Audiovisual and independence sesquicentenary (1972): circulation of images of the nation at the crossroads of authoritarian modernization

• Grant number: 21/07062-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2022
• End date: July 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Eduardo Victorio Morettin
• Grantee: Fernando Seliprandy Fernandes
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this project is the short audiovisual forms that circulated intensely in the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Brazilian independence (1972): newsreels; educational documentaries; propaganda films; telejournalism. The plurality of the corpus is justified to fill a gap in the audiovisual studies of that event, centered in historical feature films. The aim is thus to capture the nuances and contrasts of the foundational visuality even within the official production in the orbit of the civic-patriotic imagery. This is a way to overcome the dichotomy between repression or resistance, as well as the reduction of official propaganda to a machinery of ideological manipulation. Two hypotheses guide the reflections: a) these "minor" films compose a multifaceted panorama of the relations between dictatorship, society, and the cultural industry, in a gradient of official enunciators, civil complicities and tense accommodations; b) the heterogeneity of this audiovisual mosaic derives from the transitional phase of cultural policies in the Médici years, within the ambivalence between sponsorship and censorship of the authoritarian modernization. The challenges include mapping and analysis of an audiovisual corpus from different origins and typologies, dispersed over several archives. The methodological solutions for these tasks will be, firstly, the systematic inventory of the films related to the festivities; secondly, its subdivision into staggered scales of appreciation. The results will include both the global audiovisual cartography of the sesquicentenary and the analysis of the specific film language of a representative selection of titles - in the interdisciplinarity between history and audiovisual. On the eve of the 2022 bicentenary, it is relevant to criticize the views of the nation mobilized during the most violent period of dictatorship, which can be repeated or questioned in this next independence anniversary. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

FERNANDO SELIPRANDY. Circuitos da propaganda oficiosa: Amaral Netto comemora os 150 anos da Independência (1972). Estud. hist. (Rio J.), v. 37, n. 82, 2024-06-07. (21/07062-8)