WINNER of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph WINNER of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Best Monograph prize Guilherme Carréra's compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of Stone (2013) and White Out, Black In (2014); Rio de Janeiro - ExPerimetral (2016), The Harbour (2013), Tropical Curse (2016) and HU Enigma (2011); and indigenous territories - Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don't They? (2009), Tava, The House of Stone (2012), Two Villages, One Path (2008) and Guarani Exile (2011). In portraying ruinscapes in different ways, these powerful films articulate critiques of the notions of progress and (under) development in the Brazilian nation. Carréra invites the reader to walk amid the debris and reflect upon the strategies of spatial representation employed by the filmmakers. He addresses this body of films in relation to the legacies of Cinema Novo, Tropicália and Cinema Marginal, asking how these presentday films dialogue with or depart from previous traditions. Through this dialogue, he argues, the selected films challenge not only documentary-making conventions but also the country's official narrative.

" '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." -- Book cover.

Shorlisted for the BAFTSS 2020 Award for Best Monograph Despite his films being subjected to censorship and denigration in his native China, Jia Zhangke has become the country's leading independent film director internationally. Seen as one of world cinema's foremost auteurs, he has played a crucial role in documenting and reflecting upon China's era of intense transformations since the 1990s. Cecília Mello provides in-depth analysis of Jia's unique body of work, from his early films Xiao Wu and Platform, to experimental quasi-documentary 24 City and the audacious Mountains May Depart. Mello suggests that Jia's particular expression of the realist mode is shaped by the aesthetics of other Chinese artistic traditions, allowing Jia to unearth memories both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. Mello's groundbreaking study opens a door into Chinese cinema and culture, addressing the nature of the so-called 'impure' cinematographic art and the complex representation of China through the ages. Foreword by Walter Salles

Lucia Nagib presents a comprehensive critical survey of Brazilian film production since the mid 1990s, which has become known as the "renaissance of Brazilian cinema". Besides explaining the recent boom, this book elaborates on the new aesthetic tendencies of recent productions, as well as their relationships to earlier traditions of Brazilian cinema. Internationally acclaimed films, such as "Central Station", "Seven Days in September" and "Orpheus", are analysed alongside daringly experimental works, such as "Chronically Unfeasible", "Starry Sky" and "Perfumed Ball". Contributors include Carlos Diegues, Robert Stam, Laura Mulvey and Jose Carlos Avellar.

From the documentary to the cinema novo and cannibalism, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Vidas Secas to music in the films of Glauber Rocha, this third, revised edition is a century-spanning introduction to the story of a medium that flourished in one of the most developed of 'underdeveloped' nations.

This collection explores the emergence of new spatialities and subjectivities in Brazilian films produced from the 1990s onwards, a period that became known as the retomada, but especially in the cinema of the new millennium. The chapters take spatiality as a powerful tool that can reveal aesthetic, political, social, and historical meanings of the cinematographic image instead of considering space as just a formal element of a film. From the rich cross-fertilization of different theories and disciplines, this edited collection engages with the connection between space and subjectivity in Brazilian cinema while raising new questions concerning spatiality and subjectivity in cinema and providing new models and tools for film analysis.

"Like Brazilian society, documentary filmmaking is undergoing transformation, becoming an increasingly inclusive and diverse field, intervening in the ongoing struggle for social justice and equal distribution of power. As the first English-language monograph to focus on this body of work, this book examines the ways in which contemporary documentaries explore the borders between centers and margins, visibilities and invisibilities, silences and speech, and forms of authority and their contestation. Centered on an eclectic cluster of documentaries -from ethnographic documentaries and indigenous videos to films concerned with social and criminal justice, including first-person, essayistic films - this book brings into view the transformations of both Brazilian society and filmmaking, ultimately examining the genre's preoccupation with archival content"--