Sao Paulo: ‘Ugliness (They Speak Of) to Define This City’

MODERN WOMEN

In the last decades of the 19^th century, São Paulo was beginning a radical conversion. The coffee rush and the entrance of large numbers of transcontinental immigrants gave way to a new city in the making. As the whole country looked towards France for its model of civilization, the prostitute became the unofficial icon of the modern condition. The dramatic urban development brought rapid changes in the erotic ecology in the city. For the upper classes, the object of desire (and immorality for some) changed from black slaves to French prostitutes, born and imitated. Shifting desire from the domesticated and controlled body to an independent figure that was now part of the social sphere, subverted traditional moral codes as it willfully dissociated love from pleasure. The appeal of the ‘French’ prostitute was built around two central themes: seduction and ‘civilized’ cosmopolitan manners. The modernization process and the demographic boom motivated by the industrial developments linked to the coffee trade, expanded the geography of erotic desire, making room for micro- institutions (pensions, brothels, concert cafés and cabarets) that were progressively established throughout the city to support the sex market: As Tom Zé sang in his 1969 song São São Paulo, ‘Sinners invaded / the city center / armed with rouge and lipstick’.

TWO-FACED PLEASURE

High-end establishments such as Hotel dos Estrangeiros (Foreigners’ Hotel), ‘a big palace of two stories’, located in the Rua Doutor Couto and the Palais de Cristal were considered important reunion sites for the paulista upper class during the first decades of the 20^th century.

The life and characters that revol-ved around these erotic institutions were nar-rated in the 1920 novel Madamme Pommery, written by engineer José Maria de Toledo Malta under the pseudonym Hilário Tácito. The novel chronicles a period in which the nether regions of prostitution were going through electrifying transformations, using real life testimonials as sources of inspiration, specifically from Madamme Sanches, owner of the Palais de Cristal and the most recognized bawd of the time. Working as a prostitute in the Hotel dos Estrangeiros, Ida Pomerikowski, later known as Mme. Pommery, was an immigrant with a keen sense of business who perceived a lack of erotic and sexual spaces accessible to a middle class going through significant social and economic change. Her mission was to ‘break the long abstinence of bad past days, molding a renascent life of pleasure and abundance’. In her progressive brothel, the Au Paradis Retrouvé, Mme. Pommery redefined the codes of conduct of the underground, bringing class and sophistication (exemplified by the switch from beer to champagne) to a society that was avid for new cultural establishments, reflecting their newly acquired wealth, and accompanied by modern social manners. The novel, a social critique of the hypocrisy of the paulista upper-class at the beginning of the century, subverted the two-faced attitude towards erotic and sexual desire in public and private spaces. In it, the brothel was depicted as a dignified institution, a lustfully site that was highly valued as a home for exploring ones desires without any kind of moral restrictions.

THE DEVIL’S MOUTH

Boca do lixo: A refuge for prostitutes, drug dealers, pimps, thieves and other outlaws, after an official decree terminated the official prostitution site Bom Retiro. The area expanded from the Estação da Luz train station, creating an invisible demarcation between Duque de Caxias, Timbiras, São João and Protestantes streets. In the 1920s, the Boca do Lixo area was known as the principal film production pole of the city and later in the 1960s became the birthplace of an important film community that was especially lively around the Rua do Triunfo. The community experimented with a myriad of genres, and maintained an unattached approach to any specific style or ideology in an effort to create experimental films independent from state-funding. Erotic themes were central to many of the movement’s productions, much of the films being updated versions of the chanchadas, a popular comedy and burlesque musical genre that enjoyed national popularity between 1930-1960.

Although the Boca do Lixo cinema production has been almost exclusively linked to the pornochanchadas, its scope was surprisingly diverse: satire, westerns, comedies, thrillers. The Boca do Lixo was also the symbolic home for the Cinema Marginal movement (also known as Poetic Cinema or Udigrúdi Cinema), whose low budget aesthetics and irreverent style produce a self-sufficient cinema machine that had an Oswaldian (as Oswald de Andrade, literary and cultural critic mostly known for the Manifesto Antropofágico) or tropicalista approach to processing their sources. They would take specific stylistic traits of different film movements such as the Nouvelle Vague, Japanese and American underground and B-movies to produce highly distinctive works that disrupted the entrenched cinematographic language of the majority of national film productions.

