By WALNICE NOGUEIRA GALVÃO*
The memorable strategies of artists to circumvent the Brazilian military dictatorship
During the military dictatorship, artists developed strategies to avoid a suicidal confrontation, as has been revealed in interviews and testimonies relating to the period. These strategies are memorable and deserve to be among the legacies to be passed on to posterity as monuments of resistance.
Popular music
One of them, used by popular music people, was to include the request for the release of a dangerous song by including it in the folder of a neutral and indifferent singer. The collective folder was then submitted to censorship. Thus, one of the most challenging songs of the time was approved, directly addressed to censorship, which goes: “You cut a verse, I write another/You arrest me alive, I escape dead” (Nightmare).
Another trick was to include some verses of outrageous and blatant protest, so that the censor, indignant, would rush to cut them, and let through what by contrast seemed mild. This device was used thousands of times.
Chico Buarque, the most targeted of all and who, with great honor, never took refuge, made the infamous Dona Solange and her henchmen see red, prohibiting anything that came in his name. For this reason, he created a pseudonym, the unforgettable Julinho de Adelaide, which had all of his songs approved.
A show by Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil became a classic, in which the highlight was the performance by both of them of “Cup”, a pun on “Cale—se”, which addressed the existence of censorship (“Afasta de mim esse Cale—se”). The two hummed a wordless vocalization, which the audience supplied, singing in their place. The preserved film is hair-raising, even today.
It was a period in which the song and the composers took up arms against the arbitrary, suffering the consequences of their stance, expressed in censorship, persecution, imprisonment, and exile. Consider the definitively destroyed career of the popular minstrel Geraldo Vandré, who was living the height of his fame. He was execrated and hunted by the army after the performance of Not to say that I didn't talk about flowers in Maracanãzinho, he only saved his life by escaping into exile.
Since everything was becoming politicized at the time, any arena would do. That's what happened at the International Song Festival, held by TV Globo, at the end of 1968. A real war broke out, sparked by the 12 thousand opponents of the regime who filled the Maracanãzinho in a state of insurgency. As is known, the censorship had sent the message that Not to say… could not win. And the public, in weight, preferred Geraldo Vandré, receiving the award I knew with boos. The logic of terror was not naive: Geraldo Vandré's song would become the anthem of all public demonstrations against the uniformed yoke, whether it was the campaign for amnesty and openness, or funeral ceremonies for those murdered.
However, censorship interference would lead to the festivals' extinction. In 1971, the most influential composers, including the orderly Tom Jobim, withdrew their entries in open defiance of censorship, and were therefore all arrested and charged under the infamous national security law. It was in this inglorious manner that the International Song Festival came to an end.
Cinema and theater
Cinema Novo was the highest level ever reached by our seventh art, with the simultaneous screening of God and the devil in the land of the sun, by Glauber Rocha, and by Dried lives, by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, at the 1964 Cannes festival. After that date, Cinema Novo would participate in the discussion of intellectuals and artists about the dictatorship and the ways to challenge it, as can be seen in earth in trance and The dragon of evil against the holy warrior, both by Glauber Rocha, the latter awarded at another Cannes Festival.
The founding of something memorable dates back to 1961: the Popular Culture Center (CPC), an active body of the National Union of Students (UNE). Its branches are scattered throughout Brazil, driven by students, but they are also open to the participation of intellectuals and artists in general, setting up projects to bring culture to the people. As you can see, it was extremely generous and well-intentioned, but also quite deluded about the scope of such actions, but it has fertilized Brazilian culture with notable achievements.
People would actually put equipment on top of the truck and go and perform plays in favelas all over Brazil, with admirable dedication. An Uncle Sam would appear on stage in a top hat and tailcoat cut out in the American flag, punishing a pitiful Brazilian in rags.
O Auto da Compadecida, by Ariano Suassuna, was the most performed play of the period, especially by the CPC and amateur groups of student unions throughout the country. It has everything from the prevailing national-popular ideology: northeasterners, a black Christ, desires for social justice and preaching of anti-racism. Another widely performed play was Death and severe life, by João Cabral de Mello Neto, a Christmas play that showed the miserable fate of the migrants from the Northeast. The TUCA production would win the first prize at the Nancy festival in France.
