Ismail Xavier. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
In Brazil, academic research on film developed from the late 1960s on, initially inflected by a particular dialogue with the film culture produced by the tradition of cine-clubs and the cinematheques in Sao Paulo and and Rio de Janeiro.
In its first stage, academic work engaged film critics who became concerned, during the 1950s, with film history, and especially with the national film tradition. After a short period in which research on film developed in close dialogue with literary and historical studies, the rise of the media as a privileged subject matter in the late 1960s made the recently created communication schools the place for cinema studies in universities. This was a time when linguistics and semiotics were establishing a new framework for film theory, and when the established work on film history was challenged to develop a new sense of rigor and method. During the 1970s and 1980s the academic circle gradually asserted its own style as the new generations of scholars, even if not in great numbers, consolidated the inscription of Film Studies within the normative codes of scientific research in the humanities (or media studies), while maintaining a close dialogue with people involved in film production in Brazil.
The first two film departments (Universi- dade de Sao Paulo [USP] and Universidade Federal Fluminense [UFF]) were structured to combine Film Studies (history, criticism and theory) and film production courses (practice): a fact that has favoured a continuous interaction between the university and the film milieu (filmmakers and critics), giving continuity to the spirit of the 1960s and its concern for the unity of theory and practice. This institutional arrangement has survived until now, at USP and UFF, thus obliging both universities to reconcile their twin missions of providing undergraduate (professional) and graduate (theory and research) courses. With the dissemination of Film Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, each new university that incorporated cinema in its curriculum had to find its own way to deal with that question, with most keeping only cinema studies as part of media studies programmes within communication schools, and leaving aside film production.
The concern for the interaction between theory and practice has been significant in Brazilian Film Studies because the shape of film production in the country—its instability and its subaltern status vis-a-vis foreign films that dominate the market—creates the sense that any institution related to film has to make its own contribution towards the development of Brazilian cinema. This is partially true even today, although the expansion of media studies and the variety of approaches to film in academia changed the entire picture concerning cinema studies. Younger scholars trained in graduate programmes in media studies and in comparative literature, from the 1990s onwards, have moved towards the diversification of research topics and theoretical sources.
The Legitimation of Cinema as an Academic Field
The spirit of the ‘cine-club’ a la frangaise manifested itself in Brazil early in the twentieth century. Since the classic period of silent film, it created a tradition of information and debate—the idea of ‘public education for film aesthetics’—that combined the exaltation of cinema as a central value of modernity with the sense of a theoretical responsibility on the part of cinephiles. Cinema had to be praised as art, and the aesthetic discussion had to go beyond what was seen in the standard fare of film criticism found in newspapers and weekly magazines. It was not an accident that it was the Chaplin Club, founded by a group of young intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro, Octavio de Faria and Plfnio Sussekind Rocha among them, that brought the first examples of a specific and rigorous discussion of film aesthetics in Brazil, in the essays found in Fan (the magazine they published between 1928 and 1931). For many years, the Chaplin Club leaders were very influential among more erudite cinephiles, including the poet Vinicius de Moraes who also worked as a film critic. Vinicius de Moraes expressed, in the early 1940s, ideas that resumed the Chaplin Club’s arguments in a discussion about the superiority of silent film over the talkies. Before the 1960s, although cine-clubs and professional criticism formed the two major sources of the conceptual debate on film, the universities too had their role in film culture. They sometimes provided the lively cultural milieu within which cine-clubs were created, producing an interesting intersection involving film and academic life. Literary modernism and its defenders in academia took part in the exaltation of cinema as an icon of modernity, and the cine-clubs created by university students gave birth to a productive exchange of ideas among intellectuals of different aesthetic concerns. A cine-club created by Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes in the early 1940s at USP, for example, can be seen as the first step towards the foundation, many years later, of the Brazilian Cinemateca (1954), followed by the creation of the Cinemateca of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro: two milestones in the expansion of a concern for archival memory that Brazilians took from Henri Langlois and the French Cinematheque.
In the late 1960s, when public universities inaugurated their courses on cinema, the hegemonic film culture of the time, well represented by the Cinema Novo generation, fostered the convergence of three different traditions: (1) that of the cinephiles who congregated in cine-clubs; (2) that of the modernist writers and artists who, although not engaged in film, favoured, since the 1920s, a cultural atmosphere inflected by the European historical avant-garde that had itself fostered and energized film theory; (3) that of the film critics engaged in historical analyses that discussed the conditions for the development of film production in Brazil.
