Soaps with a Latin scent
Araceli Ortiz de Urbina and Asbel López, UNESCO Courier journalists
Actress Patricia Pillar, heroine of the Brazilian soap opera Rei do
Gado (“The Cattle King”).
Lucilia Santos and Rubens de Falco in a scene from Esclava Isaura
(“Isaura the Slave”).
‘What I like about Marimar is that she has the
same problems as we do. She’s poor like us. Her house was burned down. They mistreated
her. They degraded her. She’s almost Filipina.’
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A world market “Although selling telenovelas on the international market is a major cultural
industry, its economics are less important than its cultural impact,” says researcher
Daniel Mato, of Venezuela’s Central University. “They’re primarily produced for the
home market, where it is hoped returns will recoup production costs.” Mato found
that advertising during soaps was the main source of income for TV stations, while
earnings from foreign sales were only a tiny percentage of the income from advertising
in the home market (8 per cent in the case of Radio Caracas Televisión and
Venevisión, in Venezuela, 5 per cent for Televisa de México and 2.5
per cent for Brazil’s TV Globo). |
Charged with suspense
and fantasy, Latin American soap operas are pouring off the production lines into
living rooms all over the world
During Ramadan last January,
some of the mosques in Abidjan decided to bring forward prayer time. This thoughtful
gesture saved thousands of the faithful from a painful dilemma–whether to do their
religious duty or miss the latest episode of Marimar, a Mexican TV melodrama which
has turned the whole country into addicts of telenovelas, soap operas made in Latin
America.
“At 7.30 sharp in the evening, when Marimar comes on, everything stops in Côte
d’Ivoire,” the evening newspaper Ivoir’Soir noted a few months ago. The programme,
which has attracted more local fans than the 1998 World Cup, arrived in Africa after
being a similar hit in Indonesia and the Philippines. In 1997, its female star was
received in Manila like a foreign head of state.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs hold
their breath so as not to miss the tiniest detail of the Venezuelan soap opera Kassandra.
“We know Kassandra’s innocent and we want her trial stopped,” the townspeople of
Kucevo, in southeastern Serbia, wrote to the Venezuelan government, with a copy to
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. This is just one of many examples of how fiction
can invade real life and how far people come to identify with it.
Marimar and Kassandra are classics among the thousands of soap operas Latin America
has turned out over the past 40 years at the rate of about 100 a year. They are love
stories which have plenty of sub-plots and move along at a brisk pace. Their characters
overcome countless obstacles–social class, family ties, conflicts of interest and
so on–to finally win through despite all the ambushes of fate. In all of them, morality
and goodness triumph and the bad guys get punished in a happy ending where everyone
is reconciled. In this respect they are very different from Anglo-Saxon soap operas,
in which conflicts get solved in the course of a few virtually self-contained episodes,
which means they can be broadcast in any order.
The plot of a Latin American telenovela includes a strong dose of suspense. Each
episode has a dramatic ending to make sure viewers watch the next one. This tactic
produced a new way of making some pocket money when Kassandra was shown in the Balkans.
People in Bulgaria, where the soap was running 10 episodes ahead of Yugoslav TV,
would tell their neighbours across the border what was coming up next–in exchange
for 10 dinars ($2).
The worldwide success of these soaps suggests they might be something more than just
a carefully-engineered collection of dirty deeds and superficial emotions. Their
hackneyed themes don’t often amount to anything of great artistic value, but the
scripts aren’t always puerile and the dialogue and characters are less predictable
than one might expect. Telenovelas have accumulated 40 years of experience and professionalism
and turned into an industry which can buy the best actors, scriptwriters and directors
in Latin America.
Urban violence
and political corruption
Since the 1970s, producers have also tried to go beyond classic melodrama and have
adapted the works of writers like Mario Benedetti, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Amado.
In recent years, authors, directors and scriptwriters in the Latin American film
industry have brought new life to the genre by broadening its range of subjects and
bringing it closer to real life. These “new-wave” telenovelas dig straight into issues
like police corruption, influence-peddling, urban violence, impunity and the role
of mafia money, as in last year’s Colombian production La Mujer del presidente (“The
President’s Wife”) and, the year before, Nada personal (“Nothing Personal”), which
was made in Mexico.
Soaps like this have sparked off social developments which in the past would have
been unthinkable. Venezuela’s Por estas calles (“Through These Streets”), screened
in 1992, was about the decline of a corrupt and powerful ruler, who reminded many
viewers of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the country’s president at
the time. Andrés Pérez was caught up in a corruption scandal which
drove him from office two years later “because of this soap among other reasons,”
says its producer, Alberto Giarroco. In Brazil, O Salvador da Patria (“Saviour of
the Fatherland”; 1989) was accused, on the other hand, of favouring the presidential
campaign of Inácio Lula Da Silva, since it closely mirrored his life story
as a half-literate peasant who rose to be a powerful trade union leader and presidential
candidate. “Lula”, however, was not elected.
A multi-million-dollar
industry
This new trend, which is very popular with Latin American audiences, shows the vitality
of the soap tradition, which can affect politicians and adapt to current events.
