![]() Some short films that were produced about old samba artists include Heitor dos Prazeres (Antônio Carlos da Fontoura, 1965) and Conversa de Botequim ( Bar’s Talk, Luiz Carlos Lacerda, 1970), the latter featuring popular musicians and composers Donga, Pixinguinha and João da Baiana. In the 1960s, Cinema Novo filmmakers were especially concerned with the need to record specific singers and practices from the suburbs which were either ignored by the music industry, distorted by market imperatives or endangered by biological aging. Since the 1960s, music documentaries have played a significant role here, because they address the complex history of samba and are committed to presenting it as a platform for audiovisual memory. Having a privileged position in many films, it has triggered a wide range of intermedial relationships between cinema and music: lyrics becoming narrative agents, famous singers impersonating themselves, performances interrupting the storyline, and music rhythms defining the film’s editing. It has been celebrated in musicals, played in suburban stories, turned into an anthem in engaged films, and repurposed in experimental works. Early sound comedies played a key role in its dissemination in the 1930s and since then, samba has become a recurring topic and a resourceful soundtrack. ![]() It reinvents itself, orbiting between the ancestral signs of party and agony” (25).įor decades, Brazilian cinema has established a meaningful connection to samba. Then, to paraphrase a well-known song by Nelson Sargento, Neto proceeds with “amba agonises, but it doesn’t die. For this reason, the history narrated by Neto involves issues of identity, race and social class: “in those comings and goings, along the complicated journey that moved samba away from its condition of marginal genre and turned it into ‘the top symbol of Brazilianness’, there were also those who came to regret, in different moments, its supposed loss of authenticity-or even to presage its imminent death” (24–5). This process of de-Africanisation involved the movement of samba from its suburb origins to popular radio culture intended for the Brazilian masses. Although lyrics were written by marginalised black and mixed-race songwriters from the suburbs, songs were recorded by successful white singers who subsequently became stars. In practice, however, social inequalities remained intact. In the 1930s, the cultural policies of Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship enthroned samba as Brazilian national music and official prosecution ended. ![]() Engendered in the suburbs of big cities as the mixture of both African and European music traditions at the end of the nineteenth century, it was first considered a synonym of vagrancy and marginality and its practitioners were prosecuted for immorality. In his recent, well-documented book devoted to the origins of samba, historian Lira Neto describes the gradual recognition of this music genre as a national symbol of the Brazilian Republic. Documentary Shooting and Samba: Technology and Mediation in Leon Hirszman’s Partido alto Albert Elduque
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