A Dead Woman Talking: Gendered Agonic Retrospect in Two Brazilian Films

by: Livia Azevedo Lima , March 24, 2026

‘Herculano, this is a dead woman talking’ is the first line of the audio recording Geni leaves for her husband after slitting her wrists. It is also the viewer’s first contact with Geni, the protagonist of Arnaldo Jabor’s film All Nudity Shall Be Punished (1972), which was made after a homonymous play by Nelson Rodrigues (1965). A year earlier, the novel Chronicle of the Murdered House (1959) by Lúcio Cardoso, an author often compared to Nelson Rodrigues for his controversial and transgressive handling of family taboos, inspired Paulo César Saraceni’s film The Murdered House (1971), which begins with a scene showing the protagonist Nina’s dead body at her funeral.

In both films, flashbacks weave narratives of working-class women marrying up with men from conservative families, featuring implicit or explicit references to sex work, female adultery, breast cancer, and incestuous relationships between motherly figures and their sons or stepsons. With circular narratives, these films begin with the visual or aural announcement of their protagonists’ deaths. Nina and Geni seem to have been defeated by the decaying bourgeois families they tried to belong to. However, the acknowledgement of their death or agony at the films’ beginnings also suggests that, rather than being annihilated, these women continue to haunt, acting as transgressive forces.

Nina’s and Geni’s stories reflect the long-established association of female sexuality and death. Such a connection is a recurring trope in film and popular culture, from film noir femme fatales to the teen victims of slasher movies, in which women who represent any form of sexual anxiety often face death with misogynistic overtones. When it comes to motherly figures, however, the mere idea of a woman fully enjoying her sexuality is sometimes more easily conceived posthumously. In the Netflix show Santa Clarita Diet (2017), for example, Drew Barrymore’s character experiences an orgasm for the first time only after becoming undead. Ultimately, what is at stake is the split between the archetypes of the mother and the whore that goes back at least to the thought of Rousseau, one of the ideological founders of modern patriarchy.^[1] Such a split, and the repression of female sexuality that accompanies it, resurges fully in The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished. In these films, though, the negotiation of contradictory female roles is further complicated by the encounter with a lethal military dictatorship.

If hypocrisy characterised Brazil under dictatorship, so did death. While people were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, nationalists and conservatives reproduced the military slogan of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ and defended Christian morality.^[2] The number of disappeared people increased daily, and silencing practices were a public issue due to censorship. Meanwhile, progressive filmmakers associated with Cinema Novo pursued a radical, provocative film aesthetics that opposed the bourgeois and dominant worldviews of politics, social dynamics, and morality. As it usually goes under authoritarian governments, instead of openly talking about the dictatorship, films and other artistic productions from the late 1960s and 1970s often criticised the regime and its institutionalised violence indirectly. And one of the ways this critique took place was in the examination of the moral discourses around family, religion, and its prerogatives of heteronormative and monogamous sexuality, which acted as lines of support for the dictatorship’s coercive project.

In this article, I analyse these two films. They are both literary adaptations directed by filmmakers associated with Cinema Novo and financed by Embrafilme, the production company created by the Brazilian military regime in 1969. Specifically, I examine the protagonists Geni’s and Nina’s fictional gendered deaths and the way their voice-over narrations add to and sometimes contradict the visual presentation of their bodies, dead or alive, in domestic spaces. By connecting this private sphere to the patriarchal and authoritarian structures at the time, I argue that the moral agenda challenged by these films is an object of political dispute, and a strategic one for conservative and anti-democratic governments to remain in power.

Cinema Novo, Embrafilme, and Sexual Politics

The directors of The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished were part of Cinema Novo at some point in their careers.^[3] This artistic movement is often seen as part of the New Latin American Cinema in the late 1950s and 60s or compared to postwar cinema renovations in European countries, especially Italy (Neorealism) and France (Nouvelle Vague), where many Brazilian filmmakers studied film.^[4] As part of the same wave of ‘new’ cinemas from the postwar period, these movements shared certain aesthetic and ideological correspondences, including an emphasis on the director as an auteur, the use of handheld cameras and location shooting, and an intellectual and/or socially engaged approach. However, when examined closely, each movement reveals not only local characteristics but also internal differences, especially at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

Part of the first generation of Cinema Novo filmmakers, Saraceni championed this movement throughout his life. On the back cover of Saraceni’s memoir, Por dentro do Cinema Novo: minha história [Inside Cinema Novo: My Story] (1993), the publishing house Nova Fronteira marketed the book as an introduction to Cinema Novo through the filmmaker’s experiences. Eight years younger than Saraceni, Jabor was an assistant director in films by other Cinema Novo filmmakers, including Saraceni’s documentary Racial Integration (1964), before directing his own films. However, by the 1970s, Jabor no longer saw himself as part of Cinema Novo. He aimed to make ‘a popular cinema like the Brazilian Popular Music. A cinema not so desperate or suicidal as the underground … neither so messianic as Cinema Novo’ (Jabor et al. 1999: 232) and interested in establishing a dialogue with a broader audience beyond the intellectual elites.

Cinema Novo, therefore, is a non-cohesive body of work that goes beyond a canonic umbrella and does not subscribe to a monolithic aesthetic. Cinema Novo filmmakers were politically progressive, but their ideological positions varied across projects and throughout their careers. This also reflected divisions within the progressive field in the face of the dictatorship, ranging from moderate to radical members of the armed struggle. Over the decades in Brazil, general audiences and specialised criticism have favoured the study of filmmakers like Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra, and Leon Hirszman and their films dealing with the public sphere and issues such as land reform, poverty, and social class struggles that were perceived as political since early on. Meanwhile, filmmakers like Saraceni, who focused on political problems primarily through the lens of morality, gender and sexuality, are only now inspiring comprehensive academic reviews (Lima 2022).^[5]

In any case, a crucial event for Cinema Novo was the civil-military coup in 1964, which impacted not only Brazilian Cinema and other artistic manifestations but also the country’s social history. According to film scholar Ismail Xavier, until the 1960s, there was a tendency to produce films ‘more focused on the dramatisation of social problems, inventory of the conditions of the oppressed and their resistance in Brazilian history’ (Xavier 1998: 155). After the coup and especially after the AI-5 in 1968,^[6] the emphasis shifted to the ‘composition of rituals in a “closed laboratory”’ in which ‘a pessimistic diagnosis of the nation prevails’ (Xavier 1998: 156). While some of the films produced by Cinema Novo in the early 1960s, like Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha 1962), believed in a social transformation on the horizon, ten years later, the majority of the films embodied a pessimism, morbidity, and desolation that reflected the most brutal period of the dictatorship, known as the Years of Lead (1968-1974).

