Home, family, and violence: the films of João Canijo

ABSTRACT

Portuguese filmmaker João Canijo’s films and his use of family and home present a portrait of contemporary Portugal: underprivileged families trying to survive in the modern world, emphasising the women’s lack of power and the imposition of a patriarchal community. Moreover, using the same narrative pattern, these films allow a study of the tensions in Portuguese society. The place where the narrative develops is the family’s home, the site for the struggle of everyday life. This artistic analysis can be read through the lenses of a cultural analysis made in the past decades by researchers and essayists who examine how the Portuguese cultural representations are strongly attached to a Salazaristic ideology. The films of João Canijo build upon these cultural representations against a harsher reality, which is represented by the way families implode with systemic violence. Thus, this article argues how the home is a claustrophobic space –filled with markers of nationality in its mise-en-scène–, where families cannot live together, and where violence destroys the idyllic cultural representations of Portugal.

KEYWORDS:

• Portuguese cinema
• João Canijo
• Family
• Cultural representations
• Home

Introduction

In recent years, academia has been discussing Portuguese cinema widely, translating a need to re-evaluate the old debates. Mainly, these studies focused on the growing perspective of the participation of Portuguese cinema in broader international phenomena of art cinema, but also on the cultural perspective, which allows a reframing of the position of Portugal within the larger geopolitical arena. As Iván Villarmea Álvarez (2016, 116) notes, ‘The chosen themes, the characters represented, the aesthetic decisions and the narrative dynamics of a part of the contemporary Portuguese cinema directly or indirectly reflect the integration of Portugal into the world cinematographic system. It does not make sense, therefore, to continue to think of Portuguese cinema from the difference, as an autonomous and isolated entity that is on the margin of these global processes.’ Reading it closely related to the concept of ‘small cinema’, Liz (2022, 6–9) proposes to approach this cinema to an idea of internationalisation, which, contrary to the globalisation, negotiates intensively from its national specificity and international style. Returning to Villarmea Álvarez (2016, 108–111), it is worth noting how he summarises the active conversation that Portuguese contemporary filmmakers have with film history (both Portuguese and international).

The precarity of its market and the difficulties arising from the ever-coming crises (at least 2002/2003 and 2008–2012) have shaped Portuguese cinema since the late nineties, in which a diversity of financing programs allowed for a new generation to rise. As we stated elsewhere (Ribas and Cunha 2020), this profound transformation, both in the cultural landscape and the audiovisual industry, has led to a hybridisation of formats, embraced mainly by authors such as Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes, Teresa Villaverde or João Pedro Rodrigues. But more than this hybrid nature, Portuguese cinema was always political, engaging in the struggle of contemporary capitalism, and its concept of crisis demanded forms of care and production that would fabricate singular films.

This conversation also arises where Portugal’s ambiguity or borderline status demands new ways of looking at our national cinema. As Tiago Baptista (2010, 14) states, ‘In the mid-1990s, a new generation of filmmakers was to focus on their present time and to flood Portuguese cinema with realism. Only a handful of films before that had attached themselves so radically to their own time. And even less had proven so indifferent to the reasoning of what defined “Portugalness”.’ This imbalance between different cultural representations – from a colonial past to a postcolonial Europe – also led to some readings on Portuguese cinema that focused a lot on a cultural understanding of the social and economic transformations of Portugal since the Carnation Revolution in 1974 (Ferreira 2012; Monteiro 2004; Villarmea Álvarez 2016). The former studies underline how Portugal changed in the last decades, after the Carnation Revolution (April 1974) and the democratisation and Europeanization of its society.

Studies on the crossover between film and national identity (MacKenzie and Hjort 2000; Vitali and Willemen 2006; Williams 2002) have been relevant in recent decades. Mainly from a cultural studies approach, these studies are in debt to the idea that identity is a very fluid concept and a process rather than a fixed state (Hall and Gay 1996). Therefore, cultural processes build discourses and imaginaries that speak to the subjects and offer places of identification. It is helpful to address Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006) to clarify what we mean by national identity. As the scholar has suggested, the formation of nations is attached to ‘print capitalism’, which forged a national community and a sense of belonging. For him, the nation ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 2006, 6).

