Panis et Circenses, Aesthetic Cannibalism: Brazil’s Cultural Response to Imperialism.
Helena Cavendish de Moura
“’68 was, above all, a cultural revolution that attacked the body, the ‘persona artistica’”. (Corrêa, in an interview with critic Guilherme Wisnik, Publifolha 2006).
“Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. “ Oswald de Andrade, the Cannibalist manifesto, 1928.
Last April, Brazil’s government sent a timid yet significant message of reckoning to a generation of Brazilians, re-opening a timeless wound in the nation’s collective memory by revisiting the brutal years of military rule which took place between 1964 until 1985. After a long-fought battle among victim’s rights groups and the Brazilian government, on April 14 of 2010, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed legislation that would deliver reparations for victims of torture and for the release of classified documents issued in the years of military rule#. Intriguingly, the government’s message was delivered to a crucial messenger: a cultural icon was to be the first indemnification recipient, an artist whose work became the target for the ire of the conservative regime. On April 7th, 2010, in Sao Paulo’s historic Oficina theatre, Seventy-year-old Celso Martinez Corrêa, one of Brazil’s most-renowned theatre directors and a victim of torture, was handed, among cheers, tears, pomp and circumstance, the first official reparation check for 569,000 Brazilian Reais (approximately $250,000)#. A prolific, revolutionary theatre director in the 1960’s, on May 22 of 1974, Correa was taken by a group of paramilitary men wearing hoods during a performance of an experimental play called Roda Viva#. The play, which became a landmark in the history of Brazilian theatre, outraged the military regime. During one of its most famous scenes in which actors swallow the liver and insides of a cow, in order to pretend to be devouring an artist, on June 17th of 1968, 100 members of the paramilitary group called CCC (which stood for The anti-Communist Hunting Command) barged into the performance and brutally attacked the actors in mid-scene. Despite so many threats, Correa continued to perform the play until, in 1974, he was finally taken to a prison in the outskirts of Sao Paulo where he underwent multiple forms of torture including electric shock, starvation and the infamous “pau-de-arara“ or parrots perch#. He survived a series of hemorrhages and was left bleeding in a prison cell for about a month. Corrêa told the Estado de Sao Paulo Newspaper during the ceremony on April 7th that he survived, but is still a broken man:
“For many years I tried to suppress, in order to survive and begin to live again, the damages caused by the dictatorship to my body, my soul, my professional work, my creations, as well as the physical body of the Teatro Officina#.
Correa was not the alone in his attempt to suppress such memories. The Brazilian government hoped to quiet the past with the 1979 amnesty law which eventually allowed former torturers to walk free6. On the bureaucratic level, the adamant resistance by both left-wing and right-wing administrations in Brazil (and even surprisingly by the Lula administration’s whose Chief of Staff, Dilma Rousseff, suffered unspeakable torture) sheds light on the complexity and depth of Brazil’s painful relationship to its recent past, a sentiment that crosses over politico-ideological boundary lines#. The memories and impunity associated with crimes committed against citizens the regime considered “subversive” continue to haunt Brazilian politics and culture. And we are only left with more questions about the goals and methods of the persecutors. Why would the work artists like Correa become a national security threat to the Military government, worthy of constant monitoring and bulky files#?
The complexity of this question cannot be easily answered. Studies by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, as well as the release of the thousands of previously classified material from the so-called “Lead Years” help shed light on a deeper issue at a time in Brazilian history: the 1960’s polarization of society and culture, a time when ideology became extreme, forcing artists to take a political posturing in order to justify their art. Among the many pains suffered by Brazilians in those years,
freedom of speech and the autonomy of the artist4 were under threat not only from direct government intervention, but by the sectarian behavior of the left. The government’s crackdown, ironically, as its “reign of terror” reached a crescendo, harbored involuntarily a cultural revolution. This is when a highly-original syncretism began to develop in the arts, bringing about a cultural cohesion that marked the nation’s history through a movement called Tropicalismo or Tropicalia.
Galvanized in some ways by the oppositional push-and-pull created by the polarization forces of left and the right, by cultural imperialism and excessive nationalism, Tropicalismo, or Tropicalia, as it became know, gained momentum. The movement was deemed subversive by the right-wing dictatorship for its unremitting claim for autonomy and by the left-wing movements for its irreverent rejection of norm, its heretical use of tradition and political discourse. In this essay, I will chronicle and analyze this short-lived but highly influential avant-garde movement which sprouted during some of the most intense years of political repression in Brazil and to measure the movement’s pulse as it gasped for air during the military crackdown. With its epicenter at the University of Bahia, in the city of Salvador, the aftershocks of this revolutionary aesthetic movement can be felt worldwide to this day. Tropicalia’s experimental values are powerfully authentic, combative and universal in its aesthetic vision and political ideals and are still heavily borrowed by international artists such as Beck, David Byrne and many others#.
1964-1985
“Do you think we will accept this whoring on stage, portraying Our Lady in hair rollers?…. Do you think our families go to the theatre for this?” (Caetano Veloso, interrogated by Military Police in Rio de Janeiro, quoted by O Grito!
#
Before Correa was arrested and tortured in 1974, a series of political events had taken place that would escalate into a complete crackdown on nearly all forms of artistic experimentations. On March 31st, 1964,
Military tanks headed from Minas Gerais to the city of Rio de Janeiro, overthrowing the government of leftist leader Joao Goulart, an event which took place under the auspices of the middle and upper classes and conservative forces who believed Brazil was on the brink of a leftist revolution#.
