Passages of Brazilian cinema
- Submitting institution
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The University of Reading
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 88059
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- A collection of creative and critical works
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The project comprises a 94 minute documentary film, scripted by Nagib, and one chapter of Nagib's monograph, in which she discusses the research questions, process and insights animating the film. The film includes interviews with 15 Brazilian film practitioners and analysis by Nagib of their films, supported by film extracts, and original footage shot at the same locations as the films analysed. The project demonstrates the argument, developed by Nagib over a 15 year period, that utilisation within film of other artforms, namely painting, theatre, music, literature, photography, radio and television, provide a ‘passage’ to political and social reality.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Passages project argues that the utilisation within Brazilian film of other artforms and media can provide a ‘passage’ to political and social reality. The project analyses films in which painting, theatre, music, literature, photography, radio and television cause a tear in the medium’s virtual fabric through which reality seeps in. For example, in Meirelles’ City of God, literature gives access to the dire reality of the favelas; in Amaral’s Bring It Inside, theatre-making gives voice to the survivors of the military dictatorship; in Assis’ Mango Yellow, musical interludes usher in a documentary on urban poverty.
The film Passages (dir. Nagib and Paiva, 2019) is a companion piece to a chapter with the same research agenda in Nagib’s monograph, Realist Cinema as World Cinema (2020) but is also a self-standing research output. In the Passages film, myriad examples are cross-cut with extracts from interviews with 15 Brazilian film industry professionals, each strongly connected with the Brazilian Film Revival from the mid-1990s onwards, which reprioritized questions of national identity and Brazil’s historical social issues. Original footage was shot in the same locations as the films analyzed, and entwined in the audiovisual narrative alongside explicative title cards. Passages has been shown at film festivals, conferences and arthouses around the world and contracted for distribution on VOD services and public television.
Walter Benjamin referred to the Parisian passages (arcades) as at once conducive and final, roads to somewhere else and points of arrival, combining the belief in modern life and the hope of a classless society. In the films addressed in the project, passages are also roads towards an aim and points of arrival, sudden condensations of the Real of ‘inbetweenness’ (Pethő), as well as the locale of utopian connections bringing filmmakers together through the hope for a better society.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -