Poster for God and the Dev­il in the Land of the Sun, 1964

I tru­ly love movies and movie posters. Cur­rent­ly Brazil­ian film is expe­ri­enc­ing a kind of renais­sance, but it was not always this way. In this post I’d like to share a series of posters for Brazil­ian cin­e­ma, and also give some con­text in which the films and posters were cre­at­ed. In the first part of this post, I’m going to show some posters of films released before the end of the dic­ta­tor­ship peri­od. In a next post, I’ll show the movies after this peri­od.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Brazil had a con­sid­er­able movie indus­try, export­ing tal­ents such as Car­men Miran­da to Hol­ly­wood. The above two posters were for two very pop­u­lar come­dies. Almost all of the actors in these films were also well-known and radio stars.

Bar­raven­to (1962) was the first film from Glauber Rocha, the mas­ter­mind of the “Cin­e­ma Novo” move­ment. The poster that opens this arti­cle is for anoth­er Rocha film, “God and the Dev­il in the Land of Sun” from 1964. The mot­to of the Cin­e­ma Novo move­ment was “A cam­era in the hand and an idea in the head.” Rocha defied the struc­tures of Brazil­ian cin­e­ma by doing some­thing new, shoot­ing entire­ly on loca­tion with almost no pro­duc­tion mon­ey.

In 1964, Hum­ber­to de Alen­car Caste­lo Bran­co took seat as the first pres­i­dent of Brazil’s mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship, which would last until the mid-1980’s. Dur­ing this time, lit­tle resources were avail­able for mak­ing films, and those that were cre­at­ed risked being banned for being “cul­tur­al­ly inad­e­quate.” Many writ­ers, actors, direc­tors, singers and jour­nal­ists were arrest­ed and tor­tured dur­ing this time; some of them dis­ap­peared.

Movies like the one above were very com­mon dur­ing the years of dictatorship—nonsense come­dies focused on show­ing half naked women in fun­ny and sil­ly sit­u­a­tions.

In 1974, “Dona Flor e seus dois Mari­dos” (Dona Flor and Her Two Hus­bands) direct­ed by Bruno Bar­reto took the top of the Brazil­ian box-office. More than 2 mil­lion peo­ple went to the the­aters, a record only beat­en last year. This movie revealed Sonia Bra­ga to the world, and she would lat­er build act­ing career in the U.S. and mar­ry Robert Red­ford. The poster for Dona Flor, as well as the posters for Ana Ter­ra and Al Infedil­i­dade, were drawn by the great Bení­cio, con­sid­ered one of the great­est Brazil­ian illus­tra­tors. He did lots and lots of movie posters. To me, he is sort of like Drew Struzan.

Stay tuned for a post in the near future about Brazil­ian film posters from the 1980’s to the present.