BRAZILIAN NATIONAL CINEMA by Lisa Shaw & Stephanie Dennison

Author:Lisa Shaw & Stephanie Dennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-70217-6
Publisher: Routledge

Part IV

BRAZILIAN IDENTITIES ON SCREEN

Stars

10

THE STARS OF THE CHANCHADAS, 1933–60

This chapter will focus on four major stars, two female and two male, who came to prominence in the chanchada musical comedies that dominated film production in Brazil between 1930 and 1960. It will focus in particular on their star texts from the perspective of ‘national’ identities, whether based on race, class or gender. Carmen Miranda was a green-eyed, white-skinned woman of southern European descent, who became the respectable face of a pan-Latino identity in Hollywood during the ‘Good Neighbour Policy’ of the late 1930s and 1940s, and yet she self-consciously based her stage persona and performances on intrinsically African elements of Brazilian culture. Eliana (Macedo) became Brazil’s home-grown screen sweetheart in the late 1940s and 1950s, the wholesome, fresh-faced, pale-skinned girl-next-door of the Atlântida chanchadas, whose screen persona owed more than a little to Hollywood stars such as Debbie Reynolds. Her star text was complicated further by her frequent reworking on screen of the racially marked baiana figure, made famous by Miranda in Hollywood. Oscarito and Grande Otelo are the most famous comic double act in Brazilian cinematic history, and starred together in thirteen of Atlântida’s musical comedies (see Figure 10.4). It has been argued that the ‘Brazilianness’ of the chanchada lay in the tradition’s comic elements, and chiefly the comedy roles played by Oscarito and Grande Otelo. They are both synonymous with exaggerated physical characteristics: Oscarito’s puny body and facial features, namely his bulbous nose, full cheeks and odd-shaped mouth, that have been likened to a clown’s mask,1 and Grande Otelo’s very black skin, thick lips and bulging eyes, which are conducive to an interpretation of his physicality as a caricature of Afro-Brazilianness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.