Notes Introduction 1. For example, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct (1993) is commonly labeled a femme fatale but the characters played by actor Pam Grier in various blaxploitation films are not. Mainon and Ursini’s study is an exception to the latter. 2. Foster (Gender and Society) is one of the few exceptions that have engaged explicitly with gender and sexuality in Brazilian cinema. More recently, although not focusing primarily on gender and sexuality, Conde and Marsh have provided insights into women’s experience(s) of and changes in gender roles in Brazil in the twentieth century. In her work on cinema, writing, and modernity in Rio de Janeiro during the early decades of the twentieth cen- tury, Conde writes a chapter on cinema’s female spectatorship, discussing middle-class women’s new social roles after the First World War. The author informs us how women came to occupy the public spaces, unlike in the past when they were mostly confined to the private space: the home. The author argues that cinema was part of the Brazilian “modernity project” (and there- fore an aspect of the consumerist culture that developed at that time) in which women played a crucial role. For instance, Conde observes that women were the majority of Brazilian filmgoers. Concerning Marsh’s study, it looks at how Brazilian female filmmakers’ audiovisual work from the 1960s onward chal- lenged the institutional power that limited women while promoting under- standings of gender, female sexuality, and women’s role in the country during limited political and civil freedom (i.e., the military dictatorship). She claims that their work during the dictatorship contributed to “the reformulation of sexual, cultural, and political citizenship in Brazil” (3). 3. The English translations of the Portuguese film titles will be in italics if they have been released in English or translated by other researchers. Otherwise, they will be my translations. 4. For example, in 2011 there were 266 murders of homosexuals in Brazil in homophobic crimes, but this number rose to 338 in 2012. Furthermore, such statistics only include cases that were openly discussed—the actual numbers could be much higher, particularly in cases in which the victim was not openly gay. For more information on this, see Grupo Gay da Bahia at www.ggb.org.br. 176 NOTES 5. However, her control of the camera in this case should be understood in terms of how the camera focuses on the characters, not how the director positions a camera to give the actors the space on which the camera focuses. That is, it might be better understood in terms of visual presentation rather than in the filmmaking process itself. 6. Sexual practices presented in neo-noir films depicting the femme fatale include sadomasochism (S/M henceforth), sexual violence, drug taking while having sex, and lesbian sex. The last of these, although serving mostly to titillate the heterosexual male audience, especially in sexploitation films, also indicates anxieties regarding changes of hegemonic gender and sexual roles. 7. This is developed in chapter 2. 8. This was because of the creation of the Ato Institucional 5, AI5 (Institutional Act Number 5), which removed any political rights of civilians, allowed strict censorship of art production, and gave the president full power. 9. For a detailed historical coverage of this period, in English, see Fausto and Skidmore. 10. This was the department that carried out torture against subversives. 11. As I have observed elsewhere, this expression in English approximates to the term “old maid.” It means that a woman is unlucky in love and still single long after the age people “normally” marry (Da Silva). 12. See Schwartz for an extensive list of more than 600 neo-noir films. 13. Whether or not film noir constitutes a genre is a contentious point. For example, some of the critics’ definitions of this group of films include genre, style, theme, mood, form, texture, and cycle (Bould, Glitre, and Tuck). Spicer argues that film noir has been defined as “a movement, a visual style, a prevailing mood or tone, a period, or as a transgeneric phenomenon” (24). Despite these debates, it is important to remember what Schwartz points out: that “no American director during that period ever used the word ‘noir,’ nor did he or she set out to create a style or genre. It was the French critics who applied the term ‘noir’ to this group of films that shared a similar photo- graphic, artistic, and thematic style” (ix). Because of this, Schwartz argues that film noir is not a genre but an “unconscious stylistic movement” (ix). Regardless, this study shares the view that film noir is a genre. 14. For a discussion of the sexual revolution, see Weeks (Sexuality). For a critique of the sexual revolution from a feminist perspective, see Jeffreys. 