Introduction: The Adventures of Jeca Tatu — Class, Culture, and Nation in Mazzaropi’s Films

Abstract

This book is about the Brazilian filmmaker Amácio Mazzaropi, who is completely unknown outside Brazil and almost completely ignored by the official critical establishment inside his own country. This does not mean he is unknown inside the country; much to the contrary, he is one of the most successful and beloved Brazilian artists of all times. However, the reasons for his success and celebration are the very reasons why his work has been ignored by the established criticism in Brazil. For three decades, Mazzaropi’s films filled movie theaters all over the country, even at times when other critically praised Brazilian films were seen by barely a handful of people in the bigger metropolitan centers. This disparity between the attention so many thousands of Brazilians dedicated to Mazzaropi’s films and the attitude of the cinema critics toward his work provides an excellent ground for the study of the relationships between cinema and the national culture, as well as between the national culture and the culture of the lower classes. In the process, his career also problematizes the position of the intellectual classes in the country in their struggle for prominence or hegemony.

Any attempt to read popular culture politically needs to be acutely dialectical. The political cannot necessarily be understood independently of the forms of popular culture.

—Colin MacCabe, High Theory/Low Culture