Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–77) is revered in Brazil as the first ardent defender, promoter and theorist of Brazilian cinema. A film professor, critic and historian, his dedication to cinema shaped a generation of influential film critics in his home country, and set the foundations for the serious study of film in Brazil. For the first time in English, this book brings together a selection of his essays for an English-speaking audience, with detailed explanatory introductions to each section for readers unfamiliar with the context of the writings of Salles Gomes. By blending together ruminations on global and national cinema, as well as avant-garde film and popular movies, the collection shows how the defence and promotion of a national cinema has been forged through dialogues with international trends, informed by commercial influences, and shaped by global and national political contexts. The book thus introduces readers to the international dimensions of Salles Gomes’s engagements with film, and in doing so reassesses the locatedness of his formulations on national cinema and signals their international dimensions.

"Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916-77) is revered in Brazil as the first ardent defender, promotes and theorist of Brazilian cinema. A film professor, critic and historian, his dedication to cinema shaped a generation of influential film critics in his home country, and set foundations for the serious study of film in Brazil. For the first time in English, this book brings together a selection of his essays for an English-speaking audience, with detailed explanatory introductions to each section for readers unfamiliar with the context of the writings of Salles Gomes. By blending together ruminations on global and national cinema, as well as avant-garde film and popular movies, the collection shows how the defence and promotion of a national cinema has been forges through dialogues with international trends, informed by commercial influences, and shaped by global and national political contexts. The book thus introduces readers to the international dimension of Salles Gomes 's engagements with film, and in doing so reassesses the locatedness of his formulations on national cinema and signals their international dimensions." -- Publisher's description

This volume includes the first English translations of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes’ most influential essays on Hollywood, Soviet, European and Brazilian Cinema. Provides readers with theoretical ruminations on the vicissitudes of developing a national film archive, extending our appreciation of national film theory to encompass such practical endeavours. Shows how Brazil’s national film culture was theorised through extensive engagements with international trends thereby broadening our understanding of national cinema.

André Bazin remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. Fifty years after his death, he is still widely recognized as cinema's most significant philosopher-critic. Always an important presence within cinema theory, Bazin has seen a massive resurgence of interest among critics, scholars, and students now that an electronic archive of his entire critical output has been catalogued. Opening Bazin assesses the great critic's influence and legacy, with essays from several generations of the very best film scholars: Gunning, Frodon, Margulies, Conley, MacCabe, Narboni, and Vernet, to name just a few. Ultimately, these essays reaffirm Bazin's relevance in this new century, tracing his lineage, debating his aesthetics, locating him in the rich cultural moment of postwar France, and tracking the effect of his thought around the world.

Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America. This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization. With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern. Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal

Written by a team of veteran scholars and exciting emerging talents, The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies maps the field internationally, drawing out regional differences in the way that systematic intellectual reflection on cinema and film has been translated into an academic discipline. It examines the conversations between Film Studies and its contributory disciplines that not only defined a new field of discourse but also modified existing scholarly traditions. It reflects on the field′s dominant paradigms and debates and evaluates their continuing salience. Finally, it looks forward optimistically to the future of the medium of film, the institution of cinema and the discipline of Film Studies at a time when the very existence of film and cinema are being called into question by new technological, industrial and aesthetic developments.