JOSÉ MOJICA MARINS

Among the figures that were part of the marginal camp, José Mojica Marins is one of the most intriguing characters of this breed of paulista cinema auteurs. Born in São Paulo in 1931, his relationship with cinema began at an early age when his father became the general manager of a theater in the Lapa neighborhood. Mojica, credited as the father of the horror genre in the country, directed more than 30 films, starred in at least 40 and was the creator of the iconic character Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe). Portrayed as a ruthless atheist, an ambivalent figure who could be seen as both hero and villain, Zé was the champion of the underprivileged, a cathartic and anarchic response to the establishment’s rules and moral codes. Although the films starring Zé as protagonist are mostly horror films, Mojica nevertheless became branded as the infamous father of zoophile cinema in Brazil as consequence of the content he was practically obliged to make in order to sustain his financial situation. The story goes like this: actor and producer Mario Lima had invited Mojica to direct 24 hours of Explicit Sex (1985), a film whose cast included Vânia Bonier, an actress who had also appeared in Coisas Eróticas (1982). Thinking the story didn’t have enough novelty to attract moviegoers, the producers brought Jack, a German shepherd, to spice things up. Although the intercourse between the actress and Jack was simulated, the movie, and that particular scene, can be characterized as the beginning of trend sparked among the Cinema Marginal productions in the second half of the 1980s. Legend has it the owner of the dog later found him having sex – doggy style – with his wife and poisoned the animal.

COISAS ERÓTICAS

Another film landmark in the history of erotic cultural productions in the city was Coisas Eróticas (Erotic Things). Premiered at the Cine Windsor (located on Avenida Ipiranga), the film directed by Italian-Brazilian cinematographer Raffaele Rossi was the first Brazilian production that showed explicit sex scenes and was seen by more than 4.7 million in the year of its release. The director had managed to mislead the Department of Censorship apparatus with a previous film Coveted Dolls (1980) that disguised explicit scenes using shadows and fabrics between the actors and the camera. At the time, erotic and pornographic material was scarce and forbidden; apart from the imported porn magazines and the limited international films that were sold in the newsstands in a clandestine way (they were handed to the customer in pastry bags), erotic discourse was filled with taboos and restrictions. Until the release of Coisas Eróticas, the pornographic material available in the country was mainly produced abroad; Nagisha Oishima’s 1976 movie, In the Realm of the Senses, also screened for the first time at Cine Windsor, was a huge sensation in the Brazilian cinema circuit. Coisas Eróticas had an astonishing success in the box office; to this day it is the 12^th highest grossing film in Brazilian history. Perhaps its success is indebted to offering Brazilians a piece of familiarity, including narrative tropes through well-known streets, local routines and common interior architecture styles of the decade. Most importantly perhaps, the film introduced a mixture of ethnicities, looks and traits that reflected the colorful diversity of the urban population that filled the cinemas.

CINEMATIC CITY

By the 1960s, the so-called ‘new city center’ of São Paulo boasted a massive cinema circuit; at the time there were more than 44 cinemas concentrated on Ipiranga and São João avenues (Sampa’s version of Broadway), an area that was popularly known as ‘Cinelândia’. Important infrastructural developments such as the Minhocão elevated freeway, the migration of financial, commercial and cultural institutions to other parts of the city such as Avenida Paulista and a massive urban sprawl helped motivate the progressive abandonment of the city’s center. Once a thriving area and the locus of the cultural world, downtown São Paulo became a marginalized and forsaken part of town. After the 1980s the majority of the cinemas that weren’t converted into supermarkets or evangelical churches started to exclusively show porn films in order to survive, becoming important sites for mostly gay sexual encounters. Advertised as the ‘the best sound and the biggest screen showing porn’ the Cine Áurea, located on Rua Aurora 522 in Boca do Lixo, was built on the site were the Saudosa Maloca building stood before its demolition, an event famously chronicled in the classic song written by the father of paulista samba, Adoniran Barbosa. The cinema opened on April 27 of 1957 and quickly became notorious for its sensually themed programming and its double feature sessions that paired Westerns with erotic European film: from mainstream productions starring the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Cláudia Cardinale, to Roger Badam’s erotic melodramas and Henri Lepage’s sex comedies offering raunchy takes on the naturist genre. Since the ban on pornographic material was lifted in the 1980s, the cinema managed to stay afloat by programming strip shows in between the films to battle off the competition in the area.

