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This essay concerns the Brazilian filmmaker Amacio Mazzaropi, who is almost completely unknown outside--and unworthy of official critical esteem inside-his own country. This does not mean he is unknown inside the country; much to the contrary, he is one of the most celebrated Brazilian artists of all times. However, in the reasons for this celebration are the very reasons why the established critics in Brazil have ignored his work. For three decades, Mazzaropi's films filled movie theatres all over the country, even at times when other Brazilian films were seen by barely a handful of people in the bigger metropolitan centers. This disparity between the attention of so many thousands of Brazilians dedicated to Mazzaropi's films and the attitude of the cinema critics for this same body of work provides an excellent site for the study of the relationships between cinema and the national culture, as well as between the national culture and the culture of the lower classes. In the process, his career also problematizes the position of the intellectual classes in the country in their struggle for prominence or hegemony.
Mazzaropi started as a circus and radio artist. Proficient in: Biography
“ Thank you so much for accepting my assignment the night before it was due. I look forward to working with you moving forward ”
In 1950, or "maybe 1951, Abilio Pereira de Almeida and Tom Payne, sitting at the counter of the Nick Bar, [were) having their habitual drinks and watching a TV show in which a comedian stood out. Right there, in a short dialogue, they decide[d] to invite [the comedian) to work at Vera Cruz" (Catani, 290).[1] The comedian was Mazzaropi, and this invitation to work with the Companhia Cinematografica Vera Cruz was the beginning of his film career. First, he participated as protagonist in Sai da frente (1951). The film was an enormous success, and the company signed him for two more films, Nadando em dinheiro (1952) and Candinho (1953). In 1954 he participated in two films, O gato da madame, produced and distributed by Brazil Filmes, and A carrocinha, produced and distributed by Fama Filmes, and from 1955 to 1957 he appeared in three films produced by Cinedistri and directed by different people: Fuzileiro do amor(1955), o noivo da girafa (1956) and Chico Fumaca (1957). From 1958 on Mazzaropi starred in films produced by Producoes Amacio Mazzaropi--PAM Filmes--his own company. Counting those before PAM Filmes, Mazzaropi took part, directed, and/or produced 32 films.
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Before I discuss these films, however, it is important to try to understand the reasons for the established critics' indifference to Mazzaropi's work, as well as for their attention to the work of another group of filmmakers who coalesced into a movement called Cinema Novo and started to produce films around the same time Mazzaropi began his career. Such an inquiry is not exactly a matter of defining Mazzaropi as the negative of Cinema Novo. It is, however, a matter of trying to look into the political and cultural structures that have historically determined that, in Brazil, the idea of the "national culture" has hardly ever been challenged. That is, the way the country was colonized, with a predominance of cities in the eastern coastal area, determined that they become the political and economic centers of the country. It became inevitable for them to emerge as the dominant cultural centers; whatever arose from other parts of the country had to pass through the scrutiny of those in charge of labeling cultural goods.
But every wholesale representation of a country will inevitably become misrepresentation. Consider an example in one of Mazzaropi's movies. In the 1965, O puritano da Rua Augusta, the main character is a millionaire living on one of the most elegant streets in Sao Paulo. However, his roots are deep in the "caipira" universe. In the film, the hero is shocked to find his children transformed into funloving, money-spending grown-ups who do not care about the family business, who follow the trendiest fashion, and who sprinkle their Portuguese with English words. In order to save them, the father pretends to be even more trendy and cool than they are. The children, horrified to see their father doing such silly things and wearing such ridiculous clothes (imitation of North American hippies), start trying to convince him of the correctness of the moral values he used to embrace. As a result, the children realize themselves how right their father's "previous" beliefs were. In O puritano da Rua Augusta, the younger members of the family are presented as people at a moment of decision: they either embrace their father's antiquated, ultraconservative beliefs, or they fall prey to an Americanized, senseless way of life which will lead them to bankruptcy. On the other hand, the father, by pretending to be experimenting with his children's lifestyles, realizes the gaps in his own long-held beliefs.
Just to tell the story of this film, however, misrepresents the depth of the critique it implies. The stories of all Mazzaropi's films themselves can say very little to anyone who does not know both the culture they spring from and the material and historical conditions in Brazil at the time the films were being produced. Certainly O puritano da Rua Augusta has nothing to do with race, but suppose we consider another film, Jeca e seu filho preto (1978). It discusses specifically the complex matter of the relationship between blacks and whites. In this story, Jeca's wife has twin sons, one white and one black. They raise the boys equally and only later, when the black son falls in love with and wants to marry Laura, the daughter of a rich white farmer, is it revealed that he is the product of the rape of a black woman by the same rich farmer. During a trial in the end of the story, it is further disclosed that when Angenor, the black boy, was born, the rich farmer ordered the local midwife to kill him. Instead, she took him to Jeca's house, where she was going to help Jeca's wife, who was in labor. When Jeca's real son was born, the midwife presented the couple with both babies and said that they were twins. The revelation of Angenor's origin makes his marriage to Laura impossible, because they are brother and sister. Even though it might seem that Mazzaropi avoids the discussion of a mixed marriage by making it incestuous, the film can also be seen as presenting an even older problem in race relations in Brazil: the fact of the constant rape of black women by white men. As another development of the theme, Jeca e seu filho preto comments on the economic exploitation of blacks, and also on the intricacy of racial tensions in Brazil.