The long-lasting civil-military dictatorship in Brazil was characterised by authoritarianism, anti-communism, and a series of sexual politics. The first aspect involved political persecution, surveillance, censorship, suspension of civil rights, imprisonment, institutionalised torture, and lethal violence. The second one represented Brazil’s alignment with the international Cold War hunt for communists. And it was through anti-communist ideology that conservative sectors articulated themselves to promote sexual politics. For conservative military and civilians, communism threatened Christian values. The traditional family, with its defined gender roles, became a privileged locus to reinforce morality standards and ward off communist threats. Women in conservative social movements, such as the Women’s Civic Union, for example, organised the Marches of the Family with God for Freedom (Schwarcz; Starling 2015: 444-45) in 1964, questioning the progressivist policies of then-president João Goulart and representing an early support from civil society to the coup. The conservative discourse was also anti-modern and sought to limit certain trends among new generations, such as the influence of a youth culture flourishing internationally, the consumption of new-age fashion and rock music, and radical political engagement in line with the youth demonstrations happening worldwide since 1968.

The idea that political and moral subversion were linked was common, especially among the hard-line military sectors that made up the regime, as Benjamin Cowan notes in the book Securing Sex (2016: 106-07). Although the majority of the left in Brazil at the time also held traditional views concerning gender and sexuality, not always acknowledging racial, feminist, and LGBTQI+ movements as equally important in opposition to the regime, in the eyes of the dictatorship, everything questioning Christian morals and traditional family customs was subversive and should be repressed. In addition to persecuting political militants, during the Years of the Lead, the authoritarian regime made efforts to closely monitor artistic manifestations and new behaviour patterns, which included, among other things, music, fashion, drug use, and sex—especially pre-marital and same-gender sex. The military defended an ideal of a nation where sex, particularly for women, was restricted to heterosexual marriage and reproduction.[7] Any deviation from this standard, as imposed by social institutions, was considered subversive and was likely to be persecuted and condemned.

Cinema Novo members capitalised on the movement’s international prestige and social influence when acquiring and maintaining resources for their work. Although opposing the coercive government, their films benefited from state support through Embrafilme. With an atomised production model that privileged ‘independent’ filmmakers rather than investing in large studios, as it had occurred in Mexico (Johnson 1993: 40), Embrafilme financed, produced, and distributed many Cinema Novo films. Filmmakers from the group, such as Roberto Farias, also held leadership positions at the state company. This contradiction is often criticised, and the fact that the filmmakers received funds from Embrafilme is sometimes cited as a reason to dismiss the films’ political claims.^[8] It is true that, in the same period, more radical films were being made under a genuinely independent model, meaning without those resources and without being subject to censorship or being commercially released in theatres.[9] Nevertheless, it would be simplistic to dismiss Cinema Novo’s political discourse without considering the films, the political restrictions at the time, and the broader context of the Brazilian film industry, which has always relied on federal funds or public-private partnerships through incentive laws.

One way to consider this complex relationship between Cinema Novo and Embrafilme is to examine the sexual politics in the dictatorship’s efforts to both promote and control Brazilian films. As the government established Embrafilme, it required theaters to screen national movies (Veiga 2013: 55). During this time, a genre popularly known as pornochanchada emerged, featuring low-budget films that ‘combined soft-core pornography with an older style of light comedy (chanchada) based on traditional tropes of mistaken identity, idiosyncratic and/or obsessive characters, and rusticity contrasted with the modern and the urbane’ (Cowan 2016: 219).^[10] Embrafilme also produced several pornochanchadas, but the state company also tried to restrain the influence of this popular genre by promoting high-production value films to showcase Brazil’s progress. Under the premise that literature was a higher form of art than cinema, Embrafilme launched a prize for literary adaptations to encourage the production and distribution of highbrow films as an alternative to the pornochanchadas, which, in the eyes of the government, conveyed ‘a negative image of Brazil: the image of a vulgar Brazilian obsessed with sex’ (Bernardet 2014: 216-217). The prize was also a soft attempt to influence film production, since Embrafilme approved scripts but did not overregulate the films once they received funding; other state organs undertook censorship.

Following Embrafilme’s prize, many literary adaptations from Brazilian novels and plays were produced. Like other Cinema Novo auteurs, Saraceni and Jabor turned to the renowned literary works of the previous generation. Still, they continued the ongoing public debate on gender and sexuality promoted by pornochanchadas as they explored themes such as sex work, incest, and sexual repression. While The Murdered House embraced a serious aesthetic, All Nudity Shall Be Punished flirted with the popular and comical appeal of the very pornochanchadas Embrafilme wanted to avoid in the first place. Despite Embrafilme’s efforts to control film production, in the 1970s, sex had become not only a profitable niche but also an ambiguous territory from where the critique of the Brazilian dictatorship could continue.

The Literary Adaptations of Nelson Rodrigues and Lúcio Cardoso

The works of Nelson Rodrigues and Lúcio Cardoso share thematic motifs, despite differences in writing style and intended audience. Their narratives often focus on the patriarchal family in clashes over sexuality and morality in the closed domestic space. They explore taboos such as incest and other controversial topics at the time, like homosexuality (mainly male) and adultery (predominantly female). In addition, desire emerges in a morbid, macabre, and decadent environment in which death is often caused by harsh diseases such as cancer or by crime, sometimes committed without clear motivation or remorse. In the case of the ideologically conservative Rodrigues, such morbidity mirrors the characters’ moral degradation. In contrast, Cardoso’s polemical work focuses on the social and psychic ostracism experienced by those who do not abide by heterosexual monogamous marriage or Christian morality.

