A historical analysis of Chronicle of an Industrial (L. Rosemberg Filho, 1978)

• Grant number: 17/10370-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: January 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Mariana Martins Villaça
• Grantee: Izabella Cardoso da Silva Campagnol
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present research intends to historically analyze the film Crônica de um industrial (Chronicle of an industrial, 1978), by Luiz Rosemberg Filho. The work was object of rigorous censorship when this kind of control, in the cinematographic area, was becoming less frequent. The film brings us an important discussion about the left's feeling of political defeat and explicits some debates in Brazil during that period, mobilizing concepts such as underdevelopment, developmentalism and economic dependence. The film, allegorically, deals with a middle age bourgeois industrialist with a crisis of conscience, whom living in the fictional country of San Vicente, it recalls his trajectory of left-wing militant and the bankruptcy of his business. Our analysis intends to understand how the film dialogues with some thesis about the defeat of the left, among them, the one called "Theory of the two demons", according to which both the left- wing and the Armed Forces would have been responsible for the victimization of civil society in the military post-coup, as well as the repression and abuses committed, in the case of torture, also represented in the movie. This film is identified to the so-called "Brazilian marginal cinema", but it was partially financed by Embrafilme, a state-owned company. In this way, from the survey and investigation of some historical issues present in that work, and its relation with society and the debates of this period, we also intend to analyze the tensions involving the context of its production, trying to understand its relation with the political and economic discussions of that historical moment, the impact of censorship and the reaction of its critics and discourse, beyond the filmmaker himself build on the work. We start from the hypothesis that this film presents density of discussion and amplitude of subjects, its relevance to understand that historical moment of transition towards democracy in Brazil. (AU)