Once again, it is important to keep in mind the fact that Mazzaropi presents these issues in a form that is not usually used for the discussion of serious matters, comedy. That is, all his films contain humorous episodes, jokes, and songs intended to make the audience laugh, or at least smile. In Mazzaropi's films the violence is cartoonish. Sex is only hinted, and even a kiss is hardly ever shown. Cinema Novo films, on the other hand, are serious, not intended for laughter, but for thought, at least in its initial phase. 2] Eduardo Leone's comments about Vladimir Carvalho's Conterraneos velhos de guerra (1992) area good example of this serious disposition. For Leone, writing in the early 90s, a serious Brazilian film is "the fruit of creativity and invention, directed to a type of public preoccupied with the national problems ..." (my emphasis). For him, the target public, "inhabits the academic atmosphere, the locus of national decisions ... [and] forms the Brazilian intelligentsia ... ("Calicas no Pais das Maravilhas," 66). Mazzaropi's films, in contrast, try to reach those "simple Brazilians" who, as Mazzaropi once said, "only go to the movies once a year, when a new film (of mine) is released" (Folha de Sao Paulo, 14 June 1981). There must be a space for Mazzaropi in the history of Brazilian cinema, but the first of the many problems related to any study of Mazzaropi's work is the necessity to determine what counts as Brazilian cinema in Brazil, and what is considered Brazilian cinema for other countries.
This objective of this section is not to review or to duplicate--and much less to challenge--the many excellent studies documenting the history of Brazilian cinema. Rather, my intention here is to review some of the key elements of this history as a background for Mazzaropi's career, because Mazzaropi's films are difficult to present to an international audience whose knowledge of Brazilian cinema is, at best, restricted to those films made by the members of the Cinema Novo group. The Brazilian directors best known outside the country are Anselmo Duarte (Opagador de promessas, 1962), Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Vidas secas, 1963), Glauber Rocha (Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol, 1964; Terra em transe, 1967), and Carlos Diegues (Bye Bye Brazil, 1979).[3] The films most immediately associated with them have enjoyed some degree of popularity in France and the United States among an elite public composed mainly of university students and professors. In Brazil, with few exceptions, the same college-educated public watched and discussed the Cinema Novo films. Mazzaropi's work, on the other hand, has never left Brazil. It was made exclusively for an internal audience whose members were not college-educated. And yet, in spite of the many superficial differences, Mazzaropi and Cinema Novo have many things in common.
Mazzaropi's work as an actor began in the early 50s, and his mature work as director, producer and actor started in 1958, roughly coinciding with the beginnings of Cinema Novo. However, unlike the Cinema Novo productions, Mazzaropi's films, from their inception, always reached not just the periphery of the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but also countless small movie theaters even in the most remote areas of Brazil. Mazzaropi's work soon created an audience that expected his yearly films. For many people, this was the only time they went to the movies. It is a matter of some interest that the Cinema Novo films, hailed abroad, never appealed to more than a group of intellectuals and students in Brazil. Due to the filmmakers' primordial concern with political, rather than commercial, aspects of the cinema, these films hardly ever reached the audiences in the small towns of Brazil. Indeed, considering the reality of the small audience for Brazilian films in Brazil, there simply were not (nor are there to this day) enough viewers to form an audience of the scope Mazzaropi's films could inspire and create.[4]
A more provocative explanation for the lack of broad appeal for the Cinema Novo is offered by a member of the movement, Carlos Diegues, who, in an interview given in 1992 for "Cinema and Identity," a series sponsored by the Goethe Institute, reviews the achievements of Cinema Novo (for detailed study of Cinema Novo, see Johnson, 1984). Looking back in the formative years of the movement, Diegues states:
[ With Cinema Novo) we wanted to found a nation through cinema. We sought images, phrases, elements that would make us believe that we lived in a nation that had its own specificity, originality and characteristics that were different from those of all other nations. The search for this originality by different filmmakers allowed us to create an ideologically aligned movement with a political-cultural program that mediated culture and not reality, like art, literature and other artistic expressions. (cited in Festa, 6; my emphasis)
It would seem, from Diegues's words, that only with the Cinema Novo is Brazil able at last to show itself to itself. Cinemanovistas aimed to be foundational. The specificity of this nation, they believed, had finally found the right medium--" an ideologically aligned movement"--to expose itself to its members. Diegues does not elaborate on which culture or which reality Cinema Novo wanted to show. Brazil is simply reduced to one reality and one culture, and, if we are to believe Diegues, Cinema Novo is going to show it. In a 1993 essay about the current situation of Brazilian cinema, when referring to Glauber Rocha, Regina Festa calls him the "greatest genius" of the Cinema Novo, and the one filmmaker to "first ... make the Brazilian people like to see its own face on the screen" (6).
In these statements by Diegues and Festa we can see that, for them, and for the group for which they speak, there is a Brazil "out there" which begs representation, and that this representation is made possible or the first time by the Cinema Novo group.[5] What these two statements clearly ignore is, obviously, that not all Brazilians see themselves reflected in the Cinema Novo images. Moreover, this was by no means the first time such representation was attempted. As Joao Luiz Vieira and Robert Stam write, even when Brazilian filmmakers were parodying Hollywood films in the chanchadas in the 1930s, they were in search of an elusive Brazilianness, carving it out of the foreign model.[6] That is, the medium--cinema--deeply impregnated by not merely the techniques, but also the ideology of the Hollywood film industry, is yet another instance of an artistic manifestation that has to be made good in the country, with the material of the country. [7] One of the best Brazilian examples is the one provided by Mazzaropi.[ 8] For more than 30 years, he presented an image of Brazil which, although differing from those heralded by the critical establishment of metropolitan centers, nevertheless constitutes an "other"--not to say oppositional--example of the attempt to represent the country, its history, its people and their struggles.
