Banca de DEFESA: MARCELO GIL IKEDA

From garages to the world: legitimation movements in Brazilian cinema of the 1990s 2000

Brazilian cinema. Contemporary Brazilian cinema. Digital cinema. Film festivals. Film criticism.

This thesis investigates the contribution of a generation of filmmakers in Brazilian cinema from the mid-2000s, named “brand new Brazilian cinema” (VALENTE E KOGAN, 2009), “garage cinema” (IKEDA E LIMA, 2011) or “post-industrial cinema” (MIGLIORIN, 2011), which has established itself as a distinctive force in contemporary Brazilian cinema. The starting point was the following research problem: how this generation of artists considered as utsiders, that is, who emerged “in garages”, achieved legitimacy in their field, starting to be recognized, ten years later, as established by the institutionalized Brazilian cinema field of forces? Therefore, based on the theoretical and methodological contributions of the so-called “new history” (LE GOFF E NORA, 1988), applied to the field of studies on Brazilian cinema (BERNARDET, 1995; MORAIS, 2014, among others), and influenced by sociology of culture theorists like Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, the research starts from the premise that, so as to understand the legitimacy of this set of works and directors, it is necessary to realize not only their potential for stylistic innovation but also the historical constraints that allowed these films to be recognized by their peers as innovative. Therefore, the thesis starts from the recognition that the legitimation trajectory of this generation arises from very specific circumstances, singularities of its historical time, in an extensive transformation context: the transformations in modes of production (the impacts of digital cinema, affecting the whole audiovisual chain of production), in film criticism (the changes in the internet era, which, stimulated by the so-called “cybercinephilia”, proposed other methods and objects related to cultural journalism) and in film diffusion (with the emergence of a film festivals network which established other curatorial values for Brazilian cinema). In such a way, the thesis seeks to increase their appreciation to other perspectives on Brazilian cinema from the 2000s onwards, after the so-called “cinema da retomada”.