Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cinema
Brazil has a strong tradition of film-making, and the best Brazilian directors
often work outside the country on international productions. Brazil has
produced excellent films since the 1950s, many of them widely available
abroad or online, and a few nights in front of the TV or computer before
departure is a good investment in getting the most out of your trip.
Two-way tra
c
Brazil, for understandable reasons, has long attracted foreign film-makers looking for
exotic scenery.
Orson Welles
spent many months filming in Brazil immediately after
Citizen Kane
had made him a star. Although he was, characteristically, never able to
finish the project, the footage was later put together into a documentary film called
It's All True
, an invaluable record of Rio and Carnaval in the early 1940s. Two decades
later, French director
Marcel Camus
filmed
Orfeu Negro
(“Black Orpheus”) in Rio with
a largely amateur cast, resetting the Orpheus myth during the Rio Carnaval and
putting it to an unforgettable soundtrack by Tom Jobim.
Pixote
, a searing 1982 film
about street children in Rio that also used amateurs, was directed by
Hector Babenco
,
an Argentine. Key scenes in the James Bond movie
Moonraker
(1979), and
he
Incredible Hulk
(2008), were filmed in and around Rio, while the family blockbusters
Rio
(2011) and Rio 2 (2014) brought the sights and sounds (albeit computer-
animated) of the country to a new generation.
Since the 1980s, Brazilians have been moving the other way.
Sônia Braga
traded in
success in Brazilian films in the 1970s for a career in US independent cinema from the
1980s on, but the country's most distinguished cinematic exports have been directors,
most notably
Walter Salles
, who caught international attention with
Central Station
in
1998, the underestimated, beautifully filmed biopic of Che Guevara's early life,
he
Motorcycle Diaries
, and 2012's
On he Road
, based on the Jack Kerouac classic.
Fernando Meirelles
's brilliant
City of God
in 2003 led to
he Constant Gardener
(2005),
the first international Hollywood hit directed by a Brazilian. His success outside Brazil,
with four Oscar nominations so far, is an indication of how Brazilian talent can be a
shot in the arm for international cinema.
But Brazilian cinema's recent international success was built on decades of hard work,
establishing a
national cinema industry
and somehow keeping it going in the face of
intense competition from television on the one hand and Hollywood on the other.
Along the way Brazil has created a national cinema like no other South American
country, returning again and again to its history for inspiration.
The early years: chanchadas and cinema novo
The history of Brazilian cinema goes right back to the earliest years of the medium:
the first
cinematograph
arrived in Brazil in 1897 and there were already 22 cinemas
registered in Rio by 1910. But the first decades of cinema in Brazil were dominated by
American and European silent films, and it was not until the early years of sound that
the first Brazilian features were made. The first Brazilian film studio, Cinedia, based in
Rio, was making Carnaval films and slapstick comedies, nicknamed
chanchadas
, from
the early 1930s -
Carmen Miranda
was the major star of the period, making her film
debut in
A Voz do Carnaval
(“The Voice of Carnaval”) in 1932. But in an indication
of the low quality of the Brazilian film industry in those years it was not her films that
led to her discovery by Hollywood, but the fact that a Hollywood producer saw her
