Please click on the titles below to navigate through the presentation! No point-blank managed on Blogger.
1 - Introduction
2 - Sex & Violence in Brazilian Books
3 - Sex & Violence in Brazilian Cinema
4 - Sex & Violence in Brazilian Television
5 - Sex & Violence in the Brazilian Press
6 - References
Friday, July 10, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Sex & Violence in Brazilian Press
In 2009, the group ANDI (News Agency of the Rights of Children) has published a guide for journalism defining not only the inherent rights of children according to the Institute of the Rights of Children and Teenagers, but also how the press should treat stories involving violence against children. Among their recommendations:
- Children have the right to privacy, and shouldn’t be overtly exposed by the press in their story accounts.
- Any images or reports that could endanger the child or anyone around the child (even when the identities are omitted or switched) should not be published.
- In the case of an interview, make sure that the parents or responsible guardians are aware and communicate to the child that he or she is being interviewed by the press.
The list has a few more items warning journalists of the sensitivity of dealing with children, who were abused or used in pornographic movies or pictures, as well as children and teenagers who have committed crimes and are now the main leads on a current story. It also lists recommendations on, for instance, when it is appropriate to film and air children’s images on television. Basically, journalists are instructed to never show the child or teenager when:
- The teenager has committed a crime.
- Working boys and girls.
- Children or teenagers who have been sexually abused or exploited.
- Boys and girls who have suffered any act of aggression.
- Parents of children or teenagers who have been sexually abused or exploited.
According to the list, only pregnant girls can be appropriately filmed and spoken to, as long as they are aware of the nature, intentions and objectives of the interviewer.
Finally, a study published by ANDI in 2008 shows that “according to the studies performed by ANDI in partnership with Childhood Brazil between 2000 and 2006, the space destined to the abuse and exploitation of boys and girls in the Brazilian press has risen 173.65%.” In fact, it has risen since 1973, when a crime that shocked Brazil finally called the attention of its citizens to such vile acts of exploitation, when 8-year-old Aracelli Cabrero Crespo was raped and brutally murdered.
Ever since, following somewhat of a different trend set by many media critics who advocate for less violence in the press, ANDI fights for the exposure of more violence against children and teenagers, and their efforts, according to the study above, have worked better than expected.
On the other hand, the study reveals that “the press needs to advance in its capacity of presenting an ampler panorama of the problem. The study shows, for example, that newspapers do not usually discuss the consequences of the phenomenon in a more expansive manner. In 2002, 16.8% of the stories about sexual crimes against children and teenagers debated solutions for the proposed questions, and only 5.25% of those discussed actions implemented by the public sector.”
This basically means that the growth of such exposure in the press has had a side-effect that might have already been predicted: The press “exploits sexual exploitation” as well as any other violent story, and seldom care to debate or raise questions that would directly motivate the public sector to take serious actions.
ANDI still celebrates its victories, however, since, with the publication and airing of such stories, they manage to continuously keep the public informed that those acts happen, and more frequently than once thought.
The Populist Press
On September, 2001, Rosa Nivea Pedroso, professor of journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, wrote an article defining the differences between sensational and credible presses:
“The technical and ideological procedures for editorial and commercial enjoyment of the value, the power and the status quo of information, that is, the transformation of occurrences in news, are performed both by the estimated journalists and those who work at populist and sensational papers. The difference between them is the format and the manner in which news are presented, which is recognized by receivers of those news as sensationalistic.
‘The difference between newspapers famed sensationalist and others known as serious lies only on the level. Sensationalism is only the most radical level to market information: What is sold is the appearance and, in fact, we sell news where the internal information would not develop better than the [sensationalist] headline.'” (Marcondes Filho, 1985, p.66).
According to Pedroso in 2001, populist newspapers had no chance of surviving for a long time. Similar to supermarkets gossip tabloids found regularly in the US, most of what is called in Brazil “brown press” (in juxtaposition to the “yellow press” in the US) fails after a few years in the market by losing credibility, or slowly incorporate credibility and journalistic efficiency in order to become (and compete) with larger publications.
However, soon thereafter Pedroso was proved wrong. According to Liliane Correa de Freitas, executive-editor of Here from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, a populist newspaper that competes fiercely with its larger counterpart, The State of Minas Gerais (or popularly, the EM, owned by the Associated Diaries, which also owns one of the largest Brazilian portals on the web, UAI.com), and with its competitors in the state’s market, “it is impossible to speak of sensationalism and violence/sex in the press without mentioning populist newspapers.”
In May, 2002, the newspaper Super News affiliated to its larger parent, The Times, was born to eventually grow and become the second most sold and read newspaper in the country (300 thousand daily copies sold exclusively in the street stands, only losing to São Paulo Herald by a few thousand copies). Freitas, then only a sub-editor, helped conceiving and creating the model, which would spark the creation of its main competitor in Belo Horizonte, Here. After an irrefutable offer by EM’s executive manager, Freitas has moved to their company to also help creating its populist version.