In addition to similar motifs, Rodrigues and Cardoso share parallel personal trajectories, which have favoured comparative studies of their works (Lamego 2013; Cabala 2019; Cardoso 2020). Born only days apart in August 1912, they moved from their hometowns to Rio de Janeiro, the country’s capital at the time. In Rio, both developed careers during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945), a statist and ultranationalist government admired by fascist regimes around the world. Often competing against each other, Rodrigues and Cardoso wrote plays [11], newspaper short stories ^[12] and novels with opposite outcomes in each one of these genres. While Rodrigues gained prominence as a playwright and journalist, Cardoso became renowned as a literary novelist.

Rodrigues’ short stories and plays have been compiled in several editions, republished, and adapted for cinema and TV in Brazil. Reproduced to exhaustion, some of his catchphrases are now part of a popular repertoire often shared as sayings without attribution. His novels, however, are less known among larger audiences and less studied in academia. In contrast, specialised circles praised and awarded Cardoso’s literary novels and novellas shortly after their release. Years later, filmmakers such as Saraceni, Luiz Carlos Lacerda, Ruy Santos, and the theatre director Dib Carneiro Neto adapted Cardoso’s works for the cinema and theatre. Despite the early recognition and prestige of Cardoso’s novels and novellas, his oeuvre, unlike Nelson Rodrigues’, has never achieved widespread success and has become less known by the public after Cardoso died in 1968. In the past two decades, though, in part due to the commercial reissue of Cardoso’s books and the publication of an English translation of Chronicle of the Murdered House in 2017, his work has gradually become more read and studied.^[13]

The difference in reception can also be attributed to the styles of Cardoso and Rodrigues. While Nelson Rodrigues’ writing is simple and direct, opting for common words, explicit narrative disclosures, emphases, exclamations, and repetitions, Cardoso is known for verbose philosophical prose, in which meaning is suggested indirectly, often mixing abstract language with visual metaphors and comparisons. Cardoso does not use humour, scorn, social types, or catchphrases, opting instead to maintain a more sophisticated tone and melancholic, complex characters. In place of Rodrigues’ caustic and derisive style and worldview, which targeted sexually active female characters, their gay best friends or frenemies, and all the weak men that surrounded them (husbands, fathers, sons), Cardoso’s polemical work praises those who dare to fully assume their passions, even when their actions result in crimes and religious blasphemies, making them the target of police persecution as well as social and family judgment.

Despite having distinct writing styles and approaches, Cardoso’s and Rodrigues’ work eventually converge to the same effect of creating controversy and shock. Comparing the novel Chronicle of the Murdered House to the play All Nudity Will Be Punished under the idea of decadence, Frederico Cabala (2019) points out that the ‘unpleasant theater’ project of Nelson Rodrigues and the work of Cardoso share the desire to shock, an avant-garde procedure, even if none of these authors were properly avant-garde (Cabala 2019: 190-191). According to scholar Marília Rothier Cardoso (2020: 59), Lúcio Cardoso, along with other sources such as Freudian psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s philosophy, recovered the melodramatic plot, with its excesses, twists, love triangles, and interclass relationships, to create a narrative style that can be approximated to Rodrigues’ theatre. However, instead of transparency, identification, and catharsis, Rodrigues and Cardoso use melodramatic resources to convey the ‘impression of artificiality and unreality’ that Antonio Arnoni Prado (2006: 389) noticed in Cardoso’s plays.

Another point of contact between Cardoso and Rodrigues is their attention to the mise-en-scène. Cardoso’s theatrical experience was not as decisive in renewing Brazilian theatre as Rodrigues’, but it impacted his literary work. According to Mario Carelli (1988: 139), Cardoso’s interest in the Sartrean motif of the enclosed space (huis clos) first appeared in his theatre. Some of Cardoso’s plays relate to the Chronicle of the Murdered House because they focus on an asphyxiated house and highlight characters’ isolation, even when surrounded by family members. After his experience writing and directing plays and his unfinished film A mulher de longe [The Woman from Afar, 1949] (Costa 2016; Lima 2022; Araújo et al. 2022), Cardoso’s prose descriptions of characters’ gestures, costumes, and scene objects developed the precision of a play with markings of the stage, or the visual expressiveness of the big screen (Lima 2022: 184). For this reason, Marília Rothier Cardoso (2020: 57) compared Lúcio Cardoso’s novelist craft with a film editor’s work.

In the early 1970s, the combination of shock effect and mise-en-scène inventiveness in Cardoso’s and Rodrigues’ work interested Saraceni and Jabor. Following their literary sources, The Murdered House and All Nudity share common points in casting, set design, and costumes. To some extent, their differences mirror those already present in the literary pieces. Like Cardoso, Saraceni is not interested in irony and mockery, preferring to displease and shock rather than make people laugh. Even if laughter results from nervousness or embarrassment, Saraceni refuses it; he does not want spectacle and entertainment, the easy effect. Saraceni prefers Cardoso’s philosophical and visual prose to Rodrigues’s ironic superficial lines to investigate intimate dramas focusing on couples and the family. Jabor is also interested in shock, but instead of Saraceni’s emphasis on the subjectivity of the characters and the slowing down of their solitude or melancholic conversations, he wants the popular appeal of Rodrigues’ social types and catchphrases, using them in a provocative style that Jabor himself would exercise as a journalist years later (Xavier 2003b: 323-ss).

This cross-generation group of authors and filmmakers maintains a dialogue of aesthetic affinity and ideological contrast. The films, at the same time, follow and modify the literary universes of Rodrigues and Cardoso. In All Nudity, Jabor seeks a nexus between family and social drama, maintaining a tragicomic verve with accentuated notes of violence and grotesquerie. Saraceni, in turn, strips The Murdered House of the graphic descriptions of death and decay present in Cardoso’s novel, opting to exclude the temporal and visual marking of Nina’s cancer and adopting a mise en scène with tableaux shots and anti-naturalistic strategies.

Following this lead, I will compare The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished, observing the representation of domestic space, where the interplay between Geni’s and Nina’s ghostly voices-over and their gendered dead bodies circulate. Considering that some commentary on the conservative patriarchal family is already present in Cardoso’s and Rodrigues’ literary work, I aim to investigate how the films and the historical time of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship connect.

