Televisualidades da matriz religiosa espiritualista brasileira : uma análise estilística das telenovelas espíritas

Abstract

This research investigates the figuration of spiritualist principles in fictional productions that are conventionally called “spiritualist telenovelas”. Combining the formal dimension (style) with the cultural dimension (context), the aim is to capture the nuances revealed by works produced and aired by TV Globo over the last three decades, namely: A Viagem (1994), Alma Gêmea (2005-2006) and Além do Tempo (2015-2016). Based on these plots, we ask: How does the employment of stylistic resources that construct the image/text composite in spiritist telenovelas collaborate to the configuration of the theme of spiritism? The intention is to analyze, from the televisuality of the works, which marks justify the existence of spiritualist productions and the prominence of this subject in national fiction, especially from the nickname “spiritist soap opera”. In the first chapter, we present the place of Latin America and its cultural particularities, directly related to melodrama as a founding cultural matrix and the central space conquered by television. In the second chapter, we bring the field of visual culture studies as theoretical support to present how images are treated and interpreted culturally, in order to launch the image/text compound as a research tool. The third chapter compiles the methodological path of the research and outlines which narrative events were studied. After this step, five chapters follow presenting the results: chapter 4 deals with narrative events about the death of the protagonists, indicating how televisuality approaches the melodramatic archetypes and presents the space-time issues of the plots. Chapter 5 brings events that show the spiritual influences on the subjects and highlights how, starting from visuality, telenovelas adopt the “expressionist body” as a communicative artifice, besides bringing aspects about intimate life and domestic space as a place of religious experience, as well as the problematization of literate knowledge as religious distinction and male presence as reinforcement of authority. Chapter 6 traces the place of identities and individualities in spiritualist telenovelas and reveals identity conflicts and spiritual disorder experienced by the characters. In chapter 7, narrative events address the figurations of God and show how spiritist telenovelas position a melodramatic dualism between believers and non-believers in God. Finally, chapter 8 highlights the reunion of the protagonist characters in the last chapter of the telenovelas and addresses the consecration of romantic love, opening perspectives for new conceptions of “death” and the happy ending and also dealing with the sacred and the profane in the love experienced in these works. After this set of results, we consider that the spiritualist telenovelas build a melodramatic-spiritualist aesthetic from the televisual spectacularization of spiritualism updatable in function of the stylistic resources.