His difference, however, is not of intensity, or even of intention; both the Cinema Novo filmmakers and Mazzaropi sought to participate in the process of revealing a Brazil undergoing profound changes. One of the changes was demographic distribution: between 1945 and 1955 the urban population grew 53.4 percent, and after that, the average urban growth was 6 percent a year; furthermore, in the decade 1950-60, the number of cities with populations between 100,000 and 200,000 went from 9 to 19, and those between 20,000 and 100,000 from 90 to 142 (Lambert 85; Burns 467). Added to the shift in population, the country also saw an increase in the urban middle classes and the beginning of a proletariat composed by those newly arrived from the countryside. Rural Brazil, in the meantime, continued to languish without land reform. For Mazzaropi and the Cinema Novo filmmakers, the difference was situated in deciding, in the face of all these transformations, what Brazil was and how to best show it. The difference then concerns how Mazzaropi and the Cinema Novo filmmakers used the material at hand.
Cinema Novo films, even when dealing with the backlands of Brazil, approach Brazil from the ideological space of the city. Take for instance the examples of two of Glauber Rocha's most critically acclaimed films, Deus e o Diabo na tetra do sol and Tetra em transe. Regarding the former, Fernao Ramos writes that in its core "one notices the revolt of the urban middle class, where the filmmakers come from" ("Os novos rumos do cinema brasileiro," 351). That is, the main character, Antonio das Mortes, "pushes the peasants towards "history,' thus destroying two contrary ideological universes [in order to] realize the utopic leftist beliefs of the time" (351). In the latter, the "hero" (or at least the narrative device that organizes the plot) is Paulo, a poet who spends most of the time reciting his own poetry in grandiloquent tones. The story of Terra em transe is about Paulo, how he grows from a poet of intentions to a poet of actions; therefore it is a bildungsroman and not the story of the oppressed people Paulo addresses in his poetry. The oppressed are, in this case, the subject of the intellectuals' writing.
To judge from these two films, the Cinema Novo members purchased their political ideas from the standpoint of an urban middle class closely related with the academic elite of the university. Since at the time left wing thought was predominant in the university, one is not surprised at the leftist flavor of the films. Thus, in Ramos's opinion, both Antonio das Mortes of Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol, as well as Paulo of Terra em transe, dramatize the irritation of the Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro intellectuals with what they perceived as the "people's passivity."
An interesting example of this attitude is the text that opens Nelson Pereira dos Santos's great film Vidas secas. The text reads: "Este filme nao e apenas a transposicao fiel, para o cinema, de uma obra imortal da literatura brasileira. E, antes de tudo, um depoimento sobre uma dramatica realidade social de nossos dias e a extrema miseria que escraviza 27 milhoes de nordestinos e que nenhum brasileiro digno pode mais ignorar." Of course, it seems clear in this text that, by representing the extreme misery of the northeast, the filmmaker (or the author of the text) is placing himself in the group of "dignified Brazilians" who do not ignore the problem. In other words, it is not enough for the director--as it was for Graciliano Ramos, the author of the novel upon which the film is based--to merely tell the story and let the public reach their own conclusions; this introductory text suggests that the director has to distinguish himself from the audience with his reading of the story, just in case the members of the audience cannot understand the message.
However, even though the Cinema Novo filmmakers understood their national public according to its capacity for capturing the depth of their political message, they also had to take into consideration their (select) international audience. Furthermore, they were divided against themselves, as the published criticism shows. Nevertheless, they did coalesce around a political and ideological project that was fueled by their talents and by the reciprocal admiration they provided for one another in their meetings. Even harsh criticism is better than indifference. To be criticized, in this respect, is to belong.
Much in contrast, Mazzaropi did not participate in the group of filmmakers who, as Glauber Rocha describes in the 1981 Revolucao do cinema novo often met in Rio de Janeiro's Cinemateca to discuss their ideas and their films. Mazzaropi's career took on a quite different, completely individual direction when he built his own studio in Taubate and started making his movies. Luiz Carlos Schroeder de Oliveira writes that Mazzaropi prided himself on never having needed to borrow money from the government to make his films: he directed everything at PAM Filmes with "quick thinking and finely tuned commercial instincts" (95).
This does not necessarily mean that Mazzaropi and Cinema Novo were at odds about what they wanted to accomplish. It does mean, however, that Mazzaropi and the Cinema Novo filmmakers had a different audience in mind. In addition, it also means that the Cinema Novo members wanted to reach both a Brazilian and an international audience: they had international connections and were able to show their work in festivals in places such as Cannes, where they won prizes and recognition. It seems to follow that, in the absence of a box office success with the Brazilian public, Cinema Novo at least had the pleasure of being recognized for its accomplishments in Europe. And from Europethis time via Cinema Novo--once again came the judgement of what "Brazil" meant. But most Brazilians from the interior of the country, as well as those who labored in the fringes of capitalist society, did not read what the Europeans wrote. They were busy making a living on minimum salaries and, when they could afford it, they went to the movies to see Mazzaropi films.
One can say that the polarity between the Cinema Novo filmmakers and Mazzaropi can be comprehended as their respective struggle to wrest the silence of the rural and to transform it into a voice within the Brazilian nation. Obviously, this is far from a disinterested process: each wanted to secure the ideological weight that such addition to the Brazilian nation would mean. The Cinema Novo intellectuals, however, evoked the rural--peasant--from the subject position of metropolitan intellectuals, and, especially after their exposure to the European filmmaking culture, from a renewed position authorized to speak for the whole country before the outside world. Mazzaropi, even though he worked from the city, did not physically participate in the group recognized as intellectual, serious filmmakers. In addition, his work represents a rural Brazil that is not favored by Cinema Novo. In other words, the "caipira" is either not exotic enough, or not ethnic enough, or not tragic enough to merit the attention of the Cinema Novo. How can we understand how the tradition about who can determine these categories has become the province of the Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro intellectuals?