15. For discussions on the femme fatale in other contexts see the follow- ing authors: Barba; Bell; Bergfelder; Davies; Hershfield; Murphy; Powrie; Vincendeau; Wager; and Wood (Italian Film). 16. Concerning the presence of the lesbian, Orr argues that the context of pro- duction facilitated this in neo-noir as sexuality was not portrayed openly in the 1940s noir films because of the Studio Code. Phillips observes that both “adultery and homosexuality would be forbidden by the 1934 code” (31). Nevertheless, the lesbian fatale became prominent in neo-noir. 17. Of course this relationship the films create between lesbianism and violence is very problematic and stereotypical because a lesbian identity does not NOTES 177 make a woman violent, as is constructed in patriarchal society’s imaginary. On the other hand, this is clearly the intention of the films of the period: to portray lesbianism as a negative aspect of a woman’s identity, which func- tions as a kind of “backlash” against lesbians. 18. Two examples of these in Brazil are Masculino . até certo ponto (Male . Up to Some Extent, 1986) and Estou com AIDS (I Have Got AIDS, 1986). In an international context, see the episode After It Happened from the American television series Midnight Caller (1988) and Killing the Right People—an episode of the series Designing Women (1987). 19. For more information on representations of the prostitute as a femme fatale, see Bade. 20. For a discussion of multiculturalism in Brazilian cinema, see Stam (Tropical). 21. For more information on Hari, see Shipman. 22. The term “class” in this case means “a social category sharing a common set of subjectively salient attributes within a system of stratification” (Wright 14). 23. Pollution in this case refers to the femme fatale’s acts that challenge “social morality”; the latter is understood in Foucaultian terms as “a set of values and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the intermedi- ary of various prescriptive agencies such as the family (in one of its roles), educational institutions, churches, and so forth” (Foucault, The Use 25). 1 The Black Femme Fatale in Xica da Silva 1. For a detailed study of this historical character, whose name was originally spelt Chica da Silva, see Furtado. 2. All the translations from Portuguese are mine unless indicated otherwise. 3. Since the late 1960s when the Brazilian sexploitation film (pornochanchadas) appeared, this word has become a derogative way to refer to other films that are not considered to be of “good quality” or address any content related to sex in a more explicit or perhaps “tasteless” way. For a discussion of porno- chanchada, see Abreu and Dennison (Sex and the Generals). 4. Cinema-novo director Glauber Rocha wrote a manifesto titled An Aesthetics of Hunger. Xavier (Allegories) provides an important analysis of cinema-novo aesthetics. 5. This was one of the first movements that attempted to end Portuguese colo- nial rule in Brazil. For more details on this, see Perrin and Skidmore. 6. Public sex will be discussed in detail in chapter 4. 7. This applies to the film only—the historical character Chica is said to have had as many as 14 children with João Fernandes (Dennison and Shaw; Johnson, Carnivalesque). 8. Rape was a titillating sadomasochistic feature used in many (s)exploitation and pornographic films in the period mostly concerned in this book, espe- cially in pornochanchada, WIP, and rape-revenge films. These films targeted mostly heterosexual men as their main audience. For more information on this, see Da Silva. 178 NOTES 9. Tate’s proposal of beauty performativity derives from Butler’s (Gender Trouble) conception of gender as performative. 10. This has been something that appears in different reviews of the film as no one gets to know exactly what she does. For an example of this, see Oliveira. 11. There is no doubt that Xica has control over her sexuality, but the different ways in which the film portrays her sexual identity could suggest (on a super- ficial level) an objectification of the slave’s body and sexuality. An example of this is in the film’s theme song, which repeats the refrain “Xica da, Xica da” (Xica “gives out”). The word da can be a conjugation of the verb dar (to give) and the contraction of the preposition de (of) plus the definite article a (the), which is part of different surnames such as da Silva. The film plays with the word da from Xica’s surname to connote sexual passivity, but this strongly indicates a male-biased construction of her sexuality because Xica’s acts in the film show that she does not “give out.” On the contrary, she devours the males, who are scared of her domineering and castrating sexuality, but she is not scared of theirs.