Amácio Mazzaropi in the Film and Culture of Brazil: After Cinema Novo by Eva Paulino Bueno (review)

Previously published in Brazil as O artista do povo: Mazzaropi e Jeca Tatu no cinema do Brasil (Eduem 1999), this is no ordinary release in film scholarship. It is a comprehensive study of a major phenomenon in Brazilian culture at large, and in Brazilian cinema, in particular. Departing from an upfront contrast with renowned Glauber Rocha’s oeuvre and Cinema Novo productions’ reception in general, Bueno aims to show how enlightening, rich, significant and unique is the cinematic legacy of Brazil’s most popular filmmaker of all time, Amácio Mazzaropi (1927–1980).

As a cultural practice, argues Bueno, Mazzaropi’s work can be theorized as contestant of the hegemonic Cinema Novo film industry. The study convincingly argues that Mazzaropi’s enormous output (32 films, 21 of which are written, produced, and directed by him), “displays a keen knowledge of themes, problems, and anxieties that Brazilians faced with the advent of an aggressive capitalist culture” (xi). A major aspect of the Mazzaropi phenomenon is that, unlike Cinema Novo, whose concerns are also about Brazil’s social dynamics under oppression and exploitation, it “formed a loyal audience, and to this day, his films figure among some of the most popular in Brazil” (xi).

Bueno’s book develops its premises in five chapters, apart from its Introduction and Conclusion (long and short segments, respectively). In the first chapter, “Between a Cow and a Truck: Transformation in Mazzaropi’s First Films,” she discusses the earliest of Mazzaropi’s movies. Rendered “superficially simple” (47), they actually dramatize through ironic images and humorous plot lines the effects of industrialization in people’s minds. Brazil’s self-identity, which, argues Bueno, is “a shifting and fluid result of a halting and disorganized colonization,” underwent, in the 1950s, a process of “re-colonization by objects—metonymies for the industrialized world—which then began their inexorable invasion of everyday life” (47).

Bueno relates the phenomenon of metamorphosis in those movies to Guimarães Rosa’s short story “O espelho,” from Primeiras estórias (1956). This tale, in turn, has the same title and similar thematic focus of one of Machado de Assis’ best known stories, published in 1882. Both texts and Mazzaropi’s films evoke a “pervasive anxiety” in Brazilian society suffering from the symbolic violence of rapid and profound changes (47).

Bueno defines three different categories in those movies. The first category, in Nadando em dinheiro (1952), for example, is the actual, physical metamorphosis of animals replaced by and of humans transformed into machines. The second category is the dream stage or the stage of altered identity, such as those of a mild-mannered, subdued and illiterate man who becomes powerful and respectful under the influence of alcohol. The third level of metamorphosis is operated through language, in which heroes are compared to Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of “parole” (49). Those characters eventually become their “langue.” What they “want to be—expressed mainly in dreams and the altered states provoked by alcohol—constitutes a utopic dimension of language that can be realized only in a dimension other than the real life” (50). Those first films “tell the complex and difficult tale of every man trying to cope with changes he cannot fathom, with desires he cannot understand, and with differences he cannot comprehend” (50). However, characters emerge as stronger and more aware individuals by means of improved language skills, which is the case in O noivo da girafa (1957).

Other chapters approach a variety of topics. The second one is “The Divided Self: Defining Brazil in Race, Language and Origin.” The third chapter, “I Believe in Everything: Religion, Mysticism, God, the Devil, and a White Mare,” elaborates on folksy beliefs, as well as on religious practices and attitudes. The fourth, “History, Resistance, Comedy,” focuses on subtle forms in which the poor and the oppressed, in Mazzaropi’s comedies, can deal with their oppressors, “through laughter...