The telenovela, says Colombian scriptwriter Fernando Gaitán, has become “the
continent’s main channel of communication, drawing larger audiences than the cinema,
novels or the theatre.” But as well as being a firmly-established regional craze
which has now spread all over the world, it is also a multi-million-dollar industry.
The biggest production companies–in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela–present their work
at international television trade fairs and have sales offices in Miami and Europe
which distribute their products over two-thirds of the globe (see box).
Prime time productions
Brazil’s TV Globo is perhaps the most typical of these firms and has sold telenovelas
to 123 countries, according to its international sales director, Orlando Marques.
The TV Globo telenovelas are screened from six in the evening on and their 160 or
so episodes cost between $50,000 and $60,000 each to make. The local viewing audience
is around 80 million people. A 30-second prime-time advertising spot when the soaps
are on the air costs $60,000 or so. TV Globo has four recording studios and a script-writing
staff of about 1,500. While the soap is showing, polls and discussion groups are
held in several cities to gather viewers’ opinions and suggestions. Telenovelas were
responsible for almost $1.6 billion in billings for 1996, 60 per cent of Brazilian
TV’s ad billings. “Without telenovelas, TV Globo might not exist,” says Jorge Adib,
the company’s former international sales director. This is true of Latin American
television overall. The soap opera industry has helped train professionals and highly
specialized technicians, while also encouraging the emergence of a Latin American
star system.
Latin American soaps really took off worldwide in the 1980s when, after conquering
the European market, they began to interest Arab, African and Asian countries. Now
they are as much a symbol of Latin America as salsa and football. Some are tremendous
hits, like the Brazilian soap Esclava Isaura in countries as different as China (where
it was shown for the first time in 1980 in Mandarin, and again in 1983), Poland and
Cuba. Others, like Venezuela’s Cristal, which has been shown seven times in Spain,
never seem to lose their popularity. Los Ricos También Lloran (“The Rich Cry
Too”), a Mexican production, proved a real tearjerker in Russia, where two-thirds
of Moscow’s impoverished inhabitants saw that money doesn’t always buy happiness.
Topacio (“Topaz”), from Venezuela, has been sold to 45 countries.
What’s the secret of their success? Do growing demand and low production costs explain
their extraordinarily wide distribution? Or is it, as some believe, that Latin exoticism
and emotional exuberance draw the viewers? “It’s a fact that stories with lots of
local colour, showing typical Latin American scenes and people, are most popular
in the rest of the world,” says researcher Daniel Mato.
The current success of Brazil’s Rei do Gado (“The Cattle King”), set in the 19th
century during the war between landowners and landless peasants, and Colombia’s Café
con Aroma de Mujer (“Coffee with the Scent of a Woman”) which tells a love story
amid the ups and downs of big players in the coffee industry, seems to confirm this.
Some, like Henri N’Koumo, a journalist on the Abidjan newspaper Fraternité
Matin, say TV soaps are popular “because they touch very deep chords. Despite cultural
differences, people feel very comfortable with these tales. They prefer them to the
French ones which they find too intellectual.”
Filipino columnist Conrado de Quiros agrees. “Filipino soaps are too familiar. American
soaps are too alien. Latin American ones are neither,” he says. They do not fall
into the over-sophistication of American super-luxury or the intellectualism of European
productions, but still allow people to escape from a humdrum existence. The Manila
Daily Inquirer newspaper says Marimar offers relief to Filipinos “trying to escape
from the ugliness of their surroundings, the ugliness of their poverty, the ugliness
of their public officials.”
A real sense
of complicity
All telenovelas are built around topics which “have existed since the beginning of
human society,” says Arquímides Rivero, one of the founders of the genre in
Venezuela. These universal situations and the feeling of identification with a story
inspired by real life without being a carbon copy of it explains the popularity of
soap operas with such an eclectic range of audiences. Viewers live through the sufferings
and misfortunes of the characters and develop a real sense of complicity with them.
“What I like about Marimar,” says Ligaya Magbanua, who works in a Manila restaurant,
“is that she has the same problems as we do. She’s poor like us. Her house was burned
down. They mistreated her. They degraded her. She’s almost Filipina.”
Perhaps the main reason for this success is to be found in the rationale and ethics
of melodrama. Researcher Nora Mazziotti says viewers follow for months the mishaps,
injustices, dangers and threats which the characters endure before savouring with
them the ultimate triumph of love and justice–observing that in the make-believe
world, and maybe nowhere else, there’s justice. That’s something to be happy about.
• Robert C. Allen (editor), To Be Continued... Soap operas around the world, Routledge, London and New York, 1995.
• Daniel Mato, Telenovelas: Transnacionalización de la industria y transformaciones del género (“Telenovelas: transnationalization of the industry and trasnformation of the genre”) in N. García Canclini, Industrias culturales e integración latinoamericana (“Cultural industries and Latin American integration”), Grijalbo publishers, Mexico, 1999.
• Nora Mazziotti, La industria de la telenovela, Paidós publishers, Buenos Aires, 1996.