The cinema of Michael Mann: authorship and politics in contemporary Hollywood

• Grant number: 17/11947-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2018
• End date: December 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Cristian da Silva Borges
• Grantee: Lucas Do Valle Pereira
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The following essay intends to examine the political and authorial nature of north-american filmmaker Michael Mann's work, based on the analysis of two of his films, Thief (1981) and Miami Vice (2006). Mann is one of the central names of north-american filmmaking from the past 30 years, distinguishing himself by making it possible to, simultaneously, imprint a unique style when working with political and philosophical themes and meet certain aesthetic and commercial demands from the multimedia conglomerates of contemporary Hollywood. By making it possible to navigate this fine line between art and industry, Mann reveals himself as a director aware of his position inside north-american mainstream cinema, which allows him to create films with big budgets without the need to give up his creative control. Therefore, armed with all the structure provided by high Hollywood investments, Mann is capable of opening dialogue with a large audience and discussing themes which are rarely seen in commercial cinema, from the use of Marxist concepts as metaphors on a criminal fable (Thief) up until the actualization and expansion of the representational topics inside the crime genre on the context of a globalized world (in Miami Vice). Using both these movies as starting point, this project means to analyze the proceedings which Mann employs to feed the discussion on their themes and the manner in which he manages to transcend the restrictions of Hollywood cinema's repetitions and patterns. (AU)