After the take-over, the self-appointed military junta installed a temporary Government and reassured the general population that democracy would return. But soon afterwards, the junta installed a reign of terror with the support of the United States. The decades which became known as the “ lead years,” a period between 1964 and 1985, the junta launched what became known as the “Dirty War”. Hundreds died or “disappeared,” thousands of students, writers, artists or anyone the regime’s censorship apparatus deemed questionable were arrested, interrogated, imprisoned and brutally tortured. Strict censorship and government ideological vigilance became the norm with the introduction of a series of draconian laws such as the AI-5 decree, which gave the military absolute power to arrest anyone, without due process, for any suspicious communist activity#.
While the secret files remain temporarily sealed, today, the only significant body of knowledge that is available from the military era comes mostly from the ideologically-independent, underground work of a group called Never Again, a secretive, collaborative network of victim rights groups, attorneys, religious leaders, dentists, forensics and even photocopying clerks who worked zealously undercover for several years to produce the first compendium that chronicles, in detail, the human rights atrocities committed during the military rule. Brasil: Nunca Mais—Um Relato Para a Historia (Brazil Never Again, an Historical Report) is a window into the suffering of a generation of students, artists, human rights workers, farmers and other victims who were gruesomely tortured for expressing any idea deemed subversive to military rulers.
The Artist post-1964, a “Stravinskian March” to Tropicalia
As the military rulers consolidated power after the 1964 coup and the levels of torture, censorship and other forms of repression increased exponentially, artists tried to find alternative means of expression to free art not only from the regime’s optimistic, pro-U.S, pro-capitalist right-wing dogma, but also from the sectarian, left-wing rhetoric of the movements associated with the 1968 student revolts which took place concomitantly in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other major metropolises#. Avant-garde artists clearly rejected the left’s intolerance of any outside cultural influences such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other groups making headlines at the time.
In the art world, old atavistic aesthetics reappeared to battle with modern ones, a push-and-pull of tendencies that begged artists to take a political stance against or for an emerging, new world order. Returning to the musical metaphor mentioned above, as the reign of terror grew, the music changed. Reminiscent of the need for a regenerative violence that would bring change in Stravinski’s Rites of Spring, this very crescendo I am referring to is what Tropicalia critic and biographer Guilherme Wisnik calls the post-64 “Stravinskian March”#, that ubiquitous, eerie sound that begins to take over avant-garde music at the time. Brazilian artists began to juxtapose the images of Brazil’s sleek, colorful, tropical and at times kitsch export-style elements against the brutal, suffocating backdrop of the sounds of marching boots on Brazilian sidewalks, the bizarre, avalanche-style saturation of American commercial media on Brazilian airwaves which many saw as a move to keep Brazil as a provider or raw materials not only of commodities but of culture#. With ingredients borrowed from the Situationist International#, the slogans of the 1968 Paris RiotsX, Brazil’s newly founded Concrete Poetry, Surrealism, Futurism, Dada, Schoenberg and a litany of avant-garde artist of the 19th and 20th Century, this avant-garde opposition movement and some of its European-style socialist-leaning intellectuals found inspiration for a new form of rebellion, an assertive, nationalist artistic movement that swept the nation with its abrasive, uniquely subversive aesthetics that professed autonomy through free-form, aesthetic exploration.
Freedom of Choice, spheres of influence
“I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.” Oswald de Andrade#
To Tropicalia artists, autonomy was never an option. The creative man/woman post-1964 in Brazil could not avoid the sinister, omnipresent stare of the censor, or the morbid susurrations and insinuations that friends and colleagues were rounded up and arrested, many to be tortured and many to disappear into a mysterious vacuum.
Still, even though this decade was punctuated by tragedy, Brazil ‘s post-64 years offered some of the greatest art in the nation’s history. The brevity of the movement and the intensity of the times, perhaps, helped foment the eye of the storm#. Barely a year before its formation, Tropicalismo Avant-Garde artists were forced into exile after the AI-5 decree in 68, but artistic production continued inside and outside of Brazil, under the most dangerous situations, making the 60s a drama-packed moment in Brazilian art.
With the reign of terror as a backdrop, at the heart of the movement was Tropicalismo’s drive to unearth and reinvent Brazil’s African, Indian and Portuguese cultural traditions, liberate and expose the nation’s subconscious primitivism, and unleash these national assets into the modern, urban panorama of Brazil in the 1960‘s. Whether through torture and violence, imperialism and kitsch, classicism or Modernism, the essence of the Tropicalia was assimilation, syncretism, the absorption of everything tangible and its consequent regurgitation into a Brazilian aesthetic. The metaphoric digestive terminology is often used in the criticism due to the movement’s blatant borrowing of former Brazilian Modernist artists, most importantly, Oswald de Andrade, father of the Anthropophagy movement and the father of Brazilian modernism.
Drawing heavily from The Cannibalist Manifesto, a philosophical creed written by de Andrade (1890-1954) which redefines Brazil’s assimilation and cultural dependency of core- nation commercial values, the Tropicalists’ fundamental aim was to metaphorically cannibalize and ingest outside influences and create a new Brazilian aesthetic movement that would “excrete” a home-made Brazilian-style sense of modernity#.
