ISBN-13: 9780719089916 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 272 str.
Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil investigates the Brazilian image world in the first four decades of the twentieth century, an era of significant economic, political, and cultural change. Examining a constellation of still and moving images produced across the Brazilian territory by filmmakers, explorers, anthropologists, intellectuals and missionaries of various kinds, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Mario de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker, the book maps the relationships between visual culture, nation-building, colonialism and global modernity.
In locating this study within the wider context of studies of modern visual culture, this book seeks to shift the emphasis of Eurocentric histories of photography and film on the diffusion of a Western technology and its local reception by modernist pioneers. In its place, Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil aims to develop a more nuanced account of the geographies of Brazilian modernity by recognizing the distinctiveness of its cultural forms, its social heterogeneity and the complexity of the relations between the local, the national and the global. Through a range of richly-worked studies, covering not only the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but also the Amazon rainforest, the savannas of southern Mato Grosso, and the coffee plantations in the outback of Sao Paulo, the book presents a distinctive perspective on the spatial and visual history of Brazilian modernity. Its findings are of significance not only to Brazilianists, but also to historians of film and photography more generally.
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