In this context, we want to discuss and analyse the work of João Canijo, a contemporary Portuguese filmmaker who has addressed these issues with expressiveness. In his more recent films (since the late nineties), Canijo presents a portrait of Portugal in which violence and family are at stake, contrasting with the imagination of a peaceful and orderly people. This radical critique of common sense poses questions of how we can create documents of reality in fiction, how they enter a more comprehensive conversation about cultural representations, and how they question the givens of identity.

As a cultural study, this analysis will only be possible after carefully constructing a cultural framework, presenting some epistemological complications in studying Portuguese cultural representations. This article will follow, therefore, a method of film analysis as a source for a broader cultural investigation, only possible through a robust theoretical apparatus. We hope this analysis will illuminate both Canijo’s films and the identity struggles of contemporary Portugal.

Portuguese cultural representations: Home and family

Portuguese cultural identity is a given rarely placed in question. Despite the considerable internal diversity, there is a powerful representation of Portuguese identity. As the philosopher Eduardo Lourenço (1988, 10) concluded, ‘We think we know who we are because we have been who we were largely, and we also think that nothing threatens the cohesion and awareness of the national reality that we constitute.’ Thus, history imposes a particular representation of what is to be Portuguese.

However, the last decades produced profound cultural, social, political, and economic changes. The Carnation Revolution in 1974 opened a new democratic era, which brought many transformations that led to the adhesion to the European Economic Community in 1986. These changes in political organisation modernised Portuguese society, as has been widely recognised by many sociological studies. However, if culture is radically different, certain cultural representations persistently shape the discourses available to the subjects. Our working framework will take into account three critical circumstances: the conflict of imaginaries brought by democratisation and decolonisation, the influence of Salazar and his ideology of a specific idea of traditionalism and family, and a contemporary mentality based on passivity, which is structuring the concepts of the repressed (Lourenço 2010) and the non-inscription (Gil 2005).

Eduardo Lourenço was the first to point out a transformation in the Portuguese imaginary because of the Carnation Revolution. The loss of a colonial empire and its replacement by a community of European countries explains this change. Thus, politically and socially, Portugal has transformed its cultural representations towards an image of Europe, in which it is only a minor partner, losing this mythical imagination of imperial power. This transformation, implemented without trauma, was odd for Lourenço (1999, 60): ‘We entered Europe as if we always were there while we cultivate, dreamily, an Empire of five hundred years as we had never gone out.’ What seems crucial to Lourenço is that the imagination built during the dictatorship remains in the cultural representations:

In the last quarter-century [1974–1999] we made beautiful things, we restored some injustices, and improved quality of life for all citizens, but we have failed what we may call the ‘cultural revolution’ [: (…) the] necessary, complex, delicate deconstruction of a structurally imperial ideology without empire, and its militant, hagiographic, ultranationalist, open or innocently hostile to democratic inspiration principles, without which it was not feasible to overcome half a century of ‘single thought’. (Lourenço 1999, 79–80)

This statement, placed at the level of identity imaginaries, is heightened by authors from other fields of knowledge, such as Santos (2002). For the sociologist, Portugal is a semi-peripheral society, given its position in the complicated international transit of late modernity. Therefore, Santos (2002, 59) states that ‘taking into account the type and the historicity of its intermediate level of development, Portuguese society is very heterogeneous [and is c]haracterized by complex links between discrepant social practices and symbolic universes that enable social construction, both for the centre and the periphery representations.’ The sociological point of view shows the diversity and conflicting representations that come into play. It is a vision of a confrontation in the society with itself: between the advances of modernity and the forces of mentality imposed for nearly half a century of dictatorship. Also Gil (2009, 57) addressed the same problem, stressing that co-exist three different times: ‘[the] globalisation, [the] Europeanization, and our national time – that it alone is a mixture of many layers of the past’, which ‘do not fit or consist with each other. We now live adrift after the clash of these three elements, without knowing nor taking a certain direction’ (Gil 2009, 57).

