Cabem múltiplas imagens na vastidão sertaneja: a repetição e a inovação na teledramaturgia sobre o sertão nordestino da supersérie Onde Nascem os Fortes (2018)

Abstract

The northeastern sertão has been consolidated as a recurrent space in the Brazilian audiovisual productions, often associated with elements such as drought, violence and the persistence of tradition (Albuquerque Júnior, 2011). And the national television, which main fictional product is the telenovela, has followed this tendence, especially because of its concerns with thematizing Brazil and creating a narrative of the nation (Hamburger, 2005; Lopes, 2003). This research, then, focused on understanding the founding practices that constitute national television fiction (Balogh, 2002; Martín-Barbero, 1997; Pallottini, 2012), as well as the images of sertão constructed by Brazilian cultural and audiovisual productions (Cristóvão, 1994; Menezes, 2018; Moreira, 2018), in order to investigate how television practices represent this space, under the dialetic between repetition and innovation (Calabrese, 1987; Rossetti, 2013). The empirical object chosen was the fictional TV show Onde Nascem os Fortes (Land of the Strong, TV Globo, 2018), which sets its story in a space presented as sertão. The aim was to identify in which way the northeastern sertão drawn by this production reflects possible articulations between the traditional images of this space and the ones related to newness, also focusing on its cultural categories of place, characters and themes. In addition, we investigated the reflections, in the construction of this world, of the efforts to produce this show as a superseries, a fictional format placed in the intersection between telenovelas, series and miniseries (Lopes; Orozco Gómez, 2016). The investigative path adopted combined the propositions of Calabrese (1987) and Jost (2007), concerned with the show’s production and exhibition aspects, to the Audiovisual Materiality Analysis (Coutinho, 2016), which provided procedures to a detailed examination of six of its 53 episodes. At the end, we identified, in TV Globo production, a polysemic sertão, that embraces places, characters and themes of multiple characteristics, many of them antagonistic to each other. This universe was built on the repetition of elements traditionally associated with this space, which were inherited from the semantic framework shared in national culture. Their qualities were updated and their connections rearranged, though, forming new meanings and revealing a practice of qualitative innovation. Finally, it is important to highlight that the efforts of producing Onde Nascem os Fortes as a superseries allowed the creation of a cohesive and immersive sertão, in a story with dramatic sets, complex characters and a dense narrative.