The National and the Transnational in Brazilian Postdictatorship Cinema (original) (raw)

2020, Transnational Portuguese Studies

After decades of ignoring or partially acknowledging state crimes during the military regime (1964-1985), Brazil has been undergoing a unique post-transitional experience marked by debates about human rights violations and the importance of remembering. This new memory politics has been conceptualized in predominantly national terms, which defies recent contributions to the field of memory studies calling for a new, ‘transnational’ way of understanding how memories are collectively produced and disseminated. Such an emphasis on the transnational has also been significant in modern film studies, and in this chapter I employ concepts derived from this body of work to examine the tensions between, on the one hand, the turn towards transnationalism, and, on the other, the emphasis on the national in cinematic reconstructions of collective memories about the Brazilian dictatorship. In doing so, I address two sets of questions. First, what is meant by the national and the transnational in relation to postdictatorship cinema? Second, what aspects of the past are more appropriately addressed in films that utilize a distinctively national framework for remembering and what new elements are brought to light in films that widen the focus to locate the past within a wider, transnational context?

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