Documentary Filmmaking In Contemporary Brazil

"Like Brazilian society, documentary filmmaking is undergoing transformation, becoming an increasingly inclusive and diverse field, intervening in the ongoing struggle for social justice and equal distribution of power. As the first English-language monograph to focus on this body of work, this book examines the ways in which contemporary documentaries explore the borders between centers and margins, visibilities and invisibilities, silences and speech, and forms of authority and their contestation. Centered on an eclectic cluster of documentaries -from ethnographic documentaries and indigenous videos to films concerned with social and criminal justice, including first-person, essayistic films - this book brings into view the transformations of both Brazilian society and filmmaking, ultimately examining the genre's preoccupation with archival content"--

WINNER of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph WINNER of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Best Monograph prize Guilherme Carréra's compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of Stone (2013) and White Out, Black In (2014); Rio de Janeiro - ExPerimetral (2016), The Harbour (2013), Tropical Curse (2016) and HU Enigma (2011); and indigenous territories - Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don't They? (2009), Tava, The House of Stone (2012), Two Villages, One Path (2008) and Guarani Exile (2011). In portraying ruinscapes in different ways, these powerful films articulate critiques of the notions of progress and (under) development in the Brazilian nation. Carréra invites the reader to walk amid the debris and reflect upon the strategies of spatial representation employed by the filmmakers. He addresses this body of films in relation to the legacies of Cinema Novo, Tropicália and Cinema Marginal, asking how these presentday films dialogue with or depart from previous traditions. Through this dialogue, he argues, the selected films challenge not only documentary-making conventions but also the country's official narrative.

The first comprehensive study of Brazilian documentary filmmaking, offering a sweeping look at more than a century of cinematic journalism, propaganda, and artistry.

This volume examines Brazilian films released between 1995 and 2010, with special attention to issues of race, ethnicity and national identity. Focusing on the idea of the nation as an 'imagined community', the author discuss the various ways in which dominant ideas about brasilidade (Brazilian national consciousness) are dramatised, supported or attacked in contemporary fiction and documentary films.

At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works. Filling this void, Brazilian Women's Filmmaking focuses on women's film production in Brazil from the mid-1970s to the current era. Leslie L. Marsh explains how women's filmmaking contributed to the reformulation of sexual, cultural, and political citizenship during Brazil's fight for the return and expansion of civil rights during the 1970s and 1980s and the recent questioning of the quality of democracy in the 1990s and 2000s. She interprets key films by Ana Carolina and Tizuka Yamasaki, documentaries with social themes, and independent videos supported by archival research and extensive interviews with Brazilian women filmmakers. Despite changes in production contexts, recent Brazilian women's films have furthered feminist debates regarding citizenship while raising concerns about the quality of the emergent democracy. Brazilian Women's Filmmaking offers a unique view of how women's audiovisual production has intersected with the reconfigurations of gender and female sexuality put forth by the women's movements in Brazil and continuing demands for greater social, cultural, and political inclusion.

This volume examines Brazilian films released between 1995 and 2010, with special attention to issues of race, ethnicity and national identity. Focusing on the idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, the author discuss the various ways in which dominant ideas about brasilidade (Brazilian national consciousness) are dramatised, supported or attacked in contemporary fiction and documentary films.

Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil provides a distinctive contribution to the field of visual culture through a study of still and moving images of Brazil in the first four decades of the twentieth century, when the camera played a key role in making Brazilian peoples and places visible to a variety of audiences. The book explores what is distinctive about the visual representation of Brazil in an era of modernisation, also attending to the significance of the different technical properties of film and photography for the writing of new histories of visual technologies. It offers new insights into the work of key writers, photographers, anthropologists, and filmmakers, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mário de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker. Unearthing a wealth of materials from archives in the U.S., Britain, and Brazil, the book seeks to contribute to the postcolonial theoretical project of pinpointing locally distinctive histories of visual technologies and practices.

Drawing on the challenges of urban expansion and increasing population density facing contemporary Brazil, Shifting Horizons is an interdisciplinary investigation of the treatment of social difference in documentary film and photography and its potential to effect social and political change. Explores the Brazilian documentary tradition of conscientização, alongside new movements such as inclusão visual, introducing the voices of a range of innovative and highly contemporary artists, filmmakers, and cultural commentators Discusses traditionally marginalized urban spaces using the concepts of inequality, segregation, integration, and relationality Bridges the domains of film and photography and brings greater awareness to Brazilian cultural output Highlights new ways in which today’s social documentary practice and production can inspire social and cultural transformation, in Brazil and around the world