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Later this week I plan to post an interview I recently conducted with Brazilian film critic and professor Franthiesco Ballerini, who’s currently in town as a guest of the Mostra Brazilian Film Series. In addition to giving me an overview of Brazil’s film history, Ballerini also indulged my curiosity about what it’s like to go to the movies there. I was fascinated to learn that, for a while, moviegoing was considered déclassé in Brazil. During the country’s period of dictatorship (1964-1985), the film industry went into decline. In the 1970s, much of the national output consisted of what we’d call exploitation films, lurid stories marked by racy (though not flat-out pornographic) content. The movie palaces of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo—many designed to hold over a thousand spectators—were chronically underpopulated, attended mainly by single men sitting far apart from one another.