It is important to remember that the political-bureaucratic entity "Brazil" up until the third decade of this century referred only to the interests and the culture of the Eastern coastal cities of the country. The interior was terra incognita, and the Amazon the "green hell." Therefore, it is no surprise that the hegemonic centrist position has gone mostly unchallenged to this day. From the outset, Mazzaropi's work, as well as its reception by Brazilians from every comer of the country, in effect rebukes the certainty of the metropolitan intellectuals' representation of the country. In so doing, it has challenged the hegemonic view of the backlander as just an object of tragedy. Mazzaropi's films refuse to install his characters in this putative position, and instead release them into their complex social life, their folkloric knowledge, their psychological depth, and even their political sawy. Even though he never produced films of the epic scope of, say, Glauber Rocha's Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol, Mazzaropi's work addresses a segment of the Brazilian public in its own language, and thus establishes a direct contact with the members of a culture from which he himself emerged.
Unlike Cinema Novo filmmakers, Mazzaropi came from the lower class and lived many years as an artist in an itinerant circus, and he had first-hand contact with the human types he represents in his films. In his trips for his live circus appearances, which he kept until the end of his life, Mazzaropi was fond of visiting the houses of people, and it was not uncommon to see him chatting with the locals, telling and listening to stories. To say that he was loved by the people of the little towns where he visited does not explain all of his complex relationship with them. In almost all his films, some of the extras, and at times even some minor characters, were played by people he hired in these trips with the circus. It is no wonder, then, that Mazzaropi made his films specifically for the Brazilian market: he had an almost unimpeded contact with the audience, and he knew how to reach those whose stories he brought to the screen. The films at once reveal the data collecting, its interpretation and, sometimes, even the suggestion of solutions.
For these reasons, Mazzaropi's work is widely understood as part of a national patrimony in whose defense many Brazilians testify to this day. When the films became part of a legal dispute and were in danger of disintegrating for lack of proper storage, in September 1984 Norival Milan Jacob filed a suit asking the city of Sao Paulo to intervene and to preserve Mazzaropi's work. In this suit, Milan requested the "tombamento" (a process in which the artist's work becomes the nation's property) of Mazzaropi's work, which, he says in the document, belongs to the Brazilian people (Jornal do Comercio, 9 January 1984).
Just as we might from any large body of work, Mazzaropi's more than thirty films can be placed in different phases. The first eight films--from Sai da frente (1951) to Chico Fumaca (1957)--constitute the first phase; in this period he develops a physical and psychological type, and learns the essential elements of movie making. By the release dates of each film--1951, 1952, 1953, 1954 (two films), 1955, 1956, 1957-- it is clear that the cinema companies knew that, with Mazzaropi as the star, they had a hit; therefore they cashed in on his popularity by having him appear in as many films as possible. These first films established Mazzaropi as a film actor and functioned as a laboratory for the development of the character which would become his trademark: the "caipira" (a country bumpkin) or, as he was called, the Jeca.
Two of the stories follow a pattern: in Sai da frente and Nadando em dinheiro, the main character is a track driver who lives in the city of Sao Paulo and faces the daily problems of any husband and father. He deals with the world of money, machines, and neighbors in a tenement in the suburbs. In Sai da frente, he owns an old truck, Anastacio, and a dog, Corone. Together, the three of them work together moving people, furniture, animals, and even parts of a circus. In Nadando era dinheiro, a sequel to Sai da frente, the hero finds himself the heir of a large fortune. During the story, he has to sort out his feelings for his family, his feelings for his friends, and how to accommodate these in the new lifestyle the money has given him. In his 1953 film, Candinho, a version of Voltaire's Candide, we already see the prototype of the uneducated country man, the "caipira" who appears in most of his subsequent films, especially those he produces in his own PAM Filmes. In Candinho, Mazzaropi plays the character of a simple-minded man who, after being expelled from the farm by the man who raised him, goes into the big city in search of his mother, ends up taking part in many adventures and, finally, marries his true love, Filoca, whom he saves from a life of prostitution.[9]
This search for the mother, or the search for his origins, will appear in other films of the other phases. The caipira character needs to know, first, where he comes from, and then what it means to be who he is, so that he can finally reappraise his home, to which he usually returns from the city more aware, if not wiser, than when he left. In these films, Mazzaropi dramatizes this rite of passage through which the innocent Brazilian from the countryside is forced to face the reality of the city, its dangers, its attractions and, most importantly, its inevitability. Not coincidentally, in the years when these films were being made and released, a great contingent of Brazilians from the backlands were making the same trip towards the "center" of the country, trying both to escape recurrent droughts and other natural disasters and to find themselves a place in the new, modernized Brazil. In reality, most of them, illiterate or semi-literate, unprepared for the kind of specialized jobs the urban centers demand, ended up living in slums and working in low paying jobs. It is easy to see, therefore, why Mazzaropi's films became, if not a link between these displaced Brazilians and their rural past, at least a window open to the idealization of this past. When the countryside is presented--such as in Candinbo, or even in Chico Fumaca--it can embody goodness and innocence; however, it also embodies cunning, intelligence, and ability to resolve problems through sheer wit.
But the dichotomy city-country also functions to suggest the idea of a vast Brazil unimaginable to those who never leave the certainty of their home in the country. Thus, in these films, Brazilians face to the city more than a new job in their move; they confront a wholly other Brazil in the faces, accents and cultural traits of Brazilians from different places in the country. What Mazzaropi insistently explores in his films is the simultaneous shock of recognition and feeling of estrangement that these displaced Brazilians feel when confronted with these "national others" at once similar and different. But these differences--such as those presented in Chico Fumaca, o noivo da girafa, and Candinho become a way to articulate the concept of a structure which goes beyond individuals. In other words, even though these people are different, their Brazilianness is never questioned when the conflict occurs between persons. It is only when the state intervenes that the caipira begins to doubt not just his personhood, but his nationality as well.
