Brazilian cinema analyzed in terms of its relationship with other media

Researchers set out to understand the history of film in Brazil as a hybrid blend of other art forms and cultural manifestations.

By Reinaldo José Lopes  |  Agência FAPESP – Twenty-first century audiences, who are increasingly accustomed to movie going as enjoyment involving a high-impact technological spectacle to include giant screens, 3D projection and digital sound, would certainly be astounded to go back in time and watch the so-called “singing films” (fitas cantantes) that were common in Brazil between the first and second decade of the last century. They were actually silent films but a troupe of musicians positioned behind the screen would play and sing to accompany the movements of the characters and even interpret the dialogue while the action was unfolding.

“This shows how important music was for Brazilian cinema right from the start, and its importance increased with the advent of talkies,” stated Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in São Paulo State.

Araújo is participating in the Intermidia Project, which was funded by FAPESP and the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). As a collaboration between Brazilian and British researchers, the project aims to understand the history of motion pictures in Brazil in terms of intermediality – cinema’s relationship with the arts and other media.

The members of the international team held their first conference, which was entitled Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema, on November 9-11, 2016, at UFSCar.

The project has grown out of a longstanding collaboration between researchers at UFSCar and Professor Lúcia Nagib’s group at the University of Reading in the UK.

“I and other colleagues from UFSCar such as Flávia Cesarino Costa, Samuel Paiva and Suzana Reck Miranda were supervised by Professor Nagib, who’s Brazilian, or have worked with her. We began designing this joint project in 2011 when she visited us for the state conference of SOCINE, the Brazilian Film & Audiovisual Society. She was still at Leeds University in the UK at the time. The project was accepted in 2015,” Araújo said.

“The lasting emphasis on film’s autonomy and specificity, not [the] least [of which was] to distinguish it as an art form and strengthen it as a field of study in its own right, is making way for the pursuit of a better understanding of its relations with other art forms, rather than analyzing it in isolation.”

According to Araújo, the first two decades of film production after the technology was invented (“early cinema”) were especially fertile in this respect. Early film directors were greatly influenced by older art forms such as circus, theater and music hall.

A paper that was presented by Araújo at the event illustrates two unexpected and creative results of this hybridism during the 1920s. Both cases involved film director Luiz de Barros.

In 1924, working in partnership with the Jércolis-Villar variety theater company, Barros decided to choose members of the audience to act in a short film that was to be shot on the theater stage and shown the following day. At the same time, actor Jardel Jércolis directed rehearsals for the film as an exercise in improvised comedy.

Barros was hired by exhibitor Francisco Serrador to produce prologues, which were short live stage productions that were presented in movie theaters before the main feature was shown. They were miniature plays that were based on elements from the upcoming movie such as characters, scenes and themes.

With the advent of sound films in the 1930s, this mixture of circus, vaudeville, theater and musical gave rise to chanchada, the only cinematic genre that was genuinely invented in Brazil, according to João Luiz Vieira, a researcher at Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro.

According to Vieira, who presented his analysis of the genre at the conference, the chanchada’s musical comedy deliberately subverted the coherence and predictability of mainstream cinema.

It is no accident that so many chanchadas featured Carnival, given their tendency to satirize the status quo and use comedy to critique society, Vieira noted, adding that many of these films were also what he called “utopian”.

At the same time, the chanchadas had a symbiotic and paradoxical relationship with the commercial popularity of “radio stars”, as the era’s pop singers were known, and with Brazil’s nascent music industry. Rafael de Luna Freire, who is also a researcher at UFF, refers to this interpenetration as “gramophone-radio-mania”.

For Vieira, “chanchadas incorporated aspects of radio shows along with the sort of variety theater seen in casinos and night clubs. Eventually their popularity guaranteed the regular market presence and survival of film itself”.

Political implications

Examining the films that were produced in recent years, the conference also discussed the political implications of intermediality in present-day Brazil.

Perhaps the most impressive example was chosen by Reinaldo Cardenuto from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo: Thiago Mendonça’s movie Jovens infelizes ou um homem que grita não é um urso que dança (“Young and Miserable or a Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear”), which was the winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Tiradentes Film Festival in Minas Gerais State, Brazil.

In this movie, a group of artists tests the borders between art and life, trying to create a transgressive revolutionary consciousness with theater, cinema, samba and performance art in public spaces.

The attempt to achieve this ideal proves to be impossible and, ultimately, self-destructive. “It’s like our lives inside the progressive bubble of Facebook, which is fun but has no connection with the real world,” Cardenuto stated.

More information: www.reading.ac.uk/intermidia.