Directory of World Cinema: Brazil

Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza

Description

Best known to international audiences for its carnivalesque irreverence and recent gangster blockbusters, Brazilian cinema is gaining prominence with critics, at global film festivals and on DVD shelves. This volume seeks to introduce newcomers to Brazilian cinema and to offer valuable insights to those already well versed in the topic. It brings into sharp focus some of the most important movements, genres and themes from across the eras of Brazilian cinema, from cinema novo to musical chanchada, the road movie to cinema de bordas, avant-garde to pornochanchada. Delving deep beyond the surface of cinema, the volume also addresses key themes such as gender, indigenous and diasporic communities and Afro-Brazilian identity. Situating Brazilian cinema within the country's changing position in the global capitalist system, the essays consider uneven modernization, class division, dictatorship, liberation struggles and globalization alongside questions of entertainment and artistic innovation.

Sujets

• Directories
• Película fotográfica
• Reference
• Directory
• History of film
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783202300
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 13 Mo

Extrait

PINAZZA
DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA BRAZIL
BAYMAN
DIRECTORY OF
DIRECTORY OFWORLD CINEMA
BRAZIL WORLD
EDITED BY NATÁLIA PINAZZA AND LOUIS BAYMAN CINEMA
Best known to international audiences for its carnivalesque irreverence and
recent gangster blockbusters, Brazilian cinema is gaining prominence with
critics, at global film festivals and on DVD shelves. This volume seeks to
introduce newcomers to Brazilian cinema and to offer valuable insights to
those already well versed in the topic. It brings into sharp focus some of
the most important movements, genres and themes from across the eras of
Brazilian cinema, from cinema novo to musical chanchada, the road movie to
cinema de bordas, avant-garde to pornochanchada. Delving deep beyond
the surface of cinema, the volume also addresses key themes such as gender,
indigenous and diasporic communities and Afro-Brazilian identity.

