The road movie in Brazilian fictional cinema (1960-1980)

• Grant number: 10/05715-0
• Support type: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: April 01, 2012 - March 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Visual Communication
• Principal researcher: Samuel José Holanda de Paiva
• Grantee: Samuel José Holanda de Paiva
• Home Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research falls within the scope of the questions related to the film genres, trying to understand them with their definitions, roles and contexts, in view of the international dimension of road movie, problematized, however, from specific cultural meanings revealed in the Brazilian cinematographic production. In this sense, among the concepts that guided the research proposal, the notion of "transculturation" is constituted as a reference, referring to a field of study of Social Sciences that conceives the idea of a mutual transformation of cultures in contact with them, assuming exchange, barter, miscegenation, hybridity among different countries, nations, regions. Considering this perspective, some questions are put, such as: what or what would be the enabling environments for cross-cultural understanding of the character of the road movie in Brazil? To what extent are road movies made in this country a reference for understanding the genre road movie in a transnational perspective? What approaches would be desirable to construct such an object?As a hypothesis, it is conceivable that the fictional production of Brazilian films of the road, on the one hand, can repeat some matrices associated with the road movie genre in different contexts and, on the other hand, may have specific features related to the historical, sociopolitical and economic sectors in Brazil.In turn, the methodology is structured into three key stages. The first stage includes the use of "instruments of documentary", as proposed by Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie in their book "L'analyse des films", that means all sorts of written documents, bibliographies, which may serve to build the corpus of enhanced research, in the case, on the Brazilian road movies (scripts, production plans, directors' notes, interviews, reports, etc.).The second phase of the methodology consists in viewing the films and improve the analysis of each one that is part of the corpus defined in the previous section. This analysis, given the interest in cross-cultural perspective, will be guided by notions of the "external forms" (related to sets, costumes, objects, the conventions of media applicants) and "internal forms" (the type of story, theme and nature of its conventions) as proposed by Edward Buscombe in his study "the idea of genre in American cinema", considering also other American followers of the same method, for example, David Laderman and Rick Altman. Moreover, this second step of the methodology for the description of internal and external forms of the films to be analyzed will use "descriptive tools", as proposed by Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, that is, there will be descriptions of images and sounds, decoupages of the narrative sequences that, in the case, promote the objectives of the research in terms of an understanding of Brazilian road movies.The third and final phase of the methodology, guided by the proposal of Jean-Claude Bernardet presented in the book Historiografia clássica do cinema brasileiro: metodologia e pedagogia, will focus on defining the lines of consistency - from internal and external forms of each film, drawn in the previous step - which will now be collated in sets and subsets of films that constitute the corpus of research. So with this last stage, it will be possible to establish the main aspects of the history of ficcional road movies in Brazil, which allow a theoretical reflection on this particular genre and, at the same time, a more universal contribution to the theory of genre. (AU)