MODERNISM AND THE CANNIBALIST MANIFESTO
Brazil’s Modernist Movement bloomed late compared to the contemporary European Aesthetic movements. Launched in the 1920’s, it converged elements of Post-First World War ideas, elements of Cubismo, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism which Brazilian artists assimilated and merged in what they called the Anthropophagy movement which later on became known as Cannibalist Movement. The Modernist movement had three different phases, or generations, arguably from the early 1920’s all the way to 1978. On one of the historic landmarks are associated with the movements are the “Semana de Arte Moderna” (Expose Week of Modern Art) in Sao Paulo in 1922, the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, considered one of the world’s most important Modernist and avant-garde musicians of the 20th Century, was profiled on the Expose Week in 1922#. Modernist provocateur and father of the Cannibalist movement, poet Oswald de Andrade, inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder ‘s Volksgeist, or the search for a national soul, launched two historic manifestos: The Pau- Brasil Manifesto (1924) which was released in the same year as Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, and the Cannibalist Manifesto (1928). Both manifestos make a case for a Brazilian essence, for monitoring and assimilating avant-garde movements only through Brazilian lenses. It made a case for a self-assertive, Brazilian cultural autonomy.
Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality.
“ Oswald de Andrade, the Cannibalist manifesto, 1928#.
From the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Tabu, and the unleashing of the primitive man as espoused by surrealists such as Andre Breton and Francis Picabia’s Manifeste Cannibale#, the Cannibalist movement was Brazil’s cultural independence declaration which helped shape most art movements in Brazil to this day#.
The beginnings of Tropicalismo
Forty years later, in 1968, Helio Oiticica, a Tropicalismo painter and sculptor of international fame, wrote in the Correio da Manha newspaper on the meaning of the birth of this new vanguard from the Northeastern state of Bahia:
“The other day, I told a friend: there is in the air a breath of cultural repression in this country. If we are to try to create a culture for export, as Haroldo de Campos once said, the only way is to swallow, digest whatever is bombarded from the outside in our direction, and return with a valid form of creativity something that is our own, so that the cultural colonialism that they want to permanently subjected us, it is deemed to be rejected, whether through our indifference, through the dirtiest form of sabotage, through violent reactions dressed as the Right, or , a la Corcao, through a certain type of Left (orthodox? Mistaken?) who ends up identifying itself with the right in its actions, especially in its attitudes towards culture.#“
Like its Modernist precursors, the ultimate heresy of the Tropicalismo movement was its negation of both the right-wing government and its conservatism as well as the parochial traditionalism associated with the left. Political disassociation was a key element for the artist’s autonomy. And that is why both the left and right were equally suspicious of tropical’s experimentations with new forms and the re-interpretation of old ones. As the Hippie movement, The Beatles, the Parisian Situationists and other cultural icons were taking the world scene, Tropicalismo artists began to not just to assimilate or imitate, but to use the cannibalism movement’s approach to the outer world, to assimilate, re-arrange and ingest these new aesthetic imports from the Europe and the US. Tropicalismo artists believed that Brazilian artists could not and should not be impermeable to the explosive social movements taking place in Europe and the United States and that authenticity and independence would not be compromised but reaffirmed through these influences. Complete assimilation and syncretism meant they did not, purposefully, embrace solely the high-minded art of the salons. There was an element of humorous American and Brazilian kitsch that was heavily used in some of the music and art through the works of philosopher/musician/performance artists such as Tom Ze and Roberto Mautner#.
In the Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger makes the claim that the artist’s independence is fictitious and that L’art pour L’art sake is an unattainable ideal. That is clearly true in these neo-bourgeois movements of the 60’s, something Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, with their massive erudition, clearly understood. The complexity of art’s autonomy and its detachment from the “nexus and praxis of life” and the avant-garde holds true for Tropicalismo, as I will try to illustrate in my conclusion. But the most important point to me is to chronicle and explain the forces behind Tropicalismo’s sudden outbreak, its short-lived cosmology, and its long shelf-life as a provoking, influential avant-garde.
HISTORIOGRAPHY/Bahia and the Avant-Garde
“I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.” Cannibalist Manifesto
The Northeastern state of Bahia, and its capital of Salvador, is seen by many as the colonial birthplace of Brazilian national identity. Brazil’s discovery took place there in 1500 in Porto Seguro, 400 miles south of Salvador. On April 22 of the year 1500, the first Catholic mass was celebrated in Porto Seguro among the local Gé Indians and Portuguese navigators by Brazil’s first Bishop Dom Pedro Sardina. He was cannibalized shortly after in what was known as the largest anthropophagic ritual in the history of colonial Brazil, where 91 Portuguese were eaten by the Caete Indians # . A brutal, long fought war ensued causing the eventual extinction of the Caetes. As villages, churches, and eventually towns began to expand, Indian slaves were replaced by an estimated 1.3 million Africans. Brazil held 37 percent of all slaves that were to be later on shipped from Africa to the United States. Using this cannibalist ritual, as opposed to the Catholic mass, as the true Eucharistic act that baptized Brazil, 375 years later, Oswald de Andrade, Brazil’s father of Modernism, launched the Cannibalist Manifesto, in honor of… “the deglutition of the Bishop Sardina,” sarcastically immortalizing the beginning of what he saw as the essence Brazilianess, again, the using Freud’s Totem and Taboo reference to explain this marriage of the primitive and modern marriage that is what we know of Brazil. Bahia is, to many, where the Northeastern Brazilian Portuguese originated: an amalgamation of courtly Portuguese with African Yoruba and Tupi Guarani, the language of the Indians. It’s a national, historic name-giving capital, where the indigenous Brazil-wood , the Portuguese’s most favored extractive commodity, grew wildly, and the Northeastern dialect, a rich brew of influences, was born. Centuries of cultural, racial and linguistic miscegenation shaped this region. Brazil’ cultural historians claim this syncretism is the main ingredient for Bahia’s key export: culture#.
