our society. ... [Cinema Novo's] originality is [South Americans'] hunger[,] and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood." On this note, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster hold that "[t]he Marxist implications of [Rocha's] cinema are hard to miss". Themes and style Most film historians divide Cinema Novo into three sequential phases that differ in theme, style and subject matter. Stam and Johnson identify "a first phase going from 1960 to 1964," a second phase running "from 1964 to 1968," and a third phase running "from 1963 to 1972" (though they also claim the final phase concludes at "roughly" "the end of 1971"). There is little disagreement among film critics about this time frame. 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. "Because Cinema Novo is not a school, it has no established style," states Diegues. "In Cinema Novo, expressive forms are necessarily personal and original without formal dogmas". 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 (1960–1964) Films of the first phase represent the original motivation and goals of Cinema Novo. 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. They also addressed the "fatalism and stoicism" of the working class, which discouraged it from working to fix these problems. "The films share a certain political optimism," write Johnson and Stam, "a kind of faith that merely showing these problems would be a first step toward their solution." Unlike traditional Brazilian cinema that depicted beautiful professional actors in tropical paradises, first-phase Cinema Novo "searched out the dark corners of Brazilian life--its favelas and its sertão--the places where Brazil's social contradictions appeared most dramatically." 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". Diegues contends that first-phase Cinema Novo did not focus on editing and shot-framing but rather on spreading a proletariat philosophy. "Brazilian filmmakers