This conflict between cultural representations relates to the importance of Salazar’s legacy in these representations, which is critical to understanding the turn of the century. In this regard, for Lourenço (2010, 33), a particular image of Salazar’s society instilled into mentalities: an ‘image without control or possible contradiction of a country without problems, an oasis of peace, (…) archetype of the ideal solution which reconciled capital and labour, order and authority with the harmonious development of society.’

The studies of Salazar’s legacy are diverse and influential. Still, we will now address a specific construction of the Portuguese cultural representations of family and its home that Salazar designated as a fundamental part of his ideological project and its cell-based strategy of power, the ‘oasis where the children of Portugal are formed’ (Salazar cit. in Baptista 1996, 739). In a public speech, the dictator stated:

We do not discuss family. There, man is born and educated generations; there forms the little world of affection without which man can hardly live. When family is disrupted, it is the house and the home that are disrupted, kinship ties untie, and men become before the state isolated, strangers, without retaining and morally stripped of more than half of themselves; they lose a name, acquire a number – the social life soon takes a different complexion. (Salazar 1937, 133–134)

This centrality of family in the Salazaristic cultural representations disturbed more expansive areas of society because social relations reflected family affection. An appreciation of rural life and what Salazar adopted as the strategy of ‘life as usual’ (Rosas 2012, 168), without conflicts and in alleged social and familial harmony, was the base of these relationships of affection. Eduardo Lourenço (1988, 20–21, 2010, 32–34) summarises Salazar’s ideology and its legacy as the imposition of an image of the ‘spiritual ruralisation,’ represented by simplicity and modesty, in a society with minimal resources, in an orderly hierarchy, where the state controls the power of social and economic relations.¹

The imposition of a vision of the family and the harmony of rural life as the structuring of a Portuguese cultural representation was the outcome of this ideological construction. This identity both imagined a harmonious world and forced a patriarchal structure. Gil (2005) presents the concept of familiarism for reading those ideas. Founding its regime in this ideal family, Salazarism shaped social relations to reproduce the family model and hierarchy. In the words of Gil (2005, 62), familiarism ‘is, in the vast sphere of social affectivity, an engaging structure that reproduced in all levels an affective and relational model of the family unit[;] (…) its engaging force was ubiquitous and almost flawless [and] in the background also provided strange support to the political power.’ Therefore, familiarism is a social structure that cultivates affection, replicating family relations and removing the possibility of social confrontation. An illusion of emotional and familiar democracy developed in which everything worked as expected. As a result, it ‘imprisoned, shrugged the spirits in a cell where they cultivated the illusion of equality and fraternity’ (Gil 2005, 63).

The Portuguese history of sociology addressed this centrality of the family in Salazaristic representations. The home, that is, the interior space of the family, is, therefore, ‘conceived and disclosed as a space of harmony and respect,’ where conflicts and violence do not happen (Casimiro 2011, 113). However, this idealisation obscured a rigid hierarchical structure with well-defined roles and clear power structures (Almeida 2011, 9).