In the 1950’s, the state of Bahia underwent cultural and political transformations that later on would leave indelible marks on the nation’s history as seen through movements such as Tropicalismo and Cinema Novo, Brazil’s modernist cinema movement spearheaded by Glauber Rocha. The Federal University of Bahia, under the auspices of rector Edgard Santos, turned the University into an artistic haven that helped generate a “new wave” of intellectuals and artistic experimentations drawing worldwide attention. Santos brought progressive artists from Europe such as Italian-born Lina Bo Bardi, Swiss musician and visual artist Walter Smetak, German Maestro Hans J. Koellreuter, Portuguese historian Agostinho da Silva, and Polish contemporary dance teacher Yanka Rudzka (x). A wide array of Brazilian avant-garde artists who frequented this school would later on make history. To name a few , Cinema Novo’s Glauber Rocha and finally some of the giants of Tropicalismo: musicians Caetano Veloso, Maria Betania, Gal Costa, Tom Ze, and several other philosophers, visual artists and theorists associated with this Tropicalismo. Suddenly, Salvador, a provincial, quirky tropical city took on the airs of a bohemian capital, with meetings and manifestations taking place daily in what became known as the Bahia Avant-Garde (local newspapers).
Pre-Tropicalismo, the ideas that led to the 1968 aesthetic rupture
“Without revolutionary form there is no revolutionary art — Mayakovsky.”
The regional divide between Brazil’s Northeastern region and the industrialized European south found is contrast in the history of Tropicalia. Caetano Veloso’s biographer Guilherme Wisnik, in his 2006 essay on Tropicalia#, said Caetano Veloso believed that one of the movement’s goal was also to rid Brazil of the Sao Paulo and Rio-based populist, clean-cut image packaged for export, characteristic of the Bossa Nova and other Brazilian cultural exports that made Brazil “digestible” to international audiences. According to Wisnik, Veloso wanted to “pulverize the image of the Brazil carioca (derived from Rio de Janeiro), seeing Brazil through lenses of a ‘super-internationalized Rio and Sao Paulanized, pre- archaic Bahia and post-futurist Brasilia.#’”
This regenerative combativeness laden with socialist nuances that Veloso espoused, borrowed from the New Cinema of another Bahian contemporary, Glauber Rocha, set the tone for the budding movement before it even reached full gestation in 1968, when the Bahian musicians moved to Rio de Janeiro and began taking a lead at various music festivals. In 1967, Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (Earth Enthranced) was released in May. It caused an uproar internationally and domestically, winning the International Critics Prize in Cannes(x), a classic patrimony in the visual arts. In the words of American film director Martin Scorcese, who recently bought the rights to Terra em Transe:
“This film is a feverish, allegoric tableau of the political events that took place in El Dorado as see by its poet at his hour of reckoning. Much in the vein of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, its is a poem illustrated with images of unsurpassable force and beauty.#”
Film critic Helio Pellegrino wrote in Jornal do Brasil in 1967 after the film’s premiere that Terra em Transe was a film-manifesto of a new style developing in Brazilian art:
“(The film) is a vigorous and visionary allegory of Brazil and Latin America, with its central themes, populism, left-wing libertarian utopias in a baroque concert of several cultures (African, Indian, White), Terra em Transe has a fictional text that anticipates Glauber’s questioning of resistance to new notions of narratives and theme. By abolishing chronological orders and adopting a strong operatic, carnival style, this is one of the fim-manifestos of the Cinema Novo.” Helio Pellegrini, Jornal do Brasil.#
Terra em Transe is clearly a triangle of sorts, with entanglements taking place between politics and art, ideology and love, with the human body as the delicate, vulnerable yet expressive center-stage where these values are expressed, the ultimate object of desire. The opening scene is a long-cut aerial of a tropical forest along a beach with the track of a primitive African chant, the archetypal image of Brazil’s discovery. It cuts to the image of a white man, accompanied by a native Indian and an African, carrying a crucifix to his chest and kneeling before a cross (similar to the first cross inserted by the Portuguese priests on Brazilian soil). This man, the white man, Porfirio Diaz (Paulo Autran), is the technocrat, conservative politician who wants to change the fictitious land of El Dorado. The story is narrated through a long-poem by poet and journalist Paulo Martins (Jader Barbalho) who sways between lovers ideologically militant Sara and bourgeois, meretricious Sylvia, and political factions, Senator Porfirio’s conservative movement and Felipe Viera (Jose Leguoy).
