Abstract
Throughout the years 1953-1979, bloomed a popular Brazilian cycle of films closely related to the North-American Western gender. Notwithstanding, these Westerns fell quickly into oblivion, mainly due their lack of aesthetics innovations and their undisguised commercial drive. Nevertheless, once it was bound to satisfy the collective phantasies of its audience, the corpus of these films displayed a plethora of representations pertaining to their sociocultural, historical and political environment. They provided a profuse amount of audiovisual material open to researches in a variety of fields – gender representation, psychosocial culture, authoritarian politics and ethics – which are still at work in actual Brazilian social, institutional and political practices. And since they were bound to please a masculine audience, Brazilian Western movies framed a striking fictional world underlined by the psychoanalytical theme of the figuration of women as the absolute model of alterity. Women were usually placed as imaginary emblems of private property, democratic values and/or Christian faith, which, by their turn, performed dramatically under three signifiers: the “Bull”, the “Bullet”, and the “Bible”. Depicted not as proper characters and deprived of dramatic motivations, they were, by consequence, liable to specific modalities of physical violence – abduction, torture, rape and murder. Cruelty against the feminine body blended together the misogynistic bias of Brazilian culture with the masculine impotence during the authoritarian dictatorship epoch in a framework which could only be furnished by the imaginary themes and structures of Western movie.
Highlights
Throughout the years 1953-1979, bloomed a popular Brazilian cycle of films closely related to the North-American Western gender
Once it was bound to satisfy the collective phantasies of its audience, the corpus of these films displayed a plethora of representations pertaining to their sociocultural, historical and political environment. They provided a profuse amount of audiovisual material open to researches in a variety of fields – gender representation, psychosocial culture, authoritarian politics and ethics – which are still at work in actual Brazilian social, institutional and political practices. Since they were bound to please a masculine audience, Brazilian Western movies framed a striking fictional world underlined by the psychoanalytical theme of the figuration of women as the absolute model of alterity
Cruelty against the feminine body blended together the misogynistic bias of Brazilian culture with the masculine impotence during the authoritarian dictatorship epoch in a framework which could only be furnished by the imaginary themes and structures of Western movie
Summary
As realizações relacionadas ao faroeste brasileiro, provieram, majoritariamente de uma indústria cultural moldada no padrão norte-americano de produção, mas limitada pela carência de recursos materiais e de know-how técnico. A produção de filmes de cangaço, que atravessaram os anos 1960 como um gênero próprio, marcado por temas, ambientes, motivos e personagens característicos, terminaria restrito à Boca do Lixo, o principal eixo de produção cinematográfica brasileira nas décadas de 1970 e 198017, onde seriam redimensionados pela imitação dos spaghetti westerns (esses, por si mesmos, uma imitação do faroeste norte-americano)[18]. E, novamente, Jean Claude Bernardet aportou elementos significativos para compreensão do processo de substituição do nordestern, quando esse entrou em decadência, por um produto específico do cinema industrial da Boca, o faroeste feijoada. Derivada da Boca do Lixo, contudo, os faroestes aglutinavam experimentos francamente comerciais, apropriando-se dos filmes de cangaço e dos dramas sertanejos, que já encontravam respaldo na prática espectatorial, para os imiscuír com elementos estrangeiros também apelativos à audiência. Daí em diante, persistiu como um fenômeno estético praticamente desconhecido, ignorado pela historiografia cinematográfica, desprezado pelos seus temas e, como todos objetos recalcados, remetido acriticamente ao domínio das coisas descartáveis
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