In the authors cited above, we can argue that Salazar’s imagination built a strongly patriarchal society disguised by an image of a harmonious society where families live happily. This idealisation had a clear purpose of power control and the discipline of the masses. In the opinion of Eduardo Lourenço and José Gil, this imagination has practical consequences in social relationships and the contemporary collective imagination. Salazar’s life as usual meant people of easy-going. Lourenço speaks, in this context, of a particular image of passivity that these cultural representations cultivated, i.e. normalisation performed by Salazar’s power control implied the absence of civic life. Even the economic and social transformations that democracy and Europe have imposed didn’t reform this passive mentality. That’s why ‘Portugal is a historical and social fabric of tight-knit, a village of all (…) that does not allow (…) the outbreak of one individual and autonomous living that only the birth and proliferation of the grand bourgeois city instituted’ (Lourenço 1988, 12–14) For Lourenço, this idealised image hides an inherent weakness since it only remains idealised by a repression mechanism. It is this tension between the different images that Lourenço shows how, cyclically, there is a ‘return of the repressed’ in the identity and cultural process over historical development. That is, ‘each period of forced dynamism has always been followed by, in Freud’s language, might be called the return of the repressed’ (Lourenço 2010, 29). Lourenço explains that Salazar’s idealisation continues to create unrealistic images of the Portuguese imaginary, culminating in repression that leads to passivity. Lourenço (2010, 72) defined this as ‘cultural schizophrenia’.

José Gil’s formulation reinforces this cultural analysis performed by Lourenço. For Gil, the concept of non-inscription models the national mentality, that is, the inability of the subjects to actively mark their lives and to enrol in social relationships. Therefore, and linking the concept with the historical evolution of the Portuguese imaginary, ‘the non-inscription of our Salazaristic past had effects of unconscious incorporation of a traumatic space, non-inscribed, in the generations that followed’ (Gil 2005, 43). For Gil, in Portugal nothing ‘happens, that is, nothing is inscribed – in history or individual life, in social life or the artistic realm’. The non-inscription assumes a passive existence without confronting power. It is, therefore, a consequence of the amorphous obedience that Salazarism imposed.

For José Gil, this mentality caused widespread fear in Portuguese society, a diffuse fear of power, a fear that also carried the analogy with the Salazaristic concept of familiarism, which was born immediately in the smallest social cells (see also Martins 1990). This fear of power results in exaggerated respect for hierarchy, ‘while desire mutilating device, [fear] predisposes to obedience. It softens the bodies, sipping them their energy, creating a void in the minds that only the submission to tasks, duties, and obligations is supposed to fill. Fear impeccably prepares the ground for repressive law to exercise itself’ (Gil 2005, 84). This is a ‘ubiquitous fear,’ a ‘fear of desire’, or a ‘fear to exist’.

Until now, we have tried to address contemporary Portuguese society and its identity liminal space, a moment between imaginaries that accentuates the weakest side of the Portuguese condition. This weakness summons some Salazaristic cultural representations and their imposition of a hierarchical society where the family is the central place of power discipline. These representations, which are still a shared sense of national identity, cause phenomena such as repression and non-inscription and establish a patriarchal society where individuals are afraid of power. Through this theoretical framework, we will try to show how Canijo’s films are constructed from this identity debate, trying to do, at the same time, a work of revelation and deconstruction.

Home and family in the cinema of João Canijo

João Canijo created a substantial body of work in the last two decades, with several feature films. Even if he started in the late 1980s, it was after Sapatos Pretos (Black Shoes, 1998) that the director began a specific project. Since that film, and in the following four features – Ganhar a Vida (Get a Life, 2001), Noite Escura (In the Darkness of the Night, 2004), Mal Nascida (Misbegotten, 2007) and Sangue do Meu Sangue (Blood of My Blood, 2011) –, Canijo discussed the Portuguese cultural representations from a particular point of view: the marginalised and forgotten people from diverse Portuguese regions (industrial small towns, emigrant communities, nightclubs, countryside villages or the city suburbs). These films portray a country, its diversity, and its mentalities. For purposes of this study, and confronting with the framework mentioned above, we will analyse these five films as a group and specify some scenes as paradigmatic of our argument.