In this context, the CPC would appear to be responsible for the training of an entire generation of artists, actors, film and theater directors, documentarians, technicians, playwrights, writers, poets, composers, singers, who would continue to provide talent until much later, when its trademark can be seen, for example, in soap opera fans. TV Globo.
But perhaps the most notable transformation took place in the theater, including the emergence of a national and highly politicized dramaturgy. Two São Paulo companies, Arena, founded in 1953, and Oficina, founded in 1959, stand out in this trajectory.
Arena, led by Augusto Boal and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, set out to produce original productions, with its own dramaturgy and the invention of successful musicals, based on Arena counts Zombie. His first success was They don't wear black tie, which puts a workers' strike on stage. It would reach its peak in the final days of 1968 with the swan song of First São Paulo opinion fair, a heavy criticism of the regime. By putting on stage actors wearing monkey skins over military uniforms, concretizing the metaphor of “gorillas”, it entered the realm of farce and buffoonery. Censorship came down hard and banned the show, sealing the Arena’s closure.
At Oficina, José Celso Martinez Corrêa directed many hits, including the king of the candle, by Oswald de Andrade, in a production that marked an era and is considered one of the most important ever. He also directed Wheel—viva, by Chico Buarque, at the Ruth Escobar Theater, the target of invasion, vandalism and armed aggression against the actors by the Communist Hunting Command (CCC), in 1968.
While we were discussing censorship of theater and other arts, Augusto Boal and José Celso, as if to demonstrate their importance and that of the arts, were arrested and tortured, leaving for exile as soon as they were released.
In a new way of circumventing censorship, relevant protest shows emerged, such as Opinion,work of the homonymous group created in Rio de Janeiro by members of the extinct CPC, and freedom, freedom, soon amputated by censorship. They achieved enormous popularity, reaching a wide audience.
The actions of censorship during the military regime have received the research and work that such ignominy deserves, when the current estimate puts forward the figure of 500 plays that were previously prevented from reaching the public. This is the censorship that wields the scissors not against excerpts, but against the entire work.
As far as theater is concerned, it is worth highlighting the work of some visual artists, especially Flávio Império, whose sets and costumes covered practically all the important plays of the period. He himself would direct the production of Dona Teresa's rifles, by Bertold Brecht, in 1968, by the University Theater of São Paulo, Tusp, based in Maria Antonia, the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters located on that street.
visual arts
The 1964 coup would exert its nefarious influence on the visual arts, which, whether neo-figurative with pop overtones or aligned with abstract constructivism, would swell the ranks of the opposition. They would integrate Opinion 65, the group exhibition in Rio de Janeiro against the dictatorship that marked an era. Others would later follow this path, such as Cildo Meireles erecting a monument to the political prisoner in the 1970s, in an installation entirely in red.
A theme alluding to the brutality of the new masters is imposed, as can be seen in Bólides and Parangolés, in their choice of the favela and marginality, by Hélio Oiticica.
The year 1968 would be marked by Public Art Month, held outdoors at Aterro do Flamengo, in Rio. In 1969, the censors, in a fit of obscurantism, prohibited the exhibition of Brazilian artists selected for the XNUMXth Paris Biennale, to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio. The Brazilian Association of Art Critics, chaired by Mário Pedrosa, officially protested, while an international boycott of the next São Paulo Biennale was organized.
The tightness is accentuated: expressing the totalitarian blackness, an engraving by Cláudio Tozzi would show a brain pierced by a screw and would provide the cover of the magazine Almanac – Literature and essay notebooks, a publication with 14 issues that I co-directed with Bento Prado Jr. between 1975 and 1982, in which remnants of Maria Antonia were entrenched.
Comfort Castro's
The most scathing criticism came in a play, without disguises or coded language. Consuelo de Castro, a social sciences student and occupant of Maria Antonia, still an unpublished author, thus began her brilliant career on stage and television.
Fireproof was her debut play – but it did not premiere. Consuelo de Castro's theme was, precisely, the student movement and the occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy at USP. The title of the play alludes to the bombing and burning of the building on Maria Antonia Street by the forces of repression. The plot takes place inside the Faculty and its characters are the students, with their problems, their conflicts, their solidarity, living in a utopia.
The fate of Consuelo de Castro's play is exemplary. It was, of course, immediately banned by the censors in 1969, when it was already being rehearsed at the Teatro Oficina, under the direction of José Celso Martinez Correia. Despite this and while it remained banned, it won the award for best play in the country, awarded by the National Theater Service, an official award, in 1974.
