Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema

Abstract

This book resorts to a new, intermedial method in order to reconstruct the history of Brazilian cinema. It eschews teleological schemes derived from evolutionary chronologies and classical-modern or centre-periphery models, which inevitably lead to the privileging of certain film forms over others on the restrictive basis of medium-specific qualities. Instead, it proposes that different phases of a national cinema can be framed as comparable and interrelated phenomena. 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 brings 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. It hopes to directly benefit academics and researchers willing to find new ways of understanding Brazilian film history, and the history of cinema in general.