Publications
Previewed below is the full list of books, video essays and online/journal publications produced by the IntermIdia Project.
Books/Catalogues
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Screen Dossier, Volume 60, Issue 1, Spring 2019 The entirity of the first of 2019s Screen Dossier was written by IntermIdia Project colleagues. It features 5 articles: Intermediality in Brazilian cinema: the case of Tropicália Introduction by Lúcia NagibStefan Solomon, Devouring images: Hélio Oiticica’s anthropophagic quasi-cinemaby by Alison Butler, ‘The cloak of technicolor’: intermedial colour in Antônio das Mortes by Stefan Solomon, Between film and photography: the bubble of blood in ‘The Family of Disorder’ by Albert Elduque, and Multimedia identities: an analysis of ‘How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman’ by Lúcia Nagib. |
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Silent Film Prologues From Brazil (2019) The first restaging of the Brazilian movie prologues took place on 30 June 2018 at Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS-SP), by the theatre troupe Companhia Antropofágica. At the Minghella Studios on the 6th and 7th of December, UK audiences experienced the restaging of two Silent Movie Prologues, together with a screening of the films they were designed to accompany: Buster Keaton’s wonderful comedy feature Go West (US, 1925) and the surviving fragment of another extraordinary 1920s film, Beggar on Horseback (US, James Cruze, 1925). The event featured an accompanying catalogue produced by Prof. John Gibbs and Prof. Luciana Corrêa de Araújo. Available on request (l.nagib@reading.ac.uk). |
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Contemporary Brazilian Music Film (2018) The full PDF of Albert Elduque Busquets’ catalogue, ‘Contemporary Brazilian Music Film‘, is now available for free here. The PDF has one small section omitted. The printed and bound catalogue itself is not available for purchase. There are some printed copies available however; if you are interested in acquiring one of these, please contact intermidia@reading.ac.uk. |
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Tropicália and Beyond (2017) We are pleased to announce that Stefan Solomon’s introduction to Tropicália and Beyond: Dialogues in Brazilian Film History (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017) is now available as a free download! If you like what you read here, please consider purchasing the collection of 22 essays, interviews, and manifestos through Archive Books. The season also came with an accompanying catalogue, available on request (l.nagib@reading.ac.uk). ![]() |
Online/Journal publications/Video Essays
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
2019
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Multimedia identities: an analysis of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman Lúcia Nagib,Screen, 60 (1), 2019 This essay draws on tropicalist intermediality as a means to gain a deeper insight into the political contribution made by the film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, directed in 1970 by Cinema Novo exponent, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and first screened in 1971. I argue that, beyond the film’s sensational focus on cannibalism, its intermedial relations, under the influence of Tropicalism, bring about a new dimension of hybridity and transnationalism hitherto absent from the Cinema Novo agenda. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman presents a distinctive multiperspectival structure derived from the self-revealing and self-standing form in which its raw materials are shown. For example, Hans Staden’s book was not only a source for the fictional plot, but actual chunks of its text are displayed, alongside sixteenth-century drawings, letters, poems, decrees and testimonials by French and Portuguese colonizers, in the form of title cards or voiceover commentary, often in contradiction with the images and between themselves, thus multiplying the narrative layers that preserve their own, original semantic agency. This Tropicália-inspired multimedia procedure not only disregards the attachment to medium specificity that had hitherto characterized political cinema in Brazil, but also deconstructs the unified figure of the auteur, held as the supreme creator in the early Cinema Novo days. I examine the possible political utopia contained in the film’s hybrid form, which opens up to a supranational view of the world in which humans, whatever their origin or standing, become mere vessels of their cultural capital. |
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Devouring images: Hélio Oiticica’s anthropophagic quasi-cinema Alison Butler, Screen, 60 (1), pp. 128-136 (2019) Between 1970 and 1978, while living in New York City, the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, working with filmmaker Neville d’Almeida, conceived a series of projected image installations entitled Cosmococas. This essay considers these works in relation to their historical moment, as an alternative conception of expanded cinema, influenced by North American practices but inflected by Oiticica’s own cultural formation and his engagement with the Tropicália movement. Key to this alternative conception is Oiticia’s use of separate media elements which interrelate via the body of the spectator, and his use of still images, to which, like his parangolés (capes, banners and tents made from layers of painted fabric and other materials) the spectator-performer brings movement. In contrast to the North American conception of expanded cinema as immersive multimedia, Oiticica theorized his work as ‘quasi-cinema’, a fragmentary form that explodes film into ‘moment-frames’, negating ‘the unilateral character of cinema spectacle’ in order to create a space for active participation of a kind not normally associated with cinema. Across a variety of his writings, including theoretical texts and personal correspondence, Oiticica repeatedly describes media as ‘devouring’. Writing about the television set included in his Tropicália installation, he describes a ‘terrible feeling […] of being devoured by the work’. The inclusion in the Cosmococas of images of cultural icons who died at the height of their fame – Jimi Hendrix and Marilyn Monroe – resonates with this notion of mass media devoration. The intermedial strategies deployed by Oiticica in his quasi-cinema projects are essentially anthropophagic, absorbing North American media images and forms as a way of preventing the culture of his host nation from devouring him. |
