Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema - (Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality) (Paperback)

About the Book

Presents a new history of Brazilian Cinema, based on its dialogue with other arts and media

Book Synopsis

From its inception, Brazilian cinema has combined extra-filmic artistic and cultural forms, both local and imported, resulting in an original aesthetic blend. Theatre, dance, music, circus, radio, television and the plastic arts left a distinctive mark on Brazilian cinema's poetics and politics, as can be observed in a host of fascinating phenomena analysed in this book, including: the film prologues that connected the screen to the stage in the 1920s; the chanchada musical comedies, inflected by vaudeville theatre and the radio; the manguebeat and árido movie movements that blurred the boundaries between music and film; and contemporary multimedia installations and other experiments. By adopting intermediality as a historiographic method, this book reconstructs the history and cultural wealth behind filmic expressions in Brazilian cinema.

From the Back Cover

This book resorts to a new, intermedial method in order to reconstruct the history of Brazilian cinema. From its inception Brazilian cinema has combined extra-filmic artistic and medial forms, resulting in an original aesthetic blend. Theatre, dance, music, circus, radio, television and the plastic arts have left a distinctive mark on Brazilian cinema's poetics and politics, as can be observed in a host of fascinating phenomena analysed in this book, including: screen and stage interactions in the silent era; the chanchada musical comedies, inflected by vaudeville theatre and the radio; Glauber Rocha's intermedial cosmogony; the manguebeat and árido movie movements that blurred the boundaries between music and film; and contemporary multimedia installations among others. By adopting intermediality as a historiographic method, this book will bring to the public, for the first time, the polymathic cultural wealth behind filmic expressions in Brazilian cinema through the lens of its most authoritative experts. Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her many books include Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (2020), World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011) and Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007). She is the co-director with Samuel Paiva of the award-winning documentary Passages. She is editor, with Julian Ross, of the World Cinema series and, with Tiago de Luca, of the Film Thinks series. Luciana Corrêa de Araújo is Assistant Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil. She is the author of A crônica de cinema no Recife dos anos 50 (1997) and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade: primeiros tempos (2013) and co-editor of Estudos de cinema e audiovisual Socine Estadual São Paulo (2012). Tiago de Luca is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (2022), Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014) and the editor (with Nuno Barradas Jorge) of Slow Cinema (2016). He is the editor (with Lúcia Nagib) of the Film Thinks series.

About the Author

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her many books include Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (2020), World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011) and Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007). She is the co-director with Samuel Paiva of the award-winning documentary Passages. She is editor, with Julian Ross, of the World Cinema series and, with Tiago de Luca, of the Film Thinks series.

Luciana Corrêa de Araújo is Assistant Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil. She is the author of A crônica de cinema no Recife dos anos 50 (1997) and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade: primeiros tempos (2013) and co-editor of Estudos de cinema e audiovisual Socine Estadual São Paulo (2012).