Portuguese cinema has become increasingly prominent on the international film festival circuit, proving the country's size belies its cultural impact. From the prestige of directors Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes, to box-office hit La Cage Doree, aspects of Portuguese national cinema are widely visible although the output is comparatively small compared to European players like the UK, Germany and France. Considering this strange discrepancy prompts the question: how can Portuguese cinema be characterised and thought about in a global context? Accumulating expertise from an international group of scholars, this book investigates the shifting significance of the nation, Europe and the globe for the way in which Portuguese film is managed on the international stage. Chapters argue that film industry professionals and artisans must navigate complex globalised systems that inform their filmmaking decisions. Expectations from multi-cultural audiences, as well as demands from business investors and the criteria for critical accolades put pressure on Portuguese cinema to negotiate, for example, how far to retain national identities on screen and how to interact with `popular' and `art' film tropes and labels. Exploring themes typical of Portuguese visual culture - including social exclusion and unemployment, issues of realism and authenticity, and addressing Portugal's postcolonial status - this book is a valuable study of interest to the ever-growing number of scholars looking outside the usual canons of European cinema, and those researching the ongoing implications of national cinema's global networks.

Why has Portugal's vibrant and creative cinema industry not been more commercially successful?

Portuguese Film, 1930-1960: The Staging of the New State Regime provides groundbreaking analysis of Portuguese feature films produced in the first three decades of the New State (Estado Novo), a right-wing totalitarian regime that lasted between 1933 and 1974. These films, sponsored by the National Propaganda Institute (Secretariado Nacional de Propaganda), convey a conservative image of both mainland Portugal and the country's overseas African colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and St. Thomas and Principe). The films about the mainland emphasize traditional values, the importance of obedience to authorities and a strict division of gender roles, whereby women are relegated to the domestic sphere. The Portuguese countryside, where age-old customs and a strong social hierarchy prevailed, is presented in these movies as a model for the rest of the country. The films about the colonies, in turn, underline the benefits of the Portuguese presence in Africa and portray the colonized as docile subjects to Portuguese rule. The book includes chapter summaries in the introduction, in-depth analyses of the most important Portuguese films produced between 1930 and 1960, a discussion of the main topics of Portuguese cinema from the New State, and a comprehensive bibliography that guides students who wish to read further on a specific topic. First published in Portuguese to wide acclaim, Portuguese Film, 1930-1960: The Staging of the New State Regime fills a gap in English-language scholarship on the history of the national cinema of the Iberian peninsula. Films covered include Fatima, Land of Faith (Terra de Fe), Spell of the Empire (Feitico do Imperio), and Chaimite.

Providing an overview of Spanish and Portuguese cinema, this title contains 24 essays, each on a separate seminal film from the region, profiling work from the likes of Pedro Almodıvar and João Cesar Monteiro.

Women's Cinema in Contemporary Portugal brings together scholars from Portugal, UK and the USA, to discuss 14 women film directors in Portugal, focussing on their production in both feature film and documentary genres over the last half-century. It charts the specific cinematic visions that these women have brought to the re-emergence of Portuguese national cinema in the wake of the 1974 Revolution and African decolonisation, and to the growing internationalisation of Portugal's arguably 'minor' or 'small nation' cinema, with significant young women directors such as Leonor Teles achieving prominence abroad. The history of Portuguese women's cinema only begins systematically after the 1974 revolution and democratisation. This collection shows how female auteurs made their mark on Portugal's post-revolutionary conceptualisation of a differently 'national' cinema, through the ethnographic output of the late 1970s. It goes on to explore women's decisively gendered interventions in the cinematic memory practices that opened up around the masculine domain of the Colonial Wars in Africa. Feminist political issues such as Portugal's 30-year abortion campaign and LGBT status have become more visible since the 1990s, alongside preoccupations with global concerns relating to immigration, transit and minority status communities. The book also demonstrates how women have contributed to the evolution of soundscapes, the genre of essay cinema, film's relationship to the archive, and the adaptation of the written word. The result is a powerful, provocative and definitive challenge to the marginalisation of Portuguese female-directed film in terms of 'double minority'.

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.