The Humiliation of the Father: Theatrical Melodrama and Cinema Novo’s Critique of Conservative Modernisation 1

Abstract

Arnaldo Jabor, a leading Cinema Novo figure from the late 1960s onwards, played a key role in the intermedial dialogue between cinema and Nelson Rodrigues’s plays. All his films present a bitter diagnosis of the Rio de Janeiro middle-class conservatism, following the 1964 military coup. Jabor adapted Toda nudez será castigada (All Nudity Shall Be Punished) to the screen in 1972, and Rodrigues’s serial novel, O casamento (The Wedding, 1966), in a subsequent 1975 eponymous film. In the latter, he radicalised the ironic style already present in Toda nudez, taking advantage of the convoluted plot typical of serial novels. In both films, irony allows the director to posit bad taste, hysteria and family problems as historical symptoms of the decline of patriarchy in Brazil. This chapter examines these two Rodrigues adaptations in chronological order to highlight the gradual process of dramatic amplification within his filmmaking style. The focus on family dramas allows him to connect the way middle-class males handle their private traumas in that specific historical moment of Brazilian political life.