A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film
A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film
From Nationalism to Protest
Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil.
A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.
Monumental...The future of documentary production in Brazil is uncertain as is the nature of the current political process. Nonetheless, Sadlier’s book offers valuable insight into better understanding the history and inextricability of both.
With this volume, Sadlier...fills a gap in English-language scholarship on film by providing a clearly organized historical survey of documentary filmmaking in Brazil over the last hundred years...Sadlier’s prose is eminently readable, and the scholarly apparatus is robust…Highly recommended.
Sadlier has a remarkable ability to synopsize and contextualize films . . . Engrossing from beginning to end, A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film belongs on the bookshelf (or in the digital files) of anyone interested in Latin America's geography, history, politics, sociology, and popular culture.
Darlene Sadlier’s A Century of Brazilian Documentary: From Nationalism to Protest offers an accessible guide to the nonfiction output of one of Latin America’s most vibrant and prolific audiovisual industries, the most wide-ranging published in English to date. The book’s organization is at once chronological and thematic, which allows it to cover a tremendous amount of ground while anchoring the reader by grouping its detailed case studies around particular themes or approaches . . .A Century of Brazilian Documentary [Film] will find a place on the bookshelves of scholars and students of Brazilian cinema, culture, and history as well as documentary film and media, and serve as a valuable reference for years to come.
Darlene Sadlier weaves rich descriptions of films with production histories and the histories of distribution, exhibition, and reception against the backdrop of shifting political and economic circumstances in Brazil. This will be an important reference for students and educators who may be unfamiliar with Brazil and documentary filmmaking.
This book represents a major contribution to the English-language literature on both Brazilian cinema and the history of documentary. While a handful of the films discussed here have been analyzed in existing English-language studies, the majority have not, and this publication therefore significantly broadens and deepens the understanding of one of South America’s most important national film traditions as well as that of nonfiction cinema internationally.
Darlene J. Sadlier is a professor emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. She is the author of Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present, Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II, and The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. The Jungle and the City: Modernity in Two 1920s Documentaries
- Chapter 2. Government Educational Shorts, Bandit Footage, and Vera Cruz Documentaries
- Chapter 3. Documentary and Cinema Novo
- Chapter 4. Documentary, Dictatorship, and Repression
- Chapter 5. Biographies of a Sort, Part I (1974–1989)
- Chapter 6. Documenting Identity
- Chapter 7. Biographies of a Sort, Part II (1994–2016)
- Chapter 8. The City and the Countryside
- Epilogue: A Country in Crisis
- Filmography
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