We must clarify that Canijo’s films also deal with other issues that go over the scope of this article, namely the use of Greek tragedies as source material for the narrative structure. In this case, it goes beyond our argument because these free adaptations are only in some films and, mostly, because this source material becomes instead a shortcut for a melodramatic mode (which also falls out of the scope of the article).²

Home, family and the plot structure

These films have strong similarities; at their core, they use family and its home: the narrative structure focuses on the relations around family members and their violent confrontations. Therefore, this is a portrait of the Portuguese family in a degraded profile with serious conflicts. These families can’t overcome the weight of patriarchy, and a troubled past marks them. They survive in the present. The films’ narratives present a difficult transition from a family historical heritage to a dark present-day. So, on the one hand, the family as a place idealised by Salazarism is imploding. However, on the other, these families still try to reproduce the hierarchical structures of that idealised family. Thus, there is a clash between a harmonised imagination – life as usual – and destabilising social practices. On the one hand, men still are the head of the household and seek to defend their position; on the other, women challenge them. The films attempt to maintain the idealised image of women, but the evidence is that it is only possible because men insist on patriarchal power. They use that power to abuse women continuously and arbitrarily.

The detailed analysis of these narratives resulted in the finding of the same plot structure,³ pointing out that even changing various socio-economic contexts and geographies, these films seem to tell the same story. This plot structure develops as follows: at the beginning, there is a ‘normality’ in the household hierarchy. There is a well-characterised and patriarchal power structure in which social relations convey with this structure, not challenging the power. In some of these films, these structures have a troubled past covering the ‘pacified’ present. Hence, many of these characters assume passive behaviour. However, a female character in the narrative decides to rebel against authority. Even if the patriarchal practices of power submerge these women, something detonates her inner revolt. The tensions question male authority, and the women’s uprising produces various imbalances in the family structure, causing violent confrontations. But despite this action against power, the female characters cannot change the ‘normal’ family hierarchy, and the end of the plot restores previous practices. The patriarchal power wins over the insubordination of women, and this victory is often shot in scenes of graphic violence. These family conflicts are between the couple or between father and daughters.

A substantial part of the conflict and the emergence of the female characters connect to a non-conformity to the social and family situation in which they live. This non-conformation links to questions of class and the desire to change, a particularly relevant desire if we consider the economic shifts that Portugal felt in the last decades. There is, thus, a desire for a new imaginary and a different life. But this desire is castrated by male power.

Home, family and the mise-en-scène

The family home frames the violent family relations, the landscape for the plot structure. In this context, home becomes the privileged place for the filmmaker to portray various sequences of confrontation and violence. It is a private and intimate space, generally hidden from the view of others, whose dynamics João Canijo reveals. The family home is a fragile place – emotionally but also socially – short and stocky, filled with symbolic decorative elements of the lower classes and their cultural references. This space is always shot with attention to décor, and it is exploited by the camera in its reduced architecture, even if these homes are diverse, as the locations mentioned above suggest. However, these homes are always portrayed as places of lower classes and always filmed on location.

As we can see, the following frames point to specific ideas of home. In Black Shoes, we see a small independent house with a small flower garden and a small bedroom with a colourful curtain (Frame 1). In Get a Life, the first frame shows the outskirt where the family lives in a landscape of large buildings. We also see, inside, a shady kitchen. Both these two films are aesthetically close, with kitsch colours and a dark look (Frame 2). In In the Darkness of the Night, the film takes place in a nightclub, where all the family members work in the family business. We can see the intense reds of the nightclub and its kitchen, which is not good-looking (Frame 3). In Misbegotten, the home is also the village café, mixing private and public space. The frames show the outside and the inside of the café. Both have pale and brownish colours, accentuating the area’s antiquity (Frame 4). Finally, in Blood of My Blood, the frames show the suburb, its urban chaos, and the view inside the small kitchen (Frame 5).

Frame 1. Black Shoes.

Frame 2. Get a Life.

Frame 3. In the Darkness of the Night.

Frame 4. Misbegotten.

Frame 5. Blood of My Blood.

These frames exemplify the home’s interior space and geography within the countryside and urban areas. They want to represent common sense about places and the lower classes in contemporary Portugal. The family home in its banal every day is crucial for sensing the normality of life. And one of the markers of that normality is that all films present scenes of family meals. In these scenes, almost always in the kitchen, families are represented in their ordinariness. Canijo wants to document home nowadays. But by doing that, he also creates his cultural representations of Portugal. That’s why linking these banal images to the above-cited plot structure is essential: the contrast between ‘normality’ and the conflict that develops from there.