Lúcia Castro, executive-editor of The Times said that its “differential is to reach an audience that was never used to reading newspapers. The great merit of Super News”, she concluded, “is that it has created a new reading public. It has permitted the inclusion of such people [the poor, the less educated and the working classes].”
Freitas has said the same: “Our objective has always been to include these people in our societies. We have never seen it as an information consumer public, and by that they have been excluded from the democratic process of the media.
Although our stories are more sensational and we concentrate the highest percentage of our coverage on police news and sports, they still bring the public to the realization that they belong to those communities.”
Populist papers, at least those in Minas Gerais, have refused to create an editorial opinion for their Sunday issues. Instead, on a daily basis, the editorial comes from people either complaining or commending issues when before they were not even aware those issues existed, according to Freitas.
More than delivering the news, populist newspapers have arrived at a time of uncertainty for the newspaper market. As larger publications are forced to cut corners and jobs, populist newspapers are actually making money, or in the worst case scenario, helping their parent companies not to lose money.
However, there is no denying that perhaps 3 out of 5 pages of such publications are dedicated to gore, violence and sexuality on a radical level, as Pedroso explained using Filho’s own words, with vulgar or careless expressions, where popular jargons, strong imagery and perhaps some relentlessness by reporters and writers are the norm. On January, 23, one day after president Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, only a side headline mentioned the occurrence in Aqui, but the main headline read: “Uncle rapes and abuses niece for years!”
One of the tabloids that preceded the current era, the Afternoon Daily of Minas Gerais, was known for its bloody content. “When you squeezed those pages you would see blood dripping onto the floor,” said Freitas.
However, as citizens of this state are a bit more conservative than their neighbors in the southeast, the Afternoon Daily closed its doors for a lack of identification on behalf of its readers. Evidently this is not the case of the populist newspapers, which have succeeded in forcing, as Castro said, some people to learn how to read and write in order to be informed by the medium that all of their friends and co-workers are reading.
As Freitas said, “[readers] in this state don’t care how much blood spilt on the scene, or how much the victim suffered before dying, but they do wish to know exactly when, where and how the crime was committed in the most sordid details.”
Rosa Nivea Pedroso explained, back in 2001, that “the populist newspaper is sold by its headlines, which are capable of making readers read and buy only for the attraction, the sensation, the impact and morbid curiosity awakened.”
Freitas does not disagree. According to her experience, violence and sex simply sell, not only to the poorest and under-educated, but to anyone in Brazil. “In fact, not only the poor an uneducated buy these papers,” said Freitas, “but pretty much anyone from any layer of society, perhaps with the exclusion of the very rich.” Since the poorest and under-educated have been left out of the loop for such a long time, it is no wonder that they are more attracted to what has been the pillar of “brown journalism” in Brazil, “but everyone else is,” Freitas complemented.
There are, nonetheless, media analysts who argue vehemently with such affirmation. As the Press Observatory, a NGO specialized in tracking media trends, efficiency and social accountability, published in an article written by Luciano Martins Costa in April, 2009, “an analysis of the main titles created or renewed in order to expand the breath of their parent journalistic companies shows that editors’ choices repeat older beliefs that dictated that the public of those newspapers considered less “noble” likes the screaming colors, scandalous titles and, nearly always, bloody news [better than the “noble” public].” At least this is the case, as the study have showed, for most editors, who envision that violence and sex not only sell, but sell even better to the lower and middle classes.
In fact, Press Observatory works closely with the website Cruel Brazil, which publishes daily accounts of the number of violent stories exposed by the media.
As Costa concluded in his April article, “São Paulo Herald has published [in the 17th of that month] that the Justice Tribunal has forbidden the exposition of accident victims in newspaper or television reports. Of course,” Costa continued, “the National Association of Newspapers condemned the decision (…) but it suffices to observe the titles of publications such as The Liberal, Pará’s Diary and Amazon to understand the judges' reason.” Such publications publish daily pictures of torn-out, smothered bodies, even of minors, as stimulus to sell newspapers. And the question remains controversial: Is violence more likely to attract the poorest and under-educated, or as Freitas has argued, it is well sold to anyone in society (perhaps excluding the very richest)?
Costa concluded that such extreme and absurd expositions, and the fact that the National Association of Newspapers has condemned the Justice Tribunal’s attempt to reduce such exploitation, are signs that the Brazilian press is “ill, very ill.”
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Sex & Violence in Brazilian Television
Just as in any Western country, television plays an essential part in Brazilians’ daily routine, from traditional soap-operas (“novelas”), to children’s programming and sensationalistic TV news-shows. When it comes to TV, sex appeals more often and regularly than violence to the country’s audience. Similar to the “porno-chanchada” movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it seems that spectators are attracted to sex as a game, a fun thing to do when they can, and a fun thing to watch all day long. Since violence does not have the same appeal, and perhaps also because of its excess in the streets of Brazil, sex sells better in TV commercials and shows.