In Candinho there is a scene which exemplifies this fact. In this scene, Candinho is thrown in jail after a street fight; the sheriff asks him to show documents proving that he is a Brazilian citizen. Candinho, who is illiterate and has never had his birth certificate written up by the farmer who adopted him, obviously cannot produce any document. He tries to convince the sheriff that the people of the farm who helped raise him can attest to his national identity, but the sheriff insists on documents. To better explain his point, the sheriff calls in other "fully documented" Brazilians: one is Japanese, the other German, and the third from some undetermined origin. The three of them can barely speak Portuguese, but all have written proof that they are Brazilian. Candinho then concludes that, since he does not have any documents and cannot prove he is a Brazilian, he probably is a "Turk."[10] It should also be emphasized that the other "Brazilians" presented as a model not only have their papers, but also a well dressed and well groomed appearance. Candinho, on the other hand, is dressed poorly; to make things worse for him, his Portuguese accent is very different from that of the police officers. In other words, Candinho (and, by association, Jeca) is both the other to the foreigners posing as Brazilians and to the police officers representing the state.
The second phase of Mazzaropi's career starts with the foundation of the PAM Filmes in 1958. In the beginning, Mazzaropi bought used and broken machines from the bankrupt Vera Cruz cinema company. When the machines were fixed, he started making his films, and the profits went into buying new machines and hiring more people. The beginning of PAM Filmes was, in other words, a hand-to-mouth economy. In time, because his films were so successful and profitable, Mazzaropi built one of the best equipped cinema studios in the country and purchased his own farm-studio in Taubate, in the state of Sao Paulo, where most of his films were subsequently made.
The first film he made at PAM, Chofer de praca (1958), follows the line of one of his great successes in the Vera Cruz company, Sai da frente. That is, the character in Choler the praca is also a driver, his vehicle is old, and his adventures take him to several places where he meets different people and has to, once again, use his wits to get out of trouble. However, unlike the character in Sai da frente, who was an established city-dweller, in Chofer de praca the main character is a man who moves from the country into Sao Paulo in order to help a son who is finishing medical school. A closer look at this film reveals again the same anxieties of displacement and fear of loss of identity that were present in the previous, 1951 movie, and here again the character explores his identity not just among humans, but among machines (alarm clocks, trucks, cars) and animals, especially dogs. How can we understand this "mechanistic" emphasis?
This universe encumbered with so many mechanical objects can be most easily explained by considering the social changes concurrent with the production of the film. During the time, the end of the 1950s, Brazil was watching one of its most dramatic changes in its history: the new capital of the country was being built under the government of President Juscelino Kubitschek, roads were carved out of the virgin forest to connect the country to its new capital, and industries established mainly in and around the city of Sao Paulo. It is no surprise, therefore, that Mazzaropi dealt primarily with the preoccupations of Brazilians who were either moving or thinking about moving to the big city or contemplating the quick pace in which different conditions were being installed in their lives. The changes were, therefore, more than merely a shift from a physical space to another: they were moral, spiritual, emotional and cultural transformations. Accordingly, in the story of Chofer de praca, one son stays on the farm, and the profoundly divided other settles in the city after finishing his studies. The father and mother--who moved to the city to work help their student son--are rejected by him in the end, and return to the farm. In the last moment, the son recognizes the injustice he has perpetrated against his parents, and runs to the bus station to say good-bye to them and to ask for forgiveness. He does not, however, ask his parents to stay: his life is in the city now, and a set of rustic parents will not help him at all. [ 11]
This film and others Mazzaropi made in this period dramatize that for these Brazilians of the backlands to reclaim their place in the new order, they have to face not only the possibility of leaving their rural world and establishing themselves in the big cities, but, especially, they have to shake off their certainties about themselves as members of a stable religious, linguistic, and ethnic community. Furthermore, they might have to commit the same kind of ingratitude the urban son in Chofer de praca commits. Not surprisingly, the themes running through Mazzaropi's films from 1958 to 1963-- Chofer de praca, Jeca Tatu, As aventuras de Pedro Malasartes, Ze do Periquito, Tristezas do Jeca, O vendedor de linguica, and O lamparina--revolve around the characters' search for a place in a universe the displaced caipiras cannot fully understand. The most important figure in this phase is Jeca Tatu, who first appears in Mazzaropi's films with this name in the 1959 film, Jeca Tatu, and can be seen as a catalyst for many of the anxieties that his films discuss.[12]
The Jeca Tatu character was first invented by writer Monteiro Lobato for the agriculture almanac, Medicamentos Fontoura. In Lobato's version, Jeca Tatu, or Jeca Tatuzinho, is a lazy, worm-ridden country man who finds happiness when he learns to wear shoes and takes medicine to rid him and his family of worms. Jeca Tatuzinho is then merely a pedagogical tool used to explain principles of hygiene and to sell the pharmaceutical products of the Fontoura company [ 13] Here, the city, in the form of a pharmaceutical company, is presented as that which can save this ignorant Brazilian from himself. His laziness is equated with disease; he has no culture to explain or justify his way of life. Thus, the only hope for Jeca Tatuzinho is to give in and adopt the pharmaceutical--and cultural--ways of the city. In Mazzaropi's version, in contrast, Jeca Tatu is a loving but uneducated father and husband, who has to protect both his property from a neighbor, an Italo-Brazilian farmer called Giovanni, and his daughter from a suitor who keeps provoking incidents between Jeca and Giovanni. The suitor plots to reduce Jeca to misery and then save the family by marrying his beautiful daughter. But the girl is in love with Giovanni's son. After several adventures the hero recovers his land, punishes the evil suitor who was provoking misunderstandings, and attends his daughter's wedding to Giovanni's son. Some time later, his farm is prosperous and, as a final reward, his daughter and her husband come to show Jeca their triplets. So, even though Jeca does not seem to work or toil the land, he wins with his wits and with the help people give him. His laziness can be seen, then, as a form of resistance to the acceleration in the system of production that Giovanni represents.