In these films, the private area of the home is oppressive, supported by the plot and the conflict between characters. The mise-en-scène works claustrophobia from the contradiction between its smallness and the excess of scenic elements. It also uses frames within the frame, reducing the field of vision and underexposed cinematography. These strategies create a space that reflects a social closing of the characters in themselves. Moreover, the reduced space causes a lack of individual freedom: the characters live without autonomy under the ‘protective’ mantle of family oppression. In the specific case of In The Darkness of the Night, the very idea of a nightclub as a family home shows the degradation of their relations.

In the following frames, we can see other interior spaces of the home, where the framing exposes the strategies of claustrophobia: frames within the frame, reinforcing the lack of space and placing the characters with little physical space to move; dark cinematography, dimming the characters; an excess of characters in the frame, reinforcing the idea of the family as oppressing individual freedom; sometimes claustrophobia and ‘prison’ of the family home is literal, with the use of outdoor frames of the interior, bringing to the foreground grids that shape the frame. These homes are suffocating.

Frame 6. Get a Life.

Frame 7. Misbegotten.

Frame 8. Blood of My Blood.

The television is an essential element in the family home. TV acts as a resonance box of the illusion of reality, with a dialogue between what is happening on the scene (often a violent scene) and what the television delivers: images of a stable and harmonised identity – for example, a game of the Portuguese football team in the case of Blood of My Blood. The television images that these films screen thereby are always joyful, covering the real with mass media happiness. Therefore, television always shows happy people or aspects of banal nationalism (such as the national team, the Portuguese flag or Portuguese low-brow music). However, the sequences that contain the television are particularly violent, revealing a complicated world in which the mind is affected by the televised discourse but subverted by patriarchal relations and fierce power. Two scenes may be highlighted in this context. In Black Shoes, the relationship between the couple is terrible. The woman was operated to breast cancer and needs to rest in her bedroom. She is watching a current TV show which features famous musicians. At that moment, her husband comes and violently rapes her. In Blood of My Blood, an aunt must save her nephew from financial debt. She goes with him to the dealer’s house, to whom she needs to pay a large amount of money. The TV screens the European Cup semi-final between Portugal and Spain (a game the Portuguese team lost). While Spain scores, the dealer starts to humiliate the aunt in a sequence that will endure until he rapes her.

Home, family and violence

The transgression of the female characters, as explained in the plot structure, arises within a framework of violence. This violent nature is immediately manifest in all films through the dialogues, in continuous psychological violence within the family. There are many examples, but one is particularly relevant to our argument because it is a paradigmatic scene of the various cinematic elements.

Frames 9–20 Sequence of Misbegotten.

This scene happens in Misbegotten in the family home’s kitchen with the family having a special dinner: Jusmino asks Lúcia to be his fiancé in front of her mother (Adelaide) and her stepfather (Evaristo). The spectator knows more: Lúcia has been enraged against them since childhood because of her mysterious father’s death, and she is waiting for her lost brother, whom she took to a train to escape the village many years ago. This background story affects the family relations, and Evaristo forces Jusmino’s marriage with Lúcia.

The scene mise-en-scène goes as follows: the camera starts outside the kitchen, following a fifth character (Augusto, the brother of Lúcia, who has not yet revealed his identity). We hear the loud voice of Evaristo, talking about his wife and her need for grandchildren. The camera then frames the dinner and the four characters. Evaristo asks Jusmino to propose to Lúcia. The camera stops: there is a frame within the frame – a door – that closes the visual space. The four characters seem almost on top of each other. In the background, the TV is playing a variety show. It’s a claustrophobic framing.