Since the late 1950s and during the 1960s, a major task assumed by leftist critics and by Cinema Novo filmmakers was the critique of what was considered a ‘colonial mentality’ expressed in the writings of people who implied that Brazilians did not have a sense of cinema, and that the poor sections of Brazilian cities did not fit cinematographic standards. That critique of social prejudices was connected with the dominant political debates in the country, and expressed a change in mentality that is worth mentioning here because it played a role in legitimating film as a topic in university courses.
The graduate programmes in media studies—cinema studies included—began during the 1970s (first in Sao Paulo, then in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and other States). However, film scholars with a doctoral degree in cinema studies were still rare in the 1980s, even if one considers those who had received their qualifications abroad (in the US or France). The expansion and the change in scale only came in the 1990s—the decade in which the large majority of those currently at work in the university system were hired. As a sign of that expansion, the more systematic exchange involving film scholars led to the creation of the Brazilian Society of Cinema Studies (SOCINE): a society that in its Annual Conference has reached, after the year 2000, an average of 150 panelists (about 100 scholars, with a considerable number of graduate students).
Film History as a Field of Research
Memory, the national, and cinephilia. It was this combination that set the framework for the choice of film history as the hegemonic field when Film Studies emerged in universities around the 1960s. The academic context demanded scientific discipline and method, a demand which produced, in the first instance, the usual mutual estrangement and suspicion between amateur film researchers and academic scholars. In fact, this estrangement had become obvious even earlier: a first sign of it was Salles Gomes’ harsh critical review of Alex Viany’s Introdugao ao cinema brasileiro (1959), a book that was, and still is, celebrated as the first classic on Brazilian film history, and a kind of synthesis of the many efforts expressed in books, articles and film retrospectives during the 1950s. And a second sign was the way the leaders of the Brazilian Cinematheque (Salles Gomes included) received Glauber Rocha’s book Revisao critica do cinema brasileiro (1963) as a welcome manifesto that brought a legitimate programme for a new cinema in Brazil even though it could not be seen as a consistent historical approach to Brazilian cinema (see Viany, 1959).
The Cinemateca group demanded a sense of rigor that only came later when they started their work at USP from the late 1960s onwards. Something similar happened in Rio de Janeiro, where critics, intellectuals and filmmakers, who had been formed in the same spirit, were incorporated into the faculty of the film department at UFF. The scholars of my generation—that is, the first to be trained in film schools—were educated within the intellectual framework provided by the Cinematheques. Since that first period, the research on Brazilian film history—which is characterized by a great variety of topics and has been, and continues to be, one of the major sectors of the work carried out in the universities—is principally situated in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro where the major archives are located. New directions of research also include foreign cinema, studies in early cinema from the 1980s onwards, and specific topics of different national cinemas. In some circles, this research includes a debate on methods that reproduces the ongoing debates in France and the US. In its interaction with the new trends in film history, the investigation that focuses on Brazilian cinema has changed in purpose and scale but undoubtedly gives continuity to the original national concerns that marked the interest in history in the 1950s and 1960s.
Film Theory and Specific Topics of Film Analysis
In terms of its directions and specific contents, the research carried out in Brazil—at each stage of its development since the 1970s—tends to reflect, with some delay, the conceptual framework and methods that the major centres of theory (France, US, England) have been producing in the last thirty years. Although restricted to a small group of institutions, the graduate programmes have steadily given impetus to a debate on film theory, fostering the incorporation of a body of work produced abroad (mainly in France until 1980) and gradually incorporating theAnglo-American theoretical references.
Initially, Brazilian scholars were more involved with structuralism and semiology, or C.S. Peirce’s semiotics, and Film Studies followed the trends of literary theory and narratology, a framework that oriented a revision of classic film theory from the 1920s as well as the phenomenology implied in Andre Bazin’s work and in the early theory of modern cinema produced by the Cahiers du cinema culture, including the politique des auteurs. As the academic work developed along those lines, Brazilian scholars had (and still have) to face problems that, before them, were dealt with by literary scholars: how to reconcile the incorporation of new theories and methods coming from abroad while offsetting the danger of precociously interrupting the immanent development of some productive lines of investigation which might be overshadowed by the hasty borrowing of new paradigms from Europe or the United States. How might one conduct a politics of exchange with the major centres, something indispensable but unfortunately also asymmetrical, without losing the sense of pertinence—after all, what really matters?—in terms of purposes and methods?
