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Abstract
Drawing upon Latin American and feminist filmmaking approaches, Helena Solberg’s 1995 documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business critiques the fantasy of “objective” documentary by infusing memories and “strange recurring dreams.” I argue that these subjective interjections offer a relational model for constructing new narratives about women celebrities we admire.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Kim Lau, Amanda M. Smith, Micah Perks, Madhavi Murty, Zac Zimmer, and Kirsten T. Saxton who each touched this essay in some way from inception to critique and expert revisioning, and to my anonymous reviewer, whose comments prompted me to clarify and expand my ideas.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden, loc. 57.
2 Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil), Twitter, January 23, 2021, https://twitter.com/jameelajamil/status/1352936022900838400.
3 In Deadly Plots (2009), Kirsten T. Saxton traces the ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersect in texts from the long eighteenth century and links media descriptions of the motives, trials, and executions of female criminal subjects to the development of British novel narrative conventions.
4 Steve Cross and Jo Littler argue in “Celebrity and Schadenfreude” that, in addition to admiration and desire, popular audiences often feel misidentification and disgust toward celebrities due to economic frustration and issues of income inequality. Consequently, audiences’ tendency to take pleasure in celebrity “free falls” perpetuates a cycle of production and consumption of tabloid celebrity gossip. In “The Gossip Machine,” Jim Rutenberg describes the economic nuances of the US celebrity gossip industry which generated more than $3 billion in profit in 2011.
5 To name a few: Amy (2015), Diana: In Her Own Words (2017), Framing Britney Spears (2021).
6 Spears, The Woman in Me, 254.
7 Although she is best known for The Double Day (1975) and From the Ashes: Nicaragua Today (1982), I’m interested in Solberg’s auto/biographical feature films, which are rife with subjective and relational engagement with her subjects.
8 I am indebted to my first reviewer for requesting clarity and providing much of the language that helped me articulate these ideas.
9 My thinking is inspired by Black feminist and queer of color conceptual archive theorists such as Saidiya Hartman and Julietta Singh.
10 There are both possibilities and limits to personal narratives. Feminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Joan M. Scott, and Judith Butler have explored the productive power of narrative and emphasize the relational ethics of self and other when recounting personal stories.
11 The film won Best Documentary, Jury’s Special Award, and Critics Award at the 27th Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro in 1994; Best Documentary at the Havana Film Festival, International Film Festival in 1995; and Best Documentary at the International Film Festival of Uruguay and Best Film by Popular Jury at the Encontro Internacional de Cinema de Portugal in 1996. Bishop-Sanchez, Creating Carmen Miranda, 256.
12 Solberg, interview, https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/pov/clip/pov-carmen-miranda-bananas-my-business-filmmaker-interview.
13 Woolf, The Waves, 163.
14 Solberg, Bananas, 4:25.
15 Bishop-Sanchez, 223.
16 Rosa, “Helena Solberg,” 463.
17 Solberg, Bananas, 1:24:36–1:25:15.
18 Bishop-Sanchez, 221–223.
19 “Como começar pelo inicio, se as coisas acontecem antes de acontecer?” Lispector, A Hora da Estrela, 15.
20 “O que te escrevo continua e estou enfeitiçada.” Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, 96.
21 In Popular Cinema in Brazil, Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw define the retomada as a “renaissance” of national cinema prompted by Brazil’s 1993 Audio-Visual Law, which offered tax breaks to Brazilian companies who funded Brazilian films. Films produced during this time were characterized by their “international flavour,” or attempts to understand Brazil through the eyes of foreigners. Perhaps because it was internationally funded (via international the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (US), Public Broadcasting Service (US), Channel 4 (UK), Radio and Television of Portugal and RioFilme (Brazil), Bananas certainly takes up the challenge of viewing Carmen Miranda (and Brazil) from the outside.
22 Brazil’s cinema novo originated in the 1960s and underwent multiple phases until the movement trailed off in the 1970s. What began as a radical Marxist response to foreign capitalist exploitation later took inspiration from the antropofagia cultural movement of 1930s Modernistas and the Tropicalismo movement of the 1960s to incorporate, or “cannibalize,” the best aspects of foreign cultures. Cinema novo’s interest in the cannibalistic consumption of foreign cultures may have influenced the style and themes Solberg explores in Bananas is My Business, as well as its documentary style. Dennison and Shaw point out that films produced during the earliest phases of cinema novo often employed documentary-style camera work.
