The technologizing of the process of dehumanization through cinema provides a vivid window into the subtle reenactment of slavery in the Brazilian context. In this substitution of methods, chains are replaced with demeaning and caricatural costumes, padlocks with fragmentation and silencing of the voice, rape with the perverse desire of the mulatta (mixed-race woman), domestication with the “chickenization,” “zombification,” and “buffoonization” of black actors. As a result, while Brazil may be said to possess an Afro-Brazilian soul through African cultural presence, the political structure is dominantly and alienatingly white and this explains the fragmentation of that very soul as reflected in the Afro-Brazilian personality. In our examination of select films produced between 1950 and 2000 for the purpose of highlighting the gradual process of the caricaturizing of Afro-Brazilian actors as well as a very few cases of subtle resistance, heroism, and subversion, this chapter provides an exposé of the multiple representations of the Afro-Brazilian.

In film and other visual or print media, critical thinking is not necessarily common. The guardians and gatekeepers of culture in its dissemination and marketing are duly aware of this trap: fatal and yet attractive consumption of demeaning representations by the subject of that subtle dehumanization.