Violence, on the other hand, has a different role: Shows such as Alert City or the extinct Here and Now, by SBT (Brazilian System of Television, the second most popular channel in Brazilian open TV) report on violence with as much graphic scenes as possible, shaken camera shots and angles, sometimes employing a helicopter at strategic parts of the city (usually the poorest) in order to catch crimes as they happen and assist the police in capturing the culprits. Gil Gomes, who passed away in June, 2007, was one of the most infamous TV hosts when Here and Now began airing in 1991, with caricatured gestures and a somber tone in his rancid voice, always reporting a crime as if it was a fictitious horror story, shocking viewers and attracting a morbidly-curious audience for several years.
Gil Gomes Pictured Above
After Here and Now, many similar shows came to exist in Brazil’s smaller TV stations (Band, Record and SBT). Alert City, then presented by José Luiz Datena in 1999 through 2002 in TV station Band (former Bandeirantes) had a similar style, perhaps a bit less of a caricature, but still offering viewers the same spiced up stories as Here and Now. The producers provided a “reporting” helicopter following police activities throughout the city, which offered something more to the viewers, an actual interaction as crime stories developed in São Paulo. Strongly opinionated and conservative, former soccer commentator Datena presented the show with frequent vulgar expressions and popular jargons, upholding his reputation as a crime hater, someone who constantly judged criminals as sub-humans, and who gave the suffering citizens of urban violence an aggressive voice to vent out.
Such sensationalistic shows are very common, especially in afternoon and evening programming in Brazilian television. Cristina Valéria Flausino wrote in 2003 that “we can doubt of news written in a newspaper or heard on the radio, but in front of a screen, with the ‘live’ logo displayed on the top corner, with follow-up narration by the anchorperson (who constantly repeats “you are viewing these images live”) there is no contest and everything acquires the appearance of an absolute truth. There is no reality other than the one standing before our eyes.” And her concern is validated by Bourdieu (1997), who said that “an important parcel of our society is given body and soul to television.”
As most of these shows, which in actuality include General Balance (Record), Direct Line (Globo), Brazil Urgent (Band) and the infamous Ratinho Show (SBT) are played in the less popular, less watched and less regarded TV stations (other than Direct Line, which airs on Globo, the monopolistic Brazilian TV station). That means that these shows, as popular and frequent as they are, growing in number tremendously since Here and Now, are regarded as the lowest of low-cultures, and appeal to the poorest and less educated segments of society.
Although the stories are real (ever more real, since most are live, and as Flausino describes, they all provide a constant flow of live audiovisual language), they are overplayed and most of the times come with the constant static of the wild rants by their anchors and reporters. Yet, as she described on her research paper in 2003, the majority of these news-shows are heavily influenced by North-American journalism. Their models are directly taken from American newscasts, and they all claim to follow, as literarily as possible, the social journalism style.
True enough, most of these shows do portray stories that are ignored by the mainstream media (in the case of Brazil, anything that airs on Globo is considered mainstream, but only a few shows from other stations reach the larger public with the same intensity) and are more relevant to local communities and neighborhoods. Luiz Datena, for example, was forced to quit after a long period of uncertainty because of some of his controversial expressions. He never spoke against the people, but against repressive institutions and white-collar as well as petty criminals. He was pressured to leave the show since anonymous parties were unhappy with his indiscriminate criticism of high-level institutions and government.
TV Talk Shows and Soap-Operas
Also regarded as low-culture, soap-operas or “novelas” add to the sexuality and violence portrayed in the media. Talk-shows such as Márcia (Record) and The Ratinho Show (SBT) often include spoofs of news, controversial interviews and guests fighting each other both vulgarly and physically on stage, much like a common Jerry Springer episode (and very much drawn from its model).
Soap-operas, on the other hand, are particularly well viewed by female audiences, and depending on the writer and producer, they do not necessarily expose too much of these themes in their plots and characters' conduct. However, some “novelas” (such as “Kubanacan” Globo, 2004) do insinuate and provoke audiences more by presenting barely naked women and men and portraying most of the challenges and obstacles that the characters face as sexual, or most of the solutions as violent.
As an article from October, 2006, in Sao Paulo Herald described, Band station has created a soap-opera intending to break Globo’s monopoly by appealing to the most basic human instincts of the audience. Forbidden Passions (2006) had scenes of “a slave murdered in one episode … a rape attempt in the next … a few episodes later, a couple has explicit sex on top of a kitchen table …”
In fact, although Forbidden Passions has never erased Globo’s monopoly, it marked a turning-point in Brazilian television, when sex and violence became a must in Brazilian culture. Now, such scenes were not only commercially viable, but became the norm. An increase in sexual and violent content is evident, according to the article, in Brazilian mainstream and open TV stations.
