Remaking Brazil

Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Tatiana Signorelli Heise

Remaking Brazil

Tatiana Signorelli Heise

Distributed for University of Wales Press

200 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2012
University of Wales - Iberian and Latin American Studies
Cloth $19.00 ISBN: 9780708325087 Published September 2012 For sale in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand only
E-book $35.00 ISBN: 9780708325162 Will Publish October 2019 For sale in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand only

Brazil has long been home to a strong and important film industry, and in recent years Brazilian cinema has been drawing growing attention worldwide, with such films as Central Station and City of God receiving international acclaim. Remaking Brazil takes a close look at Brazilian films released between 1995 and 2010, including Elite Squad, Orfeu, The Trespasser, and Almost Brothers, paying special attention to issues of race, ethnicity, and national identity.

Despite increased interest in ethnic and racial aspects of Brazilian society, until now there has been very little academic research on how these aspects are articulated in contemporary cinema. Tatiana Signorelli Heise fills that gap, focusing on the idea of the nation as an “imagined community” and considering the various ways in which dominant ideas about brasilidade, or Brazilian national consciousness, are dramatized, supported, or attacked in contemporary fiction and documentary films.

Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Part I: Constructions of Brazilian National Identity
1. Forging the Nation
2. Modernity, Exclusion and Inclusion
3. Identity and Hegemony: The Authoritarian State and Nation-Building
4. Resisting the Hegemonic Discourse
Part II: Brazilian National Identity in Contemporary Films
5. The Brazilian Film Industry in the 1900s and 2000s
6. Celebration: The Brazilian Way of Being
7. Reform: The Land of Samba, Football, Violence and Discrimination
8. Opposition: Visions of Disorder and Regression
9. The Rise of Alternative Social Identities
Conclusion

Glossary
Notes
Select Bibliography
Review Quotes
I. M. Wilson, Wabash College | Choice
“Highly recommended.”
Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool
“Remaking Brazil is an important addition to the growing bibliography on films of the so-called ‘retomada’ or renaissance of Brazilian cinema that began in the mid-1990s, and is essential reading for students and scholars working in this field. It will also appeal to a general readership with an interest in contemporary cinema of Brazilian culture.”
Lúcia Nagib, University of Leeds
“This book offers the English reader, for the first time, an overarching picture of Brazil’s thriving contemporary film production. Tatiana Signorelli Heise has devised an insightful method to tackle its complexity by focusing on the recurrent trope of brasilidade, that is, the idea of national belonging. The categories she establishes in order to organize her vast material—‘celebratory,’ ‘reformist,’ ‘oppositional,’ and ‘alternative’—are bound to become common currency among film scholars. Bold in its assertions and unafraid of canonical theories, Remaking Brazil is a compelling testament to the resilience of the nation in the transnational era.”
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Film Studies

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