In the 1970s, the first Brazilian researches on television fiction emerged and telenovelas (it is not American soap opera) became the main object of academic productions. In cultural studies, the question of national identity is a current point. Telenovela is not a national creation, but Brazilian professionals have developed products with their own characteristics. Over the last two decades, M.I.V. Lopes has been investigating the telenovelas as a narrative of the nation and E. Hamburger has been analyzing the telenovelas and the interpretations of Brazil. However, few academic studies analyses the relationship between the constructions of national identities on telenovelas and the collective memory. I propose to investigate the construction of collective memory, in Brazil and Portugal, focusing on the telenovela Gabriela (1975), which due to its repercussion, is representative of the discussion about national identity and memory.
Jorge Amado's book, "Gabriela, Cravo e Canela", was published in 1958 and, by 1975, already had many awards and 50 editions, about 540,000 copies in Brazil and over 2 million worldwide, in more of 30 languages. The book's television adaptation had 135 chapters and it was produced by TV Globo (Brazilian broadcast company) in 1975, commemorating the company's tenth anniversary. Gabriela was the first Brazilian telenovela sold to another continent. It premiered in Portugal in 1977, opening a commercial and cultural space for the sale of Brazilian television products.
It is interesting to analyze the collective memory of the novel and its adaptation to television. The audiovisual scene in which the actress Sônia Braga, as Gabriela, climbs a rooftop to catch a kite is part of the Brazilian collective memory, having been repeated numerous times on television and eagerly awaited in the 2012 remake. This emblematic scene is not part of the book, but this detail may go unnoticed. As says Jorge Amado, the author of the literary oeuvre, although the adaptation is always a new work, it retains the spirit and content of the original.
In oral testimony, in Brazil and Portugal, the reports reveal memory constructions about the telenovela Gabriela. Issues such as female emancipation, coronelismo (characteristic of the Brazilian political and social system) and sexual behavior are memories that viewers like to tell about. The same happens in Portugal, when people usually link the telenovela's plot to the historical reality of "Revolução dos Cravos" on April 1974. The audience in the European country was huge, which made the newspapers coined the term "Gabrielomania".
Another interesting aspect that deserves analysis is the nostalgia culture around Brazilian telenovelas. There are websites selling old telenovelas, there is a cable channel especially dedicated to reruns of telenovelas and television shows, and there is Globoplay platform (TV Globo streaming) that has in its catalog countless old telenovelas. These movements indicate a symptom of the memory culture of our time (A. Huyssen). The memory of telenovelas affects people in different ways, but there is a shared memory that builds a narrative of representation of national culture.
