Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sing and dance in the legendary Urca casino in the late 1930s and took her home for a
screen test.
Serious cinema in Brazil really began in the early 1950s when Assis Chateaubriand, a
Brazilian press baron and early media entrepreneur, put up the money to create Vera
Cruz Studios and hired director
Lima Barreto
to make
O Cangaçeiro
(“The Outlaw”).
Very loosely based on the true life story of Lampião in the northeastern
sertão
, it was by
far the most expensive Brazilian film made up to that point. It was shot on location in
the Northeast, and Barreto, heavily influenced by John Ford, made what was basically a
Brazilian Western, with the landscape just as much a character as any of the actors -
which was just as well, since the acting was pretty dire. But the film, shot in luminous
black and white, looked fabulous and was a minor sensation in Europe, winning
Brazilian cinema's first international award for best adventure film at Cannes in 1952.
O Cangaçeiro
was a forerunner of what by the late 1950s was being called
cinema
novo
: heavily influenced by the Italian neorealism of masters like Vittorio Da Sica,
young Brazilian directors took a hard look at the trials and tribulations of daily life in
Brazil. The Northeast loomed large in
cinema novo
; the two classics of the genre,
Vidas
Secas
(“Barren Lives”), directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos in 1963, and
O Pagador
de Promessas
(“The Promise Keeper”), directed by
Anselmo Duarte
in 1963, are both set
in the region and were both banned by the military after the 1964 coup for their
unflinching portrayal of poverty and rural desperation.
Cinema under dictatorship
he
military
had a paradoxical effect on Brazilian cinema. On the surface they were
every bit as repressive as one would expect: films and scripts were subject to rigid
censorship and regularly banned, and anything that could be considered unpatriotic -
such as the portrayal of poverty or social problems - was off limits. On the other hand,
the military did believe a flourishing film industry was a form of building national
prestige, and in 1969 set up a state film production and financing company,
Embrafilme
, still going today and without which the modern Brazilian film industry
would not exist. As a channel for (modest) government subsidy towards the film
industry, it allowed a generation of Brazilian film-makers to hone their talents without
having to spend all their time chasing commercial work, and with expanding television
networks supplying increasing numbers of professional actors to the film industry, the
1960s and 1970s saw a sharp rise in the number of films produced in Brazil.
In cinema, as in music, this was a time of great inventiveness in Brazil. Film-
makers reacted to military censorship in a number of ways. One was diverting
political comment into genres the authorities usually didn't bother to monitor, such
as erotic films, where the usual scenes of rumpy-pumpy would be punctuated by
political monologues as the characters smoked cigarettes in bed together afterwards.
Another was to make dramas that faithfully portrayed episodes of Brazilian history,
but in a way pregnant with meaning for the present. This was a style one of the
masters of
cinema novo
, the director
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
, made his own with
two superb films during the dictatorship.
Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês
(“How
Delicious Was My Frenchman”), released in 1971, went so far as to be shot largely
in Tupi and French instead of Portuguese. It was a faithful historical reconstruction
of the earliest days of Brazil but also a hilarious political allegory.
Memórias do
Cárcere
(“Memories of Jail”), produced in 1984, was based on Graciliano Ramos's
prison diaries during his various incarcerations by Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and
1940s. Another example of the genre was
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
's
Os
Inconfidentes
(“The Conspirators”), released in 1974 at the peak of the dictatorship.
An uncensorable reconstruction of the national hero Tiradentes' eighteenth-century
conspiracy against the Portuguese Crown, so well researched that much of the
dialogue is taken from court transcripts of the period, its portrayal of the brutal