From Jeca Tatu onwards, Mazzaropi's image was forever established in the figure of the caipira.[14] The word caipira, Antonio Candido writes, does not refer to clearly defined racial type; rather, it expresses a cultural aspect prevalent in the interior of the States of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goias and Mato Grosso and, most especially, it refers to a person who remains attached to old fashioned cultural and religious practices.[15] However, Jeca only appears with this name in Tristezas do Jeca (1960), Casinha pequenina (1963), O Jeca e a freira (1967), O Jeca macumbeiro (1977), Jeca e seu filho preto (1978), and in his last film, Jeca e a egua milagrosa (1980). He also appears in variations such as Urea pistola para Djeca (1969) and Jecao ... Um fofoqueiro no Ceu (1978). In all of these films, the Jeca image is basically the same: a man who wears clothes obviously smaller than his size, speaks with an accent peculiar to people from the interior of the State of Sao Paulo, has a thin moustache and walks moving his hips and arms to the sides of his body [ 16]
And yet, even though he is ugly, awkward, and speaks a most un-prestigious version of Brazilian Portuguese, Jeca weaves his way through Brazilian history, Brazilian problems, Brazilian religion, and, especially, through the manifestations of Brazilian popular culture. For instance, some of the films comment on the growing presence of foreign films and soap operas in the Brazilian cultural life: No paraiso das solteironas (1968), Urea pistola para Djeca (1969), Bentao Ronca Ferro (1970), and O grande xerife (1971). The first one is a parody of the pornographic films which were invading the Brazilian cinema market; if the idea of a paradise for spinsters seemed to suggest an orgy in which the spinsters could have every man they wanted, in fact there is no available man besides Jeca (who is also married). In 1979 A banda das velhas Virgens also capitalizes on the pornographic dimension of the Brazilian cinema at the time, even though the story itself contains nothing pornographic. Uma pistola para Djeca and O grande xerife are allusions to the then very popular series of Italian Western movies, called "Spaghetti Westerns," in which the hero is called Django. Here again Jeca is the one who becomes a hero not because he either desires or possesses the capacity for heroism, but simply because the occasion presents itself and he is thrown into the position of command. Bentao Ronca Ferro is a loose parody on the TV soap opera Beto Rockefeller, which obtained the highest levels of audience in the year of 1970. Beto Rockefeller refers to the millionaire Rockefeller family, in Mazzaropi's film, however, Bentao Ronca Ferro is a circus clown. A thematic unity runs through all these films: in all of them the character played by Mazzaropi represents a "John Doe" type who does not seem destined for greatness but who, when the moment comes, finds ways and invents tricks to obtain justice and reach happiness.
Other Mazzaropi films can be placed in two different categories, according to the main subject they discuss: the struggle between people of different ethnic, racial, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and the competition among religious discourses to obtain not just people's faith, but their money as well. In those of the first group, we can include, for instance, o lamparina, itself already a parody of the name of the bandit Lampiao. In O lamparina the characters keep getting in trouble because they cannot understand each other; the difference, here, is both linguistic and cultural. In the story, a family of caipiras appears in the Northeast of Brazil searching for jobs. After they meet a group of cangaceiros a linguistic comedy begins.[17] Accents from different regions of Brazil begin to sound like separate languages, and the gist of the story is to decide not just who is from where, but how you can tell the difference. To make things even a little more complicated, the caipira family is accompanied by a Spaniard who insists with the chief of the cangaceiros that he is a Brazilian and that Madrid is a city in the North of Brazil.
In three other films, Meu Japao brasileiro (1964), and in Caipira em Bariloche (1972), as well as in Portugal ... Minha saudade (1973), the stories deal with the foreign within, respectively the Japanese, the Argentinean, and the Portuguese. In the two first stories, families are caught in the moment when a foreign element--a Japanese bride in one case, international money in the other--is about to propose new alignments within the family. In Portugal ... Minha saudade, the relationship between Brazil and its mother country is dramatized in the twins (both played by Mazzaropi) who are separated in childhood; one is sent to Brazil, and the other remains in Portugal. When they are old, the Portuguese brother rescues the Brazilian from desperation after his wife dies by inviting him for a trip to Portugal; but the solution for the problems can only be found in Brazil itself. In these three films, "Brazil" is never presented as a "pure" entity. As the films abundantly show, the Japanese, the Argentineans, the Portuguese, all who made their life in Brazil are Brazilians, and should be given the same rights to be respected, accepted, and happy.
In other films, Mazzaropi depicts his increasing interest in religious syncretism. Having discussed the Catholic church and its involvement with politics in the earlier Casinha pequenina (1962), o Jeca e a freira (1967), and O grande xerife (1971), from 1974 on he begins an inquiry into the possibility of an afterlife and its effects on life and politics. This phase starts with Jeca macumbeiro (1974). In this film, religious manifestations are subdivided as Catholic, represented by a greedy priest who does not pray without being paid first; spiritist, headed by a man who uses his "powers" to coerce his neighbors into giving him things and voting for him; and, finally, another (indeterminate) Afro-Brazilian religion. In the end, Mazzaropi's character unmasks the spiritist leader and saves the community from his extortion. Another film of this phase is the 1975 O Jeca contra o capeta, a parody of the blockbuster The Exorcist. Here again the spiritual and demonic phenomena are the result of corrupt politicians' attempts to force the peasants out of their lands. The characters are presented living between opposing forces that want to win them, their soul, their bodies, and ultimately, all their possessions.