The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished: Dead ‘Modern’ Women and Weak Traditional Men

A large part of the characters in The Murdered House and All Nudity fictionally embody a gender and sexuality nonconformity that would be considered morally subversive in the eyes of the official censorship and security agencies. They are ‘modern’ women, young people, students, hippies, and homosexuals. Especially for queer and trans people from the working class, this non-conformation threatened or isolated them in what Renan Quinalla (2021: 13) called a ‘double clandestinity.’ They not only avoided confrontation with the state vigilance but struggled to live in an overall conservative society. Although such conservatism is not exclusive to this historical period, the civil-military coup created a violent state apparatus to enforce moral patterns in public politics (Quinalla 2021: 27).

The female protagonists, Geni and Nina, are outsiders who arrive in decaying bourgeois families via marriage, but the films quickly make clear they were not meant to be housewives. Instead of happiness and social mobility, for them, marriage means domestic isolation and sexual restriction. The actresses cast for their roles, Darlene Glória and Norma Bengell, anticipate this information for the Brazilian audience. As vedettes from the revue theatre^[14], they were well-known as sex symbols in Brazil then. On top of representing the first winds of the sexual revolution, heated up by the commercialisation of the contraceptive pill in 1962, they attended political demonstrations and were interested in feminism. Their bodies and behaviour, which were understood as deviant ‘others’ to the official moral order, were watched by the media and police departments for their corrupt potential among the young generation of ‘family’ men.

Despite the sexually liberated protagonists, toxic masculinity—the mode of any authoritarian regime—is everywhere in these two films. In All Nudity, the widowed Herculano is a father figure for his only son, Serginho, and his whole family, including two siblings and two aunts. Nevertheless, his family members manipulate him. Herculano’s younger brother, Patrício, arranges for the cabaret singer and sex worker Geni to encounter and seduce Herculano to get him out of grief, thus securing Patrício’s allowance. But Geni and Herculano fall in love. With Patrício’s support, Geni makes Herculano marry her, despite Herculano’s vow never to remarry after his first wife dies of breast cancer. The couple see themselves as tragic characters, but the viewer, moved by the film’s overall irony and Patrício’s provocations, tends to perceive them as comedic characters (Avellar 1973b). As soon as they marry, though, Geni and her stepson Serginho start an affair. Geni narrates everything retrospectively in the audio recording she left for Herculano before dying. The motivation for Geni’s suicide is Serginho abandoning her and his family to live abroad with the Bolivian Thief ^[15], who had raped Serginho during his brief stay in prison.

The characters in The Murdered House are more complex than the tragicomic social types of Rodrigues, but patriarchalism is also at the centre of this film. Orphans of their father, the Meneses brothers face financial collapse after their mother’s death. Nina discovers that only after marrying Valdo, which thwarts her social climbing plans. With no money to keep up with their property costs, strict morality and traditional values become the only assets for the big brother Demétrio and his wife, Ana. They have no heirs or capitalistic skills to make their farm productive again, but they abide by the Catholic amendments and try to connect to politically influential people. The youngest brother, the bachelor Timóteo, lives permanently locked in his bedroom, questioning gender determinations by wearing his mother’s clothes. Valdo’s and Nina’s son, André, is the son of the gardener Alberto, who completed suicide after Nina left the Meneses’ farm pregnant. Seventeen years later, struck down by breast cancer, Nina returns to the property and engages in an incestuous relationship with André, who had grown up away from her and dies quickly after that. The film begins and ends with the sequence of Nina’s funeral, which serves as a frame. Between these two moments, we follow the story in flashbacks punctuated by the voices of Nina, Ana, and Timóteo, the feminine figures who rise against the family.

The Killing House and the Repressed Female Sexuality

In Brazil in the 1970s, generational and ideological conflicts were a problem in both the public and private spheres. The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished are part of a lineage of Brazilian films in which ‘the traditional family decomposes or exposes its crisis in dramas that take place inside the house’ (Xavier 2001: 92). There are direct accusations, humiliations, and disclosures among family members in a context of mutual surveillance and closure to the world. Hatred and adultery are verbalised with maximum violence. Death is also a recurring trope. Succumbing to madness, killing, or completing suicide becomes the way out of domestic confinement.

In The Murdered House and All Nudity, scenography is essential in establishing physical and emotional enclosure. In both films, the sober, out-of-fashion sets and costumes represent a traditional order in ruins (Demétrio, Ana [Fig. 1]; Herculano, her sister, and aunts [Fig. 3]), while the colourful new age costumes and hairstyles, in vogue during the production of the films, personify a version of modernity understood by the dictatorship as seductive/threatening or morally corrupt (Nina, André [Fig. 2]; Geni, Serginho [Fig. 4]). Geni’s and Nina’s oxygenated blonde hair ^[16] and provocative clothes contrast the decoration of the provincial houses they try to belong to after marriage (Fig. 2 and Fig. 4). The protagonists embody a clash in social classes, epochs, and mindsets, just like the long-haired young men they maintain an incestuous affair with, and upon whom they project their ‘feminine desires for freedom from patriarchal authority’ (Modleski 1987: 332-33).

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Cardoso’s novel Chronicle of the Murdered House and Rodrigues’ play All Nudity Shall Be Punished, the domestic space bears some similarities to the castle’s architecture and its dungeons and graves, hiding unknowable secrets, as in the Gothic novel. In the equivalence with Brazilian colonial history, those spaces can take the form of alcoves, basements, senzalas [slave quarters], and other annexes of the farmer’s main house already abandoned (Barros 2008: 120). At the same time, as in the Freudian concept of the uncanny (Freud 2010: 329-36), the house is familiar yet strange, with secret territories hidden from the light and visual representations of femininity repressed as sexuality is by a moralistic discourse. In this regard, as Doane observes about Women’s Films, ‘the house becomes the analog of the human body, its parts fetishised by textual operations, its erogenous zones metamorphosised by a morbid anxiety attached to sexuality’ (Doane 1987: 288). What is repressed, however, tends to return to consciousness in unexpected and unpleasant ways, for example, in the form of a failed act. Such ghosts always find clever ways to haunt.

