As Rodrigo Carreiro wrote in his analysis in the virtual magazine Cine-Reporter, “Pixote occupies one of the five historical marks of Brazilian cinema… It is a movie of the highest levels, deconstructing the tragic and hard reality of the life in an underworld in a crude and impetuous manner.”
Since Pixote, many movies have come to express and expose similar realities, now commercially viable, to the Brazilian public and beyond. In 1998, Walter Salles directed the motion-picture Central Station with Fernanda Montenegro, Marília Pêra and Otávio Augusto, three of the most powerful Brazilian actors in the market. It tells the story of an estranged child who seeks the help of a letter-writer who worked at Rio de Janeiro’s central bus station to find his relatives in the north of Brazil. Different than Pixote in its perspective, Central Station depicts the violence that adults commit against homeless children in the country, from a former police officer now working as a watchdog for local small businesses by killing petty thieves, to the black organ market, where regular people try to find homeless children to supply organs for considerable fees.
Central Station became famous internationally as it was nominated for an Academy Award as a foreign film, and as Fernanda Montenegro was nominated for best actress that same year. Other movies came out a few years later, making even more ground internationally, even though no Brazilian movie has ever been awarded by the Academy.
That is the case of City of God (2002), directed by Fernando Meirelles, now entering one of the darkest and most violent territories of the country, its slums, known as “favelas.” The controversies ensued shortly after the movie was released. As José Geraldo Couto, from the newspaper São Paulo Herald wrote in 2002, “City of God is a historical mark not only for the discussion provoked around themes such as slums, violence, drugs and youth, but also for stimulating a debate – and a crisis, in a certain way – about the productivity of current Brazilian cinema.”
It is the story of Rio de Janeiro’s infamous slum called by its dwellers City of God as a mere irony. Inside the slums, young criminals, drug dealers and the law of the strongest resurge to the screens with a vengeance. But as Couto explains, the movie makes it seem as if the drugs were solely produced to supply the slums, and that the background of treacherous violence is exclusively taking place there. In fact, most of the drugs produced in places like City of God are sold to middle-class teenagers and young-adults outside the slums, and the picture never truly explains how these came to be in the first place (social displacement, lack of government action, a police culture that stimulates violence against the poor in order to protect the rich etc). Thus, even though it was a successful production that broke national barriers and is now known worldwide, it might only speak of some of the symptoms of real violence, but never of the causes, which made some social critics disregard its expressional power and thirst for more exposure and more concrete debates.
In 2003 Dr. Dráuzio Varella’s book about his experiences as a medic in the extinct high-security prison complex, Carandiru, in São Paulo, came to life in the screens of national cinema. Another movie by Hector Babenco, Carandiru tells the story of the demise of the penitentiary as a prisoners’ revolt ended up in the invasion of the institution by Brazil’s elite squads, who mercilessly murdered 111 people in the wake of their contention in 1992. As Pedro Butcher, also from São Paulo Herald, wrote in his analysis in 2003, Carandiru loses some of the clout from its literary conceiver, but “this sensation [of loss of clout] dissipates when we realize that the images of the movie refuse to leave us.”
Babenco managed to tell Varella’s stories in the same somber timber as the doctor has, and at the same time the motion-picture does not take much away from the reality of such penitentiaries. It brings to the table a fact that many in Brazil refuse to debate: Brazil’s prison system has long failed, and the mistreatment of criminals only creates a perfect environment for the dedicated learning of criminal activities and human cruelty.
The trend in all of the movies above is clear: Brazilian directors seldom skew too much from the reality of the country when exposing its violence. As some critics have argued in the past, it seems that only the violence that is so strident and present in such narratives is also as strident and present in the Brazilian routine, leaving the positive aspects of the country out of the equation. Perhaps so, but as Bettina Bremme, a German descendant, documentary director and movie critic wrote about Brazilian cinema:
“In juxtaposition to commercial cinema (in which drug-dealers, mercenaries and former violent lovers are always superficially caricatured as ‘bad people’), directors such as Carlos Diegues, Murilo Salles, Tata Amaral, Fernando Meirelles, Beto Brant and Hector Babenco tell complex stories, showing also the violence that comes from social structures. With that, they often employ a figurative speech intending to reach a wider audience” (ICBRA-Berlin, 2004).
Bremme believed, at the time, that although the theme of violence seemed to be recurring in Brazilian cinema, it was not being abused solely for commercial purposes, perhaps because such realities are ever too close to the Brazilian public, unlike Hollywood’s tales of vengeful villains and super-terrorists.