Paulo moves to Alecrim to help support Vieria, a progressive candidate. But Viera becomes weak and demagogic, incapable of overcoming his true bourgeois roots and eventually oppressing his own people. Paulo believes Viera is a coward for not resisting a military coup d’ etat. The poet, Paulo, disillusioned, reaches out to Fernandez, a media magnate who is backed by a large multinational called Explint. Fernandez gives Paulo a television station to voice his political beliefs. We begin to see “films inside the film”, where interpretations of historic events become manipulated, re-edited.
The film shocked and offended both the military and the leftist movements for its political allegory. It was seen by many as a metaphor for Brazil in 1966, or maybe even a true parody of the present times. The film has an accusatory tone towards all ideologies, tendencies that took part in the crises that lead to the overthrow of President Joao Goulart by the Military in 1964. On the one hand, Glauber Rocha presents the left as weak and easily compromising, the right as despotic and baroque, the masses as passive and easily manipulated. The interminable chaos of that era, as seen in Terra em Transe, is heightened with the advent of television in Brazil, perpetuating ignorance and shaping culture for the benefit of foreign commercial interests. The film was censured by the Military for being subversive.#
In addition to Terra em Transe’s explosive success, other important cultural landmarks took place during pre-Tropicalismo years as well. As with Glauber Rocha, the advent of television in Brazil 1959 was a source of preoccupation for other Tropicalia artists. The installation of Tropicalia, by Rio de Janeiro artist Helio Oiticica, in Rio’s Museum of Modern Art in April of 1967, recreated a favela (Brazilian shanty) adorned with all the vibrantly kitsch décor, blasting nonsensical programs on television sets, adorned with all other clichés associated with Brazilian identity. Oiticica, Ligya Clark, Antonio Dias and Lygia Pape became contemporary visual collaborators, eventually bringing in musicians of Tropicalia. The visual arts of Tropicalia defined itself as a Non-Art movement, characterized by interactivity, improvisation, and pastiche, elements that would soon be borrowed by the musical wing of the movement#. Oiticica, whose “Tropicalia” is now in the permanent collection of the Tate Museum in London, defined succinctly the goals of the budding movement through his manifesto “A General Scheme of the New Objectivity” Movement, where he used the abstraction of his writings as an extension of this new visual enterprise, which he defined, among many:
“1-The general constructive will; 2-Tendency to ne-gate the object and to overcome the painting on an easel; 3-Participation of the spectator (corporal, tactile, visual, semantic, etc.) 5-Treatment of and taking of positioning in relation to political, social and ethical issues. 5-Tendencies towards collective endeavors and rejection of ‘isms.’”
This confrontational approach was drawing intolerance from what Oiticica saw as Sao Paulo‘s bourgeois left as well as its neo-conservatives. Like the avant-garde music coming from Bahia, this new form of art, he said, in its attempt to merge mediums, was receiving strong resistance from Brazil’s 60’s audiences, accustomed to the mellifluous Bossa Nova sounds and the clean lines of Modernist art.
“The Bahians, always extremely intelligent, fostered the most extensive critique of our popular music, including the attempt to demystify “good taste” as a criteria of judgment in music (there is a parallel there with problems confronted in the arts by Gerchman and myself, at one point, and in theater by José Celso), the reevaluation of this criteria (the repositioning of what is significant in the recent and remote past of popular music), the general absorption of alI types of musical genres from here and abroad, etc. “#
THE THIRD FESTIVAL OF MPB (Brazilian Popular Music Festival, TV Record)
By the end of 1967, the ebullience and optimism which characterized the early 60’s began to wane as the junta’s intentions to hold on to power became clear. After the military deposed democratically-elected President Joao Goulart in 1964, the military refused to cede power to a civilian government. Hardliner General Costa e Silva shut down the Congress and began to impose his autocratic rule. The new military regime was, at first, met with great enthusiasm by the United States Government #and the Sao Paulo-based conservative groups in Brazil who feared a Communist take-over. But soon after the reign of terror began, the junta ‘s support-base began to dwindle as protest marches ensued. By then, conservative pro-family groups and left-wing pro-Guevara types joined hands in protest against the brutality of this regime.#
Society woke up abruptly to a new grotesque reality, what seemed to many like a different nation. The sudden outburst of an aesthetic genre in the 67-68 years, according to essayist Guilherme Wisnik, was a result of this “pavor nocturnos” felt by the post-64 artist, a sudden awakening shock that two decades of democracy had come to an end and that the worst was yet to come with the hardening stance brought by the AI-5 act in December of 1968#.
Other revolutions in neighboring countries brought Latin America to the epicenter of student revolts throughout the world. The Bahian duo, Gil and Veloso, with their strong humanistic background and literary gifts, were closely watching these movements unfold in Paris and elsewhere. Outspoken in their political and artistic ideals, the Bahian wing of the new avant-garde began to take the stage in the new televised music festivals. These were venues that tested the waters of public sentiment and inevitably attracted the attention of government monitors, censors, and violent paramilitary groups such as the CCC (Comando de Caca aos Comunistas), a “Communist Hunting Command” which pretended to be an independent student movement and merged with the audiences in several music festivals.
The then shy Caetano Veloso endeared the hearts of Brazil’s youth with his melodic voice and original poetry. Gilberto Gil, with his piercing melodies and gift as a chronicler of the Brazilian working-class quotidian, was also making headlines. During the Popular Brazilian Third Music festival, in October of 1967, Veloso and Gil gave the competition judges a taste of the powerful brew they were concocting, not yet the aberrant new sound that was soon to develop through the fusion of conceptual art, film, literature and music. But it was the eye of the storm.
