The reason dies in an empty house:

Abstract

Paulo César Saraceni’s The dare (1965) is a milestone of the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Considered the first cinematographic movie to openly address the 1964 civil-military coup, it also inaugurated a lineage of intimate Rio films, committed to reading beyond the representation of the city through postcard images. The film pays special attention to the scenarios, especially houses and apartments, defining the political and psychological contours of the characters through their interaction with the environments. In this article I make explicit the impact caused by this new form of urban representation and, finally, I make the analysis of two sequences, in which an almost empty modernist house is set against a burning, ruined pension. The aim is to demonstrate that, while the contours of these scenarios define the protagonists’ conflicts, the actions taken in each environment add meaning to the architecture.