(2022) 'Photographs of the Invisible: Intermedial Figurations of Social Exclusion in Babás and Aquarius' in Lúcia Nagib, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo and Tiago de Luca (eds) Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Participatory Arts in International Development , 2020
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it seeks to discuss the emergence of documentary participatory filmmaking in Brazil, especially from the 1960s, and the development of identity issues as part of this process. In order to trace this emergence, we examine the work of ‘mainstream’ filmmakers, linked to Cinema Novo, also known as Modern Brazilian Cinema,1 and then film projects that involve independent filmmakers working with underrepresented groups, such as women and black and indigenous communities, examining questions of intersectionality and how these relate to issues around political and cultural resistance. The study of these sets of films is directly connected to the realisation of documentary practices by one of the authors of this essay (Sobrinho). Thus, this process serves to contextualise the second part of the chapter: a description and reflection upon the results of a participatory filmmaking project involving a group of young women from Brazil’s northeast region, and specifically the municipal district of Codó in the state of Maranhão.
BRAZILIAN CINEMA AND SOCIAL INCLUSION: THE ISSUE OF DIFFERENCES IN THE CONTEMPORARY MEDIA ENVIRONMENT AND ITS REFLECTIONS BASED ON MOVIE ANALYSIS: ``CÃO GUIA`` AND ``DO ``LUTO À LUTA`` (Atena Editora), 2023
The work aims to address the issue of social inclusion in relation to issues related to media discourse, in the last twenty-five years there has been a growing participation in relation to the documentary genre in national circuits and festivals. The imagery media, mainly cinema, has approached the theme of inclusion during these last years in a way that broadens the spectator's gaze, starting to observe a physical, sensorial, visual difficulty, without any kind of prejudice that is often linked to a lack of information and the judgment of the incapacity of the human being. In this sense, contemporary Brazilian cinema has been building new perspectives on social relations, from this inclusive perspective, people with disabilities (PCD) with reference to the analysis of two films: a fictional short and another of the documentary type that seek to inform and expand this look at the issue of difference. The fictional short film:``Cão Guia`` (Gustavo Acioli, 1999) which creates the possibilities of a life without restrictions both in terms of love and social life independently for the visually impaired and the documentary aspect of ``Do Luto à Luta`` (Evaldo Mocarzel, 2005) which shows the difficulties of people with Down Syndrome in a way never before discussed in the Brazilian filmic universe until then, in a personal way, and in a direct way, it deals with prejudices, challenges and sensitivity, leading to discussion, to question of the school and its participation in the inclusion process, and thus observe the way in which we begin to observe the other based on the Brazilian filmic context.
A Cosmética da Fome: The Staging of Poverty in Recent Arts-Focused Documentary Film
The narrative of hope is one that permeates documentary and fiction films focused on favela life in Brazil. Whether expressed through the jaded and seemingly hopeless youth involved in drug trafficking or, as in Only When I Dance (2009), through hard work and dedication building the hope of joining a classical ballet company, hope permeates constructions of favela life. This chapter looks at the role of the benevolent artist in two documentary films: Mariza Estrella in Only When I Dance (2009) and Vik Muníz (2010) in Waste Land. I argue that the narrative of art’s potential to inspire hope and to be a liberatory practice in fact reaffirms social hierarchies and racial stratification. I problematize both the role of the altruistic artist and the role of art as a privileged space for inciting social change.
Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema Alfredo
A major intervention in theory and analysis, this generative collection, featuring first-rank senior and junior scholars, deploys intermediality as the historiographic key to open up the secret chambers of Brazilian cinema, revealing the cross-fertilisation of arts and media as a springboard for creativity. Cumulatively, the text reveals Brazilian cinema and media to be extraordinarily avant-garde friendly, manifested in a cornucopia of nested arts and genres (music video, vaudeville, carnival, painting). The corpus is Brazilian, but the theories and methods are transnational and relevant to all cinemas.' Robert Stam, New York University 'This volume sheds much-needed light on the complex and wide-ranging dialogues with the other arts and media that have always characterised Brazilian cinema. Bringing together work by established scholars and emerging academic "stars", it furthermore illustrates how the intermedial method can be used to interrogate and nuance traditional approaches to the study of any cinema culture.' Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool 'With its focus on intermediality, this excellent volume offers new, multifaceted and innovative perspectives on the dynamic and creative relationship between Brazilian cinema and different areas of cultural and artistic practice from almost the beginning of film production in the country until the present. An important contribution to the field.' Randal Johnson, University of California Los Angeles Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
Intermediality in Brazilian cinema: the case of Tropicália
Screen Journal, 2019
An intermedial experiment par excellence, Tropicália unleashed a veritable artistic and political earthquake whose aftershocks can still be felt today. An immediate response to the events of its day, Tropicália collected and made sense of the debris of the left-wing revolutionary utopia shattered by the military coup in Brazil in 1964. Rather than mourning the demise of the national project as many of their contemporaries had done, Tropicália artists took the political catastrophe as an opportunity to dismiss hierarchies and break the boundaries between local and imported traditions, high and popular cultures, avant-garde and commercial practices, good and bad taste. Most importantly, in relation to our approach, their outputs and interventions recognized no frontiers between the established arts and media but circulated freely across them.
Studies in Hispanic Cinema, 2011
Analysing two contemporary Brazilian films set in the Northeastern backlands and focusing on the films' use of spatial practices involving flight and migration, this essay argues that spatial practices are instrumental in articulating new narrative possibilities that imagine the backlands as a locus of change and destabilization. The essay outlines two cultural formations: first, the role of spatial practices (migration, flight, settlement and conquest) in processes of imagining Brazilian cultural identity and modernization, and second, the 1960s Cinema Novo movement's definition of a critical poetics by revisiting the role of love in mainstream cinema and its use of this element to create new narrative possibilities, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the movement's subversion of social and cinematographic norms. This close reading of the films also historicizes them in relation to the Cinema Novo's approach to the Northeast.
Intermediality in Brazilian Silent Cinema: Luiz de Barros’s Works and Intermedial Strategies
Edinburgh University Press, 2022
Luiz 'Lulu' de Barros was one of Brazil's most prolific filmmakers. Between 1916 and 1977 he directed over 100 films, which included features and shorts, fiction and non-fiction films. Barros also worked extensively with theatre and scenography, as director, set designer, playwright and impresario, in theatres, casinos and other entertainment venues. His constant transit across different types of media and forms of entertainment contributed to the construction and viability of a career that spanned no fewer than seven decades. Although intermedial strategies, alongside constant dialogues with foreign cinema, characterise his entire career, this chapter will focus on the period between the 1910s and 1920s. This is because the study of Barros's activities in that period can enlighten us on some significant intermedial dynamics pertaining to Brazilian silent cinema as a whole. There are no known surviving film elements of Barros's silent films. Albeit distressing, this does stimulate an analysis of intermedial relations beyond film texts. Following Rick Altman (1992: 6-7), who proposes the concept of cinema as 'event' rather than as 'text', this chapter aims to consider 'a broad spectrum of objects, processes, and activities'. In Brazilian cinema scholarship, a key reference over the past decades has been Jean-Claude Bernardet's book Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro (Classical Historiography of Brazilian Cinema), published in 1995. Although it does not deal directly with the concept of intermediality, the book leans towards this field of enquiry. Its methodological proposals aim at dismantling and refuting the classical historiography that tends to isolate film production from other related arenas. By suggesting a series of 'research itineraries', Bernardet (1995: 85) argues that the 'crossover of diverse territories can enrich the way in which each one of them is understood'. 2 Avoiding nationalistic and overgeneralised approaches, he analyses the production of the socalled Bela Época (Belle Époque) of Brazilian cinema, between 1907 and 1911, by means of transversal cuts or 'veins' (filões, in the original) and draws several comparisons: between the most successful genres back then (crime films,