“Alegria, Alegria” (Joy, Joy), a song by Caetano Veloso, was first introduced at the Third Brazilian Festival for Popular Music (MPB Festival) and quickly became the symbol of a new aesthetic revolution. A new sound was born, one that would reflect the anxieties, the terror but the tenderness and color of Brazil#. “Alegria, Alegria” introduces Tropicalia as a musical synthesis, incorporating drama, cinema and art as one. This new sound depicted a new Brazil. It was no longer the sensuous girl-from- Ipanema ready-made image that was popularized through American media, but the image of a country in pain, in a hallucinatory moment in its history. In musical and lyrical terms, “Alegria, Alegria” uses the electric against the acoustic, against the dissonant sounds of Shoenberg-like orchestral piece juxtaposed with a folkloric ballad, each strike by the string session warns us again of the imminent arrival of a watchful , sinister executioner, followed by a respiratory pause that reminds us for a moment of the politics of terror that reigns, until we return to a melodic break which allows us to exhale and return to the simplicity and love of life, so characteristic of Brazilian identity. The lyrics and the music interweave several motifs that suggest this respiratory moveme. Several and critics have attempted to wrestle the lyrics of this song, very much like Bob Dylan’s post-protest songs, where he delved into greater philosophical posturing and social critique. As Alex Molotow with Canada’s EXCLAIM! Magazine points out, Tropicalia found a “cohesive agent” in Musica Nova, group of avant-garde composers who drew from the works for Arnold Schoenberg to John Cage. They still, however, envisioned music with a pop-casing:
“ The tropicalistas’ alliance with the Música Nova group would produce some of the most outlandish arrangements of the time period: Julio Medaglia, Damiano Cozzella, and especially Rogerio Duprat translated the theories underlying Tropicália into abrasive sound effects, ostentatious horn parts and exaggerated strings. With Duprat’s help, the tropicalistas would develop a lurid pop sound as seductive as it was garish. Duprat — who had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany — juxtaposed dissonance with pure melody, creating an accessible sound with an ominous undercurrent#. “
This new sound–more than Veloso’s abstract lyrics which borrowed from his favorite poet, Russia’s Vladmir Mayakovski, and drew from the emerging Verbovisual/Brazilian Concrete Poetry– shocked the audiences at the MPB3 Festival in 1967. On the images produced by TV Record of the festival, a TV host introduces the winner of the fourth prize, worth about 5 million Cruzeiros. Out walks a bashful young Veloso in a suit, nothing like the first-world glamour seen on international airwaves, but more like a provincial Northeastern whose lyrics and new music brought the crowd to a state of hysteric perplexity, causing general concern that soon he would be a victim of the censors. Poet Augusto de Campos warned in the Estado de Sao Paulo in 1967:
“There wilI be no lack of advice and admonishments by “hardliners” who warn against the risks of the creative adventure of Caetano and Gil, just as there was no lack of such warnings when Bossa Nova and concrete poetry emerged. A short time ago, I read an article whose title is symptomatic: “It is dangerous to have ‘Alegria, Alegria.’” It reminded me of those depressed judges from the poem by Mayakovsky who wanted “to enclose in a circle of incisions of the birds, the women and laughter.” And it is precisely against this, against this kind of real, that the song-manifesto of Caetano Veloso sends its message. In the stage of development of our music, the discrimination proposed by the “nationalists” wilI only permit us to provide musical raw material (exotic rhythms) for foreign Countries. Bossa nova put an end to this state of things, transforming Brazil into an exporter, for the first time, of finished products from its creative industry and having composers like Jobim and interpreters like João Gilberto respected as the masters. “
THE PROTEST SONG
“Alegria, Alegria”’s debut made an impact on the Brazilian music scene not so much for its subversive lyrics but its innovative style. It is a song that narrates, in a visual, Cinema-Novo approach, the daily life in Brazil in the 60’s, the aimless walk of the modern man through a new landscape littered with Coca-Cola bottles, the institution of marriage, television images, presidents, flags and Brigitte Bardot. Veloso’s lyrics were very much in the style of the Concrete Poets#:
Walking against the wind
Without a handkerchief, without an ID
Under a sun that nears December
I go
The sun divides itself through crimes
Spaceships, guerrillas
In pretty cardinals
I go
Veloso, in the cinematic language of Cinema Novo, lists the stroboscopic influx of images, values, commodities and products flooding into the Brazilian subconscious in this new era of television, Hollywood, political propaganda:
Through faces of Presidents
Through great love embraces
Through teeth, legs, flags
Bombs and Brigitte Bardot…
The sun on newspaper stands
Fills me with joy and laziness
Who reads so much news?
I go
Through photos and names
Eyes filled with colors
The chest filled with vain loves (goes)
I go
Why not? Why not?
She thinks about marriage
But haven’t been to school lately
Without a handkerchief or ID
I go
I drink a Coca-Cola
She thinks of marriage
Without a handkerchief or ID
I go
Veloso also describes the aimlessness and alienation of this new Brazilian persona borne in this undecipherable age.