Thus, the feminine, as Karla Bessa observed about The Murdered House, rather than being exclusive to the female characters, is to be found, first of all, in the house itself, ‘a living (female) entity that sets the tone of decay and archetypal shaking of various structures’ (Bessa 2017: 299-300). In the film The Murdered House, Timóteo’s bedroom is a prohibited territory to their nephew André, under the excuse that the uncle, cross-dressing in their deceased mother’s clothes, has a contagious disease. Nina’s love affairs with the gardener Alberto and later with André also take place outside the main house, in a pavilion. Likewise, in All Nudity, Herculano installs Geni in an old mansion far from his family, a suburban, bankrupt version of Cinderella’s dream, a plot the poster with a medieval castle affixed over Geni’s bed at the brothel anticipates for the viewer. Upon her arrival at the old house, Geni removes the white sheets covering the furniture and artwork. A visual identification between Geni and the house objects is immediately established, brought to life again by her presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For at least three moments in All Nudity, the kitsch paintings and sculptures in the house mirror Geni’s situation. Two times (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7), when she fears dying of breast cancer as Herculano’s former wife did, the viewer sees Geni touching her breast before female portraits, one of them sharing a similar pose (Fig. 6). Sometimes the gesture is followed by Geni’s angry or fearful facial expression (Fig. 6), sometimes her expression is halfway through pain and the kind of pathos conveyed by the cabaret singer she is (Fig. 7). Later, as Geni drags herself around the house wrapped in a bloodstained white sheet, she evokes a painting showing a woman in a white dress with red rose’s petals all over it suggesting ‘defloration’ (Fig.10). If the loss of virginity can have a violent component, in Geni’s case, this paves the way to a sort of morbidity that remain ambiguous. Again, her body and expressions oscillate between a charmer performer comfortably using a microphone and smiling at the audience (Fig. 5 and Fig. 8) and the excruciating pain of someone who has just slit their wrists (Fig. 9). Either way, the image of her dying body covered by a white sheet does not convey a melancholic state on the screen. She seems as disposable as the family belongings without use at the old house.

This conjunction of sexuality and death also marks The Murdered House, despite the movie being less morbid than the novel. In Cardoso’s work, the incestuous love affair involving mother and son happens when Nina’s advanced breast cancer has already disfigured her features with a purplish gangrene. Their sexual act, narrated in a voluptuous writing style, is a near-death experience. No wonder Nina’s favourite flower is the violet, which is associated with disincarnating and resurrection and the proximity of death. In Saraceni’s film, on the contrary, Nina’s body appears healthy and radiant during her sexual intercourse with André, which takes place at a pavilion covered by lush tropical vegetation. At the same time, the film maintains the book’s merging of the mother and whore archetypes, as well as a juxtaposition of sacred and profane visual references. Nina’s pose (Fig. 12), like her sister-in-law Ana with the gardener Alberto’s corpse (Fig. 11), resembles the Catholic Pietà motif of Mary holding Jesus after his death. Tableaux shots present Nina and Ana as pietà-profanes. Before sex and death, their gestures are simultaneously maternal and sensual.

 

 

 

If cinema is characterised by an effect of presentness, offering an experience in which ‘all the past and even all the future is lived in the present’ (Avellar 2016: 56), the time of The Murdered House and All Nudity is that of decay: the past conjugated with the present. Saraceni’s radical choice not to show the progression of time or the visual marks of Nina’s illness or ageing over the years adds to the mix of temporalities in the set design, contributing to a sense of an eternal present in the film. In All Nudity, Geni is about to die throughout the entire feature. Once the films inscribe themselves within an agonic narrative, what follows seems as uncertain as the return of democracy in Brazil.

The Agonic Retrospect

In Brazilian artistic production, a significant lineage of works features either a dead narrator or someone on the verge of death telling a story retrospectively. Scholar José Pasta analyses some of these works, such as the novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), by Machado de Assis, the play Wedding Dress (1943), by Nelson Rodrigues, and the film Entranced Earth (1967), by Glauber Rocha, examining what he called the point of view of death (Pasta 2012). Informed by this research, I developed, in collaboration with Mateus Araújo and Luis Alberto Rocha Mello, the related idea of agonic retrospect. We conceptualise agony as ‘an altered state of consciousness that precedes death and produces a retrospect affected by its imminence, which the film integrates’ (Araújo et al. 2022: 295).

The narrative figure of the agonic retrospect is present in films such as Rio Zona Norte (Nelson Pereira dos Santos 1957) and Entranced Earth. In these films, the agonic retrospect is used to figure not only subjective states but also historical processes disappearing or undergoing transformation: ‘the flashbacks capture the end or decline of an era the protagonist knew and the emergence of another whose contours they cannot clearly discern yet nor will have time to know’ (Araújo et al. 2022: 297). In Rio Zona Norte, a samba composer is dying as song production is increasingly concentrated in the hands of mass industry. In Entranced Earth, an intellectual in an agonic state foresees the emergence of a new dictatorship. In both films, the male protagonists’ lives are linked to broader social structures through their professional activities in the public sphere.

The agonic retrospect is also present in All Nudity and The Murdered House ^[17], but the shift to female narrators introduces particularities to the narrative point of view. First, the female bodies of Geni and Nina take up more space than their voices in these films. Unlike the films mentioned with male protagonists, the sex appeal of their dead bodies is explored. As Geni is dying and her husband Herculano is about to find her, she is naked and freshly bathed. Nina is already dead, but her corpse at her funeral still inspires desire, envy, and fights among the Meneses. Thus, the circumstances of their deaths continue to scandalise and spark libidinous instincts, as they did in life. Second, although we hear their voice-overs, Geni and Nina are not the exclusive narrators of the films, nor do their memories always mediate flashbacks and flashforwards. Other characters compete with them for protagonism. Still, their lives are linked to social structures whose demise they witness. In the private sphere, such a structure is the traditional and patriarchal family that they enter after marriage.