23 Ian Goode cites at least two practical reasons that documentary filmmakers might include subjective interjections: to provide audiences with a “rare degree of access into the lives of stars” through first-hand accounts and to pose questions from the perspective of a “public enquirer”; “Television Documentary,” 27–40. Belinda Smaill also locates the origins of subjective filmmaking in the 1960s and 70s and is interested in its recent resurgence, which she associates with a “revival in documentary culture that expanded across the first decade of the twenty-first century”; “The Documentary,” 194.
24 As Smaill summarizes by way of Diane Waldman and Janet Walker’s Feminism and Documentary (1999), feminist filmmakers of 1970s worked to address the historic omission of women’s histories in documentary film; her larger argument in this chapter is that there’s been an ironic lack of attention to feminist documentary filmmaking from its inception despite its proliferation, and she attributes this lack to the aesthetic “problem of realism.” Smaill, “The Documentary,” 192.
25 Terrell, “Helena Solberg unmasks,” 53.
26 Egan, “Encounters in Camera,” 597, 593.
27 María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara detail the subjective turn in Latin American documentary in the introduction to their 2016 collection, Latin American Documentary Film.
28 Arenillas and Lazzara, Introduction to Latin American Documentary Film, 7.
29 A survey of popular reviews on IMDB ranging from the late 1990s to mid-2000s reveals that many viewers are charmed by Solberg’s reflexive “I” while others seem to glitch over Solberg’s dreams and dramatic effects. Reactions among film critics and scholars follow similar trends, although more seem to recognize the narrative potential of the fantastic scenes (see Cheshire and Taubin). However, because of Solberg’s subjective interjections, many critics are hesitant to categorize Bananas as “documentary,” opting instead for “docudrama” or “biopic” (see Bishop-Sanchez, Davis, West and West).
30 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 9.
31 White, Metahistory, 8–9.
32 Ibid., 8–9.
33 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 17.
34 Linda Hutcheon describes historiographic metafiction as a postmodern narrative architecture whose “intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality” is tempered by “an equally self-conscious dimension of history.” Historiographic metafiction “works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of the ‘world’ and literature”; “Historiographic Metafiction,” 4.
35 Roberto González Echevarría describes archival fiction in the context of the Latin American novel as a narrative that perpetuates “a modern myth based on an old form.” Through their repetition, these archival fictions both reproduce and mock the authority of the archive, constructing a kind of “counterfeit of legitimacy” in novel form; “Archival Fictions,” 183–207.
36 The museum is no longer located in Parque Flamengo; it’s currently closed while its contents are being restored and relocated to the Museu da Imagem e do Som in Copacabana (http://www.funarj.rj.gov.br/node/124).
37 Solberg, Bananas, 5:05.
38 Ibid., 5:15–5:19.
39 Solberg cites Carmen’s birthplace as Varzea da Ovelha e Aliviada—a village located in the municipality of Marco de Canaveses, Portugal—using baptismal records. Carmen’s birthplace is traditionally cited as Marco de Canaveses.
40 Notably Bishop-Sanchez and Taubin.
41 Schaffer, “Queering Waste Through Camp,” 2015.
42 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 313.
43 This is where Sontag’s definition of camp might be usefully invoked: through its “seriousness that fails,” we recognize the museum archive as always already camp.
44 “The ultimate message of all these fantasy sequences is that Miranda is escaping from an existence of entrapment, whether confined symbolically to a museum to be looked at in a showcase and admired for her outward appearance, or bound by a film or television set. Solberg was aware of the stylized nature of these recreations.” Bishop-Sanchez, 222.
45 Solberg alludes to the controversy that still surrounds Carmen’s status as a Vargas favorite.
46 “… culturally, in Hollywood films, this South American craze translated into the international languages of song, music, and dance, as screenplays drew heavily on South American locales, and studios sought to hire authentic or pseudoauthentic Latin players… Carmen Miranda became the muse of the Good Neighbor Policy, one of the most beloved representatives of South America on the US stage and screen, and moving beyond a more specific representation of her native Brazil, she soon came to represent ‘Latin America’ more generically as a token Pan-South American actress.” Bishop-Sanchez, 9.
47 Solberg, Bananas, 50:12–50:25.
48 Ibid., 51:26–51:32.
49 A pronunciation that is notably absent from Carioca Portuguese.
50 Andermann, “Performance, Reflexivity, and the Languages of Reflexivity,” 163.
51 Solberg, Bananas, 1:25:30–1:25:42.
52 “To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.” Léger, loc. 530.
53 I am inspired by Kirsten T. Saxton’s article, “Glancing Encounters,” which suggests that eighteenth-century novels by women writers might be read as notes from the past to future readers.
54 Winehouse, “Our Day Will Come,” track #1.
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Emily Travis
Emily Travis is a PhD Candidate in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz who researches women’s autobiography in the hemispheric Americas during the long twentieth century.