MADALENA SCHWARTZ’S CHRYSALIS

Queer culture has played a big role in the consolidation of São Paulo as a multicultural urban space. Boasting the biggest Gay Parade in the world, the city’s attitude towards sexual diversity has been a complex and difficult process. In the 1970s, the city was reshaping both its infrastructure and its symbolic spirit; themes related to sexual identity, queer culture, and sexual transgression started to be discussed and performed in the underground artistic scene. Sex, lust and erotic practices were still subversive moral material for the right wing political apparatus. Theater groups such as Dzi Croquettes and bands like Secos & Molhados were the public exponents of a sense of rebellion, a revolution that had in its core a political stance that was manifested through their bodies. Between 1973 and 1974, Madalena Schwartz, considered the ‘first lady of Brazilian portraits’ by the critic Pedro Karp Vasquez, decided to photograph the stage actors, transgenders, drag queens, and performers that used to live and work in the area surrounding the Praça Roosevelt (once the principal for bars and music venues), where she lived at the iconic Copan building (built by Oscar Niemeyer) and ran a dry cleaner’s. Born in Budapest in 1921, in 1934 her family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she lived for 26 years. In 1960, she decided to move to São Paulo where she took photography classes at the legendary Foto Cine Clube Bandeirantes at age 45. Her photographs portrayed a time of transformation and metamorphosis of a marginalized group of society and the city itself. Depicting the tensions of two dialectic poles of identity construction, the public and the private, the images constructed a visual album of the metamorphosis stages and spaces of the ‘fire daughters’ (Cozarinsky, 2012), from a documentary point of view although charged with an important dose of figurative sensibility. The photographs were later reunited as a monograph under the title Crísalidas (Chrysalis), an apt title that referenced the ritualistic and symbolic transformation that the subjects of the photographs were going through: from one abandoned identity to the construction of a new persona, the stage and the body as cathartic spaces, the subject and its body living in a state of repression in search of liberating and open spaces.

O VIRA LATA (THE MONGREL)

Attacked by politicians, journalists, educators, artists, religious groups, and stigmatized as ‘illiteracy, intellectual poverty’, erotic publications were banned by the military government that ruled the country between 1964-1985. Titles like Maria Erótica by Cláudio Seto, the ‘catechisms’ designed and written by the legendary Carlos Zefiro in Rio de Janeiro and Grafipar’s Eros Magazine (later known as Quadrinhos Eróticos), as well as comic strips and graphic novels were among the cultural products that the military government had prohibited under the self appointed mission to bring back ‘good manners and values’ to Brazilian society. O Vira Lata (The Mongrel), was a milestone in the comic world in the post-dictatorial era. Created by Paulo Garfunkel and Libero Malavoglia, the story written between 1991-2000 was first published in the local Animal magazine and afterwards as exclusive content for the Carandiru prison. After reading the first of seven chapters, Dr. Drauzio Varella who worked at the prison (at the time the largest penal institution in South America), contacted the authors and proposed to use the comic as a pedagogical tool to tackle sexually transmitted disease and drug use issues in the prison. A task none of the institutional publications had managed to do. The Vira Lata was a mestiço urban samurai warrior who wandered through a violent and complex city where aggression and individual justice was the only way to survive. The only son of 5 different fathers and one mother, a direct reference to the myth of the Brazilian race, he was spiritually guided by Ogum e Exu, two important Orishas, African divine entities present in the Brazilian Candomble religion. From the second to the final chapter, the Carandiru prison becomes increasingly important to the narrative, and the Vira Lata, now an ex-con, but still depicted as a politically incorrect hero, becomes more and more radical in his views about gender equality, his rejection of IV drug users, and the use of sexual protection (never leaving his house without a condom). Sex scenes changed from sensible erotic suggestions to full and explicit sexual performances, converting its content not only in erotic entertainment material to the inmates, but also becoming an educational resource on dealing with sexual and drugs issues inside the prison.

