Kirjahaku

Encontros (Meetings) is the largest and most prestigious book collection of interviews with Brazilian artists and thinkers. With more than 50 published titles, Encontros provides a broad panorama of Brazil's cultural and intellectual wealth. Ismail Xavier is one of the most important researchers of the Brazilian cinema. In the interviews gathered in this book, Ismail, leaving aside his usual methodological discretion, emphasizes a type of formal interpretation that privileges the connections between history, cinema and ideology. And this transit across intellectual frontiers is more clearly delineated, as if we were glimpsing the critic, after his work, polishing his tools.

Examines the centrality of Cinema Novo to filmmaking in Brazil.“A camera in the hand and ideas in the head” was the primary axiom of the young originators of Brazil’s Cinema Novo. This movement of the 1960s and early 1970s overcame technical constraints and produced films on minimal budgets. In Allegories of Underdevelopment, Ismail Xavier examines a number of these films, arguing that they served to represent a nation undergoing a political and social transformation into modernity.Its best-known voice, filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that Cinema Novo was driven by an “aesthetics of hunger.” This scarcity of means demanded new cinematic approaches that eventually gave rise to a legitimate and unique Third World cinema. Xavier stands in the vanguard of scholars presenting and interpreting these revolutionary films-from the masterworks of Rocha to the groundbreaking experiments of Julio Bressane, RogÉrio Sganzerla, Andrea Tonacci and Arthur Omar-to an English-speaking audience. Focusing on each filmmaker’s use of narrative allegories for the “conservative modernization” Brazil and other nations underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, Xavier asks questions relating to the connection between film and history. He examines the way Cinema Novo transformed Brazil’s cultural memory and charts the controversial roles that Marginal Cinema and Tropicalism played in this process. Among the films he discusses are Black God, White Devil, Land in Anguish, Red Light Bandit, MacunaÍma, AntÔnio das Mortes, The Angel Is Born, and Killed the Family and Went to the Movies.A compelling chronicle of the history of modern Brazilian cinema, Allegories of Underdevelopment brings to light the work of many filmmakers who are virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.

Cadernos Ultramares seeks to present Brazilian culture and thought in a qualified way, through volumes bringing together important essays by renowned authors in different areas of knowledge. In the essays contained in this volume, Ismail Xavier, considered to be the main active thinker of Brazilian cinema, makes a broad reflection on allegory in contemporary culture and presents a panorama of modern Brazilian cinema, with emphasis on Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal of the 1960s and 1970s.