Through photos and names
Without books, without a rifle
Without hunger, without telephone
In the heart of Brazil
She doesn’t know it, but I even thought about
Singing on TV
The sun is so pretty
I go
Without a handkerchief or ID
Nothing in my pockets or in my hands
I want to go on living, love
I go
Why not, why not?
At the MPB 3 Festival in 1967, an furious audience–puzzled by what they had just heard–began to boo against Veloso’s new song; Gilberto Gil had the same reception for “Domingo no Parque,” a song about a working class romance that ends up in a brutal death. The outraged audience –despite their negative votes and boos–saw both men walk away with the top prizes and with a mission accomplished: they had set the tone for a music revolution that was blossoming under the most hostile of conditions.
Poet Augusto de Campos explained in an article published a month later, that “Alegria,Alegria”, by asking “why not?“ had struck a new chord that Brazilians were not ready to hear:
The adversaries of the “universal sound” of Caetano and Gil have misunderstood the problem of innovation in these compositions. It is not about merely adding electric guitars to Brazilian popular music as a superficial adomment. The dislocation of instruments associated with the Jovem Guarda to the arena of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) already has a “meaning” that is “new information” and it is so disturbing that there were many people who were aurally confused to the point that they could not perceive in which rhythm “Alegria, Alegria” was being played. The electronic sonorities amplify the acoustic horizons of the listener to a musical universe where dissonance and noise are commonplace. On the other hand, even though simple, the melody of”Alegria, Alegria” doesn’t abandon the use ofthe large and unexpected musical intervals that are an innovative characteristic of Caetano’s songs (“Boa Palavra” and “Um Dia”). For its part “Domingo no Parque” plays with greater complexity in terms of musical arrangement: in the definitive recording, the composition is a true assemblage of documentary fragments (noise from the park), “classical” instruments, and a markedly regional rhythm (Capoeira), with the berimbau interecting marvelously with the electric instruments and typical vocalization of Gil in counterpoint to the choral accompaniment of “youth music” – a montage of noises, words, sounds, and cries.#
1968
The uproar of last year’s music festival didn’t do much for the ordinary lives of Brazilians. A year after the MPB3 event which help launch many of Tropicalismo’s avant-garde music, daily life took a more “somber” tone with the growing discontent and fear over the new government crackdown. The military government declared the beginning of the end of democracy by banishing direct elections in 68 major cities#. A teenage student named Edson Luis de Lima was shot at point blank during a protest against the appalling conditions of a university restaurant, an event that shocked the nation and unleashed a series of riots including the “100,000” march#. More victims of the dictatorship began to emerge. As the months went by in 1968, the government began to tighten its control. In November of 1968, the Brazilian government created the National Censorship Council and the Complementary Act N. 38, which proclaimed the shutdown of Congress handing the military regime absolute powers#.
The Birth of Tropicalismo
Meanwhile, as the Military regime continued aggregating constitutional powers, Tropicalismo had already gathered enough force to form a cohesive moment. After an inebriated trajectory through Ipanema’s bar scene, a known hang out for artists in Rio de Janeiro, journalist Nelson Motta joins forces with Tropicalia artists to define “The Tropicalist Crusade,” a tongue-in-cheek manifesto published the next day in Ultima Hora Newspaper:
The film Bonnie and Clyde is currently enjoying tremendous success in Europe, and its influence has extended to fashion, music, decoration, food and customs. The 1930s have come alive in full force. Based on this success, and also on the current pop universe – with “psychedelia” dying and new trends emerging – a group of filmmakers, journalists, musicians, and intellectuals decided to found a Brazilian movement with possibility of having international repercussion: Tropicalism. It accepts everything that the tropical life has to offer – without prejudices on the aesthetic level, without hesitations about bad taste and Kitsch – merely living tropicality and the new, still-unknown universe that it contains. “ #
Two newly-released albums, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, with arrangements by avant-garde maestros Júlio Medaglia, Damiano Cozzela, Sandino Hohagen, and Gilberto Gil, arranged by the prolific Rogério Duprat, made headlines. Rogerio Duprat, whose name was constantly coming up as an instigator of this new sound, is hailed as Tropicalismo‘s hidden poet. Augusto dos Santos declares a revolution is borne:
“And here one should remember the essential contribution of the arranger Rogério Duprat, in end of itself a turning point for Brazilian popular music. The collaboration between a composer of popular music and a composer of the avant-garde (even though Rogério doesn’t like to be called that, his knowledge and practice of contemporary high musical culture justifies this classification) was an event that many would have guessed impossible. This encounter, which was so successful, demonstrates that there are no rigid barriers between popular music and erudite music any more.” #
In 1968, we witness more and more a cross-pollination among artists , artistic styles and mediums into what became known as the Geleia Geral (General Jam). Rogerio Duprat’s name is associated with nearly every avant-garde album released that year, causing the explosion of Os Mutantes and finally, the collective album Tropicália or Panis et Circensis(Bread and Circuses), with Caetano, Gil, Gal, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé and Nara Leão, with arrangements by Duprat. Helio Oiticica and Rogério Duarte produce two events at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro: the exhibition-event Apocalipopótese and the debate “Cultura e Loucura” (“Culture and Madness”), both with Caetano Veloso present.