We join the small kitchen with a cut: Jusmino, Evaristo and Adelaide are toasting while Lúcia continues to have dinner. Evaristo declares: ‘You are now both groom and bride’. The camera moves slowly but always focuses on Lúcia. She dresses in black, and her face is incredulous. In the background, we hear the television: the music Chariots of Fire.⁴ With this sound, the harmony breaks when Lúcia starts to yell directly to her mother: ‘I’m mourning!’. Both her mother and stepfather begin to speak on top of each other in a cacophony of voices and the television. She replies: ‘I’m the only widow of my father’. Adelaide continues speaking as Evaristo at the same time.⁵

The camera pans to each character’s face while they speak (not necessarily in the frame), showing a discussion like many others in the family. Both Adelaide and Lúcia talk about the past and Lúcia’s father. At that moment, Lúcia explodes, yelling and spitting food out of her mouth, saying,’ You don’t remember the past?! Fucking no! Don’t you think I do not remember [my father’s death] every time I look at your bitch face?’. The mother replies, ‘I can’t stand you. Or you accept your life and marry, or I swear by the light of my eyes, you’ll be put in a mental hospital.’ The dialogue grows to turmoil with the use of harsh language. Lúcia stands up and approaches her mother, shouting. That’s when Evaristo also stands up and violently grabs her by the hair and brutally takes her to the stockyard, filled with ‬ pigs, where she will spend the night locked (the punishment seems to be recurring in Lúcia’s life).

As we mentioned above, this familiar scene takes place in a very tight kitchen, and the frames emphasise the claustrophobia of that family. Lúcia is also very masculine, reinforcing the patriarchal order that her stepfather imposes. As noted above, he controls the family and wants to force Lúcia to marry. Other elements complete the scene: the four are dining a typical Portuguese dish, potatoes with roasted chicken, and there is a fifth character in the room: a significantly older woman dressed in black, who is always silent (she is present in more scenes, always with the same behaviour). The cinematography also points to the dining table, the centre of the action, but gives the clothes an old-fashioned look with their brownish colours.

As in this example, the scenes of violence are disseminated through all films. They are mainly directed against women: sexual abuse (humiliating rapes practised by men in Black Shoes or Blood of My Blood) or brutal deaths (Black Shoes, In the Darkness of the Night or Misbegotten). Furthermore, these violent scenes deepen men’s brutality through different strategies, such as the duration of the scenes (constantly very long), the humiliation that precedes physical violence and the way the camera forces the viewer to see the wounded body.

This violence inside the family and the family home that we just described has a deep connection with the question of identity. It suggests a failed individual affirmation, restating the patriarchal status quo. In Canijo’s films, we can see systemic violence perpetuated by male characters who regularly activate preventive violence through a discourse of power. This violence is carried by men, as the householders, against women. Most of the violence takes place in the intimacy of home. Men act both with their physical strength and through constant psychological and social pressure. They physically mark the body of the family’s women, and they decide their fate. Furthermore, we can also notice what Girard (1977) wrote about the endless violence: within these family groups, violence produces new violence; revenge generates new acts of revenge; hatred is present in all relationships within the family.⁶

Conclusion: discussing the Portuguese cultural representations

In the beginning, we argued with several authors – from sociology to philosophy – that the Portuguese cultural representations are in a liminal space: between a past imagined as a great nation and a European present, redefining how Portugal is perceived in the transnational transit of identities.

In examining Canijo’s films, we tried to demonstrate how the director discusses these cultural representations within a portrait of contemporary families and their homes. We ended that analysis by showing how violence plays a vital role in the films and their cultural representations. This violence stages the conflict within the cultural imaginary. On the one hand, it seems evident that these films extend the patriarchal domination strategies and Salazar’s family structure; on the other, new eras stimulate new visions of the world, especially of the female characters. However, its subversive violence is not enough to counteract the force of mentalities, and systemic violence seems to maintain its dominance. The symmetry of positions between men and women also helps us understand that the violent past continues to overshadow the present, and even the subversive strategies are, however, a reflection of past behaviour. This idea of similarity in violence (Girard) also comments on cultural representations, as it puts the characters on the same level of Salazarists mentalities, i.e. cyclically repeating the strategies of power.