Sex and violence, thus, are well portrayed in the Brazilian media.
Now, we turn to the press and a few NGO’s that have discussed both positively and negatively the power of such themes and their influence on popular behavior.
(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)
Violence, on the other hand, has a different role: Shows such as Alert City or the extinct Here and Now, by SBT (Brazilian System of Television, the second most popular channel in Brazilian open TV) report on violence with as much graphic scenes as possible, shaken camera shots and angles, sometimes employing a helicopter at strategic parts of the city (usually the poorest) in order to catch crimes as they happen and assist the police in capturing the culprits. Gil Gomes, who passed away in June, 2007, was one of the most infamous TV hosts when Here and Now began airing in 1991, with caricatured gestures and a somber tone in his rancid voice, always reporting a crime as if it was a fictitious horror story, shocking viewers and attracting a morbidly-curious audience for several years.
Gil Gomes Pictured AboveAfter Here and Now, many similar shows came to exist in Brazil’s smaller TV stations (Band, Record and SBT). Alert City, then presented by José Luiz Datena in 1999 through 2002 in TV station Band (former Bandeirantes) had a similar style, perhaps a bit less of a caricature, but still offering viewers the same spiced up stories as Here and Now. The producers provided a “reporting” helicopter following police activities throughout the city, which offered something more to the viewers, an actual interaction as crime stories developed in São Paulo. Strongly opinionated and conservative, former soccer commentator Datena presented the show with frequent vulgar expressions and popular jargons, upholding his reputation as a crime hater, someone who constantly judged criminals as sub-humans, and who gave the suffering citizens of urban violence an aggressive voice to vent out.
Such sensationalistic shows are very common, especially in afternoon and evening programming in Brazilian television. Cristina Valéria Flausino wrote in 2003 that “we can doubt of news written in a newspaper or heard on the radio, but in front of a screen, with the ‘live’ logo displayed on the top corner, with follow-up narration by the anchorperson (who constantly repeats “you are viewing these images live”) there is no contest and everything acquires the appearance of an absolute truth. There is no reality other than the one standing before our eyes.” And her concern is validated by Bourdieu (1997), who said that “an important parcel of our society is given body and soul to television.”
As most of these shows, which in actuality include General Balance (Record), Direct Line (Globo), Brazil Urgent (Band) and the infamous Ratinho Show (SBT) are played in the less popular, less watched and less regarded TV stations (other than Direct Line, which airs on Globo, the monopolistic Brazilian TV station). That means that these shows, as popular and frequent as they are, growing in number tremendously since Here and Now, are regarded as the lowest of low-cultures, and appeal to the poorest and less educated segments of society.
Although the stories are real (ever more real, since most are live, and as Flausino describes, they all provide a constant flow of live audiovisual language), they are overplayed and most of the times come with the constant static of the wild rants by their anchors and reporters. Yet, as she described on her research paper in 2003, the majority of these news-shows are heavily influenced by North-American journalism. Their models are directly taken from American newscasts, and they all claim to follow, as literarily as possible, the social journalism style.
True enough, most of these shows do portray stories that are ignored by the mainstream media (in the case of Brazil, anything that airs on Globo is considered mainstream, but only a few shows from other stations reach the larger public with the same intensity) and are more relevant to local communities and neighborhoods. Luiz Datena, for example, was forced to quit after a long period of uncertainty because of some of his controversial expressions. He never spoke against the people, but against repressive institutions and white-collar as well as petty criminals. He was pressured to leave the show since anonymous parties were unhappy with his indiscriminate criticism of high-level institutions and government.
TV Talk Shows and Soap-Operas
Also regarded as low-culture, soap-operas or “novelas” add to the sexuality and violence portrayed in the media. Talk-shows such as Márcia (Record) and The Ratinho Show (SBT) often include spoofs of news, controversial interviews and guests fighting each other both vulgarly and physically on stage, much like a common Jerry Springer episode (and very much drawn from its model).
Soap-operas, on the other hand, are particularly well viewed by female audiences, and depending on the writer and producer, they do not necessarily expose too much of these themes in their plots and characters' conduct. However, some “novelas” (such as “Kubanacan” Globo, 2004) do insinuate and provoke audiences more by presenting barely naked women and men and portraying most of the challenges and obstacles that the characters face as sexual, or most of the solutions as violent.
