Chapter 17: Black God, White Devil and Behind the Sun: Destinies in Modern Brazilian Cinema

To Ismail Xavier

The reflection that follows stems from the research group in art psychology developed by João A. Frayze-Pereira and his advisees in the Department of Social Psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. According to Frayze-Pereira, the interflow between the arts and psychology is not a recent one; the approximation between these areas predates the actual advent of psychology as an autonomous discipline (Frayze-Pereira, 1994). Devised in the 18th century by Baumgarten, aesthetics was based on the idea that beauty amounted to “a kind of sensitive knowledge, misleading and inferior to rational knowledge.” A while later, however, with Kant’s philosophy, “the subject of the beautiful will turn into the subject of the ‘aesthetic experience.’ ” From this point on, aesthetics distances itself from the “metaphysical domain to near the experimental and psychological domain.” Thus, even if psychology had notbeen conceived as a separate discipline, aesthetics had already conversed with the “psychology that was yet to come,” since it brings to the fore the subject of the relationship between the work of art and the spectator (Frayze-Pereira, 1994).