Michael Colvin – författare

A compelling account of the role of Fado and the fadista in Portuguese film and the wider culture.Colvin studies the evolution of Fado music as the soundtrack to the Portuguese talkie. He analyzes the most successful Portuguese films of the first two decades of the Estado Novo era, showing how directors used the national songto promote the values of the young Regime regarding the poor inhabitants of Lisbon's popular neighborhoods. He considers the aesthetic, technological, and social advances that accompany the progress of the Estado Novo---Futurism;the development of sound film; the inception of national radio broadcast; access to the automobile; and urban renewal---within a historical context that considers Portugal's global profile at the time of António de Oliveira Salazar's rise to power and the inauguration of António Ferro's Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional; Portugal's role as a secret ally of the Falange during the Spanish Civil War; Lisbon's role as a neutral refuge during World War II; and the Portuguese colonial empire as an anachronism in the post-World War II years.Colvin argues that Portuguese directors have exploited the growing popularity of the Fado and Lisbon's fadistas to dissuade citizens from alien values that promote individual ambitions and the notion of an easy life of poverty in the capital. As the public image of the Fado evolves, the fadista's role in film becomes more prominent and eventually the fadista is the protagonist and the Fado the principal concern of national film. The author exposes the irony that as the social profile of the Lisbon fadista improves with the international fame of singer Amália Rodrigues, Portuguese film perpetuates and validates the outdated characterization of the fadista as a social pariah that Leitão de Barros proposed in the first Portuguese talkie, A Severa (1931).Michael Colvin is Associate Professor of HispanicStudies at Marymount Manhattan College.

A compelling history of Portuguese cinema that reveals how politics, culture and technology shaped a national film tradition with international reach.The book focuses on the relationship between the major political, technological, and cultural movements in Portugal and the construction of a film industry, a national cinema, an international cinema, an auteur's cinema, and a Portuguese cinephile culture. After an introduction presenting a brief overview of Portuguese cinema in the context of Portuguese history and culture since the nineteenth century, the following chapters delve into silent film and the development of genres between 1896 and 1934; sound film and the construction of a national cinema under Portugal's newly established Estado Novo in the 1930s; the golden age and waning of the Portuguese comedy and class dramas in the 40s and 50s; the emergence of Cinema Novo between 1955 and 1979; cinematic responses to Portugal's political transitions in the late twentieth century; and Portuguese cinema in the contexts of private television and European cinema between the 1980s and the present day. The afterword reflects on the history, character, and function of Portuguese Cinema that Portuguese producers, directors, actors, critics, politicians, scholars, artists, and singers have made over the last 120 years and proposes Portuguese cinema as an international cinema.