Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Comédia à portuguesa
Summary
Comédia à portuguesa (kuˈmɛðja puɾtuˈɣezɐ; Portuguese Comedy) is a term conventionally used to refer to the genre of popular Portuguese film comedies made in the 1930s and 1940s. The light-hearted comedies are predominantly set in petit-bourgeois milieus in traditional Lisbon neighbourhoods and are often accompanied by musical performances, mainly light music, fados or folk songs. The popular revue (teatro de revista), the national equivalent of the North American vaudeville or the British music hall, had a marked influence over the comédia à portuguesa, including the talents of the actors, writers, and musicians.
The Song of Lisbon ("A Canção de Lisboa", 1933), the first sound feature film fully produced in Portugal, is considered to be the first style-defining comédia à portuguesa. This and a number of subsequent films are still popular in Portugal today, and the term comédia à portuguesa has become an enduring common term for the successful classic comedies of Portuguese cinema.
1933 not only saw the premiere of The Song of Lisbon, but also the establishment of António de Oliveira Salazar's authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo, which would last until the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The nascent comédia à portuguesa films — which drew much inspiration from the already popular revue (teatro de revista), as well as sharing the talents of actors and writers — were aimed at light-hearted entertainment for an audience that had been suffering from the social and economic upheaval of the interwar period, namely the unstable First Portuguese Republic and its ultimate failure and, later, the restrictions brought about by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. In that regard, the comédia à portuguesa became something of a welcome ally for the nascent authoritarian regime: in a war-ravaged Europe, the picture of a safe, carefree, orderly Portugal that was always subliminally conveyed, corresponded to the ideas of the propaganda that promoted the dictator Salazar as a caring guarantee of peace and progress in a country rich in tradition that he had successfully kept out of the war.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.