História, memória e derrisão em Narradores de Javé

Abstract

This article explores the playful aspects of historical and motion picture’s narratives in Brazil. History and the past have been the subject of humor in Brazilian culture. Since the 1930’s, historical facts were mandatory samba themes in Rio’s Carnival. Heroes and glories of the past, who were supposed to stir up the most serious civic sentiments, were sung and taught in carnival’s songs in a irreverent mode, heroism being mixed with comedy. The culmination of this derision was reached in the Samba do Crioulo Doido (Samba of the crazy black man) – by Stanislaw Ponte Preta (Sérgio Porto), launched in 1968, in which the uneducative consequences of edificatory morality were mocked. But beyond the song, and not forgetting the long tradition of tabloids and cartoons, historical characters were also targets of derision in movies. It was the case of A Princesa do Brasil (Brazil’s Princess, 1995) a movie by Carla Camurati on d. João VI’s wife, Carlota Joaquina, a landmark in the recovery of Brazilian cinema. But the playful breaking of boundaries between historical reality and fictional irony was radicalized in Narradores de Javé(Yahweh’s Narrators, 2003, by Eliane Caffé). Mixing life and art, this movie is a kaleidoscope of varying types of narratives in which truth and simulacrum cohabit in unusual harmony.

Keywords

• Brazil
• cinema
• playful culture
• humor
• carnaval