Brazil on Screen Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia

by Nagib, Lúcia

• ISBN13: 9781845113285
• ISBN10: 1845113284
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-15
• Publisher: I. B. Tauris

Summary

What connects films of a particular nation, in a particular time? What makes them especially interesting and revealing? This book offers an original answer to these central questions for world cinema, focusing on the case of Brazil and the return of the utopian gesture into its cinema. In this extensively illustrated book, Lucia Nagib argues that the foundational utopian imaginary that has permeated culture in Brazil since the time of the first discoverers has had a decisive influence on its film aesthetics, especially at creative peaks, such as the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early '70s, and the cinematic revival from the mid 1990s onwards. She shows how utopian motifs like images of the sea or the classical Greek myth of Orpheus establish a bridge between these two periods, guaranteeing thereby historical continuity from a cinema concerned with the national project to another engaged in a globalised dialogue. In focus are classics of Cinema Novo, such as 'Black God, White Devil', 'Land in Anguish' and 'How Tasty was my Little Frenchman', alongside representatives of a more recent transnational aesthetics, including the anti-utopian 'City of God'and the urban dystopia of 'The Trespasser'.

Author Biography

Lúcia Nagib is Centenary Professor of World Cinema at the University of Leeds.  Her books include (as editor) 'The New Brazilian Cinema' (I.B. Tauris 2004, reprinted 2006) and she is Series Editor of Tauris World Cinema Series. 

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Foreword	p. xi
Introduction	p. xvii
Images of the Sea	p. 1
The Centre, the Zero and the Empty Utopia	p. 31
To Be or Not To Be a Cannibal	p. 59
The Black Paradise	p. 81
An Interrupted Utopia	p. 99
The Urban Dystopia	p. 115
Notes	p. 133
Filmography	p. 143
Index	p. 157
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