Ebook: Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema

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

• Launches an entirely new historiographic method, drawing on intermediality in order to reconstruct the history of a national cinema
• Unveils the multimedia and polymathic wealth behind the various historical periods in Brazilian cinema
• Provides an overarching historical coverage of Brazilian cinema, through an innovative approach that connects different periods in Brazilian film history through the multiple art and media forms interwoven in them
• Proposes that different phases of a national cinema can be framed as comparable and interrelated phenomena, rather than relying on evolutionary chronologies and classical-modern or centre-periphery models
• Explores new ways of understanding Brazilian film history, and the history of cinema in general

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.