Brazilian Cinema

Author(s):  
Lisa Shaw

Studies of Brazilian cinema came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of the avant-garde, politicized Cinema Novo, which dialogued with New Wave cinemas in Europe, particularly France, and in other parts of Latin America. Several landmark studies by scholars such as Ismail Xavier and Randal Johnson analyzed the movement in depth and remain key works. Since then, scholarship in both Portuguese and English has broadened its scope to embrace commercially oriented Brazilian films dating back to the early sound era, including popular genres (such as in the work of João Luiz Vieira, Stephanie Dennison, and Lisa Shaw), as well as the historical evolution of Brazilian cinema, and the relationship between the film industry and the state throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium. Most recently, various scholars in Brazil and abroad, notably Lúcia Nagib, have analyzed the nation’s cinematic output, particularly since its “rebirth” in the mid-1990s—the so-called retomada—from a thematic perspective, focusing on the reworking of themes from Cinema Novo—such as poverty and violence—in nonpoliticized, box-office hits, such as Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998, dir. Walter Salles) and Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002, dirs. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund), or within the wider context of Latin American production. Following in the wake of the seminal work of Robert Stam, issues of race and ethnicity continue to provide a focus for studies of Brazilian cinema, as do questions of sexuality and gender. Scholars are increasingly turning their attentions to questions of the national and the transnational in post-retomada films, and are now looking at Brazilian film history from new perspectives, such as the role and significance of film stars and their marketing, as well as cinema’s relationship with other media and arts.

Author(s):  
Peter Baker

Glauber Rocha de Andrade (Vitória da Conquista, 1939–1981) was a Brazilian film critic, screenwriter, producer, and director. Arguably the most important director of the cinema nôvo (New Cinema) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he began his career as a film critic, writing for well-known Brazilian journals about Italian neorealism and the French New Wave – two crucial influences on his own work. His writings criticized Brazil's commercial cinema and called for a new type of film that would represent the reality of Brazilian life. His most famous essay in this regard is "Estética da Fome" ("An Esthetic of Hunger," 1965). The essay reflects on the neo-colonial condition of Brazilian cinema through the analogy of the starvation of the Brazilian people and the intellectual starvation of its cinematic tradition; anti-colonial revolutionary violence is the only possible solution to these plights. This theoretical viewpoint is reflected in his Deu e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), a film which earned him recognition on the international scene and in Brazil as the unchallenged leader of a new generation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-53
Author(s):  
Geoffroy de Laforcade

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Bolivia was a hub of Andean transnational solidarities rooted in artisanal trades, and spearheaded by migrant workers whose cultural, educational and social activism reflected a mosaic of influences from older militant traditions in neighbouring countries. Virtually absent from existing overviews of Latin American anarchism in English, Bolivian anarchism engaged extensively with autonomous indigenous and communal movements, and is therefore a distinctly revealing case from which to evaluate the engagement of anarchists with indigenous majorities in the Andean space where they lived. This article explores the work of sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose dense tapestry of pioneering scholarship on the intertwining horizons of conquest, rebellion, republicanism, resistance and populism in Bolivia over five hundred years includes profound and nuanced assessments of indigeneity and gender, pointing to the need for a more nuanced understanding of how racialised identities are defined in society, and the ways in which they are deployed discursively by revolutionary movements. From the rebellions Tupac Katari and Pablo Zárate Willka in the late 19th century, the subsequent quest of Aymara 'caciques apoderados' for allies among organized artisans and the urban poor, struggles of anarchist women, independent agrarian trade unionism, and the Katarista movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the popular insurgencies of the past three decades, Cusicanqui's work threads together archival, oral and iconographic history while enlisting the participation of popular movements in an ongoing critique of the legacies of internal colonialism, racialization, patriarchal inheritances, and languages of resistance in Bolivia; as well as the lessons of struggles for autonomy, freedom and decolonization in which anarchists and the movements they subsequently influenced took part.


Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.


Author(s):  
Moe Taylor

Abstract During the 1960s, the Cuban government attempted to play a leadership role within the Latin American Left. In the process Cuban leaders departed from Marxist−Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the developing nations of the Global South. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualisation of the role of the Marxist−Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the established leftist parties and party politics in general. The Cuban/North Korean theory of the party had a tangible influence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as revolutionary groups in these societies took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 056-064
Author(s):  
María Belén Riveiro ◽  

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-81
Author(s):  
Etienne Morales

This article focuses on the transformation of the carrier Cubana de aviación before and after the 1959 Cuban revolution. By observing Cubana's management, labour force, equipment, international passenger and freight traffic, this article aims to outline an international history of this Latin American flag carrier. The touristic air relationships between the American continent and Spain that could be observed in the 1950s were substituted – in the 1960s and 1970s – by a web of political “líneas de la amistad” [Friendship Flights] with Prague, Santiago de Chile, East Berlin, Lima, Luanda, Managua, Tripoli and Bagdad. This three-decade period allows us to interrogate breaks and continuities in the Cuban airline travel sector and to challenge the traditional interpretations of Cuban history. This work is based on diplomatic and corporative archives from Cuba, United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain and France and the aeronautical international press.


William Blake ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 124-144
Author(s):  
Sarah Haggarty ◽  
Jon Mee ◽  
Nicolas Tredell
Keyword(s):  

2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Howard J. Wiarda

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.


1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicos Mouzelis

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.


1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hartlyn

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars interested in studying Latin American politics inevitably were drawn to the study of military coups d'etat and their causes. In the 1980s, a number of the countries in Latin America whose civilian political regimes were overthrown by military regimes may undergo or attempt to consolidate processes of democratization or redemocratization. Thus scholarly interest has tended to shift away from seeking to understand the causes for military overthrows of civilian regimes toward the study of prospects and processes of democratization or redemocratization in Latin America. In this context, the reexamination of earlier examples of durable transitions from authoritarian military regimes to civilian regimes may shed light on the relative importance of different factors in determining particular outcomes. This article carries out such a re-examination for the case of Colombia, analyzing the transition from rule by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) through the crucial period of the interim military junta (1957-1958) to the consociational National Front political regime.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document