14 - Chanchada, Samba and Beyond: From the Cinema of Radio to the Cinema of Television (1930s–1960s)

Summary

This chapter will address the role of Brazilian popular music, specifically of certain generic samba forms, focusing on how their screen adaptations were inflected by a double process of cross-mediation. It will demonstrate how cinema reconfigured Brazilian music via its intermedial connections with staged modes of production, representation and consumption, including radio auditoriums, casinos, nightclubs and other entertainment spaces, thereby incorporating audiences as part of the film's diegesis. Brazilian cinema, radio and television will be investigated in their many forms of interaction, from the moment synchronised sound was first introduced into Brazilian cinema until the late 1950s, when television gradually became the most popular form of audiovisual contact with audiences around the world.

Traditionally, there is a tendency among Brazilian film historians to subordi-nate musical comedies to the radio, in particular the filmusical of the 1930s and the chanchadas of the 1940s and 1950s. The same derivative approach has been more recently applied to contemporary Brazilian mainstream film production, with expressions such as ‘a cinema of television’ (um cinema de televisão), to justify the popularity of what has been defined as neo-chanchadas or Globo chanchadas, the latter term drawn from the dominant sitcoms produced by the Globo TV broadcasting network, which will not be covered here. Granted, narrative mainstream cinema has always been derivative. It has inherited, absorbed, shaped its forms and become popular in dialogue with amusement parks, circuses, vaudeville and theatre, among other forms of entertainment, as well as with other arts. Hence, I have opted in this chapter for a cross-media approach.

I will explore the period between the mid-1930s and the arrival of sound, and the late 1950s, when the traditional chanchada genre started to face the competition of other Brazilian film genres. Here it is important to note that the chanchada had a longer life than has been commonly assumed, having survived until the mid 1960s, when it coexisted with the more progressive, aesthetically provocative and politically committed films of the Cinema Novo movement, then at its peak.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Brazilian cinema had a very brief period of visibility within its burgeoning internal market, known to some Brazilian film historians – notably Vicente de Paula Araújo, who coined the term, and Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes – as a sort of Golden Age, or ‘Bela Época’.