The last Mazzaropi film, Jeca e a egua milagrosa deals with the reincarnation of Jeca's wife in the body of a white mare. The local religious authorities--once again divided into Catholic, Spiritist and Macumba--battle over the appropriateness of Jeca's long private conversations with a "single" mare, and he is eventually forced to marry her in a Spiritist ceremony. The "bride" then trots down the main street wearing the traditional white veil and orange blossom garland, followed by the acolytes of the Spiritist leaden The end of the story shows Jeca's deceased wife, now no longer using the white mare as her "horse," following her husband in town. He holds on to his umbrella, and goes down the steps, vowing to not pay attention to her. This was the final scene of the film and the final one of Mazzaropi's career.
This scene can be used to try to draw some conclusions about Mazzaropi's relationship to Brazilian popular culture. This scene is first of all an image of a scandal. It displays, by all accounts, a scandalous, impossible, unthinkable, marriage between a human and an animal. And yet, in the logic of the story, the marriage is a sanctified one too, because the mare serves as a vehicle for the manifestation of Jeca's deceased wife. Also in the logic of the story, the mare is "single"--"virgin"-- and therefore cannot engage in prolonged meetings with a man who is not her relative or her husband. Similarly, according to the same logic, Jeca is a poor man who is being used as a pawn in the fight between two struggling political factions. But finally, the most important point turns on the matter of recognition. In this absurd marriage, there is both the recognition that the Jeca demands as a human being, a political being, and a cultural being, and the recognition that he actually receives.
Of course there is the acclaim that moviegoers have given Mazzaropi's work for more than four decades. But there is also the acknowledgement given in the form of critical praise, on the part of those whose job it is to write commentaries for newspapers, as well as to write essays and books on aspects of the national culture. This recognition has been almost completely denied Mazzaropi. A division between how urban intellectuals and the people see Brazil is of course not either new or surprising. The intellectual elite has historically been the group that has had access to the means of representation or even to the participation in political decisions in the name Brazil. Therefore, it has been the burden of this elite to comprehend a country it does not understand, and sometimes has never seen.
One question begs to be asked: how can people who do not know the totality Brazil recognize it as a totality?[18] Quite simply, recognition can only be possible through ideology. If theoretically there is room for the differentiation between or among the oppositional discourses, historically the hegemony of urban elites continues to determine how the country and its cultural manifestations should be weighed, viewed, and appreciated. And yet, if Mazzaropi's work can be characterized as being either alternative or oppositional, it is so according to an understanding of resistance to hegemony that Raymond Williams states as follows: "even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, fall initiatives and contributions are in practice tied to the hegemonic ... the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter culture" (114). Therefore, Mazzaropi's work forms, itself, an integral part of the ideological construction of Brazil.
Consider Antonio Querino Neto, whose comments on Mazzaropi's films both disdain and degrade Mazzaropi's work, but who cannot completely reject what they represent. Querino Neto writes that in all of his films Mazzaropi personifies a Brazil that wears "checkered rustic shirts, patched short trousers, awkward boots and straw hat and tight suit," and speaks a sort of gibberish, far from "the country's official language" (56). In the beginning of his article, Neto writes that this Brazil "winces" (torce o nariz) when it sees its own image reflected in a mirror" (Querino Neto, 56). What is, after all, the image Brazil wants to see in the mirror? From Querino Neto's words, we can infer that Brazil is not the one that Mazzaropi portrays in his films. And yet, why comment on it at all? What Brazil is this, then, that connects with so many who go to see their reflection in Mazzaropi's films? Even Querino Neto apparently feels connected enough to recognize his image, if only to reject it immediately.
Of course there is also the possibility that, to this day, spectators attend to Mazzaropi's films not just because they identify with the characters and situation; rather, they see each Mazzaropi production in order to bear witness to themselves about their difference from the caipira, their distance from the time they were like those characters. There is the further possibility that, today, these films are nothing but an exercise in nostalgia for a world unredeemably lost to technology, big cities, and different mores. Nevertheless, as Mazzaropi himself says, his "caipira" is neither an invention, nor a caricature: "If you want to see Jeca you only need to go to the city of Sao Paulo, in the neighborhoods of Socorro, Santo Amaro ..." (cited in Querino Neto, 58). Indeed, most of his films are primarily seen by the people who live in the periphery of the big cities and in the small towns in the Southern States. Like Mazzaropi's characters, most of these people have had a rural origin, have known poverty, powerlessness, and suffered pressure to surrender their little rural properties to banks or richer farmers. To a certain extent, even those people who have already moved to the metropolitan centers also share a general sense that there is a big world "out there" to which they can hardly aspire. Watching a Mazzaropi film, in these circumstances, embodies a profession of belief in the strength of their caipira culture: if Jeca can make it in the big city, so can they. By acknowledging the existence of these films, as well as by watching them, the subaltern, displaced, disenfranchised caipira, crowded in corticos--poor neighborhoods--and slums around the industrial cities, effectively commits an act of insubordination against the official culture of the country, which ignores Jeca and what he represents.