As an article from October, 2006, in Sao Paulo Herald described, Band station has created a soap-opera intending to break Globo’s monopoly by appealing to the most basic human instincts of the audience. Forbidden Passions (2006) had scenes of “a slave murdered in one episode … a rape attempt in the next … a few episodes later, a couple has explicit sex on top of a kitchen table …”
In fact, although Forbidden Passions has never erased Globo’s monopoly, it marked a turning-point in Brazilian television, when sex and violence became a must in Brazilian culture. Now, such scenes were not only commercially viable, but became the norm. An increase in sexual and violent content is evident, according to the article, in Brazilian mainstream and open TV stations.
Sex and violence, thus, are well portrayed in the Brazilian media.
Now, we turn to the press and a few NGO’s that have discussed both positively and negatively the power of such themes and their influence on popular behavior.
(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)
Sex & Violence in Brazilian Cinema
Pixote – The Law of the Weakest came out to shock and provoke Brazilian audiences in 1981 with the tragic story of a homeless 11-year-old boy who spent his life fleeing from reformatories and detention cells emerged in a violent city. Hector Babenco’s third movie, Pixote did not only portray a very crude Brazilian reality, but it has also exposed the existence of such children for the first time in national cinema. That is to say that, even though violence and poverty were not new to the country’s scenery at the time, the violence pictured by Babenco was thought to not have been commercially viable until that point.
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)
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)
Sex & Violence in Brazilian Books
From short stories to full novels, no author has explored more the themes of sexuality and violence than Nelson Rodrigues. It is impossible not to mention his work thoroughly if we wish to analyze how the country’s media was and still is exposed to such themes and how it influences media consumers’ behaviors.
Nelson Rodrigues as he started his career in the '40s
“I am a pornographic angel,” said Rodrigues, born in August, 1912, in Recife, city of the state of Pernambuco. Living his childhood as an observer of the hypocritical behavior of his neighbors and relatives, Rodrigues began working as a police reporter in 1925. He soon began to impress his colleagues, all renowned writers and poets, with his detailed accounts of the simplest facts of life, and he immediately specialized in young lovers’ death pacts, a common occurrence at those times. Young men and women pledged their love for one another, but amid the social distinctions and economic divisions of the times such relationships were often prohibited, leading to the suicide of one or both lovers.
Rodrigues began to show his taste for violence and strong sexual contents in his literature when he wrote The Rat... (this infamous ellipsis at the end of his titles turned out to be a registered mark), where he told the short story of a rat he had seen, smothered by the tires of a passing car. There was no particular plot for the story, just the mere account of a gruesome scene.
Rodrigues had witnessed the murder of his brother and the passing of his father before he turned 18, which deeply contributed to his artistic perspective. He became popular writing and directing for theater, particularly after The Bride’s Dress, a story riddled with sex, jealousy and murder. Many of his short stories and theater plays eventually became TV mini-series. One of the memorable and most recent plays transformed into a TV show was The Cutie, a short story about a young couple bothered and tempted by the bride’s younger sister, who comes of age and decides to seduce the groom. Successfully managing to bring him to her bed, the jealousy, guilt and inconformity with the unreal situation brings the groom to murder “the cutie” and return gloriously to his wife, just in time for his arrest.
Later in life, Rodrigues speaks
But was Brazil ready for Rodrigues? The answer is probably yes, since his fame managed to grow when all other artists had their wings cut by the military regime that later ensued in 1964.
As the novelist supported dictatorship (even though one of his sons was tortured by the military), and as the times grew dark and violent, Rodrigues’ exploration and exploitation of the vile costumes of Brazilian culture grew in controversy, but sold massively and brought in large audiences to the theaters almost infallibly.
Since the times of his first acclaimed story, The Woman without Sin (1942), Rodrigues was considered “both immoral and a moralist” (Brazil Journal). Readers and spectators were often in awe of his sordid accounts, but it never seemed to turn them off. In spite of strong literary criticism, Rodrigues is still known as the father of modern Brazilian theater. With vast short stories, novels and plays, aside of his witty, famous quotes, the writer had most of his work compiled in Life as Life Is (1951-1961). He died in December, 21, 1980.
Life as Life Is, the movie
In Brazil, however, both sex and violence as a method for storytelling has always seemed a bit more valid, real and original than the violence depicted in Hollywood. In its literature, it wouldn’t be different. Instead of ridiculing violence by creating stereotypes and flooding the pages of his books with gory accounts and pornographic images, it seemed that Rodrigues’ violence had a place and a meaning in the story, and even though it has certainly shocked readers, it did so by telling the truth about people’s intimate lives, not creating a paradox where anything goes.