EXPANDED CARTOGRAPHY

Once the military dictatorship came to an end, people felt the urge to publicize their repressed desires out of the underground and began to enact them in public urban spaces. The Ibirapuera park, home to several of Oscar Niemeyer’s projects and the Biennial of São Paulo, became part of this renewed erotic cartography that marked the end of repression and censorship. Known especially for the 1980s gay encounter site ‘Autorama’ (a parking lot that morphs itself in a huge motor catwalk of voyeurism and anonymous sex after the sun goes down) the Ibirapuera’s 1.584.000 square meters have been described as a ‘motel with an open ceiling’, Latin-American motels being common destinations for extramarital trysts. As the night begins to cover every inch of grass near the ‘Lecture woodlands’, a profusion of shadows starts to multiply and melt, revealing an erotic ritual of exuberant nature. There is a compelling peculiarity to the process of choosing a sex partner in an almost silent and pitch-black atmosphere. Due to the fact that sex acts in public spaces are considered felonies, the erotic semiotics displayed by these wandering shadows is something to admire. Similar to the visual code developed inside the porn cinemas, the process of communicating one’s desires exclusively using body gestures creates a rhythmic discursive production that has gauzy grammar of its own. A blink, a particular posture, a continuous gaze, all visual signs that indicate a desire, a fetish, a disposition, creating a dialectic correlation between offering and refusing.

KIKO DINUCCI

Although assumed as an inherent melodic trait of several of its most popular genres, eroticism in Brazilian popular music has been characterized by its humorous treatment and its hidden and never explicit meanings; as a result, musicians have often looked for other means of expression for dealing with erotic and sexual desire. Kiko Dinucci is a musician who draws, a filmmaker who composes, and an illustrator who directs. A fixture in the Casa de Francisca programming, Dinucci can be considered one of the stand out voices of a new generation of artists whose work is deeply attached and affected by the vicissitudes of paulista urban life, embodying the DIY ethos of a new generation of cultural agitators. Born and raised in the second biggest city of São Paulo state, Guarulhos, Kiko has built an impressive body of work based on historical research that traces the development of the popular music of São Paulo –from the rural samba, to the African influences, all the way through the musical vanguards of the 1980s, creating an idiosyncratic voice that takes subtle cues from important figures in paulista music history like Adoniran Barbosa, Paulo Vanzolini, Geraldo Filme, Arrigo Barnabé and Itamar Assumpção, among others. Mostly known for his musical production, Dinucci’s illustrations and engravings have regularly been used as his records covers and concerts posters. In them, the artist has built a particular visual universe populated by humans, animal and anthropomorphic characters that appear to have surrendered to their most obscure desires in a semi-fantastic world of erotic explorations. Although there’s a strong sense of agitation and violence in the scenes he creates, Dinucci’s work is based on feminine poetic lyricism, confronting the rawness of his traces to the subtlety of its forms. The images have a fuzzy sense of confrontation between obscured cravings and the cathartic sensations of letting go and submitting to ones pleasure.

TEATRO OFICINA

Founded in 1958 by several law students, the Teatro Oficina is one the most celebrated and revolutionary theater companies in the country. The history of the Oficina is a reflection of the last 50 years of counterculture movements of the city. The politically committed and experimental group, nowadays led by the charismatic José Celso Martinez Correa, approaches performance arts by constructing a direct dialogue between anthropological inquiry, the expressiveness of the artistic performance and public engagement. Constantly in a state of metamorphosis and self-critique, the Oficina has renewed the stage language with its bold approach to performance arts and by doing so has also rejected the hierarchical structure of traditional theater groups, becoming an exemplary case of cooperative institutions in the realm of the arts. Strongly based on elements of Brazilian culture, the Manifesto Antropófago by Oswald de Andrade for example, the Oficina has been no stranger to censorship, prohibition and repression due to its treatment of erotic subjects; nudity and erotic themes have had a strong presence in the history of the group’s approach to theater. Adaptations of plays by Shakespeare (Hamlet), Brecht (Jungle of Cities), Plato (Symposium), Oswald de Andrade (Macumba Antropófaga), Euripides (Bacchantes), and texts written by members of the company have constantly been staged in a Dionysiac spectacle, where both the actors and audience members are employed as performers in a game of carnal delight between the original text and the endless possibilities of its appropriation and reproduction; making a political stance about the nature of human desire and the nature of the Brazilian erotic sensibility. Projected as an extension to the Oficina’s philosophy, the theater project designed by Lina Bo Bardi and Edson Elito, fits perfectly with the sensibility of its performances. The flexibility of its parts (an open ceiling, mobile bleachers), contrasted with the simplicity of its structure, produces the metaphor of the symbolic and physical bonding between the performers’ and the audience’s bodies, that the Oficina company has built its reputation on.