In this sense, Mazzaropi's work dramatizes a complex struggle to set the terms of an alternative reading of the country. But it also represents his own personal, artistic and economic freedom to make his films the way he wanted, without the interference of the government agencies, or of the established criticism. The fact that he never borrowed money from the government to finance his films was a matter of great pride for Mazzaropi. As for the critics, even though he resented their attacks, he said in interviews that he preferred to please his loyal public. And yet, just as any artist, he wanted some measure of critical recognition. In his obituary, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo quotes him saying that he resented not having ever had his work recognized by the critics: "O que e que eles querem? Que eu perca dinheiro? So e bom quem fracassa? Se eles querem que eu faca um filme que ninguem assista, isso nao farei nunca. Nao vou trair esse publico so para que a critica fale bem de mim. ("O cinema nacional perde seu Jeca," Folha de Sao Paulo, 6.14.81)
It is tempting to conclude that Mazzaropi's work can be seen as embodying "discursive resources by which people can articulate their meanings of their subordination, but not their acceptance of it" (Fiske, 135). Indeed, in his adventures, the Jeca hero exposes the hypocrisy of priests and other religious figures, the corruption of politicians, the predatory lust of wealthy men; he is, in sum, the simple man, the "John Doe," or the caipira, who fights seemingly insurmountable odds and restores peace and order to his universe just by being himself. In the meantime, family property, daughter's virginity, wife's honor, and Jeca's lifestyle are all protected and reaffirmed.
Perhaps Mazzaropi's films can also be described, at least partly, as popular melodrama. Laura Mulvey's discussion the aesthetics of the popular melodrama says that the form "depend[s] on grand gesture, tableaux, broad moral themes, with narratives of coincidence, reverses and sudden happy endings organized around rigid opposition between good and evil" (93). In fact, such can be said to be the case of many of Mazzaropi's movies, especially those in which the "caipira" has to face the absolute evil of the farm owner whose aim is to obtain power, to be elected, or even to seduce Jeca's daughter. The happy ending, such as that of Meu Japao brasileiro, for instance, features the hero Fufuca (Mazzaropi) hitting the behind of the formerly all-powerful bad man Leao. Just so, in O vendedor de linguica, the young married couple drives away while their parents, now reconciled, make comic signs that they are going to run after them. For the caipiras newly arrived to the big city, the "can do" Jeca can be, on the one hand, a hero in whose face they see not Brazil, but themselves; however, on the other hand, the Jeca can also mean that which they have transcended, left behind, in their move to the city.
How to represent this complex face except as that of popular culture itself? Mazzaropi's films appropriate syncretic materials from several other sources of popular culture manifestations current at the time each film was made. He borrows freely from well-known folkloric material in films such as As aventuras de Pedro Malasartes (1959), Jeca Tatu (1959), O lamparina (1963), and Casinha pequenina (1962), for instance. Another important element is his appropriation--or cannibalization--of phenomena of foreign mass culture already inside Brazil.[ 19] Mazzaropi's films are not a mere collage of other films and soap operas. Rather, in them the "caipira" character functions as a unifying element that reads and comments on all these elements as they occur in the national space. The films constitute, in this case, an extremely complex meditation of folkloric and foreign materials served up as comedy. Jeca, like Mario de Andrade's character Macunaima, travels through time and space, uniting the narrative and giving it meaning.[20] Unlike Macunaima, however, Jeca does not have a specific tribe to which he can attribute his beginning; indeed, his existence confounds the idea of origins. Also, unlike Macunaima, Mazzaropi's Jeca is not "cute": he is ugly, awkward, and does not speak of a "cosmic" Brazil. In other words, if Macunaima is the "hero with no character," Mazzaropi's Jeca is the hero with "a lot of- or too much--character." He is a caipira character, no less. Furthermore, unlike the mythic, transcendental Macunaima who can even change his skin color from black to white, Jeca is always looks the same and never sheds his class character--the lowest one.
To conclude, it is possible to say that Mazzaropi's career clearly defies known taxonomies in Brazilian culture. Unlike the other filmmakers, he did not have a formal education: his knowledge of acting, as well as his knowledge of the country, came not from books, but from his travels, his experience in the circus, in the radio, and in cinema. Furthermore, the genre he used, comedy, can be taken as being superficial, not interested in serious subjects. Finally, he did not seek the company of other filmmakers, but instead preferred neither to obtain official financial help nor accept opinions about his work. Mazzaropi's work belonged, so to speak, in the interior of Brazil and in every little Brazilian town where the release of a new Mazzaropi feature film was anxiously anticipated. It is no surprise, then, that the only book ever written to date about his life and career--Mazzaropi, a saudade de urn povo-- was published in the interior of the State of Parana, where Mazzaropi went many times to participate in circus presentations and in premieres of his films. The Brazil where Mazzaropi's work fit is not the Brazil that goes to Cannes. And yet, to this day, more than fifteen years after his death, this work is among the most popular Brazilian video rentals in Brazil. [21] In 1993 and 1994, the Rede Manchete de Televisao (the second largest TV network in the country) aired all Mazzaropi's films in special Saturday night programs which also featured interviews with the actors, actresses and technical personnel who worked with him.
In his thirty-two films, Mazzaropi offers the possibility of enlarging the concept of what Brazil is, and of opening the discussion on how to better represent it so that more is visible in the representation. It offers, too, a possibility for the study of the complexity of popular culture, because it at once taps the profound dilemmas of artists posed between their art and commercialism, and exposes the culture and class divisions in the country. In the process, this work presents another facet of the complex Brazilian identity--or Ortiz Ramos's "cultural matrixes"--in profound (and funny) ways. His presentation--non-official, extra-intellectual and not reclaimed by any established Brazilian intellectual group--reaches the screens untheorized and unmediated. And yet, the radical character of Mazzaropi's work constitutes a privileged popular art form--maybe the most radical of this century-- and it enables us to see not just beyond what has been officially considered the best of Brazilian cinema, but, especially, it makes visible and audible a Brazil which has been historically effaced and silenced.
A Biography and Life Work of Amacio Mazzaropi, a Brazilian Filmmaker. (2022, Mar 25). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/a-biography-and-life-work-of-amacio-mazzaropi-a-brazilian-filmmaker-essay
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