Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema

Tim Bergfelder, Lisa Shaw, João Luiz Vieira, Tim Bergfelder, Lisa Shaw, João Luiz Vieira

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785332999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in "star studies, " Brazilian film has received comparatively little attention. As this volume demonstrates, however, the richness of Brazilian stardom extends well beyond the ubiquitous Carmen Miranda. Among the studies assembled here are fascinating explorations of figures such as Eliane Lage (the star attraction of São Paulo's Vera Cruz studios), cult horror movie auteur Coffin Joe, and Lázaro Ramos, the most visible Afro-Brazilian actor today. At the same time, contributors interrogate the inner workings of the star system in Brazil, from the pioneering efforts of silent-era actresses to the recent advent of the non-professional movie star.

CHAPTER 1

Consuming visions

Female stars, the melindrosa and desires for a Brazilian film industry

Maite Conde

In the aftermath of World War One, women began to appear everywhere in Brazil. Dressed in modern styles from abroad, they adorned the covers of glossy magazines, with further snapshots sprinkled throughout the inside pages. Advertisers used women’s bodies to sell products. Novels centred on the behaviour of young women. Educators, doctors and jurists attempted to implement standards of female health and education.¹ At the same time, filmmakers introduced female heroines, whose cinematic roles were reinforced by fanzines, such as Cinearte (1926–42), turning Brazilian actresses into movie stars. This chapter examines female stardom in 1920s Brazil. Looking across a cultural landscape of movies and fanzines, it explores the ways in which actresses’ star texts intersected with the ‘appearance’ of women in the country. In doing so, it looks at how the gendered appeal and content of 1920s stardom fed into contemporary discussions concerning Brazilian cinema.

In pursuing the issue of women’s relationship to star discourses in the 1920s, this chapter has two broadly conceived and interrelated purposes: first, to explore the connections between the elaboration of Brazil’s star system in the 1920s and contemporaneous notions of femininity; second, to provide a challenge to those assessments that posit the Brazilian star system as merely a copy of Hollywood. As shall be demonstrated, Brazil’s Hollywood-inflected star system became the site of contradictions, as it sought to negotiate between modern desires for a Brazilian film industry and the country’s traditional constellations, highlighting new discourses of femininity and questions relating to class and race. Rather than an unproblematic imitation, Brazil’s star system employed Hollywood models and adapted them for the specific needs of the social and economic context, as well as the campaign for a national film industry.

Figure 1.1 Cover of Cinearte magazine featuring actress Eva Nil, 1927.

This chapter’s particular subject is by no means new. Stardom in 1920s Brazil was the focus of academic studies conducted in the 1970s that were related to broader ways of thinking about and theorizing Brazilian cinema. Scholars Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes and Ismail Xavier examined the emergence of a star system in the 1920s, focusing on its complex relationship to the birth of a national film consciousness.² These interventions emerged as part of a wider current of criticism associated with a decolonizing impulse that marked the Cinema Novo movement. Intersecting with issues concerning cinema, modernity and national identity, this particular work highlighted how Brazilian stardom (and by extension the identity of Brazilian cinema) was indelibly inflected by foreign models, specifically by Hollywood.

As Salles Gomes and Xavier’s work highlighted, this paradoxical phenomenon was promoted through film magazines. Cinema became a regular feature of Brazil’s press after 1915, when Hollywood began exporting its entertainment to the region, providing it with films and extra-textual material such as publicity shots for magazines. Film reviews and photographs of US stars, along with gossip about their private lives, proliferated in publications such as Careta (1908–60) and Selecta (which from 1924 included a regular section on Brazilian cinema by Pedro Lima), as well as new movie magazines: Palcos e Telas (1918–21), Para Todos (1918–26), A Tela (founded 1919), Cine Revista (founded 1919) and A Cena Muda (1921–55).³ Fostering a familiarity with Hollywood’s products, this publicity was central to the consolidation of the Brazilian market, part of an aggressive strategy that aimed to make Brazilians good spectators of North American cinema. By 1921, of the total number of movies screened in Brazil, US imports represented 71%, a figure that rose to 86% in 1929.⁴

An offshoot of the magazine Para Todos, Cinearte boasted of its intention to aid Hollywood’s consolidation in the Brazilian market, describing itself as the natural intermediary between the latter and the Hollywood producer. At the same time, however, the magazine took an ardent interest in domestic cinematic activities, and its writers argued for the need for an industrial and commercial mode of production modelled on Hollywood. Cinearte’s emphasis on the need for a national film industry responded to shifts in Brazil’s cinematic landscape. Hollywood’s increasing dominance coincided with the demise of locally specific forms of filmmaking from previous decades, known as the belle époque of Brazilian cinema. During this period (roughly 1906–12), quickly produced documentaries fed into current events of local interest and fostered a habit of frequent movie-going. Once it established itself in Brazil, Hollywood displaced this local cinema as audiences familiar with narrative styles and filmmaking techniques from the US saw the appeal of new kinds of films, one that Brazilian filmmakers also tapped into.⁵ In 1916 António Leal made the successful Lucíola, based on the celebrated Brazilian novel by José de Alencar. According to Alex Viany, Leal constructed a studio for this production, ‘constituting the start of the industrialization of our cinema’.⁶