By the end of 68, this aesthetic concoction helps gave birth to Os Mutantes, one of the most internationally renowned Tropicalia bands from that era. Still touring to this day thanks to indie-rock fans in the US and Europe, Os Mutantes’s highly original sound has made a huge comeback. In 1968, Os Mutantes became part of a combative musical front that that is still taught in Brazilian history books as a cultural landmark event. Os Mutantes shocked the public when it backed Caetano Veloso’s historic performance in Rio‘s TV Globo International Song Festival E Proibido Proibir (It’s Forbidden to Forbid, a allusion to the Situationists and the 68 Paris riots). This performance which followed Gilberto Gil’s “Questão de Ordem” (“Question of Order” by Gil, backed by the Argentinean Beat Boys) did not qualify in the final round after an defiant speech improvised by Caetano, in reaction to the audience’s boos:
So this is youth who says it wants to take power? Do you have the courage to applaud a song this year, the same kind of song that you didn’t have the courage to applaud the year before? You are the same youth tha will always, always kill tomorrow the old enemy who died yesterday. You don’t understand anything, anything, anything-nothing at all!#
According to Tropicalia scholar Ana de Oliveira:
“ Os Mutantes had only just started playing when eggs, tomatoes, and wood blocks were hurled against Veloso, Gil and the group, who were dressed in plastic and plastic and tribal necklaces necklaces, entered the stage swiveling his hips in an erotic dance simulating the sexual act. The scandalized audience turned their backs on the stage. The Mutantes’ response was immediate: without missing a beat, they turned their backs on the audience. Gil was hit in the leg by a piece of wood, but, unperturbed he took a bite out of one of the tomatoes on the floor and threw the rest back at the incensed audience. Caetano made a long and fiery speech that was almost inaudible over the uproar inside the theater.#”
Caetano Veloso’s speech drew anger from conservative groups and the military. The end of 1968 saw the subtle ebb of the counter-cultural force as the military began its crackdown and the dark years, otherwise known as the “lead” years began.
On December 13, 1968, The Ato Institucional Número Cinco – AI-5, one of 15 decrees issued by President and Dictator General Artur da Costa e Silva was imposed. The act consolidated the ambitions of a group inside the military, known as “hardliners,” unwilling to give the power back to the civilians as promised. These hardliners used the AI-5 act as a response to the student protests. The first public victims of this new law, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were interrogated by the Military Police in Sao Paulo on December 27, 1968, for allegedly disrespecting the national anthem and the Brazilian flag. They are taken to the Marechal Deodoro army barracks in Rio de Janeiro, where photos of their shaven heads became a national symbol or warning that a new age of terror had begun. The two giants of Tropicalismo spent two months in prison and were later on under house arrest until forced into exile. Many artists, intellectuals suffered similar, if not worse fates. While Veloso and Gil suffered from severe depression overseas, other artists such as Jose Correa, Geraldo Vandre and many others were killed or tortured. Jose Celso Correa joined the Socialist Revolution in Portugal, smuggling all of his plays through a network of theatrical accomplices. Most of Tropicalismo’s founders were in exile writing songs about Brazil in foreign languages, in foreign climates.
In the meantime back in Brazil, the Marginalia Movement, which roughly translates into the outlaw or marginal movement, began to take off. After the arrest and exile of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the Marginalia movement took on a very acerbic, sexually and scatologically transgressive and even sadistic tone through its irony-packed publications such as O Pasquim and Flor do Mal. The words of poet and journalist Torquato Neto, sung in dozens of popular songs of Tropicalismo, became shouts of damnations. The orphic sublimation of the “musico maldito” (damned musician) characterized this new phase or movement, which lasted until 1970. Mixing pamphlet-style journalism with kitsch, Marginalia protested the brutality and violence of the bourgeois, conservative Brazilian society that remained unaffected by the military regime. The bizarre and kitsch became a vehicle for protest. Jorge Mautner, a prominent intellectual and author as well as the father of the “Philosophy of Chaos,” routinely appeared in lycra costumes singing a cacophonous and absurd form of English into Portuguese, such as with the lyrics of “Guzzy Muzzy Wuzzy, Hey You!#” Several other Tropicalia artists rode the way of Marginalia, which again, drew the attention of Brazil’s censors. However, by 1970, there was absolutely no place for artistic expression. The AI-5 law was crowding the Brazilian prisons with artists and dissenters, most who underwent torture.
Marginalia’s outlandishness brought about their quick extinction. The end of Marginalia was marked by the suicide of Torquato Neto. After he returned from exile in 1970, Neto became depressed and complained of feeling isolated not only by the military regime, but also by what he called “The left-wing ideological patrols” who ostracized artists for not using their medium as a sole means of protest. Again, Brazil’s artistic pulse is weakened by ideological pressures from both sides.
After a series of letters to friends such as Helio Oiticica about the state of things in Brazil. Torquato killed himself a day before his 28th birthday, in 1972, leaving a note which read:
“I miss,as all Cariocas, the day in which we thought were blind days. So, I will remain calm here, while it lasts. For me, it’s enough! Please don’t shake Thiago, because he can wake up.” (Thiago was his 2-year-old son).
The military regime was able to temporarily shut the voices of dissent. But the repression of this movement may have contributed to the everlasting success of Tropicalismo and its ancillary art movements. Tropicalismo has not only secured a prominent position in modern avant-garde cultures but it has also kept a constant presence and influence in contemporary culture in general.
Helena Cavendish de Moura
Helena.demoura@turner.com
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