A imagem da nação: cinema e identidade cultural no Brasil (1960-1990)

Abstract

The present study proposes an analysis which ranges from Cinema Novo, in the beginning of the 1960s, covers the years of the military dictatorship and eventually reaches the demise of Embrafilme (1990), during the Collor years (1990-1992), trying to understand how cinema became an arena of representations of moving images, contended by different social agents in their attempt to obtain the hegemonic production of the cinematographic images of the nation. On one side, Cinema Novo, with a nationalist cultural perspective, and, on the other, the official cultural policy of the authoritarian and nationalist State too, which was promoting an economic modernization of the Nation, and, between them, other cinematographic agents (exhibitors, distributors, Embrafilme, Cinema Marginal, pornochanchada, foreign movies among others) interacting in the fight for the preponderance in the process of producing movies which would constitute the national identity in the cinematographic field. Brimming with contradictions, involving conceptions about popular culture and mass culture, the Brazilian cinematographic production expressed the sum of the projects in contention taking into account the issues of the national question and popular culture. The result was a rich cinematographic diversity.