Also, Rodrigues’ characters seldom found happiness and always had some sort of pathology haunting them, and his women were objectified to an extent, as the anonymous author of the Weblog Bacanartes, a literary critic, explains: “In a suburban room, the conflict between lovers occurs, while none of the members of a love-triangle is happy. A friend who says he is sick, incapable of not having sex with all the girls he sees – and the woman as an object, whether she is innocent, or woman, or free – and the man betrayed, desperate before the sands of Ipanema or any other Brazilian beach. On a train destined to anywhere, a man slides his hands through the thighs of another man, a sordid sexual advance in a public situation. And The Cutie. The Cutie precedes Lolita and Anita for a decade. The man opens the door to his dark living room… And the surprise…”
My Destiny is to Sin, one of Rodrigues' famous books and theater plays
Rubem Fonseca, another contemporary author, has written of violence in his dozens of short stories, but with a different perspective. Unlike Rodrigues, Fonseca incorporates the modern concepts of human behavior and inter-relations as he speaks of drug dealers and users, the homeless, prostitutes and petty thieves in a heavy urban setting that resembles noir films, but that are ever too close to Brazilian reality.
Born in May 11, 1925 in Minas Gerais, Fonseca has never liked the public life and has constantly avoided it. His last book, Romance has died, was published in 2007, but the author has very few interviews and even less current pictures of him along his career. A former police officer, Fonseca has incorporated what he had witnessed while on duty in the pages of his fiction. As his friends describe (Releituras, 2008), at the time that Fonseca worked as a policeman, the profession tended to be more about maintaining peace and helping the community than hunting thugs. Nevertheless, it is those thugs and marginal men and women that Fonseca liked to write about in his chronicles.
Once again, because of the modernity of his writing and how they have always appealed to young and old audiences as they attempted to use his books and tales to make sense of the world around them, Fonseca has also had some of his stories turned into movies, and he wrote most scripts for those productions as well. Reports of a Married Man (1974), Stellinha (1990), and the thriller The Great Art (1991) were three award-winning movies of the several screenplays he wrote and saw directed.
One of the rare pictures taken of Rubem Fonseca
Although some literary critics have condemned the work of Nelson Rodrigues as immoral, times favored the accounts of somber violence and urban crimes in 1963, a year before the military revolution, when Fonseca wrote and published his first chronicle, The Prisoners. Whereas Rodrigues perhaps sensationalized violence and sex through the eyes of his common characters, Fonseca’s characters already belonged to the dog-eat-dog medium of the big cities.
David Sexton, writing for the Independent, has said this about Fonsecas’ romance The Great Art: “Latin-American fiction has showed itself capable of combining, without any difficulty, the intelligent with the popular. The Great Art captivates readers because its paradoxical elements underscore, instead of depreciating, its sensationalist side, turning it into a refined and superior book.”
From the critics (both positive or negative) of these two authors we can infer that, although violence and sexuality have been intrinsically explored in their works, sensationalized and objectified, they don’t take much from their artistic and philosophical value, remaining among the “high culture” literature still found on Brazilian bookshelves.
64 Tales by Rubem Fonseca
Both Rodrigues and Fonseca, as seen before, have contributed immensely to national cinema and TV shows. The next two parts speak of the two media formats.
(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)
Nelson Rodrigues as he started his career in the '40s
“I am a pornographic angel,” said Rodrigues, born in August, 1912, in Recife, city of the state of Pernambuco. Living his childhood as an observer of the hypocritical behavior of his neighbors and relatives, Rodrigues began working as a police reporter in 1925. He soon began to impress his colleagues, all renowned writers and poets, with his detailed accounts of the simplest facts of life, and he immediately specialized in young lovers’ death pacts, a common occurrence at those times. Young men and women pledged their love for one another, but amid the social distinctions and economic divisions of the times such relationships were often prohibited, leading to the suicide of one or both lovers.
Rodrigues began to show his taste for violence and strong sexual contents in his literature when he wrote The Rat... (this infamous ellipsis at the end of his titles turned out to be a registered mark), where he told the short story of a rat he had seen, smothered by the tires of a passing car. There was no particular plot for the story, just the mere account of a gruesome scene.
Rodrigues had witnessed the murder of his brother and the passing of his father before he turned 18, which deeply contributed to his artistic perspective. He became popular writing and directing for theater, particularly after The Bride’s Dress, a story riddled with sex, jealousy and murder. Many of his short stories and theater plays eventually became TV mini-series. One of the memorable and most recent plays transformed into a TV show was The Cutie, a short story about a young couple bothered and tempted by the bride’s younger sister, who comes of age and decides to seduce the groom. Successfully managing to bring him to her bed, the jealousy, guilt and inconformity with the unreal situation brings the groom to murder “the cutie” and return gloriously to his wife, just in time for his arrest.
Later in life, Rodrigues speaksBut was Brazil ready for Rodrigues? The answer is probably yes, since his fame managed to grow when all other artists had their wings cut by the military regime that later ensued in 1964.
As the novelist supported dictatorship (even though one of his sons was tortured by the military), and as the times grew dark and violent, Rodrigues’ exploration and exploitation of the vile costumes of Brazilian culture grew in controversy, but sold massively and brought in large audiences to the theaters almost infallibly.
