A compelling account of the role of Fado and the fadista in Portuguese
film and the wider culture.
Colvin studies the evolution of Fado music as the soundtrack to the
Portuguese talkie. He analyzes the most successful Portuguese films of
the first two decades of the Estado Novo era, showing how directors used
the national songto promote the values of the young Regime regarding the
poor inhabitants of Lisbon's popular neighborhoods. He considers the
aesthetic, technological, and social advances that accompany the
progress of the Estado Novo---Futurism;the development of sound film;
the inception of national radio broadcast; access to the automobile; and
urban renewal---within a historical context that considers Portugal's
global profile at the time of António de Oliveira Salazar's rise to
power and the inauguration of António Ferro's Secretariado da Propaganda
Nacional; Portugal's role as a secret ally of the Falange during the
Spanish Civil War; Lisbon's role as a neutral refuge during World War
II; and the Portuguese colonial empire as an anachronism in the
post-World War II years.
Colvin argues that Portuguese directors have exploited the growing
popularity of the Fado and Lisbon's fadistas to dissuade citizens from
alien values that promote individual ambitions and the notion of an easy
life of poverty in the capital. As the public image of the Fado evolves,
the fadista's role in film becomes more prominent and eventually the
fadista is the protagonist and the Fado the principal concern of
national film. The author exposes the irony that as the social profile
of the Lisbon fadista improves with the international fame of singer
Amália Rodrigues, Portuguese film perpetuates and validates the outdated
characterization of the fadista as a social pariah that Leitão de Barros
proposed in the first Portuguese talkie, A Severa (1931).
Michael Colvin is Associate Professor of HispanicStudies at Marymount
Manhattan College.
