Cinema, Historiographic Method and Intermedial Passages

Abstract

The aim of this project is to investigate a historiographic method focusing on cinema and constructed on the perspective of Intermediality, continuing earlier research entitled IntermIdia Project. Some questions which guide the investigations are: how can an intermedial approach support the history of Brazilian cinema? How do intermedial encounters in Brazilian cinema relate to each other across history and geography? As a case study, films from the "Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro" (Renaissance of Brazilian Cinema) (NAGIB, 2002) will be considered focusing on the so-called Árido Movie, from Recife, observed as the cinematic side of the Manguebeat movement, which will be understood, however, in the context of its compared relations with São Paulo. Thus, the proponent of this project and Prof. Lúcia Nagib, who is director of the CFAC - Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, at the University of Reading, intend to jointly analyze several interviews already conducted by both with filmmakers from Recife and São Paulo, especially considering the relation between cinema and music and the reality of these two specific and interrelated cities in terms of exchanges of their filmmakers. Taking into account intermedial relations between these places, the hypothesis is that there are "passages", in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin (2007) in terms of elaborating History as montage, in our case, among cinema and other arts and different geographies and realities.