Iracemas do cinema: um estudo de adaptações

Abstract

The character Iracema, of the novel of Jose de Alencar was conceived to become the mythical mother of Brazil. A little more than a hundred years later, Carlos Coimbra canonically adapts to the cinema the beautiful and courageous India in Iracema, a virgem dos lábios de mel (1979). However, four years earlier, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna had conceived in Iracema, uma transa amazônica (1974) a mundane Iracema, with traits that the virgin of the lips of honey could never have, since she was created to be close to the divine and the chastity. This work approximates these motion pictures from the reinvention of its Iracemas and the foundation project of Alencar. We raise a theoretical discussion about the cinematographic adaptation and certain aspects that relate to it, such as the concepts of translation and transcription, the paradigm of fidelity, bereavement in translation and the question of authorship. We investigated the characterization of Iracema de Alencar from his mythical heroine traits and established some parallels between characteristics of classic heroines, such as Pocahontas, whose biography gained contours of myth; Atala, character of the novel of François-René de Chateaubriand; and Dido, Camilla and Lavinia, three characters from the Roman epic "Aeneid", by Publius Virgilio Maro. We then traced the profiles of Iracema of Coimbra and Iracema of Bodanzky and Senna, from some techniques of film analysis, such as study of plans and sequences and analysis of the film as narrative. We approach the characters from their counterpoints and elaborate a reflection on a trait identified in both: the erotization process. From the bibliography that guided the elaboration of this work we can highlight the studies of Linda Hutcheon, Marcel Silva, Julio Plaza, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Aumont and Laura Mulvey. We conclude with a reflection on the importance of the history of Brazilian cinematographic productions and the large amount of material we have available for studies in academic research.