Contrary to what typically happens in voice-over films (Doane 1980), in The Murdered House and All Nudity, there is almost no overlap between Nina’s and Geni’s voice-over and their image. When we listen to their narrations, rather than to their bodies, we see the Meneses’ house from the outside or objects in Herculano’s house, such as the tape recorder Geni left for Herculano. In this emptying-out of the human figure, the voice-over does not coincide with the body again to indicate who is narrating, thus contributing to a ghostly effect. Although the voice-over still conveys what is inaccessible to the image (Doane 1980), it reveals little about Nina’s and Geni’s thoughts. It recalls moments in their lives before marriage while serving to announce temporal leaps in the plot and to detail what happened to the family and their homes during such periods.

Both films propose an equivalence between the idea of the house and a patriarchal tradition. Therefore, there is a continuity between the women’s bodies and the houses in the visual and sound records. No wonder film critic José Carlos Avellar noticed that the story of The Murdered House ‘is presented by a narrator who has assumed the point of view of the house and looks at all things with the prejudices and censures imposed by the house’ (Avellar 1972). What the viewer sees is the distorted image of Nina and Timóteo as they are seen by the house. The true image, strictly speaking, never reaches the screen’ (idem).

However, these films seek to occupy a paradoxical position, observing from within and against patriarchy. Despite the funding from Embrafilme, they do not endorse or positively value the authoritarian regime. Although not explicitly referring to the country’s political situation, the exaggerated characterisation of the characters suggests they could serve as commentary. Some characters would be considered moral ‘subversive’ by the dictatorship, such as sex workers and homosexuals. In contrast, others could be compared to the hypocritical people supporting the regime and instrumentalising a moralistic discourse of the Catholic matrix for their self-interest in social reality. Amid the tension between old and new of the dictatorship’s conservative modernisation, Jabor and Saraceni present a patriarchy in crisis, seeking all means of perpetuating itself, including violence. In the films, death victimises the female protagonists, but male characters are the biggest failures. Patriarchy resists in what I have called patriarchy without fathers (Lima 2022: 345-ss). In this agonic and weak state of the patriarchy, the father, the authority figure, is questioned or absent, and the transgressive seed is planted by the female protagonists who survive their deaths.

Interestingly, both films end with a freeze frame, suggesting interruption and a yet-to-be-concluded narrative. The action is halted, but an afterlife is projected as a possibility. In this sense, the freeze frame evokes André Bazin’s idea on the power of photography to ‘embalm’ time, freeing the object ‘from the conditions of time and space that govern it’ (Bazin 2005:14). In All Nudity, the freeze frame on Geni’s half-open eyes creates a ghostly effect of presentiveness that continues after the film’s ending. Whereas in The Murdered House, the freeze image marks the arrival of the deceased gardener Alberto at Nina’s funeral, suggesting reincarnation and reintroducing the shadow of incest.

Although the incestuous relationships in these films still point to the classical moral trope of social disintegration, they gain other meanings in the context of the dictatorship in Brazil. In European novels such as Os Maias (Eça de Queiroz, 1888) and films such as The Dammed (Luchino Visconti, 1969), incest tends to occur between members of the decadent aristocracy, pointing to a selfish attempt of this class to remain in power. At the height of their bankruptcy, their attachment to themselves and to what they represent that leads to incest. In All Nudity and The Murdered House, incest occurs among outsiders and those the authoritarian and elitist regime would not consider ‘good’ people, either for their lower class, non-conforming gender and sexuality, geographic displacement, or the dysfunctionality of their homes. Geni’s and Nina’s arrival in ruined traditional families marks the beginning of the end for these groups, as their members stop marrying among themselves and producing heirs. While Geni is an ex-sex worker and her stepson Serginho is bisexual, the incest in The Murdered House between Nina and André does not involve the blood of the patriarchal lineage; André is the gardener’s son. Thus, incest occurs between figures on the margins and subalterns, and their disobedient posture questions the idea of a hierarchical, authoritarian power that prohibits all forms of freedom.

Censored Nudity and Subversion—Uncensored Death

In the 1970s, all films, including those funded by Embrafilme, had to be submitted to the censorship authorities for approval before being publicly screened in Brazilian theatres. Contrary to the general assumption, though, censorship in Brazil did not occur only during the dictatorship. It dates back to the 19th century and ended after the democratic Constitution was signed in 1988 (Luca 2015:135). Throughout this extended period, censorship was deeply intertwined with the conservative morality in Brazilian society.

After the civil-military coup in 1964, censorship practices were expanded, with criteria including morality and political subversion. As much as nudity and sex, activities deemed to be communist or to threaten the regime would be censored under the guise of national security. Censorship was then endowed with legal authority and a bureaucratic, regular application aligned with the state’s authoritarian precepts, which is not to say that arbitrariness was excluded. Among other changes, in 1966, censorship started to be centralised in Brasília; after the AI-5, in 1968, a prior restraint to press and arts came into force; and, in 1973, the Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas (DCPD) [Public Entertainment Censorship Division] was created (Vieira 2010: 42). Despite working with some level of independence from each other, DCPD and Embrafilme remained linked either because ‘Embrafilme wished to avoid a complete veto of its productions’ (Cowan 2016: 221) or because censors felt pressured to approve national films that had received state funding.

Once submitted to censorship, a film could be approved, required to have certain scenes removed, or banned from circulating altogether. Initially, the two movies discussed here were partially censored on ‘morality’ grounds, with censors requiring the removal of nudity and sexual content. In the case of The Murdered House, censors demanded the exclusion of the entire scene depicting the incestuous relationship between mother and son [Fig. 12], ‘from the moment the actress begins to undress until the moment she appears dressed, after the [sexual] act.’^[18] In the case of All Nudity, it was required to exclude a five-minute scene mocking police work. This is the scene when Herculano goes to the police station to argue for Serginho’s release. The situation echoes that of many parents from all backgrounds who, at this time, tried to rescue their children from arbitrary arrest and torture in Brazil. By excluding this scene, the actor and filmmaker Hugo Carvana, who played the police chief, would no longer appear in the film, which the director Jabor resented (Avellar 1973a).