The 1920s saw the production of a number of narrative films, especially in cities such as Recife (see the chapter by Luciana Corrêa de Araújo in this volume), Campinas, Porto Alegre and Cataguases. Alongside reports on US movies, Cinearte documented these cinematic ventures, endowing these independent regional projects with a united ‘Brazilian’ identity. Adopting the template of Hollywood’s fanzines, Cinearte included reviews of national films and printed copious photographs of their stars, in poses and clothes that were so similar to their US counterparts that, as Salles Gomes notes, readers had to carefully read the captions to determine their nationality.⁷

In this way Cinearte created a specifically Brazilian star system, its spectacular movie stars projecting the image of a thriving national film industry. However, the limited exhibition of domestic films meant that the majority of the public had little access to the actual films that the Brazilian stars appeared in, their consumption relegated to features in journals like Cinearte. Salles Gomes thus writes that the magazine ‘created a fiction that had the semblance of an appearance of reality but that had little actual basis in it’, making it an example of Brazilian cinema’s ‘creative incapacity for copying’.⁸

Given the superficial qualities of this star system, it is hardly surprising that explorations of 1920s stardom have emphasized its mimetic qualities.⁹ Cinearte’s writers often stressed the similarity between Brazilian stars and their perceived Hollywood counterparts. A feature in the 9 October 1929 issue referred to actress Lelita Rosa as ‘the national Greta Garbo’ and to Lia Jardim as ‘Brazil’s Clara Bow’.¹⁰ For Xavier, Cinearte’s star system is an example of the ‘mimetic stance that dominated ideas concerning domestic cinematic production, from the postwar period. That is, a Brazilian cinema based on imported models’.¹¹ Reflecting the homogenizing impulses of Hollywood and its domination over markets, Cinearte’s star system highlights, consciously or not, the dilemma of dependency that was a marked feature of Brazilian film theory in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cinearte’s Hollywood-style stardom had practical intentions; its endeavour was, as the journal stated, to ‘make names. This will guarantee the success of our films’.¹² By publicizing domestic cinema, the magazine aimed to foster a desire for Brazilian films, in order to create a space for domestic movies not just in the pages of the magazine but on the country’s screens too. All of this points to an ‘unlimited’ and ‘unconditional faith in the power of publicity’, and an overwhelming faith in the agency of magazine readers.¹³ Stardom did not merely project a national film industry; it was considered capable of conjuring it into existence, with stars manufacturing a Brazilian dream factory. The display of star bodies signified not just a fiction of the cinema’s presence in Brazil but also the commercial possibilities of an industry that could capitalize on the desires of a growing market of mass consumers. As Susan Besse points out, by the 1920s this market was predominantly composed of women.¹⁴

Brazil’s star system was connected to a broader culture related to female consumers, with films and fanzines linked to the appearance of women in society. Examining the content of Cinearte, and the preponderance of advertisements for female products, João Luiz Vieira suggests that women were the magazine’s principal audience and were visually and textually inscribed into its address.¹⁵ Maria Fernanda Bicalho has also demonstrated how Cinearte’s focus on female stars promoted new representations of femininity.¹⁶ Women were the objects of Brazilian cinema, as well as its target audience, with the star system catering to a mass market in which women occupied a key role.

Melindrosa: Brazil’s new woman

That women featured prominently in Brazil’s star system is not surprising. As Gaylyn Studlar writes, ‘in the 1920s the American film industry operated on the assumption that women formed their most important audience’.¹⁷ Films were addressed to a female spectator and sexual difference was linked to a well-orchestrated exploitation of a star system aimed at women. Shelley Stamp and others have noted that Hollywood’s ascendency was yoked with the industry’s campaign to build its female audience, and producers and exhibitors openly and aggressively solicited women in narratives and extra-textual materials.¹⁸

Hollywood’s consolidation within the Brazilian market had a profound impact on Brazilian women. June Edith Hahner writes that ‘novel attitudes and images of female behaviour arrived in Brazil from the United States in easily assimilated form through the movies. Films portrayed women as independent working girls, modern heroines, and even as sexual temptresses’.¹⁹ Besse similarly notes that in Brazil, ‘female movie goers gained as role models sexy flappers and independent working girls who stepped out of traditional roles of resignation and modesty’.²⁰ Hollywood disseminated new models of femininity in Brazil; nevertheless, as Hahner and Besse observe, these new models were imbricated with changes taking place in relation to the role and place of women in Brazil.

These changes occurred within a broader ideological framework wrought by socio-economic shifts following World War One. These included the intensification of industrialization and urbanization in Brazil, and the rearticulation of the country’s import-export economy linked to the USA. While the USA had sought worldwide markets for its products before the 1910s, after World War One and the decline of European economies it strengthened and refocused its marketing strategies and established transport networks to reap the rewards of foreign markets, including Brazil. More US goods made their way into Brazil, enabling increasing numbers of Brazilians to participate in the ‘American way of life’. Magazine advertisements, department store windows and cinema sold the glamour of modernity in Brazil, associating it with a ...