The cultural commentary of João Canijo – from the established plot structure and the use of violence in the family – is an artistic practice that rhymes with the comments of Eduardo Lourenço and José Gil and their readings of contemporary mentalities. On the one hand, we have seen a central role in the family as a cultural symbol of national identity. This centrality repeats the organisation of familiarism (Gil) and shows the illusion of fraternity and normality. But this illusion is a repression (Lourenço) of frozen conflicts. When the daily reality requires the changes of the characters, it is through a return of the repressed (violence). There is no doubt that the plot structure presupposes the idea of non-inscription (Gil) of the female characters (at least looking at the end of the films), as they fail to act against power, and their desire is not fulfilled. The tensions that the non-inscription suggests imply violence because they play on the authority imposed by fear. The myth of the ‘easy-going’ is exposed by actual underground violence.⁷

Therefore, we are trying to demonstrate throughout this article how five films build their cultural imagination, which dialogues with the Portuguese cultural representations. This dialogue allows the evaluation of a hegemonic ideology: a Salazaristic technology of control in the family and its hierarchy of power. In João Canijo’s films, this power technology is still active. However, contrary to the idealised views that common sense proposes, this discretionary power is exercised through latent violence. The filmmaker, therefore, offers a deconstruction of the idealised representations, imposing a starker reality. In a way, Canijo uses the same formula as Eduardo Lourenço: the Portuguese need a more realistic view of themselves, solve traumatic problems and overcome their false image of a great country.

The fiction films of João Canijo reveal how the Salazaristic discourse still exists in contemporary times, pointing to its schizophrenic nature, as it shows, on the other side of the coin, brutal violence. The scene we analysed demonstrates this underground violence and how it arises abruptly and ferociously. Salazar’s idealised families are Canijo’s destroyed families. The tensions of the social transformations of contemporary Portugal still do not allow a social rise, and practices of a patriarchal and violent society remain. These portraits of families are thus a portrait of a complicated future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002, 61–64) refers to a similar problem explaining how the centralist state has been characterized – in its modern history – by a predominance of authoritarianism. Therefore, Portugal has a weak civil society and still is organized in modes of a ‘welfare society,’ that is, a community network of neighbours or kinship who help each other. It is a society which is still governed by symbolic models of rural societies that breed in urban areas.

2. Three films are free adaptations from Greek tragedies: Ganhar a Vida - Antigone (Sophocles); Noite Escura - Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides); Mal Nascida - Electra (Aeschylus and Euripides). For more on the use of the Greek tragedies and the melodrama, see Ribas (2019, 148–160).

3. For a detailed analysis of this plot structure in each one of these films, see Ribas (2019, 119–141).

4. Chariots of Fire music, by Vangelis, was made popular in the homonymous film (1981, Hugh Hudson). It is, at first, a song that is associated with a past (i.e. it is a song from the 80s). On the other, it calls an idea of overcoming and victory. This statement relates to the television viewing as a place of happiness; and as opposed to what happens in the film (and Portugal). In fact, near the end of the scene, when Lúcia is already closed in the stockyard, the camera reveals the image of television: it is the flag of Portugal, and the tone of the music and the people surrounding the flag (on television) is overly positive. Once again, it emphasizes the contrast between the TV and the sequence.

5. This technique of overlapping dialogue would be improved in Blood of My Blood, as a signal of lack of communication inside the family.

6. The epitome of family violence is incest, present in almost all these films. For more details on this form of violence, see Ribas (2019, 175–179).

7. As notes Cláudia Casimiro (2011, 118), through the sociology of history, the ‘physical and psychological aggressions (…) women suffered under the conjugal relation [during the dictatorship], even if they provoked sorrows, they were not experienced by women as an effective abuse by the man. The assaults were integrated into their worldview as part of the natural order of family life and, very specifically, the established hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.’