They don't wear black-tie: Intellectuals and workers in São Paulo, Brazil, 1958-1981

In 1979, film-maker Leon Hirszman (1937–1987) collaborated with playwright Gianfrancesco Guarnieri on a film adaption of Guarnieri’s famous play about Brazilian working-class life, They Don’t Wear Black-Tie.1 The resulting film, released in 1981, reconfigured the politics and content of the 1958 play to fit the new era of the late 1970s when dramatic metalworkers’ strikes placed Sao Paulo on the front lines in the fight against the Brazilian military dictatorship. Using biography and the dramatic and cinematic texts, this article traces the political and aesthetic challenges facing these two important cultural figures and their generation of radical intellectuals. In particular, the article will explain why an image of “workers” proved so central in the making of modern Brazilian theater and film since the late 1950s, while exploring the changing configuration of intellectual and povo (common people) between the late Populist Republic and the remaking of the Brazilian working class during the late 1970s. Throughout, it will ask: What is the cultural, political, and historical substance or significance of the presentation of workers in Black-Tie? Does it represent an expression of social reality? And if so, what reality, and whose vision? A lifelong resident of Rio de Janeiro, the leftist film-maker Leon Hirszman (1937–1987) was drawn to the city of Sao Paulo in 1979 by something old and something new. In part, the demands of his profession drove the forty-two-yearold cineaste to move to Brazil’s industrial and financial capital, a megalopolis of thirteen million residents. Hirszman was to collaborate with playwright Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, an old friend, on a film adaption of Guarnieri’s famous 1958 play about working-class life Eles Nao Usam Black-Tie (They Don’t Wear BlackTie). Yet the decision to film Black-Tie was not prompted solely by middle-aged nostalgia for a golden youth, when each had first made their respective reputations. Rather their decision to rewrite the play was directly linked to dramatic new labor struggles that had placed Sao Paulo on the front lines of the fight against a military dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1964. After inplant stoppages in May 1978, 125,000 workers in March 1979 struck the automobile assembly plants in the heavily industrialized ABC region on the outskirts of Sao Paulo (named after the municipios of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul). This wave of industrial militancy in ABC, which originated among the country’s most highly paid manual workers, quickly spread to millions of other Brazilian workers over the next three years. As the first mass strikes since 1964, International Labor and Working-Class History No. 59, Spring 2001, pp. 60–80 © 2001 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. the work stoppages in ABC captured the Brazilian imagination precisely because they were so dramatic and unexpected. The region’s foreign auto assembly plants, established during the previous twenty years, were closely associated with a period of intensified economic growth in the 1950s followed by a spectacular boom from 1968 to 1974 (the Brazilian “economic miracle”). If anything, the autoworkers were viewed—even by the few sociologists who had studied them—as a privileged aristocracy within the working class. Thus the autoworkers’ strikes upended established expectations and seized the foreground during a period that pitted an increasingly assertive opposition against a military regime engaged, in fits and starts, in a process of negotiated liberalization known as the abertura or political “opening.” Under such circumstances, Hirszman’s and Guarnieri’s decision to transform They Don’t Wear Black-Tie into film was directly linked to the contemporary anti-dictatorial struggle. Indeed, the censors’ nationwide ban on the play Black-Tie, which dated from 1968, was only ended in 1977 while restrictions on basic civil liberties and freedom of expression would only be loosened in September 1979. Interviewed in April of that year, Hirszman explained that the original Black-Tie was set in Rio de Janeiro and “dealt with a strike situation, with class consciousness and solidarity, [and] that we are going to adapt it based on the experiences of the recent strikes” in Sao Paulo and ABC.2 With funding from the government’s film agency Embrafilme, Hirszman and Guarnieri worked for six months to complete the film script in January 1980. In their preliminary discussions, they had toyed with basing the film on a group of amateur actors in Sao Paulo who were staging Black-Tie during the strikes of 1978.3 Yet the trajectory of the adaptation altered, as Hirszman explained in early 1979, when, upon his arrival in Sao Paulo, he “encountered an immense strike of crossed arms and stopped machines” among ABC’s metalworkers.”4 Putting the script-writing to one side, Hirszman quickly put together a film-making cooperative that set out to document the strike as it unfolded in Sao Bernardo. The didactic purpose of the sixteen-millimeter color documentary was evident in its title, O ABC da Greve (The ABC of the Strike), while the three months proved useful in adapting the theatrical text.5 Yet the feature film Black-Tie, he insisted, was to be “an original cinematographic work [filled] with the same emotion” as the play, written by Guarnieri in 1955 as a twenty-one-year-old communist student activist.6 Whether discussing the documentary or Black-Tie, Hirszman came back to the question that had been central to his own personal and political biography as a long-time member of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB): the relationship between radical intellectuals and the povo. The literal meaning of povo in English (the “people,” i.e., the inhabitants or citizens of a given country) does not accurately capture the specificity of the Brazilian expression, which posits a dichotomy between the povo (a globalizing category encompassing the working people of the city and countryside, the poor, the illiterate) and the nao-povo (the dominant classes, the elites, the educated). In a country characterized by a vast abyss between the top and the bottom, it is not by chance that one refers to “Ze [Jose] Povo” meaning “Joe Nobody.” Hirszman had posed the question with Intellectuals and Workers in Sao Paolo 61