In June 1973, All Nudity was released in theatres, receiving several awards [19] and representing Brazil in international film festivals. As the film was being screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, General Antônio Bandeira, director of the Federal Police Department, demanded its prohibition, along with that of nine other films shown in Brazilian theatres at the time.^[20] It would take numerous negotiations for All Nudity to be re-released with cuts on 17 August 1973 (Jornal do Brasil 1973). The full version of the film would only be seen by the public in May of 1983 (Barros 1983: 2). To return to the theatres, All Nudity counted with the support of the press, embassies, and the international film community, as well as the fact that the playwright Nelson Rodrigues was a supporter of the dictatorship since its beginning.^[21] On top of that, the narrative content of Rodrigues’ play was ambiguous enough to be seen as anti-communist.

Similarly to All Nudity, the debut feature of filmmaker Tereza Trautman, The Men I Had (1973), was prohibited in 1973 after its initial release by the same General Antônio Bandeira, following an anonymous complaint he received from a woman who claimed the film conveyed a negative image of ‘family women’ in Brazil.^[22] The Men I Had follows the story of Pity (also played by actress Darlene Glória), an upper-middle-class woman in a non-monogamous marriage. Throughout the film, Pity’s liberated sex life provides her with delightful experiences. Eventually, she starts living with her husband and boyfriend while, in parallel, dating a filmmaker with whom she collaborates as an editor. Later, the character moves into a communal house and becomes pregnant, not knowing the father. Despite that, the character faces no negative consequences, nor does the film’s plot ‘punish’ Pitty for her unconventional conduct. Probably perceiving Pitty’s unpunished behaviour as a threat to patriarchy, censors required the film to be retitled The Men and I when it was finally re-released in theatres after seven years (Veiga 2013: 63, 61).

The absence of punishment for moral ‘deviant’ characters was a constant justification for banning films (Luca 2015: 148). While nudity and sex were censored, death by a gendered illness like breast cancer or violence would be understood by censors as a means to impose a disciplinary morality on female characters. Additionally, the censors tended to be more lenient towards comedies. They considered ‘well-made films in a naturalistic language more harmful than those using allegories and parables, since the former would be easier to understand’ (idem: 145) and would have, for this reason, a significant impact on the audience’s behaviour.

Although not reflecting the regime’s intellectual bias, literary adaptations like The Murdered House and All Nudity still represented an alternative in the eyes of the military government, not only to the erotic comedies but also to films like The Men I Had. Contrary to an overtly feminist film like The Men I Had, Saraneci’s and Jabor’s films still place the women protagonists and their fates halfway between liberation and punishment, subject and object. If it were not for the films’ ambiguity and the voice-overs of the characters narrating retrospectively from their agony or beyond death, it would be difficult to claim these films as critical of patriarchy and the regime’s moral tenets. By suggesting that death is not ultimate silencing, though, these films condense a criticism of the most mordacious period of the Brazilian dictatorship. Such disguised criticism, as it was under authoritarianism, led the censors to see the films as attacks on morality rather than political ‘subversion’ (communism). The films, though, were a provocative depiction of the hypocrisy within the conservative family and the dictatorship they have chosen to support.

Final Thoughts

Despite the funding from Embrafilme, in The Murdered House and All Nudity, the filmmakers Paulo César Saraceni and Arnaldo Jabor found their way to construct autonomous works, acknowledging how the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, especially during the Years of Lead, used sexual politics as a strategy for social control and coercion. In an ambiguous and indirect criticism, their films employ the same Christian themes and language used by regime supporters to defend order, tradition, family, and private property. The casting included actresses who were famous for their sexually liberated behaviour. Set and costume design fused past and present, sacred and profane, highlighting miracles and blasphemies in and out of the house. Such provocation, which includes the taboo of incest from the narratives of Lúcio Cardoso and Nelson Rodrigues, challenges a regime that talked about morality but practised institutionalised violence.

At one point in The Murdered House, Timóteo stares at the camera, provoking the viewer: ‘The only freedom we have in full is to be monsters to ourselves.’ The provocation, pertinent after the AI-5, also resonates now, when progressive sectors questioning compulsory heterosexuality and gender binarism face a wave of ultranationalist and religious-based neoconservatism forcing its way back to power worldwide. When gendered and racialised death, far removed from the metaphor realm, ‘has become the most profitable business in existence’ (Valencia 2018: 20-21).

Narrated in agonic retrospect by Nina and Geni, two controversial motherly figures who have died or are about to die, The Murdered House and All Nudity Shall Be Punished connect their images and voices to a claustrophobic and decadent domestic space, demonstrating the distortion with which the authoritarian regime understood a group of sexually non-conforming people, especially women, and homosexuals. In this agonising patriarchy, full of weak men, the films are set up paradoxically, hoping for their final breath. Even the threat of death, a cowardly recourse used daily by the dictatorship, cannot suppress these female protagonists. Until democracy returns, they seem to claim in these films, all sorts of transgressions will haunt such an obsolete state of affairs.

Notes

^[1] For Rousseau, a woman is respected above all for her position as a mother, which she must honour by devoting herself to housework, being the ‘Angel of the House.’ The character Sophia, from Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’Éducation (1762) embodies this ideal of womanhood that would be continuously reinforced and perpetuated. Her attributes of piety, purity, domesticity, and submission synthesise what modern patriarchy cultivates as ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’ (Kaplan 1987: 116).

^[2] For a critical analysis questioning the reality of an ‘economic miracle,’ see Carvalho 2018.

^[3] In his in-depth analysis of films made after Nelson Rodrigues’ literary work, Ismail Xavier (2003b) organises the films into three groups: 1962-66, 1972-75, and 1978-83. In Xavier’s assessment, only two features, Golden Mouth (1962) by Nelson Pereira dos Santos and The Deceased (1965) by Leon Hirszman, belong to Cinema Novo. While Saraceni is presented as a Cinema Novo filmmaker when Xavier mentions The Murdered House (idem: 183), Arnaldo Jabor’s adaptations of Nelson Rodrigues’ All Nudity Shall Be Punished, and The Marriage (1975) are analysed as a separate moment in time (1972-75) and aesthetic. In this paper, rather than claiming these films as Cinema Novo works, I am interested in analysing how Saraceni’s and Jabor’s connections with the Cinema Novo movement favoured their careers, potentially helping them to obtain funding for their films from Embrafilme.