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Introduction to the dossier: Brazilian cinema in the neoliberal age (O cinema brasileiro na era neoliberal). Lúcia Nagib, RL Sousa, AS Brandão, Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 5 (2), pp. 306- 310, 2019 O fim dos regimes autoritários e a instauração de democracias neoliberais na América Latina, na virada entre as décadas de 1980 e 90, deu margem ao renascimento cinematográfico em vários países da região, notadamente Argentina, México e Brasil. As razões desse fenômeno (chamado de “Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro” no Brasil) foram diversas, entre elas a explosão de escolas de cinema na Argentina; a privatização dos meios de produção no México; a redistribuição dos recursos da extinta Embrafilme pelo Prêmio Resgate do Cinema Brasileiro e a introdução da Lei do Audiovisual em 1993, no Brasil (Dennison, Nagib e Shaw 2003). Continue reading… |
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Passages: travelling in and out of film through Brazilian geography Lúcia Nagib, Rumores: Revista Online de Comunicação, Linguagem e Mídias, 24 (12), pp. 19-40., 2019. ISSN 1982677X A relação entre o cinema e o real é provavelmente a questão mais central e complexa nos estudos cinematográficos. Neste artigo, tentarei abordar esta questão por meio da análise de uma seleção de filmes em que dispositivos intermidiáticos, isso é, o emprego no interior do filme de formas artísticas como pintura, teatro e música, parecem funcionar como uma “passagem” para a realidade política e social. Para tanto, irei focalizar casos exemplares da produção de São Paulo e Pernambuco, representados por filmes de Beto Brant, Cláudio Assis, Tata Amaral, Paulo Caldas e Marcelo Luna, a fim de demonstrar os valores compartilhados por eles em determinado contexto histórico e os laços geográficos que estabeleceram através do Brasil. |
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Introduction to dossier: Intermediality in Brazilian cinema: The Case of Tropicália Lúcia Nagib, Stefan Solomon, Screen, 60 (1), 2019 The contributors to this proposed dossier are investigators on the AHRC-FAPESP funded Intermidia Project, which explores the uses and possible advantages of intermediality as a historiographic method applicable to cinema in general, and Brazilian cinema in particular. The choice of the artistic movement known as ‘Tropicália’ or ‘Tropicalism’ as the dossier’s common thread is due, in the first place, to its strong reliance on intermediality. This short-lived movement, stretching for a few years between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, unleashed a veritable artistic and political earthquake whose aftershocks can be felt up to today, as testified by the multiple celebrations of the movement’s 50th anniversary in 2017 taking place all over the world. |
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Between film and photography: the bubble of blood in ‘The Family of Disorder’ Albert Elduque Busquet, Screen, 60 (1), 2019 Founded within the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the film company Belair was one of the most radical attempts to cultivate a cinema in the spirit of Tropicalism: its works are distinguished by parodies of genre filmmaking, a carnivalesque celebration of the body, and a profound investment in subversive politics. Led by filmmakers Rogério Sganzerla and Júlio Bressane and actress Helena Ignez, Belair produced six films between January and March 1970, when the team was forced into exile. A Família do Barulho/The Family of Disorder, directed by Bressane, contains one of the most striking sequences in all of Belair’s productions. Its portrait of a nuclear family in constant tension ends up with the three main characters looking straight into the camera and suffering in front of an unknown, invisible danger: a young man has a wound on his face; another covers his face with his hands in a liminal state; and a woman, played by Ignez, vomits a bloody slobber. Following Brigitte Peucker’s exploration of the relationship between cinema’s impurity, stillness and the cinematic body, as well as Raymond Bellour’s analysis of some dispositifs that anticipated the movement of cinema from the immobility of death, I argue that these images exist in a territory between different media, and between life and death: they are intersections of the liberating dynamism of cinema and the enforced stillness of photography, which evokes police mugshots, the menace of firing squads, and the ghostly quality of wax figures. I focus particularly on the case of Ignez and her bloody mouth, which chime with the tropicalist exploration of the grotesque and the intermedial quality of the cinematic body. |
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‘The cloak of technicolor’: intermedial colour in Antônio das Mortes Stefan Solomon, Screen, 60 (1), 2019 While shooting O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro/Antônio das Mortes in 1969, Glauber Rocha turned to colour film. Although it was not the first time he had worked with colour, here the director made special use of Eastmancolor technology in bringing to life the world of Deus e o diabo na terra do sol/Black God, White Devil (1964) that had previously appeared only in black-and-white. In his earlier manifesto, The Aesthetics of Hunger’ (1965), Rocha had suggested that the cloak of technicolor’ would not conceal Brazil’s social problems, but would rather aggravate them; in this context, his use of colour does not appear as a simple capitulation to the allure of foreign productions, but instead as part of an even deeper concern for the plight of his nation. While in part motivated by the potential to depict his country with an even greater degree of accuracy, Rocha also pointed to the similarities between film and painting in making the switch to colour, and professed an interest in the visual integration of colour with music and dance’. The intermedial comparison is an intriguing one, especially considering that while filmmakers like Rocha were reaching for a greater sense of realism, visual artists in Brazil like Helio Oiticica were following a more conceptual trajectory where colour was concerned. In this environment, emergent forms of chromatic stock in Brazilian cinema in the late-1960s captured both the non-representational and realist aspects of colour, its supplementarity and its indexical connections to the world. Following recent work on intermediality and colour by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, this article considers how the use of new colour technology in Glauber Rocha’s filmmaking resonated with certain tropicalist notions about the clash of the archaic and the modern in Brazilian cultural and political history. |