In 1931, when Portugal can finally see and hear herself in talkies, that most progressive of contemporary visual art forms, her incarnation is Maria Severa, “a michela cigana” [the gypsy harlot] with whose death “morria um pouco da alma portuguesa” [a little bit of Portugal's soul died]. The fact that Leitão de Barros's Franco-Portuguese production of A Severa – Júlio Dantas's story of a pathetic nineteenth-century prostitute whose untouchable social class combined with her surrender to fate is the source of all of her suffering – should be Portugal's first sound film indicates the Estado Novo's uphill battle to penetrate the national psyche with its modernizing aesthetics. Two years later, Cottinelli Telmo's irreverent A Canção de Lisboa announces itself as Portugal's first self-produced talkie, and we are left wondering why, in light of the Estado Novo's anti-fado rhetoric, a second fadista film should mark the birth of the young regime's ideological progress. Whereas A Severa and Canção appear before the establishment of Portugal's Ministry of National Propaganda [SPN], these films do not adhere to the regime's prescription for national cinema. As a result, these privileged movies present values and images that, shortly thereafter, will be purged from Portuguese cinema for the rest of the decade: values linked to a people who are dissatisfied with the previous quarter of a century of experimental democracy, yet who are cynical about the seemingly progressive ideals of the nascent state. And as the fado, bullfights, and folklore are common motifs in A Severa and Canção, these films allow us to observe a dialogue between Portugal's first talkies and to catch a glimpse of the nation's popular culture before the Estado Novo's propaganda has a chance to recontextualize it to promote its own agenda.

After two decades of political turmoil following the fall of the monarchy (1910) and the coup d’état of the First Republic (1926), the Estado Novo would dig its heels into popular culture through carefully planned propaganda.