October 1968. During the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, teachers and students from the Student Movement faced attacks from the Communist Hunting Command, the CCC, from across Maria Antônia Street, in the central region of the city of São Paulo. The event became known in very precise terms: “The Battle of the Students”. Student demonstrations and marches marked the area, but in that short period, hostilities allowed violence, and the street saw a battle: insults, eggs, stones, firecrackers, Molotov cocktails, gunshots, arrests. In 24 hours, a high school student was killed, a public building was set on fire, and dozens of students were arrested.
This page of history is told in the film “The Battle of Maria Antônia Street”, which has just hit the commercial cinema circuit. It is not a documentary. But the format chosen to present the narrative suggests this close relationship with what was documented, recorded for history. It uses 16mm films, in black and white, as if opening a photo album left somewhere in the memory. It is not an invention either. It is a fictional feature film. In about an hour and a half, it narrates through 21 sequence shots a historical fiction based on dramatic facts, experienced and recorded by various means.
The tensions that fueled the confrontation between students from the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of the University of São Paulo (FFCL-USP) and the Mackenzie Presbyterian University opposed not only two institutions that were then located on opposite sides of the same street, but above all, antagonistic positions in political terms. They would be two extremes, two sides of a growing political polarization, if we were to borrow current words.
On one side, the student movement was organized in strong opposition to the civil-military government established by means of a coup in 1964. The confrontations were constant from the first day, and in 1968 they were already marked by the death of student Edson Luís de Lima Souto, in March, and by protests such as the Passeata dos Cem Mil, in July, both in Rio de Janeiro.
On the other side, the CCC, founded in 1962 by João Marcos Flaquer (nicknamed “Flaquer, the Subtle”), infiltrated Mackenzie. In July of that same year, he had already led the group’s attack on the cast of the play “Roda Vida,” written by Chico Buarque and directed by Zé Celso. Equipment was vandalized and 19 actors were injured. The objective of the attack was to cut off the subversive path that the theater was taking.
This is the ambiance of the battle. A challenge to decide where and when to frame a narrative that neither begins nor ends there.
The events that took place on Maria Antônia Street between October 2 and 3, 1968, are narrated in the film in vivid harmony with this environment, without needing to mention the mobilizations against the dictatorship or the hundreds of student arrests that would occur just a few days later, at the 30th UNE Congress in Ibiúna. That year would be surprised again, just two months later, with Institutional Act number 5, AI 5, which suspended constitutional rights and paved the way for an unprecedented persecution of opposition to the regime, which lasted for a torturous decade, between December 1968 and January 1979.
But where should a narrative like this begin? Where does this story begin?
The narrative is driven by a nervous camera, which allows us to closely observe the characters' feelings, between fear and courage. The action predominates, always guided by the eyes of its agents. Some scenes capture a young man with a camera, perhaps a tribute to the photographer and former architecture student Hiroto Yoshioka, who captured that battle in October. He left precious records of a battle that is difficult to narrate and understand without context or witnesses.
Despite indirect references to records like these, few scenes in the film set the historical timeline. It is between the lines of the rhythm of the time of waiting, increasingly tense, in the face of the intensification of hostilities, marking the narrative from beginning to end. Chords of a guitar rehearsing a melody in the college's internal courtyard seem to mark this waiting at various moments. Only once, the guitar continues, echoing in the silent courtyard the voice of the actress Clara Buarque, singing precisely Wheel of life. It would perhaps suggest that art continues, resistant and subversive. “Time rolled by in an instant…” In the film, time passes through 21 frames that seem to refer to the 21 years of dictatorship in the country.
Why tell this story today? How can we tell such a story? Rather than speculating about the reasons for the choices, it seems crucial to think about why this story is worth telling. The question would then be a little different: what does the narrative want to put on the agenda?
It does not seem possible to me to answer these questions promptly in light of the intense scenes in “The Battle of Maria Antonia Street” without considering the feelings and political passions as central ingredients of this story shown in black and white, accentuating contrasts. Many elements combined in the film underscore these ingredients.
The narrative begins and ends on the street. In the first sequence shot, it closely follows a student on her way to philosophy class, her steps determinedly on the sidewalk. She bumps into Mackenzie students walking in the opposite direction – a premonition of the conflict that would be followed by the cameras, exposing emotions and tensions almost to the surface. The contrasts can be felt in the story itself, in the plots woven, in the chosen shots, in the highlighted characters (and those relegated), in the reinvented settings, in the tense editing, in the economy of sound, in the sequence shots that organize the entire narrative. What emerges from these elements at the end takes us, moves us, moves us. From this, the final sequence does not seem to be fortuitous. At the end, the street is once again the setting, but this time making room for the forceful demonstration of students, resisters, facing repression: “down with the dictatorship!”
Director and screenwriter Vera Egito seems to want to make the choices she made to tell a story like this explicit, about why she should focus on this battle today. At least two perspectives are presented. In the foreground, the side of the street from which she narrates, the student movement that led the confrontation against the dictatorship in 1968. Then, but without secondary importance, the intertwining of the characters’ public and private dimensions, between feelings and commitments of all kinds. At the end of the story, we only know about the CCC and the attacks coming from the other side of the street through the eyes of those who were at USP. On the other hand, we delve into the convictions and commitments, without straying from the doubts and anxieties of young students who were simultaneously learning to take a public stand in the face of political dilemmas and to experience the dramas of their personal uncertainties. These choices in the narrative seem capable of raising the tension and emotion to the maximum by the time we reach the end of the narrative. They place before us the impossibility of ignoring their effects: whether from the 21 years of dictatorship on our history, or from the 21 sequence shots in front of each life that it mobilizes, or from the feelings and emotions on our social and political relations.
It is interesting to consider the trajectory of the film itself. Winner of the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival in 2023, it was directed by Vera Egito and produced by Paranoïd Filmes in partnership with Globo Filmes. According to the filmmaker, the project began to be drafted in 2009, but only came to fruition in April 2022, when it was filmed in 12 days, using the historic buildings of the Secretariat of Justice and Citizenship, in Páteo do Colégio, in downtown São Paulo, as a location. The symmetry between the two buildings, which differs from the original battle setting, emphasizes the proximity of these two sides of a dispute of ideologies that was far from being resolved. It is hard to avoid thinking that, in 2022, many places could host the filming. It would be the year in which the battle between “two sides of the street” took on the dimensions of the country, in a dramatic way.
It is not just October 1968. “The Battle of Maria Antonia Street” invites us to look at ourselves. It invites us to face the ways in which we meet and collide on the street, in the public space that we share. It calls us to look at the past and reconsider the ways in which we foster intolerance. But, above all, it calls us to look at the present and at ourselves in the face of the past and the possibility of resisting, as protagonists.
The DCE of Unicamp organized a preview on March 12, bringing some professors and students from Unicamp to discuss the film with the audience. Veronica Fabrini and Alfredo Suppia, from the Institute of Arts (IA), and I, Josianne Cerasoli, from the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH), participated in the debate at the preview, coordinated by the Multimedia student Brunna Aprigio.
For more data:
- Document from the São Paulo Truth Commission Rubens Paiva, about the battle: Veja magazine / Truth Commission – archives / Truth Commission/SP
- Interview with Hiroto Yoshioka (carried out by two graduates of the PhD in history from Unicamp, Eduardo Costa and Deborah Neves)
- Exhibition video: Battle to preserve: Maria Antonia, 55 years old, photographs by Hiroto Yoshioka (2024), curated by two PhD graduates in history from Unicamp, Eduardo Costa and Deborah Neves.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
