Q. Soft pornography and political resistance - is this a possible scenario?
A. Well, yes! The Pornochanchada
style of cinema in Brazil, under the military dictatorship of the late
1960's, '70's and early 80's, and reflected today in contemporary
Brazilian television.
Pornochanchada
is the name given to a genre of sex comedy films produced in Brazil
that was popular from the late 1960s following the popularity of commedia sexy all'italiana cinema. Pornochanchadas were massively produced in the downtown quarter of São Paulo that was nicknamed "Boca do Lixo" ("Garbage Mouth"). Its name combined
pornô (porn) and chanchada (light comedy), a combination of comedy and
erotica.
The genre was usually seen as a part of low-budget films produced there, collectively known as Mouth of Garbage Cinema. Later, there were productions in Rio de Janeiro as well, creating the subgenre pornochanchada carioca, which was to find its star in Alba Valeria during the early 1980s.
By the 1980s, with the
wide availability of hardcore pornography through clandestine video
cassettes, the genre suffered a considerable decline.
The Abstract of this paper, accessible on Research Gate, by Emma Camarero, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, published in January 2017, summarises the subject as follows:
Abstract
The
period of the dictatorship in Brazil was marked by the convergence of
two cinematic movements: on the one hand, the erotic films produced in
the Boca do Lixo neighbourhood in Sâo Paulo, which gave rise to the
pornochanchada; and on the other, Cinema Novo, which turned Brazilian
cinema into an international intellectual phenomenon. An analysis of
Brazilian cinema during the dictatorship from a historical perspective
reveals that both these movements brought about a revolution of ideology
and of form that neither the censors nor their tools of repression
could restrain. However, the importance of erotic cinema in the creation
of a collective consciousness that rejected the regime has been
underestimated in comparison with Cinema Novo. Concealed behind the
eroticism of these productions there was also a struggle based on the
affirmation of sexuality as a path towards freedom that often succeeded
in outwitting the censors, constituting a cinematic process that is
indispensable today for the construction of the memory of those years.
The paper begins with this heading: EROTICISM VERSUS SOCIAL PROTEST: THE TWO FACES OF BRAZILIAN CINEMA UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP and then introduces a recent television series Magnifica 70 to underline the significance of pornochanchada as a socio-political cultural phenomenon.
Magnífica
70 (Cláudio Torres, Conpiraçao Filmes and HBO: 2015-) is the name given
to the television series that has become Brazil’s latest on-screen
phenomenon. The series offers a portrayal of Brazil’s film industry in
the early 1970s, the so-called “Years of Lead” of the dictatorship that
held power from the coup of 1964 until the election of Tancredo Neves as
president in 1985. This production, with its meticulously crafted
aesthetic, large doses of black humour and a contemporary filming style,
is one of the more successful products currently being offered by the
HBO Latino network. Over the course of three episodes, Magnífica 70 uses
the world of 1970s Sâo Paulo’s Boca do Lixo neighbourhood, the cradle of
Brazil’s erotic cinema movement, which was one of the most commercially
popular film genres in the country during the dictatorship.
Concealed
beneath this supposedly frivolous reality is a script with constant
references to repression, freedom and censorship. The program’s
protagonist is a stereo-type of the Brazilian of the era; a man full of
contradictions, married to the daughter of a general close to the
regime, working at the Federal Censorship Office and obsessed with one of
those actresses whose voluptuous physiques made them a perfect
candidate for stardom in the sub-genre which in Brazil was graphically
referred to as pornochanchada. Using the backdrop of a country
superficially dedicated to commercial cinema, this production shows a
whole social reality marked by state control of all creation, including
the film industry. Magnífica 70 is an entertaining product that is at the
same time a merciless social critique of the regime in power at the
time, but with a focus on the recreation of a world of unscrupulous
producers with absolutely artistic (or, in theory, political)
pretensions. The technical execution of the series is impeccable, and
although the odd stereotype appears in the plot and character
development, such defects are barely noticeable because of the
fast-paced storyline and the constant succession of conflicts that arise.
Such
meticulously crafted productions as this one are confirmation that
Brazilian filmmaking is more relevant today than ever before. Reflecting
the same fascination with Brazilian film production under the
dictatorship, in 2011 the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid presented “Cuando
Brasil devoró el cine (1960-1970)” [“When Brazil Devoured the Cinema
(1960-1970)”], a review of the intense, revolutionary activity that took
place in the Brazilian film world during the harshest years of the
dictatorship, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that tells us a lot
about the interest that Brazilian cinema has aroused beyond its
borders. These are films by directors as important as Hélio Oiticica,
Neville d’Almeida, Raymundo Amado, Glauber Rocha, Eduardo Coutinho, and
Rogerio Sganzerla, to name a few. They are audiovisual documents that
are indispensable for understanding the cultural production related to
the events in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, and they portray the other
side of the rebellion against censorship in the country that was also
represented, in its own way, by the purely erotic films of the pornochanchada and Boca do Lixo.
Today
Brazil is experiencing a political moment that has little to do with
the Years of Lead, when the most creative generation of Brazilian
filmmakers of the twentieth century had to wrangle with the State and
navigate the censorship restrictions to ensure their projects saw
the light of day. However, the underlying social reality of many of the
films made under the dictatorship has not changed all that much,
including that persistent eroticism that appears to be an inherent
feature of Brazilian society.
At
the time of their production the pornochanchadas were regarded with a
degree of prejudice by the Brazilian intellectual community, and they
dismissed them as depoliticizing, in relation to the actions of the
dictatorial government and its repressive regime. However, in the midst
of nudity and sarcastic humour, brutality and the picaresque, the
pornochanchadas, clothed in the guise of naivete, were similarly
dismissed by the censors, making it possible for some productions to
subtly insert criticism of the entire edifice of cultural production, in
this case, a dictatorial government.
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