In 2007 Elite Squad, by José Padilha, inundated the international scene once again with its story of the police elite squad BOPE, highly trained and almost incorruptible in comparison to regular police forces in Rio de Janeiro. It was probably the most controversial violent film in Brazilian history, since critics were divided between adoring the movie and its values, to abhorring it and rejecting its lessons.
Unlike similar-themed movies previously produced, Padilha’s Elite Squad seems to commend the efficiency and incorruptibility of a squad that does not think nor calculate before torturing and killing in the name of a “good cause,” as a columnist wrote for the North-American magazine Variety. Jay Weissberg, author of the column, stated that the torturous actions portrayed in the movie are comparable to SS actions in Nazi Germany.
Colonel Alberto Pinheiro, 45, has commented for the Northeastern Diary (a regional publication by Globo industries) that BOPE’s actions in the “Germans’ Mount,” another infamous slum in Rio de Janeiro, when authorities managed to avoid a populist rebellion that nearly scourged down the city’s main avenues, has “restored self-confidence” to the public of the city.
However, he also accentuates that those actions, as efficient as they were, raised the same questions that Padilha raised in his motion-picture. That is, as efficient as these troops are, they are also vile, abusive and merciless, disregarding social structures and simply prying on citizens’ impatience with the crime sprees that have long disrupted the city’s peace. This is why, many think, the protagonist Cpt. Nascimento is held as hero to a large percentage of viewers, as well as a criminal to another percentage.
As Bremme wrote in 2004, most of Brazil’s films touch upon violence in a different prism than normally seen in mainstream cinema, with touches of realism and a social conscience that characterizes an independent movement. Thus, although many critics still complain that these movies sometimes show only one side of the story of the country (its violence, poverty and social injustices), they are still generally regarded as more conscious and responsible than the violence portrayed in Hollywood.
As Esther Hamburguer noted on her research entitled “Violence and Poverty in the Brazilian cinema: Reflections on the idea of a spectacle,” movies such as those mentioned above give “some examples of fiction or documentary work that accentuate the visual presence of poor, black, slum-dwelling and marginal-peripheries-dwelling citizens to Brazilian television and movies. By bringing this universe to the public attention, these movies intensified and stimulated what I call a dispute for the control of visual communication, by defining themes and characters that will earn audiovisual expression, “how and where,” strategic elements in the definition of contemporary social order/disorder.”
However, that was not the case for many years. Sex in Brazilian cinema was much more of a norm than violence prior to Pixote. In fact, the rise and fall of what are known as “porno-chanchadas” has defined Brazilian cinema for at least two decades.
“Chanchadas” usually refers to a comic style of Latin-American movies, where characters act absurdly in an absurd world, usually as superficial as their dilemmas and obstacles. The term was coined since these movies, popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Brazil, combined the comic, absurd style of the “chanchadas” with strong eroticism, which, although was never explicit, was always overtly insinuated.
Among the most popular titles we can find a spoof of Snow-White and the 7 Dwarves as well as other children’s tales classics in Stories that our Nannies never told us (1979), and many other titles still remembered by older movie-audiences to this day, such as Oh! Rebuceteio (1984, no translation, although “buceta” vulgarly means vagina, and is the root of the second word of the title) and Seven Kittens (1980). (Casadonocio).
Seven Kittens, We Rent Girls (starring porno-star Gretchen) and I'll still catch my neighbor
The movie style flooded theaters at a time of dictatorship and military rules, becoming popular in an environment of prohibition and limited freedom of speech, probably as an escape from the harsh realities of the times. That may as well explain why the military allowed them to circulate freely: They did not criticize the government nor the military. They did not criticize anything, really, only spoofed sex through comedy in a very superficial manner.
It ultimately gave birth to another movement called "Garbage Mouth" in 1981 started by director Rafaelle Rossi, daring even more with their titles (among which Oh! Rebuceteio is produly included), helped tremendously by the libertine behavior of the Brazilian public, and the fact that pure pornography was easily watched at any movie theater in town.
No introduction necessary for the above picture
As we have seen, sex and violence were always present in Brazilian cinema, perhaps not because of their commercial viability, but because these themes are very real in Brazilian reality.
Ending on this note, we will discuss sex and violence in television shows and sensational press on the next part of this presentation.
(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)
Great blog, and deconstruction of the themes that seem to litter Brazilian cinema!
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