Moving beyond Latin America: Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness and the epidemic of transnational co-productions

What is it about?

This article provides a textual analysis of what is arguably one of Fernando Meirelles’s less financially and critically successful films, Blindness, in an attempt to situate it as a key text in the increasingly transnational career of its Brazilian director. The English-language adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira becomes a self-consciously transnational artefact through the reinterpretation of, and subtle distancing from, its original source. This transnational impulse is evident in terms of production, but it surfaces more solidly in its celebration of a hybrid cosmopolitan consciousness. The film can be read as a transnational allegory that reflects on Meirelles’s own evolution from a locally-entrenched cinema to a cinema that navigates across nations, affected by the broader international shift undergone by the Brazilian film industry in the late 1990s. Relying on the popular virus genre, the film’s epidemic of blindness serves as an apt analytical tool in the way it expresses these border-crossing preoccupations. The rich logic of the epidemic embodies the ambivalent global forces that govern contemporary Latin American co-productions and transnational cinema in general.

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