Brazils Current Film Industry :: essays research papers

In this paper I will discuss Brazil and it’s current film industry. I will elucidate its role in the Brazilian economy, and also what part the government deals in the industry itself. Certain Brazilian films will be given as representations towards my theories. Within a year of the Lumiere brother’s ‘first experiment’ in Paris in 1896, the cinematograph machine appeared in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years later, the capital boasted 22 cinema houses and the first Brazilian feature film, The Stranglers by Antonio Leal, had been screened. From then on Brazil’s film industry made continuous progress and, although it has never been large, its output over the years has attracted international attention. In 1930, still the era of the silent movie in Brazil, Mario Peixoto’s film, Limite was made. Limite is a surrealistic work dealing with the conflicts raised by the human condition and how life conspires to prevent total fulfillment. It was considered a landmark film in the Brazilian cinema history. In 1933 Cinedia produced The Voice of Carnival, the first film with Carmen Miranda. This film ushered in the ‘chanchada’ which dominated Brazilian cinema for many years. Chanchada’s were the slapstick comedies, generally filled with musical numbers and thoroughly cherished by the public. By the end of the 1940’s Brazilian film making was becoming an industry. The Vera Cruz Film Company was created in Sao Paulo with the goal of producing films of international quality. It hired technicians from abroad and brought back from Europe, Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian filmmaker with an international reputation to head the company. Vera Cruz produced some important films before it closed in 1954, among them the epic O Cangaceiro which won the "Best Adventure Film" award at Cannes Film Festival in 1953. In the 1950’s, Brazilian cinema radically changed the way it made films. In his 1995 film, Rio 40 Graus, director Nelson Pereira dos Santos employed the filmmaking techniques of Italian non realism by using ordinary people as his actors and by going to the streets to shoot his low budget film. He would become one of the most important Brazilian filmmakers of all time, and it is he who set the stage for the Brazilian ‘cinema novo’ (an idea in mind and a camera in the hands) movement. By 1962 ‘cinema novo’ had established a new concept in Brazilian filmmaking. The ‘cinema novo’ film’s dealt with themes related to acute national problems, from conflicts in rural areas to human problems in the large cities, as well as film versions of important Brazilian novels. At the end of the 1960’s, the Tropicalist movement had taken hold of the