyday and the forms of consciousness of migrant rural workers who lived the experiences of arrival and departure of the city of São Paulo in the so-called "Trem do Norte" during the 1960s, seeking the reasons for the success or failure of their insertion in professional activities and, consequently, of their migratory initiative. In this opportunity, the narrative of the documentary film, based on references such as the field of social sciences of the 1950s and 1960s and of the national cinema of this time, was highlighted in this opportunity, expressing ideas of modernity and economic development that gave predominantly to the very worker responsibility on their condition of pauperization in the countryside and in the city, in spite of the social contradictions inherent in the expansion of the capitalist mode of production in the countryside in Brazil in the mid of the 1950s.