This is a question that persists, since the flow of concepts and of new theoretical fields, with very few exceptions, is hardly equal or bi-directional. Scholars linked to different theoretical traditions deal with—or decide not to deal with—those questions in different ways, making this ‘geo-political’ factor a sometimes significant aspect of the debate, apart from more general philosophical arguments.
Although a ‘system’ (taken as a metaphor) deeply involved with the digestion of concepts and methods coming from abroad, Brazilian scholarship on film has at the same time developed its own dynamics and shown its energy in its continuous struggle with scarce resources and, depending on the research topic, limited access to important sources. (That situation at least is radically changing nowadays with new information technologies such as DVD, etc.). Such problems are typical in regard to any academic production within a huge country obliged to make major changes in its university system in order to cope with its basic needs.
As the conceptual systems become more and more diversified in the major centres, the work done in Brazil tends to reproduce that variety, even if inevitably on a minor scale. Nowadays, the shape of Film Studies is closely related to the concerns of a generation that was educated at the time in which the topics for debate in the US and Europe involved the impact of Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books (translated into Portuguese in 1985 and 1987), the crisis of film theory as a unified conceptual field, the critique of psychoanalysis and of Grand Theory launched by cognitivism, the development of gender and race studies, the discussion around the ‘death of the author’, the renovation of genre studies (comedy, melodrama) and other forms of research combining history, anthropology and media theory to displace the emphasis from the analysis of form to the analysis of cinema (and television) as a social experience.
Up to the late 1970s, the theories linked to modernism formed the hegemonic paradigm—again linking academic work to the defence of a particular cinema (avant-garde and modern cinema). For my generation, the central question was—apart from the already established historical research—to incorporate different theoretical references to deal with the specificity of Film Studies strongly inflected by a concern with film aesthetics and what was called the critique of illusionism. (In this theoretical project Bertolt Brecht had a stronger hand than Theodor Adorno, although the notion of cultural industry also had its place). In recent years, the defence of modern cinema and the concern for style and the ‘auteur theory’ have changed their theoretical references, turning increasingly to philosophy and especially to Deleuze’s work- a trend stronger in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, but hardly exclusive to them. At the same time, the revision of pre-modern cinema in Brazil (the study of popular genres, for instance) and the work done on contemporary cinema have fostered the incorporation of a wide range of inter-disciplinary studies that, within the Anglo-American context, would be called cultural studies. (This tendency is especially strong in UFF, UFSC and UNISINOS-Rio Grande do Sul).
Roughly speaking, the major topics of debate and the new proposals in Film Studies all have their place in Brazilian academic life today. Some research incorporates the new concern with Film Studies as a part of aesthetics, including the new insertion of film (and video) in the field of art history. Other work incorporates the new methodological discussion in film history and the recent studies on the representation of history in films. A number of analyses integrate the variety of approaches gathered under the trans-disciplinary umbrella of ‘cultural studies’, which include television and other media products in their scope. Various theorists also defend the primacy of a philosophy of cinema within an intellectual project that takes film criticism as a ‘poetic genre’ and positions the film critic as an author, while others still interrogate film theory and its so-called ‘crisis’ as an autonomous field (meaning its commitment to specificity). And finally, there is a ‘boom’ in the investigation focused on the question of the documentary as a modality of film practice and a general problem for film theory.
As this inventory suggests, Brazilian scholars, although small in number when compared with those in the major centres, in their context tend to make visible a great diversity of theoretical approaches. The pragmatic adjustment of concepts coming from different sources—something not exclusive to this country—forms a striking feature of their production, making Brazilian scholarship an example of a ‘system’ able to displace theories and adapt them to a national context. There is no hegemonic thought, and the particular ethos of Brazilian academic life favours what seems to be at present a significant trend on the international scene: the development of inter-disciplinary approaches in the study of film.