It would only be released and staged a quarter of a century after the events, in 1993, premiering at the Grêmio da Faculdade de Filosofia on Rua Maria Antonia, where the plot takes place. And it was, to say the least, a curious experience, difficult to fit into aesthetic theories: a play staged in the very place where the events it recounts took place, watched by an audience that was part of the plot – the person who wrote these lines, by the way.
Literature
The sudden politicization is a new accent and an immediate consequence of the 1964 coup. Censorship was fierce against writers, as well as against everything related to art and thought. Books became an enemy, as is usual in times of obscurantism or totalitarianism.
In the novel, the reaction comes from the veterans. Experienced and prestigious novelists, with established reputations, are the first to speak out. They write works of protest, allegorized or not: Érico Veríssimo, Josué Guimarães, JJ Veiga, Antonio Callado, Carlos Heitor Cony, Lígia Fagundes Telles.
Antonio Callado occupies a special place: Quarup, Bar Don Juan, Reflections of the dance e forever form a saga of the left, which we owe to the one who would become its chronicler in the period. Something rare in Brazilian fiction of the time and even later due to its scope, Quarup proposes a project for Brazil. The project includes indigenous people, highlights the Peasant Leagues and investigates the then revolutionary role of the Catholic Church, which would lead to Liberation Theology and grassroots ecclesial communities.
But the progressive tightening of censorship would decree a farewell to realism. Already praying by the allegorical primer, in the style of magical realism, then in vogue in Hispanic America, other veterans would proceed to settle their accounts. And the new ones would emerge, as well as a whole youthful memorialism of guerrillas, whose flagship was What is this fellow?, by Fernando Gabeira.
Rejected by several publishers, Zero, by Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, would end up being published in Italy in 1974 and only a year later in Brazil, to be censored and confiscated throughout the country. Fragments of experimental prose make up an immense mosaic-like mural, with parodies and pastiches that denounce violations of civil rights, the gagging of opinions, the media deceiving everyone, a country where one could not breathe. Composed of heterogeneous fragments, everything happens as if the novel were struck by lightning, the lightning of censorship, which shattered it.
the poetry
While this was happening in prose, where was poetry? In the early 1970s, Marginal Poetry or the Mimeograph Generation was born, with its origins in Rio de Janeiro but spreading throughout the rest of the country. In order to circumvent censorship, groups of young people published and informally distributed their works, passing them around at meetings, in bars, on the street, and in schools. This poetry expressed the state of mind that has come to be called “internal exile.”
Another type of poetry, usually absent from our panorama, militant poetry, would soon flourish with D. Pedro Casaldáliga and other poets, in the dungeons of the dictatorship, but it would have to wait for more benign times to see the light of day. The political lyre of clandestine production was smuggled out of prison, only coming to be published much later. This is the case of Hamilton Pereira/Pedro Tierra, Alex Polari de Alverga (sentenced to two life sentences and record holder for imprisonment for almost ten years) and Alípio Freire, among others; the latter would later film a documentary entitled 1964. In this journey to the hells of pain, mourning, agony, despair, the “voice from prison” speaks for those who have been gagged: the prisoners, the persecuted, the tortured, the disappeared.
In the poetry section, a poem stands out about the political climate of May 1968, written by none other than our greatest poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
“May Report” was published in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhã on May 26, 1968, therefore, at the height of the student movement taking to the streets and occupying schools, here and around the world. The poet alludes to the omnipresent repression and the fear of chaos – but with great sympathy. The poem ends with a beautiful metaphor of hope:
and yet in the darkness a dizzy bird
streaked across the sky that May.
Em Almanac – Literature and Essay Notebooks, we decided to republish the poem to commemorate the ten years of 1968 (n. 6, 1978). When consulted, the poet agreed. But this poem would only receive the honor of being collected in his book in 1985.
While the theater was dismantled, cinema lost its way and literature was shelved, popular music reached its peak, until it was defeated by the censorship of the dictatorship. And only after the restoration of democracy in 1985 would artists breathe easy.
*Walnice Nogueira Galvão Professor Emeritus at FFLCH at USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reading and rereading (Sesc\Ouro over Blue). [amzn.to/3ZboOZj]
Originally published in the magazine Theory and debate.
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