Situating Brazilian cinema within the country’s changing position in the global
capitalist system, the essays consider uneven modernization, class division,
dictatorship, liberation struggles and globalization alongside questions of
entertainment and artistic innovation.
Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema aims to play a part in moving intelligent,
scholarly criticism beyond the academy by building a forum for the study of
film that relies on a disciplined theoretical base. Each volume of the Directory
will take the form of a collection of reviews, longer essays and research
resources, accompanied by film stills highlighting significant films and players.
Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971
Dirorld Cinema eISSN 2040-798X
Directory of World Cinema: Brazil ISBN 978-1-78320-009-2
Dirorld Cinema: Brazil eISBN 978-1-78320-230-0
Dirorld Cinema epubISBN 978-1-78320-231-7
NATÁLIA PINAZZA
www.worldcinemadirectory.org
AND LOUIS BAYMANintellect | www.intellectbooks.com
BRAZILVolume 21
directory of
world cinema
Bra Zil
Edited by Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza
intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USAFirst published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press,
1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Publisher: May Yao
Publishing Manager: Melanie Marshall and Jelena Stanovnik
Cover photograph: Madame Satã/Madame Satan, 2002, Karim Aïnouz, courtesy of VideoFilmes.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-edited by Emma Rhys
Typesetting: John Teehan
Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971
Dirorld Cinema eISSN 2040-798X
Directory of World Cinema: Brazil ISBN 978-1-78320-009-2
Dirorld Cinema: Brazil eISBN 978-1-78320-230-0
Dirorld Cinema epubISBN 978-1-78320-231-7
Printed and bound by Gomer Press, UK.
contentsdirectory of
world cinema
Bra Zil
acknowledgments 5 a fro-Brazilian identity 128
Essay
introduction by the editors 6 Reviews
film of the year 10 t he r epresentation of the 148
5 x Favela, Now By Ourselves Brazilian indian
Essay
star study 14 Reviews
Carmen Miranda
diaspora 168
film-makers 18 Essay
Glauber Rocha Reviews
José Mojica Marins
documentary 188Walter Salles
Essay
Reviewsc ultural c rossover 29
Cinema de Bordas in Brazil
adaptation 208
Essayt he r e-emergence of Brazilian 32
Reviewsc inema: a Brief History
festival focus 34comedy 230
Film Festivals in Brazil Essay
Reviews
early years 38
r oad movie 252Essay
Reviews Essay
Reviews
c inema n ovo 58
r ecommended r eading 272Essay
Reviews
Brazilian c inema o nline 274
Gender 82
test your Knowledge 276Essay
Reviews
n otes on c ontributors 279
music 104
Essay filmography 290
Reviews
contentsDirectory of World Cinema
acKnowledGementsDirectory of World Cinema
The Directory of World Cinema: Brazil is the result of the commitment
and enthusiasm of authors and chapter editors from a range of institutions
across the globe, and we would like to thank everyone who has believed
in and contributed to this volume. We are particularly thankful to the
contributors for their efforts in making the volume what it is, and the
chapter editors, who have not only written the introductions to each
chapter but have played a crucial role in determining the shape of the
book. We are very thankful for the opportunity to work on a project that
covers the history and ongoing development of Brazilian cinema. We
would like to express our gratitude to May Yao and Melanie Marshall for
their support and Intellect for creating the Directory of World Cinema and
their dedication to the feld of flm studies. We would also like to extend
special thanks to Stuart Smith, and our other friends and family for their
support and encouragement.
A note on chapter editors:
A number of contributors have played a particular role in selecting the
flms and reviewers for their respective chapters and giving them editorial
direction. They are credited as follows:
Eliska Altmann, ‘Cinema Novo’
Jens Andermann, ‘Documentary’
Jack A Draper III, ‘Music’
Regina R Félix, ‘Comedy’
Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, ‘Literary Adaptation’
Vanessa C Fitzgibbon, ‘Afro-Brazilian Identity’
Natália Pinazza, ‘Early Years’; ‘Representation of the Brazilian Indian’;
‘Road Movie’
Cacilda Rêgo, ‘Diaspora’
Antônio Márcio da Silva, ‘Gender’
Acknowledgments 5
acKnowledGementsDirectory of World Cinema
introduction
By t He editor s
To develop an interest in Brazilian cinema and its cultural roots is to
discover a topic in renewed bloom. Its best-known examples portray the
country while making important contributions to international cinema: the
favela (shantytown) life shown in Cidade de Deus/City of God (Fernando
Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) pushes the gangster flm into a new
direction, while Central do Brasil/Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)
combines the urban realism of its Rio de Janeiro locations with a road trip
into the wilderness and to countryside traditionalism. Figureheads of a near
twenty-year surge in the domestic industry, these flms accompany – and
form part of – a no less remarkable transformation in the global position
of Brazil, which has overturned its (always disputable) designation of ‘Third
World’ status to emerge as a dynamic economic centre. Dynamism also
describes the combination of domestic and international dimensions
at work in Brazilian cinema, and its absorption and transformation of
traditions. Manifested in ways which are both historical and current, it is
such dynamism that this volume exists to convey.
Recently Brazilian cinema has achieved an unprecedented success in
its national market with Tropa de Elite 2/Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within
(José Padilha, 2010), which newspapers proclaimed ‘the most watched
Brazilian flm of all time’ with more than ten million domestic spectators.
The flm testifes to a topic addressed in this volume: the continued surge
in prominence of Brazilian cinema within both national and international
markets, discussed in the introductory essays ‘The Re-emergence of
Brazilian Cinema’ and ‘Film Festivals in Brazil’, as well as in the account
of Brazil’s most exportable contemporary flm-maker, Walter Salles. At
the time of writing the growth in national production shows no signs of
abating, having increased from fourteen commercially released feature
1flms in 1995 to ninety-nine in 2011 in Brazil.
On the other hand, Frederic Jameson has argued that ‘the free
movement of American movies in the world spells the death knell of
national cinemas elsewhere, perhaps of all other national cinemas as
"distinct species".’ (1998: 61). Important though they are, Brazilian
blockbusters such as Elite Squad, Central Station and City of God cannot
overshadow the two remaining forces that affect the national cinema
market: the social inequalities that lead to constraints in terms of the
size of the potential flm audience and hence the number of cinemas,
and the domination of the US flm industry. Data provided by ANCINE
6 BrazilDirectory of World Cinema
shows that in 2011, 99 out of 339 (29.2 per cent) flms screened in Brazil were national
2productions. What is more, the flms which mark the recent success of Brazilian cinema
have been criticized as compromising their national culture by offering Hollywoodized
entertainment.
Such discussion is not new, and the collection that follows includes an account of
the sometimes frustrated attempts to establish a healthy studio system during Brazilian
cinema’s long-lasting ‘Early Years’, and the perennial diffculties of the relationship
with – and oft-criticized perceived accommodation to – Brazil’s main competitor to the
north, in the shape of Hollywood. One strategy employed by Brazilian cinema has been
to counter Hollywood dominance (and to forge links with Latin American and other
cinemas) through a critical rejection of the ‘neocolonial’ state of flm-making described
above. This was in particular the strategy adopted from the late 1950s onwards by the
Cinema Novo flm-makers, whose aesthetic and political revolutionary radicalism is the
subject of the chapters on Cinema Novo and its most famous exponent Glauber Rocha.
Another strategy adopted by some Brazilian producers and flm-makers has been to
appropriate Hollywood production values in flms that embrace a popular commercial
form of cinema in order to secure a share of their home market. This strategy has led to
the development of genres which are distinct to Brazilian cinema such as the
carnivalinspired chanchada (discussed in particular in the chapters ‘Music’ and ‘Comedy’ and in
the introductory essay on Carmen Miranda) in the 1940s and 1950s, and has seen the
instit