Since the times of his first acclaimed story, The Woman without Sin (1942), Rodrigues was considered “both immoral and a moralist” (Brazil Journal). Readers and spectators were often in awe of his sordid accounts, but it never seemed to turn them off. In spite of strong literary criticism, Rodrigues is still known as the father of modern Brazilian theater. With vast short stories, novels and plays, aside of his witty, famous quotes, the writer had most of his work compiled in Life as Life Is (1951-1961). He died in December, 21, 1980.
Life as Life Is, the movieIn Brazil, however, both sex and violence as a method for storytelling has always seemed a bit more valid, real and original than the violence depicted in Hollywood. In its literature, it wouldn’t be different. Instead of ridiculing violence by creating stereotypes and flooding the pages of his books with gory accounts and pornographic images, it seemed that Rodrigues’ violence had a place and a meaning in the story, and even though it has certainly shocked readers, it did so by telling the truth about people’s intimate lives, not creating a paradox where anything goes.
Also, Rodrigues’ characters seldom found happiness and always had some sort of pathology haunting them, and his women were objectified to an extent, as the anonymous author of the Weblog Bacanartes, a literary critic, explains: “In a suburban room, the conflict between lovers occurs, while none of the members of a love-triangle is happy. A friend who says he is sick, incapable of not having sex with all the girls he sees – and the woman as an object, whether she is innocent, or woman, or free – and the man betrayed, desperate before the sands of Ipanema or any other Brazilian beach. On a train destined to anywhere, a man slides his hands through the thighs of another man, a sordid sexual advance in a public situation. And The Cutie. The Cutie precedes Lolita and Anita for a decade. The man opens the door to his dark living room… And the surprise…”
My Destiny is to Sin, one of Rodrigues' famous books and theater playsRubem Fonseca, another contemporary author, has written of violence in his dozens of short stories, but with a different perspective. Unlike Rodrigues, Fonseca incorporates the modern concepts of human behavior and inter-relations as he speaks of drug dealers and users, the homeless, prostitutes and petty thieves in a heavy urban setting that resembles noir films, but that are ever too close to Brazilian reality.
Born in May 11, 1925 in Minas Gerais, Fonseca has never liked the public life and has constantly avoided it. His last book, Romance has died, was published in 2007, but the author has very few interviews and even less current pictures of him along his career. A former police officer, Fonseca has incorporated what he had witnessed while on duty in the pages of his fiction. As his friends describe (Releituras, 2008), at the time that Fonseca worked as a policeman, the profession tended to be more about maintaining peace and helping the community than hunting thugs. Nevertheless, it is those thugs and marginal men and women that Fonseca liked to write about in his chronicles.
Once again, because of the modernity of his writing and how they have always appealed to young and old audiences as they attempted to use his books and tales to make sense of the world around them, Fonseca has also had some of his stories turned into movies, and he wrote most scripts for those productions as well. Reports of a Married Man (1974), Stellinha (1990), and the thriller The Great Art (1991) were three award-winning movies of the several screenplays he wrote and saw directed.
One of the rare pictures taken of Rubem FonsecaAlthough some literary critics have condemned the work of Nelson Rodrigues as immoral, times favored the accounts of somber violence and urban crimes in 1963, a year before the military revolution, when Fonseca wrote and published his first chronicle, The Prisoners. Whereas Rodrigues perhaps sensationalized violence and sex through the eyes of his common characters, Fonseca’s characters already belonged to the dog-eat-dog medium of the big cities.
David Sexton, writing for the Independent, has said this about Fonsecas’ romance The Great Art: “Latin-American fiction has showed itself capable of combining, without any difficulty, the intelligent with the popular. The Great Art captivates readers because its paradoxical elements underscore, instead of depreciating, its sensationalist side, turning it into a refined and superior book.”
From the critics (both positive or negative) of these two authors we can infer that, although violence and sexuality have been intrinsically explored in their works, sensationalized and objectified, they don’t take much from their artistic and philosophical value, remaining among the “high culture” literature still found on Brazilian bookshelves.
64 Tales by Rubem FonsecaBoth Rodrigues and Fonseca, as seen before, have contributed immensely to national cinema and TV shows. The next two parts speak of the two media formats.
(Click to go to the next part of the presentation)
Introduction
From the early literature of the contemporary Brazilian authors to the latest movies and TV shows popularly circulating throughout the country’s homes and streets, sex and violence as a method of storytelling is particularly present in the largest state of South America. The Federative Republic of Brazil is mostly known for its Carnival in February or March, beautiful beaches in the southeast and north, the Amazon and its great jungle and, of course, soccer. But even when it comes to tourism, sex and violence sell.
