José Mojica Marins’ style in The Awakening of the Beast (1969) as a device for social criticism

Abstract

This article analyses José Mojica Marins' style in The Awakening of the Beast, understanding it as a constituent element of social criticism. Based on a problematisation of the concept of style, the text draws on contributions from David Bordwell (2008, 2013), Meyer Schapiro (1953), and Erwin Panofsky (1991, 1995) to define style as a historically situated an expressive system of technical and formal choices that organises the film’s materiality and produces effects of meaning. In dialogue with Rodrigo Carreiro (2013, 2019), Lúcio Piedade (2002) and Laura Cánepa (2008), the study recognises in the filmmaker's work an authorial horror, marked by a peculiar style that explores the fusion between popular and erudite culture, the grotesque and performative excess. The reflection also incorporates the readings of Giancarlo Couto and Carlos Gerbase (2021), articulated thorough the notions of the monster and the abnormal, to understand the figure of Zé do Caixão as a synthesis of moral deviation and social transgression. The objective is to identify how Mojica's work, marked by genre heterogeneity, precarious production, and cultural syncretism, consolidates a recurring set of visual and sound strategies that, in The Awakening of the Beast, are articulated with a metalinguistic structure, the representation of urban moral decadence, and ironic normative discourses. It is concluded that Mojica's style, far from being merely ornamental, constitutes the critical mechanism of the work itself: by embracing excess, theatricality, and enunciative ambiguity, Mojica transforms horror into a device for reflection on moral hypocrisy and the control mechanisms in force in the context of the military dictatorship.