In a key moment of Carlos Diegues's Bye bye Brasil (Bye Bye Brazil, 1980), the troupe of travelling performers that comprise ‘Caravana Rolidei’ and an indigenous family that has hitchhiked a ride with them have an anticlimactic arrival at the Amazonian town of Altamira. Located on the shores of the Xingu river in the state of Pará, Altamira was nationally relevant in the 1970s as a landmark for the westward expansion of the Transamazon Highway, the centrepiece of the military regime's project of national integration through the construction of roadways into the forest and aggressive settlement of the region. Immediately after their arrival, we see the members of the troupe and their fellow travellers inside an Altamira bar (Figure 18.1). They are positioned as disappointed spectators, standing in front of a wall that holds a television set and a map of Brazil. The TV shows nothing but coloured lines – a detail that functions as an ironic twist underscoring the troupe's disappointment with Altamira, as well as making the TV set stand not for any particular televisual content but rather for the medium itself. The map, the largest element in the field of vision, is also reduced to the bare bones of cartographic representation and amounts to a blunt affirmation of the nation's territorial unity, emphasised by the high contrast of the country's geographical contours against a monochromatic background. This bar, along with the map and the television, are, in all likelihood, found objects incidentally discovered in Altamira by Diegues and his crew as they, much like the fictional troupe, ventured through the Brazilian interior in 1979. These elements, however, are aptly appropriated by the film to produce an ‘intermedial figuration’ (Pethő 2011: 2), by which I mean a spatialised citation of media in the mise-en-scène, which is deployed here to reflect the film's concern with the transformation of national space as well as with cinema's relationship to television in the wake of the latter's consolidation as a hegemonic audiovisual medium.

Although the significance of this intermedial figuration performed at an Altamira bar can and should be mapped out in relation to the narrative of Diegues's film, it can also serve as a point of entry into an underexplored and eclectic constellation of audiovisual works made in the Amazon during the 1970s and 1980s