A trend in the growing spec of the national movie industry began emerging in 1998 with Walter Salles’ Central Station, starring that year’s academy award nominee for best actress Fernanda Montenegro. The film pictured the depths of Brazilian poverty through the character of a boy who seeks the help of a letter-writer (Montenegro) to reach his long lost family in the north of the country. What emerges from the story, however, and has been much criticized as well as commended, is a pattern of violence and disregard for human life that added to the drama and seemed to lure international audiences to the foreign-film theaters. Several scenes depict the lowest and darkest side of Rio de Janeiro, as when a detective is hired to “clean” the streets of the petty thieves, abandoned children mostly, who never get to see a judge before being coldly executed by the sidewalk, or the organ selling market that tempts the villain of the plot to kidnap the protagonist and earn the ransom in a sinister manner.
Central Station is not the only movie to explore the theme of violence and it certainly hadn’t been the first shock-and-awe Brazilian film (an adjective that fits Pixote - The Law of the Weakest by Hector Babenco, 1981) but perhaps as a consequence of its modern success, motion pictures such as City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), Carandiru (Hector Babenco, 2003) and the TV series City of Men (Guel Arraes and Regina Casé starting in 2002, until Paulo Morelli directed the long-length feature in 2007) managed to captivate massive national and international audiences.
Brazil’s fascination for sex and violence is not new, and it is well depicted from its books to the movies and television shows, from commercials to its music culture. Renowned authors such as Nelson Rodrigues (Life as Life Is, 1961) and Rubem Fonseca (Happy New Year, 1975) have explored the themes to its minuscule details in hundreds of short stories, and a few long ones.
Image of a protesting seal against the lack of ethics of Brazilian media
Brazilian Carnival is riddled with sexuality in the lyrics of the old samba marches and the new funk fad. From such literature and poetry spring the show of barely naked women and men dancing in the streets of Brazilian populated capitals, the TV successes of the works of Rodrigues and Fonseca, and the movies and documentaries that depict the opposite metaphysical aspects of the universe, eroticism (life) and violence (death) .
Notably, there is also the influence of American television, cinema, music and graphic animation in its heavy hegemony over show-business, and the fact that Brazil is among the few Global South countries with a middle-class wealthy enough to purchase these products has helped the influence sink deep. In the following presentation we will review the trends of sexuality and violence in Brazilian media, from books to newspapers and the recent phenomenon of the popular press, television, movies, and also briefly discuss the influence of the American media on its Brazilian counterpart.
(Click to go the next part of the presentation)
A trend in the growing spec of the national movie industry began emerging in 1998 with Walter Salles’ Central Station, starring that year’s academy award nominee for best actress Fernanda Montenegro. The film pictured the depths of Brazilian poverty through the character of a boy who seeks the help of a letter-writer (Montenegro) to reach his long lost family in the north of the country. What emerges from the story, however, and has been much criticized as well as commended, is a pattern of violence and disregard for human life that added to the drama and seemed to lure international audiences to the foreign-film theaters. Several scenes depict the lowest and darkest side of Rio de Janeiro, as when a detective is hired to “clean” the streets of the petty thieves, abandoned children mostly, who never get to see a judge before being coldly executed by the sidewalk, or the organ selling market that tempts the villain of the plot to kidnap the protagonist and earn the ransom in a sinister manner.
Central Station is not the only movie to explore the theme of violence and it certainly hadn’t been the first shock-and-awe Brazilian film (an adjective that fits Pixote - The Law of the Weakest by Hector Babenco, 1981) but perhaps as a consequence of its modern success, motion pictures such as City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), Carandiru (Hector Babenco, 2003) and the TV series City of Men (Guel Arraes and Regina Casé starting in 2002, until Paulo Morelli directed the long-length feature in 2007) managed to captivate massive national and international audiences.
Brazil’s fascination for sex and violence is not new, and it is well depicted from its books to the movies and television shows, from commercials to its music culture. Renowned authors such as Nelson Rodrigues (Life as Life Is, 1961) and Rubem Fonseca (Happy New Year, 1975) have explored the themes to its minuscule details in hundreds of short stories, and a few long ones.
Image of a protesting seal against the lack of ethics of Brazilian mediaBrazilian Carnival is riddled with sexuality in the lyrics of the old samba marches and the new funk fad. From such literature and poetry spring the show of barely naked women and men dancing in the streets of Brazilian populated capitals, the TV successes of the works of Rodrigues and Fonseca, and the movies and documentaries that depict the opposite metaphysical aspects of the universe, eroticism (life) and violence (death) .
Notably, there is also the influence of American television, cinema, music and graphic animation in its heavy hegemony over show-business, and the fact that Brazil is among the few Global South countries with a middle-class wealthy enough to purchase these products has helped the influence sink deep. In the following presentation we will review the trends of sexuality and violence in Brazilian media, from books to newspapers and the recent phenomenon of the popular press, television, movies, and also briefly discuss the influence of the American media on its Brazilian counterpart.
(Click to go the next part of the presentation)
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