^[4] For instance, Paulo César Saraceni and Gustavo Dahl studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, while Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Eduardo Coutinho studied at Idhec in Paris.

^[5] The representation of female characters has also been a subject of particular interest in recent scholarship revisiting works of Cinema Novo (Nwabasili 2017; Silva 2020; Lima 2022).

^[6] The AI-5, which stands for the Institutional Act number 5, was decreed on 13 December 1968, during the government of General Costa e Silva, and remained in effect until December 1978, granting broad powers to the Executive to declare a State of Siege and suspend citizens’ political rights. It also allowed the president to revoke political mandates, suspend constitutional guarantees, dismiss, retire, or transfer government workers. For a historical overview of the Brazilian dictatorship, see Napolitano 2018.

[7] While divorce was legalised in 1977, abortion is still prohibited in Brazil.

^[8] Filmmakers associated with Brazilian Marginal Cinema, for example, often criticised Cinema Novo. A famous example is the interview director Rogério Sganzerla and actress Helena Inês gave to the alternative newspaper O Pasquim in 1970, in which Sganzerla accuses Cinema Novo of being an elite, paternalistic, conservative, and right-wing movement at the time. According to Sganzerla, ‘Cinema Novo began in 1962, and in 1965 it ended. Exactly at the moment when it ended and gained prominence, it began to win international awards and established itself as a school. So, every guy who appeared from then on was either paternalised or marginalised. I was marginalised. All the other good guys were paternalised.’ (Sganzerla et al. 1970: 11). Jabor would be a filmmaker paternalised by Cinema Novo, in Sganzerla’s assessment of the film tendencies at the time.

[9] One example is the alternative film production circuit focused on Super-8. For a selected filmography of Super-8 films during the 1970s, see Machado (2001).

^[10] While analysing Nelson Rodrigues’s film adaptations, Ismail Xavier (2003b: 189) considers the term pornochanchada inaccurate because these films were erotic comedies and did not show explicit sex, being screened in conventional theatres.

[11] Cardoso and Rodrigues disputed the establishment of modern theatre in Brazil. In 1943, the theatre company Os Comediantes staged the plays The Slave by Cardoso and Wedding Dress by Rodrigues. Although Cardoso’s play was the first attempt at renewal in the theatrical field, it was received coldly by critics and the public, primarily due to the literary excess of the text (Prado 1953). Meanwhile, the staging of Wedding Dress under the direction of the Polish refugee Ziembinski, a master of mise en scène and lighting, received a warm reception from critics and is often considered the start of modern Brazilian theatre.

^[12] In the early 1950s, Cardoso and Rodrigues contributed to rival newspapers, maintaining similar columns of short stories based on crimes and targeting working-class female readers. Between 1952 and 1953, Cardoso wrote for the column ‘O Crime do Dia’ [The Crime of the Day] in the newspaper A Noite, created after Rodrigues’ successful column, ‘A Vida Como Ela é’ [Life as it Is], launched seven months earlier by the newspaper A Última Hora. The pieces published in Rodrigues’ column are considered a milestone of his prose and are well-known in Brazil. On the other hand, Cardoso’s irregular articles for ‘O Crime do Dia’ have not yet been compiled in a book or inspired adaptations.

^[13] For an overview of Lúcio Cardoso’s studies, including recent scholarship, see the special issue published by Opiniães when the novel Chronicle of the Murdered House completed sixty years (Correia et al. 2020: 15).

^[14] The French word for ‘star,’ vedette, is used in Portuguese to describe an actress working in the revue theatre. Despite being born in Portugal, Carmen Miranda is one of Brazil’s most internationally famous vedettes.

^[15] Although local power struggles are evident in All Nudity, Latin America appears in the film as a generic amalgam under the influence of U.S. imperialism. The film uses bolero songs ironically to reinforce its melodramatic charge. The Bolivian Thief, played by actor Orazir Pereira of Indigenous descent, is the most stereotypical of all characters. He does not have a proper name. On top of that, his nationality and marginality are used as a laughing stock.

^[16] Noir films in the U.S. often cast brunettes for the femme fatale trope, while blondes are associated with purity. However, in Brazil, the opposite is true. The scarcity of blondes in a place where most women are brunettes, connected to colonialism and white beauty standards, influences their sex appeal.

^[17] Although this film starts with Nina already dead, the recurring motif of resurrection and its fragmented structure convey an agonic afterlife state.

^[18] According to a censor review reproduced in this file documenting the ‘subversive’ activity of the actress Norma Bengell.

^[19] Including five awards by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC) [National Film Institute] for Best Actress (Darlene Glória), Best Actor (Paulo Porto), Best Supporting Actress (Elza Gomes), Best Stage Design (Régis Monteiro), and an additional prize for quality. Among other prizes, All Nudity also won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Festival and two Kikitos at the I Gramado Film Festival (Best Film and Best Actor) in 1973.

^[20] General Antônio Bandeira banned eight international and two national films. Most of the films had leftist content, but there were also comedies with titles that suggested inappropriate moral content, such as All Nudity Shall Be Punished and Virgin Boys from Ipanema (1973), directed by Oswaldo de Oliveira. For an analysis of Bandeira’s intervention and the criteria used to censor these ten films, see Luca 2015.

^[21] Nelson Rodrigues supported the dictatorship and denied the existence of torture in the Brazilian dictatorship as leftist propaganda until his son, Nelsinho, was arrested and tortured by the military due to his participation in the armed struggle group MR-8. After this episode, Nelson Rodrigues started to be more critical of the regime, initiating a media campaign against amnesty for torturers (Rosa 2018).

^[22] While analysing the censorship of The Man I Had, Veiga compares it with All Nudity Shall be Punished by Arnaldo Jabor. Tereza Trautman and Jabor also discuss it in an interview with Alex Viany (Jabor et al. 1999: 242-ss).

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented online at the Brasa-Brazilian Studies Association conference on 11 March, 2022. The author would like to thank the film scholars Mateus Araújo and Calac Nogueira, the anonymous reviewers of this paper, and the guest editors of this focus issue, Devaleena Kundu, Bethan Michael-Fox, and Khyati Tripathi, for their comments and suggestions.