Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. She is the author of seven books, among them, Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Bloomsbury, 2011). She has edited and co-edited eleven books, among them the award-winning volumes The Moving Form of Film: Historicising the Medium Through Other Media (with Stefan Solomon, Oxford University Press, 2023) and Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (with Luciana Corrêa de Araújo and Tiago de Luca, Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Luciana Corrêa de Araújo is Assistant Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil. She is the author of A crônica de cinema no Recife dos anos 50 (1997) and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade: primeiros tempos (2013) and co-editor of Estudos de cinema e audiovisual Socine Estadual São Paulo (2012). Tiago de Luca is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (2022) and Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), He is the co-editor of Elemental World Cinema: Cinematic Entanglements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air (2025), Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (2022, EUP) and Slow Cinema (2016, EUP). He is the series editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of Film Thinks (Bloomsbury).

This volume sheds much-needed light on the complex dialogues with the other arts and media that characterise Brazilian cinema. It illustrates how the intermedial method can be used to interrogate and nuance traditional approaches to the study of any cinema culture.

• IntroductionPart I – Intervisuality 1. Traffic in images: visual spectacle before cinema in Brazil - Ian Christie2. Intermedial landscapes in the work of Cao Guimarães - Alison Butler3. ‘The most innocent film of the year’: Comic Books, Sex and Cinema Marginal - Stefan Solomon4. Photographs of the Invisible: Intermedial Figurations of Social Exclusion in Babás and Aquarius - Tiago de Luca5. Exploring the Cinematic Imaginary: Carlos Adriano, André Parente, and the Precision of the Vague - Martine BeugnetPart II – The Empire of Music 6. Watson Macedo’s Aviso aos navegantes (1950): reflections on the musical numbers of a Brazilian chanchada - Flávia Cesarino Costa7. (In)Visible Musicians: Supporting Instrumentalists and their Intermedial Vocation - Suzana Reck Miranda8. Music-Video Aesthetics in Pernambucan Cinema - Samuel Paiva9. Possessing Archival Images: ghosts, songs and films in Cartola – Música para os olhos (2007) - Albert ElduquePart III – Entertainment Circuits 10. Intermediality in Brazilian Silent Cinema: Luiz de Barros’ works and intermedial strategies - Luciana Corrêa de Araújo11. ‘Synchronised film fever’ amid the ‘gramophonoradiomania’: record, radio and cinema at the dawn of the ‘talkies’ in Rio de Janeiro - Rafael de Luna Freire12. The Singer, the Acrobats and the Bands: A Study of Three Brazilian Films and their Intermedial Characters - Alfredo Suppia13. Gilda de Abreu’s O Ébrio as a Unique Intermedial Project - Margarida Maria Adamatti14. Chanchada, Samba and Beyond: From the cinema of radio to the cinema of television (1930s-1960s) - João Luiz VieiraPart IV – From Impure Cinema to Cosmopoetics15. Impure Cinema as Method: The last films of Eduardo Coutinho - Consuelo Lins16. Queering Intermediality in Brazilian Cinema - Ramayana Lira de Sousa and Alessandra Soares Brandão17. The Humiliation of the Father: Theatrical Melodrama and Cinema Novo’s Critique of Conservative Modernisation - Ismail Xavier18. Intermedial Territories: Maps and the Amazonian Moving Image - Gustavo Procopio Furtado19. An Intermedial Reading of Glauber Rocha’s Cosmogony - Lúcia Nagib