Search results for ""Author Michael Colvin""

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fadista improves with the international fame of singer Amália Rodrigues, Portuguese film perpetuates and validates the outdated characterization of the fadista as a social pariah that Leitão de Barros proposed in the first Portuguese talkie, A Severa (1931).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.

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This book exposes how Fado lyricists have appropriated popular novelist and playwright Júlio Danta's forging of Mouraria fadista/ prostitute Maria Severa as a national heroine, and the Fado as the national song—in A Severa (1901) and A Severa: Peça em Quatro Actos (1901)—to manifest a sub-rosa criticism of the Estado Novo's demolition of the Mouraria between the 1930s and 1970s. The lyricists exploit Dantas's fictionalization/dramatization of Severa's life, death, and consequent legacy in its attempt to link Severa's Mouraria and the Fado to the Portuguese character, to evoke national sympathy, or even outrage for the local cause of the erasing of the Mouraria. In the fado novo 's recontextualization of Dantas's Mouraria, we observe a criticism of the imminent destruction of the Mouraria's three faces: the fadista , the artistocratic, and the Christian. The lyrics of the fado novo of the 1930s to 1970s lament the demolitions that have taken place and warn against further erasing Dantas' Mouraria.

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