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6 Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Cinema de lágrimas darlene j. sadlier Wherever there is a woman, there is purity of life . . . But wherever there is a mother, ah, there is God! Las abandonadas, 1945 In 1994 the distinguished Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos , who is widely regarded as the founder of the radical Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and 1970s, began work on a project for the British Film Institute (BFI) to commemorate the centenary of cinema. The BFI had commissioned nearly twenty directors worldwide to make movies that would portray the history of cinema in their respective countries. The idea was perhaps excessively nationalistic, and it was inconsistently applied.1 Instead of recognizing Latin America as a large and culturally diverse geographic region where different languages are spoken, the BFI chose to regard South America, Central America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and Mexico as comprising a homogeneous entity that could be surveyed in a single film. As Pereira dos Santos pointed out in an 1999 interview, a history of Latin American cinema as a whole would have required at least a four- or five-hour film (quoted in Amâncio 81). Although the BFI gave him complete freedom to take any approach he wanted, a documentary of this length was out of the question. On the other hand, the impossibility of representing all of Latin American cinema forced Pereira dos Santos to think creatively about the project. Instead of filming a documentary, which was how Martin Scorsese and others approached the assignment, he decided to make a dramatic film about the golden age of Latin American melodrama—a genre that had thrived in Mexico from the 1930s into the 1950s and had been produced in other countries in the region to great popular appeal. Pereira dos Santos was inspired by the book Melodrama: O cinema de lágrimas da América Latina (Melodrama: Latin America’s Cinema of Tears, 1992) by Silvia Oroz, which surveys the history of what were often referred to in Portuguese as “filmes para chorar” (films to cry at). Using a revisionist approach, Oroz’s book focuses on the social implications of melodrama’s emblematic themes of love, passion, and sacrifice and its allegorical treatment of history to comment on contemporary issues. The book also discusses the star system in Mexico, which was fundamental to the evolution and success of the genre, resulting in indelible associations of certain actors with certain roles. In Mexico these associations included Sara García as the suffering mother, Dolores del Río as the vulnerable beauty, and María Félix as the awe-inspiring “devourer of men.” The stories of such women pervaded films of every kind, but especially films about domestic issues, and they often served repressive, socially conservative ends. As the critic Jésus Martín-Barbero notes: The melodrama was the dramatic backbone of all the plots, bringing together social impotency and heroic aspirations, appealing to the popular world from a “familiar understanding of reality.” The melodrama made it possible for film to weave together national epics and intimate drama, display eroticism under the pretext of condemning incest, and dissolve tragedy in a pool of tears, depoliticizing the social contradictions of daily life. The stars—María Félix, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Ninón Sevilla—provided the faces, bodies, voices and tones of expression for a people to see and hear themselves. Above and beyond the make-up and the commercial star industry , the movie stars who were truly stars for the people gathered their force from a secret pact that bonded their faces with the desires and obsessions of their publics. (365) Pereira dos Santos used Oroz’s book as a guide to the cinematic archive, in the service of a fiction film that also was titled Cinema de lágrimas. The film tells the story of an aging homosexual Brazilian film actor–playwright of the present day named Rodrigo (Raul Cortez), who is obsessed with a recurring dream about a childhood trauma—the suicide of his mother. In the dream, Rodrigo’s mother enters his bedroom at night, sits on his bed, lovingly and tearfully takes her leave, and then walks out the door to her death. In order to understand his mother’s act, Rodrigo decides to locate a movie that she had seen shortly before killing herself, which she referred to as “that film you cannot see.” Prior to this search...

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