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From the mid 1930s until the end of the 1950s Brazilian cinema was dominated by a popular tradition which came to be known as the chanchada, a term that was coined in the 1930s by journalists and film critics to refer scathingly to the highly derivative, light musical comedies that were used to promote carnival music and were often modeled on Hollywood movies of the same era. In time this designation became the accepted way of referring to increasingly polished productions, particularly those of the Allantida studios, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, which enjoyed unprecedented popular success in Brazil. This article aims to examine the relationship between the chanchada and Hollywood, and to show how imitation of the latter's cinematic models gradually gave way to parodie re-workings of these same generic templates. It will begin by considering the ways in which the Brazilian musical revues of the 1930s and 1940s adapted key elements of the Hollywood musical, particularly its so-called backstage variant. It will then focus on the impact that the USA's celluloid depiction of Brazil/Latin America in the 'Good Neighbor Policy' era had on the chanchada. It will finally look at the parodie and satirical comedies produced in Brazil in the 1950s, which undercut Hollywood's stock motifs in a spirit of carnivalesque inversion, and reflected changes in popular sentiment, particularly in the face of increasing threats to Brazil's socio-cultural identity.
Brazilian Musicals in the 1930s: The Carnival Revue Meets the Backstage Plot
During the silent era carnival was the focus of much interest amongst Brazilian filmmakers. It has been estimated that between 1906 and the arrival of the talkies in the early 1930s around fifty shorts were produced using footage from the annual celebrations in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Auguste) 1993, 88). The first sound documentary on this popular theme, O carnaval cattlado de 1933 no Rio de Janeiro/ The 1933 Rio de Janeiro Carnival in Song (Léo Marten and Fausto Muniz, Brazil, 1933), was screened on Ash Wednesday 1933, and paved the way for a series of carnival films, such as A voz do carnaval/The Voice of Carnival (Adhemar Gonzaga and Humberto Mauro, Brazil, 1933), which combined real-life footage of carnival balls and processions with a fictitious plot...