Dramatic Renaissance: The Theater and Cinema Come to Life
by DECIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO
1
PERHAPS the most striking feature of the Brazilian theater today is its extreme youth. It is not rare, for example, to see actors under thirty playing roles which in other countries would be considered the crowning of a long career. The fact is that, in spite of its four hundred and fifty years, Brazil is young. But in the world of the theater its youth is even more marked because during the last World War a veritable revolution took place which affected everyone in the theater from producers and actors to critics and audiences.
Before the war, such veteran actors as Procópio Ferreira and Jaime Costa usually had to content themselves with superficial and hasty productions because few plays ever enjoyed continuous runs of longer than one or two weeks. To survive, companies had to take to the road, playing in all the larger cities. The repertory consisted chiefly of unambitious Brazilian comedies and translations of foreign farces. The director was more technician than artist, expert in improvising a new set from old backdrops, and the prompter gave his generous support to the actors in their difficult moments. The direction usually developed by itself, indicated in broad sweeps by the leader of the troupe; everyone did the best he could, drawing on his intuition and knowledge of the stage. We lived as though Stanislavski and Copeau had never existed.
By contrast, the situation in recent years seems unbelievably lively and varied. In little more than a decade, stimulated by the economic growth of the country and by the presence of a few foreign producers, we have caught up with what was happening in the theaters of Europe and North America. We have produced O’Neill and Sartre, García Lorca and Pirandello, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Montherlant, Giraudoux and Anouilh, without forgetting Noel Coward and André Itoussin, or an occasional classic —Shakespeare, Goldoni, Molière, Sophocles. We have most enthusiastically rediscovered the modern trends, from expressionism to genuine realism (which we had scarcely known). We have experimented with lighting, with non-realistic scenery, and every aspect of staging, just as was done in Europe some forty years before.
With the intellectual gluttony of M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, we have tried to cram into a few years several decades of artistic and aesthetic experience. And I think I can honestly report that our success has been beyond our highest expectations. Nowadays we have fewer new productions each year than before, but their average quality is higher and the best can measure up honorably to any international standard. Public interest. in serious theater is on the increase, so that the producer of a really good play can now look forward to a run of several months. Among our actors enthusiasm, an almost adolescent fervor in the struggle for leading parts, makes up for what may be lacking in maturity or artistic finish. A feeling that we are progressing rapidly makes the task of the Brazilian critic most rewarding, in spite of our frank awareness of deficiencies which still remain. Perhaps the North American theater of the 1920’s was in a comparable state.
Such growth could, of course, only be the collective accomplishment of a whole generation. But it is possible to name certain outstanding leaders. By 1943 an amateur group, “Os Comediantes,” was in the vanguard of our theater movement. It was directed by Ziembinski, recently arrived from Boland, and its leading actress was Duleina de Morais, who risked her established name and reputation to bring new spirit into the commercial theater. A French actress who has made Brazil her home, Henriette Morineau, was also most influential in the new trend. In São Paulo the “Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia" took the lead; directed by two Italians, Adolfo Celi and Luciano Salce, it has acquired its own theater and formed a permanent company of fifteen to twenty actors. Celi and Salce have given our theater two things it badly needed: stability and a repertory system able to reconcile the artistic with the commercial, one which can salisfy at the same time the demands both of art and of the public. They produced with equal boxoffice success Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. In 1954 the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia was able to establish itself in Bio as well, where it is now inspiring rival groups organized along similar lines, such as the “Teatro Maria Della Costa,” also direeled by an Italian, Gianni Ratio, who was for many years the director of “Il Teatro della Cittá” in Milan.
The European directors who are working here — and we should add the names of the Italians Ruggiero Jacobi and Flaminio Bollini, the Portuguese Ester Leão, and the German Hoffman Ilarnisch — have brought with them a taste for European plays. There are more translat ions on our stage today than pieces written in Portuguese. But in this respect Europe finds stiff competition from the United States; many of Broadway’s hits soon find their way to São Paulo in translation. Why is North American drama so popular in Brazil? It could be that our audiences, especially the serious ones, are more in tune with North American writers than with the French who are always colder and more intellectualized, less concerned with the mysteries of human personality and more with abstract, moral, or metaphysical questions.
2
CERTAIN modern Brazilian plays tire of particular interest to the foreigner, either because of their real value or simply their unusual success. The first of these, in chronological order, is Deus The Pague (May God Reward You), written in 1932 by Joracy Camargo. Interesting as it was in the thirties, it has not worn too well, although it has recently been filmed in Argentina. It is the story of a beggar-philosopher who discourses paradoxically and amusingly on social problems. The point is that his paradoxes are nothing but the purest common sense.
