Fernanda Person: Forbidden Pleasures

The MIS – institution of the São Paulo State Culture – presents the exhibition “Forbidden Pleasures”, by the filmmaker and visual artist Fernanda Person. Mixture of eroticism and popular cinema, the films of pornochanchada category were the most produced and most viewed in Brazil in the 1970s. This does not mean, however, that these productions have escaped the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship under which the country was in . It is this suppression of one of the most notorious genres in the history of national cinema theme Forbidden Pleasures. In video installation format, the work uses official documents of censorship and cut sections of Brazilian films in an exhibition route that spans three environments.

In a survey that has lasted four years Fernanda Person searches the universe of pornochanchada films and censorship imposed on them during the Brazilian military regime (1964 – 1985), with emphasis in the 1970s. Contrary to what common sense might think, many of these productions have suffered restrictions and severe cuts in their narrative structures and their directors and producers used a variety of mechanisms to try to circumvent or at least diminish the actions of the censors.

For the creation of the exhibition Forbidden Pleasures, Fernanda Person analyzed hundreds of dictatorship documents and more than 150 national time movies, in-depth research trying to identify how the dictatorship has acted in this kind of film so popular in the period. In 2015, filmmaker and artist was one of the selected NECMIS residence MIS. During a year of intense immersion in the topic, he completed his research.

The result is a video installation that occupies the ground floor room and is divided into three environments. In the first, the visitor is faced with a 35mm projector that runs on false projecting only its light, without any image. Then, the artist presents a corridor with a selection of official documents of censorship. Finally, the third and largest of environments is a digital screening room where a video in six screens mounted only with film clips that were cut at the request of the censors is displayed.

The exhibition Forbidden Pleasures emerged as an offshoot of the film the filmmaker first “Stories that our cinema (not) count”, which carries a historical retelling of the 1970s from the pornochanchada movie images and is being finalized.