As the decade ended, young Brazilian filmmakers protested films they perceived as made in "bad taste and ... sordid commercialism, ... a form of cultural prostitution" that relied on the patronage of "an illiterate and impoverished Brazil.
[12] In 1961, the Popular Center of Culture, a subsidiary of the National Students' Union, released Cinco Vezes Favela, a film serialized in five episodes that Johnson and Stam claim to be "one of the first" products of the Cinema Novo movement.
Johnson and Stam further claim that Cinema Novo has something in common "with Soviet film of the twenties," which like Italian neorealism and French New Wave had "a penchant for theorizing its own cinematic practice.
"[14] Italian neorealist cinema often shot on location with nonprofessional actors and depicted working class citizens during the hard economic times following World War II.
Some proponents of Cinema Novo were "scornful of the politics of the [French] New Wave", viewing its tendency to stylistically copy Hollywood as elitist.
[6] But Cinema Novo filmmakers were largely attracted to French New Wave's use of auteur theory, which enabled directors to make low-budget films and develop personal fan bases.
As Cinema Novo filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade explained to Viany in a 1966 interview: In our films, the propositions, positions, and ideas are extremely varied, at times even contradictory or at least multiple.
"[16] On this note, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster hold that "[t]he Marxist implications of [Rocha's] cinema are hard to miss".
[19][20][21][22] Filmmaker Carlos Diegues claims that while lack of funds lowered the technical precision of Cinema Novo films, it also allowed directors, writers and producers to have an unusual amount of creative freedom.
[11] This directorial freedom, along with the changing social and political climate in Brazil, caused Cinema Novo to experience shifts in form and content in a short amount of time.
First-phase films were earnest in tone and rural in setting, dealing with social ills that affected the working class like starvation, violence, religious alienation and economic exploitation.
"[6] These topics were supported by aesthetics that "were visually characterized by a documentary quality, often achieved by the use of a hand-held camera" and were shot "in black and white, using simple, stark scenery that vividly emphasized the harshness of the landscape".
"[24] Most film historians agree that Glauber Rocha, "one of the most well-known and prolific filmmakers to emerge in the late 1950s in Brazil",[25] was the most powerful advocate for Cinema Novo in its first phase.
Dixon and Foster contend that Rocha helped initiate the movement because he wanted to make films that educated the public about social equality, art and intellectualism, which Brazilian cinema at the time did not do.
In 1964, Rocha released Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol ("Black God, White Devil"), which he wrote and directed to “suggest that only violence will help those who are sorely oppressed".
Brazilians consequently lost faith in the ideals of Cinema Novo, as the movement had promised to protect civilian rights yet had failed to uphold democracy.
Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw state that second-phase directors "recognized the irony in making so-called 'popular' films, to be viewed only by university students and art-house aficionados.
As a result, some auteurs began to move away from the so-called 'aesthetics of hunger' toward a filmmaking style and themes designed to attract the interest of the cinema-going public at large.
Hans Proppe and Susan Tarr characterize Cinema Novo's third phase as "a mixed bag of social and political themes against a backdrop of characters, images and contexts not unlike the richness and floridness of the Brazilian jungle".
At the time, Cinema Novo filmmaker Carlos Diegues said he supported Embrafilme because it was "the only enterprise with sufficient economic and political power to confront the devastating voracity of the multinational corporations in Brazil.
In Italy, Gillo Pontecorvo directed the Oscar-nominated The Battle of Algiers (1965), which depicted native African Muslims as brave terrorists fighting French colonialists in Algeria.