Vestidu de Noiva (The Wedding Dress), by Nelson Rodrigues, has a certain artistic importance. As produced by “Os Comediantes” and directed by Ziembinski in 1948, it was practically the beginning of our modern theater movement, introducing expressionist techniques such as the slowing down or speeding up of rhythm, and bringing the figures in and out of focus to show the delirium of a woman in agony. We no longer consider expressionism a novelty, but even so, Vestido de Noiva will remain in our modern repertory as a great play.
As Mãos de Kuridice (The Hands of Eurydice), it monologue in two acts by Pedro Bloch, owes its fame in South America to the fact that it is both an intense drama and an excellent vehicle for good actors to demonstrate some tearful histrionics. Other interesting plays are . Amanhã, se não Chover (Tomorrow If It Doesn’t Rain), by Henrique Pongetti; Um Dens Dorm in Id cm Casa (A God Slept in Our House), a treatment of the Amphitryon theme by Guilherme Figueiredo; Paint Velho (Old Silo), by Abilin Pereira de Almeida; A Canção dentro do Pão (The Song inside the Bread), by Raimundo Magelhães, Jr., who spent several years in the Foiled Stall’s during the war; and Para Onde a Terra Cresce (Where the Earth Grows), by Edgard da Rocha Miranda, who writes with equal facility in English or Portuguese. A series of three comedies by Silveira Sampaio called A Trilogia do Herói Grotesco (The Trilogy of the Grotesque Hero) has delighted audiences with its delicate irony.
One of our most proniising new playwrights is Jorge Andrade, the thirty-year-old winner of several literary prizes, whose first play, A Moratório (The Moratorium), produced in May, 1955, suggests certain remote affinit ies with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. But Andrade’s solution of the time problem is all his own, and the subject matter and characters could not be more Brazilian, revolving as they do around the coffee crisis of 1929.
In a still maturing theater world, amateur enterprise is frequently more interesting than professional. Among the amateur producers there are three dominating figures: in Rio, Pascoal Carlos Magno, the moving spirit of the Teatro do Estudante, whose production of Hamlet was outstanding; Alfredo Mesquita, Director of the “Escola de Arte Dramátical,”in Sao Paulo, the most efficient school of its kind in the country; and in Recife, Waldemar de Oliveira, the imaginative director of one of our best and oldest experimental groups. This geographic distribution is in itself a good sign; until 1940, Rio was the only city with real interest in the theater. Today, São Paulo, with eight or nine theaters, is offering real competition, and Recife and Porto Alegre are not far behind.
To complete the picture two more facts should be mentioned. Here, as elsewhere, there exists an intelligentsia of theater people who know what is happening in Paris, London, and New York, and students capable of criticizing the production methods of Jean Vilar or the plays of Christopher Fry. Then too, our knowledge of the European theater is increased by tours every year of important Trench and Italian companies.
At the other end of the intellectual scale we find the musical revue, which although limited in scope and without much originalily, reflects the wit of the people and the humor of the streets and circus. If the amusing revues of a Walter Pinto are no more than imitations of the Folies-Bergère or the Casino de Paris, comediennes like Alda Garrido and Dercy Gongalves express whatever is most genuinely Brazilian on our stage in spite of the lack of authors worthy of them.
Among our young actors and actresses, Cacilda Becker perhaps holds the first place; she has developed an epic sense which is extremely moving. Maria della Costa, who now has her own theater, possesses a strong individual style, and Cleido Yaconis, an unusual talent for characterization. Bibi Ferreira delights us with her delicious sense of humor, while Jardel Filho, among the handsomest and most successful juveniles, is taking several years off to study acting, directing, and producing at the Cniversity of California.
New theater buildings have contributed to our theatrical renaissance, with such distinguished architects as Pino Levi and Oscar Niameyer designing unusually attractive buildings. On the outskirts of Rio, for instance, Afonso Peidy has created the charming Marechal Hermes Theater, seating four hundred people, with the inside curtain and outside surrounding gardens designed by Roberto Burle-Marx.
Although, as I have said, a first-rate play can en joy a long run in Brazil. I believe that the greatest problem still facing our theater is not so much one of aesthetic innovation as of creating and educating audiences. Even Eric Bentley, who is usually unwilling to cater to the box office, felt obliged when he visited Italy to state a truth that to us is elementary. “Sheer quantity may not theoretically be important, but it is essential for theater that a certain body of players should be regularly at work.” The problem of financial success is constant. What good is an avant-garde without an army behind it? Let us remember the famous phrase of Dr. Johnson, “For we that live to please must please to live.” It is in this bondage, to which Moliere and Shakespeare submitted so gracefully, that lie, as we all know, the stigma and greatness of the theater.
3
As FOR the cinema in Brazil, it is even more difficult than the theater to discuss without considering its economic aspects. Although artistic problems are not lacking, the financial one of putting the motion picture industry on a solid commercial footing is the most imperative of all. While moving pictures are by far the most popular form of entertainment in Brazil, our native films in Portuguese must still compete with the often more exciting importations from Hollywood. Then too, tickets to our motion picture theaters still sell for a very low price — they are one thing which has not gone up in our recent inflat ion — and there is often difficulty in collecting the profits through lack of legal controls and organization within the industry.
These questions have come more into relief since 1949 with the appearance of several large producing companies, of which the most important both economically and artistically is the “Vera Cruz" of Sao Paulo, organized by more or less the same group which directs the “Teatro Brasileiro de Comedia. Until then our cinema industry had led a difficult and irregular existence, full of gambles and financial disasters, creating around itself a climate of discouragement and discredit. Only one company, the “Atlantida,” of Rio de Janeiro, had prospered at all, and this by means of an extremely modest program of two or three films a year and with the support of a few very popular comedians such as Grande Otelo and Oscarito, both of whom come from radio and revues. These films consisted of a series of songs and sketches strung together with primitive technique and even more primitive artistic intentions.
Just before 1930 there had been a slight wave of activity pioneered by Humberto Mauro and Carmen Santos, and the few critics who saw the silent film Limite (The Boundary), by Mario Peixoto, considered it a minor masterpiece. But the advent of the sound track, with its new technical and financial problems, sent us back to the starting post, although there have been a few successful films such as 0 Ébrio (The Drunkard), a superdrama which made a 6,000 per cent profit — unhappily, a far from typical case. Only a certain amount of government subsidy to the infant industry kept it alive.
Into this atmosphere of uncertainty the “Vera Cruz” group brought a surge of hope. The company had capital and ideas; beyond that, it knew how to secure whatever was lacking, from foreign equipment to such experienced technicians as the film editor Oswaldo Haffenrichter and the Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, who had made his mark in France and England. In four years “Vera Cruz” constructed 25,000 square meters of studio space and turned out nineteen long films. Cavalcanti was responsible for Sinhá-Moça (Missy), directed by Tom Payne, a film about the last days of slavery, which won prizes at the festivals of Berlin and Venice. Indeed Cavalcanti’s participation in the cinema life of the country raised standards on all sides. Caiçara (Vagabond) and Tico-Tico no Fubu, directed by Adolfo Celi, were shown with great suecess at the festival of Cannos, and a thrilling drama, O Cangaceiro (The Outlaw), by Lima Barreto, not only won a prize at Cannes but has been acclaimed in many foreign countries.
Little by little, technical errors and production weaknesses were being eliminated when suddenly the state and federal governments discontinued their subsidies to the industry. So the “Vera Cruz,” as well as other smaller companies such as “Maristela” and “Multifilmes,” temporarily went out of business in 1953. Just recently a federal loan lias been granted, but it is only enough to guarantee tin or twelve months of reduced activity. Many now feel that the government should buy the studios, which have greatly enhanced in value with the real estate boom, and then rent them back to the private companies. In this way some economic and full artistic responsibility would rest with the producers, while the government would assure the smooth-running production mechanics which are almost unobtainable without a very large initial investment.
Vet we should not overlook the occasional independent films born of a partnership between a courageous and earnest, if not rich, producer and a director, possibly talented and probably poor. Such frankly adventurous activity is carried on, mostly in Kio de Janeiro, by directors like Matson Macedo and Eurides Ramos. In Sao Paulo t he trend is more toward larger organizations based on an industrial pattern. In 1954 our total production was more than thirty full-length films.
An evaluation of Brazilian cinema from the artistic point of view shows that it is more advanced in its photography than in its acting or scenarios. It seems easier to get good sound and camera work than first-rate dramalic talent and really interesting scripts. Too many of our films consist of little more than locale plus actors; we fail to create a tradition which, seen with the eye of the camera, seems authentically Brazilian. In these terms, our best film by all odds has been The Outlaw, which in spite of historical inaccuracies and a kind of ingenuous exoticism, has stature. It is the only important Brazilian film which could not as well have been made in some other country; its beautiful music, dancing, and costumes, are typical of our northeastern region, which is extraordinarily rich in folklore.
Notable among Brazilian documentaries have been one by Lima Barreto on the work of our great colonial sculptor O Aleijadinho, and another by Barreto and Cavalcanti on Cândido Portinari’s Tiradentes, the huge mural at the Cataguazes High School (designed by Oscar Niemeyer) in Minas Gerais. Cavalcanti, I might add, has expressed his views on the cinema, both as an art and an industry, in a most provocative book entitled Films and Reality.
As one reflects on the ideas of a gifted director like Cavalcanti and considers the energy and inventiveness of many others who are at work in various branches of the field, it seems obvious that if the financial problems of the industry can be solved the Brazilian cinema will one day win for itself the same international recognition which has been accorded to our contemporary painters, composers, and architects.
Translated by Margery Eliot